– Jonathan Goldberg[1]

In “The English Renaissance ‘Timeline’: Part II,” I discussed how I came upon the works of English Renaissance calligrapher Esther Inglis, specifically through her drawing of an emblem from Jean-Jacques Boissard’s Emblemes (1588). The emblem became even more interesting to me as I thought about it in relation to the self-portrait included in one of the Folger Shakespeare Library’s copies of her Octonaries upon the vanitie and inconstancie of the world (1600/01). The Folger’s is one of nine copies Inglis made of Calvinist theologian Antoine de la Roche Chandieu’s Octonaries.[2] The image I included last week was a detail of Inglis’s self-portrait, whereas, in the image below, you can see her self-portrait within the larger context of the manuscript:

Fig. 1    Self-Portrait of Esther Inglis (1v) and “Octonarie 1” (2r) from Inglis’s Octonaries (1600/01). Folger MS V.a.91, 1v || 2r.[3] (Click here to zoom in.)

There are apparently forty-seven octonaries – eight-line stanzas – in the manuscripts, each illustrated with flowers and written in a different calligraphic style. One of the most fascinating and ornate styles she uses, to me, is lettera mancina, or “mirror writing”:

Fig. 2    “Octo XXX” and Example of “Mirror Writing” from Inglis’s Octonaries (1607). Folger MS V.a.92, 34v || 35r. (Click here to zoom in.)

Fig. 3    “Octo XXX” and Example of “Mirror Writing” from Inglis’s Octonaries (1600/01). Folger MS V.a.91, 30v ||31r. (Click here to zoom in.)

The 1600/01 manuscript is written in French and English, with translations of the octonaries appearing on facing pages. Inglis’s use of “mirror writing” is particularly interesting to me within this context – it is a reversal, or translation, of the French. However, it is also a “reflection” of Inglis as, again, writer and maker of text, as well as the calligraphic nuance with which she pens and translates the octonaries, making each one more memorable for readers – an aide-mémoire.

The intricacy of Inglis’s penmanship and drawings illustrates that, while Inglis copies Antoine de la Roche Chandieu’s printed octonaries, she does not “lack originality” or merely “reproduce” the “designs [of] others,” as some scholars have suggested.[4] Indeed, the self-portrait she draws and includes in the 1600/01 manuscript announces this at its outset – namely through the prominence of her hand. By depicting herself with the instruments of literary composition, Inglis’s self-portrait situates her, visually, as a writer and maker of texts, with her first and last name bookending the drawn frame. Notice how the letters of her name, written in Roman majuscule, so closely mimic print. In this way, her penmanship is very similar to that of English Renaissance calligrapher Thomas Fella, whose “drawings” of printed media I wrote about in an earlier post. She copies printed words from la Roche Chandieu, but through her use of multiple calligraphic styles and floral illustrations, asserts the authority of her own hand and the originality it brings to her works.

As I conclude my three part series on “The English Renaissance Timeline,” I leave you with two more of my favorite images and examples of Inglis’s penmanship, as well as a list of references should you like to know more about Inglis:

Fig. 4    “Octo XIII” from Inglis’s Octonaries (1600/01). Folger MS V.a.91, 13v ||14r. (Click here to zoom in.)

Fig. 5    “Octo XLI” from Inglis’s Octonaries (1600/01). Folger MS V.a.91, 41v||42r. (Click here to zoom in.)

Further Reading:
Frye, Susan. Pens and Needles: Women’s Textualities in Early Modern England. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2010.

Knoppers, Laura Lunger, Ed. The Cambridge Companion to Early Modern Women’s Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009.

Ziegler, Georgianna. “‘More than feminine boldness’: the gift books of Esther Inglis.” Women Writing and the Reproduction of Culture in Tudor and Stuart England. Ed. Mary E. Burke, et al. Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 2000: 19-37.

[1] Jonathan Goldberg, Writing Matter: From the Hands of the English Renaissance. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1990: 55.

[2] To clarify, the Folger Shakespeare Library houses two copies of Inglis’s Octonaries – one dated 1600/01 and the other 1607.

[3] All images identified as “Folger MS” or “FSL Collection” are here used by permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

[4] Elspeth Yeo, “Inglis, Esther (1570/71 – 1624),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004.

Amy K. Burnette is a 6^th year doctoral candidate in the Department of English at Syracuse University where she is currently at work on her dissertation project, Praxis Memoriae: Memory as Aesthetic Technique in English Renaissance Literature, 1580-1630.

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Fig. 1   Self-Portrait of Esther Inglis. Folger MS V.a.91, Fol. 1v.[1] (Click here to zoom in.)

The second of five children, Inglis was born in London around 1570 to French Huguenot refugees Nicolas Langlois and Marie Presot.[2] Inglis was taught calligraphy by her mother – a “skilled scribe,” according to scholar Elspeth Yeo.[3] Inglis, like Fella, was also influenced by John de Beauchesne’s popular book on handwriting, A Booke Containing Divers Sortes of Hands (Fig. 2).[4]

Fig. 2   Example of “Italique Hande” from A booke containing divers sortes of hands (1602). FSL Collection. STC 6450.2. (Click here to zoom in).

