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Nets and Bridles: Early Modern Conduct Books and Sixteenth Century Women's Lyrics

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SOURCE: “Nets and Bridles: Early Modern Conduct Books and Sixteenth Century Women's Lyrics,” in The Ideology of Conduct: Essays on Literature and the History of Sexuality, edited by Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse, pp. 39-72. New York: Methuen & Company, 1987.

[In the essay below, Jones explores how sixteenth-century social conduct books defined socially acceptable behavior, primarily for women and their fathers and husbands. She also shows how the focus of conduct books and the image of women shifted over time.]

Recent analysis of early modern treatises on the nature of women suggests that debates over gender were articulated with basic issues of hierarchy and change in European society.1 In the crossfire of gender polemics, however, women were consistently the objects of scrutiny and the targets of complex prescriptions for proper behavior. Even defenses of women were, in the great majority, written by men, and the practical conduct books that proliferated during the sixteenth century were directed by men toward fellow men on the rise, as in the etiquette manuals written for aspiring courtiers, or addressed to the fathers and husbands of potentially unruly daughters and wives, in the case of bourgeois and Protestant marriage manuals.

In the essay that follows, I offer a survey of sixteenth- and early-seventeenth-century courtesy books and marriage manuals in order to show how conduct books positioned women in the class transformations occurring throughout the male-dominated societies of Renaissance Europe. As the focus of these manuals shifted from the feudal king and his queen to the professional courtier and the lady-in-waiting, and from the landed aristocrat and his sumptuously attired consort to the bourgeois husband and his wife, women confronted new requirements for their morals and manners. Public self-display was the norm at court and in the urban coteries in which ambitious men (and, less frequently, women) met and competed for recognition and patronage. But the most widely disseminated feminine ideal was the confinement of the bourgeois daughter and wife to private domesticity in the households of city merchants, professional men and, in England, Protestant fathers and husbands. The court lady was required to speak; the bourgeois wife was enjoined to silence.

Male-authored literary texts reinforced these models. The witty yet virtuous court lady was sketched out in sonnet sequences and in élite comedy (Ronsard's Hélène in Les Sonnets pour Hélène and Beatrice in Shakespeare's Much Ado about Nothing are two exemplary heroines); the chaste, prudent wife became an admirable, if rare, character in city comedy; satires, in highly profitable popular forms, were aimed at women who transgressed gender decorum (Bertrand de la Borderie's L'Amye de court, the anonymous pamphlets Hic Mulier and Haec Vir). Yet the late 1500s was also a period in which women were beginning to enter the public sphere as writers, occasionally as poets. The ideologies of contemporary conduct books pervade their literary performances as well as those of men. By necessity, women writers acted out propitiatory obedience to expectations of women in order to defend themselves against attacks for making public their still unusual and suspect ambition to contribute to a culture still produced almost entirely by men. Two poets from different class and cultural situations, Catherine Des Roches and Isabella Whitney, illustrate the kinds of tactics adopted by women in order to negotiate the gender ideologies being used to consolidate emergent class identities in early modern Europe.

Conduct books as a genre in this period illustrate an uneasy confrontation between long-standing official discourses and new social practices. Medicine and philosophy had traditionally defined woman as the physical and intellectual inferior of man, given to hysterical and irrational outbursts; religion had defined her as subject to man since the Fall, owing him obedience to compensate for Eve's sins; law defined married women as covertes, subsumed under their husbands' economic and civic identity and incapable of making legal contracts on their own. These discourses represented female character and status as fixed—eternal givens founded on nature, Scripture, and precedent. Conduct books appear to be based on a different assumption: men and women can be produced. They are malleable, capable of being trained for changing roles; proper instruction can fashion them into successful participants in new social settings and the etiquettes belonging to them.

But the question was not so simple. Historians of courtiership have shown that the availability of courtesy books actually intensified the social uncertainties arising from competition between the aristocracy and the new man.2 Historians of women have argued that commitments to fixed social rank versus upward mobility underlay the increase in polemics on both sides of the woman issue throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.3 The uproar over upstart women had some basis in an actual increase in women's opportunites. Like men, a few women were encountering new milieux outside the private domestic sphere—local and national courts, humanist coteries—where “merit,” in the form of beauty, polished manners, and verbal skill, could improve the principal employment available to them: marriage into a higher rank. Anne Boleyn, the granddaughter of a tenant farmer, rose to a position as spectacular as it was precarious at the English court in the 1520s; Stefano Guazzo in 1574 recorded seeing “about the French Queene, certayn meane Gentlewomen enter into such credit [through their music, painting, poetry, arts and sciences] that they are come to be maryed to the cheefe Gentlemen in Fraunce, without any peny given to them in dowry by their father”; when Annibal Guasco sent his daughter Lavinia to the court of the Duchess of Mantua in 1586, he foresaw the possibility of a secretary's career as well as marriage among the benefits she might expect.4

Yet the profession of lady-in-waiting, like membership in the urban salons in which women joined men in conversation and literary improvisation, included fewer women, for a shorter time, than did the career of courtiership and humanism for men. The reaction against feminine ambition seems vastly out of proportion to the number of women actually departing from traditional norms. Nonetheless, the fixity of those norms encouraged opponents of class mobility in general to ransack the classics and scholasticism for arguments in the new debates over women's nature. Anxiety about the artifices of the class-climbing man could be displaced into attacks upon unnatural women.5 But conservative beliefs in the supposedly innate female virtues of obedience and humility, asserted in support of the “natural” hierarchy menaced by men on the rise, were also incorporated into the new feminine ideals being formulated by rising classes in the process of establishing group identities to rival or challenge the privileges of the aristocracy.

COURTESY BOOKS, THE COURT LADY, AND THE COSMOPOLITAN COTERIE

Courtesy manuals, written for members of a transitional occupation, are the most complex texts among conduct books. They argue for a kind of relativism that looks extremely progressive in the context of reactionary appeals to a stable gender system. Stefano Guazzo's La civil conversatione (1574, translated into English by George Pettie in 1581) is a case in point. Aiming at a wide range of sub-aristocratic classes, Guazzo posits variable custom rather than eternal principle as the basis for socially acceptable behavior. Whatever company Guazzo's courtier finds himself in, he is shown how to adapt gracefully and obligingly. So, too, Guazzo argues that daughters should be brought up according to a policy of flexible pragmatism. His liberal spokesman, Annibal Magnocavalli, recognizes that daughters will have diverse careers, marry men of differing ranks, and inhabit different geographical regions; therefore, they require diverse practical and moral training. Piety should be encouraged in a girl destined for the nunnery, but a more worldly education is necessary for a girl who is to go to court: she will need to “write, to discourse, to sing, to play on Instruments, to daunce, and to be able to perform all that which belongeth to a Courtier to doe” (“tutto ciò che adorna alle donne di palazzo,” II, 78; 417). Wives, too, will need to conform to local customs rather than to a transcendent marital code: a Roman wife must submit to the seclusion imposed upon her by that city's conventions, but a Sienese wife should be ready for the open socializing accepted further north. Annibal sums up the consequences of class and regional variation as follows: “At this day, the manner of bringing up [daughters] is so different, I say not of one Countrey from another, yea but of one Countye, and of one Citie, that a manne can set downe no certaine determinate rule of it” (II, 74; 413).

But Guazzo's permissiveness has its limits: his commentary on the court lady reveals a fixation on chastity that interferes with his mapping of effective speech at court. His dilemma is that courtly etiquette coincides with other sixteenth-century ideologies of femininity in making a more or less explicit equation between women's sexuality and their speech. Outside the court, fathers and husbands were encouraged to silence their daughters and wives in order to preserve women's function as the repositories of family honor and the guarantors of domestic peace. But once a conduct-book writer like Castiglione or Guazzo admitted the presence of women at court and in other masculine gathering places, he faced the contradiction between longstanding discourses that condemned the public woman as a whore and the courtly code, which constructed women as decorative and inspiring adjuncts to men, necessary partners in the outward show of country house, palazzo, and literary salon. The sections of courtesy books addressed to the court lady imply that she was being given a share in the public sphere, in the “civil conversation” that led to useful connections and rewards for verbal expertise. But continuing anxiety about female sexual purity defined that sphere as a dangerous one for women. Etiquette books for the courtier offer him an array of positive models for imitation, but their instructions to women are couched in prohibitions and warnings. Threatened with the constant possibility of scandal, the court lady is advised to defend herself through a calculated rhetoric of words and gestures. What she must learn is how to assess the surveillance that operates at court and how to exploit a corresponding set of words and gestures for feminine self-display.

