Introduction: critical framework and issues

Summary

Esther Inglis's oval-framed portrait of herself wearing a wide-brimmed hat and a falling ruff, holding a quill pen and standing behind a table upon which is an ink pot, a small open book and a large sheet of paper, gives a striking visual image of an early modern woman writing (figure 1). The tiny pen-and-ink portrait (45 mm x 31 mm) with a stippled background and leafy frame, is pasted on to the verso of the title page of a 1601 Octonaries upon the Vanitie and Inconstancie of the World, one of nearly sixty calligraphic bound manuscripts produced by Inglis and given, in hopes of remuneration, to various noble and royal figures in Scotland, England and France. Raised in Scotland, Inglis was the daughter of French Huguenot (Protestant) refugees who settled in Edinburgh and ran a French school. An accomplished calligrapher, Inglis wrote in often minute letters in a dazzling range of scripts: roman, italic, gothic, mirror writing, broken writing and other ornamental hands. Her texts are manuscript copies (sometimes translations) of printed texts - the Geneva Bible (most often Psalms or Proverbs) or the pious verse of French Huguenot writers - illuminated with flowers or sprays of flowers, birds, butterflies and other insects, squirrels, frogs and snails. The pen-and-ink portrait, on either side of which Inglis has written her name in roman majuscule letters, is one of nearly two dozen self-portraits with which Inglis distinctively marks her scribal copying.