3 - ‘Graced both with my pen and pencell’: Prophecy and Politics in Jane Seager's Divine Prophecies of the Ten Sibills

Summary

Abstract: Chapter 3 discusses the translation by Jane Seager of ten sibylline prophecies into both English and a shorthand system of writing invented by Timothy Bright called ‘characterie’. This chapter argues that Seager's elaborately decorated manuscript gift book was likely intended for presentation to Elizabeth I and that in it Seager presented for the Queen's gaze an authorial persona legitimized in part through their shared virginity. Seager also makes clear her political affiliations with militant reformists and her aspirations for the Queen's religious foreign policy through both the book's content – its translatorial choices – and its material presence as a highly decorated and symbolic object of exchange.

Keywords: Elizabeth I; gift books; illuminated manuscripts; Protestant; sibylline prophecies; shorthand

In 1589 Jane Seager dedicated an elaborately wrought manuscript to Queen Elizabeth I. The Divine Prophecies of the Ten Sibills is a presentation manuscript bound in red velvet with painted glass panels on both the front and back covers. The manuscript, written in calligraphy and bordered with delicate gold rule, contains ten verse translations of sibylline prophecies, a dedicatory epistle to the Queen, and a concluding poem composed by Seager. Seager translated the sibylline prophecies into English verse, each poem consisting of ten iambic pentameter lines, and into Timothy Bright's newly invented system of ‘characterie’, each poem consisting of five lines of characterie (Fig. 3.1). This manuscript, which was possibly given to the Queen as a New Year's gift in 1589/90, not only reflects Seager's facility in a variety of artistic media, it indicates her desire to participate in what Jessica Malay calls a ‘tradition of politicized gift-giving’, in which the manuscript is at once a beautifully crafted bid for favour or courtly patronage, and representative of Seager's (and her family’s) religious and political positions.

I concentrate in this chapter on the material presence of the manuscript and the political suggestiveness of the translations contained within it. Seager's book was clearly conceptualized as a gift offering, an exquisite object that could highlight its producer's varied talents.