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

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis essay examines sixteenth-century women’s marginalia in devotional books as a mode of transmission, particularly in circumstances of where early modern women themselves were in circumstance of limited circulation, under house arrest or imprisoned. Recent work on prison literature has highlighted the importance of the prison as a crucible for writing in early modern England. However, it has focused less on the material cultures through which such texts were circulated, which for women writers in particular included marginal annotations to texts then circulated through domestic and coterie circles to a broader world. Anne Boleyn, Jane Dudley, Elizabeth Tudor and Mary Stuart all circulated writing as marginalia while under forms of imprisonment, providing a means of political engagement through lamentation, critique and protest. This essay uncovers the ways in which such texts constructed and disguised their political objectives, as well as the material means through which these prison poems were transmitted, showing the ways in which material and rhetorical cultures operated together to make meaning in this neglected group of texts.