Hostname: page-component-5c6d5d7d68-wpx84 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-08-10T00:44:22.041Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Gender and Politics in the Henrician Court: The Douglas-Howard Lyrics in the Devonshire Manuscript (BL Add 17492)*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Bradley J. Irish
Bradley J. Irish*
Affiliation:
The University of Texas at Austin
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

BL Additional MS 17492, the so-called Devonshire Manuscript of Henrician courtly verse, is a prime example of how social and cultural phenomena contributed to early modern manuscript culture. Among the treasures of the Devonshire MS is a series of lyrics that chronicles a fascinating courtly intrigue of the 1530s: the illicit, clandestine marriage of Lord Thomas Howard and Lady Margaret Douglas, the headstrong niece of Henry VIII. After unpacking this historical drama, this essay advances the first substantial literary analysis of these poems by exploring the textual strategies through which Howard and Douglas attempted to negotiate the crown's insistent management of their erotic life. This treatment of the Douglas-Howard lyrics provides new opportunity to consider how the Devonshire MS reflects and refracts the gender dynamics of the contemporary Henrician court.

Type
Research Article
Information
Renaissance Quarterly , Volume 64 , Issue 1 , Spring 2011 , pp. 79 - 114
Copyright
Copyright © 2011 Renaissance Society of America

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

*

This project originated in the Mellon Summer Institute for Vernacular Paleography hosted by the Folger Shakespeare Library in July 2009; I thank Heather Wolfe, Owen Williams, Steven W. May, Alan Stewart, and Adrienne Shevchuk for their guidance and support during the seminar. I am also greatly indebted to Jason Powell, Raymond G. Siemens, Marjorie Curry Woods, Frank Whigham, Wayne A. Rebhorn, Noël Clare Radley, Ruth Ahnert, Kristen P. Walton, and my colleagues at the University of Texas at Austin. I am especially grateful to the editors, reviewers, and staff of Renaissance Quarterly, whose kind and generous attention has strengthened the essay tremendously.

