Esther Inglis: A Franco-Scottish Jacobean Writer and her <em>Octonaries upon the Vanitie and Inconstancie of the World</em>

Abstract

This article draws attention to the hitherto ignored poetry of the Franco-Scottish Jacobean calligrapher and limner, Esther Inglis (c.1570 -1624). Inglis is the subject of a fast growing body of published scholarship, but though she left a small body of original prose and verse, she has been given no place in Scottish literature. The article falls into six sections. The substantial first section notes first that to date, there has been a tendency to shy away from dealing with her as a writer, and that Inglis’s formative Scottish background has been largely ignored. The second section looks at Inglis and her family in Edinburgh, as well-integrated Huguenot bourgeois immigrants. The short third section considers Inglis’s spiritual reading material, and the lengthier fourth contextualises and then analyses the three commendatory sonnets that preface several of her productions. The short fifth section briefly survey Inglis herself as an author, and the sixth introduces the fifty Octonaries upon the Vanitie and Inconstancie of the World, which are currently known in only three manuscripts she created before 1610. The article itself is followed by the first-ever printed text of Inglis's Octonaries, textual notes with variats among the three manuscripts, and three appendices.