Narrow Confines: Marginalia, Devotional Books and the Prison in Early Modern Women’s Writing (original) (raw)

This essay examines sixteenth-century women's marginalia in devotional books as a mode of transmission, particularly in circumstances of where early modern women themselves were in circumstance of limited circulation, under house arrest or imprisoned. Recent work on prison literature has highlighted the importance of the prison as a crucible for writing in early modern England. However, it has focused less on the material cultures through which such texts were circulated, which for women writers in particular included marginal annotations to texts then circulated through domestic and coterie circles to a broader world. Anne Boleyn, Jane Dudley, Elizabeth Tudor and Mary Stuart all circulated writing as marginalia while under forms of imprisonment, providing a means of political engagement through lamentation, critique and protest. This essay uncovers the ways in which such texts constructed and disguised their political objectives, as well as the material means through which these prison poems were transmitted, showing the ways in which material and rhetorical cultures operated together to make meaning in this neglected group of texts. Early modern women routinely annotated their books of hours and private prayer books with signatures, marks of ownership, notes on significant passages, short lyrics, letters, drawings and, more rarely, extended poetic and prose works. Largely overlooked in histories of early modern women's writing, the marginal material in these volumes comprises a diverse new corpus of early modern women's textual activity and, viewed collectively, indicates the importance of marginalia as a mode of transmission for women. Particularly in the case of queens and princesses held in a variety of carceral environments, including house arrest and confinement in the Tower of London, marginal annotation of devotional books becomes an orthodox means of textual circulation, a way of attaching the imprimatur of the devotional text to their own writing, and a way of continuing to assert their faith and their leadership of spiritual communities outside the narrow confines of their imprisonment. These forms of authorship foreground the material text to make their meanings: annotations are carefully positioned under images