“I Walked Out”: Perambulatory Poetics, Authorial Independence, and Isabella Whitney’s Poetic Voice in A Sweet Nosgay

ABSTRACT

The act of walking energizes the formation of Isabella Whitney’s poetic voice in her second volume of verse, A Sweet Nosgay (pub. 1573). Walking out of her house, trespassing in Plat’s garden, and traversing the perimeter of Bedlam are just a few of the striking scenes that depict Whitney’s perambulation. To examine the connection between walking and the formation of her poetic voice, I suggest that Whitney’s walking operates in two distinct registers. Firstly, walking is a thematic concern that exposes her interest in the contours of intellectual independence, the process of artistic production, and the vulnerability occasioned by impecunity. Secondly, walking operates as a form of poetic performativity, figurative of her trajectory towards print publication. This essay expands discussion on Whitney’s mobility, suggesting that perambulatory poetics are a crucial component of her authorial self-presentation in A Sweet Nosgay.

KEYWORDS:

• Isabella Whitney
• A Sweet Nosgay
• poetic voice
• walking
• perambulatory poetics
• independence

Acknowledgements

I am exceedingly grateful and offer my sincere thanks to Carrol Clarkson, Rudolph Glitz and Danielle Clarke for providing insightful and generous feedback on early versions of this article. I would also like to thank Ingo Berensmeyer and Sören Hammerschmidt for sharing some of their (published and unpublished) work on Whitney’s urban mobility.

Disclosure Statement

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

Notes

1 Michelle O’Callaghan offers a useful overview of critical sources pertaining to Whitney’s “status as England’s first professional woman writer” (15) in Michelle O’Callaghan, “‘My Printer must, haue somwhat to his share’: Isabella Whitney, Richard Jones, and Crafting Books,” Women’s Writing, 26.1 (2019): 15.

2 Unless otherwise specified, all quotations from A Sweet Nosgay are taken from Danielle Clarke, ed. Isabella Whitney, Mary Sidney and Aemilia Lanyer: Renaissance Women Poets (London: Penguin, 2000).

3 For a consideration of Whitney’s servant status, particularly as it relates to her urban mobility and authorial identity, see Patricia Phillippy, “The Maid’s Lawful Liberty: Service, the Household, and ‘Mother B’ in Isabella Whitney’s ‘A Sweet Nosegay’,” Modern Philology 95.4 (1998): 439–62; and Laurie Ellinghausen, “Literary Property and the Single Woman in Isabella Whitney’s ‘A Sweet Nosgay’,” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, 45.1 (2005): 1–22. For critical discussion on the textual mobility of the Nosgay, see Michelle O’Callaghan, “Household Books: Richard Jones, Isabella Whitney, and Anthology-Making,” in Crafting Poetry Anthologies in Renaissance England: Early Modern Cultures of Recreation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 73-113; and Ingo Berensmeyer, “From Pilgrimage to Picaresque Dimensions of Mobility in Late Medieval and Early Modern English Literature,” in Offprint Real Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature 28, Mobility in Literature and Culture, 1500-1900, eds. Ingo Berensmeyer, Christoph Ehland and Herbert Grabes (Tübingen: narr verlag, 2012), 3–21.

4 The body of scholarship on intersections between walking and literary creation is extensive and encompasses topics and eras from medieval pilgrimage to the Romantic poets to modernist flânerie to contemporary urban psychogeography. See, for example, Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust (New York: Penguin Books, 2001) and Frédéric Gros, A Philosophy of Walking, trans. John Howe (London: Verso Books, 2014). The interrelation between women, walking and literature, has been examined by Lauren Elkin in Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London (London: Vintage Publishing, 2017) and Kerri Andrews in Wanderers: A History of Women Walking (London: Reaktion Books, 2020). With the notable exception of Ingo Berensmeyer who reads the Nosgay as a travel narrative alongside Chaucer and Hoccleve in “From Pilgrimage to Picaresque”, 3–21, Whitney’s relationship to literary traditions of walking has received insufficient consideration.

5 Whitney’s biographical impulse encourages the conflation of poet and constructed poetic persona. For the purposes of this article, I use “Whitney” to refer to Isabella Whitney’s authorial self-presentation in print.

6 Clarke, ed. Isabella Whitney, “To the worshipfull and right vertuous yong Gentylman, George Mainwaring Esquier: IS. W. wisheth happye health with good successe in all his godly affayres,” 42. In her prefatory address Whitney presents these poetic “SLIPS” to her friend George Mainwaring.

