“I Walked Out”: Perambulatory Poetics, Authorial Independence, and Isabella Whitney’s Poetic Voice in A Sweet Nosgay

ABSTRACT The act of walking energizes the formation of Isabella Whitney’s poetic voice in her second volume of verse, A Sweet Nosgay (pub. 1573). Walking out of her house, trespassing in Plat’s garden, and traversing the perimeter of Bedlam are just a few of the striking scenes that depict Whitney’s perambulation. To examine the connection between walking and the formation of her poetic voice, I suggest that Whitney’s walking operates in two distinct registers. Firstly, walking is a thematic concern that exposes her interest in the contours of intellectual independence, the process of artistic production, and the vulnerability occasioned by impecunity. Secondly, walking operates as a form of poetic performativity, figurative of her trajectory towards print publication. This essay expands discussion on Whitney’s mobility, suggesting that perambulatory poetics are a crucial component of her authorial self-presentation in A Sweet Nosgay.


Introduction
Isabella Whitney's stride into the sixteenth-century literary marketplace establishes her as possibly the first English female poet to publish secular poetry in print. 1 Her second volume of verse, A Sweet Nosgay (pub.1573; hereafter Nosgay), exposes the risks and affordances of this venture through sustained deployment of perambulatory imagery. 2 Walking out of her house, trespassing in a garden, and traversing the perimeter of Bedlam are just a few of the striking scenes that depict Whitney's perambulation.Critical discussion has been quick to note Whitney's mobility, both in terms of her self-proclaimed status as a migrant serving-woman in early modern London and in terms of the textual mobility of the Nosgay, a verse miscellany, circulating in print. 3Nonetheless, how the physical, embodied, act of walking shapes her poetry has been less thoroughly examined.Whitney's poetic perambulation locates her in the literary tradition of the Romantic poets much as it renders her a kind of proto-flâneuse. 4As these literary figures and traditions exemplify, the act of walking is a distinct facet of what constitutes mobility in literature: one that bears a close relationship to artistic creation and the formation of authorial identity.In order to explore more fully the connection between walking and Whitney's authorial self-presentation in print, this article will consider how forms of walking articulate a productive convergence between, on the one hand, precarity and marginalization, and on the other hand, opportunity and creativity, in A Sweet Nosgay.
The prevalence of perambulation in the Nosgay gives rise to the following question: what is the connection between the specific act of walking and the formation of Isabella Whitney's poetic voice?I suggest that walking energizes Whitney's poetic voice in two distinct registers, namely as a thematic concern and as a form of poetic performativity.On a thematic level, Whitney uses walking imagery to explore the contours of intellectual independence, the process of artistic production, and the vulnerability occasioned by impecunity.Testing the boundaries, limits and confines of her sixteenth-century urban society, Whitney's walking exposes the adventurous and transgressive impulses that characterize her poetic persona. 5I deploy the sustained metaphor of stepping into print to suggest that Whitney's walking also operates as a form of poetic performativity that depicts her trajectory towards print publication as a female writer in early modern England.
Stepping out of her house and into Plat's garden in the poem entitled "The Auctor to the Reader", Whitney gathers "SLIPS" of poetic material, namely pseudo-Senecan sententiae picked from Sir Hugh Plat's The Floures of Philosophie (pub.1572). 6These figurative flowers comprise the main body of the Nosgay, a verse miscellany that Whitney offers to her readers as a prophylactic against moral contagion.Whitney's re-worked sententiae are accompanied by a range of poems that profess financial and social precarity in the persona of an unemployed maidservant.The volume includes epistolary poems to friends and family, and concludes with Whitney's last "Wyll and Testament", a ballad that charts her movement through the locales of London as she bequeaths the city to itself. 7Michelle O'Callaghan suggests that in her "Wyll and Testament" Whitney "defines her authorship in terms of walking the city". 8I take this claim one step further to suggest that Whitney's perambulatory poetics in fact function as a crucial element of authorial self-presentation in A Sweet Nosgay as a whole.Whitney's verse miscellany reflects her desire for material, intellectual and authorial independence as a female writer in a male-dominated literary landscape, and it is precisely the act of walking that energizes the formation of her poetic voice in print.

