New Directions in Criticism on Isabella Whitney

Introduction

The output of Isabella Whitney [fl, 1569–1573] occupies a unique place within the history of extant early modern printed poetry; an urban, female, non-élite poet deeply engaged with the rapid social and rapacious economic change happening in 1560s and 1570s London. Her work is innovative formally, generically and thematically, but there has as yet been no dedicated collection devoted exclusively to her work. This special issue marks a watershed in Whitney scholarship, being the first publication solely devoted to Whitney – to date, there has been no dedicated collection of essays, nor a monograph, even though articles and chapters now abound, and her work is widely taught at undergraduate level in anglophone universities. This special issue aims to reflect the integration of feminist criticism with new and emerging fields such as materiality, affect, textual cultures, ideas about the body and somatics, and book history.

There is wide critical agreement on the unique, even anomalous, status of Isabella Whitney’s entry into the print marketplace of sixteenth-century London, and acceptance that these singular texts’ meanings and reception are inflected by questions of gender. Whitney is the author/compiler/textual progenitor of two volumes of poetry, modelled loosely on the print miscellany, along with speculative authorship of several other poems.¹ How to frame the impact of authorial gender on literary output has been a key question in the field of early modern women’s writing, but also has been the subject of debate in criticism of poetry from the period more generally.² Contestation around gendered authorship is a continuing strand in criticism on the sixteenth century, and has been a significant feature of Whitney criticism in particular – which points to the field’s continuing commitment to reclamation and recovery on the one hand, and to the highly flexible use of voice, mode and convention in English poetry of the 1560s and 1570s, on the other. Whitney provides us with a fascinating case study not only of questions of authorship and attribution, but also of the need to think more expansively about literary agency in a period of co-authorship and strongly collaborative poetic production. An instructive example of such contestation over authorship (here in the high stakes arena of a claim to the “first” sonnet sequence printed in English) is the figure of Anne Prowse Locke.³ The terms of debate are arguably symptomatic of wider issues in the field, as well as illustrating the deep-rooted assumption about the antithesis between innovation and female authorship, but also demonstrate which concepts of authorship and authority determine critical models and ideas of attribution. Whitney’s oeuvre challenges and contests the notion of singular authorship, at the same time as that singularity is the condition of entry into the revisionary canon.⁴

One well-established line of scholarly argument suggests that Whitney’s generic, stylistic and linguistic choices are all conscious strategies to manage the antithetical status of print production and conventional gender roles (Travitsky, Wall).⁵ By contrast, some critics assert that Whitney – working collaboratively with her printer, Richard Jones – carefully deploys these conventions and assumptions in order to craft a highly marketable voice and persona (O’Callaghan, Trettien, Ellinghausen), tailored specifically to the lively market for poetic miscellanies, characterized by their “hybrid malleability”.⁶ The appeal of the miscellany format for printers and readers alike is clear; for printers it was possible to maximize flexibility in production, to create and track demand, and to reach new and emerging readerships quickly. For readers, the miscellany format enabled the development of taste based on ranging through a variety of thematically related materials, much as Whitney herself envisages her ideal reader in A Sweet Nosgay, enhancing their already “godly mind” with further virtuous prophylactics in the form of “these Flowers”. Here, as for the roving reader of the print miscellany, it is the process of “gathering and makeing up” that constitutes poetic “labour”, and in which the creation of meaning inheres.⁷ Miscellany creation is the spatial materialization of autodidact, autonomous reading, the rendering permanent of the samplings of the literary flâneur: “Had leasure good … some study to apply”; “Somtime the Scriptures I perusd … I layd them by, and Histories gan read … I straight wart wery of those Bookes, and many other mor” (4–5). Whitney’s poetic persona is positioned as a compiler, a gatherer, an arranger, but also as a reader in search of novelty. The encounter with Hugh Plat’s text (“Plat his Plot … where fragrant Flowers abound”, l.29) is represented as the result of Fortune’s arbitrary intervention, as physical retreat (“I went home all sole alone”), as intimate but distal (textual) encounter, “the Master of the same, I yet dyd never see” (39).⁸ This way of presenting textual encounters suggests a poetics marked by change and instability, and highlights a series of social transactions, real, imagined, actualized, thwarted, grounded in notional or anticipated exchange. Poetry, for Whitney and her community of readers, is a form of social as well as textual, interaction.

