ABSTRACT
Anyone who reads Isabella Whitney’s 1573 collection of poems faces a most vivid structural metaphor for the volume: as the poet presents it in her address to the reader, the collection is a “sweet nosgay” that will protect its readership from a plague-like disease of the mind. This “posye” is constituted not only by the poeticization of selected aphorisms from Hugh Plat’s The floures of philosophie, with the pleasures of poetrie annexed to them (1572) called “flowers,”1 but also by the poems of advice and good will written to family and friends that follow these short verses. She refers to her poems throughout the address to the reader as “my Nosegay” (sig. A7v) and “vertuous Flowers” (sig. A4v). That the flowers are “vertuous” points directly to their medicinal virtues; the poet tells her reader that, as Plat’s text served as her “defence” “[i]n stynking streets or lothsome Lanes” (A6v) of London, she presents the poems for the reader’s “health, not for [his/her] eye” (sig. A7r). She does so because she “did safety finde” (sig. A7r) in Plat, and she offers her poetry to her reader as an act of “good wyll” (sig. A7r). The virtues of Isabella Whitney’s herbs, some of which are picked from Plat’s “ground” (sig. A7v) or “Plot” (sig. A8r), therefore, are that they protect the reader from the moral contagions in the metaphoric “aire” (sig. A5r) of London through their lyrical sweet scent. That the metaphor is meant to apply to the whole volume and not just the verses derived from Plat is clear when she uses the word “prescribed” to describe the “order” (sig. C7v) she provides for her younger sisters to “prevent” a moral “infect[ion]” (sig. C8r) while they are serving-maids in London. Whitney gives her sisters advice ratified through her experience in service (the poet having lost her position for some not fully disclosed reason)2 and, as with Plat’s sentiments, offers her prescription because it has worked for her, giving her readership an “approved”
medicine. While many critics have made the connection to women’s domestic practice of medicine,3 this chapter attempts to demonstrate how the connection to household practice may be made too readily and conclusively, closing off a very suggestive set of signifiers. Going beyond this connection to the domestic, my analysis here sets out to delineate the complex economics of authorial herbalism through the metaphors and intertextuality of Isabella Whitney’s Sweet Nosgay.
