'Grossly material things': women and book production in early modern England 9780199651580, 9780191741654

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‘GROSSLY MATERIAL THINGS’

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‘.

Grossly Material Things

Women and Book Production in

Early Modern England HELEN SMITH

OXFORD

UNIVERSITY PRESS

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6pP Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in

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First published 2012 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose the same condition on any acquirer

British Library Cataloging in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Smith, Helen, 1977— ‘Grossly material things’ : women and book production in early modern England / Helen Smith.

p. cm Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Women in the book industries and trade—England—History— 16th century.

2. Women in the book industries and trade—England—History—1 6th century. 3. Women—Books and reading—England—History. 4. Authorship—Collaboration— History. 5. English literature—Early modern, 1500—1700—History and criticism. 6. English literature—Women authors—History and criticism. I. Title. Z325.S655 2012

38 1'.450020820942—dc23 2012004253 Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by MPG Books Group, Bodmin and King’s Lynn

ISBN 978-0-19-965158-0

13579108642

They still inhabit language, caught between the unsaid and the unsayable, hands dappled as apricots in the latticed light. (Pauline Stainer, “Ghost Writers to the Emperor’)

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Acknowledgements Like the books it describes, Grossly Material Things is the product of numerous conversations, collaborations, and contingencies, and both its and my debts are too numerous to trace in full. The University of York has

been a formative home, from the illuminating comments of Jonathan Dollimore, who supervised my PhD thesis, to the friends and colleagues

who make the Department of English and Related Literature and the Centre for Renaissance and Early Modern Studies such stimulating environments. David Attwell, Heather Blurton, Mike Brown, Andrew Cam-

bers, Victoria Coulson, Simon Ditchfield, Jane Elliott, Harriet Guest, Melissa Hollander, Kevin Killeen, Amanda Lillie, Emma Major, Jane Moody, Bill Sheils, Jim Watt, Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, and Michelle Wolfe have all—in various ways—made York a wonderful place to be. Neil Armstrong, Anna Bernard, Catriona Kennedy, and Alison O’ Byrne have been most instrumental in illuminating just how productive consumption can be, and Neil, Catriona, and Alison, as well as Abi Shinn, have been generous in commenting on chapter drafts and ideas. At an early stage, my external examiner, Lisa Jardine, offered encouragement and sound advice. Mark Jenner has seen this project through every stage of its existence; his boundless curiosity, compendious wisdom, and impossible questions have pushed me to think harder and go further. Bill Sherman has been the best colleague and mentor I could hope for. Conversations with him pervade this book, while his native optimism, efficiency, and insight have made the process of writing it a happier one. Each page bears the marks of Richard Rowland’s unique combination of wit and pedantry: in reading every chapter he has found numerous errors and signalled them with humour and horror. Any that remain are, of all this book, most wholly my own. My students have engaged with much of this material in nascent forms, and their enthusiasm for the detective work needed to uncover obscure printers and writers has reassured me I am not alone in these joys. Seminar discussions have helped me to clarify and develop my own thoughts, while the work of Claire Canavan and Lizzie Swann, in particular, has demanded that I rethink my prior assumptions. Beyond York, conference and seminar audiences in Cambridge, Edinburgh, Lancaster, London, Newcastle, Southampton, Stratford, and St Andrews, as well as at SHARP, Sixteenth Century Studies, and the MLA (for which particular thanks to Elizabeth Hageman), have heard versions

viii Acknowledgements of much of this material, and their responses and questions have helped to shape its development and final form. The anonymous readers for Oxford University Press provided crucial encouragement and welcome suggestions for improvement. Matthew Day and Jason Scott-Warren have been fonts of obscure and essential knowledge, as of inspiration and ideas, while conversations with Piers Brown, Ian Gadd, Adam Hooks, John Jowett, Eric Langley, Randy McLeod, Sonia Massai, Emma Smith, Cathy Shrank, and Louise Wilson have sparked—and continue to spark—new avenues of enquiry. Alex Davis, Chris Jones, Tom Jones, Sara Lodge, Susan Manly, and Philip Parry made St Andrews a welcoming place to live and work for a brief, but crucial, few months. Neil Rhodes and Andy Murphy offered me advice and support at that formative stage, and their ongoing encouragement and counsel has sustained me throughout my academic career thus far. The Arts and Humanities Research Board were, for a time, the source

of my own ‘five hundred a year’ (or its modern equivalent), while library and archive staff at the J. B. Morrell Library, the Borthwick Institute for Archives, and the Minster Library in York, the Bodleian, the British Library, Cambridge University Library, the Folger Shakespeare Library, the National Archives, and—remotely—the Huntington Library have answered queries with patience and efficiency. Parts of chap-

ter 5 appeared as ““More swete vnto the eare/than holsome for ye mynde”: Embodying Early Modern Women’s Reading’ in Huntington Library Quarterly, 73 (2010), 413-32, and an early draft of some of the materials in chapter 3 was published as ““Print[ing] your royal father off’: Early modern female stationers and the gendering of the British book trades’ in TEXT, 15 (2003), 163-86. I am grateful for permission to republish parts of that work. Thanks to everyone at Oxford University Press, especially Jacqueline Baker and Jenny Townshend. My family have done most to root this par-

ticular book in material things, offering support, encouragement, and nagging at crucial stages, especially my sister Anne, whose kindness and cookery sustained me throughout key parts of the writing process. My

eranddad Bill died before this book was completed; his delight in my hunger for books, and the countless walks on which he showed me the secrets of the world around us, taught me to read. Thanks, last of all, to Stuart Kenny, for technical and other support.

Contents

List of Abbreviations xi List ofto[lustrations xiii Note the Reader XV Introduction: “Grossly Material Things’ I

and Print 53

1. “Pend with double art’: Women at the Scene of Writing 16 2. ‘A dame, an owner, a defendresse’: Women, Patronage,

the Stationers 87

3. ‘A free Stationers wife of this companye’: Women and

London Book Trades 135

4. ‘Certaine women brokers and peddlers’: Beyond the

5. “No deformitie can abide before the sunne’: Imagining

Early Modern Women’s Reading 174

Bibliography 218 Index 247

Epilogue: Books on the Body 212

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List of Abbreviations Arber Edward Arber, A Transcript of the Registers of the Company of Stationers of London, 1554-1640 A.D., 4 vols. (London, 1875-94; rpt. New York: Peter Smith, 1950).

Dict. I R. B. McKerrow, A Dictionary of Printers and Booksellers in England, Scotland and Ireland, and of Foreign Printers of English Books, 1557 to 1640 (London: Bibliographical Society, 1910).

Dict. II Henry R. Plomer, A Dictionary of the Booksellers and Printers Who Were at Work in England, Scotland and Ireland from 1641 to 1667 (London: Bibliographical Society, 1907).

ELR English Literary Renaissance. Greg and Boswell W. W. Greg and E. Boswell, Records of the Court of the Stationers Company, 1576 to 1602: From Register B (London: Bibliographical Society, 1930).

HLQ Huntington Library Quarterly. HMC Historical Manuscripts Commission. Jackson William A. Jackson (ed.), Records of the Court of the Stationers Company, 1602-1640 (London: Bibliographical Society, 1957).

ODNB Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, online edn (Oxford University Press, 2004).

OED The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edn, online edn (1989). Plomer Henry R. Plomer, Abstracts from the Wills of English Printers and Stationers, from 1492 to 1630 (London: Bibliographical Society, 1903).

SQ Shakespeare Quarterly.

STC Alfred W. Pollard, A Short-title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, and Ireland, and of English Books Printed

Abroad, 1475-1640, 2nd edn, revised and enlarged by Katharine F. Panzer, 3 vols. (London: Bibliographical Society, 1976-91).

TNA The National Archives, Kew. YES Yearbook of English Studies.

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List of Illustrations Esther Inglis, presentation manuscript for Charles I, showing ideogram of a pointing hand. BL Royal MS 17D.XVI, f. 4r.

© The British Library Board. All rights reserved, 1 June 2011. 24 1.1 Esther Inglis, presentation manuscript for Charles I, showing self-portrait. Royal MS 17D.XVI, f. 7r. © The British

Library Board. All rights reserved, 1 June 2011. 25

1.2. British School, seventeenth-century portrait of a Lady, probably

Mrs Clement Edmondes, c.1605—10. © Tate, London, 2011. 42 2.1 Walter Baley, A Short Discourse of the Three Kindes of Peppers in Common Vse (London, 1588), A2r. © The British Library Board.

All rights reserved, 1 June 2011. 58

3.1 Jan Luyken, Der Lettergeiter [the type founder), 1698. With

permission of the owner. 97 University Library, 2011. 98

3.2 Hieronymus Hornschuch, “Ofhcime typographiz delineatio’, from Orthotypographia (Leipzig, 1608), A8v. © Cambridge

6.1 Unknown Lady from the court of King Edward VI (possibly Lady Jane Grey) c.1550—5 (oil on panel) by Eworth or Ewoutsz, Hans (fl. 1520-74). © Fitzwilliam Museum, University of

Cambridge, UK/The Bridgeman Art Library. 214

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Note to the Reader Original spelling has been retained in quotations. Punctuation and capitalization have been preserved as they appear in the sources, although some contractions have been silently expanded. Spelling has been preserved for the titles of early printed works, but titles have been capitalized for consistency throughout. Dates are given Old Style, except that the year is taken to begin on | January. Emphases in quotations and extracts are all as they appear in the original unless stated otherwise.

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Introduction ‘Grossly Material ‘Things

It is very likely that much male writing contains unacknowledged contributions from women.!

In 1928, Virginia Woolf invited a lecture hall full of women students to imagine the fate of Shakespeare's sister, driven to write by a burning talent, yet denied the opportunity for education or literary self-expression. Woolf’s evocation of the fictional Judith Shakespeare has been both an inspiration and a provocation to feminist literary critics: on the one hand initiating Elaine Showalter’s search for A Literature of their Own, a tradition that allows scholars to, in Woolf’s terms, ‘think back through

our mothers’; on the other prompting a challenge to our ideas about what constitutes ‘writing’ and literary expression.* Margaret Ezell, in particular, has argued for the need to embrace manuscript as well as printed texts, including such genres as letters and household writing, and notes that ‘by unconsciously permitting our perceptions of the past to be shaped by unexamined ideologies... we have unintentionally marginalized or devalued a significant portion of female literary experience’.* Thanks to a significant body of scholarship, a new critical consensus has emerged:

women could and did write in the early modern period; it is not true that ‘any woman born with a great gift in the sixteenth century would

' Harold Love, Attributing Authorship: An Introduction (Cambridge University Press, 2002), 128. ; Viswinia Woolf, A Room of Ones Own (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1928, rpt. 1993), 76; Elaine Showalter, A Literature of their Own: British Women Novelists from Bronté to Less-

ing (Princeton University Press, 1977). Woolf’s lectures, given in locations including Newnham Hall and Girton College, were edited and expanded to form her famous booklength essay.

> Margaret Ezell, Writing Womens Literary History (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 7.

2 ‘Grossly Material Things certainly have gone crazed, shot herself, or ended her days in some lonely cottage outside the village, half witch, half wizard, feared and mocked at’. Critics have, however, paid less attention to another aspect of A Room of Ones Own: Woolf’s insistence that writing is rooted in physical and economic circumstance: Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often, the attachment is scarcely perceptible; Shakespeare's plays, for instance, seem to hang there complete by themselves. But when the web is pulled askew, hooked up at the edge, torn in the middle, one remembers that these webs are not spun in mid-air by incorporeal creatures, but are the work of suffering human beings, and are attached to grossly material things, like health and money and the houses we live in. [43]

Woolf’s emphasis is on the stultifying effect of the lack of ‘grossly material

things’, famously ‘money and a room of one’s own’ (106), upon Judith Shakespeare and her successors. Her words also stand, however, as a reminder that texts, as historians of the book have come to recognize, are the product of ‘the material sources (and their makers and suppliers) of type, paper, cord, and all the appurtenances of a printing house’, as well as ‘the previous movements—however bodily—of an author, the absent labor of the print shop, the booksellers who bring the book to market, the subsequent trajectories of readers’.? Texts, rather than being the product of a solitary author, transmitted direct from fertile mind to well-stocked bookshelf, are the products of numerous processes populated by diverse persons. Against the traditions of formalist New Criticism and the abstractions of theory, accused of isolating ‘textuality from the circumstances, the events, the physical sense that made it possible and render it intelligible as the result of human work’, textual scholars have argued for

* Woolf, Room, 51. The editor of one recent collection offers a concise overview of the field, noting that ‘the study of early modern women writers has become a major, thriving field in the past twenty-five years’, marked by a proliferation of monographs, articles, dis-

sertations, editions, and anthologies (Laura Lunger Knoppers, ‘Introduction: Critical Framework and Issues’ in Knoppers (ed.), Zhe Cambridge Companion to Early Modern Womens Writing (Cambridge University Press, 2009), 5).

> D. E McKenzie, “The London Book Trade in 1644’ in Peter D. McDonald and Michael F. Suarez, S. J. (eds.), Making Meaning: ‘Printers of the Mind’ and Other Essays (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002), 128; Julian Yates, Error, Misuse, Failure: Object Lessons from the English Renaissance (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 108—9. Yates’s emphasis on the ‘absent’ labour of the print shop refers to the ‘blackboxing’ of physical labour: the tendency of material objects to efface their own histories of production. Recent work by Randall McLeod, however, demonstrates that the tools and labour of the printing house leave traces when texts are read bibliographically rather than linguistically (Random Cloud, ‘Fearful Asymmetry’, forthcoming in Neil Praistat and Julia Flanders (eds.), Zhe Cambridge Companion to Textual Scholarship. I thank Randall McLeod for sharing this with me prior to publication).

Introduction 3 the need to excavate the economic, social, and legal transactions, as well as the mechanical processes, that structure the inception and creation of a text.° In a move that marks their distance from their bibliographical forebears, book historians are also increasingly eager to extend the concept of textual creation to include the production of meaning inherent in acts of reading and reception.’ Thanks in part to her work as one of the founders of the Hogarth Press, Woolf was alert to the material constitution of the text. On 18 July 1923, she wrote to Barbara Bagenal explaining, ‘I have just finished setting up the whole of Mr Eliots [séc] poem with my own hands—you see how my hand trembles.’* Woolf’s hands shook not in recognition of an auspicious literary moment but as a result of her exhausting compositorial work. Thanks to her efforts to set Eliot’s words in the correct formes, Woolf discovered that her hands, the tools of her own writing, were no longer fully under her control. The circumstances of production shape the text: in this case both the Hogarth Press edition of The Waste Land (with its handful of unique misprints), and Woolf’s subsequent letter, in which her

handwriting is transformed by her labours. Playfully suggesting that Bagenal’s response to her shaky script would be to question her own corporeal response (her sight), Woolf prompts Bagenal to read the distorted handwriting as a material trace of the circumstances of production: ‘Dont blame your eyes. It is my writing.’ Woolf’s letter contains in miniature many of the concerns that inform this book: the varied and often invisible roles of women in textual production, the processes of making and consumption, the ways in which print and manuscript cultures overlap, and the idea that books are ‘grossly material things’ which have a physical as well as intellectual impact upon makers and readers. Recognizing the need for scholarly work which brings together feminist history and bibliographical analysis, Maureen Bell has argued that we need to investigate ‘the specifics of women’s agency: as writers, scribes, patrons, dedicatees, translators, editors; as printers, booksellers, bookbinders, publishers, hawkers, mercuries and peddlers; and as ° Edward W. Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 4. For a wide-ranging survey of the production of books in early modern Europe see Andrew Pettegree, The Book in the Renaissance (Yale University Press, 2010). ’ Recent work on reading, to which I return in ch. 5, includes Jennifer Andersen and Elizabeth Sauer (eds.), Books and Readers in Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002); Heidi Brayman Hackel, Reading Material in Early Modern England: Print, Gender, and Literacy (Cambridge University Press, 2005); Kevin Sharpe and Stephen Zwicker (eds.), Reading, Society, and Politics in Early Modern England (Cambridge University Press, 2003); and William H. Sherman, Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008). ° The Letters of Virginia Woolf, ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann, 6 vols. (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1978), III, 56.

