Burke et al. 2000

Burke, Mary E., Jane Donawerth, Linda L. Dove, and Karen Nelson. Women, Writing, and the Reproduction of Culture in Tudor and Stuart Britain. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2000.

"Women's Poetry and the Tudor-Stuart System of Gift Exchange," Jane Donawerth (3-18)

"I suggest taht many women gained authority to write by envisioning their poems as part of the Tudor-Stuart gift-exchange system, which helped to weave the social fabric of court, community, and extended family." (3)

"The New Year's lists suggest that the gifts themselves were stratified and gendered." (6) -- earls gave gold cons, marquesses and countesses gave gold but also pendants and clothing; "more appropriate for men to give coins or gowsna dna for women to give feminine crafts -- embroidered smocks or petticoats, looking glasses, worked combcases, and ruffs" (7)

"only men gave books, and only women gave smocks" in the lists Donawerth examined (8)

Anne Lok, gives her translation of Calvin, with her sonnets, as a gift to Catherine Willoughby Bertie, duchess of Suffolk; describes it as both a prayer and a medicine (10-11)

"Dedicated to the duchess of Suffolk, Lok's book may e seen as a gift with political designs on its audiences, meant to build community, religious and social." (13)

Isabella Whitney, "Nosgay" "self-consciously employs gift exchange as a structural metaphor for a life well lived and well ended." (14)

"Demonstrating how to live and leave the good life through the unifying conceit of the exchange of gifts, these writings transform deathbed advice from sad to joyous." (14)

"Whitney's poems are thus a series of intertwined secular moral maxims -- such sentences were often called 'flowers' -- put together for the moral health of her readers. As gifts, they are meant to create a bond of 'respect' to the donor. Hovering behind these moral maxims drawn from the ancients are the many forms of Christian charity, here recast as obligations in the gift-exchange cycle." (15)

advice letters as gifts to family members; will as gift of material goods to London, like New Years gift rolls

"Whitney's sequence of prose and verse writings is thus a joyful ars moriendi: the gift cycle works effectively as a symbol of preparing for death -- through nourishing moral health and education, through establishing a community of kin and friends to support oneself in despair, though acknowledgin the joy of the life one leaves to others -- because the gift represents not only the humanist Christian's solace (God who freely gave his son), but also the thingness, the joyful materiality, of life." (16)