THE POEMS OF ISABELLA WHITNEY: A CRITICAL EDITION by ...

Geoffrey] Whitney of Draiton" who has custody of Geoffery's
"trunck with Lynnen and apparell together with my plate" in
the will, and to whom Emblem 181 is dedicated. These
parallels would seem to prove beyond doubt that Isabella and
Geoffrey were indeed brother and sister.
If we then accept the relationship of the two poets, we
can with some degree of accuracy extrapolate some of the
events of Isabella's life from the known facts about
Geoffrey's life. Isabella was probably, like Geoffrey, born
at Coole Pilate, a township between Nantwich and Aldelyn in
Cheshire, and the family residence since 1388, when the
family acquired it during the reign of Richard II. Her
father was Geoffrey Whitney and her mother was possibly a
member of the Cartwright family, a sister to the uncle
Geffrey Cartwrighte named in Geoffrey's A Choice of Emblems
(Green liii, note). Richard J. Panofsky believed Isabella
could hardly have been younger than twenty-five when she
wrote A Sweet Nosgay, or her first book would have been
published before she was eighteen; if she were older than
thirty-five, she would have been considerably older than her
siblings (Floures, xviii). If Panofsky is correct, her date
of birth would have been between 1538 and 1548, the
approximate date of Geoffrey's birth. Green, however,
believed that Isabella was younger than Geoffrey, the eldest
of his four sisters (Iv), but gave no reason for this
assertion.
xi