New Directions in Criticism on Isabella Whitney

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 See Isabella Whitney: Poems by a Sixteenth-Century Gentlewoman, Maid and Servant, ed. Shannon Miller (New York and Toronto: Iter Press, 2023), pp. 35–9. I am immensely grateful to Professor Miller for sharing the text of her edition in advance of publication.

2 See for discussion, Rosalind Smith, “Authorship, Attribution, and Voice in Early Modern Women’s Writing”, The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Women’s Writing in English, 1540–1700, ed. Danielle Clarke, Sarah C.E. Ross and Elizabeth Scott-Baumann (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022), pp. 23–38.

3 On the problematics of “firsts”, see Rebecca Quoss-Moore, “Unradical Feminisms: Whitney and the World of Women’s Work,” this volume, pp. 125–142.

4 See Jake Arthur, “Anne Lock or Thomas Norton? A Response to the Re-Attribution of the First Sonnet Sequence in English”, Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal 16.2 (2022): 214–36.

5 Betty Travitsky, “The ‘Wyll and Testament’ of Isabella Whitney”, English Literary Renaissance 10.1 (1980), https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-6757.1980.tb01411.x, https://go.exlibris.link/XRYWvgDJ. See also Wendy Wall, “Isabella Whitney and the Female Legacy”, ELH: English Literary History 58.1 (1991): 35–62.

6 Michelle O’Callaghan, Crafting Poetry Anthologies in Renaissance England: Early Modern Cultures of Recreation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), p. 10. See also Michelle O’Callaghan, “‘My Printer Must Haue Somwhat to his Share’: Isabella Whitney, Richard Jones, and Crafting Books”, Women’s Writing 26 (2019): 15–34; Laurie Ellinghausen, “Literary Property and the Single Woman in Isabella Whitney’s A Sweet Nosgay”, Studies in English Literature 45.1 (2005): 1–22; and Whitney Trettien, “Isabella Whitney’s Slips: Textile Labor, Gendered Authorship and the Early Modern Miscellany”, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 45.3 (2015): 505–21.

7 All quotations are taken from Danielle Clarke, ed. Renaissance Women Poets (London: Penguin, 2000).

8 The tautologous phrase “sole alone” points irresistibly towards the idea of the speaker’s specific unmarried status as femme sole in control of this literary property, which is nonetheless owned by another.

9 See Michelle O’Callaghan, “‘My Printer Must. Haue Somwhat to his Share’: Isabella Whitney, Richard Jones, and Crafting Books”, Women’s Writing 26 (2019): 15–34; and Susan Wiseman, “Labours Loves? Isabella Whitney, Leonard Wheatcroft and the Love Miscellany”, Textual Practice 33.8 (2019): 1363–87.

10 See Lawrence Manley, Literature and Culture in Early Modern London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); also Londinopolis: Essays in the Cultural and Social History of Early Modern London, ed. Paul Griffiths and Mark S.R. Jenner (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), and Women’s Labour and the History of the Book in Early Modern England, ed. Valerie Wayne (London: The Arden Shakespeare, 2020).

11 Miller, Isabella Whitney, p. 15.

12 See Miller, pp. 3–7.

13 See Miller, pp. 19–22. On the situation of women servants in London, see Eleanor Hubbard, City Women: Money, Sex, and the Social Order in Early Modern London (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 273–4.

14 Recent work on Whitney’s familial connections amongst recusants in Cheshire may provide one explanation for her poetry’s evasion of devotional or religious content, which makes her an outlier amongst sixteenth century female poets, either in print or in manuscript. See Miller, ed., pp. 3–7.

15 Danielle Clarke, “Mid-Tudor Poetry”, The Oxford History of Poetry in English, vol. 4, Sixteenth-Century British Poetry, ed. Catherine Bates and Patrick Cheney (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022), pp. 422–38.

16 Her poetry is included in the Norton Anthology of Poetry, 6th edition, ed. Margaret Ferguson (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2018), but is limited to extracts from the “The Manner of her Will” – 5 pages in total, pp. 152–6.

17 R.J. Fehrenbach, “Isabella Whitney (fl.1565–75) and the Popular Miscellanies of Richard Jones”, Cahiers Elisabethains: Late Medieval and Renaissance Studies 19.1 (1981): 85–7; Travitsky, “Wyll and Testament”.

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Notes on contributors

Danielle Clarke

Danielle Clarke is a Professor of English Renaissance Literature at University College Dublin. She is the editor of Isabella Whitney, Mary Sidney, and Aemilia Lanyer: Renaissance Women Poets (Penguin, 2000), and has written extensively on early modern women’s writing, textuality and gender. Mostly recently, she co-edited (with Sarah C.E. Ross and Elizabeth Scott-Baumann) The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Women’s Writing in Englishm 1540–1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022).