The Female Baroque in Early Modern English Literary Culture: From Mary Sidney to Aphra Behn. Gary Waller. Gendering the Late Medieval and Early Modern World. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020. 288 pp. €105

Manifesting as a chronic restiveness—an inability to resolve the exaggerated extremes of its own making—the Baroque is read as European culture's response to the seismic shocks of preceding decades: its tendencies toward religious extremism and political absolutism reflecting a scramble for the verities of a metaphysical universe that was fading fast. “Part of the originality of my study,” Waller states, is the determination to look beyond the victimizing and marginalization of women in order “to discover more distinctive and less oppressed voices” (49), and to this end he invokes Julia Kristeva, whose 2014 book on Teresa of Avila serves in large part as the inspiration for his project. While the longest chapter of the book considers the (only superficially) paradoxical notion of a Protestant Baroque in Mary Sidney Herbert, Amelia Lanyer, the women of Little Gidding, Anne Bradstreet, and Anne Hutchinson, his close study of writings by and about Gertrude More and Mary Ward—two recusant nuns whose work is little known outside devotional studies—is greatly welcomed.