Frye 2010

"Decades of scholarly work on early modern English women have expanded our sense of their lives and of the media that they used to express those lives, media that I call women's textualities. Early modern modes of perception made women's verbal and visual textualities seem closely related, even versions of one another. As a result, this book considers women's writing alongside their paintings and embroidery. Through their multiple textualities, I argue, women from about 1540 to 1700 expressed themselves in several media that also record the ongoing redefinition of the feminine." (xv)

"This study of women named and anonymous, historical and fictional, includes but also moves beyond the court in order to demonstrate that women from a variety of backgrounds possessed related forms of verbal and visual expression that began in royal, aristocratic, and artisanal practice and quickly spread to England's other classes, who altered and developed these textualities to suit their needs." (xx)

Introduction

"for many early modern English women, writing, visual dseisn, and enedlework were not considered mutually exclusive activities; rather, they were related ways to create texts." (3)

"From about 1540 to 1700, the definition of an accomplished woman changed only slightly, and, just as in the Lucar epitaph, the interaction among her abilities created an emblem of virtue that connects artistic and domestic achievement." (3)

"Such descriptions of the activities of girls and women demonstrate the extent to which they were expected to contribute toward their families' well-being by practicing everyday the goodly -- and godly -- relations among verbal and visual texts. In their world, combining visual images and writing derived from a mode of thought charged with religious conviction, which made writing itself a visual art form; portraiture as vehicle for inscriptions; painted cloths, tapestries, and needlework the primary vehicle for translating written narratives into everyday design; and the household, market, court, inn, church, and theater into the social locations where speech connected with the signifying wealth of recorded texts." (3)

"Everyday objects imbued with writing and design could, in effect, save time by breathing truths into everyday actions." (4)

"The visual and verbal combinations that privileged people commissioned as impresas and coats of arms, engraved within rings, and had embroidered on their clothing demonstrate the allure that multivalent expression had for the culture that Elyot and Puttenham were describing. combining words and images made the best possible use of time, brought great truths into human reach, recreated the senses, and stimulated the beholder to 'marvel'." (4)

"As architectural artifacts, these houses demonstrate how, b the turn of the seventeenth century, merchant- and middling-class families of varying degrees of wealth increasingly appropriated sixteenth-century forms of royal and aristocratic interior decoration." (5)

"With writing and design moving without copyright interruption from engraved print to cheap printed picture to embroidery, or from cheap picture to painted cloth and wall, narratives from religious history, as well as proverbs, emblems, and images celebrating fertile and productive country life, filled domestic interiors." (6)

Juan Vives, The Instruction of a Christian Woman, published in Latin in 1529 and dedicated to Catharine of Aragon, for the education of Mary Tudor; relates "the feminine" to needlework (6-7)

Constance Aston Fowler, commonplace book from 1630s, 1640s; religious and secular drawings, resembling embroidery patterns (8)

"These early modern women worked at the intersections of visual and verbal texts in different ways and with different audiences in mind, but they saw the needle, the pen, and the pencil or brush as interrelated tools because women for the most part perceived their products -- writing and needlework, designing and painting -- as separate but related forms of expression." (9)

"AS can be seen from these examples, learning about women's lives and women's textualities requires embracing a broader sense of text than the literary. This is why I argue that in recovering early modern women's textualities -- their many forms of expression -- we need to consider their verbal and visual texts, as well as the texts created by the intersection of the two. Adding visual texts like drawings, paintings, and needlework as well as expanding the written to include words painted and sewn expands our ability to study women of the middle classes. The rich mix of the verbal and visual in early modern life also provides access to once ubiquitous media, media to which women were valued contributors and through which omen women simultaneously asserted and explored their identities. Women's textualities record these assertions and explorations, as women worked within and altered definitions of the feminine. By bringing more women into view and into relation with one another, studying women's texts both on and off the page sheds light on historical women's lives, on the objects that they produced with pens and needles, and on how literary texts by and about women represented these textualities." (9)

"the instability of the category of women lies at the heart of this study" (11)

"Both inside and outside the home, women's verbal and visual textualities -- and the ways these textualities are represented int exts that we now consider literary -- form crucial sites for exploring the instabilities of early modern life that women variously accepted, confronted, and mediated." (12)

"Textiles and the social practices surrounding them are evidence of the materiality of women's agency. In their textile work, early modern English women represented themselves through narrative pictures and patterns, locations of their expressed identity." (14)

"How is it possible to connect with early modern English women via the objects of their everyday lives? What happens if we study objects not only when they appear within discourse as metaphors but also as descriptions of experience that gave rise to the metaphors in the first place?" (28)

"Studying the material object offers ways in which to perceive connectiosn between ourselves and the people of the past, as well as to access the contexts that produced the object, contexts that the object continues to recall." (29)

