Isabella Whitney's Slips: Textile Labor, Gendered Authorship, and the Early Modern Miscellany

Abstract

As early efforts to include women in the canon of Renaissance literature give way to gender-oriented research in material culture and book history, it is increasingly the scholar's task to marry the language of ideological negotiation to a more wide-ranging investigation into the many ways that women of all social ranks contributed to the making, weaving, writing, printing, etching, annotating, composing, and publishing of English literary culture. This essay takes a fresh look at the authorship of Isabella Whitney, the earliest identified woman to publish secular English verse in print. Specifically, Whitney restructures humanist notions of reading-as-gathering around “huswifely” textile work by drawing on the rich semantic context of the word slip. Situating Whitney's A Sweet Nosgay in the material culture from which she drew her metaphors illuminates its relationship to a range of Elizabethan verse miscellanies and demonstrates her innovation within the genre as a woman.

The Assembled Book as a Map of Relations

“…5 This decision, no doubt in uenced by the limitations of print and classroom needs, had the e ect of distorting the collaborative, contingent nature of Whitney's project as a whole, which only comes back into view when we return to the design and structure of the original book. 6 The constraints of print become even more evident in a collection like Early Modern Women's Manuscript Poetry, an anthology of texts excerpted from bespoke manuscripts like Esther Inglis's calligraphy books and Jane Seager's gift book of sibylline prophecies, encased in a painted glass cover. 7 Thoughtful editorial introductions bring wider attention to these unique manuscripts but cannot substitute for seeing or touching the originals.…”

“My Printer must, haue somwhat to his share”: Isabella Whitney, Richard Jones, and Crafting Books

“…Whereas Whitney Trettien aligns Whitney here with the aristocratic women readers who were the dedicatees of florilegia, like Breton's A smale handful, and her composition in the specifically feminised domain of "huswifery", arguably there is a social difference that works against such an identification since the working world is primarily defined by the economic instability and mobility that characterised the lives of servant and artisanal classes. 54 Such provisionality generates a detailed and embodied narrative of textual agency in which the physical and intellectual actions of reading books prompts the author to walk abroad through the streets of London, presumably from "Abchurch Lane", and then stop to harvest wholesome, medicinal flowers at Hugh Plat's garden, "his Plot" (A5v-6r). Readers are counselled to go themselves "to Master Plat his ground", gather their own herbs, and to make sure that they do not let in swine, dogs or thieves that might despoil the garden (A7v-A8r).…”