The rhetoric is intricate because the court lady's function was double. Officially she was to serve a princess or a queen, whose reputation depended not only on the beauty and splendor of her ladies-in-waiting but also on their chastity, which she was expected to oversee. Anne de France, in her instructions to her royal daughter (1504), warns her that any misbehavior on the part of her women will make people at court suspect her of secret vice;6 Guazzo advises his Lavinia that chaste thoughts, apparent in her eyes and face, will endear her to her patroness more than anything else (C4v). But the lady was also at court to serve courtiers, to be a member of the chorus prompting men to bravery in tournaments and eloquence in conversation; she was expected to be a witty and informed participant in dialogues whose subject was most often love. Rather than prohibiting amorous repartee to women, the courtly code elicited it from them. To paraphrase Foucault, the court lady had to speak of sex; she had to speak in public, and in a manner determined by the divisions between licit and illicit pleasure.7 She performed a generalized erotic function directly opposed to the silent fidelity demanded of the private woman.

Castiglione's Courtier reveals the tension arising from this double assignment. His opening celebration of the mixed-sex conversations at the court of Urbino is followed by a hasty qualification:

There was never agreement of will or hartie love greater between brethren than there was between us all. The like was betweene the women, with whom we had such free and honest conversation, that everye man might commune, sitte, dallye and laugh with whom he lusted. But such was the respect which we bore to the Dutchesse will, that the selfe same libertie was a very great bridle. Neither was there any that thought it not … the greatest griefe to offend her.8

Castiglione's effort in this passage is clearly to deny that verbal access to the ladies of Urbino implied sexual access as well. But Guazzo depicts a clumsier character, William, who exposes precisely the assumption that Castiglione denies. When Annibal announces that he will now discuss “la conversatione delle donne,” William takes it for granted that he means bodytalk—that is, relations with the women “with whom men try their manhood withall in amorous encounters” (“con le quali si giuoca alle braccia,” I, 324; 290). In William's view, “conversation,” like “intercourse,” has two meanings: with men it is civil; with women it is sexual. Men are refined through the artful practice of speech; women are corrupted by it. Annibal immediately disabuses William of this low-life notion, drawing together courtly commonplaces to assert that speaking with women sharpens men's wits, polishes their language, and elevates their thoughts. But the exchange is symptomatic: the courtly ideal of femininity cannot banish the conflict assumed to exist between women's conversation and their chastity. Thus speaking properly becomes a minefield for women, and its rules become bewilderingly complex.

Castiglione's comments on the donna di palazzo (significantly, she is not called a cortigiana/courtesan because the term already connoted a prostitute)9 illustrate in their syntax a continual vacillation between the spontaneous natural modesty attributed to women and the necessity for artifice. The male courtier's misura, his graceful negotiation of a mean between extremes, is reduced for the court lady into elaborate directions for demonstrating sexual purity. Recommendations are followed by counter-recommendations and by acute analysis of how her behavior might be interpreted; “yes, but” and “neither/nor” are standard formulations. Beauty is posited as the court lady's first quality. Giuliano de' Medici says, “Beautie is more necessary in her than in the Courtier, for … there is a great lacke in the woman that wanteth beautie” (190; 342). But he immediately spells out the consequences of this desirability: “She ought also to be more circumspect, and to take better heede that she give no occasion to bee ill reported of, and so behave her selfe, that she be not onely not spotted with any fault, but not so much as with suspition.” Virtue is not enough; she must foresee the judgments observers will make of her. Giuliano explains why in a pragmatic acknowledgment of the power imbalance operating in courtly reputation: “a woman hath not so manie waies to defend her selfe from slanderous reportes, as hath a man.” Here already is an ambivalent demand: the lady must be beautiful enough to attract men, but alert to the possibility that she will be criticized for doing it too well. She must look seductive, but she must be seen not to be seduced.

Giuliano's prescriptions for the court lady's speech call for a similar tightrope act. Her affability, which endears her to all men, must be accompanied by a modesty that keeps them at bay:

there belongeth to her above all thinges, a certaine sweetness in language … whereby she may gently entertain all kinde of men with talke worthie the hearing and honest (“ragionamenti grati ed honesti”) … accompanying with sober and quiet manners, and with the honestie that must alwaies be a stay to her deeds, a readie liveliness of wit.

The ideal becomes ever more demanding, as Giuliano seems to recognize:

but with such a kinde of goodness, that she may be esteemed no less chaste, wise and courteous than pleasant, neate, conceited and sober (“arguta e discreta”), and therefore muste she keepe a certaine meane verie hard, and (in a manner) derived of contrary matters, and come just to certain limittes, but not to passe them.

(191; 343)

His version of what the court lady is to talk about is based on a similar strategy of second-guessing observers who, he assumes, will scrutinize her mercilessly. Rather than deny that she takes pleasure in erotic chat, she must signify that she enjoys it within correct limits:

This woman ought not … to be so squeimish … to abhorre both the company and the talke (though somewhat of the wantonest) … for a man may lightly guesse that she faigned to be so coye to hide that in herself which she doubted others might come to the knowledge of.

Another qualification follows:

Neither ought she againe (to show her selfe free and pleasant) speake words of dishonestie, nor use a certaine familiarity without measure and bridle … but being present at suche kinde of talke, she ought to give [it] hearing with a little blushing and shamefacednesse.

To maneuver her way through the love chat central to her calling, then, the court lady needs a triple consciousness: she must know how to avoid appearing to be faking prudishness. A complex censorship of speech had also been recommended by Giovanni della Casa in one of his few remarks about women in Il Galatheo (1559): the court lady must replace frank sexual terms with euphemisms, and she must be especially careful to avoid unintended sexual puns.10 Della Casa is obsessed with polite control of the body, but even he does not prescribe the blush required by Giuliano—a particularly tricky performance. The court lady is to accompany risqué conversation with an artfully produced version of what is naturally an involuntary symptom of embarrassment.

Six years after the publication of the Courtier, Agostino Nipho concretized Castiglione's ambivalent theory into specific models of feminine verbal strategy. Four chapters of his De re aulica (1534, translated into Italian in 1560) record reponses made by court ladies to their suitors. Nipho's affable ladies are almost incredibly adept at turning propositions delicately aside, and the preponderance of such maneuvers suggests that he expected them to occupy most of a woman's time. One lady places her lover neatly into the double bind built into Neoplatonic idealization of the mistress: “If I gave into your request,” she says, “you would rule over a treasure much diminished from the one you enjoy now.”11 Another, whose lover praises her skill in turning aside his plea for an “indecent favor,” exposes the difficulty of the technique required of her: “If I were as clever as you say,” she tells him, “you would not even have noticed my counter-move” (120).

But the elaborate sprightliness of these affabilità jars with the natural sincerity Nipho also demands of the court lady. A woman's “sweetness of speech,” he writes,

should above all be simple, not feigned, ornamented or highly colored, but consonant with the purity of nature. For a woman who has nothing feigned or simulated about her seems worthy of every kind of praise, because she maintains the chastity and integrity that are proper to her.

(115)

Spontaneity cannot be taught. What is it exactly, then, that Nipho is teaching? He forbids to women the self-serving flattery and acerbic wit he outlines for men, yet the speeches that he attributes to his lady, Phausina, as to others, suggest that the court lady is to practice artifices similar to men's: she is to provide an attentive ear for the verbal virtuosity of her superiors, and she is to use elaborate devices for praising herself indirectly. One of Phausina's remarks suggests that she is as expert at controlling group conversations as private ones. Three court ladies try to guess what Nipho's greatest pleasure in courting her is; one suggests bluntly that it lies in mutual handholding and embraces (“il piacevolissimo e scambievol maneggiar delle mani,” 124). Phausina quickly suppresses this suspicion, assuring her listeners that the purity of Nipho's love, his freedom from the temptations that torment younger men, is the cause of his bliss—a point he has made himself throughout the book. Thus she compliments him for his self-control, herself for her chastity, and she administers a witty rebuke to the lady who presumed to trust the evidence of her senses rather than following the rules of the game. The ingenuity of Nipho's codes contradicts the unadorned speech he sets forth as a norm for women at court. He appeals to nature, but he teaches art.