7 Whitney’s epistolary poems are gathered under the heading “Certain familier Epistles and friendly Letters by the Auctor: with Replies”, Clarke, ed. Isabella Whitney. The “Wyll and Testament” as her final poem is conventionally known, is divided into two parts, namely “A comunication which the Auctor had to London, before she made her Wyll” and “The manner of her Wyll, and what she left to London: and all those in it: at her departing”, Clarke, ed. Isabella Whitney.

8 O’Callaghan, Crafting Poetry, 94.

9 Laura Gowing, “‘The Freedom of the Streets’: Women and Social Space, 1560–1640,” in Londinopolis: A Social and Cultural History of Early Modern London, 1500-1750, eds. Paul Griffiths and Mark S.R. Jenner (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 134.

10 Jean. E. Howard, “Textualizing an Urban Life: The Case of Isabella Whitney in Bedford,” in Early Modern Autobiography: Theories, Genres, Practices, eds. Lloyd Davis, Ronald Bedford and Philippa Kelly (Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 2006), 228.

11 See, for example, Phillippy, “The Maid’s Lawful Liberty,” 439–62; Ellinghausen, “Literary Property,” 1-22.

12 Wendy Wall examines the gendered experience of writing and publishing in early modern England in Wendy Wall, “Isabella Whitney and the Female Legacy,” ELH 58, no. 1 (1991): 35–6.

13 Clarke, ed. Isabella Whitney, “The Auctor to the Reader,” 1-2.

14 Ibid., 11, 13-15.

15 Ibid., 5, 7, 12.

16 Ibid., 13–4, 13, 15.

17 “walk, v.”. OED Online. March 2022. Oxford University Press. https://www-oed-com.proxy.uba.uva.nl/view/Entry/225241?rskey=TmLfki&result=1&isAdvanced=false (accessed June 04, 2022).

18 Isabella Whitney. [A Sweet Nosgay, Or Pleasant Posye] [Contayning a Hundred and Ten Phylosophicall Flowers &c.] (London: R. Jones, 1573). ProQuest. https://www.proquest.com/books/sweet-nosgay-pleasant-posye-contayning-hundred/docview/2248546198/se-2 (accessed June 11, 2022).

19 See Maura Nolan, “Medieval Habit, Modern Sensation: Reading Manuscripts in the Digital Age,” The Chaucer Review, 47.4 (2013): 465–76.

20 Ibid., 469.

21 Isabella Whitney, A Sweet Nosgay, Or Pleasant Posye, “The Auctor to the Reader”.

22 Clarke, ed. Isabella Whitney, “The Auctor to the Reader,” 15.

23 Ibid., 18, 17, 24.

24 Ibid., 25.

25 Ibid., 37; Dana E. Lawrence, “Isabella Whitney’s ‘Slips’: Poetry, Collaboration, and Coterie,” in A History of Early Modern Women’s Writing, ed. Patricia Phillippy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 121. Lawrence provides an insightful overview of the Nosgay as it relates to early modern plague experiences noting that, “[j]ust ten years before the publication of A Sweet Nosgay, bubonic plague swept through the country,” 125.

26 Ibid., 19–20.

27 Ibid., 21–2.

28 Ibid., 24, 26.

29 Ibid., 26.

30 Howard, “Textualizing an Urban Life,” 221; For a discussion of what constituted femme sole status, in terms of both legal parameters and cultural understanding, see Marjorie K. McIntosh, “The Benefits and Drawbacks of Femme Sole Status in England, 1300-1630,” Journal of British Studies, 44.3 (2005): 410–38. McIntosh suggests that while, legally speaking, femme sole status applied to married women trading under their own names, in practice the term was sometimes also applied to single women and widows.

31 Clarke, ed. Isabella Whitney, “The Auctor to the Reader,” 26.

32 Ibid., 28–9.

33 Ibid., 29.

34 Clarke, ed. Isabella Whitney, “To the worshipfull and right vertuous yong Gentylman,” 25–8.

35 Crystal Bartolovich. “‘Optimism of the Will’: Isabella Whitney and Utopia,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 39.2 (2009): 413.

36 Isabella Whitney, A Sweet Nosgay, Or Pleasant Posye, “A farewell to the Reader”. This poem is not included in Clarke’s edition.

37 Isabella Whitney, A Sweet Nosgay, Or Pleasant Posye, “T.B. in commendation of the Authour”. This poem is not included in Clarke’s edition.

38 Ibid.

39 Ibid.

40 Ibid.

41 Ibid.

42 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): 516.

