ABSTRACT
Richard Brathwaite's famous illustrated frontispiece to his conduct manual for the aspiring gentry The English Gentlewoman has the distinction of being one of the most reproduced images in the field of early modern feminist and gender studies. The pictures in this eight-panel illustration, grouped around the central female figure, have been interpreted as a handy and comprehensive visual epitome of the ideals of early seventeenth-century gentry womanhood, with the ideal gentlewoman depicted largely within domestic, private spaces, themselves the familiar emblems of woman's virtue. While the early modern culture of ancestry, then, continues to have the reputation of being largely the tool of cultural elites, the handmaiden of hegemony, and the clearest testimonies to a trans-historical and debilitating human investment in social inequality, recent critics have begun to profoundly reshape our conceptions of this ubiquitous early modern way of thinking about the past, present, and future.