Guazzo's representation of the feminine ideal brings further contradictions into view. His eulogy of an unnamed lady, probably a patroness at Casale, foregrounds the instability of the response the court lady is expected to arouse in men. Guazzo's phrasing makes clear the pleasure he feels in the alternation of desire and awe. The lady's speech, he writes, combines elegance, sweetness, and highmindedness to such a degree that “the mindes of the hearers, intangled in these three nets, feele themselves at one instant to bee both moved by her amiability and bridled by her honesty” (I, 241; 300). This is a masculine image of Petrarchan desire, not a practical guide for women's behavior. The metaphors and paradoxes of love poetry, its nets of desire and silent eloquence, produce a model that few women readers could have put into practice. Guazzo's reverie reveals the tensions built into court life between the call for women's purity and the flirtatious volubility they were expected to provide for their male companions.

CATHERINE DES ROCHES: CHASTENING THE COURTIERS

One woman writer, however, put these intricate demands into highly successful practice in the poetry she wrote for an audience of humanist scholars and professionals much like Nipho, although they gathered in an urban household rather than the court of Urbino.12 Catherine Des Roches, writing in Poitiers in the 1570s, adapted the precepts governing the conduct of the lady at court to her own role as the center of a literary salon. She constructs for herself a position of authority much like that of Castiglione's Cardinal Bembo, whose long Neoplatonic speech concluded the fourth book of The Courtier on a note of sublime masculine virtue and established a verbal code for generations of courtiers to come.13 Through a series of gender reversals, she assembles a dialogue that assigns the woman speaker greater expertise in love theory and greater moral weight than her lover, at the same time that she invents a spotlessly chaste persona for herself in the midst of men's erotic celebration of her beauty.

Des Roches was one partner in a mother-daughter pair, Madeleine and Catherine, who published two collections of Oeuvres from Poitiers in 1578 and 1583. They turned to the public world for sustenance by necessity: Madeleine, twice a widow, held a salon to which Parisian experts in law made their way during Les Grands Jours, the special court sessions at which lawyers from the capital dispatched unfinished provincial cases.14 Mother and daughter alike became famous among humanists and professional men for the learning and wit they exhibited on such occasions, and their fame spread beyond Poitiers in ways that profited them both. Catherine addressed odes on political subjects to the queen and king (Catherine de' Medici and Henri III), and Madeleine won a generous grant from the court as compensation for Protestant attacks on her property. Catherine apparently succeeded in making a living for them both. In their collection of letters, Les Missives (1586), Madeleine praises her daughter for her determination to support them both with her pen, “without any aid from others.”15

Catherine works out a self-presentation in her poems that turns the directives of male-authored courtesy books into an enabling permission for less acceptable feminine ambitions. In the second of two songs she composed for a chorus of Amazons, for a masque in which they defeat Cupid and fend off the attacks of his earthly followers, the penultimate stanza typifies a central move throughout her writing: her appropriation of chastity as a condition and a justification for her activity as dame de salon and woman poet:

Un coeur qui n'ouvre point aux voluptez la porte,
Un penser généreux, une puissance forte
Nous preserve tousiours de l'Amour et de Mars.
Aussi en toutes parts la fame ne resonne
Que du pouvoir hautain de la Royne Amazone
Qui faict marcher les Dieux dessus ses etandars.

(1, 120)16

A heart that never surrenders to love's pleasures,
A fruitful mind, an enduring strength
Guards us forever against Love and Mars:
And so, everywhere, the glory resounds
Of the lofty power of the Amazons' queen,
Who makes the gods march underneath her banners.

Catherine's insistence on her sexual integrity is particularly understandable in light of the coterie setting in which she performed. Her poems were initially recited directly to her audience, in a potentially unstable public space. The Poitiers salon resembled Castiglione's Urbino in the emphasis placed on quick wit and verbal elegance for men and women both: it was a gathering place for many men and few women, where face-to-face flirtation and erotic innuendo went hand in hand with poetic improvisation. The exposed situation of both Des Roches, who would attract highly placed and influential men only as long as they avoided any breath of scandal, generated a set of defensive strategies clearly visible in Catherine's contribution to a collection of poems written by the Des Roches's visitors during the Grands Jours of 1579. The idea of assembling the volume came from Etienne Pasquier, a humanist lawyer and poet, who named it La Puce (The Flea). The occasion for the poems was his claim that he had seen a flea on the bosom of “la belle Catherine,” a claim that led to an explosion of poems on the topic by some two dozen men, all entering with obvious glee into a competition over who could be most wittily lascivious in his paeans to the flea and its hostess. The men's poems play on “puce/pucelle” (flea/maiden/hymen), endlessly rework the blason du tétin (poem in praise of the breast), and identify the poet with the flea in verbs of action directed toward the woman's body: exploring, sucking, biting, penetrating.

Surrounded by an extravagant display of erotic entomology, what does the woman poet do? Acutely aware of her visibility in the coterie setting, Des Roches produces a self-portrait for a world that differentiated sharply between permissible sexual discourse for men and women. Only a courtesan poet could gain from sharing the salacious language used by the men writing in this contest. Catherine, instead, invents a witty yet irreproachably chaste persona for herself. She draws on Ovid's standard plot pattern in The Metamorphoses to transform the flea into a creature with whom she can identify: an ingeniously self-protective female, changed by Diana from a nymph fleeting Pan into a safer (if lower) form of life.

She explicitly takes on the role of a courtesy-book writer in a sequence of twenty-seven sonnets written to illustrate an exemplary exchange between two lovers, Sincero and Charite. (This may be one of the first versions of the letter-writing manuals so influential during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.) She introduces the poems as a guide to amorous etiquette, explaining in her preface:

[Mes lecteurs] diront peut estre que je ne devois pas escrire d'amour, que si je suis amoureuse il ne fault pas le dire, et que si je ne suis telle il ne fault pas le feindre: je leur respondray à cela, que je ne le suis, ny ne feins de l'estre: car j'escry ce que j'ay pensé et non pas ce que j'ay veu en Syncero, lequel je ne connoys que par imagination. Mais comme il est advenu à quelques grands personnages de représenter un Roy parfaict, un parfaict orateur, un parfaict courtisan, ainsi ai-je voulu former un parfaict amoureux.

(1, 52c)

Perhaps my readers will say that I should not write of love - that if I am in love, I should not say so, and if I am not, I should not pretend to be. To this I'd answer that I neither am in love nor pretend to be. For in Sincero I write what I have thought, not what I have actually seen, since I know him only through imagination. But as it has happened to some great writers to represent a perfect king, a perfect orator, a perfect courtier, so have I wanted to fashion a perfect lover.

Thus Des Roches shifts love poetry into a didactic rather than a confessional mode. Her construction of the exemplary couple draws on a wide range of Neoplatonic treatises and lyric collections in which the male writer demonstrates his philosophical and literary polish through the speeches of characters capable of the élite refinement encoded in Neoplatonic dialogue. (Castiglione's Bembo was an early example; contemporary examples in France included Scève's Délie and Du Bellay's L'Olive.) In Catherine's text, however, a woman directs the spiritual training of the man. In their first dialogue, Sincero proclaims the intensity of his passion and asserts his hope of ascending to heaven through her agency; Charite points out the exaggerations and logical flaws in his declaration with the gentle acerbity Nipho recommends. And while Sincero invokes Petrarchan torment and desire, Charite repeats like an incantation her definition of “l'amour saincte,” the chaste mutual admiration she insists will win them both emotional stability and worldly fame. Moreover, Des Roches's appropriation of Neoplatonic precepts allows her to praise herself/Charite with the subtle indirection demonstrated by Nipho's Phausina. At the end of Charite's fourth sonnet, she addresses a command to Sincero that is also a claim to fame for her own sexual purity:

Faictes que la raison commande à vos desirs,
En esperant de moy les honnestes plaisirs
Que l'on doit esperer d'une chaste maitresse.

(1, 108)

Be certain that reason directs your desires,
And hope from me only the honorable joys
That may be expected from a chaste mistress.

Des Roches, then, inscribes the gender ideology of courtly conduct books at the center of her collected poems. She speaks of love from the middle of an erotically charged social and verbal arena, but she negotiates the minefield by asserting a rhetoric of feminine purity against the frankly sexual language of her male interlocutors. Her poetry needs to be understood as a set of subtly effective maneuvers within the contradictory definitions of womanly virtue, which, by the 1580s, had filtered down from royal and ducal palaces to the urban salons where ambitious professionals met and courted fame. These professionals, Des Roches demonstrates, could include women as well—as long as they obeyed and manipulated the rules of courtly discourse for their own ends.

