Speaking Pictures: Margaret Roper and the Representation of Lady Rhetoric

Abstract

In the first quarter of the sixteenth century, a woodcut featuring a young woman at a desk, facing an audience of smaller figures, appears in five books, all printed by, or with a connection to, Wynkyn de Worde. In four of these, first printed between 1504 and 1512, the image is explicitly linked to figures associated with rhetoric and/or powerful female speech. In the fifth instance, the title page of Margaret Roper’s Erasmian translation, A Devout Treatise Upon the Pater Noster (1526?), the moment at which the associated text is produced by a woman famed for her rhetorical skill, the image appears altered, with the audience cropped from the frame. What may be argued from this change is first, that, as print historians increasingly agree, while woodcuts travel fairly freely among early printed books, they do bear some relation to either the work itself or the context in which it is produced. Second, that when faced with a non-allegorical Lady Rhetoric, tensions around female speech and agency reach a literal breaking point with a physical alteration of the woodcut that undermines both the tradition of the figure and its more recently-imagined functions.