Tag: Esther Inglis

Ice-schoklis

On By Georgianna Ziegler
Icicles from a gargolye on Washington National Cathedral, detail. Photo by Linda Davidson (Washington Post, 2014)

Our thoughts turn to ice and icicles in various forms these days, especially on the heels of a major storm. That reminded me of the term used by Esther Inglis in translating a series of French poems. The word is “yse-shok,” one I’d never seen before. Turns out it’s an old Scots term for “icicle.” It can be spelled various ways, and according to the Dictionaries of the Scots Language, comes from Danish and Norwegian terms isjokkel and isjøkul via German îs-jokel, and Middle English ise-yokel.

The poem in which she uses the term is part of a cycle of 50 Octonaires sur la Vanité et Inconstance du Monde (Octonaries on the Vanity and Inconstancy of the World). They were written around 1570, by Antoine de la Roche Chandieu, French Protestant theologian, diplomat, and man of letters. The poems became quite popular, circulating in manuscript and print, set to music, and going through many editions well into the 1630s.[i] The purpose of the cycle was to remind Protestants to keep the faith: not to let themselves be led astray by all the fleeting attractions of this world, but to keep their focus on God. Thus they could live a good life and hope for salvation from Christ.

Esther Inglis, Cinquante Octonaires . . . A Monseigneur le Prince, 1607. RCIN 1047001. Royal Collection Trust. c.His Majesty King Charles III.

Strange as it may seem to us, the poems also proved to be a popular New Year’s gift, and Esther presented several of her beautifully decorated manuscript ones in this way. She wrote out at least nine copies in French and three in “Anglo-Scots.” The French ones she gave to a number of prominent Scots including Prince Henry (seen above) and Prince Charles, the sons of James VI and I. Her translation went to her Mortlake landlord, William Jeffrey (1607), and to John, 1st Baron Petre, the major landholder where she lived while in Essex (1609).

Esther Inglis, Octonaries, 1607, Oct. XI. Dedicated to William Jeffrey. Folger Library, V.a.92

Near the beginning of the Octonaires, Chandieu devotes four to the seasons of the year, numbers VIII through XI. Here is Esther’s translation of winter (seen above), where her summer flower on the page contrasts with the season:

OCTO. XI.

The wrincled winters face dost thou behold

With frosts and snowes ore-spred, benumd with colde?

Thus are we all, such is our very cace

When wee the last part of our age attaine.

When winter’s past, the spring returns againe,

But yee, o wordlings! that your hoipes do place

In this fraile lyfe, and higher hoipes resing,

Your winter lasts without all hoipe of Spring.

The theme of winter and spring reasserts itself with reflections on cold and heat in Octonaire XVII (XVI in Esther’s version).

Esther Inglis, Octonaries, 1601, Oct. XVI. Her copy text with French on left and her translation on right. Folger Library V.a.91
Detail of above (V.a.91)

OCTO XVI

The wordling still desyres, and ever feares withall;

A contraire martyredome his hart doth doubly gall.

Desyre is like a fyre that runs through all his vaines

That dryes and alters him, and plagues his ioints with paines.

His feare an yse-shok is, that his faint hart doth holde,

Still douting that he hath what hee about him beares.

And so beseeged both with his desyres and feares,

He freizes in the fyre, and burnes in yssie colde.

The contrast between the two extremes was commonly used in Renaissance love poetry to describe how lovers feel when confronting the fires of their passion and the icy regard of their mistress. Here’s an example from Spenser’s sonnet XXX from his Amoretti:

My Love is like to ice, and I to fire:

How comes it then that this her cold so great

Is not dissolved through my so hot desire,

But harder grows the more I her entreat? . . .

But Chandieu, and Esther have taken the hot-cold, fire-ice metaphor and used it to describe the heated vain desires of a worldly person – “wordling” –  versus the icy fear that they might be losing all their worldly possessions. Esther translated the French “Sa crainte est un glaçon, qui luy saisit le coeur,” (His fear is a piece of ice which seizes his heart) as “His feare an yse-shok is, that his faint hart doth holde.”

Robert Henryson and Gavin Douglas, two great earlier Scottish poets, used the term in its literal “dripping frozen water” sense. Henryson in his Testament of Cresseid (c.1500) describes the personified “cold” planet Saturn, “The ice schoklis that fra his hair doun hang/ Was wonder greit, and as ane speir als long” [as long as a spear].  Gavin Douglas in the Eneados, his 1513 translation of Virgil’s Aeneid, describes the huge figure of Atlas “baryng on his crown the hevyn”: “Furth of the chyn of this ilk hasard auld [same old man]/ Gret fludis ischis [floods issue], and styf ise schoklyllis cauld [stiff icicles cold]/ Doun from his stern and grysly berd hyngis.”

Hendrick Avercamp, Winter Landscape with Skaters, 1608. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Esther and her family lived during what is now known as the “Little Ice Age” when European winters were especially cold, and frost fairs were held on the frozen Thames in London. Dutch artists in the period were especially fond of depicting life on ice, as seen in this landscape (1608) by Hendrick Avercamp with skaters, ice-hockey players, and sleigh riding, along with people trying to carry on their daily lives in the cold. A detail of the building on the left shows “ice schoklis” (ijskejels in Dutch) hanging from the eves.