BOURGEOIS MARRIAGE MANUALS: THE SHIFT TO DOMESTIC VIRTUES

Conduct books for fathers and husbands, including pedagogical treatises and marriage manuals addressed to male heads of households, make no attempt to balance the desirability and the dangers of women's entry into the public world: they forbid it. Their advice has a single focus, the chastity of the wife, which is assumed to need reinforcement through a range of physical and psychic controls. Throughout the sixteenth century women's dress, speech, and activity in the domestic realm were examined in more and more probing forms, motivated by two emerging social currents: hostility to aristocratic style and, in England, Puritan patriarchalism.

Domestic discourse linked physical enclosure and household tasks to the purity of women's bodies and the scarcity of their speech. The good wife was constructed as the woman who stays indoors, guarding her chastity as she guards the other property of her husband.17 As her body is locked within the walls of the house, her tongue is locked in her mouth. Women are reminded that nature gave them teeth as a guard against careless speech. Giovanni Bruto, in his La Institutione di una Fanciulla nata nobilmente (1555), picked up the classical commonplace that nature hedged the tongue with rows of teeth to limit speech and made ears hollow to encourage listening, and Richard Brathwait repeated the warning in highly colored language in The English Gentlewoman (1631):

What is spoken of Maids may be properly applied to all women: They should be seene and not heard. … What restraint is required in respect of the tongue may appeare by that ivory guard or garrison by which it is impaled: See, how it is double warded, that it may with more reservancy and better security be restrained!18

Simultaneously the Old Testament model of the good wife, much quoted from Proverbs, links her virtuous industry to her closed doors and few words. In contrast, the woman who lets herself be seen in the streets and at banquets is a harlot, described by Barnabe Rich in My Ladies Looking Glasse (1616) as “full of words, … loud and brabbling.”19

The new directions of sixteenth-century marriage manuals can be clarified by a step backward in time and upward on the class scale. Earlier books written for the nobility had defined the aristocratic wife as a public figure, representing her husband's rank to the view of lesser citizens. In fifteenth- and sixteenth-century manuals written for queens and their attendants, high sumptuary requirements had been the rule. One example: in 1505 Queen Anne of France advised her daughter, should she ever be called upon to serve a queen, that ladies-in-waiting should dress fashionably and class-consciously:

Be sure every day that you dress as well and carefully as you can, for in the eyes of the world, believe me, it is inappropriate, even shocking, to see a nobly born girl or woman ignorantly or inelegantly dressed. Neither men or women can be too elegantly or neatly dressed, in my view—as long as they are not over-finicky, or so obsessed over it that they cease to serve God.

(25)

She adds that queens and the wives of the upper aristocracy, who are expected to be on constant public view, should dress more lavishly than other women, a view almost exactly similar to that in a text written a century earlier, Christine de Pisan's Livre des Trois Vertus (1405). Elaborate costume is a required sign of rank, a class duty along with generous hospitality and the knowledge of correct forms of speech toward all lesser-ranking groups. Throughout her Enseignments, Anne repeats that exemplary behavior in public is the noblewoman's main duty: “Noblewomen are necessarily more observed than others, so they must be more careful. For in all things they are and must be the mirror, pattern and example for others” (65).

In total contrast to the feudal ideal, advice books for merchants and the lesser gentry define the wife as a domestic worker, conspicuous not for beauty or splendor but for practical virtues, which are celebrated in opposition to aristocratic leisure and display. This attitude was recorded early on by Leon Battista Alberti, writing for the Florentine merchant patriciate in his Libri della Famiglia, finished in 1421 and, although unpublished, a typical statement of the new class attitude.20 A later Italian text, Torquato Tasso's Discorso della virtù feminile, e donnesca (1582), shows how persistent the distinction between royal grandeur and bourgeois modesty had come to be. Tasso dedicated his book to the Duchess of Mantua, to whom he announced that he was writing not for “the citizen's wife, or to a private lady, even less to an industrious mother of a family.”21 For these categories of women, he says, thriftiness and usefulness must be the main concerns. For a queen, they are “lightness, delicacy and decorum,” which he links to “fine linen robes, embroidered with silk and gold.” Chivalrous nostalgia and a transparent desire for ducal patronage motivate a good deal of Tasso's praise of feminine elegance, but he typifies the early modern split in his focus between regal display and domestic simplicity.

English writers make equally precise distinctions when they discuss proper dress for women. Rich, who dedicated his Looking Glasse to the wife of a knight, Sir Oliver James, concedes that if a woman can afford the finery (silk, silver, gold) suited to her high rank, “she useth them to the glory of God, that hath created them to that end and purpose, to decke and ornifie such worthy persons” (42). But once the issue of wifely conduct is raised, Rich quotes Proverbs on domestic industriousness in a practical vein that suggests he is no longer defending the sumptuary rights of the aristocracy: “She seeketh out wool and flax, and laboureth cheerfully with her hands; / She overseeth the waies of her household, and eateth not the bread of idlenesse.” And he ends with a dismissal of courtly refinements as vices, out of reach and dangerous to the good woman, who “is not shee that can lift up her heeles highest in the galliard, [or] that is lavish of her lips or loose of her tongue” (44). Moral virtue is defined as the property of lower ranks here, while verbal looseness is implicitly paralleled to big spending.

Brathwait takes a similar position in The English Gentlewoman, addressed to women of the lesser nobility, whom he obviously wantws to protect against corruption and betrayal by “courtezans” and foppish gallants (a widespread reaction against Jacobean court and city life). In the opening emblems, the gentlewoman is pictured holding a coat of arms and dressed richly in ruff, farthingale, and brocade—but not, Brathwait emphasizes in his chapter on “Apparrell,” in excessive splendor. She is also shown in an illustration of “Decency,” preferring natural flowers to artificial, prideful plumes; and in his chapter explicating “Decency,” Brathwait advises unmarried women and men of this class to take the safest—that is, the lowest—path as far as dress and demeanor are concerned:

Do you think that a j[u]tting Gait, a leering Looke, a glibbery Tongue, or gaudy Attire can move affection in anyone worthy of your love? Sure, no. … To be an admirer of one of these were to prefer a Maymarrian [Maid Marian] before a Modest Matron.

(95)

Such precise discriminations play no part in marriage manuals written for city fathers and the petty gentry, in which the attack on fancy dress and elaborate manners as a sign of vanity and dereliction of feminine duty supports a new sense of class values constructed against the old and new aristocracy. A case in point is Robert Greene's dedication to A Quip for an Upstart Courtier, or a quaint dispute between velvet breeches and cloth breeches (1592), in which the symbolism of clothing underlies the writer's praise of Thomas Barnabie as a fellow “maintayner of Cloth breeches (I meane of the olde and worthie customes of the Gentilitie and yeomanrie of England).”22 When Greene turns to women, however, his defense of simplicity brings him into contradiction with the romance genre he uses for the exemplary tales of his Penelope's Web (1601). The royal heroines of this narrative marriage manual perform in fantastic plots, which, gainst all class verisimilitude, still represent them as axhibiting the practical skills and the modest virtue of the bourgeois wife. Barmenissa, rejected by her sultan husband, supports herself in her exile by working with “the Needle and the Wheele;” Cratina attracts a king through her humility and chastity, which Greene presents as the qualities of a “country wife.”23 More abstractly, marriage as an institution began to be associated with an unadorned and therefore genuinely noble state, as in the formula delivered by a courtier in George Whetstone's Heptameron of Civill Discourses (1582):

Gorgeous and rich Apparayle delighteth the Gazers eye: and (perhaps) offendeth the wearers heart: where Maryage, in homely Attyre, is everywhere honored.24

The pressure on non-aristocratic wives to prefer bodily and moral plainness to worldly glitter and to practice profitable private industry instead was directed toward a variety of readers from the mid-sixteenth century onward. Ambitious parents and upstart or unthrifty husbands seem to be the main targets for domestic ideology, but its promoters also promise happier marriage to single women. Thomas Becon, defending marriage against Catholic celibacy and aristocratic adultery in his preface to The Christian State of Matrimony (1543), advises men against marrying wives richer than they are. Higher-ranking wives will be “froward and scolding,” “so ladylyke and high in the insteppe … that they think that theyre husbands ought of very duty to give them place.”25 Humble and domestically trained women are a better prospect:

Get unto thee such a wyfe, as fereth God, loveth hys word, is gentle, quiet, honest, silent, of few wordes, servisable, obsequious, modest, loving, faithfull, obedient and redy to do whatsoever becometh an honest marryed woman.