4 ‘Grossly Material Things owners, listeners, readers and collectors of books’.’ ‘Grossly Material Things’

traces the contributions women made to early modern printed books at each stage of their production, dissemination, and appropriation. Though my focus is on women, this account forms a history of sexed relations, taking into account the politics of patronage, domestic labour, guild practices, and the family." As the first wave of the cross-disciplinary project to recover women’s voices has entered its maturity, some of the assumptions which under-

pinned that project have been opened to scrutiny. Danielle Clarke reminds us that ‘significant problems—political, textual, and methodological—remain to be discussed if scholarship upon early modern women is to fulfil its early promise’.'' Arguing that editors of women’s writings have been motivated by the twin desires to discover stable texts, revelatory of women’s experience, and to identify a canon from which readers ‘might trace their own cultural genealogy’, Clarke suggests that we need to find ways to understand the essentially mediated nature of women’s writing.

When twinned with Woolf’s exposure of the ‘grossly material things that underlie textual making, Clarke's insights can launch us on a

different, though parallel, trajectory. This book returns to the male-authored texts that have more usually been the subjects of critical

and historical scrutiny, but looks at those books with eyes that are attentive ‘to the textual manifestation of gender at all stages of literary production’..'? Where the traces of men’s input and interference can be discovered in much early modern women’s writing, so too can the traces of women’s labour be recovered within the pages of texts that have previously been assigned to a masculine realm of imaginative expression and

publication. As a result, the early modern book and its texts can be reconceptualized not as male- or female-authored but as the interface at which numerous agents coincide, in complex and varied ways. Recent work on early modern textuality offers a flexible definition of co- and social authorship. Jeffrey Masten observes that ‘collaboration was a prevalent mode of textual production in the sixteenth and seventeenth > Maureen Bell, “Women Writing and Women Written’ in John Barnard and D. EF McKenzie (eds.) and Maureen Bell (assistant ed.), Zhe Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, © vols. (Cambridge University Press, 2002), IV, 451.

'° Tuse the term ‘sexed’ in line with Elizabeth Grosz’s assertion that both gender and sex emerge in the interactions between bodies and environments: ‘sex is no longer the label of both sexes in their difference... it is now the label and terrain of the production and enactment of sexual difference. Gender, it seems, is a redundant category (Space, Time, and Perversion: Essays on the Politics of Bodies (London: Routledge, 2005), 213). '' Danielle Clarke, “Nostalgia, Anachronism, and the Editing of Early Modern Women’s

Texts, TEXT, 15 (2003), 188. 2 Tbid., 190.

Introduction 5 centuries, only eventually displaced by the mode of singular authorship with which we are more familiar’ and notes not only that many dramatic texts were co-authored but that the processes of exchange and addition continued into both printing house and playhouse.'? Arthur F Marotti, Margaret Ezell, and Steven W. May have furthered our understanding of lyric verse as the product of coterie circulation and exchange.'* Moving into the seventeenth century, Steven Shapin and Timothy Raylor have shown how the different projects of natural philosophy and cavalier versification were dependent upon the interactions of aristocratic networks and clubs, while Stephen Dobranski argues that authorial interactions with members of the book trade should be considered collaborative." Correspondingly, editorial theorists and bibliographers have anatomized what Paul Werstine describes as an ‘increasingly engorged author function’ to identify other agents including ‘the army of scribes, the theatrical industry (with its players, bookkeepers, costume-buyers, theater-owners, and thousands of patrons), and the government with its censors, etc.’.'° Commentators on commonplace books have read manuscript revisions and adaptations as examples of deferred or composite collaboration." Mary Thomas Crane, in particular, asks that we conceive of a humanist ‘version of authorship that was collective instead of individualist, published instead of private, inscriptive instead of voice-centred, and aphoristic or epigrammatic instead of lyric or narrative’.'® Finally, Juliet Fleming’s influential work on the materiality of writing draws on Crane's formulation 'S Jeffrey Masten, 7extual Intercourse: Collaboration, Authorship, and Sexualities in Renais-

sance Drama (Cambridge University Press, 1997), 4. See also Heather Hirschfeld, Joint Enterprises: Collaborative Drama and the Institutionalization of the English Renaissance Theater (Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2004). “ Arthur E Marotti, Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995); Margaret Ezell, Social Authorship and the Advent of Print (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999); Steven W. May, The Elizabethan Courtier Poets: The Poems and their Contexts (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1997). '? Steven Shapin, A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England (University of Chicago Press, 1994); Timothy Raylor, Cavaliers, Clubs, and Literary Culture: Sir John Mennes, James Smith, and the Order of the Fancy (Newark: University

of Delaware Press, 1994); Stephen Dobranski, Milton, Authorship, and the Book Trade (Cambridge University Press, 1999). '© Paul Werstine, ‘Editing after the End of Editing’, Shakespeare Studies, 24 (1996), 50. '” See Catherine Field, ““Many Hands Hands”: Writing the Self in Early Modern Women's Recipe Books’ in Michelle M. Dowd and Julia A. Eckerle (eds.), Genre and Womens Life

Writing in Early Modern England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 49-63; Mary Hobbs, Early Seventeenth-Century Verse Miscellany Manuscripts (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1992); Max W.

Thomas, ‘Reading and Writing the Renaissance Commonplace Book: A Question of Authorship?’ in Martha Woodmansee and Peter Jaszi (eds.), The Construction of Authorship: Textual Appropriation in Law and Literature (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1994), 401-15. '® Mary Thomas Crane, Framing Authority: Sayings, Self, and Society in Sixteenth-Century England (Princeton University Press, 1993), 4.

6 ‘Grossly Material Things to insist that we understand the early modern text, written on walls and windows as well as on paper, as ‘collective, aphoristic, and inscriptive’, rather than tied to an individual authorial voice." The years covered by this study, roughly between 1557 and 1640, though reaching earlier and later as the subject demands, saw crucial changes in the conceptualization of the author and the textual field. The incorporation of the Stationers’ Company in the last year of Mary Tudor’s reign marked an important stage in the organization and self-identity of the London book trades, while the collapse of licensing during the Civil Wars significantly altered the landscape of print. My excavation of women's productive encounters with the world of the early modern book con-

tributes to an understanding of book creation as collaborative and contingent, and insists that all texts, not simply those attributed to women, were marked and mediated by numerous agents, rendering books

more mobile and more complexly sexed than has been allowed. ‘This understanding is further enriched if we recognize that creative action was

distributed not only across networks of men and women but across the material and institutional environments in which they dwelt and which, in part, constitute the work of production and consumption, as I discuss below.

The overarching structure of ‘Grossly Material Things is that traced by Robert Darnton’s influential ‘communications circuit’: that runs from the author to the publisher..., the printer, the shipper, the bookseller, and the reader. ‘The reader completes the circuit because he influ-

ences the author both before and after the act of composition... He addresses implicit readers, and hears from explicit reviewers. So the circuit runs full cycle.”

That cycle may be traced through these pages, which move from the scene of writing to the commissioning of texts, the printing house and its denizens, the business of dissemination, and finally the reader and book-user. Darnton’s model has, however, been subject to a number of critiques, not

least from its author. In a return to his earlier analysis, Darnton subtly reappraises the andro-centrism of his model, stressing the possibility that both ‘men and women might take on the roles he describes.*! First and foremost, my book restores early modern women to their place in the 9 Juliet Fleming, Graffiti and the Writing Arts of Early Modern England (London: Reaktion Books, 2001), 41. °° Robert Darnton, “What is the History of Books?’ Daedalus, 3 (1982), 65-83; rpt. in The Kiss of Lamourette: Reflections in Cultural History (London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1990), 111. *! Robert Darnton, ““What is the History of Books?” Revisited’, Modern Intellectual History, 4 (2007), 496, 502.

Introduction 7 communications circuit. Yet the particularities of women’s work also reveal that Darnton’s closed circuit, emanating from and returning to the author, does not fully capture the dislocations and contingencies of early modern book production, or the lively paths of dissemination, circulation, and exchange.

Darnton has been taken to task by Thomas R. Adams and Nicholas Barker who seek to replace the ‘communications circuit’ with a more open-ended ‘map’. In a protest against bibliography’s relegation to a position ‘ancillary to social history, Adams and Barker object that Darnton

places social and economic forces at the centre of his circuit, working upon the individuals who make books, so that the books themselves disappear as objects of study.** They argue that the book, rather than its makers and movers, should be placed at the centre of the schema, with the various processes which constitute the life of the printed text replacing the histories of human agents.” Despite their embrace of Milton’s observation that books ‘contain a potencie of life’, however, Adams and Barker's foregrounding of the book reinscribes the divide between human actors

and worked-upon thing, and renders the textual object curiously inert, subject to social and economic factors ‘pressing inwards’ as well as to the whims of book-trade workers, readers, and collectors.” Though Adams and Barker acknowledge the importance of manuscript publication in the early modern period, their emphasis is primarily, and Darnton'’s wholly, on the printed text, supporting Ezell’s assertion that ‘book history as currently practiced...is still mostly about the history of print and how manuscripts become and are circulated as printed objects’. The relegation of manuscript writing—the preferred form of publication for many women—to a separate sphere of enquiry has left ‘book history

again almost by default to be defined by examples from male writers seeking print.” Yet Ezell’s defence of manuscript study reveals its own informing assumptions: that a book's sexed status is determined by its author and that women’s role in print production was significantly limited, neither of which allows for the full diversity of early modern women’s textual labours. Throughout this book, I remain attentive to the overlapping *? ‘Thomas R. Adams and Nicholas Barker, ‘A New Model for the Study of the Book’ in Nicholas Barker (ed.), A Potencie of Life: Books in Society (London: ‘The British Library and

Oak Knoll Press, 1993), 7. °° Leah Price argues that ‘accounts of print culture would look different if narrated from the point of view not of human readers and users, but of the book’, invoking the ‘nineteenth-century genre of “it-narrative” as a possible model for scholarship’ (From The History of a Book to a “History of the Book”’, Representations, 108 (2009), 120). *4 Adams and Barker, ‘A New Model’, 15. *> Margaret Ezell, “Ihe Laughing Tortoise: Speculations on Manuscript Sources and Women’s Book History’, ELR, 38 (2008), 335, 336.

8 ‘Grossly Material Things economies of manuscript and print, investigating the materiality of writing as well as the materiality of printing, but insisting that women are more present than has been assumed, even in books securely attributed to male authors.” Not the least of the problems of the revised model for book history offered by Adams and Barker is that the book continues to possess a stable object-status (the domain of the bibliographer), which can be opposed to the world of social relations that remains the business of the historian. As Jonathan Gil Harris has observed in response to two influential collections on early modern objects: ‘for a growing number of Renaissance and

Shakespeare scholars...the play is no longer the thing: the hing is the thing’.”” Yet, Harris argues, ‘even as the new object scholarship has situ-

ated itself within a broadly materialist tradition of historicist criticism, the “material” of “material culture” has remained largely untheorized’.”®

Harris's critique is equally pertinent to studies of the book as object, which have investigated both the ways in which the physical book structures reading and the mechanical operations which produce the book, but have rarely called into question how we conceptualize the ‘thingness’ of the book as thing.

On the one hand, the book is understood as the product of technological processes. Yet, as William H. Sherman notes, such histories frequently understand production ‘in mechanical or technological rather than social terms’, producing a view of print manufacture and textual movement that remains ‘curiously unpeopled’.” In his ‘First Thesis on Feuerbach’, Marx notes that ‘the chief defect of hitherto existing materialism (that of Feuerbach included) is that the thing, reality, sensuousness, is conceived only in the form of the object or of contemplation, but not as *° On the overlapping economies of orality, writing, and printing see esp. D. E McKenzie, “Speech—Manuscript—Print in McDonald and Suarez (eds.), Making Meaning: Printers of the Mind’ and Other Essays (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002),

237-58. *” Jonathan Gil Harris, ‘Shakespeare’s Hair: Staging the Object of Material Culture’, SQ, 52 (2001), 480. The collections to which Harris refers are Patricia Fumerton and Simon Hunt (eds.), Renaissance Culture and the Everyday (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), and Margreta de Grazia et al. (eds.), Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture

(Cambridge University Press, 1996). Two more recent collections are Tara Hamling and Catherine Richardson (eds.), Everyday Objects: Medieval and Early Modern Material Culture and its Meanings (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2010), and, for Italy, Michelle O’Malley and Evelyn Welch (eds.), The Material Renaissance (Manchester University Press, 2007). *8 Harris, ‘Shakespeare's Hair’, 480.

° William H. Sherman, “The Social Life of Books’ in Joad Raymond (ed.), The Oxford History of Popular Print Culture, 2 vols. to date (Oxford University Press, 2011), I, 164-5. For a valuable account of the printing house which places the material text at its centre, see Margreta de Grazia and Peter Stallybrass, “Ihe Materiality of the Shakespearean Text’, SQ, 44 (1993), 255-84.

Introduction 9 sensuous human activity, practice, not subjectively’.°’ For Marx, historical materialism is distinguished from mechanistic materialism by its interest in the social relations of production, embedded in the processes of labour and human practice. This tradition encourages us to attend to the particularities of making, and the sensuousness of books as the products of human hands. In this, my approach parallels Natasha Korda’s recent extension of the disciplinary boundaries of stage history ‘to include not only players and playhouses, but the heterogeneous forms of commerce that lent them sup-

port and her insistence that ‘we must redefine the “all-male stage” as a network of commerce between active economic agents of both genders’.*!

This book offers a parallel project, revealing the early modern male-authored book as a web of commercial, intellectual, technological, and corporeal encounters, and recovering the importance of women’s work to the processes of book-making. Alternatively, book historians have interrogated ‘the physical support that offers [the text] for reading’, asking how readers or users appropriate

and circulate their texts.°* The book is thus claimed alternately for the domain of the material and that of the social: a division which ignores the insights of recent anthropological and sociological work which insists that ‘there exists no relation whatsoever between “the material” and “the social

world”, because it is this very division which is a complete artifact’.”° Books, their makers, and users exist as actors in mutually constitutive networks, in which ‘meaning’, ‘the social’, or ‘culture’ are not overlaid on

a bedrock of ‘gross’ matter but are narrated in the movements of their participants, who are ‘simultaneously real, discursive, and social’ .* Rather than being a circuit or map, the life of a book may best be represented through Woolf’s web, connecting the discursive strands of the °° Karl Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach’, tr. S. Ryazankaya in Karl Marx: Selected Writings, ed. David McLellan, 2nd edn (Oxford University Press, 2000), 171. >! Natasha Korda, “Labour’s Lost: Women’s Work and Early Modern Theatrical Commerce’ in Peter Holland and Stephen Orgel (eds.), From Script to Stage in Early Modern England (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 197; 195-6. Korda’s recently published Labors Lost: Womens Work and the Early Modern English Stage (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011) advances this field of study still further. ** Roger Chartier, Zhe Order of Books: Readers, Authors, and Libraries in Europe between the Fourteenth and Eighteenth Centuries, tr. Lydia G. Cochrane (Stanford University Press, 1994),

9. For ‘users’ see Bradin Cormack and Carla Mazzio, Book Use, Book Theory: 1500-1700 (University of Chicago Library, 2005). °° Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network- Theory (Oxford University Press, 2005), 75—6. * Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, tr. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 64. Posing the question in different terms, Tim Ingold asks: ‘what is discourse, if not a narrative interweaving of experience born of practical perceptual activity?’ (The Perception of the Environment: Essays in Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill

(London: Routledge, 2000), 286.

