ABSTRACT
Much recent scholarship on early modern women’s writing has focussed on their marginalia. Yet how active readers responded to their printed work after it left the bookseller’s stall has remained largely unexplored. This article responds to this critical gap by applying the principles of feminist bibliography to copy-specific annotations found in Isabella Whitney’s poetic miscellany A Sweet Nosgay (1573). Texts by early modern women often enjoyed a surprisingly long reception history and textual afterlife. By analysing early modern ownership inscriptions and nineteenth century marginalia found in the sole extant copy of Whitney’s text, this article considers how A Sweet Nosgay was read across time as a valuable work of ameliorating literature. Descriptions of Whitney's text in nineteenth century auction catalogues similarly allow us to trace changing attitudes towards, and readership of, her work: raising questions of how gender contributed to an author’s desirability, economic value, and ultimate survival. Ultimately, this case study demonstrates the need for a wider chronological and generic framework by which to consider the layered reception of the multitude of women’s texts like Whitney’s that survive in a single recorded source.
In A Sweet Nosgay’s concluding “A Farewell to the Reader” (1573), the poet Isabella Whitney explains her desire to be fondly remembered by appreciative readers. In return for the “many hours” of “payne” she had put into reordering and versifying Hugh Plat’s pseudo-Senecan collection of commonplaces The Flours of Philosophie (1572), Whitney hoped that “when I am distant farre … some may say, God speede her well/ that dyd this Nosegay make”.Footnote1 But her awareness of London’s literary marketplace frequented, as she explains in “The Auctor to the Reader”, by those with differences in “complextion” acquainted her with the harsh reality: that her verses for “the brused mynde” may “helpeth some” but “to others good doth none” (sig. A7r, B1r). After pleading with disapproving readers not to “in peeces teare” her work, and imagining Plat’s materially misogynistic response (“I wolde/ not leave her worth a rag”), Whitney settles for her work being allowed to reach appreciative readers unimpeded: “If as I say, no harmes doo hap,/ but that this well may speede:/ My mind is dully satissfyed,/ I crave none other meede” (sig. C5v-6v).
As these verses demonstrate, Whitney was an author acutely aware of her readership and potential reception. With critical interest in women readers continuing to grow, much of the recent material turn in Whitney scholarship has focussed on her work’s relationship to readers and her own reading practices. The influence of Whitney’s reading of contemporary Ovidian translations and construction of female readers in her first collection, The Copy of A Letter (c.1567), has been considered by Kirk Melnikoff and Maggie Ellen Ray.Footnote2 Mary Ellen Lamb and Felicity Sheehy have examined Whitney’s active reading of Plat’s Flours of Philosophie, her strategies for democratizing high humanist culture to non-elite readers, and training of readers to attend to textual ambiguities.Footnote3 Michelle O’Callaghan has highlighted the important role played by the printer-publisher Richard Jones in shaping the readership of her miscellanies, as well as using bibliographic analysis of the sole surviving copy of The Copy of a Letter in the Bodleian Library to recover seventeenth-century reader and institutional responses to her first collection.Footnote4 Yet how readers beyond the booksellers’ shop responded to the largest and most ambitious collection of poetry of England’s first professional woman writer remains largely unresolved.
This article addresses this critical gap in Whitney scholarship by considering how the unique surviving copy of A Sweet Nosgay was received and read prior to its institutional acquisition in 1871. Building on the initial research of Michael Felker and methodology of O’Callaghan, close bibliographic analysis of Whitney’s volume in the British Library is used to develop our understanding of how readers responded to her work.Footnote5 Popular print is often regarded as ephemeral. But Whitney’s A Sweet Nosegay enjoyed a surprisingly long reception history and textual afterlife. It has been assumed that, despite experiencing initial commercial success, Whitney and her work fell into relative obscurity and remained unread until the republication of “The Maner of her Wyll, and What She Left to London” by Betty Travitsky in 1980.Footnote6 The presence of mould in the surviving copy, a very literal ecological enactment of Ben Jonson’s condemnation of old-fashioned texts in “An Ode to Himself” (1629) as “some mouldy tale/ like Pericles and stale”, suggests a period of readerly neglect.Footnote7 But the marginalia and provenance of A Sweet Nosgay reveals how a small group of readers continued to appreciate her work long after Whitney’s retirement from the print marketplace. The early seventeenth-century inscription witnessing William Atkins’s ownership and exchange of the volume for a hatband provides an insight into the mercantile readership of her work, as well as raising wider questions about informal acts of textual exchange. Moving into the early nineteenth century, Benjamin Haywood Bright’s annotations demonstrate how Whitney was acquired by a prominent collector not only for her rarity, but to be actively read for her sententious wisdom.Footnote8 And the subsequent marketing and sale of Whitney’s work by auction, initially in 1844 to the antiquarian Rev. Thomas Corser and finally the British Library in 1871, helps us begin to appreciate the market for and institutional attitudes towards her work later in the century.
Revaluating the reading and reception of Whitney’s work is about more than improving our understanding of an individual author. Book history as a discipline is structurally male.Footnote9 To understand women writers through a book-historical lens therefore requires an alternate methodology: one that implements Kate Ozment’s concept of feminist bibliography, defined as “the use of bibliographic methodologies to revise how book history and related fields categorize and analyze women’s texts and labor”.Footnote10 Marie-Louise Coolahan’s recent project, RECIRC: The Reception & Circulation of Early Modern Women’s Writing, 1550–1700 (2014-20), demonstrated that a feminist approach to reception can be archived by tracing reader responses across a wider range of sources (manuscript miscellanies, auction catalogues, and translations).Footnote11 But even under these broadened parameters, the focus on manuscript and not copy specific annotations in printed texts and later sources in RECIRC’s database reinforces the assumption that Whitney has no reception history.Footnote12
Building on Coolahan’s model, this case study demonstrates the need for a wider chronological and generic framework by which to consider the layered reception of the plethora of women’s texts like Whitney’s that survive in a single recorded contemporary source. As scholarship on early modern women readers and their active reading practices continues to grow, attending to the manuscript additions to A Sweet Nosgay emphasizes the need to also consider annotators of their work.Footnote13 And as interest is renewed in the development of the rare book trade between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, we must take the opportunity to apply the principles of feminist bibliography to this area of book history, using auction catalogues and bookseller’s descriptions to question how gender contributed to an author’s desirability, economic value, and ultimate survival.Footnote14 In so doing, we can better understand the reception history of not only Whitney’s A Sweet Nosgay, but other printed writings by early modern women.
