Elizabeth's Embroidery

Abstract

THE ELEVEN-YEAR-OLD Princess Elizabeth covered a manuscript volume that she presented as a gift to her stepmother Katherine Parr in 1544 with an embroidered sleeve or chemise, for which she, apparently, had done the needlework.(1) Embroidered in bright turquoise blue and decorated with an interlaced design picked out in still-shiny silver thread, the volume makes an elaborate gift, with Katherine's initials, K.P., raised up in cotton batting-stuffed relief in the center of both back and front covers. Raised-work embroidered silver flowers are at each of the four corners, probably pansies, forming a pun on the French word for thoughts, pensees. The French pun is appropriate because the manuscript is of Elizabeth's translation of Marguerite de Navarre's Miroir de l'Ame Pecheresse [The Mirror or Glass of the Sinful Soul]. More cotton batting is used to raise cord-marks on the book's spine, as if the embroidered cover were part of the manuscript's actual binding, allowing the book to mimic authorship of a bound manuscript volume such as one might find in a library. Paradoxically, the contrast between the smooth, nearly professional perfection of the gobelin-stitched embroidery in its elaborate interlaced design and the rather awkward italic printing of the manuscript itself, if it does not betray the hand of a more mature sewing teacher, reveals that even for royally born Elizabeth, the needle was a far more practiced instrument in her eleven-year-old hand than the pen.(2) She had not yet come under the tutelage of Roger Ascham, who, after age fourteen, had a pronounced effect on her handwriting. Perhaps the most important aspect of this object--which may help us to understand how the embroidery assists rather than detracts from her writerly authority--is that she dedicated the volume to her stepmother. Such a dedication may be no more than an attempt to please a queen of pronounced Protestant sympathies by translating the work of another, but it is uncanny that the text of this translated poem, sent from one female family member to another, covered in a personally worked textile, results in a gesture that looks oddly like the trade in woven heirloom items that Annette Weiner finds generic to female communities and that, she has brilliantly argued, requires us to revise our sense of the in outlined by Levi-Strauss and Marcell Mauss.(3) Indeed, using Weiner's theory of possessions as central to her understanding of the function of some gift-giving in Elizabethan society, Lisa M. Klein has argued that 1544 was the year Elizabeth had been established in the succession by an act of Parliament, although she was still illegitimate.(4) As a gift to a female member of her father's family--in which Elizabeth now had a slightly more secure place--the woven nature of the object calls attention to its inalienable status.(5) Klein never discusses the actual contents of Elizabeth's translation (her concern is for the embroidery), but the central trope of incest insists upon the endogamous withholding from circulation of the female speaker. Elizabeth's one remark about the content of the translation insists upon multiple intimacies: The which book is entitled, or named, The Mirror or Glass of the Sinful Soul, wherein is contained how she (beholding and contemplating what she is) doth perceive how of herself and of her own strength she can do nothing that good is, or prevaileth for her salvation, unless it be through the grace of God, whose mother, daughter, sister, and wife by the scriptures she proveth her self to be.(6) Such a metaphor speaks directly against the traffic in women that, according to Levi-Strauss, the incest taboo was supposed to protect: the textual content of a woman-to-woman gift of cloth, as Weiner has further suggested, and the endogamous status of the object indicate Elizabeth's very youthful self-citing at an anthropologically very powerful position for a female. …