“Habits of behavior begin with the control of the hand, with the formations of the hand.”

– Jonathan Goldberg[1]

In “The English Renaissance ‘Timeline’: Part II,” I discussed how I came upon the works of English Renaissance calligrapher Esther Inglis, specifically through her drawing of an emblem from Jean-Jacques Boissard’s Emblemes (1588). The emblem became even more interesting to me as I thought about it in relation to the self-portrait included in one of the Folger Shakespeare Library’s copies of her Octonaries upon the vanitie and inconstancie of the world (1600/01). The Folger’s is one of nine copies Inglis made of Calvinist theologian Antoine de la Roche Chandieu’s Octonaries.[2] The image I included last week was a detail of Inglis’s self-portrait, whereas, in the image below, you can see her self-portrait within the larger context of the manuscript:

Fig. 1    Self-Portrait of Esther Inglis…