These textiles provide both documentation on the development of needlework and serve as a social history. Included are pictorial panels, a box, samplers, costume items and fanciful novelty pieces from the Ashmolean Museum's fine embroidery collection.

This book examines scriptural authority and its textual and visual instruments, asking how words and images interacted to represent and by representing to constitute authority, both sacred and secular, in Northern Europe between 1400 and 1700.

The Renaissance woman, whether privileged or of the artisan or the middle class, was trained in the expressive arts of needlework and painting, which were often given precedence over writing. Pens and Needles is the first book to examine all these forms as interrelated products of self-fashioning and communication. Because early modern people saw verbal and visual texts as closely related, Susan Frye discusses the connections between the many forms of women's textualities, including notes in samplers, alphabets both stitched and penned, initials, ciphers, and extensive texts like needlework pictures, self-portraits, poetry, and pamphlets, as well as commissioned artwork, architecture, and interior design. She examines works on paper and cloth by such famous figures as Elizabeth I, Mary, Queen of Scots, and Bess of Hardwick, as well as the output of journeywomen needleworkers and miniaturists Levina Teerlinc and Esther Inglis, and their lesser-known sisters in the English colonies of the New World. Frye shows how traditional women's work was a way for women to communicate with one another and to shape their own identities within familial, intellectual, religious, and historical traditions. Pens and Needles offers insights into women's lives and into such literary texts as Shakespeare's Othello and Cymbeline and Mary Sidney Wroth's Urania.

New ser. v. 6-10 include 77th-81 Report of the trustees, 1946-50 (previously published separately)