10 ‘Grossly Material Things text to the people and things which shape and are shaped by it. Yet where Woolf’s web of fictions needs to be ‘hooked up at the corner’ in order to reveal the ‘grossly material things’ on which it depends, we can instead conceive of fictions, broadly defined, as the woven artefacts of objects, persons, and processes, whose traces remain present on and in the pages before us. In such a view, the strands of the web are not simply dependent upon, but are made of, interlinked economic, social, and corporeal relationships. Woolf’s spider thus calls to mind Bruno Latour’s demand for scholarship which charts ‘the delicate web of relations between things and people’: a series of ‘interwoven stories’ linked by ‘Ariadne’s thread’.°? Introducing an influential collection of essays, Arjun Appadurai argues

for the need to break from ‘the production-dominated Marxian view of the commodity’ and instead to focus ‘on its total trajectory from production, through exchange/distribution, to consumption’. For Appadurai, apparently inert objects have complex and productive ‘social lives’, which

can be illuminated by tracing the paths traversed by ‘the things themselves, for their meanings are inscribed in their forms, their uses, their trajectories .°° Where my first three chapters focus on the networks and exchanges that constitute the work of making, I move in chapters 4 and 5 to questions of consumption. Appadurai'’s recognition that ‘consumption is eminently social, relational, and active rather than private, atomic, or passive’ reworks his implicit distinction between making and social circulation and chimes neatly with Michel de Certeau’s declaration that con-

sumption is ‘another production.’ The recognition of consumption as making informs my account of women’s reading in chapter 5 and underlies the exchange and commission of books in chapter 2. Appadurai repeatedly insists that the conceit of objects’ social lives is a necessary ‘methodological fetishism’ and that in reality ‘things have no

meanings apart from those that human transactions, attributions, and motivations endow them with’.*® Such an approach risks establishing °° Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 3, 39. For Latour, ‘a network is not made of nylon thread, words or any durable substance but is the trace left behind by some moving agent’: an assertion that renders the model of the spider's web particularly pertinent (Reassembling the Social, 132). For an entertaining take on the distinctions between Latour’s actor-network-theory and the proposition that ‘skilled practice involves developmentally embodied responsiveness’, see Tim Ingold, “When ANT Meets SPIDER: Social Theory for Arthropods in Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description (London: Routledge, 2011), 89-94. °° Arjun Appadurai (ed.), The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge University Press, 1986), 13, 5. *” Tbid., 27, 31; Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, tr. Steven Rendall (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984), xii. For de Certeau’s pertinence for the history of reading see Chartier, 7he Order of Books, chapter 1. °° Appadurai (ed.), The Social Life of Things, 5.

Introduction 11 non-humans as, in Latour’s terms, ‘the hapless bearers of symbolic projection’, and thus acceding to a well-worn narrative that places the human actor at the centre of history at the expense of a more fundamental critique of the status not only of subjects but of objects.*’ Early modern authors, scribes, stationers, and readers worked with, as well as within,

particular environments, and meaning was produced through, rather than being simply preserved in, the processes of making, use, and exchange.

Within the iconographic tradition of the Renaissance, the spider’s web

insists not only upon interconnection but incorporation, raising questions of bodily experience and the connections between the sensing subject and her environment. ‘The spider was frequently used to emblematize touch, thanks to its fabled ‘tactile sensitivity’.“° The web is particularly important to this tradition, Carla Mazzio suggests, as it ‘relocates touch from the physically proximate to the relatively distant space of environment’ and asks us to reconceptualize the engagements between embodied subjects and the world in ways which chime with Tim Ingold’s insistence that the mind ‘is immanent in the network of sensory pathways that are set up by virtue of the perceiver’s immersion in his or her environment ’.*! The recognition that ‘much of what we are exists not through our consciousness or body, but as an exterior environment that habituates and prompts us”? is strikingly resonant for those critics who have begun to explore the relationships of environment and embodiment (to borrow the title of a recent collection) in early modern England. As the editors of that collection note: “Scholars have emphasized the porousness of an early modern body that takes the environment into itself or spills out of its own

*’ Latour, Reassembling the Social, 10. Alfred Gell insists on the need to ‘explore a domain in which “objects” merge with “people” by virtue of the existence of social relations between persons and things, and person and persons via things’. As for Appadurai, however, the idea

that objects work upon people remains a conceit, derived from the fact that, ‘in practice, people do attribute intentions and awareness to objects like cars and images of the gods’. The agency of objects is repeatedly revealed to be ‘a mirror, vehicle, or channel of [human] agency , albeit ‘a source of such potent experiences of the “co-presence” of an agent as to make no difference’ (Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press,

1998), 12, 17, 20). “© Elizabeth D. Harvey, ‘Introduction: The “Sense of All Senses” in Harvey (ed.), Sensible Flesh: On Touch in Early Modern Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 13). See also Frederick Kiefer, ‘A Dumb Show of the Senses in Timon of Athens in Thomas Moisan and Douglas Bruster (eds.), ln the Company of Shakespeare: Essays on English Renaissance Literature in Honor of G. Blakemore Evans (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 2002), 139-58. *! Carla Mazzio, ‘Acting with Tact: Touch and Theater in the Renaissance’ in Harvey (ed.), Sensible Flesh, 173; Ingold, The Perception of the Environment, 3. ® Daniel Miller, ‘Materiality: An Introduction in Miller (ed.), Materiality (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 5.

12 ‘Grossly Material Things bounds (or both).’** Bodies, then, are a product of the books they handle, and both books and bodies are produced by their environment, even as

they work upon it. This insight returns us to the world of practice: in Ingold’s terms, ‘far from being inscribed on the bedrock of physical reality, meaning is immanent in the relational contexts of people's practical engagement with their lived-in environments’.** Productive agency is distributed beyond human activity into an environment which both constitutes and is constituted by those who dwell within it. For that reason, this

book pays attention, where the evidence allows, to the bodily habits of writing and reading, and to the places and spaces within which books come into being and through which they move. The variety of sources I examine is testament to the inherent capaciousness of both book history, memorably described by Cyndia Susan Clegg as an ‘undisciplined discipline’, and the study of ‘stuff’ which, for Daniel Miller, ‘thrives as a rather undisciplined substitute for a discipline: inclusive, embracing, original’.®” It is my contention that such undisciplined inclusiveness offers a more accurate picture of the textual lives of the men, women, and books who occupy these pages, and who lived in a world in which hefty devotional controversies were printed on the same presses as household miscellanies, mortality bills, or dramatic texts; genealogies and financial records might be drafted next to coterie verse; and ‘Venus and Adonis was read between encounters with letters and the Bible.*° Throughout this book, I frequently foreground women’s religious com-

mitments, whether in the practices of devotional reading, writing, and dissemination, in a printer’s or bookseller’s choice of publications, or in the bodily practices associated with divine texts. Though scholars have long recognized the centrality of religious discourse to women’s textual practice, women’s devotional concerns have frequently been depicted as a “8 Mary Floyd-Wilson and Garrett A. Sullivan, Jr, ‘Introduction’ to Floyd-Wilson and Sullivan, Jr (eds.), Environment and Embodiment in Early Modern England (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 2. Mary Thomas Crane argues for the need to explore how ‘our embodied brains create meaning out of experience of an environment’. In her focus on ‘Shakespeare’s brain as one material site for the production of the dramatic works attributed to him’, Crane does not pursue her suggestion that we should ‘consider the place of the author as one material condition among many’, instead using cognitive theory to suggest how Shakespeare negotiated the linguistic and ideological formations of his period in ways mediated by the ‘kinesthetic and spatial experiences of living in a body’ (Shakespeare's Brain: Reading with Cognitive Theory (Princeton University Press, 2001), 9, 1, 5, 209). “ Ingold, The Perception of the Environment, 168. *® Cyndia Susan Clegg, ‘History of the Book: An Undisciplined Discipline?’, Renaissance Quarterly, 54 (2001), 221-45; Daniel Miller, Stuff (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010), 1. “© The early modern period is, of course, not unique in this material blurring of boundaries where modern criticism attempts to impose conceptual divisions, but is perhaps more unusual in the self-consciousness and explicit commentary offered on this subject by some of its practitioners.

Introduction 13 retreat to a disappointingly constrained arena, and assumed, as Erica Longfellow laments, to belong to ‘a less transgressive and therefore less interesting aesthetic’.*” Religion was neither a secondary nor a necessarily well-behaved domain in early modern England.** As Alexandra Walsham has established, it was not only Protestant reformers who embraced print in post-Reformation England, and readers, writers, and stationers from both sides of the confessional divide find a place within these pages.” It is in the domain of authorship that I locate my first chapter, which opens with John Donne's ‘A Valediction: of the Booke’, a poem which foregrounds the textual labours of a woman, even as it refuses to reveal her identity. I investigate new evidence for women’s participation in the processes of composition, but also offer a challenge to critical paradigms which establish aspects of the textual process, particularly translation, copying, and editing, as mechanical and derivative. By examining contemporary accounts of these activities | demonstrate their originary and creative aspects, and argue that they need to be understood as elements of a composite authorial practice. Women’s acts of writing were, I suggest, conceived of as embodied, crucial to the work of production, and tied to questions of inheritance, perpetuity, and estate management. Chapter 2 offers a new take on the old question of patronage, surveying existing work on women patrons, and investigating neglected evidence to investigate the expectations, disjunctions, and rewards of the patronage relationship. I offer evidence of women’s commissions, particularly of translations, before turning to their patronage of printers and the publication of particular works. Where patronage—usually aligned with privacy, manuscript production, and hierarchy, and, by extension, with women—has been opposed to the public, democratic, masculine arena of print, I demonstrate that women sponsored and promoted print publica-

tion. If the market for printed texts did largely, though never wholly, displace patronage, it was a market that was shaped by the interpersonal economy it succeeded.

*” Erica Longfellow, Women and Religious Writing in Early Modern England (Cambridge University Press, 2004), 10-11. *8 On the centrality of religious life to post-Reformation literary culture, see Brian Cummings, The Literary Culture of the Reformation: Grammar and Grace (Oxford University Press, 2002), esp. 5—6. On religion as a nascent public sphere, see David Zaret, ‘Religion, Science, and Printing in the Public Spheres in Seventeenth-Century England’ in Craig Calhoun (ed.), Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1992),

212-35. Alexandra Walsham, ““Domme Preachers”? Post-Reformation English Catholicism and the Culture of Print’, Past and Present, 168 (2000), 72—123. See also Frances Dolan, Whores of Babylon: Catholicism, Gender, and Seventeenth-Century Print Culture (University of Notre Dame Press, 2005; first published 1999), 23-34.

14 ‘Grossly Material Things My third chapter moves from questions of composition and commission to the printing trade, offering a comprehensive account of women’s business activities, and arguing for their centrality to the genealogical networks that structured the early book trades. I also investigate aspects of the Stationers’ Company Registers often overlooked by historians of the book: details of Company banquets, domestic labour, property transactions, and gifts including spoons, tablecloths, and windows. By paying attention to these material moments, it is possible to recognize the centrality of women’s labour to the civic self-construction of the Stationers’ Company, and read early modern books as products of the overlapping realms of domestic and guild practice, property exchanges, and human relationships, as well as of mechanical and financial endeavour. Chapter 4 opens the field of enquiry beyond the London book trades, exploring the activities of women who operated outside the remit of the Stationers Company, whether because of geographical location or the criminal nature of their publishing activity. | map the topographies of early print, arguing that books were central to the social construction of space, and tracing the ways in which particular places were experienced differently by members of the established print trades and by itinerant booksellers or women engaged in illicit printing. The chapter contributes

to the under-developed study of the provincial book trades, but also makes the case that English and Scottish printing and bookselling cannot be understood in isolation from an attention to European producers and markets, and to the ways in which books both transgress and define national boundaries.

Chapter 5 completes the trajectory from writing to reception, in a study of women’s reading. This chapter brings together the theories of practice articulated by de Certeau and recent work on the physiology of reading to argue that early modern women’s reading was an embodied activity in part produced by its physical situation. I explore places of reading, moving beyond recent accounts of the closet to uncover evidence of public and exemplary reading in spaces from the household to the royal barge. Drawing upon a range of sources, including funeral sermons, diaries, and Helkiah Crooke’s Mikrokosmographia, the chapter demonstrates the interconnectedness of optics and aurality, and the psychophysiological basis of memory, and explains why the connection between reading and eating should be understood as a physical rather than a figurative phenomenon. Throughout this chapter, readerly consumption is revealed to be not a passive, but an active, transformative process. My epilogue turns briefly to a handful of practices which fully expose the materiality of writing and the printed book as they were worn—and worked—upon the body. ‘These final pages move beyond the conceit that

Introduction 15 books carry social meaning between subjects to investigate the effects of movements that weave together people and book objects in unsettling ways. My larger quest for particular practices understands women as embodied within extended networks of environment and action, a valuable move given that recent work on corporeality and materiality has tended to privilege male experience and the authority of the object.” To uncover the specific manifestations of women’s engagements with books is not, however, to insist upon a uniformity of experience, interests, or selfhood which would render either ‘women’ or ‘woman’ a self-evident analytical category. Women’s bodies are nonetheless—to borrow Judith Butler’s

titular pun—'bodies that matter’; they are constituted by material and social praxis even as they bring that practice into being, but they are also bodies whose recovered traces matter because they allow us to tell a different story about the past.’' Virginia Woolf dreamed of rewriting history, so that women might figure there without impropriety... For one often catches a glimpse of them... whisking away into the background.’” By foregrounding women’s work in the fields of book production, dissemination, and reception, my own book offers a new perspective not only on the career choices open to the young Judith Shakespeare, but on the effects of those choices upon our reading practice. °° See, for example, the instructive emphasis on the social and environmental construction of the male body in Katherine Craik, Reading Sensations in Early Modern England (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) and Will Fisher, Materializing Gender in Early Modern English Literature and Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2006), as well as the stimulating essays collected in Gail Kern Paster et al. (eds.), Reading the Early Modern Passions: Essays in the Cultural History of Emotion (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). >! Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (London and New York: Routledge, 1993). See also Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1994), in which Grosz argues against the reductions of either idealism or materialism and for ‘some kind of understanding of emboaied subjectivity, of psychical corporeality (23). °° Woolf, Room, 47.

l ‘Pend with double art’ Women at the Scene of Writing John Donne opens ‘A Valediction: of the Booke’, a premature act of leavetaking to his poems, with a brief catalogue of women who have adopted or shared the authorial role. He tells his female addressee that her fame:

... may out-endure Sybills glory, and obscure Her who from Pindar could allure, And her, through whose helpe Lucan is not lame, And her, whose booke (they say) Homer did finde, and name.’ Only the Cumean prophetess Sybil, who, according to Richard Brathwaite, ‘first gave life to an Heroick verse: and in exquisite composures (amongst

other propheticall raptures) recounted the memorable actions & occurrents of her time’, is named; the other women, despite the suggestion that their poetic prowess exceeded that of their husbands, competitors, or successors, are reduced to a series of anonymous ‘hers’.’

Donne implicitly repeats the process of canonization that allows the great men of classical literary history to overshadow their female rivals, co-authors, and ghost-writers: the poet Corinna, ‘who is reported to have surpassed the Poet Pindarus in artfull and exact composures’, Lucan’s wife, Pollo Argentaria, who ‘is said to have assisted him in the apt and majestick composure of his verses: being no lesse rich in fancy, than hee himselfe when most enlivened by a Poeticall fury’, and the Egyptian prophetess Phantasia, from whom Homer was reputed to have stolen his Iliad or Odyssey, or sometimes both.’ Read within the context of a culture ' John Donne, ‘A Valediction: of the Booke’ in The Elegies and the Songs and Sonnets, ed. Helen Gardner (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), 67-8, Il. 5—9. * Richard Brathwaite, Art Asleepe Husband? A Boulster Lecture (London: R. Bishop for R. B. or his assignes, 1640), X3—X3v. In the St Paul’s manuscript of Donne’s poem, the women’s identities are further obscured as Il. 7-8 collapse two figures into one: ‘Her who from Pindar could alure, / And through whose helpe, Lucan is not lame’ (St Paul’s Cathe-

dral Library MS 49.B.43, f. 93v). > Brathwaite, A Boulster Lecture, X3v—XA4t.

