Pens and Needles

Susan Frye's book is most fascinating in drawing out the histories and texts, both written and sewn, of less well-known women, and showing that they saw their needlework as equally articulate, valuable, and artful as their words. -TLS Susan Frye's book is a beautiful and powerful contribution to scholarship on early modern women's material culture. . . . No other book covers such ground; Pens and Needles is an invaluable resource for art historians, social historians, literary critics, and anyone interested in the material world that early modern women made. -American Historical Review Susan Frye's meticulously researched, beautifully illustrated, and brilliantly titled Pens and Needles makes a significant addition to a growing subfield in early modern gender studies: the expressive arts of women's needlework, which Frye sees as a mode of both female self-fashioning and creative communication. -Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 No other book analyzes the combination of visual, textile, and textual modes in relation to early modern women as this one does. Frye draws on a vast range of sources, from comments on the minutiae of Shakespeare's plays, to contemporary translations of the poems of Mary Stuart, to a range of theorists including Michel de Certeau, Marcel Mauss and Karl Marx, to make a complex and convincing argument about women's consciousness and work. -Ann Rosalind Jones, Smith College Frye beautifully succeeds in aligning the different material practices, especially in the surprising discovery of a new portrait of Mary Queen of Scots embroidered by Bess of Hardwick. -Maureen Quilligan, Duke University