A Sweet Nosgay’s Early Readers
Tracing A Sweet Nosgay’s ownership and reception history begins by analyzing the oldest manuscript additions to the volume. Appearing in the margins of the prefatory material partway through “The Auctor to the Reader” (), the marginalia in secretary hand provides evidence of the earliest named owners and readers of Whitney’s work outside of her coterie:
This book is Thomas Atkins of this I have good witness uppon ... <I gave a> hat bond <for it> of William leper (sig. A7r)
Figure 1. London, British Library, C.39.b.45, Sig. A7r. © British Library Board.
Comprehending the anthropology of the surviving copy of Whitney’s verses begins by identifying the people involved. Felker was unable to locate either man.Footnote17 The identity of Leper remains unknown, though the very act of exchanging Whitney’s poems to “geue others leave to weare them” rather than “in peeces teare them” (Sig. C5v) suggests a certain amount of respect for her work. A likely contender for the book’s second known owner with access to a ready supply of hatbands is found in puritan politician and mercer Sir Thomas Atkins (c.1589-1668/9).Footnote18 Atkins was the aspirational second son of a prosperous provincial merchant. After completing an apprenticeship under a London mercer in 1614, he was elected as a Member of Parliament for his native Norwich. Later rising to the ranks of sheriff and lord mayor of London, Atkins was eventually knighted by Cromwell in 1657 for his loyalty during the Rump Parliament, before retiring to Kingston-Upon-Thames at the restoration.Footnote19
In her “The Maner of her Wyll, and What She Left to London”, Whitney herself regards mercers like Atkins with caution. Unlike the other traders, they are characterized as deceptive, and treated with suspicion, gifted woolen and linen wares by the speaker on the condition that “they me not deceive” (sig. E4r).Footnote20 But in many ways Atkins was exactly the sort of reader Whitney envisaged for her work. A lack of university education, paired with a drive for upward social mobility, made him the aspirational middling class of reader she was attempting to reach with the accessible humanist learning of “A Sweet Nosgay”.Footnote21 His mercantile background, apprenticeship, and experience working as a mercer would have made Whitney’s discussions of commodified city life through London’s “stynking streetes” and “loathsome lanes” (Sig. A6v) in her “Wyll” familiar and relatable. And whilst other male readers condemned women poets for appearing in print, their shared backgrounds as provincial gentlefolk attempting to establish themselves in the unwelcoming metropolis seems to have garnered a sympathetic response to Whitney’s often outspoken verse.
Aktins’s act of informal exchange recorded in his ownership inscription attests that he valued Whitney’s work for its commodity status as much as his “silk so rich/ as any would desire” (Sig. E4r). Despite the large amount of scholarship on gifting books, and comments from readers describing texts as metaphorically being “Worth” their “Wait in Gold”, little research has been conducted on the trading of books outside of the established economic system.Footnote22 The act of exchange recorded in A Sweet Nosgay is an example that such customer-driven transactions could mirror the monetary value of a book. Hatbands, lengths of fabric or ribbon designed to be tied around the brim of millinery, were aspirational accessories associated with what Margaret Cavendish in Sociable Letters (1664) calls the “Fashions of Grandeur”.Footnote23 Made from “silk so rich”, the finest were “trymmed with Golde or Sylver” and could cost someone visiting a mercer like Atkins anywhere between 2s 6d and 3s 6d, and were frequently evoked by writers as examples of material excess.Footnote24 In comparison, the price of second-hand books varied depending on their condition and rarity, making it “hard to generalize about how relatively expensive old or second-hand books were compared to new ones”.Footnote25 But records of other second-hand octavos bought in the period, such as those acquired by John Buxton between 1627-31, suggest that the comparative pecuniary value of A Sweet Nosgay agreed by Leper and Atkins was towards the higher end of the scale, and was markedly more than its original retail value: an ironic afterlife for a work of popular print published in some numbers that closes with a fictional will motivated by being “very weak in the purse” (Sig. E3r), but one that aligns with tensions in Whitney scholarship between her work’s commonality and rarity.Footnote26
A work of popular literature long since out of print, but evidently not out of favor, as a desirable commodity the exchange value of Whitney’s work had increased by the early part of the seventeenth century. As such Atkins wanted to impress upon readers his status as the volume’s legal owner through the quasi-public space of the book’s prefatory matter.Footnote27 Ownership of a book does not always equal readership. But the careful placement of his inscription as not to obscure the text beneath, combined with its formulation, suggests a desire to read and understand Whitney’s work. Similar inscriptions in prayerbooks, Latin dictionaries, and ars morendi literature surveyed by Scott-Warren demonstrate that those witnessing book ownership often took a legalistic tone.Footnote28 But in the context of a volume containing Whitney’s “Wyll”, Atkin’s choice of diction seems to recall the concluding poem’s legal lexicon and syntax, particularly its closing envoi: “In witness of the standers by,/ whose names yf you wyll have/ Paper, Pen, and Standish were” (Sig. E8v).
Atkins and Leper’s agreement to exchange A Sweet Nosgay for a hatband can be similarly read as a response to Whitney’s attentiveness to mercantile material culture and the commodity status of her work.Footnote29 By describing her “Bookes” as appearing “with other ware” in Jones’s bookshop, Whitney equally blurs the line between the books and other merchandise such as the remedies, pomanders, and perfumed wax sold alongside texts by printers and stationers.Footnote30 Their choice to exchange A Sweet Nosgay for a silk hatband could also be interpreted as a form of reader response. Whitney’s text figures itself as a collection of embroidered silk or linen “slips”, and her “Wyll” questions the honesty of the mercers selling these fabrics.Footnote31 By equating the value of A Sweet Nosgay with an expensive hatband, Aktins could be seen as playfully refuting the deception his company is accused of by paying above the market price for her work in the form of “silke so rich”. The marks left by Whitney’s first readers are minimal. But their interpretative richness demonstrates the important of attending to even the smallest of annotations, particularly for texts that survive in a single printed copy, for understanding their anthropology.