In addition to being an accomplished calligrapher – indeed, “a woman known for her handwriting,” as Georgianna Ziegler describes in her blog post for The Collation – what is perhaps most remarkable about Inglis is that fifty-nine of her manuscripts are extant. However, I came across Inglis’s work in a sort of roundabout way – through the research I was doing on Thomas Fella, actually.

When I first began working on my dissertation prospectus about two years ago, I was using the database Arkyves to search for Renaissance depictions of Mnemosyne, mother of the nine Muses and the Greek personification of Memory, as the relation between memory, femininity, and practices of literary invention is of particular interest to me. Of the images that turned up in my search results, I was especially drawn to one of an emblem from Jean-Jacques Boissard’s Emblemes (1588). The legs of the table are carved in the shape of women, holding up the instruments of literary composition – paper and a quill:

Fig. 3   Boissard’s emblem[5]

I kept this image in a folder for dissertation research, but I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do with the emblem in relation to my dissertation. Last year, when I came across Fella’s commonplace book, I emailed Georgianna Ziegler, Head of Reference at the Folger Shakespeare Library, to see about consulting the manuscript in person, as well as to discuss my interest in Fella’s illustrations. Dr. Ziegler very kindly drew my attention to the work of Esther Inglis, explaining that, “Fella is not the only person who ‘draws’ print.”[6] Dr. Ziegler linked me to her blog post on Inglis to see “how she copied an emblem from a printed book woodcut.”[7] To my surprise, the image to which Dr. Ziegler referred me was Inglis’s drawing of Boissard’s emblem! Inglis’s copy is very near to the original:

Fig. 4   Inglis’s drawing of Boissard’s emblem (1599). Folger MS V.a.93. (Click here to zoom in.)

If we turn to the self-portrait of Inglis shown in Fig. 1, from her Octonaries upon the vanitie and inconstancie of the world (1601), Inglis depicts herself with the tools for literary composition – ink and paper. Imitating and copying print seems to be, for Inglis, a means of defining herself not only as a female calligrapher, but also as a female author. Perhaps Inglis fashions herself as a sort of Mnemosyne.

*

The concluding sentence of Elspeth Yeo’s entry for Inglis in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography reads: “Although her [Inglis’s] draughtsmanship was weak and she lacked originality, preferring to reproduce designs by others, the delicacy and precision of her calligraphy, particularly when working on a very small scale, was outstanding.” As I wrote last week, however, what interests me most about the images from Fella’s commonplace book, especially his illustration of the woodcut of sixteenth-century printer John Day, is “the delicate balance he strikes between his meticulous attention to the original medium of Day’s woodcut and the apparent differences in his copying of it.” This, too, informs my interest in Inglis.

In my next post, “The English Renaissance ‘Timeline’: Part III,” I will turn to other works by Inglis to suggest that she did not merely “reproduce designs by others,” nor did she necessarily “lack originality.” Like Fella, she “draws” print, but there are also apparent differences in her copied illustrations and calligraphic print – differences that she fashions with her own hands, as she indicates in Fig. 1, thus supplanting, in a unique way, the highly masculinized work of the English Renaissance printing press.

[1] All images identified as “Folger MS” or “FSL Collection” are here used by permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/.

[2] Elspeth Yeo, “Inglis, Esther (1570/71 – 1624),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid.

[5] http://www.emblems.arts.gla.ac.uk/french/emblem.php?id=FBOa016 (Accessed via Arkyves, January 11, 2014).

[6] Georgianna Ziegler, personal communication, November 24, 2014.

[7] Ibid.

Amy K. Burnette is a 6^th year doctoral candidate in the Department of English at Syracuse University where she is currently at work on her dissertation project, Praxis Memoriae: Memory as Aesthetic Technique in English Renaissance Literature, 1580-1630.

The post The English Renaissance “Timeline”: Part II appeared first on Broadly Textual Pub.

– Susan Sontag, On Photography

In a post for her blog Brain Pickings, Maria Popova introduces the above quotation by asserting photography as “both an attempted antidote to our mortality paradox and a deepening awareness of it.” “This seems especially true,” Popova continues, “if subtly tragic, as we fill our social media timelines with images, as if to prove that our biological timelines – our very lives – are filled with notable moments, which also remind us that they are all inevitably fleeting towards the end point of that timeline: mortality itself.”

Popova’s post and, in particular, Susan Sontag’s quotation, reminded me of an image I came across about a year ago while studying at the Folger Shakespeare Library. I was doing research for a dissertation-related project exploring the relation between practices of literary invention and English Renaissance ideas about mutability, mortality, and memento mori (Latin: “Remember that you have to die”). The following turned up in my search results:

Fig. 1   Folger MS V.a.311, fol. 43r. [i]

Click here to zoom in.

