George Ballard, the eighteenth-century tailor and antiquarian turned recorder of women’s lives, provides the epitaph for Elizabeth Lucar, wife of a wealthy London merchant who died in 1537 at the age of twenty-seven. The monument raised to her in the parish church of St. Michael in Crooked Lane included an inscription that read in part:

She wrote all Needle-workes that women exercise

With Pen, Frame, or Stoole, all Pictures artificiall.

Curious Knots, or Trailes, what fancie could devise,

Beasts, Birds, or Flowers, even as things natural:

Three manner Hands could she write them faire all.

To speak of algorisme, or...

This chapter considers the political textualities generated by a future queen, an exiled queen, and a countess whose granddaughter might have been queen. With their pens and needles, Elizabeth Tudor, Mary Stuart, and Bess of Hardwick asserted their political prerogatives as highly placed women. As princesses, Elizabeth and Mary were educated to produce translations, prayers, letters, speeches, and poems; to use commissioned objects like portraits and clothing to further exercise their agency through self-representation; and to design and execute skilled needlework. The woman who served them both, Elizabeth, Countess of Shrewsbury, called “Bess of Hardwick,”¹ was among the most successful...

Even as Elizabeth Tudor, Mary Stuart, and Bess of Hardwick materialized their dynastic identities in their textualities, during this same period a few women who lived at the periphery of power created their own verbal and visual texts in order to attract patronage. The women who are the subject of this chapter were upwardly mobile members of the artisan class,¹ among the first women who might be considered early modern professionals. Endowed with abilities that were cultivated in family workshops run along continental models, they enjoyed connections to the court conducted in part through male relations eager to profit from...

Levina Teerlinc, Jane Segar, and Esther Inglis simultaneously lived within and altered their society’s expectations of women’s roles as they used their rare abilities to make objects for powerful patrons. This chapter on domestic needlework¹ and its related texts describes how women in the household continuously shaped their environment by creating objects that expressed their always-evolving identities. To adapt what Michel de Certeau writes of the colonized, women were able to use “the dominant social order” in ways that “deflected its power, which they lacked the means to challenge.” By engaging in expected practices that nevertheless explored and partially reset...

Two Women Sewing(1600) by Geertruid Roghman, an artist who was a daughter and sister of artists, pictures two women communing as they work (Figure 25). This view of the associations between women working together is one of a series of engravings showing women performing domestic tasks without the erotic overtones of so many Dutch interiors.¹The domestic culture of the Netherlands at this time closely paralleled that of England in a number of ways, as is evident in the books of needlework patterns and other self-help books that passed steadily across the channel in both English and Dutch.² Because the...

InOthelloandCymbeline, the everyday, erotic, and theatrical properties of cloth locate Desdemona and Innogen in the genres of tragedy and dramatic romance. In these plays, as the meanings of cloth curtail and enable female agency, those meanings are realized in genre: the pace of events, the interaction of characters within narrative, and the play’s outcome depend on the significance of handkerchiefs, an embroidered strawberry pattern, sheets, a bloody cloth, cross-dressing, and disguise. This chapter takes the discussion about textiles and female agency from male-authored drama to female-authored prose romance, from the compact structure of the plays to the...