“For Whom I Store of Bookes have Left”: A Sweet Nosgay and Nineteenth-Century Bibliophiles
Who owned A Sweet Nosgay after Atkins is unclear. No books are mentioned in his will.Footnote32 If it was read during the eighteenth century no trace was left behind, though this may be when the volume’s title page and three preliminary leaves were lost in a partial realization of Whitney’s fears for the text’s material destruction. The volume disappears from records for over a century, before re-emerging in the library of Whitney’s next known reader and annotator, the Bristolian barrister and bibliographer Benjamin Heywood Bright (1787-1843). Bright is an important, yet under researched, figure for understanding the provenance and collecting history of early modern women’s writing. Before we analyze how the twenty-seven pencil annotations to the volume’s titular poem allow us to understand how he read his Nosgay, we must first understand what motivated Bright to acquire Whitney’s work, the context in which she was read, and his established reading practices.
With the help of the London bookseller Thomas Rodd Jr and his familial wealth, made from the Jamaican slave and sugar trades, Bright created one of the country’s largest non-aristocratic private collections of early printed books.Footnote33 This included an impressive collection of early editions of Shakespeare’s poetry, described prior to its sale as “unrivalled, except by the Collection in the Bodleian”.Footnote34 But like many collectors of his time it was Bright’s attraction to anything that “had an appearance of rarity, or that he knew was not to be found in libraries” produced during the first three centuries of western printing that led him to form one of the largest collections of texts by early modern women writers.Footnote35 As feminist bibliographers we strive to improve access for readers to this category of literature. But it is precisely this inaccessibility, scarcity, and need for intellectual exclusivity that led Bright to collect their work: filling the shelves of his library with rare works by then little-known authors such as Anne Vaughn Locke, Anne Dowriche, Mary Sidney Herbert, Elizabeth Cooke Hoby Russell, Elizabeth Cary, Aemilia Lanyer, Margaret Cavendish, Anne Bradstreet, Ephelia, and Anne Finch.Footnote36 Exactly when and how A Sweet Nosgay was added to this impressive collection is unclear. It seems likely that the volume was one of the many “Book[s] or scrap[s] of Old Poetry” acquired by Rodd on behalf of his wealthy patron between the 1820s and 1840s.Footnote37 But as a “unique” work, a term used to describe only seventeen out of the six thousand one hundred and seven items in his library sale catalogue, Whitney’s scarcity granted her a prominent place in Bright’s collection.Footnote38
Collectors of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century were often characterized as indiscriminate conspicuous consumers of antiquarian books who lacked “either taste, inclination, or knowledge sufficient to peruse them”.Footnote39 Many fulfilled this stereotype, including Sir Thomas Phillips (1792-1872) who bought up whole libraries at auction only to leave his purchases sitting in boxes for years after their acquisition.Footnote40 But Bright was not one of the collectors chastized for being “deeply read in titles and indexes” alone.Footnote41 As Rodd explains in the preface to the library’s sale catalogue:
Mr Bright was not merely a collector and proprietor of a most curious library … he read the books which he collected; and their value may be considered as enhanced by the pencil notes which so many of them contain, pointing to the curious facts, the singular opinions, the remarkable words, the parallel passages, the references to other writings, or to the lives of other persons, which he observed in the perusal, intended only for himself and his own particular pursuits and objects, but useful to all.Footnote42
The picture that has emerged from this brief analysis frames Bright as an active, systematic, and discerning reader of Whitney’s work who had an awareness and appreciation of early modern women’s writing.Footnote47 Under Rodd’s categorization, his annotations () are best understood as reflecting his scholarly interest in her “singular opinions”. Much like Jones’s use of printed manicules at quatrains or Flowers 48, 56, and 72, Bright’s marginal notations direct readers to passages of interest, perhaps with the view of returning to extract these sententiae into a commonplace book under thematic headings.Footnote48 Of these “N[ota]” and “N[ota] B[ene]” are the most frequent (). Described by William Sherman as “the most common annotation of all”, historians of reading tend to ignore the “endless nota benes” that augment the margins of printed books in favor of their “visually striking” sibling, the manicule.Footnote49 But by creating a hierarchical distinction between the fifteen flowers that should be noted versus the five noted well, Bright’s annotations give us an important insight into an engaged nineteenth century reader’s layered reading of Whitney’s work ( and ).
Figure 2. London, British Library, C.39.b.45, Sig. B7v. © British Library Board.
Figure 3. London, British Library, C.39.b.45, Sig. B8r. © British Library Board.
Table 1. Bright’s annotations to A Sweet Nosgay.
Bright’s annotations demonstrate a particular interest in Whitney’s advice on friendship. This may have been because his large library was surprisingly lacking material on this subject.Footnote50 Friendship is a central theme of A Sweet Nosgay, which is framed by Whitney in the epistle dedicatory as “the dutie of a friend” (Sig. A4v). Seven of the titular poem’s twenty-five flowers on the topic have been annotated with “N” (7, 14, 16, 30, 42, 55, 57). With the exception of Flower 42, these can be grouped together into subheadings, suggesting an attempt to read Whitney for diverse yet specific advice on friendship. Flowers 30, 55, and 57 all focus on the need for faithfulness in friendship, with Flower 7 developing the theme of absent friends in 55 by reworking Plat’s proverbial “Out of Sight, out of minde” to apply to the joy of companionate reunion (“absent frends/ much joy at meeting finde” (Sig. B2v).Footnote51 Quatrains 14 and 16 advise readers of the need to admonish friends for their offences (“Admonisht be with willingnesse” [Sig. B3v]). Jones’s addition of a printed manicule at Flower 56, an ominous reminder that “thy friend,/ as he thy foe may frame” (Sig. B7v), suggests he regarded this quatrain as particularly important. But despite annotating the flowers at either side as notable, evidencing an active engagement with the section, Bright ignores this verse. Instead, his annotation of Flowers 32 and 33 with “NB” suggests he regarded Whitney’s advice on flattery in friendship as particularly noteworthy. Whilst her other observations may have been useful, it was Whitney’s sententious reminder to “flatter none” and that the hate of a “fawning frende” is better than “their deceateful love” (Sig. B5r) that Bright saw as particularly pertinent.