(B5r)

The lady-like refinements Becon warns husbands against were also forbidden to a housewife-to-be by Giovanni Bruto in his sharply anti-courtly treatise on the education of a nobly born maiden. La Insitutione di una Fanciulla nata nobilmente was dedicated not to a noblewoman, in fact, but to the daughter of a Genoese merchant living in Anvers, Marietta Cattaneo. Throughout, Bruto sets the humanist education and the dancing and music lessons given daughters of the aristocracy against an ideal of feminine virtue that calls the reigning class hierarchy into question. He tells Marietta that her nobility consists in the “generosità” she has been given by nature, and he encourages her to model her piety and domestic skills “not only upon ladies nobler than herself, richer and more powerful, but, far more important, on those who are virtuous and wise … knowing that the world contains many noble and elevated women inferior to her” (iiiir). He also insists that weaving, spinning, and sewing are suitable tasks for a girl of her rank. His English translator, Thomas Salter (A Mirrhor mete for all Mothers, Matrones and Maids, 1579), expanded Bruto's preface to include an attack on mothers and schoolmistresses, whose longing for luxury in dress he interprets as a symptom of parental and pedagogical irresponsibility:

likewise such garments as be gallant, garnisht with gold, which (notwithstandyng how gorgeous so ever they be to the eye, are but durt and drosse), we see bothe Mothers and Mistresses to be so curious as so nere as they can, they will not permit so muche as a mote to remaine upon them, and yet God … knowes them to be so negligent and careless over their Daughters, and Maidens, as thei never regarde nor respect their behaviours.26

Aristocratic vanity is banished, to be replaced with practical education and genuine Protestant values.

“Servisability” in girls and wives is also called for in a sermon by Edward Hake, published as A Touchstone for this Time Present (1574), in which thunderous satire reinforces a concern for masculine advancement. Hake opposes honest labor to conspicuous consumption in a series of exhortations that foregrounds the economic needs of penurious young men and condemns the expensive self-adornment of women of various classes:

I would to God that maydes at the least wise might be brought up, of not in learning, yet in honest trades and occupations.


… the Substaunce which is consumed in two Yeares space upon the apparail of one meane Gentlemans Daughter, or uppon the Daughter or Wife of one meane Citizen, would be sufficient to finde a poore Student in the Universitye by the space of fowre or five Yeeres at the least.

(D2r-v)27

Such urging toward utilitarian rather than aesthetic considerations in marriage runs throughout Guazzo's third book of Civil Conversation, “Domestice Conversation,” in which he warns husbands that although beauty in a wife may promise handsome and therefore successful children, public opinion, which opposes beauty and virtue, must shape marital choice: “And even if a woman who combines beauty and chastity can be found, such rare beauty will nonetheless be suspect, and critical judgments will be made against the reputation of husband and wife both” (326). He also warns wives that free speaking and elegant dress will be read as sure signs of unchastity, an irremediable catastrophe. He recommends instead “a grave expression, lowered eyes and calm features” and ends the discussion by mocking a hyper-elaborate court coiffure (355-7). Pettie intensifies Guazzo's warning by referring to a law of the street which added official force to the dress code: “I will tell you moreover, that it is ordained by the civile law, that if a man offer abuse to an honest matrone, [she] being attyred like a harlot, there is no remedy against him by law” (II, 36).

Guazzo's last word on wifely decorum involves a subtler argument: true beauty is the beauty of exertion, of physical fitness:

Nothing can increase a husband's love more than his wife's good government of the household, for he not only rejoices in her usefulness and energy, but forms a good opinion of her chastity … seeing that through her efforts in useful and honest occupations, she takes on a healthy glow. [Pettie writes, “A lively naturall colour and that vertuous vermillion that neither sweat nor teares can wash away.”]

(366; II, 4)

Housework, that is, is set up as the source of an alternative, earned beauty, while the cosmetic contrivances of the upper classes are cast out of the household.

The link between wifely plainness and chastity is bluntly spelled out in William Vaughan's The Golden Grove (1608; book 2, “The Family”). The wife “must not be too sumptuous and superfluous in her attire, as, decked with frizled hair, embroidery, precious stones, and gold put about, for they are the forerunners of adultery.”28 Like English writers who followed him, Vaughan spelled out the economic function of the middle-class family: he deals with the “acquisitive facultie” as the last among “the chiefest parts of a family,” linking domestic profit to the repression of wasteful display and of sexual temptation.

One apparently liberal exception to the redefinition of wifely beauty reinforces the power of the husband according to a deceptive logic of equality. Sir Thomas Smith, in The Commonwealth of England and the Maner of Government thereof (1583), posits a divinely ordained balance between the husband's natural authority and the wife's physical charm as the basis for a harmonious union, incorporating the wife's beauty into a safely enclosed circuit of exchange, which he likens to Aristotelian oligarchy:

So then the house and family is the first and most naturall (but private) appearance of one of the best kinds of a commonwealth, that is called Aristocratia, where a fewe, and the best do governe: and where not one alwaies, but somtime and in some thing another doth beare the rule. Which to maintaine for his part, God hath given to the man greater wit, bigger strength, and more courage, to compell the woman to obey by reason, or force: and to the woman beauty, faire countenance, and sweet words, to make the man obey her againe, for love.29

Wifely beauty is conceived of here as a private virtue, relevant only to the couple and apparently invisible to the larger world. Moreover, beauty is set up as women's only source of power in an asymmetrical division of gender characteristics that firmly assigns all real power to the husband.

As Smith's Commonwealth shows, the Protestant defense of marriage gave new importance to family relations, but it shaped those relations according to a newly elaborated theory of patriarchalism.30 As the king ruled over his kingdom, the father ruled over his family flock; as Christ was head of the church, the husband was head of the wife. One consequence for women was that wifely speech came under intimate scrutiny. English marriage manuals monitor women's speech indoors and out, on the assumption that natural female garrulity must be carefully controlled in the interests of the domestic unit. Vaughan warns husbands that an excess of severity may cause embarrassing verbal outbreaks: “There is nothing in the world as spiteful as a woman, if she be hardly dealt withall.” For purely pragmatic reasons, the wife must be allowed a cautious degree of freedom: “otherwise (a woman's nature is such) she will by stealth find out some secret place or other to tattle in, or to disport herself” (05r). Vaughan attempts to convince wives as well that it is to their disadvantage to make domestic secrets public: “she must not discover her husbands imperfections and faults to any, for by disclosing them, eyther she makes herself a iesting stock, or els she ministreth occasion for knaves to tempt her to villainy” (06v).

The same fear of women's speech as a threat to the private sanctum of marriage permeates Richard Snawsel's A Looking Glasse for Married Folkes (1631), an expansion of a dialogue by Erasmus. In this dramatic sketch against shrewish wives, Snawsel has Eulalie, an exemplary wife, reproach a shrew for describing her husband's drunken fits. “O Xantip,” says Eulalie, “you make my heart ake to hear you. Therefore, marke this, that when you doe thus disgrace your husband, you shame your selfe.”31 Eulalie also tells a story about a wife who softened her husband's heart by keeping her tears at being beaten a secret, and she quotes Scripture in support of wifely reticence: “we women are apt to speake … but the Apostle James willeth us to be swift to heare, and slow to speake” (42-3). The second heroine of the dialogue was added by Snawsel: Abigail, a Puritan wife who acts as a marriage counsellor, brings about a reconciliation between Xantip and Ben-Ezer by advising the wife on how to speak humbly and obediently and by exemplifying womanly meekness in her own speeches to the husband. She says to Ben-Ezer, “Wee are but women, and therefore somewhat bashfull, as it be-seemes us, to speak unto you, being a man … yet, under leave and correction, we will do our good will to declare those things which we have learned” (94). The dialogue is a Protestant courtesy book: it offers women instances of proper speech, within the narrow confines of the speech defined as proper to wives. Snawsel teaches the grammar of Puritan obedience.