Women at the Scene of Writing 17 which thrived on riddling, emblems, and punning mis- or oblique identifications, we may ask how complete this erasure is, or whether the readerly work required to discover the identities of Corinna, Pollo Argentaria, and Phantasia goes some way to restoring them. They appear frequently in catalogues of learned women, including Heywood’s Gunaikeion (1624), Brathwaite’s Boulster lecture (1640), and that attached to Elizabeth Weston’s Parthenica (1608).* Donne's correspondent, he suggests, will enjoy lasting fame if she preserves and collates the evidence of her exchange with the poet:

Study our manuscripts, those Myriades Of letters, which have past twixt thee and mee, Thence write our Annals, and in them will bee To all whom loves subliming fire invades, Rule and example found; [10-14] Outside the narrative frame of the poem, Donne participated in a coterie culture in which copying, rewriting, and response poems all played important roles; in Marotti’s words, ‘Donne’s poems were products less of the study than of a series of social relationships spread over a number of years.” The collaborative dynamics of coterie verse are epitomized in the playful “Letter written by Sir H. G. and J. D.’ composed by Donne and Henry Goodyere in alternating stanzas, and the poems co-written by a circle of court wits, including Donne, Lucy Russell, Thomas Overbury, possibly Anne Southwell, and Cecilia Bulstrode.® Bishop Henry King invoked such practices in rhymed responses “To a Lady who sent me a copy of verses at my going to bed’, and “To my Sister Anne King, who chid me in verse for being angry’.’ In ‘A Valediction’, Donne situates his collaborations within the context of a heterosexual relationship, and foregrounds, while reproducing, the gender politics of cross-sex writing practice. Direct * Thomas Heywood, Gunaikeion: or, Nine Bookes of Various History (London: Adam Islip, 1624), 119, 386; Elizabeth Weston, Collected Writings, ed. and tr. Donald Cheney and Brenda M. Hosington (University of Toronto Press, 2000), 283, 295. > Arthur FE. Marotti John Donne: Coterie Poet (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986), 24. ° ‘A Letter written by Sir H. G. and J. D., alternis vicibus’ in C. A. Patrides (ed.), John Donne: Complete English Poems (London: Everyman, 1994), 239-40; A Wife. Now the Widdow of Sir Tho: Overburye (London: for Lawrence Lisle, 1614), F4r—G2v. The Overbury exchange is briefly discussed in Victoria Burke, ‘Medium and Meaning in the Manuscripts of Anne, Lady Southwell’ in George L. Justice and Nathan Tinker (eds.), Womens Writing and the Circulation of Ideas: Manuscript Publication in England, 1550-1800 (Cambridge University Press, 2002), 109-11. See ch. 4 of Barbara Lewalski, Writing Women in Jacobean England (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), for further evidence of poetic exchange between Bedford and Donne. ’ Henry King, Zhe Poems of Henry King, ed. Margaret Crum (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), 165; 178-9.

18 ‘Grossly Material Things co-creation is also invoked in “The Canonization’. When the speaker declares “The Phcenix ridle hath more wit / By us, we two being one, are it’,

the ‘one neutrall thing’ created by the lovers’ union is a dual-bodied author: not I but ‘we’ will ‘build in sonnets pretty roomes’ in order to celebrate the relationship.®

The unnamed woman addressed in the “Valediction’ is encouraged to ‘anger destiny (2) by collating her own and the male speaker's writing: for once, her name will be remembered alongside his through the wider cir-

culation of ‘this thy booke’ (53). Marotti argues that the addressee is Donne's wife, Anne More, but reads the poem as an uncomplicated assertion of male authorship: “What the lover says, through his pedantic mask, is that he will show his mistress how to change from victim to aggressor,

how he can remain with her through his forced absence, how /e will record their experience for posterity...and, finally, how she will enjoy a fame superior to that of the great women of the past’ (my italics).’ It is, however, the woman, not the speaker, who is expected to write the ‘annals’ of the relationship, securing immortality for the poet as well as herself. As

Elizabeth Harvey points out, the historical irony of this statement is apparent, since, while we can still identify the women Donne describes in the first stanza, we cannot securely discover his own addressee.'° Though ‘A Valediction’ does not teach us to read Donne's Songs and Sonnets as recopied versions of letters exchanged with one identifiable woman, it does serve as a reminder of the numerous endeavours of women as authors, competitors, helpmeets, participants in manuscript exchange,

scribes, and editors. Women in the early modern period took on these and other roles in the preparation and composition of texts, each of which raises particular questions of expressive agency. It is those roles—especially copying, translation, and editing—that I explore in this chapter.

Much existing work on co-authorship focuses on collaborations between men, situated in the homo-social environs of the universities and Inns of Court or the public theatres.’ Though recent scholarship has called into question how far such sites were exclusively male arenas, it is clear that the range of writing partnerships they fostered privileged

male sociability and worked to exclude women from the scene of * Donne, “The Canonization’, in Gardner (ed.), The Elegies, 73—5, ll. 23-4, 25, 32. > Marotti, John Donne, 170-1. '© Elizabeth Harvey, Ventriloquized Voices: Feminist Theory and English Renaissance Texts (London: Routledge, 1992), 117.

'' One exception is Micheline White, ‘Power Couples and Women Writers in Elizabethan England: The Public Voices of Dorcas and Richard Martin and Anne and Hugh Dowriche’ in Rosalynn Voaden and Diane Wolfthal (eds.), Framing the Family: Narrative and Representation in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods (Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2005), 119-38.

Women at the Scene of Writing 19 writing.'* As Holly A. Laird notes, that exclusion has been reproduced by later critics: “The great majority of the books written about literary

coauthorship devote themselves to writing partners of the same sex... Such studies rightly claim to treat a marginal kind of authorship. Yet it is no easier to obtain acclaim for a thoroughgoing, cosigned literary coauthorship between a woman and a man than for one between

two men or two women.’!’ Laird does not deny the importance of recovering homo-social collaborations, but reminds us that, in the process, we risk repeating prior sins of omission, not least the exclusion

of women from our record of the literary and historical past. In the final chapter of his influential Textual Intercourse, Jeffrey Masten turns away from exchanges between men to the example of Margaret Cavendish and her husband, William. It was in the mid seventeenth century, Masten argues, that cross-sex co-composition became possible, in the context of a new ideology of companionate marriage.'* The evidence I present in this chapter shows, however, not only that cross-sex collaboration and exchange was a reality well before the Civil War, but that reconceptualizing women’s work as co-creation may require us to recognize some of the ingrained heterosexist assumptions that situate certain textual interventions as secondary or derivative. Where mixed-sex collaboration in this period has been brought to critical attention, it has been by scholars of women’s writing. ‘The practice of verse exchange and commonplacing has been scrutinized in recent years, and excavations of the processes of inscription, alteration, and appropriation have challenged our ideas of authorship, situating creative authority in the various figures to whom a text is attributed or in the woman who reworks a poem or saw to better express her own situation.'’ In the mid seventeenth century, Henry King made a strong claim for the agency of a woman commonplacer. ‘Upon a Table-book presented to a Lady’ urges

'* For the theatre see Natasha Korda, “Women’s ‘Theatrical Properties’ in Jonathan Gil Harris and Natasha Korda (eds.), Staged Properties in Early Modern English Drama (Cambridge University Press, 2002), 202—29 and Labors Lost: Women’s Work and the Early Modern English Stage (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011); Pamela Allen Brown and Peter Parolin (eds.), Women Players in England, 1500-1660: Beyond the All-Male Stage (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005). 'S Holly A. Laird, ‘“A Hand Spills from the Book’s Threshold”: Coauthorship’s Readers, PMLA, 116 (2001), 344-53. ‘4 Jeffrey Masten, Textual Intercourse: Collaboration, Authorship, and Sexualities in Renaissance Drama (Cambridge University Press, 1997), ch. 5. > See, for example, Burke, ‘Medium and Meaning’; Elizabeth Heale, “Fathers and Daughters: Four Women and their Family Albums of Verse’ in Anne Lawrence-Mathers and Phillipa Hardman (eds.), Women and Writing, c.1340-c.1650: The Domestication of Print Culture (York Medieval Press, 2010), 146-61; Jane Stevenson, “Women, Writing and Scribal Publication in the Sixteenth Century’, English Manuscript Studies, 1100-1700, 9 (2000), 1-32.

20 ‘Grossly Material Things the recipient of the ‘book’ to plant and people ‘those empty regions which

within you see’, concluding ‘without crime or envy You have roome / Here both the Scribe and Author to become’.'® The drive to rediscover women's voices has, however, been accompanied by the realization that those voices are seldom, if ever, unmediated. As Helen Ostovich and Eliz-

abeth Sauer put it: “While early modern writing in general needs to be reconceived as collective, collaborative, and occasional rather than just being identified with the production of completed, market-ready texts, this is especially true of women’s writings.’’” It is difficult not to read male

interventions in women’s texts as reproducing patriarchal control over female speech and identity, and critics are understandably resistant to reading strategies that might theorize such interactions as collaborations rather than censorship or manipulation.'® In this chapter, though, I chart the ways in which women can be understood as co- or composite authors of texts attributed to men, demonstrating that cross-sex mediation is not peculiar to women’s texts, and that critics and editors should be equally attentive to the sexed agents, discourses, and practices that inform and mediate male-authored books. As Jack Stillinger points out in his study of Romantic authorship, ‘in many cases multiple authorship begins, literally, at home’.'’ Jennifer Richards observes that, in the early modern period, ‘the domestic sphere of male homosociality—the closet, the dinner table, the bed or bedchamber, even the collaborative literary text—provides an arena for rethinking

social relations between men’.’’ Stillinger’s provocative observation, however, opens up the possibility that domestic space is also a space of heterosexual or social production. By recognizing that acts of composite authorship take place within particular locations, we are further reminded that writing is an embodied act, structured by the physical environment of writing, and that writing as practice undermines any easy distinction between literary content and material form, the working of the intellect and the situation of inscription. '© Henry King, The Poems of Henry King, ed. Margaret Crum (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), 154. Adam Smyth argues that ‘the blur of “Scribe and Author”, typical of commonplace book culture, presents an opportunity for female agency within manuscript culture’ (Commonplace Book Culture: Sixteen Traits’ in Lawrence-Mathers and Hardman (eds.), Women and Writing, 95). '7 Helen Ostovich and Elizabeth Sauer, Reading Early Modern Women: An Anthology of Texts in Manuscript and Print, 1550-1700 (New York and London: Routledge, 2004), 10.

'8 See, however, Patricia Pender, ‘Reading Bale Reading Anne Askew: Contested Collaboration in The Examinations, HLQ, 73 (2010), 507-22. Jack Stillinger, Multiple Authorship and the Myth of Solitary Genius (Oxford University Press, 1991), 50. *° Jennifer Richards, Rhetoric and Courtliness in Early Modern Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2003), 42.

Women at the Scene of Writing 21 Taken together, these productive encounters allow us to conceptualize the multiple-authored text as a series of relationships over time. In Grace Ioppolo’s terms, authorship can be understood as ‘a continual process,

not a determinate action’, though one in which, Ioppolo insists, the author often retains a determining interest.*! The women’s work I examine in this chapter highlights the tension between the desire to uncover

the precise contributions of each agent and the possibility that coauthorship leads, in Masten’s terms, to a ‘dispersal of author/ity, rather than a simple doubling of it; to revise the old aphorism, two heads are different than one’.** At the same time, I uncover evidence to support Ioppolo’s argument that authors retained an interest in the permutations of their texts. This conclusion is complicated by examples of posthumous

collaboration in which a woman prepared a husband or male family member's text for the press. Even after the literal death of the author, women collaborators often formally privileged male authorial authority, and this chapter explores the ways in which women conventionally pre-

sented their own textual interventions as secondary, while suggesting that modern readers need to be aware of the personal and cultural work these protestations are performing.

I ‘HIS SCRIBE AND AMANUENSIS’: MALE AUTHORS, WOMEN WRITERS Where Donne's writing partner is explicitly invited to take on a creative role—not only to copy ‘our manuscripts but to ‘study them and ‘write our annals—some women engaged in acts of writing that appear more reproductive than productive. Edmund Waller’s daughter, Margaret, the poet's scribe during the latter half of the seventeenth century, may be read as an obedient copyist, reproducing her father’s textual offspring in a hand described by Peter Beal as ‘unprofessional, sometimes ungainly, but always

very legible... reminiscent of the hand of Waller himself’.*? Here, the relationship is filial, and the genealogical connection is reproduced in Beal’s discovery of the genetic similarity of the pair's writing. This scene of

reproduction is evocative of Jonathan Goldberg's analysis of copying in early modern England. For Goldberg, ‘penhold takes hold of the hand’,

*! Grace loppolo, Dramatists and their Manuscripts in the Age of Shakespeare, Jonson, Middleton and Heywood: Authorship, Authority and the Playhouse (London: Routledge, 2006), 1. ** Masten, Textual Intercourse, 19.

, sig Beal, Index of English Literary Manuscripts, 2 vols. (London: Mansell, 1987-93),

22 ‘Grossly Material Things generating ‘a certain way of viewing the world through the prospect of script. To learn to write is to be produced as a ‘divided, denaturalized pedagogic subject’ within ‘an entangled scene of constraints and appropriation’.”* For Margaret Waller, to write was, in these terms, to be definitively shaped by a family resemblance.

In an earlier article, Goldberg argues that the writing hand (curiously disembodied in many writing manuals) is worked upon by the rules of writing, and brought into being—and the body brought into sentience— through the act of handling (including handling the pen). Goldberg positions the writing hand as the object of both social regulation and labour, suggesting that the writer is trapped within ‘a scriptive formation’ in which subjectivity is produced by imitating the ‘character’ of writing masters and copy-books.” Goldberg's approach denies the ‘sensuous human’ aspect of practice celebrated by Marx, seeing labour not as a mutual constitution of body and environment but as, in Paul Connerton’s terms, an act of ‘disciplinary control’.*° Tim Ingold’s critique of much anthropological body-work is pertinent here, since Goldberg too seems ‘to treat body praxis as a mere vehicle for the outward expression of meanings emanating from a higher source in culture or society... The body is rendered passive and inert, while the active role of mobilising it, putting it to use and charging it with significance is delegated to a knowing which is both detached from the body and reified as “society”.’”’

A different understanding of embodiment is offered in Helkiah Crooke’s celebration of the mobile hand in Mikrokosmographia (1615), which is strikingly reminiscent of the action of holding a pen (something

Crooke was presumably doing as he wrote). Crooke explains that the thumb is ‘set or opposed to the other four [fingers], which beeing bowed with a small flection might meete and agree with the action of the other foure opposite vnto it’.“* For Michel Serres, it is in the sensuousness of touch that we discover self: “Without this folding, without the contact of the self on itself, there would truly be no internal sense, no body properly speaking.’*’ Crooke’s fingers ‘meete and agree’, marking the point at which

*4 Jonathan Goldberg, Writing Matter: From the Hands of the English Renaissance (Stanford University Press, 1990), 8, 54, 59. See also James Daybell, Women Letter-Writers in Tudor England (Oxford University Press, 2006), 47-60. *> Jonathan Goldberg, “Hamlet’s Hand’, SQ, 39 (1988), 320. *° For Marx, see pp. 8-9 above; Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge University Press, 1989), 77. *’ ‘Tim Ingold, The Perception of the Environment: Essays in Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill

(London: Routledge, 2000), 169. *8 Helkiah Crooke, Mikrokosmographia (London: William Jaggard, 1615), Qqq5v. *? Michel Serres, The Five Senses: A Philosophy of Mingled Bodies (1985), tr. Margaret Sankey and Peter Cowley (London: Continuum, 2008), 22.

Women at the Scene of Writing 23 the body becomes conscious of itself and at which it makes contact with the world. The early modern hand occupies, as Katherine Rowe argues, a mediating position: it is ‘both figurative and corporeal, both singular and corporate, partly in and partly of the world of objects’.°° In writing, the mind is diffused throughout the bodily habits of posture and location, pen on paper, the conjunction of body, quill, and writing surface. In such a context, the disembodied hand of numerous early modern accounts of writing appears less the symptom of a regulatory apparatus and more a recognition of its status as the nexus between thought and inscription. In a subtle compliment to Lady Mary Wroth, Ben Jonson suggested that the act of copying possessed a formative force: I That have beene a lover, and could shew it, Though not in these, in rithmes not wholly dumbe, Since I exscribe your Sonnets, am become A better lover, and much better Poét.*!

Copying allows the writer to inhabit and incorporate the written word, rather than experiencing it as a ‘denaturalizing’ pedagogic habit. Even the most faithful act of copying might serve not to reproduce the social order

but to negotiate or exploit it. On 31 January 1604, Jane Jennings, of St Botulph’s-without-Aldgate in London, was alleged to have counterfeited the writing of one Christopher Hamman in a letter claiming: “M' Savericke, I understand you have paied to this bearer iii’. I praye you paye her aboue the xLs. w*. is behinde and this shalbe your discharge.’ In the act of forgery, Jennings appropriated the hand which was supposed to secure

Hamman’ identity in order to write herself into the space of economic exchange.*? Here, however, I turn to those acts of writing which might appear most divided or denaturalized—scribal copying and taking dictation—to ask how far we may conceptualize the act of writing as itself creative and recreative.