Bright was also drawn to Whitney’s wide-ranging advice on love. A key and recurrent theme running throughout her oeuvre, love is the topic of seventeen sententiae in “A Sweet Nosgay”. Those found in the third quarter of the text at Flowers 61–75 appear to have been of particular interest and befitting of their own specific abbreviation. Seven out of ten stanzas across the bifolium containing flowers sixty-four to seventy-three are annotated with Bright’s distinctive Greek e (64, 65, 67, 69, 71, 72, 73) ( and ). These include Flower 64 on love’s ability to fade but ultimately endure (“to pluck his rootes,/ in vayne you do assay” (Sig. B8v) and 69’s combination of two of Plat’s somewhat suggestive sentences on secret love: “When secret love once kindled is/ twill burne with fiercest flame:/ The surest way to be beloved, is fyrst to doo the same” (Sig. C1r).Footnote52 Flowers 67 suggests a similarly hierarchical system at work in Bright’s annotations on love. Like Flower 74, marked with an “N”, the verse deals with the negativity of love for older people, concluding that “it is a fault/for they should love defye” (Sig. C1v). Bright’s categorization of two stanzas of similar content as noteworthy can be read as the result of aesthetic preferences. Although both offer wisdom on the same issue, Flower 67 is more positive in its outlook, dealing with the profit “yongmen … gaine … when they are in love” as well as the “fault” of loving old (Sig. B8v). Flower 72 similarly deals with the difficulty of hiding love, noting that “love ful fraught w[ith] foolish toies/ may easely be espyde” (Sig. C1r). A verse signposted to readers with a printed manicule, Bright’s annotation of this quatrain contrasts with his pointed bypassing of the similarly marked flower on friendship discussed above. A delayed response to Jones’s directed reading, the marginalia records the printer and Bright’s shared interest in Whitney’s handling of the topic, and evidences that the former did correctly predict reader response to Whitney’s work in at least one instance.
Figure 4. London, British Library, C.39.b.45, Sig. B8v. © British Library Board.
Figure 5. London, British Library, C.39.b.45, Sig. C1r. © British Library Board.
In many ways Bright was the sort of reader Whitney envisaged for her work. His careful, systematic, and extensive annotations to the poem with a view to extraction suggest an attempt to follow Whitney’s advice in “The Auctor to the Reader” to “fyrst tast and after trye” (Sig. A7r) out her sententious advice. The fact that the text’s derivative nature is made explicit in the poem’s prefatory material, yet does not devalue the text for a nineteenth century reader in itself is important. Living in a post-enlightenment society that equated literary value with originality, early modern writers such as the essayist Grace, Lady Gethin were systematically chastised and condemned for their reliance on pre-existing sources.Footnote53 It is difficult to read intention into a lack of annotations. Yet Bright’s active engagement with the volume’s titular poem, in comparison to unannotated texts in the volume’s second and third parts, suggests he may have preferred “A Sweet Nosgay” to the texts which later came to define her reputation such as her “Wyll”. Like many early modern women writers recovered in the late twentieth century, Whitney scholarship began by focusing on her “original” productions. But as our appreciation of early modern literary economies, reading practices, and the social text has developed over the last twenty years, Whitney’s reworking of Plat’s commonplaces has received increased critical attention: a recent re-evaluation but one that has its origins in the surprising scholarly interests of a nineteenth-century bibliophile.
In 1845, Rodd was tasked with cataloguing his late employer’s library ahead of a mammoth twenty-two day sale at Sotheby’s.Footnote54 Despite being an imperfect copy, the bookseller saw A Sweet Nosgay as an important part of the vast collection. Most of Rodd’s descriptions are limited to a book’s title, author, format, date, and binding. By comparison Whitney’s work is given almost an entire page. A Sweet Nosgay’s value is once again tied up in its rarity, designed to tempt collectors by being advertised as a “probably unique” volume that “has escaped the notice of all our poetical antiquaries, nor is the name mentioned by the bibliographers”.Footnote55 Rodd’s entry is an important, if unintended, moment in the readership, reception, and early scholarship of Whitney’s work. He was the first known reader to recognize “Is. W” as the same figure behind The Copy of a Letter and established her full name and identity from A Sweet Nosgay’s preliminary material.Footnote56 But it also made him responsible for reprinting Whitney’s work for the first time since the sixteenth century, flattening the multi-author nature of the collection into the product of a single “authoress”.Footnote57 By reproducing twenty-four carefully edited lines from her “Wyll” as “a specimen” of her work the bookseller was, like Richard Jones three centuries prior, hoping to entice buyers into acquiring the volume through the careful packaging and identification of their reading interests.Footnote58 His selection of lines 229–52 of the poem provides an insight into what Rodd thought might appeal to Victorian readers and collectors:
Rodd’s choice to include Whitney’s lines on Bridewell may have been an attempt to attract those with more general contemporary interests in the continuing debates surrounding prison and poor law reform.Footnote60 But his overriding focus on the scholarly activities of the gentleman at the Inns of Court suggests he was appealing directly to Victorian bibliophiles and their agents attending the sale. Similarly laden with a “store of Bookes” and “with study cloyd”, Rodd’s extract allows these readers to recognize themselves within the antiquated topography of Whitney’s poem, as well as whetting their appetite for rarity by reproducing her informed account of a legal scholar’s daily activities. Rodd’s choice to end his extract as Whitney describes the theatrical “wonders” seen at the Inns of Court similarly teases the innumerable deep-pocketed collectors of early modern drama with what further details her text may have revealed about early Elizabethan performance history.