But women's speech, even in the service of Christian piety, eventually met stiffer resistance than Snawsel's little book suggests. Conduct books of the early seventeenth century suggest that a backlash against women's religious testifying was beginning to gain force. Gervase Markham, in The English Huswife (1615), writes that it is the wife's responsibility to urge her family to “an upright and sincere religion” through her own example, but he forbids her

to utter forth that violence of spirit which many of our (vainely accounted pure) women do, drawing a contempt upon the ordinary Ministrie, and thinking nothing lawefull but the fantazies of their owne inventions, usurping to themselves a power of preaching and interpreting the holy word, to which onely they ought to be but hearers and beleevers.32

Brathwait is equally severe, dismissing women's comments on the Scriptures as “the strange opinions of Shee-clarkes, which, as they understand them not themselves, so they labour to intangle others of equall understanding to themselves.” He concludes, “Women, as they are to be no speakers in the Church, so neither are they to be disputers of controversies of the Church” (90).

Handbooks aimed at English housewives suggest that their tasks were more broadly defined, more varied, and more physically practical than those assigned to the court lady. They were to supervise servants, cure the sick, administer charity as well as manage household, bakery, and dairy. But at the same time their speech was increasingly subordinated to their husbands' will. Rites of humility are clearly spelled out in William Gouge's much reprinted collection of sermons, Of Domesticall Duties (1622, 1627, 1634). The minister chastens body and speech alike. He defines “wifely courtesy” as “that vertue whereby a wife taketh occasion to testifie her acknowledgment of her husband's superiority by some outward obeisance.”33 He means that she is to bow down to her husband when he leaves or returns from a journey, in gratitude for favors he has bestowed upon her, and daily, “when she sitteth down or riseth up from table.” Nor is she to undercut his authority by calling him pet names (such as “Ducke, Chicke, Sweethearte, Pigsnies”); she must address him as “husband,” registering his superiority at every utterance. Moreover, wives are to carry out these gestures of submission not in self-interest but as a truthful sign of the state of their conscience:

Here lyeth a maine difference betwixt true, Christian, religious wives and mere naturall women; these may be subject on by-respects, as namely that their husbands may the more love them, or live the more quietly and peacably with them. … But the other have respect to Christ's ordinance, whereby they are commanded subjection.

(319)

There is no room for calculated effect in Gouge's Christian marriage.

The consolidation of Protestant and rising-class ideology in England appears throughout Gervase Markham's The English Huswife, published in 1615 along with Country Contentments, a treatise on the “Princely exercise of Hunting.” Markham advertises this volume as suited to men “whose more serious imployments will not afford them so much leisure as to follow this pasttime which almost consumeth the whole day; but must draw their pleasure into a more streighter circle, proportioning an hower or two in the morning for the full scope of their delights” (34-5). He offers speed and efficiency in attaining high gentry style to his male readers, but he has a different purpose in his household handbook, in which he promises he will lay out both “the inward and outward vertues which ought to be in a compleat woman.” Technical advice for the “English husband-man” expands into moral commands for the housewife, who is instructed in religious and supervisory duties as well as medicine, brewing, baking, and preserving. Markham's recommendations draw together requirements for wifely obedience, bourgeois thrift, and patriotic simplicity. He links one obligation to the next according to a logic of foresightful and sober acquisition, which ends in adducing the housewife's dress and diet as proofs of class and national solidarity:

Next unto this sanctity and holiness of life, it is meete that our English Hous-wife be a woman of great modesty and temperance as well inwardly as outwardly; inwardly as in her behavior and carriage toward her Husband, wherein she shall shunne all violence of rage, passion and humour, coveting lesse to direct then to bee directed, appearing ever unto him pleasant, amiable and delightfull … outwardly as in her apparrell and dyet, both which she shall proportion according to the competency of her husband's estate and calling, making her circle rather straight than large, for it is a rule if we extend to the uttermost we take awaie increase … but if we preserve any part, we build strong forts against the adversities of fortune.

Markham's style for the virtuous bourgeois wife is actually an anti-style, a class-reinforcing rejection of higher ranks' exotic fashions that reverses the inner/outer split by now presumed to underlie aristocratic immorality and surface show:34

Let therefore the Hus-wifes garments be comely, cleanly and strong, made as well to preserve the health, as adorne the person, altogether without toiish garnishes, or the glosse of light colours, and as farre from the vanity of new and fantastique fashions, as neare to the comely imitations of modest Matrons. … Let her dyet … be apter to kill hunger then revive new appetites, let it proceede more from the provision of her own yarde, then the furniture of the markets; and let it rather be esteemed for the familiar acquaintance she hath with it, than for the strangeness and raritie it bringeth from other Countries.

(3-4)

Markham's housewife, then, inherited a set of instructions that opposed and rewrote earlier class images that had included different ideals of womanliness in Europe. He transforms the symbolic splendor and public visibility through which the noblewoman shored up and extended her husband's influence into the practical activity of a frugal and energetic preserver of newly earned goods and homespun virtues, and he recommends an analogous kind of speech: not the cultivated elegance through which the court lady complemented and stimulated the courtier, but the plainspoken, pragmatic dealings of country wife with her neighbors. Markham's prescription for the compleat woman, like the contrasting prescriptions for womanly conduct that preceded it, illustrates that femininity is a constantly changing construction, open to debate and revision (although women rarely took an active part in such debates in the sixteenth century) as class interests shift and enter into conflict with one another.

ISABELLA WHITNEY: MARKETING MANNERS

Marriage manuals' prohibitions and controls of public appearances and public speech by women were certainly one reason that so little writing by women of the petty gentry or urban bourgeoisie was published in sixteenth-century England—and perhaps also a reason that when they wrote, they wrote protest in pamphlet form, most often under pseudonyms.35 One exception to the rule of modest silence, however, was Isabella Whitney, a London serving-woman whose poems were printed in two inexpensive collections in the 1570s. Whitney made a virtue of necessity; more precisely, she turned necessity into virtue. Rather than flouting emergent ideologies of the private woman, she appropriated bourgeois gender discourse for her own profit.

Whitney is best known through Betty Tavitsky's research, especially her edition of Whitney's “Last Wyll and Testament,” a high-spirited farewell to the streets and merchants of London that reveals Whitney's interest in reaching a broad urban readership.36 Whitney published two pamphlets with Richard Jones, a printer who specialized in popular pamphlets and miscellanies, and who may also have published other poems by Whitney anonymously in his anthologies.37

Whitney appears to accept the exclusion of women from the public sphere. She justifies her own writing as a stop-gap measure through which, as “maid” (unmarried woman), she must support herself. In a verse letter in the pamphlet, A Sweet Nosgay of Pleasant Posye, “To her Sister Misteris A.B.,” she piously acknowledges the duties of a married woman; indeed, her emphasis on useful activity sounds much like Markham's. She does not challenge contemporary expectations of women; she simply asserts a temporary difference in situation between her sister and herself:

Good sister so I you commend,
          to him that made us all:
I know you huswifery intend,
          though I to writing fall:
Wherefore no l[o]nger shall you stay,
          from businesse, that profit may.
Had I a Husband, or a House,
          and all that longes therto
My selfe could frame about to rouse
          as other women do:
But til some houshold cares me tye,
          My bookes and Pen I wyll apply.

(D2r)38

In an undated text, The Copy of a Letter lately written in meeter by a yonge Gentilwoman: to her unconstant lover, Whitney continues to work within the confines of correct womanly behavior. Ingeniously, however, she adopts the role of a marriage counsellor in order to write an eminently public and publishable letter to a man who has broken his promise to marry her. In Whitney's hands, the lament of the abandoned mistress, enjoying a vogue in England after George Turberville's translation of Ovid's Heroides in 1567, is turned into a set of recommendations for marital success that has more in common with Hake's sermons than with the anguished reproaches of Ovid's Ariadne or Medea. Like Des Roches, Whitney deploys contemporary gender ideology in order to establish a profitably respectable speaking and writing position for herself. She echoes conduct-book commonplaces on the good wife in order to write her way out of the discursive double bind that positioned loquacious women as whores, on the one hand, or, in the case of Ovidian lament, as exemplary tragic victims.

From the opening of the Letter, Whitney shifts from accusation to an advisory role toward the man who has failed to keep his marriage to another woman secret. She speaks to him in a tone of familiar yet detached camaraderie:

You know I always wisht you well
          so will I during lyfe:
But sith you shall a Husband be
          God send you a good wife.