°° Katherine Rowe, ‘““God’s handy worke”: Divine Complicity and the Anatomist’s Touch’, in David Hillman and Carla Mazzio (eds.), The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern Europe (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), 289. °! Ben Jonson, ‘I That have beene a lover’ in The Complete Poetry of Ben Jonson, ed. William B. Hunter (New York: Norton, 1968), 166. ** ‘J.C. Jeaffreson (ed.), Middlesex County Records, 3 vols. (London 1974 (1886-92), I, 34. °> Jennings’s forgery can be read as one of the ‘alternative sites’ of writing that, as Goldberg acknowledges, ‘vitally contradict [writing manuals’] regulatory aims’ (Writing Matter,

9). Carolyn Sale offers the useful counter-example of Thomasine White, suspected of slander, but able to ‘defeat the prosecutor’s attempts to identify her as the author... by contending that she could neither read nor write’, suggesting the connection between intentionality and scriptive practice in certain social formations (‘Slanderous Aesthetics and the Woman Writer: the Case of Hole v. White’ in Peter Holland and Stephen Orgel (eds), From Script to Stage in Early Modern England (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2004), 187.

24 ‘Grossly Material Things There is evidence that women worked as domestic amanuenses: Lady Margaret Hoby recorded on 4 September 1601, that ‘after dinner I Copied out a letter which Mr Hoby had wretten to the Busshopp of Limbricke,

touchinge his agrement to peace.” John Donne teased the antiquarian and administrator, Sir Walter Cope, about the writerly contributions of other agents in his description of the fictive Believe you have something and

you have it. A rule for antiquities: a great book on tiny things, dictated by Walter Cope, written down by his wife, and translated into Latin by his

amanuensis John Pory.” Though the joke remains obscure, it suggests, even as it mocks, the possibility of wives taking dictation in order to create their husbands’ texts. Women also worked as copyists outside the family; Margaret Spitlehouse was a scrivener, copying wills in Bury St Edmunds between 1582 and 1596 in a ‘carefully wrought secretary script’,

whilst in 1560, the Newcastle Merchant Adventurers) Company paid “Thomas Trestrome wyft’ 13s. 4d. ‘for writing of an order betwixt the awners and marynars’.”°

Better known is Esther Inglis (1571-1624), daughter of another skilled calligrapher, Marie Presot, Inglis produced at least fifty-five manuscript books, usually religious in content, small or miniature, written in a variety of hands, carefully decorated and bound, and circulated within the patronage economy of the Scottish and English courts.” A number of the books contain self-portraits, usually presenting Inglis

surrounded by the tools of her writing (see figure 1.1). Late in life, Inglis materialized the centrality of bodily presence to her writing practice in a playful ideogram, offering Prince Charles ‘this two yeeres labours of the small cunning, that my tottering right «> now being in the age of fiftie three yeeres, might aftoord’.”’ Both Georgianna Ziegler and *' Margaret Hoby, The Private Life of an Elizabethan Lady: The Diary of Lady Margaret Hoby, 1599-1603, ed. Joanna Moody (lhrupp: Sutton Publishing Ltd, 1998), 162. * Piers Brown offers a new translation of Donne's The Courtiers Library, in ‘“Hac ex consilio meo via progredieris’: Courtly Reading and Secretarial Mediation in Donne's /he Courtier’s Library , Renaissance Quarterly, 61 (2008), 833-66. °° John Craig, “Notes and Queries: Margaret Spitlehouse, Female Scrivener’, Local Population Studies, 460 (1991), 54; British Book Trade Index, “\restrome, Mrs’, . This phrase may indicate either that Trestrome worked as a copyist or that she collected payment on behalf of her husband. Women’s work as scribes in mid- to late-medieval Europe is well attested. See Alison I. Beach, Women as Scribes: Book Production and Monastic Reform in Twelfth-Century Bavaria (Cambridge University Press, 2004);

Richard H. Rouse and Mary A. Rouse, Manuscripts and their Makers: Commercial Book Production in Medieval Paris, 1200-1500, 2 vols. (London: Harvey Miller, 2000). *” See A. H. Scott-Elliot and Elspeth Yeo, ‘Calligraphic Manuscripts of Esther Inglis (1571-1624): A Catalogue’, The Papers of the bibliographic Society of America, 84 (1990), 12-14. * Esther Inglis, presentation manuscript for Charles 1, showing ideogram of a pointing hand, BL Royal MS 17D.XVI, f. 4r.

Women at the Scene of Writing 25

OP a ¥ fee ep en ak bi a UN

=e FES = ae ; a 7 ‘| gee ES ea eee” IP Seeee —*- aPeers) ps ee a See \*)i eee J NS 6 eee wvearns Bo2 3ee | See =e ee oer Gi ee i) eee ory sc Ne 6 see 7 \a hee ). asiyfeae? a¥ {-=a -‘aLA PBaan . a =< a ne \ *ej. : ,4 ‘\: Stee a wb ae ee IY

pS ate a = a) — Bike = os oe oe iaant ISG ! Heather Wolfe, “The Scribal Hands and Dating of Lady Falkland: Her Life’, English Manuscript Studies, 9 (2000), 207. See also Wolfe, “Reading Bells and Loose Papers: Reading and Writing Practices of the English Benedictine Nuns of Cambrai and Paris’ in Victo-

ria E. Burke and Jonathan Gibson (eds.), Early Modern Womens Manuscript Writing (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), 135-56. 2 Claire Walker describes the ‘biased recruitment patterns [which] determined the insular nature of the cloisters... This exclusivity reflected the nuns’ close identification with the plight of their co-religionists in England’ (“Doe not supose me a well mortifyed Nun dead to the world”: Letter-Writing in Early Modern English Convents’ in James Daybell (ed.), Early Modern Womens Letter Writing, 1450-1700 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), 161). Walker notes that there were twenty-two contemplative English post-Reformation cloisters by 1700 (160). See also Caroline Bowden, “The English Convents in Exile and Questions of National Identity, c.1600—1688’ in David Worthington (ed.), Emigrants and Exiles from the Three Kingdoms in Europe, 1603-1688 (Amsterdam: Brill, 2010), 297-314; Cordula van Wyhe (ed.), Female Monasticism in Early Modern Europe: An Interdisciplinary View (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008). > Augustine Baker, Apology’ in Ampleforth Abbey, MS SS118, 100. Cited in Heather Wolfe, “Dame Barbara Constable: Catholic Antiquarian, Advisor, and Closet Missionary’, in Corthell et al. (eds.), Catholic Culture, 159.

Women at the Scene of Writing 29 active and urgent labour, presenting, as Claire Walker argues, ‘manifold

Opportunities for missionary work and political action’. The work of contemplation that underlay the exertions of copying was itself a mode of active spiritual engagement. For the women of the post-Reformation English convents copying and

textual dissemination produced and legitimated networks and correspondences which extended beyond the physical boundaries of the religious community, and tested the strictures of post-Tridentine monastic enclosure.’ When the Cambrai daughter house was founded at Paris in 1651 the nuns copied texts for the benefit of their sisters in religion. Dame Barbara Constable was a prolific transcriber who reproduced excerpts from Julian of Norwich’s The Shewings of Love as well as the writ-

ings of spiritual leaders including Johann Tauler, Heinrich Suso, and Augustine Baker.*° Dame Margaret Gascoigne also compiled an extensive anthology of devotional materials, including the Shewings.’’ At the Con-

vent of the Immaculate Conception in Ghent, the first Abbess, Lucy (Elizabeth) Knatchbull (1584-1629), wrote spiritual meditations and exercises and copied out an inspirational tract by the Abbess of Elpidia in Saxony to be read by the sisters in her care.?® Few of Knatchbull’s writings survive since ‘before she died, [she] commanded...a great quantity of her most private Papers to be burnt’.”’ The few that remained were compiled by Sir Tobie Matthew, the Catholic son of the York Archbishop, to form part of his Life of the Abbess. Matthew describes Knatchbull’s religious life as itself a process of copying, in terms that reveal the formative force of ‘copy in the period: The whole life of this happy creature was nothing (during all her time of Religion) but a mere Sacrifice of all her excellent parts to the greater glory of our Lord Jesus, for whom her rare examples made no less than a most irrefragable proof that he came...to sanctify us by his celestial Life and Conver-

sation; for out of that Original it was that she took and made the Copy of hers by his Grace.

4 Claire Walker, Gender and Politics in Early Modern Europe: English Convents in France and the Low Countries (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 119. > On post-Tridentine convent life see Mary Laven, Virgins of Venice: Broken Vows and Cloistered Lives in the Renaissance Convent (London and New York: Viking, 2002). °° MS St Joseph's College, Upholland, Lancashire (U). >? St Mary’s Abbey, Colwich, H18.

8 Caroline M. K. Bowden, ‘Knatchbull, Elizabeth (1584-1629), ODNB, accessed 16 June 2008. »° Sir Tobie Matthew, The Life of Lady Lucy Knatchbull, ed. David Knowles (London: Sheed and Ward, 1931), 116.

° bid., 166.

30 ‘Grossly Material Things The term ‘copy’ refers not to Knatchbull’s imitation of Christ's virtues but

to those virtues themselves, which stand as a pattern (‘copy’) to be imitated.°' The copying work undertaken by nuns also stood as both replication and example. Taken together, these women’s scribal labours ask us to reconsider the secondary or mechanical nature of copying. Rather than being ‘the disowned mark of material production’, the writing hand becomes emblematic of ‘the interlaced and mutual nature of divine and human agency’.” It is plausible that women introduced, consciously or otherwise, hints of their own concerns or interpretations into the texts they wrote, and that the material circumstances of their writing might also intrude upon the text, not least in the particularities of handwriting, orthography, and punctuation. Anne Lady Bacon invoked the possibility that physical circumstances might shape writing when she described a letter to her ‘very loving friend Mr Parr’ as being written ‘by a dim candle, and old eyes going to bed’.®? Even where

it is presented as wholly faithful, copying is described as a physical and sometimes transformative activity. The copyist is a co-labourer with the author or the divine word, reproducing, but also experiencing, the formative force of the text. Women’s scribal work testifies to the broader ramifications of female literacy and to urgent shared agendas, whilst relocating the practice of composition in the processes of inscription and mutual labour.

IT ‘PERUSINGE AND CONFERRINGE’: TRANSLATION AS COLLABORATION As part of their work of manuscript production, the nuns of the postReformation convents also engaged in translation. The title-page of Francois Paludanus’s A Short Relation, of the Life, Virtves, and Miracles, of S. Elizabeth (1628) makes no mention of its author but names the woman

who translated it from the Dutch: “Sister Catharine Francis, Abbess of the English Monasterie of S. FRANCIS third Rule in Bruxelles’. The text further privileges female authority through the inclusion of an engraved portrait of Saint Elizabeth on the flyleaf. In a dedication which returns the book to its translator, Father Francis Bellamy explained: ‘Having seen in

English the little booke of the life of S. ELISABETH Queen of Portugall...I knew it to be your Reuerences hand wrighting, and being farder °! ‘Copy’, def. 8c. OED, 2nd edn (1989). °° Goldberg, Writing Matter, 308; Rowe, ‘“God’s handy worke”’, 37. °3 Anne Lady Bacon to Mr Parr, 1613, in Jane Lady Cornwallis Bacon, The Private Correspondence of Jane Lady Cornwallis Bacon, 1613-1644, ed. Joanna Moody (London: Associated University Presses, 2003), 67.

Women at the Scene of Writing 31 certified that it was your owne labour, and that you had your selfe translated

it out of the dutch.’ Catharine Wilcox, widow of a London silk-merchant and citizen, was the first Abbess of the English Franciscan convent at Brussels. Bellamy’s privileging of her ‘hand wrighting’ is reminiscent of Goodwin and Nye’s address to Elizabeth Brooke, discussed above, which equally

prized a woman’s manual labour. Bellamy describes his own work in ‘conferr[ing Wilcox’s translation] with the originall; and finding it in all things to agree, and to be 4 mirrour, not only for Religious, but also for Princes’. His syntax allows the mirror to reflect both ways: the text is so faithful that it is a mirror of the original, and this scrupulous reproduction allows it to function as a formative reflection for its religious and royal readers. That one identifiable reader was a woman again raises the question of exemplarity: did the ‘Elizabeth Rutcliff’ who signed her name on the title-page of the copy now held by the British Library enjoy the concordance between her name and that of St Elizabeth or appreciate the labour of translation and transmission undertaken by Wilcox?® Bellamy’s stress on Catharine Francis’s accuracy might seem to establish

her translation as derivative rather than inspired, a conclusion reinforced by her sex. Massimiliano Morini reproduces a critical truism when he observes that: Translation asked of translators a personal contribution, an infusion, as it were, of their personality in the final result: at least, it did so for men, for with women things stood differently. It has been observed, in point of fact, that while writing was often ‘presented as a violation of a woman's chastity’, or at least ‘as a male prerogative’, translation, particularly if exercised within a devout sphere, could be the only activity permitted to women, for in their case it could be seen as a mechanical exercise, one that would occupy the mind and body much as embroidery did.°”

Morini’s observation is based on a critical double bind through which the devaluing of women’s labour as mechanical and the devaluing of transla-

tion as derivative perpetuate each other. When brought together with prevailing conceptions of early modern women’s writing practice as ama-

teur, occasional, and unschooled, translation is haunted more urgently than ever by ‘the fear of error, amateurism, opportunism—an abusive exploitation of originality’.°® As Sherry Simon notes with reference to “ Francis Paludanus, A Short Relation of the Life, Virtves, and Miracles, of S. Elizabeth Called the Peace-maker (Brussels: Ihon Pepermans, 1628), A2r—v.

6 Paludanus, A Short Relation, A2v. 6 BL 701.a.5.(2.). °” Massimiliano Morini, Tudor Translation in Theory and Practice (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 24. 8 Lawrence Venuti, 7he Scandals of Translation: Towards an Ethics of Difference (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), 31.

32 ‘Grossly Material Things John Florio's assertion that translations are ‘reputed femalls, delivered at second hand’: ““Woman” and “translator” have been relegated to the same position of discursive inferiority. Scholars of women’s writing have unwittingly participated in this tradition by describing translation as secondary: the lesser half of a binary which privileges original composition.” Instead, I argue, women’s translation, like men’s, was understood as a skilled, and frequently a collaborative, venture, in which translator and author both worked to discover the full sense of the text.” The critical relegation of translation to an ancillary category is also tied to women’s subject matter. Though women translated verse, plays, prose narratives, and treatises, the majority of their translations were religious. For Tina Krontiris: “The acceptable literary areas for women were basically two: religion and domesticity... [T]he permission to translate did not also carry with it a licence to cross the boundaries of gender and sub-

ject matter.’ The doubled denigration of women and of translation is reinforced by the assumption that religious texts were personal, devotional, and uncontroversial, rather than being concerned with the public Church, Church politics, and doctrinal controversy. Writing in 1578, however, Margaret Tyler framed her decision to translate a romance as an attempt to avoid the contentious topic of religion, noting that she ‘durst not trust mine own iudgment sufficiently, if matter of controuersie were

handled’.’? However disingenuous Tyler’s defence of her decision to ® John Florio, ‘Dedication’ to Michel de Montaigne, The Essayes or Morall, Politike and Militarie Discourses, tr. John Florio (London: V. Sims f. E. Blount, 1603), A2r; Sherry Simon, Gender in Translation: Cultural Identity and the Politics of Transmission (London: Routledge, 1996), 1. ” In an influential collection Margaret Hannay describes women as being ‘debarred from original discourse by the absence of rhetorical training, urged to translation for the greater glory of God’ (‘Introduction in Margaret Hannay and Margaret Patterson (eds.), Silent But for the Word: Tudor Women as Patrons, Translators, and Writers of Religious Works

(Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1985), 9), Mary Ellen Lamb states that ‘Renaissance women could, at least theoretically, have chosen vehicles which permitted their selfexpression; but they did not’ (“The Cooke Sisters’, ibid., 124), and Gary Waller contrasts Mary Sidney’s output with the writing he imagines she should have undertaken: ‘She wrote no prose romance; she edited [Sidney's] Arcadia. She wrote no original drama; following Philip’s exhortation, she translated Robert Garnier’s closet-drama Antonie. Instead of composing a heroic poem, she translated one of Petrarch’s Trionfi; instead of writing an original devotional treatise, she translated Discours de la vie et de la mort by her brother’s friend, Philippe de Mornay’ (“The Emergence of Renaissance Women’s Writing’, ibid., 246). “' Brenda Hosington notes the significance of translation within the early book trades (‘Commerce, Printing, and Patronage’ in Gordon Brady et al. (eds.), The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English (Oxford University Press, 2010), 47-57); her forthcoming monograph, ‘Weaving the Web’: Women Translators in England, 1500-1660, promises to reshape this field of study. ” Tina Krontiris, Oppositional Voices: Women as Writers and Translators of Literature in the English Renaissance (London: Routledge, 1992), 17. ” Diego Ortufez, The First Part of the Mirrour of Princely Deedes and Knighthood, tr. Margaret Tyler (London: Thomas East, 1580), A4v.

