2009/09/01 by Andrea Brady
Arts and Humanities · #Literature: history, themes, analysis
paper · doi:10.1525/hlq.2009.72.3.373
This article offers a transcription of and commentary on a previously undiscovered seventeenth-century manuscript elegy. The anonymous poem, written in tribute to one of Elizabeth's maids of honour, is unusual in the extensive biographical details it provides and in its depiction of an early modern woman's domestic life. Although it derives in part from conventional models of female virtue, including the good wife of Proverbs and the many popular instruction manuals for housewives, the elegy is unusual in its depiction of Ridgeway's personality, including her resistance to the norms of obedience and her independence within marriage. Although the hypermetrical elegy may lack literary quality, it offers significant insights into the life of a seventeenth-century noblewoman.