p. 42 “Extended networks of collateral relatives, neigbbours and friends also functioned as additional resources for ariscratic widows and wives in trouble. Lady Margaret Beaufort opened her great household at Collyweston to numberous women of this kind. Lady Anne Clifford, her half-brother’s daughter, and her two dughters found refuce with her when she separated from her husband, Henry, Lord Clifford. Elizabeth, Lady Scrope, lived at Collyweston after the death of her second husband, Sir Henry Westworth, in 1501. When her steopson, Sir Richard, disputed the terms of her marriage contract with his father, Lady Margaret intervened and forced him to sign heavy bonds in which he promised to accept the findings of an arbitration panel headed by her chamberlain. … Another of Margaret’s widowed friends, Cecily, Viscountess Welles, visited Collyweston frequently. When she died in 1506 Lady Margaret arranged for prayers to be said for her in her private chapel. Three years later, she bequeathed “a heart of hold with a fair sapphire” to Lady Powis’s daugher in her own will.”
p. 43 “A similar circle gathered around Elizabeth Mowbray, duchess of Norfolk, who retired to the Minories in London in 1488. … the group included her sister in law, Dame Jane Talbot, widow of Sir Humphrey, Elizabeth Brackenbury, coheir of Sir Robert, a follower of Richard III who had died at Bosworth, and Mary Tyrell, Anne Montgomery’s niece. Anne Montgomery died and was buried at the Minories in 1498. Subsequently both the duchess and Dame Talbot asked to be bured near her, a final tribute to the strength of their mutual ties.”
“Decades later, two high-ranking noblewomen, Elenaor, countess of Rutland, and Catherine, countess of Westmorland, who were connected by the marriage of their children, retired together to Haliwell, the London home of the Rutland heir, Hentry, the second earl. When they died in the early 1550s, they were both buried in the nearby church of St Leonard Shoreditch. Margaret, the second earl’s wife and the countess of Westmorland’s daughter, was also buried there in 1559. The internment of three countesses at St Leonard’s turned it into a mausoleum for members of the earl of Rutland’s family. Eventially two of Eleanor, countess of Rutland’s sons, Oliver and Sir Thomas, her daughter, Anne, and her granddaughter, Catherine Nevill, wife of Sir John Constable, were also duried there. Lady Constable’s sister, Lady Adeline Neville, built a monument in the church marking their tombs.”
p. 53 “both rhetoric and pragmatics encourage us to attend to context. They offer concepts of decorum of appropriateness, the fit of the words to the audience and the occasiona, as a critical measure for the value of the verbal performance as social activity. How strongly aware Elizabethan writers were of the adequacy of that fit is suggested when a copy of Lady Catherine Grey’s petition for the Queen’s forgiveness regarding her illicit marriage to the earl of Hertford is sent by her uncle in advance of her advice to Sir William Cecil to guard against there being “onni faute foud with onni word theerin wrytten”. Politeness analysis, as developed within pragmatics, can help to show that how a gentlewoman frames a request depends to a very large extend on the power relations obtaining in the situation. For example, consider the verbal complexity of Elizabeth Cavendish’s request to her mother, the countess of Shrewsbury, that her mother should neither believe nor spread lies about her – “I myght be so bould as to crave at your Ladyships hands that it wold please you to exteme (esteem) shuch falce bruts [rumours]… as lightly as you have don when others were in the like cas”. The complicated redundancy in the framing of the request reflects the power difference between them and the daughter’s corresponding estimation of the repair work required to counter the risk implicit in making the difficult request… Pragmatics is not wholly responsive to the discourse conditions of the Elizabethan political scene, in which a noblewoman’s social rank, marital status, property holdings, relationship to a patron or favoured faction, accompanying gratuity, previous expense laid out for a New Year’s gift for the Queen, all may affect the reception and efficiacy of a supplicatory letter as much as the virtuosity or decorum of its style. In this essay I will eventually draw upon Pierre Bourdieu’s economic model of linguistic exchange, which regards linguistic skill as only one among other forms of symbolic capital affecting how an utterance is received in any field or market.”
p. 212 “one of the manuscripts I am going to discuss describes a kind of sub-university for women in the 1630s made up of women who were sent to be educated by the wife of the Principal of New Inn Hall, Dr Rogers. Another mentions a kind of Nonconformist academy for the daughters of Dissenting families, run by a Mr Hill in Godmersham in Kent in 1671.”
p. 212 “Attitudes to female publication are shown in Robery Boyle’s dedication of his book, Occasional Reflections, to Katherine Ranelagh. Although she was ‘so great a Mistress of Wit, and Eloquence’, and encouraged him to publish his writing, she refused herself to publish anything at all: “her Modesty did … confine her pen to Excellent Letters.”… Katherine Ranelagh joins the list of early modern literary figures who thought Margaret Cavendish seriously deranged – “I am resolved she scapes Bedlam onely by being too rich to {be} sent thereto” she wrote in 1657.”
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