Women at the Scene of Writing 33 translate a prose romance, it suggests that women’s translation of religious texts could be controversial and important. Anne (Cooke), Lady Bacon’s translation of John Jewel’s Apologia Ecclesiae Anglicanae (1564) was placed in all churches by the end of the seventeenth century, and prompted C. S. Lewis to observe that ‘If quality without bulk were enough, Lady Bacon might be put forward as the best of all sixteenth-century translators.’”* On

the other side of the confessional divide, Elizabeth Cary, Viscountess Falkland’s 1630 translation of Zhe Reply of the Most Illustrious Cardinal of Perron is reputed to have been burnt when it was discovered in England, scarcely evidence of its ‘acceptable’ nature. Morini’s claim that women’s translation was inherently mechanical is belied by the creative complexity of several surviving examples.” Nor is it

supported by other contemporary evidence. Patronizing or derogatory attitudes towards women’s translation, or translation more generally, can of course be found. In A Defence of his earlier Apologie (translated by Anne Bacon), Bishop John Jewel accused his enemies of unoriginality, declaring: “Ye are but Translatours: ye are no Authours. Yf euery birde shoulde fetche againe his owne feathers, alas your poore Chickens woulde die for colde.’”° Yet in Nicholas Breton’s An Olde Mans Lesson (1605), Chremes advises his friend Pamphilius on the best way to manage a wife: ‘if she belearned and studious, perswade her to translation, it will keepe her from Idlenes, & it is a cunning kinde taske: if she bee vnlearned, commend her huswifery, and make much of her carefulnesse’.’”” As in Morini’s and Krontiris’s accounts, women’s translation is aligned with domestic labour and will keep a woman from dangerous ‘Idlenes’. There is no suggestion, however, that this occupation is mechanical: it is a ‘cunning kinde taske’ which demands ability, skill, and dexterity.

Religious translation was particularly ‘cunning’ work, since early moderns ‘distinguished between approaches to different kinds of text— religious and secular, verse and prose... The higher the status of the text, the greater was the pressure on the translator to follow the original working closely.’ In the dedicatory letter “To the right honorable learned and ”* Patricia Demers, Women’s Writing in English: Early Modern England (University of Toronto Press, 2005), 85; C. S. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century Excluding Drama (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954), 307. ”™ See Danielle Clarke, “The Politics of Translation and Gender in the Countess of Pembroke’s Antonie’, Translation and Literature, 6 (1997), 149-66; Demers, Womens Writing, 64-98; and the essays in Hannay and Patterson (eds.), Silent But For the Word. © John Jewel, A Defence of the Apologie of the Churche of Englande (London: Henry Wykes, 1567), C2v. ’” Nicholas Breton, An Olde Mans Lesson, and a Young Mans Loue (London: Edward Allde for Edward White, 1605), E4r—v.

’8 Peter Burke, “Cultures of Translation in Early Modern Europe’ in Burke and R. Po-Chia Hsia (eds.), Cultural Translation in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2007), 28.

34 ‘Grossly Material Things vertuous Ladie A. B.’ which accompanied Bacon’s translation of Jewel’s Apologie, Matthew Parker noted that he and Jewel had scrutinized her

translation, informing her that ‘bothe the chiefe author of the Latine worke and I, seuerallye perusinge and conferringe youre whole translation, haue without alteration allowed of it’. He goes on to comment ‘ye haue done pleasure to the Author of the Latine boke, in deliueringe him by your cleare translation from the perrils of ambiguous and doubtful constructions: and in making his good woorke more publikely benef-

ciall’.” Gemma Allen notes that the vernacular public who received Bacon's translation may have prized both her turn to alliteration and use of the treasure-house of “Old and Middle English words as well as colloquialisms, to give an authentically “English” feel to her translation’, an effort which Parker recognized in his praise of Bacon’s defence of ‘the good fame and estimation of your owne natiue tongue, shewing it so able to contend with a worke originally written in the most praised speech’.*” In many ways, Parker, like Bellamy, seems to deny the translator's authority, insisting that the work needs to be authorized, and closing the epistle by informing Bacon that he has had her translation printed according to ‘a reasonable pollicye: that is, to preuent suche excuses as your modestie woulde haue made in staye of publishinge it’.*’ The invocation of Jewel’s approval in the dedication stands as evidence for Ioppolo’s asser-

tion that authors continued to have an interest in their texts during the processes of transmission. At the same time, however, Parker’s praises establish Bacon's translation as a skilful act of collaboration in an ongoing,

though mediated, correspondence with the author: her translation is ‘cleare’ and doctrinally precise, avoiding the ‘perrils’ of hostile or mistaken constructions. Where Bassnett and Lefevere characterize translation as a ‘rewriting’ which is also a manipulation, Parker presents it as a collaborative endeavour to convey authorial meaning.®** Allen argues persuasively that ‘Anne repeatedly establishes an authorial presence’ through personal pronouns and direct appeals to the readers, yet that presence is framed as a decidedly social and collaborative one.*

Similarly diverse modes of collaboration are evident in Elizabeth Tudor’s translation of Marguerite de Navarre’s A Godly Medytacyon of

” Jewel, Apologie, T12r.

8° Gemma Allen, ““A Briefe and Plaine Declaration”: Lady Anne Bacon’s 1564 Translation of the Apologia Ecclesiae Anglicanae’ in Lawrence-Mathers and Hardman (eds.), Women and Writing, 62-76; 74, 72; Jewel, Apologie, 13r. *! Jewel, Apologie, M12v.

8° Susan Bassnett and André Lefevere, “General Editors’ Preface’ to Bassnett and Lefevere (eds.), Translation, History and Culture (New York: Pinter Publishers, 1990), xii. 83 Allen, ‘“A Briefe and Plaine Declaration” ’, 75.

Women at the Scene of Writing 35 the Christen Sowle (1548). The princess undertook the translation as a youthful exercise for presentation to her stepmother, Katherine Parr in 1544. In 1548, John Bale published a lightly edited version of Elizabeth’s text. In his dedication to the princess, Bale recalled: “I receyed your noble boke [and] also your golden sentences out of the sacred scriptures with nolesse grace than lernynge in foure noble languages.’ Having circulated the translations among ‘the lerned men of our cytie’, Bale discovered that his correspondents were so impressed with the royal translator's ‘faythe, scyence, & experyence of languages & letters’ that they could not ‘witholde their lerned handes from the publyshynge therof, to the high prayse of God the geuer’.® It is not clear who undertook the work of comparing Elizabeth's text with the French, and restoring several lines.® This silent intervention, however, establishes the processes of translation, comparison, and revision as ongoing and perfectible. The circuit did not always close with a male intervention: according to Thomas Stapleton, Margaret

(More) Roper proposed that one obscure section of Cyprian’s letters should be emended from nisi vos to nervos, a reading subsequently adopted by Erasmus.*° Though his elision of the details of transmission and alteration is a politic one, Bale situates Elizabeth’s translation within a culture

of learning and instruction (though also a culture of compliment to a probable future queen) and establishes her work as part of the communal endeavour of humanist, Reformist translation. Richard Hyrde praised Margaret Roper’s translation of Erasmus’s own A Devout Treatise vpon the Pater Noster (c.1526), commenting: ‘I dare be bolde to say it / that who so lyst and well can conferre and examyne the

translacyon w' the originall / he shall nat fayle to fynde that she hath shewed herselfe...erudite and elegant in eyther tong.’*’ The act of comparison is here part of the work of reading and results in praise of the

translator. Hyrde’s insistence that Roper’s translation should be ‘examyne[d]’ also offers a proleptic account of a moment in the textual history of the Devout Treatise. The printer, Thomas Berthelet was examined by the Vicar-General and admitted that ‘he had printed a certain work called The Treatise of the Pater Noster translated... by the wife of Mr 8* Marguerite de Navarre, A Godly Medytacyon of the Christen Sowle, tr. Elizabeth Tudor (Wesel: Dirik van der Straten, 1548), A7r, B1r—v. 8° See Anne Lake Prescott, “The Pearl of the Valois and Elizabeth I: Marguerite de Navarre’s Miroir and ‘Tudor England’ in Hannay and Patterson (eds.), Silent but for the Word,

61-76.

x “Thomas Stapleton, The Life and Illustrious Martyrdom of Sir Thomas More (1588), tr. Philip E. Hallet (New York: Benziger Brothers, 1928), 104. *” Desiderius Erasmus, A Deuoute Treatise vpon the Pater Noster... Tourned in to Englisshe by a Yong Vertuous and Well Lerned Gentylwoman of. xix. Yere of Age (London: Thomas

Berthelet, 1526), B2v.

36 ‘Grossly Material Things Roper in the vulgar tongue’.** Though the book was allowed it aroused suspicions of Reformist heresy, a further reminder that religious translation was not uncontroversial. Comparison and the weighing of alternative versions was also an appropriate part of translation practice: when Mary (Sidney) Herbert translated Philippe de Mornay’s Discours de la vie et de la mort in 1592 she drew on Edward Aggas’s 1576 translation as well as at least one French edition of the text.* The act of translation was properly one of comparison, communication, and exchange. In each of these examples, it was the male correspondent who chose to

publish, and to publicly acknowledge, a woman’s translation. When women produced their own paratexts they were less likely to highlight the social and intellectual contexts of their work. Instead, they showed themselves at home with the tropes and figures that Morini, following Linde-

man and Hermans, suggests constitute early modern theories of translation.”” Despite the ‘scarcity of resources available to assist translation in the early modern period’,’' women signalled themselves as being fully familiar with its theory as well as practice, able to adopt and appropriate the common prefatory rhetoric of transfer and transformation. Ina

dedication which presents her 1560 translation of the Sermons of John

Calvin as a new years gift to her fellow Genevan exile Katherine Willoughby Bertie, Duchess of Suffolk, Anne Vaughan Locke (later Prowse) explained: “This receipte God the heauenly Physitian hath taught, his most excellent Apothecarie Master Iohn Caluine hath compounded & I your graces most bounden & humble haue put into an Englishe box, &

do present vnto you.” Jane Donawerth suggests that this elaborate metaphor signals Locke’s gendered concerns: ‘the book is presented...as both a prayer and a medicine, gifts regularly exchanged by womer’.”? It

is also, however, one of the most common metaphors for translation, which describes:

88 Arthur W. Reed, “Ihe Regulation of the Book Trade before the Proclamation of 1538’, Transactions of the Bibliographical Society, 15 (1917-19), 166. ® See Diane Bornstein, “The Style of the Countess of Pembroke’s Translation of Philippe de Mornay’s Discours de la vie et de la mort’, in Hannay and Patterson (eds.), Silent but for the Word, 126-48.

°° Morini, Tudor Translation, 35. See also Yehudi Lindeman, “Translation in the Renaissance: A Context and a Map’, Canadian Review of Comparative Literature, 8 (1981), 204-16; and Theo Hermans, ‘Images of Translation: Metaphor and Imagery in the Renaissance Discourse of Translation’ in Hermans (ed.), Zhe Manipulation of Literature. Studies in Literary Translation (London: Croom Helm, 1985), 103-35. 7! Burke, “Cultures of Translation’, 13. ** Jean Calvin, Sermons of Iohn Caluin, vpon the Songe that Ezechias Made, tr. Anne Locke (London: Iohn Day, 1560), A3r. °> Jane Donawerth, “Women’s Poetry and the Tudor-Stuart System of Gift Exchange’ in Burke et al. (eds.), Women, Writing, and the Reproduction of Culture, 17.

Women at the Scene of Writing 37 a process whereby a precious core (a pearl, a jewel, a medicine) is brought without diminution, and without alteration, from one language to another. The outside may be changed, and indeed impoverished (the jewel is set in a rough casket, the medicine in a wooden box): but it is irrelevant. These figures... reflect the medieval emphasis on ‘sentence’ as the only constitutive element of a text.”

Though she offers a faithful translation in the medieval tradition, Locke works a subtle change in the terms of the trope: she does not denigrate her ‘boxe’ as either poor or wooden, and her humility is directed towards her patron rather than her translation, which is presented as a necessary third step in a communal and connected process of distillation and presentation. The extent of Locke's collaboration with Calvin is suggested in the following sentence, in which she speaks confidently for the reformer, as well as for herself: “My thankes are taken away & drowned by the greate excesse of duetie that I owe you: Master Caluine thinketh his paynes recompensed if your grace or any Christian take profit of it.’” Brenda Hosington notes that ‘a very high proportion of dedications penned by women translators are addressed to women’, perhaps suggesting social and intellectual bonds, a recognition of a mutual interest in the provision of vernacular texts, or, on occasion, ties of kinship.”° Elizabeth, Lady Russell, sister to Anne Bacon, revised a customary trope when she translated a French version of a Latin original, dedicating A Way of Recon-

ciliation of a Good and Learned Man Touching the Trueth, Nature, and Substance of the Body and Blood of Christ in the Sacrament (1605), to her daughter, Anne Herbert. The text was, she says, ‘Made aboue fiftie yeeres

since in Germanie, After by traueile a French creature, Now naturalized by mee into English like to his learned Author’.”” Russell calls attention to

the English birthright of the anonymous author. ‘The text’s translation from Latin into French comes about through painful ‘traueile’ which leaves it tainted with the bestial and the foreign, ‘a French creature’. In contrast, its further translation into English functions as a return to its native and proper form, free from the taint of suspect Continental mores. For Russell, the passage between cultures is a journey that restores the text to its native clarity at the same time as it delivers it to the author's country of birth. Russell thus engages in a witty reworking of one of the key tropes

used by translators in their dedicatory defences and descriptions: the metaphor portraying ‘the original author as being taught English, brought

4 Morini, Tudor Translation, 47. °° Calvin, Sermons, A3r-v. °° Hosington, ‘Commerce, Printing, and Patronage’, 56. ” A Way of Reconciliation of a Good and Learned Man, tt. Elizabeth Russell (London: R. B[arker], 1605), A2v.

38 ‘Grossly Material Things to England, even transported by the translator’.”> Where Lawrence Venuti

highlights ‘the violence that resides in the very purpose and activity of translation’ as it works to ‘bring back a cultural other as the same, the recognizable, even the familiar’, Russell presents translation as a restoration rather than an alteration, one that renders the text more like the author than the author himself first made it.” Other women expressed concern for those contemporaries who did not

share their linguistic skills. When Margaret Tyler translated Ortifez’s Mirrour of Princely Deeds and Knighthood she explained that ‘the invention, disposition, trimming, and what els in this story, is wholy an other mans, my part none therein but the translation’.'"’ Morini reads Tyler's statement as a disavowal of creative engagement, separating the transla-

tion from the rhetorical organization of the source text, but we may equally see it as an advertisement of Tyler’s familiarity with rhetorical structures and the question of whether a translation should engage in inventio. She declares that her task is ‘as it were onely in giuing entertain-

ment to a straunger, before this time unacquainted with our countrie guise, collapsing the twin tropes of transporting the text to the translators native soil and of reclothing it. Tyler also reworks the terms of ver-

nacular dissemination, accusing gentlemen readers of resisting the widespread circulation of the text with the observation: ‘I perceiue some may be rather angrie to see their Spanish delight tourned to an English pastime.’'®' The move from humanist ‘delight’ to a rougher ‘English pastime’ mirrors Tyler's breaching of class boundaries as she opens a text which noble readers have enjoyed in Spanish to a non-elite, vernacular readership.

