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Chapter 4 ‘‘you sow, Ile read’’: Letters and Literacies in Early Modern Samplers Bianca F.-C. Calabresi Midway through Thomas Heywood’s 1608 play, The Rape of Lucrece: A True Roman Tragedie, the drama’s antagonist, Sextus Tarquin, describes the challenges to wives’ chastity while their husbands are at war: . . . ist possible thinke you, that women of young spirit and full age Of fluent wit, that can both sing and dance, Reade, write, such as feede well and taste choice cates, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Can such as these their husbands being away Emploid in forreine sieges or elsewhere, Deny such as importune them at home?1 While Sextus seems most encouraged by a feminine desire for sweets ‘‘[t]hat keep the veines full, and enflame the appetite’’ (E4v ), he also includes women’s literacy as one of the female activities that threaten sexual sobriety. To counter this accusation, Heywood’s next scene shows a chaste Lucrece dutifully reading when surprised by her husband, Colatine , and his friends.2 Staying up to supervise the household in Colatine ’s absence, she has instructed her maid, ‘‘Here take your worke againe, a while proceede, / And then to bed, for whilst you sow, Ile read’’( F2r ). This essay explores the link between these two feminized activities, specifically the potential place of sewn letters in the development of women’s literacy during the early modern period. This connection might at first appear counterintuitive: indeed, Colatine’s fellow soldiers miss the role of the book as an instrument of probity altogether, exclaiming at the sight of Lucrece reading, ‘‘By Ioue Ile buy my wife a wheele and make her spin’’ and ‘‘If I make not mine learn to liue by the 80 Calabresi prick of her needle for this, Ime no Roman’’ (F2r ). However, the rhetorical pairing of proper reading and sewing, particularly when those activities are differentiated by status, increasingly emerges as a counterpoint to the conventional early modern opposition of needle and text. The frontispiece of Giovanni Ostaus’s manual for The True Perfection of Drawing Various Sorts of Embroidery etc., printed in Venice in 1561, likewise shows Lucretia discovered with a book, surrounded by female servants spinning and sewing, even as the caption similarly conflates the two textual activities as equivalent female labor, describing Lucretia as ‘‘found amongst them at work’’ (‘‘trouata in mezzo d’esse à lauorare’’).3 This elision of praiseworthy literacy and needlework draws reinforcement from the early modern period’s multiple uses of the verb ‘‘to sow.’’4 For the early modern auditor or reader of English in particular, sowing—planting in one’s own or another’s mind, disseminating, distributing abroad—and sewing—needlework, including cross-stitch, cutwork, stump work, and a range of other practices—were not only homophonic and orthographically identical but also conceptually similar. The 1594 printed quarto of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus plays on this interchangeability when Marcus describes Philomel as having ‘‘in a tedious Sampler, sowed her minde.’’5 Marcus hardly means that Philomel reveals her rape in what is now thought of typically as a sampler, a rectangular piece of needlework displaying a range of practice stitches. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries a sampler, like Philomel herself, was a paradigm, a model: on the one hand, ‘‘an archetype’’; on the other hand, an ‘‘illustrative or typical instance.’’ John Palgrave defines ‘‘sampler’’ (with tautological etymology ) as ‘‘an exampler of a woman to work by.’’6 Early sewn samplers provided women with prototypes for their own pieces, as an alternative to expensive pattern books and as fuel for artistic competition. From the late sixteenth century on, about the time when it began to display alphabets , the sampler grew increasingly associated with individual handiwork and proficiency—it became more and more the ‘‘exampler of’’ the woman who worked it.7 At the same time, however, developing ideologies of gender meant that such sewn works were seen as the material manifestations of exemplary women: those praiseworthy dames who, in John Taylor’s words, ‘‘vse their tongues lesse, and their Needles more.’’8 Such prescriptions made for tedious samplers indeed. Yet this essay argues that precisely because these set pieces were considered to be ‘‘sown’’ in the sense of ‘‘published’’ as well as ‘‘sewn’’ with a needle, they interacted in significant ways with questions of female literacy in the period.9 More specifically, because these pieces are frequently lettered, and because those letters participate in and differentiate themselves from the systems that...

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