References

Baron, Helen. “Mary (Howard) Fitzroy's Hand in the Devonshire Manuscript.” The Review of English Studies 45.179 (1994): 318–35.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Boffey, Julia. Manuscripts of English Courtly Love Lyrics in the Later Middle Ages. Suffolk, 1985.Google Scholar
Bond, Edward A. “Wyatt's Poems.” Athenaeum 2274 (1871): 654–55.Google Scholar
Burke, Victoria. E. “Manuscript Miscellanies.” In The Cambridge Companion to Early Modern Women's Writing, ed. , Knoppers, Laura Lunger, 54–67. Cambridge, 2009.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chaucer, Geoffrey. The workes of Geffray Chaucer newly printed, with dyuers workes whiche were neuer in print before. Ed. William Thynne. London, 1532.Google Scholar
Clarke, Elizabeth. “Women's Manuscript Miscellanies in Early Modern England.” In Teaching Tudor and Stuart Women Writers, ed. , Woods, Susanne and , Hannay, Margaret P, 52–60. New York, 2000.Google Scholar
Ellis, Henry, ed. Original Letters Illustrative of English History. 3rd series. 4 vols. London, 1846.Google Scholar
Galfridus, Anglicus. Incipit liber q[ui] dicitur Promptorium paruulorum siue clericorum. London, 1499.Google Scholar
Goldberg, Jonathan. Desiring Women Writing: Renaissance Examples. Palo Alto, 1997.Google Scholar
Hammons, Pamela S. “The Gendered Imagination of Property in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century English Women's Verse.” Clio 34.4 (2005): 395–418.Google Scholar
Harrier, Richard C. “A Printed Source for ‘The Devonshire Manuscript.’” The Review of English Studies, n.s., 11.41 (1960): 54.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Head, David M. “‘Beyng Ledde and Seduced by the Devyll’: The Attainder of Lord Thomas Howard and the Tudor Law of Treason.” Sixteenth Century Journal 13.4 (1982): 3–16.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Heale, Elizabeth. “Women and the Courtly Love Lyric: The Devonshire MS (BL Additional 17492).” The Modern Language Review 90.2 (1995): 296–313.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Heale, Elizabeth. “‘Desiring Women Writing’: Female Voices and Courtly ‘Balets’ in Some Early Tudor Manuscript Albums.” In Early Modern Women's Manuscript Writing: Selected Papers from the Trinity/Trent Colloquium, ed. , Burke, Victoria E, , Gibson, Jonathan, and , Clarke, Elizabeth, 9–31. Aldershot, 2004.Google Scholar
Hicks, Michael. “Bigod, Sir Francis (1507–1537).” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography http://www.oxfordddnb.com/view/article/2375 (accessed 10 September 2010).Google Scholar
Journal of the House of Lords, 1509–1577. Vol 1. London, 1802.Google Scholar
Lerer, Seth. Courtly Letters in the Age of Henry VIII: Literary Culture and the Arts of Deceit. Cambridge, 1997.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of Henry VIII. Ed. J. S. Brewer et al. 23 vols. London, 1862–1932.Google Scholar
Marotti, Arthur F. Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric. Ithaca, 1995.Google Scholar
Marshall, Rosalind K. “Douglas, Lady Margaret, Countess of Lennox (1515–1578).” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography http://www.oxfordddnb.com/view/article/7911 (accessed 10 September 2010).Google Scholar
Muir, Kenneth. “Unpublished Poems in the Devonshire MS.” Proceedings of the Leeds Philosophical Society 6 (1947): 253–82.Google Scholar
Murphy, Beverley A. Bastard Prince: Henry VIII's Lost Son. Gloucestershire, 2001.Google Scholar
North, Marcy L. The Anonymous Renaissance: Cultures of Discretion in Tudor-Stuart England. Chicago, 2003.Google Scholar
Powell, Jason. “Marginalia, Authorship and Editing in the Manuscripts of Thomas Wyatt's Verse.” English Manuscript Studies, 1100–1700 15 (2009): 1–40.Google Scholar
Remley, Paul G. “Mary Shelton and Her Tudor Literary Milieu.” In Rethinking the Henrician Era, ed. , Herman, Peter C, 40–77. Urbana, 1994.Google Scholar
Riordan, Michael. “Howard, Lord Thomas (c. 1512–1537).” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography . http://www.oxfordddnb.com/view/article/70793 (accessed 10 September 2010).Google Scholar
Seaton, Ethel. “‘The Devonshire Manuscript’ and its Medieval Fragments.” Review of English Studies, n.s., 7 (1956): 55–56.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sherman, William H., and , J. Sheils, William, eds. Prison Writings in Early Modern England . Special issue of Huntington Library Quarterly 72.2 (2009).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Siemens, Raymond G, et al.. “Drawing Networks in the Devonshire Manuscript (BL Add 17492): Toward Visualizing a Writing Community's Shared Apprenticeship, Social Valuation, and Self-Validation.” Digital Studies 1.1 (2009), http://www.digitalstudies.org/ojs/index.php/digital_studies/article/view/146/201 (accessed 1 February 2010).Google Scholar
Southall, Raymond. “The Devonshire Manuscript Collection of Early Tudor Poetry, 1532–41.” The Review of English Studies, n.s., 15.58 (1964): 142–50.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Southall, Raymond. “Mary Fitzroy and ‘O Happy Dames’ in the Devonshire Manuscript.” The Review of English Studies, n.s., 45.179 (1994): 316–17.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
State Papers, Henry VIII. 11 vols. London, 1830–52.Google Scholar
Statutes of the Realm. Ed. A. Luders et al. Vol. 3. London, 1810–28.Google Scholar
Surrey, Earl of [Henry Howard]. The Poems of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey. Ed. Padelford, Frederick M.. London, 1966.Google Scholar
Thomas, Thomas. Dictionarium linguae Latinae et Anglicanae. London, 1587.Google Scholar
Walker, Gregg. Writing under Tyranny: English Literature and the Henrician Reformation. Oxford, 2005.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Watkins, John. “‘Wrastling for this world’: Wyatt and the Tudor Canonization of Chaucer.” In Refiguring Chaucer in the Renaissance, ed. , Krier, Theresa M, 21–39. Gainesville, 1998.Google Scholar
Woods, Marjorie Curry. “Boys Will Be Women: Musings on Classroom Nostalgia and the Chaucerian Audience(s).” In Speaking Images: Essays in Honor of V. A. Kolve, ed. , Yeager, Robert F. and , Morse, Charlotte C, 143–66. Asheville, 2001.Google Scholar
Woods, Marjorie Curry. “Weeping for Dido: Epilogue on a Premodern Rhetorical Exercise in the Postmodern Classroom.” In Latin Grammar and Rhetoric: From Classical Theory to Medieval Practice, ed. , Lanham, Carol Dana, 284–94. New York, 2002.Google Scholar
Woods, Marjorie Curry. “Rhetoric, Gender, and the Literary Arts: Classical Speeches in the Schoolroom.” New Medieval Literature 11 (2009): 113–32.10.1484/J.NML.1.00586CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wriothesley, Charles. A Chronicle of England During the Reigns of the Tudors, from A.D. 1485 to 1559. Ed. , Hamilton, William Douglas. 2 vols. London, 1875–77.Google Scholar