At the end of her ‘Preface to the reader’ of Bernardino Ochino’s Certayne Sermons (1551), Anne Cooke shows a similar concern for the

vernacular, explaining that since ‘he preacheth in the Italyan toung, whyche all men understand not, I haue translated vi of hys Sermons out of hys toung in to Englysh’.""’ The print history of Cooke’s translations helps to illuminate the shifting presentation of women’s translation. In 1548 two Sermons of Barnardine Ochine of Sena were published in a slim volume. The book does not identify its translator who, in a letter from “The interpretovr to the gentle reader’, asks pardon for ‘my grosse tearmes

°§ Morini, Tudor Translation, 54. ” Lawrence Venuti, Zhe Translators Invisibility: A History of Translation (London: Routledge, 1995), 18.

© Orttiez, Mirrour, A3v. '8! Ortuhez, Mirrour, AAv. ' Bernardino Ochino, Certayne Sermons of the Ryghte Famous and Excellente Clerk Master Barnardine Ochine, tr. Anne Cooke (London: John Day, 1551), A3r [STC 18766].

Women at the Scene of Writing 39 as of a begynner and promises ‘I shalbe redye and wyllynge hereafter when god geueth better knowlege...to turne mo godly sermons of the sayd mayster Barnardine into Englishe for the enformacion of all that desyre to know the truth.’ It was not until she fulfilled this promise, with the Fouretene Sermons of 1551, published by John Day, that Anne Cooke was revealed as Ochino’s interpreter. With Cooke’s title-page appearance as ‘A.C.’ comes a new concern for

the paratextual presentation of the translator. Cooke's letter to her mother, in which she explains that she has undertaken the translation as an answer to reproofs against her ‘vaine studye in the Italyan tonge’ is prefaced by a letter from ‘G. B.’ “To the Christen Reader’, which hails Cooke as exemplary while assuring the reader that she ‘neuer gaddid

farder then hir fathers house to learne the language’.' This addition suggests the extent to which the proliferation and formalization of paratextual matter contributed to the presentation and self-presentation of women. Early texts translated by women rarely contain an apology for the work that has been undertaken, while later texts draw attention to the woman’s sex, and encourage a specifically sexed deployment of

the modesty topos. Humility is a conventional introductory trope among men as well as women writers, but it is not one that Morini includes in his list of prefatory figures.'” It is, in part, because he does not read their protestations of inadequacy with his usual regard for figurative meaning that Morini is able to dismiss women’s translation as mechanical and unthinking. A version of the modesty topos prefaces Anne Prowse’s translation of Jean Tafhn'’s Of the Markes of the Children of God (1590). Prowse explains in her

dedication to the Countess of Warwick that ‘great things by reason of my sex, | may not doo, and that which I may, I ought to doo, I haue according to my duetie brought my poore basket of stones to the strengthening of the walles of that Ierusalem whereof (by Grace) we are all both Citizens and members’.'°° A number of critics have noted Prowse’s humility, reading it as

a recognition that women should not trespass in the realm of writing. Prowse’s version of this topos is not, however, self-effacing: it figures her '° Bernardino Ochino, Sermons of Barnardine Ochine (London: R. Carr for W. Redell, 1548), A3v—A4r [STC 18764]. '04 Barnardino Ochino, Fouretene Sermons of Barnardine Ochyne, Concernyng the Predes-

tinaction and Eleccion of God, tr. Anne Cooke (London: John Day and William Seres, 1551), A2v [STC 18767]. '® On the ‘modesty prologue’ see Peter J. Lucas, “Ihe Growth and Development of English Literary Patronage in the Later Middle Ages and Early Renaissance’, The Library, 6th ser., 4 (1982), 219-48. '06 Jean Taflin, Of the Markes of the Children of God and of their Comforts in Afflictions (London: Thomas Orwin for Thomas Man, 1590), A4r.

40 ‘Grossly Material Things translation as an integral part of the collective activity required to build the textual walls of the new Jerusalem. Women, and their male readers and collaborators, presented the work of translation in a variety of ways. In doing so, they showed an awareness of, and an ability to rework, the metaphors which articulated the differing ends of translation practice. Both women and men presented female translators as partners in a collaborative endeavour to discover the author's meaning, a process which took place within an extended circuit of exchange, comparison, and mutual correction.

II] ‘HIS DEARE WIFE AND EXECUTRIX’: A PREHISTORY OF THE EDITOR In accounts of women’ translation we see a tension between two dynamics of publication: one in which women's texts are ostensibly published without their permission in order to circumvent their modest refusals, another in which women’ translation is crucial to texts’ reproduction and circulation. A different relationship between translation and transmission is figured in the Jesuit Father Alfonsus Rodriguez's Treatise of Mentall Prayer (1627). In a dedication to the ‘Right Reverend Lady Abbesse of the English Religious Dames, of the Order of S. Benet in Gant’, Lucy Knatchbull, John Wilson explained his choice of dedicatee: “Since by the instinct of Nature, all things acknowledge the Fountayne, whence originally they flow, I should haue wronged this Excellent TREATISE, had I directed the same, vnto any other,

then your LADISHIPPS Hands, from whome I first receaued it; and to whome, by the TRANSLATOVSRS Intention, and for many other respects, it is singularly due.’'”’ The text is figured as being the peculiar property of the

Abbess because it has been in her possession, and because she passed it on to Wilson. The dictates of property are described as possessing creative authority, through the metaphor of the originary fountain.’ Women were frequently involved in the transmission of male-authored texts. The first printed edition of George Herbert’s Zhe Temple derives

from a manuscript fair copy prepared by Nicholas Ferrar’s nieces, the scissor-wielding readers of the religious community at Little Gidding,'’” '°” Alfonsus Rodriguez, A Treatise of Mentall Prayer, tr. Tobie Matthew (St Omer: English College Press, 1627), T121—v.

'°8 On the significance of the fountain for early modern readers see Hester Lees-Jeftries, Englands Helicon: Fountains in Early Modern Literature and Culture (Oxford University Press, 2007). ' On Little Gidding, and Herbert’s connections with Ferrar see Paul Dyck, ‘“So Rare a Use”: Scissors, Reading and Devotion at Little Gidding’, George Herbert Journal, 27 (2003), 67-81; Joyce Ransome, “George Herbert, Nicholas Ferrar, and the “Pious Works” of Little Gidding’, George Herbert Journal, 31 (2007-8), 1-19.

Women at the Scene of Writing 4] while the Jesuit Henry Garnet, awaiting execution, wrote to Anne Vaux describing his knowledge of the Gunpowder Plot and his own innocence, in a letter identified by its interceptor, the recusant-hunter Sir William Waad, as being sent from “Garnet to Mrs Vaulx, to be published after his death, by her and the Jesuytes’.''® Dedicating Richard Niccols’s A Daystarre for Darke-wandring Soules (1613) “To the right honovrable, and truely religious Lady, the Lady ANNE GLEMHAM’, ‘J.C.’ explained that the treatise was ‘made for the priuate vse of himselfe and his Wife, who being a godly and religious Gentlewoman, imparted the same to some few of her friends; amongst whom my selfe (as vnworthiest of those few) had a written Copie’ which he caused to be published.''' Both Niccols and his wife profited privately from Niccols’s meditation, but her religious copying was central to its wider circulation and eventual appearance

in print. Texts also moved from manuscript to print upon the author's death, and widows were often responsible for securing the publication of their

deceased husbands’ writings. In a remarkable portrait, Mrs Clement Edmondes aligned herself with her husband’s popular Observations upon Caesars Commentaries (1600); clad in an elaborate costume, possibly inherited from Queen Elizabeth, she faces the viewer, and, with her right hand, holds open a copy of her husband’s book, which replicates the flyleaf illustration from either the 1604 edition published by William Pon-

sonby, or one issue of the 1609 edition published by Matthew Lownes (figure 1.2)."! Roger Ascham’s The Scholemaster (1570) contains a dedication written by Margaret Ascham, reminding Sir William Cecil of his former acquaintance with her husband and her new status as a ‘poore widow [with] a great sort of orphanes’.''? Ascham comments little on the work itself, presenting herself as the faithful conduit for her husband’s text, while assuming a proprietary claim. Anne Austin, widow of William Austin, was even more self-effacing. Although the STC states that Austin’s Haec Homo (1637) was published posthumously by his widow, that text

makes no statement about her role in its production.''* The title-page of Austin’s 1635 Devotionis Augustinianae Flamma, however, declares itself

is Henry Garnet to Anne Vaux, 3 April 1606. TNA: SP 14/21, Gunpowder Plot Book, 245. a Richard Niccols, A Day-starre for Darke-wandring Soules (London: Thomas Snodham for Iohn Budge, 1613), A3r.

STC 7490, 7491.

The Scholemaster (London: Iohn Daye, 1570), ijr. "4 Haec Homo wherein the Excellency of the Creation of Woman Is Described (London: Richard Olton for Ralph Mabb, and are to be sold by Charles Greene, 1637), A31-v.

42 ‘Grossly Material Things’

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to have been ‘Set forth, after his Decease, by his deare Wife and Executrix,

Mrs Anne Austin, as a Surviving Monument of some part of the great worth of her ever-honoured husband’.'"” That the text is designed to stand

as a monument to her husband underlines the extent to which Austin’s textual practice participated in the funerary rituals of memorialization. Austin’s concern is to memorialize her husband in a ‘surviving monument’. Like Margaret Ascham’s, her paratexts produce her deceased husband as a singular author.

Laurie Maguire has argued persuasively that editorial work can be aligned with the processes of grieving, noting that ‘the tidying of the deceased’s corpus, which burial practices have long demanded, and the

' William Austin, Devotionis Augustinianae Flamma (London: [John Legat] for [[ohn] Lfegat] and Ralph Mab, 1635).

Women at the Scene of Writing 43 idealisation of the deceased are two of the early stages of mourning’ as they are of editing.''® I want to suggest that women’s role in the processes of mourning, and in the estate management and accounting of their deceased husbands’ affairs, created a close link between the hands that tidied

the corpse and the hands that tidied the corpus.''’ When the poet Anna Hume returned home after her father’s death in c.1630 she discovered a manuscript account of The History of the Houses of Douglas and Angus ‘amongst my Fathers scattered Papers’. Though Hume denied any editorial intervention, declaring that it appeared ‘in his own method, without addition or change, I cannot say, without defect’, she was heavily involved

in the printing of the volume in 1644, seeking appropriate dedicatees, and petitioning to have the controversial account allowed.'" In the epistle to King James which accompanied the fourth edition of Richard Greenham’s Workes (1605), Elizabeth Holland presented her dedication as a response to the wishes of her deceased husband, Henry, who had edited the work, explaining that he ‘straightly and many times charged me vpon his deathbed to present and dedicate the whole vnto your Highnes’.''’ Invoking the will of a dying man, this ‘poore widow’, represented her paratextual and editorial endeavours as a fulfilment of her wifely duties. Yet her self-presentation as the conduit for Holland’s desired

address does not fully encapsulate Elizabeth’s interest in the text, as her ongoing negotiations with the Stationers Company reveal. The Company, which had taken over the rights to Greenham’s popular text, had simultaneously inherited the bookseller Robert Dexter's debt to Henry Holland, which subsequently fell to his wife. On 7 October 1605, the Court Records note that ‘“M'* Holland had received ijl’. X° in return for which ‘she promiseth to deliv’ the company her bond w® her husband had from m' Dexter’, whilst on 13 April 1607, they record a further payment of 30s. ‘gyven to

her as a benevolence...for her full satisfaccion for mr Grenhams woorkes’.'*° Elizabeth’s inheritance then, was material as well as marital, and she pursued her rights to the text for which she provided a saleable dedication. Other widows too retained a legal and economic interest in

"6 Laurie Maguire, ‘Composition/Decomposition: Singular Shakespeare and the Death of the Author’, in Andrew Murphy (ed.), Zhe Renaissance Text: Theory, Editing, Textuality (Manchester University Press, 2000), 138. "'” For women as executrices, see Amy Louise Erickson, Women and Property in Early Modern England (London: Routledge, 1993), 156-73. 8 Anna Hume to Lord Archibald Douglas, 11 December 1643, citedinS. M. Dunnigan,

‘Hume, Anna (ff. 1644)’, ODNB, , accessed 30 July 2008. "9 Richard Greenham, The Works of the Reuerend and Faithfull Seruant of Iesus Christ M. Richard Greenham (London: Felix Kyngston for Cuthbert Burbie, 1605), II3v. '29 Jackson, 17, 24.

AA ‘Grossly Material Things their husband’s books: on 7 February 1620, one Mrs Sylvester was awarded 20s. because “Thomas Jones and Lawrence Chapman haue printed a booke

Called the woodmans beare w"out the Consent of m* Silvester being of her husband mr Jos. Siluesters doeing & Compiling’.’”!

In a dedication to Elizabeth of Bohemia, Briget Paget offered her husband John Paget's Meditations of Death (1639) as ‘a testimony of thank-

full acknowledgment & devoted affection’ for the ‘gentle & propitious respects your Majesty hath at sundry times manifested unto the Author & sometimes also to my selfe’.'** Paget is clear that textual authority rests with her husband, ‘the author’, and presents her efforts to publish the text as a project of devoted remembrance, explaining: “These Meditations of my deare husband of blessed memory, I haue much longed to see clad in such wise as might be most serviceable, & that I my selfe might heare him being dead yet speake unto me comfortable words, to solace my soule in his absence.’ Invoking the trope of reclothing the text frequently used to describe the practice of editing as well as that of translation, Paget does not

entirely cede authority to her spouse. Though the dedication thanks Elizabeth principally for her good will to John, Briget uses a version of the modesty topos to describe the book as ‘but a widowes mite’, appropriating her husband’s writings as a token of her ongoing service within a patronage

relationship.'”

Though Kate Aughterson claims that Paget’s preface ‘shows that she was responsible for editing her husband’s sermons for the purposes of publication’,'* the dedication is followed by an address from “The publisher to the reader’, in which her husband’s nephew and heir, Robert Paget, notes that the manuscript consisted of sermon texts ‘penned in such manner as we found it after his decease’.'”’ This suggests a collabora-

tive endeavour between widow and nephew, though Robert suggests he undertook the editorial work, explaining: ‘I have had some trouble in bringing together what was scatteredly set downe, & in some places extending into plaine words what was left in concise notes and short intimations; yet I have purposely avoyded the adding of any thing that was not in the Authors Manuscripts.’

'7l Jackson, 119. The text in question is Joshua Sylvester, 7e VVood-mans Bear (London: for Thomas Jones and Laurence Chapman, 1620). '2 John Paget, Meditations of Death (Dort: Henry Ash, 1639), T12v.

°° Paget, Meditations, M12r-I]2v. For more on the rhetoric of widowhood, see pp. 142-6 below.

'4 Kate Aughterson, ‘Paget, Briget (b.1570, d. in or after 1647)’, , accessed 8 May 2008. ' Paget, Meditations, sig. T15r.

Women at the Scene of Writing 45 Paget's description of his methodology adds to our understanding of the dynamics of ‘editing before the beginning of editing’ uncovered by Sonia Massai.'”° As John Jowett notes, “In early modern book production

there was and had to be editing...[T]he absence of an appropriate vocabulary [to describe editorial work] in the period reflects, not the absence of an equivalent activity, but the innovative fluidity of a stage of

emergence.” Though there was, in early modern England, no figure who can be precisely aligned with the modern editor, certain ‘editor functions, which may have influenced the content of the book, and certainly influenced its reception, including the transcription, selection, revision, and arrangement of texts; preparation for publication; and the provision

of a paratextual apparatus, were undertaken by a number of agents, including wives and widows.'*® Briget Paget joined Austen, Ascham, and others in the editorial practice of managing her husband’s literary remains, and penning the paratexts that made his book complete.