Walking Out of the House and into the Street
A young maidservant traversing the streets of sixteenth-century London alone would have been a fairly unremarkable sight.Critics have comprehensively demonstrated the porousness of the early modern household, noting that it was "embedded in the community and its boundaries were often permeable and insecure". 9Women participated in trade and production networks that wove in and out of the household proper and maidservants in particular would have had errands and duties to execute beyond the perimeters of the dwelling.While Whitney's servant status thus offers "some freedom to be a legitimate 'walker in the city'", maidservants were simultaneously the target of widespread suspicion. 10Persistent cultural anxiety linked female mobility to licentious behavior that threatened to undermine patriarchal social structures and maidservants were a particularly mobile demographic as they moved from country to town, around urban centers and between employment in different households. 11Alongside pervasive suspicion of women's mobility, Wendy Wall argues that the social stigma attached to print publication in early modern England rendered female writers who adopted this medium particularly vulnerable to charges of promiscuity. 12Women risked cultural disapprobation whether they were physically venturing beyond the home or enacting a kind of social mobility through the circulation of printed texts.
In "The Auctor to the Reader", Whitney suggests that social and physical constraints hinder her mobility.It appears that while she would very much like to be out and about, unemployment and ill-health mean that she is unable to venture forth: "Harvestlesse, and serviceless also: / And subject unto sicknesse … abrode I could not go". 13Her lament generates an image of stasis and immobility within the confines of an unspecified household.Whitney turns to books for entertainment but "straight wart wery" of her studies and soon declares: And to refresh my mased [mu]se, and cheare my brused brayne: And for to trye if that my limmes had got their strength agayne I walked out: but sodenly a friend of mine mee met. 14nking intellectual and physical fatigue with her studious endeavors and confinement indoors, Whitney performs an adroit about-face on her earlier indication of immobility and steps beyond the threshold of the home.She casts aside the reading material available to her, namely "Scriptures", "Histories" and classical texts by "VIRGILL, OVID, MANTUAN" in favor of her own lived experience. 15The repetition of "and" (thrice, including twice anaphorically) as she explicates her reasoning for going outside, coupled with her corporeal alliteration ("mased [mu]se" / "brused brayne"), builds climactically towards the declaration: "I walked out". 16To "walk out" is a phrasal verb that carries a range of literal and figurative meanings; it can imply physically stepping outside as well as connoting defiant abandonment of a situation. 17Whitney enacts both of these meanings as, dissatisfied with her situation, she steps out of the house in order to assert her physical and intellectual independence.
In the 1573 print edition, "I walked out" comprises the first three words of the first line on a new page. 18The catchword "I walked" is thus customarily positioned in the lower right-hand corner on the previous page.A convention prevalent in medieval manuscript culture, the use of catchwords to ensure pages were bound in the right order and to facilitate a smoother reading experience migrated into sixteenth-century print culture. 19Maura Nolan suggests that the catchword "commands the body of the reader to take a certain action", namely turning the page or, as in this case, lifting one's eyes to the top of the recto page. 20The kinetic experience of reading and Whitney's narrative account of walking coalesce in the catchword "I walked"; it propels the reader onto the next page as much as it launches Whitney outdoors. 21Whether a happy accident or evidence of Whitney actively manipulating early modern print conventions, the first catchword in this poem embodies a sense of thematic, as much as typographic, movement Figure 1.
