‘My Euell Hande’: The Shapes of Women’s Letters in Early Modern England

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This essay considers a recent shift in scholarship on early modern women writers, away from studying what these women wrote to investigate how and where women’s writings occurred. A critical focus on letters inscribed on whitewashed walls and funeral monuments, jewels and embroidered cloths, for instance, has supplied us with useful information about women’s schooling and teachers, their gift-giving and household responsibilities, and scholars have demonstrated how poems and prayers also belong to this women’s circulation of material things. Indeed, early modern women were not always seeking to transform their letters into literature, and this essay also briefly suggests other ways of reading the shapes and designs of women’s letters. What Mercie Collyn describes as her ‘small raggid secretary hand’ is designed to throw off unauthorized readers, so that what looks like illiteracy, in other words, might just be another – and equally valuable – form of writing. Continued discussion of female literacy and female schooling in the early modern period should attend more closely to the many marks on cloths and walls – even the flourishes on Elizabeth Tudor’s signature or alphabets adorning embroidered samplers – as evidence of an alternative use of letters by women in the early modern period.