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To Take up the major early seventeenth-century poets together as a cohort, as Paul Alpers once suggested--not divided up into separate schools of Sons of Ben Jonson and of Metaphysicals a la John Donne, but to see them in their quite local (new historicist) context--is not only an intrinsically interesting idea but one which has a great deal to suggest to the study of early modern women. To do so would also put us in a better position to be able to consider, for example, Lady Mary Wroth's writing as something other than the mere imitation of family members' outmoded styles, decades out of fashion. To take Wroth up as not merely a member of her family or her gender, but of her generational cohort, promises to add something that heretofore has been missing from our sense of the dominant poets themselves, that is, the other side of the conversation, the women to whom, in fact, they were in part speaking and to whom they may quite well have been listening. My program for the continuing study of early modern women then, is to deghettoize them, and to place them in that local historical context where they, like their male counterparts, are most specifically revealed. Scholarship has up till now quite rightly emphasized sexual difference by focusing on what early modern women have in common with each other, whether experientially based in local history or essentially formed by the shared characteristics of their common (transtemporal) gender. Both approaches have constructed the early modern woman if not as a fully agented and autonomous subject, then certainly as a subject of study. What is needed now is to fold this new subject back into the old, so to speak, and to let it work its transformation. That is, to change the entire landscape of, for example, early seventeenth-century lyric poetry, not merely by sticking a heretofore unnoticed feature onto the map but by seeing how that new feature changes the relationship among all other features. Another example may help. The Sidney legacy--a set of influences deriving from her aunt, uncle, and father--may well remain a very powerful context in which to understand Mary Wroth.(1) But the juxtaposition of Wroth to Donne has this effect: it helps retrieve for us a sense of the power of context for him as well as for her. And by this context I mean both their experience of the patriarchally organized traffic in women and also of developing institutions of New World colonization. Their different sexual ideologies were forged through the impact of patriarchal structures on each, and their responses to the voyages to the New World are formulated through gender. Unusually similar to each other in this matter, Donne and Wroth both appear to have freely risked virtually their entire social position in order to make their own affectionate choices; they both thus transgressed against the rules governing the normal traffic in women in patriarchal society and consequently they both seem to value passionate eroticism over other social goods. Wroth had fallen in love with her first cousin, and Donne had fallen in love and married the sixteen-year-old niece of the Lord for whom he worked as secretary. As a member of a great household, then, Donne's breach in stealing the affections of a teenage girl without her father's consent is something akin to the trespass against the exogamous traffic in women Wroth also caused when she bore to her first cousin two illegitimate children. Donne's wife's father had him arrested and then went so far as to have Lord Egerton dismiss him from his position as secretary, a scandal from which Donne's career never fully recovered.(2) Both transgressed against the social rules prescribing conduct in the selection of appropriate mates both then in some profoundly similar sense, transgressed against the patriarchal system run by incest taboos. In 1621 Wroth published her scandalous romance, The Countess of Montgomerie's Urania; in that same year Donne finally was elected to the position of the Dean of St. …
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