Abstract: Chapter 4 considers the work of calligrapher and copyist Esther Inglis. Inglis created a manuscript gift book titled Cinquante Emblemes Chrestiens for Prince Charles (later Charles I) in 1624. The work is a handdrawn copy – with alterations – of Georgette de Montenay's Emblemes ou Devises Chrestiennes, and this chapter argues that Inglis's version should be considered as a work of translation. The chapter situates the work within the larger political and religious contexts of early modern emblem books and argues for its participation in the patronage and gift economies of the early seventeenth century. Finally, the chapter offers a reading of particular emblems to demonstrate how Inglis's alteration at the level of both word and image worked to articulate specific political allegiances and desires.

Keywords: Charles I; emblem books; Esther Inglis; gift books; portraiture; translation

Esther Inglis's 1624 version of Georgette de Montenay's Emblemes ou Devises Chrestiennes is, on its surface, a work of repetition. Inglis's writing life was spent creating manuscript copies of existing print books – books like the Psalms, Ecclesiastes, and Proverbs – and dedicating them to prominent figures in Elizabethan and Jacobean England. These copies were unsolicited repetitions of familiar books that were readily available in print; they were a luxury and an excess, unnecessary and unbidden. Hélène Cixous's meditation in ‘The Last Painting’ on the grief and lack experienced by the writer ‘who must paint with brushes all sticky with words’ seems particularly apposite in thinking about Inglis's lifelong work of repetition. Somehow, in folio after folio of calligraphic repetition of ‘phrases already heard a thousand times’, Inglis approaches in writing what Cixous ascribes to the painter who ‘dares to stalk the secrets of light with the help of a single object, armed only with a few water lilies’.