However, this propulsion forward is abruptly stymied: "I walked out: but sodenly". 22A mid-sentence colon interrupts Whitney's narrative account of her walk and the expansive possibilities of her perambulatory venture are brought to a sudden halt by an encounter with a male friend.Suggesting that she risks infection from the "noysome smell and savours yll" of the street, he not only implores her to "shift … to some better aire" but also explicitly condemns her decision to remain in town: "you doo a misse". 23is concern for Whitney's well-being seems genuine enough, in as much as he is "hastyng out of Towne" and encourages her to do the same. 24fter all, there may indeed be safer and more preferable environments in which to walk than these "stynking streetes, or lothsome Lanes": a depiction of the urban landscape that emphasizes a lack of sanitation as much as it calls to mind "the specter of plague". 25His reproof for not caring about whether she lives or dies ("have regard unto your health, or els perhaps you may: / So make a dye, and then adieu, your wofull friends may say") also has a religious basis in terms of Christian respect for the sanctity of life. 26hile it is certainly plausible that this encounter is a display of genuine concern inflected with Christian sensibility, her friend's insistent reproval may be read as a rebuke for venturing into the public sphere at all.Walking along unsanitary streets carries an undeniable health risk but this specific threat is also a figurative representation of the moral contagion risked by a woman in the public sphere.If we recognize that "The Auctor to the Reader" depicts various stages of Whitney fashioning herself as an author, as will be elaborated further in my discussion, then her friend's objections raise the possibility that he is a figurative embodiment of public, and particularly male, scepticism towards her (authorial) trajectory.The obstacle he poses alerts the reader to the idea that Whitney cannot walk in public unimpeded; in the space of their brief encounter, he manages to challenge, advise, and chastise her for not taking due consideration of the risks she faces.Yet, Whitney displays profound equanimity towards both him and the supposed threat her environs pose.She courteously rebuffs his concern in a defiant assertion of self-governance and in declining assistance, she refuses to be swept along in his hasty exit: "I thankt him for his carefulnes, and this for answer gave: / I'le neither shun, nor seeke for death, yet oft the same I crave". 27In this death-defying assertion of independence, Whitney seemingly refuses to acquiesce to her interlocutor's advice.
Whitney's assertion of autonomy is nonetheless rendered somewhat ambiguous by the events that occur after his departure.She relates that as soon as her friend "bad he mee adieu", "I went home all sole alone". 28The tautological nature of the phrase "sole alone", emphatically insists upon her solitary route as a performative act of self-determination. 29Jean Howard also connects Whitney's assertion to her "status as a feme sole, someone not yet 'covered' by marriage" and thus, in a generic interpretation of the legal term, trading under her own name. 30However, having experienced little more on her walk than an objection to it taking place at all, her decision to turn around and head home signals at least partial acceptance of her friend's advice to exit the street promptly.Furthermore, Whitney reveals that "good Fortune was my guyde", meaning that even though her companion is an unusual one, she is not in fact as alone as she claims. 31While the affective power of an anthropomorphized Lady Fortune operates in a different register to a physical interlocutor blocking her progress, both encounters have the effect of interrupting Whitney's walk and re-directing her narrative.Her friend interrupts her walk as soon as she leaves the house, cutting short more expansive wandering, while Fortune interrupts her return home.Fortune stops Whitney in her tracks before proceeding to alter her route: "she stood me in some steede, and made mee pleasures feele./ For she to Plat his Plot mee brought, where fragrant Flowers abound". 32Rather than accompanying her home, Fortune leads Whitney to Plat's garden.The abundance of "fragrant Flowers" she finds there is a metaphor for the poetic material, namely Sir Hugh Plat's recently published, pseudo-Senecan sententiae, that Whitney will gather for her own verse miscellany. 33

Trespassing in Plat's Garden
Publishing her Nosgay in print, Whitney steps beyond conventional gender expectations as much as she steps into a sphere dominated by male writers.Whitney's arrival in Plat's garden dramatizes her indication to George Mainwaring that "I go about (like to that poore Fellow which wente into an others ground for his water) did step into an others garden for these Flowers". 34hitney alerts her reader to the transgressive act of crossing into a space demarcated as private property.In "A Farewell to the Reader", a lyric that follows the sententiae, she exhibits a similar "awareness of an emergent concept of literary ownership, modeled on property in land", betraying "an assumption that cultural property is male". 35Whitney earnestly hopes that Plat will not, be less vulnerable to retribution precisely because she is a woman.While in her dedicatory address to Mainwaring she compares herself to a fellow stepping into the garden, in the "Farewell" lyric she self-consciously draws attention to the possibility that as a female writer her work may be perceived as less valuable or taken less seriously.
