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margaret cavendish’s inclination to celebrate female partici pation in martial affairs in her dramatic works has received a substantial amount of critical attention. The indulgent wish fulfil ment represented by the remarkable victories of Lady Victoria and her female army in Bell in Campo, and the astonishing battle achievements of Lady Orphant (Affectionata) in Love’s Adven tures, have unsurprisingly been the focus of that attention. While the disruption and horror of the civil war overturned gender hierarchies, allowing and even requiring women to assume tradi tionally masculine roles, few writers depict female soldiers quite as flamboyantly and unapologetically as Cavendish.1 Not until very recently have scholars turned their attention to the less startling but, we contend, no less dramatic figure of Madam Jantil, a mourning war widow in Bell in Campo, who dies of grief after designing and overseeing the erection of an elaborate monument to her husband, a casualty of war.

Shakespeare's Macbeth does not present a particular position on Anglo-Scottish politics that defines itself in relation to the belief system of one small political body, as is often argued, but confronts three models of the Union recorded in the pamphlet literature of the period and dramatized on the Jacobean stage. The construction of the drama as a whole—the configuration of character, form, and genre and the use of geographical space—produces a number of colliding and competing positions on the Union, reflecting the complexity of its relationship to the Court and to the marketplace.

It is tempting to argue for a distinct female voice in medieval and early-modern religious works by women and to read their texts in light of feminist notions of ecriture feminine or womanspeak.1 It would be unwise, however, to give credence to any simplistic account of “feminine writing” in devotional works of the period, for textual production involves a complex process of different and conflicting determinants. Gender is only one of the factors that affect the workings of the spiritual imagination. Nevertheless, many female religious writers in medieval and early-modern Britain operated within an aesthetic of opposition, writing against essentialist concepts of “woman” as a static cultural category—inherently disruptive, spiritually inadequate, physically inferior, and inclined to the bestial.2 A rhetoric of resistance that exposed gender as a social construct surfaced in their writings, challenging the exclusion of women from the discursive formations of philosophy and religion that defined and transmitted “truth.” Ironically, medieval and early-modern women most often discovered their identity and authority in the very discourse of religion that was regularly employed by the clergy and laity to render them secondary, even soul-less, beings. Though a “foundational discourse,” religion was not a monolithic language that spoke “with only one voice” (Hinds 7); medieval and earlymodern women could employ sacred discourse to promote the notion of the self as a fluid process rather than a fixed object, rereading the scripture to invest the dynamic female body and soul with spiritual and material, private and public, worth.