(A4r)39

After listing classical villains (Jason, Theseus, Aeneas) to add weight to her criticism of the man who has betrayed her, she turns to classical heroines to construct a didactic counter-portrait of wifely virtue. Preaching to the would-be husband from the elevated position of marriage counsellor, she takes on a role that had belonged only to men writers in the middle decades of the sixteenth century:

For she that shal so happy be
          of thee to be elect:
I wish her virtues to be such
          she nede not be suspect.

(A4r)

And she goes on to moralize Ovid in a historically specific crosscutting of literary and ethical discourses, using his heroines in The Metamorphoses to exemplify virtues central to the ideal of feminine behavior being promulgated in Puritan sermons and in the middleclass conduct books to which Greene's Penelope's Web would later belong:

I rather wish her HELENS face,
          then one of HELENS trade:
With chastnes of PENELOPE,
          the which did never fade.
A LUCRES for her contancy,
          and THISBE for her trueth.

(A4v)

Whitney's performance throughout the Letter appears to demonstrate her acceptance of dicta regarding wifely modesty and restrained speech, yet her citation of such requirements actually allows her to turn the power relations between herself and the man who has broken off their engagement upside down. Rather than bewailing her abandonment, she rewrites her fiancé's freedom to leave her and choose another woman as the move of a foolish man, a “noddye” who requires the counsel that a jilted woman turned marital advisor is eminently capable of giving.

In the second half of the pamphlet, in quatrains on the subject of undependable suitors, Whitney echoes the mistrust of foppish gallants evident in anti-courtly treatises such as Brathwait's English Gentlewoman. But in a striking reversal of assumptions about gender, she displaces the seductive artifice traditionally attributed to women onto deceptive men courting women:40

Trust not a man at the fyrst sight!
          but trye him well before:
I wish al Maids within their breasts
          to kepe this thing in store.
Beware of fayre and painted talke,
          beware of flattering tonges:
The Mermaids do pretend no good,
          for all their plesant Songs!

(A6r)

In the last two lines, her return to female figures as examples of vice demonstrates the extent to which notions of woman as temptress dominated the gender ideology of her time (and the literary sources upon which sixteenth-century writers of either sex drew). Even when her aim is to criticize the opposite sex, the ammunition that comes to hand is determined by a history of suspicious and condemnatory discourses about women.

Nonetheless, Whitney's Admonition establishes her as a survivor rather than a victim, and as an expert on feminine self-protection:

And sith the fish that reason lacks
                                        once warned will beware:
Why should we not take hede to that
                                        that turneth us to care.
And I who was deceived late
          by ones unfaithfull teares:
Trust now for to beware, if that
          I live this hundred years.

(A8v)

Both halves of the pamphlet weave marriage manual formulas together with classical allusions to produce a popularly aimed poem in which Whitney simultaneously masters abandonment and interpellates a respectful readership. By grafting two vocabularies she finds in place—the lexicon of Ovidian victimizers and victims and the pieties of bourgeois marriage theory—and using them as permission for her work as a woman writer, she constructs an alliance with a public potentially more loyal and certainly more profitable than the “unconstant lover” to whom the Letter is ostensibly addressed.

These poets' negotiations of cultural prohibitions and permissions demonstrate that conduct books and women's lyrics occupied the same ideological terrain in the second half of the sixteenth century. The nets and bridles that restrained women's participation in literary culture also provided them with entries into it in ways that mentors of élite manners and Protestant preachers could hardly have foreseen. Des Roches made a name and a career for herself within the confines of court-oriented etiquette, which assigned women a role of public visibility and verbal flirtation yet instructed them in the uses of chastity as a defense against censure for seeming too accessible; Whitney claimed a sturdy bourgeois credibility by purifying the passionate regrets of the Ovidian heroine into the judiciously practical moral authority claimed by male class-spokesmen writing and translating bourgeois marriage manuals in the mid-1500s. Together, Des Roches and Whitney represent a miniscule, almost invisible sample of European women, but they reveal the ingenuity that was required to divert early modern controls upon women into channels for their survival through literary self-representation.

Des Roches's feminized Neoplatonism and Whitney's prudent advice to lovers shattered no ideological enclosures in 1571 or 1582. But when their poetry is recognized as a productive use of the diversifying discourses of ideal femininity that surrounded them, it breaks down a conceptual enclosure that is still too much with us: the notion that social life and aesthetic invention occupy separate spheres. I have been arguing instead that ascendant class ideals, mobilized in polemical dialogue with feudal values, defined sixteenth-century behavior and channeled literary production in intricately interconnected ways. By writing at all, women departed from governing codes of conduct in spirit, but they did so by the letter, by appropriating positive prescriptions rather than immobilizing prohibitions. Des Roches read Castiglione as saying, “Speak chastely, in this dangerous new coterie world, but speak;” Whitney read her Puritan brothers as saying, “If you must speak, speak as a true godly woman for the greater good of your sex.” These poets' compromises with new conceptions of proper femininity in a historical period now generally conceded to have had largely negative consequences for women may be to our present theoretical benefit.41 Sixteenth-century women writers offer evidence that literary-historical survival depends not upon isolated genius or immunity from social conflict but from creative manipulation of the gender ideologies that clash around poets, and in them, as they compose their stanzas. Hypothetical and coercive both, the social relations of daughter to father, wife to husband, and beloved to suitor intermesh with the poet's relations to past tradition, to contemporary languages of class, and to readers in her present and in her future.

Notes

  1. For this argument in relation to scholarly treatises on the nature and duties of women, see C. Jordan (1985) “Rethinking gender: Renaissance defenses of women,” MLA paper.

  2. F. Whigham analyzes the effects of courtesy books in his (1983) “Interpretation at court: courtesy and the performer-audience dialectic,” NLH, 14, Spring, and in his (1984) Ambition and Privilege: The Social Tropes of Elizabethan Courtesy Theory, Berkeley, Calif., University of California Press.

  3. R. Kelso, in her survey of European conduct books, suggests that the new emphasis on secular activity for men led to a re-emphasis on Christian humility and withdrawal from the world for women: (1956, 1978) Doctrine for the Lady of the Renaissance, Urbana, Ill., University of Illinois Press, 23-6. For England, see the doctoral dissertation of S. Cahn (1981) “Changing conceptions of women in sixteenth-and seventeenth-century England,” University of Michigan, and L. Jardine's argument that unofficial changes in inheritance patterns, to the benefit of women, were a cause of new attacks, in her (1983) Still Harping on Daughters: Women and Drama in the Age of Shakespeare, Totowa, NJ, Barnes & Noble, ch. 3. An excellent study of French class loyalties and women's roles in salons, arguing that the birth versus merit debate was a central issue, is C. Lougee (1980) Le Paradis des femmes: Women, Salons and Social Stratification in Seventeenth-Century France, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press.

  4. For details about Anne Boleyn's training as a lady-in-waiting, see A. Plowden (1979) Tudor Women: Queens and Commoners, London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 40-3. Guazzo's remark is quoted from E. Sullivan (ed.) (1925) La Civil Conversatione del Signor Stefano Guazzo (Venice, 1575), trans. G. Pettie (1581) London, Constable, II, 78; 418. In my citations, page numbers refer first to Pettie's translation, then to the Italian text. Annibal Guasco's very interesting epistle to his daughter is entitled Ragionamento à D. Lavinia sua figliuola della maniera del governarsi in corte, andando per Dama (1586), Turin.

  5. See F. Whigham on “cosmesis” (ch. 4) and sumptuary laws (ch. 5) in Ambition and Privilege; and P. Stallybrass (1986) “The body enclosed,” in M. Ferguson, M. Quilligan, and N. Vickers (eds) Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe, Chicago, Ill., University of Chicago Press. A discussion of radical uses of images of unruly women is N. Z. Davis (1975) “Women on top: symbolic sexual inversion and political disorder in early modern Europe,” in Society and Culture in Early Modern France, Stanford Calif., Stanford University Press. For the often contradictory amalgamation of classical and patristic writing with contemporary ideas about women, see I. Maclean (1980) The Renaissance Notion of Woman, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

  6. Les Enseignements d'Anne de France à sa fille Susanne de Bourbon (1505), repr. (1878) Moulins, Des Rosiers, intro. A. M. Chazaud, 81.

