Materializing Authorship in Esther Inglis's Books

Esther Inglis (1571-1624), the miniaturist, embroiderer, calligrapher, translator, and self-described "writer," produced nearly sixty known calligraphic manuscripts bound as small, usually miniature, books. These books frequently consist of a central pious text placed within covers of Inglis's own making and introduced by a variety of materials including a title page, self-portrait, and dedication to someone of rank, including Elizabeth I, James VI, Prince Henry, and Lucy Harington, Countess of Bedford. In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries in England, such texts continued to circulate in manuscript form even as print became the more available technology; sometimes even printed books were copied by scribes to recreate the look of less widely marketed books. ¹ Esther Inglis's books are significant because as objects they are tiny (the smallest measure one and a half inches by two inches or two inches by three inches), and because, written in dozens of different scripts accompanied by drawings and ornaments, they are marked as the work of her hand. But the most significant aspect of her books lies in the relation between their existence as handmade objects and the ways that she uses their objectivity to represent her subjectivity as a woman author who appropriates both the conventions of presentation manuscripts and of print culture. Every material feature of Inglis's books asserts her project, to assemble and publish exquisite textual objects whose value resides in the tension between manuscript and print cultures, the hand and the machine. In creating a place for herself between these two cultures, I argue, Inglis connected the writing woman to desired political and social affiliations, negotiated in part by and for her family at the same time that her books materialized an authorial self.

In order to demonstrate how Inglis worked within and against the discouragement of women's publication in early modern Scotland and England, I will first discuss the family experience that constructed this woman writer who, like so many women from this period, connected her skills with her Protestantism. A crucial part of Inglis's experience as a family member is the extent to which her husband made certain that he would profit from her abilities. Having discussed the relation between her writing and her family's social status, I focus on how and why Inglis also used her books to separate her represented self from familial and social constraints by discussing the extent to which Inglis may be considered both the publisher and author of her books.

The family that produced Esther Inglis's skilled hand was devout, educated, and struggling to obtain an economic and social foothold. ² Born in 1571 in London, the daughter of two Huguenot refugees, Nicholas Langlois and Marie Presot, by 1574 Inglis had moved to Edinburgh with her family. There, after living on poor relief, her father became Master of the French School about 1580, after which King James paid him an annual pension of £80 to £100 (Scots). Langlois taught French and writing to his pupils and is described as "forming of their handis to a perfyte schap of lettir." ³ Her mother, a well-known calligrapher, was probably also involved with the school. A page of Marie Presot's writing in several hands has survived, and is now at the Newberry Library. ⁴ For this family's members, as for most humanist-educated Europeans at the turn of the seventeenth century, writing properly meant living a moral life. Like Langlois in Edinburgh, as Jonathan Goldberg points out, London's famed educator Richard Mulcaster aimed "To frame the childes hand right," an expression that joins the child's hand to the child's morality. As Goldberg summarizes this early modern connection, "Habits of behavior begin with the control of the hand, with the formations of the hand." ⁵ Although Inglis demonstrates familiarity with a number of writing masters, including Clément Perret...