As established in the previous section, courtiers’ practice of adapting translation to express frustration in the Henrician court has received a great deal of critical attention since Stephen Greenblatt first outlined the practices of ‘courtly making’; more recently, attention turned to the ways in which transcription might serve similar purposes. Largely independent of this question, research has also begun to explore the ways that manuscript production could create and strengthen communities and the contributions of women to that production. Here, I want to demonstrate how we can unite these threads to reinterpret both how manuscript production was used, particularly by women, and, as a result, how we might re-read translations by the more thoroughly researched courtly makers like Wyatt and Surrey. Alongside comparison to translated work by courtly women like Elizabeth and Lumley, we can use new understandings of manuscript work to better contextualize those thoroughly studied translations as working within the larger position-taking system outlined in this project, both informed by and informing other writers’ strategies of verse production and courtly critique.

Speaking of the Devonshire Manuscript specifically, Arthur F. Marotti articulates the collection’s function as ‘the medium of socioliterary intercourse within a restricted social group’—an exemplar, of sorts, of his larger arguments that manuscript verse ‘was embedded in specific social situations’ to which writers responded ‘in terms of shared sociocultural assumptions’.