The Maid's Lawful Liberty: Service, the Household, and "Mother B" in Isabella Whitney's "A Sweet Nosegay"

Phillippy, Patricia

doi:10.1086/mp.95.4.438904

Cited by 8 publications

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“…Patricia Phillippy, for instance, submits that the "Wyll and Testament" that concludes A Sweet Nosgay "cast[s] the city [of London] as a faithless erotic partner modeled on those of Ovid's Heroides." 39 Arguing that "Whitney's persona shares the mode of complaint … common to Ovid's heroines," Phillippy claims that the Elizabethan author "reformulates that inconstancy" of male lovers so frequently reiterated in Ovid's Heroides into "an economic betrayal." 40 To similar effect, both Wendy Wall and Paul Gleed concur that Whitney "rewrites the role of abandoned lover into that of evicted citizen" in the "Wyll and Testament," with London itself figuring as "the last and greatest in a sequence of cruel male lovers."…”

Section: Whitney's Heroidean Engagementsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Early Modern Women's Complaint

2020

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Calling attention to the Ovidian contours of Isabella Whitney's cursus litterarum, this essay reconsiders the literary heritage of the personae she adopts in The Copy of a Letter (c. 1566) and A Sweet Nosgay (1573). Existing analyses of Whitney's Ovidianism have tended to emphasize her debts to the female-voiced epistles of the Heroides while simultaneously overlooking profound intertextual connections between A Sweet Nosgay and Ovid's exilic writings. In contrast, this essay argues that the outlines of a self-consciously classical career trajectory (its stages demarcated by Whitney's subtle aesthetic shift from Heroidean amatory complaint to Tristian exile complaint) can be detected when The Copy of a Letter and A Sweet Nosgay are read contiguously.

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Section: Whitney's Heroidean Engagementsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Early Modern Women's Complaint

2020

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Isabella Whitney, A Sweet Nosegay

Brace¹

2008

A Companion to Early Modern Women's Writing

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W hitney, I sabella

Bartolovich¹

2017

The Encyclopedia of English Renaissance Literature

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So far as we know, Isabella Whitney ( fl . 1567–73) is the first woman in England to be identified in print as the author of collections of her own secular verse. Although recent reassessments have cast doubt on the commonplace that few women were writing at all in the sixteenth century, as scholars uncover more, and more varied, women‐authored manuscripts, Whitney's contribution remains striking. To be sure, in an age in which the circulation of manuscripts was still a frequent and prestigious mode of ‘publication’, new discoveries of, and attention to, female‐authored manuscripts is an extremely important development. It is however important to recognize that not only did Whitney's work deviate from the religious subject matter typical of other sixteenth‐century female writers who found their way into print (a very small number in the sixteenth century in any case), but she appears not to have belonged to the elite aristocratic or humanist circles from which that rare printed writing typically emerged.

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The Maid's Lawful Liberty: Service, the Household, and "Mother B" in Isabella Whitney's "A Sweet Nosegay"

Cited by 8 publications

References 0 publications

Early Modern Women's Complaint

Early Modern Women's Complaint

Isabella Whitney, A Sweet Nosegay

W hitney, I sabella

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