Pre-empting Plat's response is one way in which Whitney seeks to mitigate the aforementioned risks attached to her authorship.In order to help shape a favorable response among her readers, the Nosgay also includes a "commendation of the Authour" by her friend Thomas Berrie (T.B.), inserted between "The Auctor to the Reader" and the reworked sententiae. 37Notably, Berrie deploys his own walking imagery in the first stanza: Marching among the woods of fine delighte Where as the Laurell branch doth bring increase Seelde, of Ladies fresh, a solem sight: I viewd, whose walkes betokened all their ease: And how in friendly wise, it did them please: While some did twist the Silke of liuely hewe Some other slipt the Brannch for preyses dew. 38ving purposefully through a wood wherein "the Laurell branch doth bring increase", Berrie invokes the Petrarchan laurel of poetic achievement before depicting something that is seldom seen: "Ladies fresh, a solem sight". 39By choosing to publish in print, Whitney was indeed walking sparsely trodden ground in terms of poetic precedent but in situating her amongst other women Berrie signals that, while this event may have been rare, it was not unique.His depiction of the scene as "a solem sight" suggests that these women are worthy of reverence and respect.Moreover, he characterizes their collective "walkes" in terms of graceful and self-satisfied "ease". 40Berrie indicates that while some women have twisted the fibers of silk together to weave a colorful thread of artistic creation, others have "slipt the Brannch", namely grafted their work onto the laurel branch of poetic achievement to garner "preyses due". 41Whitney Trettien demonstrates how "Whitney exploits the rich semantic network of the word slip, as it refers variously to plants, paper, and needlework motifs, to carve out a space for her own composition". 42Perhaps recognizing this authorial strategy at play in the Nosgay, Berrie also draws on the multivalent word "slip", both to situate Whitney's work in a predominantly male poetic lineage and to encourage praise for her creative "slipping" of Plat's work.
Merely "one howre" in Plat's garden is sufficient for Whitney, the idle and unemployed, to metamorphose into a busy working woman. 43She claims that she would have liked to linger longer had she not "leasure lackt, and businesse bad [her] hye". 44This business/busyness to which she must hurriedly attend is indicative of her new occupation as a writer.She returns to the garden "ech day" to gather material for her verse: "I may be bolde, to come when as I wyll: / Yea, and to chuse of all his Flowers, which may my fancy fill". 45Whitney is careful to note that it is as much her decision when to visit the garden as it is which material to choose.Even though she is reliant on Plat for source material, Whitney is keen to represent the crafting of her verse as an independent activity.Her carefree movement in and out of the garden and the habitual nature of her visits foreground the ease with which she undertakes the writing process, and her self-satisfied tone indicates the pleasure she gleans from the work.In the closing lines of "The Auctor to the Reader", however, she adds a provocative afterthought: "One word, and then adieu to thee, yf thou to Plat his Plot / Repayre: take heede it is a Maze to warne thee I forgot". 46Whitney metaphorically aligns entering a maze, an experience characterized by dead-ends, wrong turns and retraced steps, with the process of gathering material from Plat's garden.Despite the rich offerings available in the garden, this warning is a cryptic allusion to the complexity of the path that she has navigated to bolster her authorial development.