As A Sweet Nosgay’s first modern editor, Rodd’s mediation of Whitney’s text also played an important part in the volume’s marketing. On a lexical level Rodd’s edition closely follows his source. Punctuation is occasionally changed, namely swapping commas for semi-colons. Original spelling, except for modernizing u/v and “theyr”, is retained. But key formal changes are made. Condensing Whitney’s twenty-four short and snappy quatrains into twelve octameters could be understood as an attempt to economize on space. But it seems more likely in the already lengthy catalogue, one in which Whitney has a prime role, that Rodd was attempting to elevate the literary status of Whitney’s work by distancing it from the ballad verse form. Bright himself valued ballads, buying and enlarging the Roxburghe collection for which the British Library paid the princely sum of £535 at his sale.Footnote61 But Rodd’s treatment of her verse suggests a gendered judgement based on a need to distance her from the marketplace for printed ballads, perhaps in an attempt to raise Whitney’s work from popular to higher brow literature worthy of further reading and study. The bookseller’s marketing of A Sweet Nosgay worked. The auctioneer’s hammer fell at £8, making it the fifth most expensive lot on that day of the sale.Footnote62 Whitney’s miscellany did not come close to the prices realized for Bright’s Shakespeare collection.Footnote63 But it did outsell all the early editions of Milton, nearly doubling the amount achieved by the “rarest of all Milton’s works” Comus (1637) and, with the exception of Dowriche’s The French Historie (1589), all other volumes of early modern women’s poetry: demonstrating her work continued to be regarded as culturally valuable.Footnote64
Despite Rodd’s best efforts, Whitney’s subsequent readers were not as engaged or respectful of her work. The volume’s final private owner was the poet’s fellow Cheshire native, Rev. Thomas Corser (1793-1876).Footnote65 Like Bright, he curated a large library filled with “rare and unique works”, including many by early modern women, which was sold for in excess of £20,000 between 1868–74 after “age, ill health, and bodily infirmity” prevented “the further enjoyment of his books”.Footnote66 In 1860, he begun to republish descriptions of and extracts from “a select portion” of “the volumes of least frequent occurrence” in his vast library of early printed poetry as the ambitious eleven-part descriptive catalogue-come-anthology Collectanea Anglo-Poetica (1860-83).Footnote67 As a unique volume explicitly connected to his beloved Cheshire, it might be expected Corser would include a text such as A Sweet Nosgay, which he appears to have had re-bound in expensive half-Morocco. But overwhelmed with illness, material and, as his condemnatory entries on Lanyer and Bradstreet attest, overt misogyny, Corser left this task to the antiquarian Henry Green, who borrowed A Sweet Nosgay to produce his 1866 facsimile edition of Geoffrey Whitney’s Choice of Emblems (1586).Footnote68
For Green, Whitney’s poetry did not “possess much literary merit or poetical beauty”. Her work was dismissed as “just the outpourings of a country maiden’s spirit when brought into contact with the London society of Elizabeth’s reign”, and extracts of her poetry were reproduced to simply flesh-out her brother’s biography and “serve to carry out remarks nearer to completion”.Footnote69 “An Order Prescribed” is glossed as “especially note-worthy from its genuine sisterly goodness and quaint simplicity, presenting quite a picture of private life in the sixteenth century”: an appreciative assessment of Whitney’s emotional veracity and value as a historical source, but one that over simplifies her poem’s moralizing reflection on class and gender.Footnote70 But as Green’s pointed retitling of her “Wyll” as The “Auctors (feyned) Testament before her departing” demonstrates, Isabella’s verse and literary talents were generally regarded as second rate to that of her brother.Footnote71
Green’s republication and assessment of Whitney impacted contemporary opinions, prompting a shift in attitudes towards what one reader now regarded as her “book of mediocre verse”.Footnote72 In 1871 A Sweet Nosgay was auctioned off for the final time. Previously promoted by Rodd as “an authoress”, the brief accompanying catalogue entry now erased Whitney as an author in her own right.Footnote73 Sotheby, Wilkinson, and Hodge instead saw her market appeal as the “Sister to G Whitney, Author of the Choice Emblems”, and directed prospective buyers to read the damning assessment of her work in “Green’s elegant reprint of the same”.Footnote74 The result was that, whilst Bright’s copy of Geoffrey’s work at Corser’s sale rose in value from £2 17 shillings to £10 5 shillings, Isabella’s fell to £5 5 shillings: a shift that can be read as a reflection of the fallen cultural value of her work resulting from Green’s negative critical appraisal.Footnote75
This devaluation may have affected the recovery and reading of A Sweet Nosgay in the short term. But it also ensured her text’s survival to the present day within the protection of an institutional collection. Although the British Museum was present at Bright’s sale, budget limitations and current expansionist collecting agendas under Sir Anthony Panizzi seem to have prevented them from acquiring Whitney’s work in 1844. But with the arrival of John Winter Jones and a shift towards consolidating the existing collections, the lowered price made Whitney’s unique volume an appealing addition, prompting the museum to acquire A Sweet Nosgay alongside thirty-four other new titles for the collection through the bookseller Thomas Boone in July 1871.Footnote76 After it was accessioned on 4th October 1871, Whitney’s volume appears to have remained unread for just over a century, until the poet Ann Stanford edited a number of her Flowers and “A Sovereign Receipt” for her anthology The Woman Poets in English (1972). It was Travitsky’s reading of Whitney’s “Wyll” from a microfilm copy of A Sweet Nosgay for her landmark article of 1980 that led to Whitney’s recovery through partial reproduction in affordable anthologies in the decades that followed. But without the series of careful owners and readers such as Atkins, Bright, Rodd, and the British Museum librarians to ensure the single mould-stained surviving copy was not “in peeces” torn past the missing preliminary leaves, there would not have been a text to “gene others leave to” read her work (Sig. C5v).