Female speakers and personae were highly marketable, and scholars such as Michelle O’Callaghan and Susan Wiseman have outlined the ways in which London’s printers responded to the emergent and highly volatile market for printed poetry.⁹ London was growing rapidly, with an expanding class of female domestic servants; new discourses for navigating courtship were prominent, and women were emerging as a noticeable market for booksellers and printers. Whitney herself positions her speaker as such a bookworm and browser supplying the bookstalls of St Paul’s churchyard, “I store of Bookes have left,/at each Bookebinders stall”; “To all the Bookebinders by Paulles/because I lyke their Arte:” (“The Maner of her Will”, ll. 240–1; 193–4).¹⁰ As Shannon Miller suggests, questions around female speech, the sincerity of promises, and the moral credit (and credibility) of speakers was absolutely paramount in a rapidly developing social context – that of the urban – where social encounters were more often with the unknown, than the known, and may have been transitory, fleeting encounters rather than the dynamic intimacy of the rural parish, village or small town.¹¹ As The Copy of a Letter illustrates, this new context carried real risks for women, as well as opportunities, as her poems track the dynamics of promises and betrayal, and articulate targeted advice about the value of words, those of men in particular: “Beware of fayre and painted talke,/beware of flattering tonges” (34, ll.13–14).

The miscellany then, provides a dialogic environment in which such questions and personas can be imagined and received, and their assumptions tested. Reading and literary production co-exist as coterminous in textual time and space. This double framing is also relevant to Whitney’s authorial persona, which she presents through a series of bifurcated lenses (producer, but also produced; observer, but observer; agent, but bystander; as economic producer and consumer). Her authorial persona is assertive and confident when she occupies clearly coded narrative positions – often inherited from or refracted through other literary traditions, but she is also a detached voyeur and observer, who leaves scant trace, “I little brought/but nothyng from thee took” (ll. 131–2). Reciprocity is hard wired into her poetry, with a dash of morality attached to her non-consuming persona, based on the repeated play in “The Maner of her Wyll” on the double meanings of “leave”: “left” used to refer simultaneously to the act of vacating, going away from a place, and the notion of inheritance or bequest. Her “possession” is not material goods, but, pointedly, cultural and moral capital – capital that more recent biographical research on Whitney’s Cheshire and recusant connections suggests was in jeopardy.¹² Her poetic productions are both clearly indebted to both a cultural position and construction of voice (the inheritances of Chaucer, the querelle des femmes, Ovid, ballad traditions, complaint, discussed in this issue by Michelle O’Callaghan, and Lindsay Anne Reid), and to the unique mosaic of circumstances though which Whitney projects her own persona (a woman in service, abandoned, lacking resources).¹³ In line with four decades of discussion about questions of voice and agency in relation to early modern women’s writing, Whitney’s authorial persona is – rather like the miscellany format in which it is positioned – constituted of moveable and extractible parts of speech, place, rhetoric, topic. This bricolage is a key feature of humanist culture through from Latin rhetorical education to autodidact commonplacing and reading. This is a self which is fashioned relationally, shaped by its environment, as Anna-Rose Shack’s article demonstrates through its analysis of the complex interactions between Whitney-as-walker and the social, cultural and geospatial dynamics of a city that both is and is not her own. It is this flexibility, perhaps, that has facilitated the survival and revival of her poems, as certain texts prove capable of orientation towards the future, a future often foreshadowed and pre-empted in Whitney’s own poetic productions, via their interest in commodity culture, the de-personalized streetscape of the city, and questions of credibility in speech.

Despite four decades of scholarship on Isabella Whitney, her status as measured in conventional scholarly ways remains stubbornly marginal – the first full edition of her poems, edited by Shannon Miller is due for publication at the end of 2023 – an edition which, unlike previous selections, places Whitney’s extant poems in the context of the volumes of which they are an integral part. Like many female writers from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, questions about genre, taste, aesthetics and form have resulted in the persistent segmenting and anthologization of Whitney’s poems, often on the basis of those excerpts that appear to thematize gender and questions relating to women’s status and experience, and study of the carefully curated volumes that she produced with her printer, Richard Jones, has largely been confined to scholarly articles and books rather than student-orientated materials. Of Whitney’s writings – including those latterly attributed to her through painstaking scholarly detective work – the focus has been squarely on those poems which can be aligned to emergent or existing paradigms. Of these, the most centrally positioned is probably Whitney’s highly innovative and witty “Wyll”, which is in itself a powerful witness to the psychogeography of early Elizabethan London, a reflection of its economic rapaciousness, and the development of a non-reciprocal relationship to waged labour. This economic focus has not, to date, been dominant in scholarship on early modern women’s writing. The city is addressed in “A comunication which the Auctor had to London, before she made her Wyll”, in terms which echo those of rejected courtship: arguably both relationships hinge on economic power and security. As she writes,

But many Women foolyshly,

   lyke me, and other moe

Doe such a fyxed fancy set,

   on those which least deserve,

That long it is ere wit we get,

   away from them to swarve. (“A comunication”, ll. 7–11)

The verb “swarve” here embodies the energetic homophonic layering of much of Whitney’s vocabulary as print betrays the oral residue of sixteenth-century language: it means both to leave, depart, but also “to turn away or be deflected from a (right) course of action, a line of conduct” (OED 3.a.), and “To forsake, desert, be disloyal to (a person)” (OED 3.b.ii), a subtle but pointed comment not so much on women’s folly, but on the shortcomings of those men on whom they are involuntarily dependent.