The possibilities for mis-step implicit in Whitney's poetic trajectory are echoed in her "familier Epistles".In her address "To her Sister Misteris.A.B.", she acknowledges that while "you to huswifery intend … I to writing fall". 47The juxtaposition of her sister's domestic duties with her own fall (a mis-step perhaps leading to injury) suggests the peril attached to gathering "SLIPS": indeed, slipping beyond the security of the household. 48The imagery of a fall reinforces the virtuous/fallen woman paradigm circulating in the sixteenth century as well as associations of promiscuity specifically attached to print publication. 49Whitney signals that she will mitigate the risk of treacherous terrain by leaning on her brother: "You are, and must be chiefest staffe that I shal stay on heare". 50Whitney metaphorically represents her brother as a crutch that will help her sustain her independent trajectory; her pleas for financial assistance suggest that her life in London is on a precarious footing.Whitney's desire for material and authorial independence is palpable ("til some houshold cares mee tye, / My bookes and Pen I wyll apply"), and yet the ideal of walking "all sole alone" belies the obstacles, mazes and falls that must be overcome, as well as the necessity of obtaining guidance and assistance en route. 51hitney's advice to her readership, in both the epistolary poems and the sententiae, is characterized by insistent reminders of the risk of solo ventures.In her reworking of Plat's fifty-first saying (in Whitney's volume, verse fiftytwo), she asserts: He that is voyd of any friend, him company to keepe: Walkes in a world of wyldernesse, full fraught with dangers deepe. 52e sentiment articulated, namely that operating "sole alone" is a source of danger, is comparable to Plat's original: "He that hath no friend to keep him / company, is in the widest and most fear-/ful wildernesse of the whole worlde." 53In Whitney's version, however, she not only adopts a more forceful tone (e.g. the alliteration of "full fraught" and "dangers deepe" heightens the sense of threat) but also mobilizes the situation. 54Being alone is no longer a matter of statically inhabiting the wilderness but is rather a walk over rough and risky terrain.
While the precise nature of the danger is left to the reader's imagination, in her revision of Plat's seventeenth saying, she is more explicit.Plat advises, "Let not youth range abroad, for if / he see the yong mares, he will neigh or / bray if he see time." 55 In Plat's version, young men, figured as both horses who neigh and donkeys who bray, risk distraction by young women, represented as female mares.Whitney's reworked verse (number eighteen in her volume) omits this equine analogy in favor of a more direct, un-gendered condemnation of youthful mobility: You must not suffer youth to raing nor stray abrode at wyll: For libertye doth lewdnesse breed, wherefore preuent that yll. 56itney's rendering removes Plat's gendered dichotomy, instead suggesting that the freedom all young people have to travel away from home will generate "lewdnesse", variously connoting that someone is unchaste, of low social status, ignorant, unprincipled or un-learned. 57Whitney also emphasizes the unguided nature of this movement by adding the suggestion that they may "stray … at wyll". 58Mobility is presented as a source of precarity that can relegate both men and women to the social margins.The idea that liberation from household ties weakens the protection afforded by community and connection is similarly expressed in "A modest meane for Maides": "The rolling stone doth get no mosse your selves have hard full oft". 59In contrast to her own itinerancy Whitney advises other young women in particular to remain within household service to cushion themselves from life's hardships.
Alongside her moral exhortations against "stray[ing] abrode at wyll", Whitney aims to equip her readership to manage their own mobility. 60he both proffers her Nosgay as a kind of protective "mosse": "for thy health, not for thy eye, I did this Posye frame", and counsels her readers to visit Plat's garden to pick their own bespoke nosegay: "repayre, to Master Plat his ground./ And gather there what I dyd not". 61y encouraging her reader to develop their own gardening practice to avoid physical contagion, Whitney figuratively advocates the development of literary skills, namely the analysis and careful selection of Plat's material, that will enable her readership to mitigate moral corruption.She is equivocal about the likelihood of her readers' success, emphasizing the importance of "good skyll: / To slip, to shere, or get in time, and not [Plat's] braunches kyll". 62While Whitney repeatedly warns against the perils of walking out on one's own, she also promotes independent labor and a diligent work ethic as means by which to cultivate greater personal security.