[i] See Jamie Reid Baxter, ‘Esther Inglis: Franco-Scottish Jacobean Poet and her Octonaries upon the Vanitie and Inconstancie of the World’, Studies in Scottish Literature, 48.2 (2022) https://scholarcommons.sc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2315&context=ssl

Women of Many Talents

On By Georgianna Ziegler

Calligrapher, limner, embroiderer, writer – those are all arts in which Esther Inglis engaged. She seems to have been unique in Britain at the time, so who were her cohorts?

There must have been other contemporary British women who were multi-talented, but it’s not easy to find them. Certainly upper-class women, including queens Elizabeth and Mary of Scots, learned to embroider and often had handwriting lessons, but they didn’t use their talents professionally.

Mary Queen of Scots monogram. Museum no. T.29-1955. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

Jane Segar, Enamel on velvet front binding from British Library, Add. MS 10037

Then there was Jane Segar, from an artistic family, who wrote out her own poems on the Sibylls in a beautiful hand, and bound them in a jewel-like enamel binding for Queen Elizabeth, but this work seems to be unique.1

To find really multi-talented professional women artists working on a scale similar to Esther’s we need to turn to the continent, and especially, the Netherlands. Many of them will be found in an exhibition on now (until Jan. 11, 2026) at the National Museum of Women in the Arts: “Women Artists from Antwerp to Amsterdam, 1600-1750.”2

Most of these women were from professional families; some like Esther had a father who was an educator. Often other members of their family were involved in the arts, like Esther’s calligrapher mother Marie Presot, and many were multi-talented. One of the best-known is Anna Maria van Schurman (1607-1678), a scholar, writer and calligrapher who also made drawings, and engraved on copper and glass.

English translation of Schurman’s work, with engraving of her self portrait. First published in Latin in 1641, then in London in 1659. Folger Shakespeare Library.

Then there is Margaretha van Godewijck, known only by reputation, since her works are lost. Her talents were described by Arnold Houbraken in his Great Theatre of Dutch Painters and Paintresses (1718): “She was able to stitch landscapes, farms, houses, flowers and all kinds of ships, as well as paint everyting in oil and water paints. . . She was also able laudably to depict all sorts of objects in pen and pencil, [and] could further write inventively on glass . . . .”[3]

More than 40 versatile women artists—painters, sculptors, embroiderers, lacemakers, printmakers, papercutters—are featured in the exhibition and catalogue, along with self portraits. Esther Inglis was the first woman in Britain to include self portraits with her works, but she had a forerunner in Catharina van Hemessen (1548), the first European artist of either sex to create a self portrait.3 After Hemessen, many other Dutch women artists, including van Schurman and Judith Leyster followed suit.

Catherina van Hemessen, Self portrait, 1548. Öffentliche Kunstsammlung, Kunstmuseum, Basel. Dépôt de l’Institut Professeurs Bachofen et J.J. Burckhardt, 1921.

 Like Hemessen, Esther shows herself at work with the tools of her trade: pen, ink, and paper. Schurman never shows her hands actually creating. Apparently she was taken to task for that by Constantijn Huygens, the statesman and poet, who thought she should be proud of her ink-stained hands.4

Esther Inglis, Self portrait drawn with pen and ink, 1602 (NLS MS 20498); Schurman, Engraved self portrait, 1640 (NMWA, National Museum of Women in the Arts, Gift of Wallace and Wilhelmina Holladay)

As we saw with Godewijck, some of these women were praised for embroidering with such skill that it looked like painting. Several handwriting styles used by Esther make the letters look as though they were stitched to the page. Similarly, the amazingly fine cut-paper work created by several of these artists, most especially Johanna Koerten (1650-1715), achieves the effect of pen-and-ink drawing produced by Esther and others of these Dutch artists.

Esther Inglis, Proverbes de Salomon, 1599. Bodleian Library MS 990.
Johanna Koerten, Paper cutting of William III c.1700, Museum De Lakenhal, Leiden

As a Franco-Scot, Esther Inglis was herself of continental origin, part of that wave of talented immigrants who poured into England and Scotland during the Protestant Reformation. Artists, goldsmiths, jewelers, calligraphers, printers, engravers, weavers—men and women—they enriched British society in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries with their artistic contributions. To find Esther’s female peers, we do well to look to France and the Netherlands.

  1. On Segar see Susan Frye, Pens and Needles: Women’s Textualities in Early Modern England (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010). ↩︎
  2. Unforgettable: Women Artists from Antwerp to Amsterdam, 1600-1750, ed. Virginia Treanor and Frederica Van Dam (Ghent: Hannibal Books, 2025). ↩︎
  3. Treanor, p.27. ↩︎
  4. NMWA website: https://nmwa.org/art/collection/schurman-self-portrait/ ↩︎