  7. I am drawing on Michel Foucault's comment on the situation of doctors involved in sex research at the beginning of the eighteenth century: “One had to speak of sex; one had to speak publicly, and in a manner that was not determined by the division between licit and illicit, even if the speaker maintained the distinction for himself,” in his (1978) The History of Sexuality, trans. R. Hurley, New York, Pantheon, 24. When a woman spoke in the sixteenth century, however, she had to observe licit/illicit distinctions very carefully, determined as they were by the tensions between courtly and domestic discourse on women.

  8. J. H. Whitfield (ed.) (1974) Il Libro del Cortigiano (Venice, 1528), trans. Sir Thomas Hoby (1561) London, H. M. Dent. Page numbers after my citations refer first to Hoby's translation, then to the Italian text: B. Maier (ed.) (1964) Turin UTET, second edn.

  9. Arturo Graf records the use of “cortigiana onesta,” the highest category to which courtesans were assigned, in a Roman census and a diary entry of the early sixteenth century, “Una Cortigiana fra mille: Veronica Franco,” in A. Graf (1926) Attraverso il Cinquecento, Turin, Chiantore, 226.

  10. G. della Casa (1560) Il Galatheo, Florence, first published in Milan (1559), 38a-39a. Like Giuliano, della Casa warns that more may be imputed to the court lady's words than she intends: “Those ladies who are or wish to be well mannered should be careful to avoid not only improper actions but also improper words, and not only those that are improper or shocking, but even those which could be or could seem so” (32b).

  11. A. Nipho (1560) Il Cortigiano del Sessa, trans. from the Latin by F. Baldelli, Genoa, 120.

  12. Lougee's study of seventeenth-century coteries (Le Paradis des femmes) is informative about their social functions, as is the biography of the Des Roches by G. Diller (1936) Les Dames Des Roches: Etude sur la vie littéraire à Poitiers dans la deuxième moitié du XVIe siècle, Paris, Droz.

  13. For an incisive analysis of the vocabulary of Neoplatonism as the code of an endangered, self-protective courtly élite, see J. Guidi (1980) “De l'amour courtois à l'amour sacré: la condition de la femme dans l'oeuvre de B. Castiglione,” in A. Rochon (ed.) Images de la femme dans la littérature italienne de la Renaissance, Paris, Centre de Récherche sur la Renaissance Italienne, Université de la Sorbonne nouvelle. For a similar argument relating to an earlier period, see F. Goldin's discussion of French and German courtly love poetry as “the ideal image” through which the “best educated and most powerful secular class in the Middle Ages regarded itself and justified its existence,” in his (1967) The Mirror of Narcissus in the Courtly Love Lyric, Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press.

  14. Diller discusses the financial history of the Des Roches, including their winning of a royal grant, in Les Dames Des Roches, pt 1, ch. 1.

  15. Paraphrased from the Houghton Library edition of Les Oeuvres des Mesdames Des Roches de Poitiers mère et fille (1586) Paris, Abel l'Angelier, “Epistre à ma fille,” 2a.

  16. I have used the British Museum Library edition of Les Oeuvres de Mesdames des Roches de Poitiers, mère et fille (1578) Paris, Abel Angelier.

  17. A good study of bourgeois Protestant marriage and household handbooks is S. Hull (1982) Chaste, Silent and Obedient: English Books for Women, 1475-1640, San Marino, Calif., Huntington Library.

  18. R. Brathwait (1631) The English Gentlewoman, London, 64, 88.

  19. B. Rich (1616) My Ladies Looking Glasse, London, 44.

  20. Leon Battista Alberti's handbook for the Florentine patriciate has been edited, with a useful introduction, by G. Guarini (1971) Della Famiglia, Lewisburg, Pa., Bucknell University Press.

  21. T. Tasso (1582) Discorso della virtù feminile, e donnesca, Venice, 5.

  22. R. Greene, A Quip for an Upstart Courtier, in A. Grosart (ed.) (1881-6) The Life and Complete Works of Robert Greene, repr. (1964) New York, Russell & Russell, XI, 20.

  23. R. Greene (1601) Penelope's Web, London, E4r.

  24. G. Whetstone (1582) An Heptameron of Civill Discourses, London, X2r-v.

  25. T. Becon (1543), preface to The Christian State of Matrimony, trans. from the Dutch by M. Coverdale, London, B3v.

  26. T. Salter (1579) A Mirrhor mete for all Mothers, Matrones and Maidens, London, A7r-v. For a useful critique of the now discredited assumption that Renaissance humanism supported women's access to education and the public sphere, see J. B. Holm's (1984) analysis of the Bruto/Salter book, “The myth of a feminist humanism,” Soundings, 68, Winter.

  27. E. Hake (1574) A Touchstone for this Time Present, London, D2r-v.

  28. W. Vaughan (1608) The Golden Grove, London, 06r.

  29. Sir Thomas Smith (1583) De Republica Anglorum: A Discourse on the Commonwealth of England and the Maner of Government thereof, ed. L. Alston (1906), Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 23.

  30. Arguments that Protestantism worked in favor of women are summed up and debated in several recent studies, including K. Davies (1977) “The sacred condition of equality—how original were Puritan doctrines of marriage?”, Social History, 5, May, 563-81; L. Stone (1977) The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500-1800, New York, Harper & Row, 195-206, 216-18; and L. Jardine's chapter 2, “‘She openeth her mouth with wisdom’: the double bind of renaissance education and reformed religion,” in her (1983) Still Harping on Daughters.

  31. R. Snawsel (1631) A Looking Glasse for Married Folkes, London, repr. (1975) Norwood, NJ, Walter Johnson, 34-5.

  32. G. Markham (1615, 1631) The English Huswife, London, 2. For an argument that women's prophesying and preaching had been justified on the basis of traditional views of women's passivity and excitability and that they were firmly suppressed by the end of the seventeenth century, see P. Mack (1982) “Women as prophets during the English Civil War,” Feminist Studies, 8, Spring, 19-45.

  33. W. Gouge (1634) Of Domesticall Duties: Eight Treatises, London, 281.

  34. Compare a similarly anti-aristocratic stance from T. Powell's later (1635) The Art of Thriving, or the plaine pathway to preferment, London. Speaking of the daughters of a London merchant, he writes, “Instead of Song and Musick, let them learn Cookery and Laundry, and in steade of Reading Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia, let them read the grounds of good huswifery. I like not a female Poëtesse at any hand: let great personages glory [in] their skill in Musicke, the posture of their bodies, their knowledge in languages, the greatnesse and freedome of their Spirits and their arts in arraigning of men's affections, at their flattering Faces: this is not the way to breede a private Gentleman's daughter” (114-15).

  35. B. Travitsky (1984) “The lady doth protest: protest in the popular writings of Renaissance Englishwomen,” ELR, 14, Autumn, 255-83.

  36. B. Travitsky (1980) “‘The Wyll and Testament’ of Isabella Whitney,” ELR, 10, Winter.

  37. R. J. Fehrenbach (1981) studies the anthologies of Whitney's publisher in “Isabella Whitney and the popular miscellanies of Richard Jones,” Cahiers élisabéthains, 19.

  38. I have used the British Museum Library edition of A Sweet Nosgay of Pleasant Posye: contayning a hundred and ten Phylosophicall Flowers (1573), but a useful facsimile has been edited by R. Panofsky and included in his edition (1982) of Sir Hugh Platt: The Floures of Philosophie (1572), Delmar, NJ, Scholars' Facsimiles and Reprints, vol. 374.

  39. I have used the Bodleian edition of The Copy of a letter, lately written in meeter, by a yonge Gentilwoman: to her unconstant lover, with an Admonition to all yong Gentilwomen, and to all other Maydes in general to beware of mennes flattery, London, n. d. Excerpts from this apparently unique copy are printed by B. Travitsky in her (1981) The Paradise of Women: Writings by Englishwomen of the Renaissance, Westport, Conn., Greenwood Press, 118-20.

  40. Travitsky, too, was struck by this reversal of traditional blame of women as deceivers (“The lady doth protest,” 262).

  41. For the now classic statement of this view, see J. Kelly-Gadol (1977) “Did women have a Renaissance?” in R. Bridenthal and C. Koonz (eds) Becoming Visible: Women in European History, Boston, Mass., Houghton Mifflin. See also the editors' introduction to Rewriting the Renaissance.

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