ABSTRACT
The value of early modern women’s writing, in other words, was similar to that of other goods and services that women circulated or bequeathed at this time, like Lady Jane Grey’s Greek New Testament, sent to her sister Catherine at her death.2 To be sure, women’s wealth could take a variety of shapes. Much of it was personal property collaboratively produced and exchanged, like those things that legally comprised a wife’s paraphernalia and were, therefore, not subject to a husband’s
scrutiny or control, such as candlesticks, jewels, pots, tapestries, combs, stockings, ribbons, chairs, pillows, glassware, gloves or the services of a midwife, even a single plate, handed down for special use.3 Those objects made up the bulk of what women owned or shared, and if their possessions might also occasionally include livestock or cash, women’s wealth was primarily material in nature-sewn, copied, embroidered, “trauncelated,” or otherwise crafted by hand. Rather than enriching the maker or owner, these goods sustained the world of female kin, transmitting not the authority of a single person but the power of this set of relationships.4