Navigating London in Whitney's "Wyll and Testament" In the final poem in the volume, fortified by her Nosgay, Whitney expands her own perambulation into the wider environs of London.Announcing "The time is come I must departe", Whitney's "Wyll and Testament" both indicates the beginning of the end of her poetic trajectory and connects this ending to the fact that she is once again on the move. 63As Lawrence observes, by "[a]ppropriating the perambulation, a literary mode concerned with boundaries and order, Whitney reads the city through the lens of one who has been relegated to its margins". 64Part protest walk, part urban walking tour, part psychogeography, her stimulating trajectory through early modern London is spurred by a sense of discontented marginalization.By anthropomorphizing the city as an unfaithful lover, Whitney aligns herself with other young women who: Doe such a fyxed fancy set, on those which least desarve, That long it is ere wit we get, away from them to swarve. 65r own "swarve" away from London represents her departure as the avoidance of an unhealthy relationship. 66Despite London's "great cruelnes", Whitney asserts that "I [am] in no angry moode, / but wyll, or ere I goe / In perfect love and charytie". 67Characterizing her departure in these beneficent, dignified terms, indicative of the love and charity Christians are expected to show even their enemies, it is clear that this is no walk of shame.Rather, Whitney reclaims autonomy in an imbalanced relationship; while she may have been treated poorly in the relationship ("thou never didst me good"), she is in control of how she stages her exit. 68She proceeds to enact her departure by bequeathing the city to itself through a vivid, ekphratic mapping of London's locales and landmarks.Her depiction of London exposes intimate knowledge of the city and conversancy with the populace that live and trade in its environs.
A recognizable account of the urban cityscape, Whitney's sustained projection of a maidservant persona, and the lack of readily available maps in the 1570s, are all factors that lead to the reasonable assumption that Whitney's "Wyll and Testament" is a visualization of her own movement through the city on foot.Certainly, as Wendy Wall notes, "her inventory of London reveals her mastery of a public world often denied to more privatized aristocratic women". 69Nevertheless, Wall's characterization of this leave-taking as a "stroll" does not quite correspond with Whitney's pace. 70Noting the sheer quantity of city sites listed, other critics have drawn attention to the urgency of her "hasty progression" as she "rapidly" "swings from area to area". 71hile the poem's spirited ballad meter indeed conveys a sense of expeditious mobility, there are in fact very few moments in the poem where Whitney explicitly elaborates on her own movement in the city.The most striking of these is her reference to her habitual route past Bedlam, apparently recollected from memory: And Bedlem [sic] must not be forgot, for that was oft my walke: I people there too many leave, that out of tune doo talke. 72 the early modern period, Bethlehem Hospital, known colloquially as Bedlam, was an asylum for the mentally unwell.Bedlam was a well-known London landmark and it is thus unsurprising that it should be mentioned in Whitney's vibrant catalogue of city sites.Even so, while Bedlam certainly belonged to London's wider environs, it was in fact situated in the parish of St. Botolph, north of Bishopsgate, and thus just outside the city's walls Figure 2.
