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)