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Chapter 1 Inventing the Early Modern Woman Reader through the World of Goods: Lyly’s Gentlewoman Reader and Katherine Stubbes Mary Ellen Lamb This essay uses two contrasting stereotypes of the woman reader-consumer to explore the intermingling of appetites for romances, for sexual gratification, and for the consumption of luxury goods as described in the late sixteenth century. At opposite extremes as consumers, John Lyly’s ‘‘gentlewoman reader’’ and Philip Stubbes’s pious Katherine make visible a volatile mixture of cultural prohibitions and personal pleasures gendered as female yet also incorporating issues beyond those of gender. Within the ideologies of emergent capitalism, the reading of romances by women implied not only leisure time and culpable idleness but also the economic wherewithal to buy books of no practical value. Lyly portrays the desires of his gentlewoman reader as participating in her transgressive appetite for other useless luxury goods, such as decorative feathers, spoiled lapdogs, and sweet junkets. No less exaggerated was Stubbes’s representation of his wife Katherine, whose devotional reading for the cultivation of her soul represented an implicit critique of bourgeois woman consumers who offered her a world of goods—fine food, prideful apparel, and plays. ‘‘Katherine Stubbes’s’’ reading was as subject to her husband’s control as was her consumption; and this much-published ideal of the devotional reader also represented a response to the anxieties and exhilarations attending the profusion of goods circulating within a consumerist economy.1 Through the frivolous woman reader of romance and the sober reader of devout texts, respectively , both Lyly and Stubbes invent women’s relationships with emergent capitalism. Displacing early modern anxieties over the increased circulation of goods onto women, both writers represent the dangerous freedom of self-definition possible to women through their reading as a metonym for the similarly dangerous freedom possible through their 16 Lamb production of meanings from their modes of consumption. Through and against such stereotypes and the dilemmas they expose within an emergent capitalism, actual women readers would invent their own modes of consumption, of books as well as of goods. The economist-historian Craig Muldrew has identified the last half of the sixteenth century in England as ‘‘the most intensely concentrated period of growth before the late eighteenth century’’; in fact, ‘‘this process of change . . . was much more intense and problematic than in the eighteenth century.’’2 As early as the middle of the sixteenth century, the rise in the accessibility of goods occurred rapidly enough to register a dramatic change within lived experience. This growth of a consumer economy had accelerated to full gear by the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.3 Aristocrats depleted ancestral wealth to embark on a frenzy of extravagant building projects during this period, and they freely adapted the international style of ‘‘paintings, sculpture, fountains, gardens, and triumphal arches’’ that were, as noted by Linda Levy Peck, so much a part of the ‘‘performance of royal and aristocratic power’’ in Europe.4 The middling sort also accumulated material possessions within homes of a size and comfort far beyond the financial capacity of their parents.5 As a contrasting response to this profusion of goods, those who followed Calvinist exhortations to moderate personal luxuries practiced an equally distinctive pattern of consumption as this easy access to goods elevated abstention, whether entirely voluntary or not, from the giddy indulgence in material things to a moral high ground.6 Thus, for all but the poor this expanding quantity of goods offered, or seemed to offer, unprecedented opportunities for choice: to select not only which goods to consume but, more broadly, also a pattern of consumption . In this way emergent capitalism promised new ways, and a larger choice of ways, for early moderns to form themselves as subjects through the consumption as well as the production of goods. On every social level, goods—clothing, food, and books—became part of an increasingly complex and inventive language of the self. As T. H. Breen has observed, for colonial America, consumer goods were ‘‘woven into a complex cultural conversation about the structure of colonial society’’ to become ‘‘the stuff of claims and counter-claims, of self-representation among people who understood the language of Holland shirts and neat nightcaps.’’7 With the power to purchase came, in theory, the power to shape new identities. Breen states that ‘‘to make choices from among contending possibilities . . . to rely upon their own reason in making decisions, is in a word, to reconceptualize...

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