Rather than merely listing Bedlam among the other landmarks that comprise her "Wyll", Whitney makes special mention that it was "oft my walke". 73While this may be an autobiographical indication that the environs of Bedlam were familiar to her, it is also intriguing that Whitney uses this specific place-marker to situate herself on the periphery of the city.Insistent assertions that she is "whole in body, and in minde" and in possession of a "stedfast brayne" make it clear that Whitney is keen to distance herself emotionally and intellectually from the Bedlam inmates who "out of tune doo talke". 74Yet, curiously, Bedlam is the only landmark in the poem in connection with which she emphasizes her habitual physical proximity.Imagining her embodied relationship to the city in this precise way speaks to the precarity of her position as a female migrant in the city, despite her somewhat conflicting claim that she was London "bred". 75Knowledge of her gender may prompt readers to consider whether the social constraints around female literary expression have a bearing on why Whitney marks her poetic trajectory as one that skirts the perimeter of those who have been relegated to the fringes of society.The fact that she aligns talking "out of tune" with madness is also suggestive of concern with how her own poetic voice will be received. 76By signaling her habitual walk past Bedlam, Whitney raises questions about the nature of her vulnerability as a female author projecting her voice into the public sphere.
Whitney suggests that had her impoverished situation further deteriorated, her habitual walk along the perimeter of Bedlam may have turned towards actively ensconcing herself in the teeming multitude of London's marginalized.The debtor's prison at Ludgate is presented as a likely destination: When days of paiment did approch, I thither ment to flee.To shroude my selfe amongst the rest, that chuse to dye in debt: Rather then any Creditor, should money from them get. 77Bedlam is marked by the larger circle in the centre while the four smaller circles mark the nearest city gates: Cripplegate, Moorgate, Bishopsgate and Aldgate (from left to right).The map was produced using the MoEML drawing tools and this edition of the Agas Map was used with kind permission of Janelle Jenstad and the Map of Early Modern London. 82hitney imagines a situation in which, no longer traversing the city at ease, she will have to pick up the pace and hotfoot it over to Ludgate.Her projected flight into obscurity signals a specific situation in which her own expansive city wandering would be curtailed by extracting herself from debt repayment obligations.As Whitney informs her reader that she is too poor to obtain financial credit, this flight does not materialize.Having dispensed with London and all contained therein, Whitney draws her "Wyll" to its close: "So finally I make an end / no longer can I tary". 78Whether these two final lines announce the end of her time in London, departure from life itself, or merely the closure of her poem, is ambiguous.Recalling the headnote wherein she is both "constrained to departe" and "fayneth as she would die", all three possibilities remain implicit in this ending. 79nable to linger any longer, Whitney prepares to leave her youthful urban ambitions behind, hastening forward to destinations and fortunes unknown.
Despite her farewell, it is certainly possible that Whitney's perambulatory poetics did not end with her "Wyll and Testament."Michelle O'Callaghan has identified a similarly peripatetic ballad that Whitney's printer Richard Jones entered in the Stationers' Register several years later in 1576: "a walkynge Ladyes now goo we somme pleasant thinges to view and see". 80hether or not Whitney was the author of this now lost ballad, she is certainly a walking lady; her perambulation is integral to the formation of her poetic voice and the presentation of her authorial identity in A Sweet Nosgay.In the verse miscellany as a whole, walking is both a persistent thematic concern and operates as a form of poetic performativity that charts Whitney's trajectory towards print publication.Perambulatory poetics energize her poetic voice as much as they offer an exposition of the boundaries and fault lines, limitations and opportunities that shape the contours of an inescapably interdependent world.Her ambiguous claim that she walks home "all sole alone" is at least partially indicative of her sustained assertion of independence. 81Nevertheless, this assertion belies the deeply interconnected nature of the world in which she moves: a thought by which Whitney is persistently troubled and intrigued.

Figure 1 .
Figure 1.A facsimile of the first two pages of "The Auctor to the Reader" from the 1573 edition of Isabella Whitney's, A Sweet Nosgay, Or Pleasant Posye.

Figure 2 .
Figure 2. A section of the Agas Map showing the location of Bethlehem Hospital (Bedlam).Bedlam is marked by the larger circle in the centre while the four smaller circles mark the nearest city gates: Cripplegate, Moorgate, Bishopsgate and Aldgate (from left to right).The map was produced using the MoEML drawing tools and this edition of the Agas Map was used with kind permission of Janelle Jenstad and the Map of Early Modern London.82