Needle, Scepter, Sovereignty: The Queen of Sheba in Englishwomen’s Amateur Needlework
Jones, Ann Rosalind
Early Modern Culture, No. 3 (2003)
Abstract
In this essay, I want to propose a similar interplay of private and public activity as a framework for understanding a pair of topics for needlework often employed by early modern English and American women: Esther and the Queen of Sheba. As successors to Du Bartas’ Judith, needlewomen textualized “devine history” via a stitched rhetoric celebrating the regal and intellectual power of women of the Old Testament. Judith’s needle, foreshadowing the sword of a female hero about to enter the world of battle, and the intricacy of this woman’s stitched “take” on earlier events sacred in her culture are rematerialized in seventeenth-century stitched representations of the Queen of Sheba. I’ll examine literary texts and prints as sources for needleworked pictures in which women reinterpreted this biblical queen from the seventeenth to the early eighteenth centuries in England and in the American colonies.
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