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The Sempster's Wares: Merchandising and Marrying in The Fair Maid of the Exchange (1607)*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Juana Green
Juana Green*
Affiliation:
Clemson University
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Abstract

This essay demonstrates how handkerchiefs in The Fair Maid map out the cultural anxieties about courtship and marriage practices that were mobilized by women's participation in early modern England's expanding market economy. It locates handkerchiefs within the material culture of the period, examining the status of handkerchiefs as commodities as well as women's relationships to these commodities, and it considers how handkerchiefs are transformed into love tokens when women personalize them with embroidery. Contextualizing the play's use of handkerchiefs with historical evidence from matrimonial cases, the essay shows how handkerchiefs embody the social contradictions embedded within early modern marriage practices.

Type
Studies
Information
Renaissance Quarterly , Volume 53 , Issue 4 , Winter 2000 , pp. 1084 - 1118
Copyright
Copyright © Renaissance Society of America 2000

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Footnotes

*

The research for this article was funded by grants and fellowships from Columbia University, the Folger Institute, and the Huntington Library. Earlier versions of this essay were presented at the Central New York Conference on Language and Literature SUNY Cortland, October 1997, and The Group for Early Modern Cultural Studies Conference, Pittsburgh, PA, September 1996. I wish to thank Laetitia Yeandle for her patient instruction in Renaissance paleography; the members of the Renaissance dissertation seminar at Columbia and the readers for Renaissance Quarterly for their helpful suggestions; and Lena Cowen Orlin, whose work on material culture has greatly influenced my own, for her advice and encouragement. Finally, I am indebted to Jean E. Howard for her pointed critiques, scholarly guidance, and unwavering support through many versions of this essay.

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