-
Reading Isabella Whitney Reading
- Studies in Philology
- The University of North Carolina Press
- Volume 118, Number 3, Summer 2021
- pp. 491-520
- 10.1353/sip.2021.0015
- Article
- Additional Information
- Purchase/rental options available:
Abstract:
This article considers the reading strategies embedded in Isabella Whitney’s two published volumes, The Copy of a Letter (1567) and A Sweet Nosegay (1573). As it suggests, Whitney was a writer who actively represented herself as a reader and who in turn anticipated the future reading of her own work. In particular, it will focus on Whitney as a female reader who responded to Renaissance constructions of passive female reading: a discussion that, though productively applied to her contemporaries, has largely excluded Whitney. First, the article will examine how A Sweet Nosegay rereads Hugh Plat’s own instructions for reading the Floures of Philosophie, claiming a more active role for Whitney’s own readership. It will then consider this approach in Whitney’s first publication, The Copy of a Letter, in which the poet trains her readers to attend to textual ambiguities and alternatives. As I will argue throughout, Whitney models an active reading process, which encourages her readers to intervene in her texts.