Whitney has since become one of the most widely anthologized early modern women writers. Her work has appeared in field-defining collections such as Travitsky’s The Paradise of Women (1989), Danielle Clarke’s Renaissance Women Poets (2000), and Jane Stevenson and Peter Davidson’s Early Modern Women Poets (2001). Since the publication of Emrys Jones’s New Oxford Book of Sixteenth Century Verse (1991), most general anthologies of early modern literature have included excerpts of her work. Yet despite her widescale anthologization and incorporation into the canon, there is still no mainstream critical edition of her complete works.Footnote77 Scholars continue to rely on EEBO’s error-riddled transcriptions and low-resolution digitized microfilm, rendering parts of the printed text and manuscript marginalia unreadable to those without archival access. Students depending on anthologies are similarly disadvantaged. Most reproduce the same homogenized selection of Whitney’s work. Whilst outspoken poems such as her “Wyll” and “To her Unconstant Lover” are repeatedly republished, the more conventional ameliorating advice of “A Sweet Nosgay” is largely ignored: primarily due to a continued equation of literary value with originality, but also the difficulty of anthologizing extracts from longer texts of didactic literature for non-specialist readers.Footnote78
Editors often find themselves repeating the same questions with regards to the form editions of women’s writing should take.Footnote79 But they seldom question the need to remove the “editorial accretions” that have gathered around the work of early modern women like Whitney resulting from their selective anthologization.Footnote80 The commercial failure of Oxford’s Women Writers in English 1350–1850 series has tainted the standalone edition for many publishers. But affordable critical editions, available digitally or in print through The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe, are making a comeback.Footnote81 In addition to an increased scholarly focus on her oeuvre, the ever-increasing socio-economic diversity of student cohorts, combined with a lack of representation of early modern women from similar backgrounds in critical editions, emphasizes a real need for an accessible edition of Whitney’s complete works.Footnote82 But the time intensive nature of such projects, combined with hiring committees in a precarious job market favoring other forms of research publications, continues to make them “only safe for the securely tenured”; a somewhat ironic fate for an author like Whitney whose work is so preoccupied by financial precarity.Footnote83 Whitney’s A Sweet Nosgay may have been preserved for posterity thanks to the efforts of previous readers and collectors. But she still awaits an editor to make her work accessible to a wider demographic.
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Additional information
Notes on contributors
Ben Wilkinson-Turnbull
Ben Wilkinson-Turnbull is a lecturer and doctoral candidate in English at the University of Oxford. His research focuses on women’s writing and book history between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. His work has appeared in The Review of English Studies and The Palgrave Encyclopaedia of Early Modern Women’s Writing. He is co-editor of Philosophical and Physical Opinions for The Complete Works of Margaret Cavendish and contributing editor to The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jonathan Swift. At present, he is also working as part of a team of researchers at UCL’s Centre for Editing Lives and Letters to develop a database of early donations to the Bodleian library.
Notes
1 Isabella Whitney, A Sweet Nosgay, Or Pleasant Posye (London, 1573), sig C5r-v. Subsequent references are provided in text.
2 Kirk Melnikoff, “Isabella Whitney Amongst the Stalls of Richard Jones”, in Women's Labour and the History of the Book in Early Modern England, ed. Valerie Wayne (London: Bloomsbury, 2020), pp. 145–62; Maggie Ellen Ray, “‘The Simple Fool Doth Trust / Too Much before He Try’: Isabella Whitney's Revision of the Female Reader and Lover in ‘The Copy of a Letter’”, Early Modern Women, 6 (2011): 127–58.
3 Mary Ellen Lamb, “Isabella Whitney and Reading Humanism”, in Women's Bookscapes in Early Modern Britain: Reading, Ownership, Circulation, eds. Leah Knight, Micheline White, and Elizabeth Sauer (Ann Arbor, Michigan, 2018), pp. 43–58; Felicity Sheehy, “Reading Isabella Whitney Reading”, Studies in Philology, 118.3 (2021): 491–520.
4 Michelle O'Callaghan, “‘My Printer must, haue somewhat to his share’: Isabella Whitney, Richard Jones, and Crafting Books”, Women’s Writing, 26.1 (2019): 15–34.
5 Michael David Felker briefly outlines the provenance of A Sweet Nosgay in “The Poems of Isabella Whitney: A Critical Edition” (Unpublished PhD Thesis, Texas Tech University, 1990), pp. xlv–vi.
6 Betty Travitsky, “The 'Wyll and Teastament' of Isabella Whitney”, English Literary Renaissance, 10.1 (1980): 76–94.
7 The Cambridge Works of Ben Jonson, ed. Colin Burrow, 7 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 6, 310–3. The bottom third of A Sweet Nosgay’s textblock is heavily water-stained, explaining the appearance of mould at sig. D7r-v.
8 Sheehy noted the existence of these annotations, although she does not suggest an identity for their creator or examine how they response to Whitney’s work. See “Reading Isabella Whitney Reading”, p. 509.
9 Kate Ozment, “Rationale for Feminist Bibliography”, Textual Cultures: Text, Contexts, Interpretation, 13.1 (2020): 149–78.
10 Ibid., p. 152. For an example of feminist bibliography in practice, see Eve Houghton, “Private Owners, Public Books: Henrietta Bartlett’s Feminist Bibliography”, The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 116.4 (2022): 567–87.
12 “Isabella Whitney”, https://recirc.universityofgalway.ie/people/person/2748
13 For an ongoing project on the topic, see Rosalind Smith’s “Marginalia and the Early Modern Women Writer (1530–1660)” https://earlymodernwomensmarginalia.cems.anu.edu.au/. A notable example of a male reader responding to woman’s text can be found in the extensive hostile annotations on a copy of Rachel Speght’s Mouzzel for Melastomus (1617) (Yale, lh Sp 617m.), reproduced in The Polemics and Poems of Rachel Speght, ed. Barbara Kiefer Lewalski (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).
14 See David McKitterick, The Invention of Rare Books: Private Interest and Public Memory, 1600–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2018).
15 Jason Scott-Warren, “Reading Graffiti in the Early Modern Book”, Huntington Library Quarterly, 73.3 (2010): 363–81, 375.
16 ibid., p. 374, 380.
17 See Felker, “The Poems of Isabella Whitney”, p. xlv.
18 Thomas Atkins (1538- aft.1603), MP for Gloucester, is another possible candidate. However, the younger man’s profession as a mercer makes him a more likely candidate. For the former, see https://www.historyofparliamentonline.org/volume/1558-1603/member/atkins-thomas-1538.