The image is of an illustration from Thomas Fella’s commonplace book, or miscellany, A booke of diverse devices and sorts of pictures, compiled between 1592 and 1598, to which he later made additions in July 1622. Fella was a calligrapher and draper from the Halesworth area of Suffolk County, England. He didn’t attend university, and most of what is known about him derives from two extant writings, including his commonplace book. Perhaps this is what I find so interesting about him: little is known about Fella – “who” he was, what his life was “like.” But if we turn, for clues, to the images and aphorisms copied into his commonplace book, or “timeline,” as it were, it’s striking that those which he thought to include seem to be, as Popova writes, reminders “that they are all inevitably fleeting towards the end point of that timeline: mortality itself.” While the invention of photography postdates Fella’s commonplace book by about two and a half centuries, Popova and Sontag are, I think, instructive for how we might interpret certain of Fella’s illustrations and, more broadly, a particular historical moment in print, visual culture, and memory.

*

Issuing from the man’s mouth in Fig. 1 is a banderole, or “speech bubble,” on which appear the words “Tempus Omnia terminat” (Latin: “Time ends all things”) – a sort of memento mori proclaiming “time’s relentless melt.” What initially attracted my attention to this image, however, was the phrase written within the second banderole: “Life is death and death is Life.” Fella’s appropriation of the phrase isn’t unusual; I’d encountered it before in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century sermons, all of which place it within the context of St. Augustine’s City of God (462 AD). Variant iterations of the phrase crop up in other English Renaissance texts, most famously in Hamlet’s musings on being and not being – “To be, or not to be.”

However, Fella’s deployment of the phrase participates, per Sontag, “in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability,” namely English Renaissance printer John Day:

Fig. 2   Folger MS, f.515v

Click here to zoom in.

In the 1563 edition of John Foxe’s Actes and Monuments, there is, included at its end, a woodcut-cum-miniature portrait (quasi-photograph?) of John Day, Foxe’s printer. The woodcut is included in all editions of Actes and Monuments. Engraved within the ribbon that encircles Day’s profile is the phrase, “LIEFE IS DEATHE AND DEATH IS LIEFE,” bookended by Roman numerals indicating Day’s age. Forty.

The few scholarly paragraphs devoted to Fella’s commonplace book are driven, primarily, by a desperation to find out how he was able to access texts such as Foxe’s Actes and Monuments – whether he owned them, borrowed them – and what other texts the images might have been copied from: the “irrepressible desire to return to the origin,” as Derrida has it.[ii] I share this desire somewhat differently, however: what fascinates me is the delicate balance that Fella strikes between his meticulous attention to the original medium of Day’s woodcut and the apparent differences in his copying of it.

While this image suggests a heightened attention to the sensuous particularities of everyday objects, namely Fella’s interest in the materiality of the woodcut, I think that copying the woodcut communicates this interest in a different way: it holds the memory of its past engravedness, of its former life, in Foxe’s book. The aesthesis of Day’s woodcut is memorialized in the shading techniques used by Fella to detail Day’s apparel, hair, and beard. If memory, as defined by William Fulwood in The Castel of Memorie (1562), is the faculty by “which the mind repeateth things that are past,”[iii] then copying – repetition – is, for Fella, an aesthetic technique through which he preserves, yet also recreates, the medium of the woodcut in his own “timeline” – the English Renaissance commonplace book.

Indeed, the phrase and numbers that encircle, confine, Day’s profile in Fig. 2 are, in Fella’s rendering, notions over which he has physical and sensual control: life and death he grips with his hand, but Fella also used his hand to write those italic words into the swirling banderole on which they appear. Whereas Day’s woodcut indicates his age, or the passage of time, via Roman numerals, Fella’s illustration ostensibly speaks of time’s finitude, and of age, as memento mori – “Remember that you have to die.” Fella thus participates in Day’s “mortality, vulnerability, mutability” by “slicing out,” or copying, the woodcut into his commonplace book.

*

Fittingly, the phrase “Tempus omnia terminat” – “Time ends all things” – is the epigraph to Fella’s “end” page (Fig. 3), at once testifying “to time’s relentless melt” and acknowledging the inevitable end point of his own timeline/commonplace book: “And all must ende that ever was begonne.” The whole of Fella’s miscellany is preoccupied with mortality – and, for someone alive during the plague-ridden English Renaissance, understandably so. But if A booke of diverse devices and sorts of pictures is “both an attempted antidote to our mortality paradox and a deepening awareness of it,” so, too, is my interest in it. I participate in Fella’s “mortality, vulnerability, mutability” as I look at, and write about, a digitized image of his copied image of Day’s woodcut image.

However, the phrase “Life is death and death is Life,” especially Fella’s deployment of it, has a chiasmatic formulation – it implies circularity rather than antithesis. Time’s melt is relentless; but, as Hamlet so often reminds us, memory is the only human antidote to mortality.

Fig. 3   Folger MS V.a.311, fol. 75r

Click here to zoom in.

[i] All images from Thomas Fella’s A booke of diverse devices and sorts of images are here used by permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/.

[ii] Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995), 91.

[iii] Guglielmo Gratarolo, The castel of memorie, trans. William Fulwood (London: 1562).

Amy K. Burnette is a 6^th year doctoral candidate in the Department of English at Syracuse University where she is currently at work on her dissertation project, Praxis Memoriae: Memory as Aesthetic Technique in English Renaissance Literature, 1580-1630.

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