Pens and Needles: Women’s Textualities in Early Modern England (review)

For the high quality of production alone—the jewel-like cover, twenty-one color plates, and thirty-one black-and-white illustrations—Susan Frye’s Pens and Needles is a valuable addition to any early modern scholar’s library. It is the compelling and original tapestry it lays before that scholar, however, that will motivate and engage her. As revealed in the book’s extensive bibliography, art historians and feminist critics have been restoring pieces of the larger picture for decades, and in bringing these pieces together along with her own original findings, Frye’s scholarship convinces the reader that the textiles and related objects produced by women in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries have a vital place in our discussion of textual histories including Shakespeare and his male and female contemporaries.

Anyone who has spent time with early modern anything soon realizes the pervasiveness of the materials. Yes, Frye’s scholarship takes the reader into the depths of the Victoria and Albert Museum’s impressive collection of early modern embroidery—a place where few monographs lead us—but the landscape is not only one of the heretofore unknown. One thing is clear from so much of what we read: women wrought. From the first two chapters we learn that such a simple statement, however, is not quite so simple. In the second half of the sixteenth century, the textiles made and owned by Elizabeth Tudor, Mary Stuart, and Bess of Hardwick take on highly politicized meanings, and these examples establish the pattern upon which Frye’s subsequent analysis draws. It follows that the chapters regarding women of the artisanal and middling sorts reveal the potentials for garnering influence and establishing one’s personal authority through a signature or choice of story. Indeed, the central insight concerning the economic implications of needlework—what in the sixteenth century was the mark of the elite home became in the seventeenth century the appropriation by lower-rank households—promises to upend and nuance previous and subsequent analyses. Esther Inglis, Mary Dudley Sidney, Elizabeth Isham, Grace Mildmay, Margaret Hoby, Christine de Pizan, Hannah Smith, and many unnamed or initialed domestic needleworkers are not just different instances of a pervasive phenomenon but rather exemplars of particular positions of status and chronology.

Not all this study examines is embroidery, and the reader may have to trust the author’s wider schema before the connections between textile and text become clear. The glasswork of Jane Segar and the miniatures of Levina Teerline are perhaps only tangentially and speculatively connected to needlework, but the insights they provide about the local economics and politics of women’s artisan-ship are made readily applicable to women’s domestic embroidery. The centrality of both literal and figurative textiles in Othello and Cymbeline (the much-discussed handkerchief and the bedroom tapestries, respectively) builds on the omnipresence of women’s textile production in the early modern era, as well as its pervasiveness in classical literature; the motifs and vocabulary with regard to the plays resonate clearly with that of the previous chapters. Throughout the study, we find similar connections to the poetry of John Skelton, Edmund Spenser, Anne Bradstreet, and Margaret Cavendish, letting us know of the wider applications.

It is the final and very fine chapter on Mary Sidney Wroth, however, that really ties all the parts together. In it, we discover how three generations of Sidney women represent an increasing distance from actual needlework at the same time that needlework informs the texts the later two generations produce. When Lady Wroth, niece to Mary Sidney Herbert and granddaughter to Mary Dudley Sidney, chose to write a pastoral romance, this analysis implies, she followed not only her most famous male progenitor, but also previous female generations and the consistently pastoral themes of their embroidery. In this exciting new light, Wroth’s attention to cloth and color in Urania sparkles like gold thread in a magenta...