It is not coincidental that the “Wyll” is not the central focus of the articles gathered here, given that text’s dominant position within critical discussion. As these articles suggest, the meanings of Whitney’s texts are heavily shaped by their internal relationships to other poems – “Wyll” is integrally linked to the ideas of loss and disappointment articulated in the other poems in A Sweet Nosgay. Whitney’s positioning relative to the mainstream of early modern poetry has always been contested – a poet committed to the secular, the demotic, the urban and the economic, via the marketplace of print, is often viewed as marginal to the poetic canon of the sixteenth century for reasons that are not solely to do with gender.¹⁴ As I have argued elsewhere, the London printing world of the 1560s and early 1570s was one full of possibility: not defined by the court, theologically uncertain, politically unstable, and not yet dominated by elites, courtliness, or any one discursive mode.¹⁵ The dynamics of a volume like The copy of a letter have been rendered inscrutable, even strange, in the light of a canon dominated by the masculine, courtly modes that come to dominate ideas of value in the 1580s and by the uber-canonical status of the exceptional poetic talents that practiced those modes, eclipsing even major poets of the earlier Elizabeth period such as Gascoigne or Breton. Whitney’s texts reveal much about a poetic world that predates Sidney or Spenser, and suggests a radically different trajectory arising from the movement of the Henrician generation of poets into the marketplace of print. Indeed, as several generations of critics have argued, Whitney’s alliance with print rather than manuscript, and with the city rather than the court, is symptomatic of the instability and uncertain direction of English poetic culture in the early Elizabethan period. Rather than viewing Whitney’s contribution as exceptional, or as an outlier, the articles in this issue all argue for the essential connectedness of her writing to contemporary literary production, tastes and aesthetics, either through engagement with sources (Reid and O’Callaghan), discursive constructions (Basu, Clark, Shack) or reception (Quoss-Moore and Wilkinson-Turnbull).

Shannon Miller’s decision to include the complete contents of Whitney’s miscellanies for her edition for The Other Voice reflects the broad trends in Whitney criticism and reception since the excerpted edition produced by Clarke in 2000, moving from authorship, gender and attribution to ideas about print, the marketplace and dispersal of agency. It also reflects larger changes in the field in terms of a fuller engagement with book history and miscellany culture. Despite her strong presence on the university curriculum, Whitney has not been included in the Norton Anthology of English Literature since 2000, with teachers relying on a gallimaufry of online and anthologized selections to teach her work.¹⁶ In this, Whitney is typical of many early modern women writers, even as her formation and context differs markedly from later writers, both in print and in manuscript. This is not to say, at all, that Whitney is an isolated or even a unique figure – indeed, the articles in this special issue testify repeatedly to the rich and varied literary, social and cultural networks in which Whitney’s published outputs participate. Perhaps more than any other woman writer, indeed, Whitney has always been read in context, in relation to her contemporaries, a reflection of the ways in which ideas and practices of reciprocity are enacted or performed to her two collections, but also of her status as an early poet, whose formation and engagement with her poetic milieu predates many of the poets who have come to define what we think Renaissance English poetry is. This apparent bifurcation was laid down in two of the earliest articles on Whitney, one by R.J. Fehrenbach in 1981, and the other by Betty Travitsky in 1980.¹⁷ The former focusses on Whitney, print and miscellany culture; the latter on Whitney’s “Wyll” and her status as a woman writer of non-elite status. Subsequent scholarship demonstrates that these two positions are not in any sense antithetical, the dynamics of reciprocity, credit and exchange concretized in the design of Whitney’s two key volumes (together with the presence of her elegy in Thomas Proctor’s The gorgious Gallery of gallant Inventions [London, 1578]) are also central to her negotiation of “place” (social, geographical, gendered, poetic, sexual) within sixteenth-century London. Central and marginal at one and the same time – conversant with a range of emerging poetic imaginaries, but deeply conscious of her peripheral status in relation to these. Her narrative voice, at once distinctive and self-aware, reminds us again and again of the complexities of voice and attribution, particularly in an emergent culture of print, surrounded by the vestiges of oral culture. Arguably, her interest in dialogue, with poetic addresses to individuals only made manifest by her interpellations, allows us to think about the ways in which print makes presence and absence central as conceptual categories.