19 Keith Lindley, “Atkins, Thomas [Created Sir Thomas Atkins under the Protectorate] (c. 1589–1668/9), Local Politician”, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. 23 Sep. 2004; Accessed 29 Nov. 2022. https://ezproxy-prd.bodleian.ox.ac.uk:2648/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-66500.
20 Whitney’s characterization of mercers as deceptive follows that of her precursor, The Wyll of the Deuyll (1548): ‘to the Mercers … a clothe, to hange before their wyndowes: & everyche of them a subtle light, to make all their wares to shew fyne’ (London, c.1580), sig. A3v-A4r). Whitney had access to this text through Jones’s 1567 edition. See Melnikoff, “Isabella Whitney Amongst the Stalls of Richard Jones”, pp. 145–54.
21 For other examples of mercantile humanist readers in the period see Robyn Adams, “A Tudor Family Library Revealed: Philanthropy, Social Ambition, and Continental Books in Sir Michael Dormer’s Donation to the Bodleian Library, 1603”, Huntington Library Quarterly (forthcoming).
22 John Gee, Steps of Ascention unto God or A Ladder to Heaven (London, 1645), front endleaf (Folger Shakespeare Library, 268- 092q). For images of Mary Stile’s inscription, see https://luna.folger.edu/luna/servlet/s/xys408. For a related discussion of using books to pay off debts on the continent, see Alex Wingate, “’No entiende en el Balor de los libros’: The value of books for women owners in seventeenth-century Navarre” in Gender and the Book Trades, eds. Elise Watson and Jessica Farrell-Jobst (Leiden: Brill, forthcoming).
23 Valerie Cumming, C. W. Cunnington, and Phillis Cunnington, “Hatband”, in The Dictionary of Fashion History. 2nd ed. (London: Bloomsbury, 2010), p. 138; Margaret Cavendish, CCXI Sociable Letters (London: 1664), 261.
24 By the Queene. A Proclamation with Certayne Clauses of Divers Statutes, & Other Necessary Additions (London, 1580),[sig Br]; Documents Relating to the Office of Revels in the Time of Queen Elizabeth, ed. A. Feuillerat (Louvain: A. Uystprust, 1908), p. 222; Walter Cary, The Present State of England Expressed in this Paradox, Our Fathers Were Very Rich with Little, and Wee Poore With Much (London, 1626), p. 9.
25 Leah Orr, “Prices of English Books at Auction c.1680”, The Library, 20.4 (2019): 501–26; Henry Woudhuysen, “From Duck Lane to Lazarus Seaman: Buying and Selling Old Books in England during the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries”, in The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Book History, ed. Adam Smyth (Oxford: Oxford UP, forthcoming).
26 David McKitterick, “‘Ovid with a Littleton’: The Cost of English Books in the Early Seventeenth Century”, Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society, 11.2 (1997): 184–234. See also Nicolas Barker, “Notes on the Origins of the Second-Hand Book Trade”, Book Collector, 52.3 (2003): 356–70.
27 Aktins’s choice to place the inscription on the volume’s preliminaries rather than endleaves may be an attempt to ensure its preservation, as the latter were frequently discarded when books were rebound.
28 See Scott-Warren, “Reading Graffiti in the Early Modern Book”, pp. 373–4. Works examined include Christopher Sutton, Disce vivere (London, 1608) [Bodleian, Vet.A2.f.103, front flyleaf], Thomas Elyot, Bibliotheca Eliotae (London, 1542), [CUL, Syn. 4.54.7, flyleaf], and Preces priuatae (London, 1573) [Cambridge University Library, Pet.F.3.12,sig. 2A3r].
29 For more on the commodity status of Whitney’s work, see Melnikoff, “Isabella Whitney Amongst the Stalls of Richard Jones”.
30 Ben Higgins, “'The Book-sellars Shop’: Browsing, Reading, and Buying in Early Modern England”, in The Oxford Handbook to the History of the Book in Early Modern England, ed. Adam Smyth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming).
31 For the importance of fabric in A Sweet Nosgay see Whitney Trettien, “Isabella Whitney's Slips: Textile Labor, Gendered Authorship, and the Early Modern Miscellany”, The Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 45.33 (2015): 505–21.
32 Kew, National Archives, PROB-11-329-70.
33 Thomas Rodd, Catalogue of the Valuable Library of the Late Benjamin Heywood Bright, Esq., Containing a Most Extensive Collection of Valuable, Rare, and Curious Books, in All Classes of Literature. Which Will Be Sold by Auction (England: Compton and Ritchio, 1845), p. v.
34 This included the only known copy the of 1627 Scottish edition of Venus and Adonis (1593), as well as first editions of The Rape of Lucrece (1594) and Sonnets (1609). See Rodd, Catalogue, pp. 319–20.
35 Ibid., p. i. What made a book rare varied, see McKitterick, The Invention of Rare Books, pp. 1–14.
36 For entries on each author, see Rodd, Catalogue, p. 66, 122, 183, 307, 69, 213, 77–8, 49, 134, 143.
37 Letter from Rodd to Bright 1841, University of Melbourne Archives, 1980.0075.07770.
38 See Rodd, Catalogue, p. vii.
39 H.W, “Essay on the Bibliomania”, The European Magazine, and London Review, 65 (London, 1814): pp. 197–9 (198).
40 For a study of Phillips see A. N. L Munby, Portrait of an Obsession: The Life of Sir Thomas Phillipps, the World's Greatest Book Collector, adapted by Nicolas Barker (London: Constable, 1967).
41 Isaac D’Israeli, Miscellanies; or, Literary Recreations (London, 1796), p. 138.
42 See Rodd, Catalogue, p. vii.
43 Bright’s copy is now British Library, General Reference Collection, 696.a.40.
44 Bodleian Library, MS. Corn. e. 1, front endleaves.
45 See Rodd, Catalogue, p. vii.
46 Ibid., p. 344, 58, 137, 49, vii; On the developing market for annotated books see McKitterick, Rare Books, pp. 104–8.
47 Bright’s identity as the author of these annotations has been confirmed through palaeographical comparison with a known autograph penciled notes in his copy of Richard Carew’s Survey of Cornwall (1609) (Bodleian Library, MS. Corn. e. 1, front flyleaves).
