Isabella Whitney’s Bruised Brain: Taking Care of the Mind in Elizabethan Poetic Posies

Sixteenth and seventeenth-century writers were preoccupied with reflecting on the nature of the mind. A vast array of authors seized upon the opportunities offered by new and established literary genres to explore the place that the mind held as a governing force of the human individual, but little attention has been paid to the portrayal of minds suffering from creative frustrations of a non-romantic nature. My article establishes the importance of this literary topos in respect to Isabella Whitney’s A Sweet Nosgay (1573), Nicholas Breton’s A Smale Handfull of Fragrant Flowers (1575), and George Gascoigne’s The Posies of George Gascoigne (1575). I explore the prefatory materials of each collection to reveal their shared concern with the ways that the mind can be corrupted, and perhaps cured, by the labor of poetry creation. More specifically, I trace the notion of the bruised brain as it appears in the prefatory poems of Whitney’s Nosgay to Gascoigne’s Posies to establish new points of connection and potential influence between these authors, in addition to shedding new light on an underappreciated aspect of Elizabethan poetic culture.