Existing Whitney scholarship is marked by a number of directions and trends, many of which have shaped her more recent critical reception more broadly. As I suggested above, however, there has been a tendency for Whitney’s exploitation of the miscellany to require a critical response rooted in scholarship of print culture, of urban life, of the servant class. An important impetus in Whitney studies has also been materialist or historicist, viewing her poems – the “Wyll” in particular, as providing psychogeographical evidence from a rarely represented perspective on the rapidly expanding urban spaces of early modern London. Whilst scholarship has continued to be interested in the materiality of the print miscellany, and in Whitney’s own careful engagement with economic and social hierarchies, often these very same issues present significant barriers to students – texts printed in black letter, authorship is represented as playful and contingent, attribution sometimes uncertain, and generic alliances are hybrid and sometimes unfamiliar, the application and purpose of sententiousness hard to explicate. The aim of the current collection of articles is to identify new directions and trajectories for the future study and reception of Whitney’s work, which nevertheless retain the imprint of the scholarship that underwrites her reception. The articles are grouped so as to highlight three main strands: relationship to inherited traditions and sources (O’Callaghan and Reid); engagement with contemporary discourses, genres and circumstances (Clark, Shack, Basu); and book history and critical reception (Wilkinson-Turnbull, Quoss-Moore).

*  *  *

Lindsey Ann Reid’s article, “Isabella Whitney and George Turberville: Mid-Tudor Heroidean Poetry and Questions of Precedence”, challenges a number of literary historical assumptions by arguing that the evidence supporting the notion that Whitney’s knowledge of Ovid derives from Turberville is inconclusive at best, and that we might consider that the lines of influence work in the contrary direction. Such insights enable us to rethink assumptions about the derivative or secondary nature of women’s writings, and to recognize Whitney’s writings as highly responsive to context (and thus, not in any sense exclusively positioned in the private or domestic sphere), and as innovative with regard to poetics, gender and voice. Michelle O’Callaghan develops the insights advanced by recent work on complaint to argue that Whitney’s literary models are not limited to the Heroidean paradigm that dominated early criticism of The copy of a letter, by highlighting the importance to Whitney of the transmission of mediaeval traditions via the figure of Chaucer. This article makes a powerful case for re-engaging Whitney’s writing with the querelle des femmes tradition but from a different perspective, via the precedent of Christine de Pisan.

The second sub-group of articles engages with criticism focussed on questions of mind and body, of affect, emotion and genre, enabling a recalibration of Whitney’s deployment of a gendered persona as a form of connection with her contemporary world rather than being in opposition to it. Douglas Clark’s article, “Isabella Whitney’s Bruised Brain: Taking Care of the Mind in Elizabethan Poetic Posies”, extends and complicates ideas about creativity and the mind, focussing on the topos of the “brused brain” as it appears in Whitney’s verse and those of her contemporaries; Clark’s work thus breaks new ground in terms of re-framing Whitney’s interest in the prophylactic qualities of “posies” as a specifically cerebral and poetic act. Debapriya Basu’s article, “‘Here doth shee mourne:’ Epitaphic Compulsion in Isabella Whitney's Lament upon William Gruffith’s Death”, turns a literary critical lens on one of the texts that appears outside of the two volumes of verse conventionally associated with Whitney. Using a linguistic analysis based on the poem’s use of deixis, Basu argues that Whitney wittily inverts the conventions of the epitaph in order to assert herself as the living legacy of her dead friend. Anna-Rose Shack, in “‘I walked out’: perambulatory poetics, authorial independence, and Isabella Whitney’s poetic voice in A Sweet Nosgay” presents Whitney as a walker, traversing public space in the often challenging spaces (for women) of early modern London. She argues that walking, for Whitney, is integral to the formation and representation of her poetic voice, being both a thematic concern (independence, vulnerability) and a mode of performance. The article thus situates Whitney’s poetry anew in the urban environment of Elizabethan London.

The final sub-section of this special issue looks at the material and critical afterlives of Whitney’s texts. In “The Reading, Reception, and Collecting of Isabella Whitney’s A Sweet Nosgay, c.1573–1871”, Ben Wilkinson-Turnbull tracks the reception and evaluation of A Sweet Nosgay using annotations, marginalia, and the evidence of auction catalogues in order to analyse how gender inflects ideas of value, rarity and survival. Finally, Rebecca Quoss-Moore in “Unradical Feminisms: Whitney and the World of Women’s Work” re-situates the powerful language of “firsts” in the wider context of ideas about women’s work, enabling a fuller and richer conceptualization of women’s participation in the poetic and literary cultures of early modern London. Taken together, these rich and varied scholarly interventions point to new ways in which Whitney might be read and understood, and to emerging paradigms for a fuller integration of this most intriguing and engaging of poetic voices into our understanding of sixteenth-century literature and culture.

Disclosure Statement

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

Additional information

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).

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”.