48 Commonplacing continued into the first part of the nineteenth century. See David Allan, Commonplace Books and Reading in Georgian England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 255–67.
49 William Sherman, Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England (Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press, 2008), p. 29, 43.
50 Outliers included essays in collections by Francis Bacon and Grace, Lady Gethin. See Rodd, Catalogue, p. 18, 160.
51 See Felker, “The Poems of Isabella Whitney”, p. xcvii.
52 See Felker, “The Poems of Isabella Whitney”, p. 144.
53 Ben Wilkinson-Turnbull, “Originality, Plagiarism, and Posthumous Publication: Grace Gethin’s Reliquiæ Gethinianæ (1699)”, The Review of English Studies, 72.304 (2021): 301–20. As mentioned, Bright owned a copy of Gethin’s essays.
54 The catalogue was published anonymously. Rodd’s authorship is identified by an inscription in an annotated copy: “A Bookseller at Oxford told me that this catalogue was drawn out by Rodd of London” (University of Michigan Library, B 999, 484, front flyleaf).
55 See Rodd, Catalogue, p. 377.
56 “it appears that she had written a previous work, of which an account is given in The Resitutia … She was probably of the family of Whitney, of Cheshire; as at the end of the dedication to George Manwairing, she subscribes ‘your welwillyng Countriwoman, Is. W.’”, ibid.
57 See Rodd, Catalogue, p. 377.
58 ibid.; See O’Callaghan, “Isabella Whitney, Richard Jones, and Crafting Books”, p. 23.
59 See Rodd, Catalogue, p. 377.
60 See Stones of Law, Bricks of Shame: Narrating Imprisonment in the Victorian Age, ed. Frank Lauterbach and Jan Alber (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009) and David Englander, Poverty and Poor Law Reform in Britain: From Chadwick to Booth, 1834–1914 (London: Longman, 1998).
61 See Rodd, Catalogue, p. 20.
62 ibid., p. 377
63 Bright’s first editions of Lucrece and The Sonnets sold for £58 and £34 10s. Ibid., pp. 319–20.
64 The former sold for £4 15s, whilst the latter made £13 13s. Ibid., p. 243, 122.
65 Corser bought a total of nine items from the Bright sale, including his copy of Cary’s Tragedy of Mariam (1613). See Catalogue of the Third Portion of the Valuable & Extensive Library Formed by the Rev. Thomas Corser (London: J. Davy and Sons, 1869), p. 5.
66 G. C. Boase and Nilanjana Banerji, “Corser, Thomas (1793–1876)”, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. 23 Sep. 2004; [https://ezproxy-prd.bodleian.ox.ac.uk:2648/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-6358.]; Catalogue of the First Portion of the Valuable & Extensive Library Formed by the Rev. Thomas Corser (London: J. Davy and Sons, 1868), titlepage.
67 Collectanea Anglo-poetica, Or, A Bibliographical and Descriptive Catalogue of a Portion of a Collection of Early English Poetry, with Occasional Extracts and Remarks Biographical and Critical, ed. Thomas Corser, 11 vols. (Manchester: Printed for the Chetham Society, 1860–83), p. i: iv. The series was completed by James Crossley from Corser’s materials following the death of the editor.
68 See Collectanea Anglo-poetica, 8: 346–55 and 2: 330–6.
69 Whitney's “Choice of Emblemes”: A Fac-simile Reprint, ed. Henry Green (London: Lovell Reeve & Co, 1866), p. lviii.
70 Ibid., p. xlvi.
71 Ibid., p. lviii. For more on changing evaluations of early modern women’s writing during this period, see Paul Salzman, Editors Construct the Renaissance Canon, 1825–1915 (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), p. 19.
72 Stephen Whitney Phoenix, The Whitney Family of Connecticut, and Its Affiliations (New York: Privately Printed, 1878), p. xv. Phoenix claimed to be a distant relation of Isabella and frequently cites Green’s edition of Emblems.
73 See Rodd, Catalogue, p. 377
74 Catalogue of the Seventh Portion of the Valuable & Extensive Library Formed by the Rev. Thomas Corser (London: J. Davy and Sons, 1871), p. 31.
75 Ibid., p. 31, 43.
76 Philip R. Harris, A History of the British Museum Library, 1753–1973 (London: British Library, 1998), pp. 109–241; British Library, BLCA/S01/29: British Museum Department of Printed Books, Acquisition Invoices, 14 Jun 1871–19 Feb 1872. My thanks go to Hannah Graves at the British Library Archives for locating this invoice.
Leah Orr, “Prices of English Books at Auction c.1680”, The Library, 20.4 (2019): 501–26.
77 Shannon Miller’s edition of Whitney’s complete works is due imminently from The Other Voice series, from The University of Chicago Press.
78 For examples, see David Norbrook and Henry Woudhuysen, eds. The Penguin Book of Renaissance Verse, 1509–1659 (London: Penguin, 1992) and Paul Salzman, ed. Early Modern Women's Writing: An Anthology, 1560–1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). An exception is Marie H. Loughlin, Sandra J. Bell, and Patricia Brace’s The Broadview Anthology of Sixteenth-Century Poetry and Prose (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview, 2012), which includes a selection of Whitney’s flowers from “A Sweet Nosgay.”
79 Jaime Goodrich and Paula McQuade, “Beyond Canonicity: The Future(s) of Early Modern Women Writers”, Criticism, 63.1–2 (2021): 1–21, 4.
80 Leah S. Marcus, Unediting the Renaissance: Shakespeare, Marlowe, Milton (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 5.
81 Paul Salzman, “Hidden in Plain Sight: Editing and (Not) Canonizing Early Modern Women's Writing”, Criticism, 63.1–2 (2021): 121–30, 122.
82 High-status women such as Mary Sidney Herbert, Elizabeth I, and Lucy Hutchinson have all been afforded complete scholarly editions of their work.
83 Claude Rawson, “Recent Studies in the Restoration and Eighteenth Century”, Studies in English Literature: 1500–1900, 52, 697–741, 697. See also Kathleen Keown, “Recent Scholarship on Eighteenth-century Women's Poetry”, Literature Compass, 18.8 (2021).