ABSTRACT
In this essay I want to review some of the evidence for women's participation in the production and circulation of courtly verse in the early Tudor period, at a time when the ability to contribute a successful 'balet' for an album, an apt occasion, or an evening's pastime, became one of the defining marks of a person of courtly sophistication and culture. 1 Such contributions may have taken the form of copies, adaptations, memorizations, or fresh compositions, and we find all these in the manuscript that I shall examine in most detail, British Library Additional MS 17492, a courtly album of miscellaneous verse known as the Devonshire Manuscript in which there is extensive evidence of the involvement of women. My argument will be that this and other early sixteenth-century manuscripts offer evidence of women's participation that is both more frustratingly uncertain than many modem critics, eager to find named female authors and an authentic female voice, would like, and at the same time more extensive and central than is often recognized. 2
It will be useful to my argument to start with a chapter by Jonathan Goldberg in his punningly titled Desiring Women Writing (144-63, 'Mary Shelton's Hand'). This is in many ways a sophisticated and suggestive discussion of one of the poems in the Devonshire Manuscript, but it also illustrates, in spite of its sophistication, many of the modem desires that distort critical enquiry into the elusive voices of early-modem women. In spite of protestations to the contrary, Goldberg's analysis of the Devonshire poem seems to be motivated by three particular desires: the desire to identify a named historical woman writing in the early-modem period as the originator of a poem; the desire that this woman should be feisty and 'unconventional'; and the desire to read, in her unconventional writing,
evidencethat'somewomen'could,somehow,escape'thedisablementsof gender'anddesirelikemen(141).
