ABSTRACT
The domestic, maternal spaces occupied by early modern English women defined and demarked the forms of writing that they produced within those spaces. This chapter focuses on four types of trace writings: vestigial notes or messages, initials, a cipher, as well as two diaries in order to demonstrate that the examples available of women’s textuality complicate our sense of maternal roles in the early modern household. Needlework offers small glimpses of English maternal and filial relations because girls and women by the thousands left behind whispers of their historical “selves” in the form of needlework projects. To consider the textuality of women it is important to understand the extent to which they fashioned their own activities and forms of self-expression within the reciprocal concepts of “woman” and “domestic space.” The wrought initials of aristocratic women tell more within the contexts of their more recoverable lives and homes than the occasional names and initials on samplers.