1. Political Designs: Elizabeth Tudor, Mary Stuart, and Bess of Hardwick

Elizabeth, gift books with embroidered covers for Henry VIII and Katharine Parr

"These volumes, although in some respects the work of the eleven- and twelve-year-old girl that she was, serve notice that she was capable of combining strategies that moved beyond accepted gender roles into the world of decision makers, whose minds were trained in humanist and religious discourse." (41)

"Elizabeth used her volumes to signify the humanist education of a prince within an explicitly feminine object valued for generations." (41)

Mary Queen of Scots, shown in white mourning in many circulated portraits; "The many versions of this portrait, whether in pencil, paint, or words, function as forms of inalienable possession constructed as treasured statements of Mary's past, present, and future selves." (49)

"Mary's needlework became a principle means through which she asserted her royal identities and her position as heir-in-waiting to the English throne." (51)

"Women like Elizabeth Tudor, Mary Stuart, and Bess of Hardwick expected to orchestrate the intersecting codes through which they articulated their evolving identities, even if they risked being misread." (55)

devices -- "powerful signifiers that could be used for good or ill", mix of visual/verbal

"Bess of Hardwick's needlework must be read in the context of her decades spent remodeling and building the country houses as Chatsworth, Hardwick Hall, and New Hardwick Hall, as she balanced princely display with the financial management that would underwrite both the Cavendish and Talbot dynasties." (57)

"Elizabeth and Mary found themselves in the middle of national and international disputes about the relations among their female bodies, their divine connections, and their ability to govern. AS a wealthy countess rather than a queen, Bess used her Chatsworth workshop to assert her identities as the powerful, chaste, and resourceful wife to her several husbands, as well as the founder of dynasties. Bess represents these identities in her Notable Women series." (61)

Diana and Actaeon panel -- reworks Virgil Solis illustration; "by emphasizing Diana's feminine strength rather than her shame, the needlework panel asserts the perspective of an active, powerful woman over the confident pleasures of the male voyeur." (65)

"Overall, the intergration of architectural and interior design at Bess's New Hardwick Hall united the gaze of the powerful females pictured in her textile productions with the pleasures of designing a house for her combined political and personal needs." (66)

Bess "assembled in this room [Withdrawing Chambers] a theater of identity populated with notable female figures that included other portraits both painted and embroidered" (71)

2. Miniatures and Manuscripts: Levina Teerlinc, Jane Segar, and Esther Inglis as Professional Artisans

"Although we do not know a great deal about these women, we do know that they produced miniatures and manuscripts for very different reasons and that all three produced exquisite objects that have survived the centuries. These objects make visible the agency of their producers, who knowingly or unknowingly followed a female tradition of artful book production that had begun in the Early Christian era, when nuns trained in both the writing and illumination of manuscripts." (76)

"At a time when ornate textiles formed much of the king's wealth, embroidered work in all its variety was considered a serious art form. It was also the one art form that many women at court produced." (77)

Teerlinc, painting of Elizabeth and 'the knights of the order' -- "makes visible the itnersectio of two traditions, that of the increasingly secular miniaturist and illuminated manuscript, and the heraldic tradition of illumination that memorialized dynastic connection" (82-83)

Teerlinc probably performed a range of activities; portraits, illumination, heraldic and legal documents, designs for seals, coins, needlework (83)

"Although she may well have been the first miniaturist in England to paint full-length portraits in her miniatures, based on current attributions Teerlinc's painting failed to represent a high point int he long history of the Ghent-Bruges school. Instead, the value of her illuminated manuscripts and designs lay in their adaptability to Tudor politics." -- adapted religious iconography for female rulers, Mary I and Elizabeth I (86)

Segar book, "a carefully made object that represents its producer as an agent simultaneously interested in attracting Elizabeth as a patron and in producing a work strongly marked by personal choices" (88)

in early modern facing-page translations, English goes on left; Segar puts Bright's characters on the right, showing her English poem is a translation of the original prophecy, written in gold; "In this way, Segar manipulates the conventions of facing-page translation to make her English verses appear to be translations from the golden symbols of some sibylline code." (93)

Esther Inglis

"Esther Inglis's books frequently consist of a central pious text placed within covers of her own making and introduced by a variety of materials, usually including a title page, self-portrait, and dedication to someone of rank. In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries in England, such texts continued to circulate in manuscript preciely because print became the more available technology. So valued were elegant manuscript books at the turn of the seventeenth century that scribes were someties employed to copy printed books to re-create the look of less widely marketed volumes." (103)

"The most significant aspect of her books lies in the relations between their existence as handmade objects and the ways that she uses them to represent herself as a woman author. Every material feature of Inglis's books asserts her project, to assemble and publish exquisite textual objects whose value resides in the tension between manuscript and print cultures, the hand andthe machine. In creating a place for herself between these two cultures, Inglis connected the writing woman to desired political and social affiliations at the same time that her books materialized an authorial self." (103)