Books of Secrets: Natural Philosophy in England, 1550-1600

Chapter Four: Secrets Gendered: Femininity and Feminine Knowledge in Books of Secrets

95 chapter four Secrets Gendered: Femininity and Feminine Knowledge in Books of Secrets In 1573 John Partridge and Richard Jones became the first English Renaissance team of a compiler and printer to create a book of secrets intended for a female audience.1 The Treasurie of commodious Conceits, and hidden Secrets appears to be a rather staid combination of recipes for dinners, desserts, and herbal medicines, but the dedication letter to Richard Wistow, a gentleman and assistant in the Company of the Barbers and Surgeons, the letters from Thomas Curtesye and Thomas Blank who are both identified as gentlemen, praising and defending the author,suggest that creating this book for a general audience was considered risky.2 The risk cannot have been understood solely in financial terms, or the book would probably not have been printed at all. This book, instead, marks a balance between the compiler and printer’s perception of what was appropriate for a female audience, their ideas about the desires of that audience for “secret” knowledge, and the larger question of what made knowledge secret, whether secret knowledge was inherently dangerous, and how secrets could be safely told.Furthermore,it points to the position of secret knowledge in the construction of femininity, particularly as it was understood to be shared by womenwhocouldread—therefore,asmallerpercentageofthetotalpopulation of readersthantheotherbooksaddressed.In1588thosequestionscontributed to the creation of another book of secrets directed to female readers. TheWidowestreasurehasbeenattributedtoJohnPartridgeandwasprinted by Edward Allde for Edward White.It is a largely medical and veterinary text with some cookery mixed in, and it expands the category of knowledge that 96 / books of secrets women could appropriately master.It is prefaced only by an anonymous letter to the reader either by Partridge or Allde attributing the recipes to a book created especially for a gentlewoman that fell,entirely by accident,into Partridge’s hands and that he believed to be so useful that it ought to be made available to everyone. This type of letter is very common as a heading in cheap-print editions of natural knowledge, especially those including information and recipes gathered from a variety of sources and packaged as elite and protected. It helped to promote the secrecy of the knowledge and protect the compiler from accusations of greedily profiting from secret knowledge. In this case, it seems likely that it also legitimized selling this kind of knowledge to female readers,since it was supposed to have been taken from a book that was created specifically for an elite female. In 1596 Richard Jones produced The Treasurie of hidden Secrets, which combined the 1573 Partridge text with another cookery book printed by Jones called The good huswives handmaid for the kitchin.3 A signed letter from the printer and a poem from the anonymous author introduce the text and attribute its creation to the request of an(other) anonymous gentlewoman whose ideas about its widespread utility brought it to light. This book lacks the veterinary emphasis of the previous one, but it provides a broad arena of natural knowledge that women could be expected to master and manipulate to their needs. Thischapterwillanalyzethestructureandcontentofallthreetextstoplace them within the genre of cheap print intended for general audiences and the subgenre of inexpensive books for women. It will continue to emphasize the construction of authority established in chapters 2 and 3 to concentrate on the ways in which it was created in these books for both men and women. It will extend the emphasis on the natural worlds that books of secrets allowed readers to create, begun in chapter 3, and focus upon the multiple natural worlds available in each book and the methods the books offer readers for manipulating those worlds. It will dissect the ways in which those methods are, and sometimes surprisingly are not, gendered. It will also trace the relationship in the books between representations of femininity, female readers, and secret knowledge. Finally, it will argue that these books were powerful, not just because they offered strategies to women for controlling the natural worldandwaysofbeingfemininethatincludedcontrollingnature,butbecause in doing so they bridged intellectual and social communities and threatened the divides between accepted structuring binaries such as male and female, common and reserved,known and secret,closed and open,private and public, and masculine and feminine.4 The history of the relationships between women of different social classes and their connections to books and domestic and social spaces has attracted a burgeoning amount of attention in recent...