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)