43 Clarke, ed. Isabella Whitney, “The Auctor to the Reader,” 32.

44 Ibid., 33.

45 Ibid., 38, 45–6.

46 Ibid., 89–90.

47 Clarke, ed. Isabella Whitney, “To her Sister Misteris. A.B.,” 22.

48 Clarke, ed. Isabella Whitney, “To the worshipfull and right vertuous yong Gentylman”, 42.

49 Wendy Wall, “Isabella Whitney and the Female Legacy,” 35–6.

50 Clarke, ed. Isabella Whitney, “To her Brother. G.W.,” 8.

51 Clarke, ed. Isabella Whitney, “To her Sister Misteris. A.B.,” 27–8; “The Auctor to the Reader,” 26.

52 Isabella Whitney, A Sweet Nosgay, Or Pleasant Posye, “Verse 52”.

53 Clarke, ed. Isabella Whitney, “The Auctor to the Reader,” 26; Sir Hugh Plat, The Floures of Philosophie with the Pleasures of Poetrie Annexed Vnto them, as Wel Pleasant to be Read, as Profytable to be Followed of all Men, (London: Frauncis Coldocke and Henry Bynneman, 1581), “Verse 51”. https://www.proquest.com/books/floures-philosophie-with-pleasures-poetrie/docview/2264214784/se-2?accountid=14945 (accessed June 11, 2022).

54 Isabella Whitney, A Sweet Nosgay, Or Pleasant Posye, “Verse 52”.

55 Plat, Floures of Philosophie, “Verse 17”.

56 Isabella Whitney, A Sweet Nosgay, Or Pleasant Posye, “Verse 18”.

57 “lewdness, n.”. OED Online. March 2022. Oxford University Press. https://www-oed-com.proxy.uba.uva.nl/view/Entry/107738?redirectedFrom=Lewdness (accessed April 20, 2022).

58 Isabella Whitney, A Sweet Nosgay, Or Pleasant Posye, “Verse 18”.

59 Clarke, ed. Isabella Whitney, “A modest meane for Maides In order prescribed, by Is. W. to two of her yonger Sisters serving in London,” 34.

60 Isabella Whitney, A Sweet Nosgay, Or Pleasant Posye, “Verse 18”.

61 Clarke, ed. Isabella Whitney, “A modest meane for Maides,” 34; “The Auctor to the Reader,” 51, 70-1.

62 Ibid., 78.

63 Clarke, ed. Isabella Whitney, “A comunication,” 1.

64 Dana E. Lawrence, “Isabella Whitney’s ‘Slips’,” 134.

65 Clarke, ed. Isabella Whitney, “A comunication,” 9–12.

66 Ibid., 12.

67 Ibid., 18, 27–9.

68 Ibid., 25.

69 Wall, “Isabella Whitney and the Female Legacy,” 53.

70 Ibid.

71 Ulrike Tancke, ‘Bethinke Thy Selfe’ in Early Modern England: Writing Women’s Identities (Leiden: Rodopi, 2010), 106; Helen Wilcox, “‘ah famous citie’: women, writing, and early modern London,” Feminist Review, 96 (2010): 24; Clarke, ed. Isabella Whitney, “Introduction,” xv.

72 Clarke, ed. Isabella Whitney, “The manner of her Wyll,” 225–8.

73 Clarke, ed. Isabella Whitney, “The manner of her Wyll,” 226.

74 Ibid., 1, 20, 228.

75 Ibid., 26.

76 Ibid., 228.

77 Ibid., 183–8.

78 Ibid., 327–8.

79 Clarke, ed. Isabella Whitney, “The Aucthour (though loth to leave the Citie) upon her Friendes procurement, is constrained to departe: wherfore (she fayneth as she would die) and maketh her WYLL and Testement, as foloweth: With large Legacies of such Goods and riches which she moste aboundantly hath left behind her: and therof maketh London sole executor to se her Legacies performed.”

80 O’Callaghan, “‘My Printer must, haue somwhat to his share,’” 26.

81 Clarke, ed. Isabella Whitney, “The Auctor to the Reader,” 26.

82 Janelle Jenstad, dir. The Map of Early Modern London. v.6.6. Victoria: University of Victoria, 2021. https://mapoflondon.uvic.ca.

Additional information

Funding

This publication is part of the project Languages of Vulnerability in Early Modern Women’s Writing (with project number PGW.21.010) of the research programme PhDs in the Humanities 2021 which is (partly) financed by the Dutch Research Council (NWO).

Notes on contributors

Anna-Rose Shack

Anna-Rose Shack is a PhD candidate at the Amsterdam School of Historical Studies at the University of Amsterdam. Her doctoral project examines how early modern female poets represent and articulate vulnerability in lyric poetry.