The Reading, Reception, and Collecting of Isabella Whitney’s A Sweet Nosgay, c.1573–1871

Abstract

ABSTRACT Much recent scholarship on early modern women’s writing has focussed on their marginalia. Yet how active readers responded to their printed work after it left the bookseller’s stall has remained largely unexplored. This article responds to this critical gap by applying the principles of feminist bibliography to copy-specific annotations found in Isabella Whitney’s poetic miscellany A Sweet Nosgay (1573). Texts by early modern women often enjoyed a surprisingly long reception history and textual afterlife. By analysing early modern ownership inscriptions and nineteenth century marginalia found in the sole extant copy of Whitney’s text, this article considers how A Sweet Nosgay was read across time as a valuable work of ameliorating literature. Descriptions of Whitney's text in nineteenth century auction catalogues similarly allow us to trace changing attitudes towards, and readership of, her work: raising questions of how gender contributed to an author’s desirability, economic value, and ultimate survival. Ultimately, this case study demonstrates the need for a wider chronological and generic framework by which to consider the layered reception of the multitude of women’s texts like Whitney’s that survive in a single recorded source.