Perhaps the best-known case of hetero-social authorial and editorial collaboration in early modern England is that of Sir Philip Sidney and his

sister, Mary Herbert. It is difficult to chart the precise dynamics of the pairs collaboration, and many of Herbert's textual endeavours took place after her brother's death in 1586.'”’ Accounts of the work involved in the revision of the Arcadia and the completion of the translation of the Psalms reveal again the extent to which women’s collaboration was tied to memo-

rialization, the expression of grief, and estate management. The two projects, however, reveal different modes of conceptualizing the pair’s colabours: Herbert’s role in the publication of the Arcadia is constructed as one of editorial management while the religious nature of the Psalms, and their status as translations, allowed the project to be expressed as an act of collaboration.'*°

'6 Sonia Massai, Shakespeare and the Rise of the Editor (Cambridge University Press, 2007), 1. '°7 John Jowett, ‘Henry Chettle: “Your Old Compositor”’, Text, 15 (2003), 143-4. 8 For the Foucault-influenced conception of ‘editor functions’ see Robert Iliffe, *“Author-mongering”: The “Editor” between the Author and Reader in the Late Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Century’ in Ann Bermingham and John Brewer (eds.), Zhe Consumption of Culture 1600-1800: Image, Object, Text (London: Routledge, 1995), 166-92. '*° Gary Waller argues that Herbert began by revising Sidney’s versions of Psalms 1—43, and then undertook the translation of the remaining Psalms, working between two copytexts and constantly revising (Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke: A Critical Study of Her Writings and Literary Milieu (Salzburg: University of Salzburg Press, 1979), 152-256). '°° As Danielle Clarke notes, the status of the psalms as translations is far from secure: they are ‘autonomous poems constructed from a range of sources and intertexts’ (The Politics of Early Modern Women’s Writing (London: Longman, 2001), 137). See also Debra Rienstra and Noel Kinnamon, ‘Circulating the Sidney-Pembroke Psalter’, in Justice and Tinker (eds.), Women’s Writing, 50-72.

46 ‘Grossly Material Things A recognition of Herbert’s editorial role led Hugh Sanford to claim her as inspiration and author of the Arcadia in a prefatory letter to the reader of the 1593 edition. As Eve Rachele Sanders points out: The 1593 preface unpacks the double entendre of the possessive case used in the book's title, Zhe Countess of Pembrokes Arcadia. Foregrounding Mary Sidney's ‘honourable labor’ in repairing the ‘ruinous house’ of Philip's unfinished manuscript, the preface concludes that the work ‘is now by more than one interest The Countess of Pembrokes Arcadia: done, as it was, for her: as it

is, by her’.

Sanford criticized the editorial work that had produced the GrevilleGwinne-Florio edition of 1590. Bemoaning that edition’s ‘disfigured face’, Sanford explained that the Countess started by ‘wiping away those spottes wherewith the beauties therof were vnworthely blemished’, but found that where she had ‘begonne in correcting the faults’, she ‘ended

in supplying the defectes; by the view of what was ill done guided to the consideration of what was not done’.'** Sanford’s description of the Countess’s increasingly interventionist proofreading allows us to conceive of a woman's textual practice as editorial in nature. Accounts of the psalms, in contrast, establish Herbert not as editor but as co-author. In ‘Even now that Care’, a poem intended for Elizabeth I, Herbert describes the mechanics of creation, explaining: ‘hee did warpe,

I weavd this webb to end’.'*? Herbert establishes Sidney’s work as structural and her own as secondary but essential: both warp and weft are necessary to create the ‘liverie robe’ she presents to Elizabeth. She de-

scribes the psalms, “Which once in two, now in one Subject goe, / the poorer left, the richer reft awaye’ (21-2), again suggesting her own secondary status, but also, as Hannay remarks, her earlier presence as colabourer.'** Herbert here reveals a familiarity with the guiding tropes of translation theory, not only drawing on the semantic field of clothing, but describing the text as “English denizend, though Hebrue borne’ (30), a foreign figure legally transformed into an English citizen. '5! Eve Rachele Sanders, Gender and Literacy on Stage in Early Modern England (Cambridge University Press, 1998), 91. Suzanne Trill, Kate Chedgzoy, and Melanie Osborne note

that ‘the Arcadia was not simply written for the Countess of Pembroke, it was also edited, revised and published dy her’ (‘Introduction to Suzanne Trill et al. (eds.), Lay By Your Needles Ladies, Take the Pen: Writing Women in England, 1500-1700 (London: Arnold, 1997), 1). '** Philip Sidney, Zhe Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia (London: John Windet for William

Ponsonby, 1593), T4r.

°° Mary Sidney, ‘Even now that Care’ in Danielle Clarke (ed.), lsabella Whitney,

ane and Aemilia Lanyer: Renaissance Women Poets (London: Penguin, 2000), 34 Margaret Hannay, ‘“Doo What Men May Sing”: Mary Sidney and the Tradition of Admonitory Dedication’, in Hannay and Patterson (eds.), Silent But for the Word, 152.

Women at the Scene of Writing 47 In her prefatory poem to the published psalms, “To the Angel Spirit of the Most Excellent Sir Philip Sidney’, Herbert extends her play on the

duality of collaboration and the singularity of her bereaved state, declaring:

To thee pure sprite, to thee alone’s address't this coupled worke, by double int’rest thine: First raisde by thy blest hand, and what is mine inspird by thee, thy secrett power imprest.'” The elegiac tone of “To the Angel Spirit’ allows Herbert both to establish

her contribution to the psalms, and to privilege her brother's originary authority. She has completed the translation, she suggests, so that the psalms may stand as ‘Immortal Monuments of thy faire fame’ (71). In another textile metaphor, Herbert describes the work as being by ‘thy matchless Muse begunne, / The rest but peec’t, as left by thee undone’ (23-4). Her work is presented as secondary, part of the project of completion and apparelling that marks editorial endeavour, yet the language of

coupling and doubleness insists upon the work’s multivocality and mutuality.

The conventions of mourning lend Herbert greater authority in the closing stanzas, which describe the psalms as:

... theise dearest offrings of my hart, dissolved to Inke, while penn’s impressions move the bleeding veines of never dying love: [78-80] Herbert’s grief transforms the psalms from an exercise in godly translation into a somatic expression of feeling: her heart is dissolved into an unending stream of ink, pouring forth ‘sadd Characters indeed of simple love’ (82). Herbert's position as chief mourner allows her to reappropriate her efforts

as separable and creative, and, in the first line of the final stanza, where she begs the ‘Angell spirit’ “Receive theise Hymnes, theise obsequies receive’ (85), to switch swiftly from a recognition of the divine origin of the poems (‘theise Hymnes’) to a renewed assertion of their personal and expressive nature (‘theise obsequies’) before moving to a more attenuated desire for Sidney's continued presence, described within the punning terms of noble lineage, legal property, and literary presentation: ‘If any marke of thy sweet sprite appeare, / well are they borne, no title else shall beare’ (86-7).

' Mary Sidney, “To the Angell spirit of the most excellent Sir Phillip Sidney’, in Clarke (ed.), Renaissance Women Poets, 50—3, Il. 1-4.

48 ‘Grossly Material Things The figures of two-in-one and one-in-two deployed by Herbert also appear in the paratexts Dorothy Lily provided for her husband Peter Lily’s Two Sermons (1619), in which she appears to suggest that her role was not editor but co-author: Reader, this Booke was pend with single heart, But yet this Booke was pend with double Art; And therefore, reade this Booke with single eie, And it with double honour dignifie.'*° Like Briget Paget, Lily deployed the modesty topos in a dedication to “The Religious and Noble Lady, the Lady Barbara Villiers’, asserting the inadequacy of her gift, a meagre ‘handfull of Lilies’. Lily’s pun is an obvious one, but it suggests a plurality which is reflected in the paratexts. Not only

does the volume feature Dorothy Lily's dedication, it contains jangling commendatory verses provided by her daughter, Maria: I Ioy that I haue found him whom I lost, Whose death so many teares mine eies hath cost; The Church yet calls him Father, so will I, His Workse doe liue, and he shall neuer die.'°’

Once again, the preparation of the text for publication is presented as a crucial moment in the grieving process, allowing Maria Lily both to remember her lost father, and to construct his enduring presence. It is also part of the process of estate management: Dorothy Lily was appointed as executrix of her husband’s will, in which he bequeathed her all ‘my temporall goodes whatsoeuer and wheresoeuer .'*° Couched in the language of Protestant marriage, Dorothy Lily’s short verse suggests that she and her husband shared a partnership in which they contributed their ‘double art’ to the book within the ‘single heart’ of their marital union, giving both hands an equal status. The movement between doubleness and unity is reminiscent of Thomas Gainsford’s description of woman as ‘the wonder of nature: for she maketh two bodies one flesh, and two hearts one soule, so that the husband and wife truely louing, so conspire in all their actions that they haue in a manner, but one motion: for loue maketh vnion’.'*’ In his will, Peter described Dorothy as ‘lovinge and faythfull’, and the latter term can be read as an expression '°6 Peter Lily, Two Sermons (London: Thomas Snodham, 1619), A3v.

'57 Lily, Two Sermons, AAv. '88 "TNA: PROB 11/125, f. 508r. ' ‘Thomas Gainsford, The Rich Cabinet Furnished with Varietie of Excellent Discriptions (London: John Beale for Roger Jackson, 1616), Y3r. Elsewhere Gainsford is less flattering, describing woman as ‘a stinking rose, a pleasing euill, the mouse-trap of a mans soule’ (Y2v).

Women at the Scene of Writing 49 both of a successful marital union and of the religious observance that informed their lives together.'*° It is impossible to determine whether the Lilys’ ‘double art’ was synchronic or diachronic, a collaborative writing process or a posthumous editing, but Lily’s brief address is suggestive,

signalling the possibility that many more texts than we have acknowledged were ‘pend with double art’ in a cultural poetics of heterosexual or social production and exchange.

IV ‘ONE MISTRESS TALEPORTER’: MEN’S TEXTS, WOMEN’S VOICES Until now, this chapter has privileged the written or printed evidence of womens collaboration. Recent work on co-authorship, however, high-

lights the importance of conversation and the creation of a mutual voice.'*' There is, of course, little extant early modern evidence for verbal, pre-authorial collaboration, though a number of scholars have drawn attention to the framing of conversation in literary and conduct texts and the centrality of dialogic form in this period.'*? Nonetheless some titlepages, and the details of certain narratives, reveal their roots in a culture

of news and gossip that privileged women’s oral communication.'* Michael Saenger has pointed out that women’s voices, though mediated, were privileged as authorial in ballads and pamphlets reporting the salacious details of domestic crime.'“* Another genre which invokes women’s spoken testimony is the monstrous birth pamphlet.'® In this case, the woman whose evidence was most important was the midwife: a figure who, in the imaginative links between her trade and the reproduction of texts, straddled the domains of

40 "TNA: PROB 11/125, f. 508r. ‘41 See Mary Alm, “The Role of Talk in the Writing Process of Intimate Collaboration’ in Elizabeth G. Peck and Joanna Stephens Mink (eds.), Common Ground: Feminist Collaboration in the Academy (Albany: SUNY Press, 1998), 123-40; Linda Hutcheon and Michael Hutcheon, ‘A Convenience of Marriage: Collaboration and Interdisciplinarity’, PMLA, 116 (2001), 1364-76. 2 See especially Richards, Rhetoric and Courtliness. 3 On the overlapping cultures of speech and writing/print, including women’s different modes of literacy, see Adam Fox, Oral and Literature Culture in England, 1500-1700 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000). ‘4 Michael Saenger, The Commodification of Textual Engagements in the English Renaissance (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 120-3. ' On this genre, see Julie Crawford, Marvelous Protestantism: Monstrous Births in PostReformation England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005); David Cressy, Travesties and Transgressions in Tudor and Stuart England: Tales of Discord and Dissension (Oxford University Press, 1999).

50 ‘Grossly Material Things oral communication and print production.’ The role of the midwife as a source of particular narrative genres is mocked in The Winters Tale, when Autolycus responds to Mopsa’s demand, ‘Is it true, think you’, with

the worthless guarantee, “Here’s the midwife’s name tot, one Mistress Taleporter, and five or six honest wives that were present.’'*” The further link between the figure of the printer and that of the midwife was made

explicit by Margaret Cavendish who complained in the letter to The Worlds Olio (1655) that “by the false printing... my Book is lamed by an ill Midwife and a Nurse, the Printer and Overseer’.!*8 When Jane Coe published the Minister Edward Fleetwood’s A Declaration of a Strange and Wonderfull Monster (1646), she was the second midwife of what presents itself as a socially authored text constructed by a

parliamentary committee. The account draws heavily on the reports of two witnesses: Fleetwood, and the midwife Mrs Gattaker. The Minister he spoke of it to others, and so did the Midwife also, which made it to be spread up and down the Country, so that it came to the eares of some of the Committee; And for the further satisfaction of the truth thereof...one of the Committee being there, it was desired he should send a Letter to Mr. Fleetwood the Minister of the Parish, to know the certainty of it... And Mr. Fleetwood receiving the said Letter, sent for the Midwife about it, and she still confirmed what she said before.'”

The authority of the pamphlet dissipates as the authors offer their version of Fleetwood’s report of a phenomenon that only Gattaker saw at first hand. The textual offspring of the committee’s labours, thus distanced from the domain of women’s speech and transformed into attested fact, had then to be delivered to the press of a second midwife, Jane Coe, who ushered it into the social space of the literary marketplace. This convoluted path to publication extends our understanding of the layers of composition and publication that underlie the printed text, and the overlapping voices that occupy the page. Thomas Bedford’s monstrous-birth pamphlet, the True and Certaine

Relation of a Strange-birth (1635) further illuminates the complex authorship of texts derived from women’s testimony. The author, a min-

46 On midwifery, see Caroline Bicks, Midwiving Subjects in Shakespeares England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003). 47 William Shakespeare, The Winter's Tale in Richard Proudfoot et al. (general eds.), The Arden Shakespeare Complete Works, rev. edn (London: Thomson Learning, 2001), IV, iv,

2ae—2. ‘Margare Cavendish, 7he Worlds Olio (London: Printed for J. Martin and J. Allestrye at the Bell in St. Pauls Church-Yard, 1655), O3r-v. 49 Edward Fleetwood, A Declaration of a Strange and Wonderfull Monster (London: Jane Coe, 1646), A4r.

Women at the Scene of Writing 51 ister in the Church of England, is quick to assert his superior knowledge

over that of the gossips who first brought him to the side of the new mother, refusing, for example, to accede to their assertions that the children, Siamese twins, were born with teeth.'’”” A similar strategy is deployed in A Declaration, in which the reader learns that Fleetwood was only convinced of the truth of Gattaker’s narrative once the child’s grave

had been opened to allow examination of the corpse. In the True and Certaine Relation, Bedford complains that: “The common sort make no further use of these Prodigies and Strange-births, than as a matter of wonder and table-talk: looke upon them with none other eyes, than with which they would behold an African monster, a mishapen beast. It was not thus in the better ages of the world.’””' Imaginatively entering the female space of the birthing room, Bedford is not content to accept the position of bedside gossip.” Rather than recognize his role as one of the narrative’s many midwives, he extends the male authorial principle into the womb itself: The wombe is by the hand of God, sometimes closed up...sometimes opened...Sometimes weakened, that it ripeneth not the birth... And all these doe teach us the presence of Gods Providence... Well may wee say, Digitus dei, It is the finger of God that hath beene here, and manifested his presence by hindering the common and ordinary course of Nature in the Birth of the Wombe.'”

Belittling the folk knowledge of the women who surround him, Bedford struggles to envisage a substantially different mode of ‘taleportering’ that will allow him to separate his discursive activity from the oral, feminine language and culture from which his story springs. Yet however far he attempts to escape the position of the female bedside spectator, the tempting world of tall tales and local lore insists on intruding in the copious marginal notes that flank his didactic text. In places, Bedford’s religious interpretation is squeezed into thin col-

umns by voluminous printed marginalia, themselves supplemented with secondary notes and crammed with scurrilous tales (“Notorious and in the mouth of every man is that story of Margaret, Sister to Earle Floris the fourth... who being of the age of two and forty yeeres, brought forth at one birth three hundred three score and five children, halfe of '° ‘Thomas Bedford, A True and Certaine Relation of a Strange-birth (London: Anne Griffin for Anne Bowler, 1635), A4v. For more on Griffin and Bowler, see ch. 3 below. ! Bedford, A True and Certaine Relation, C3v. '? As Laura Gowing points out, “For early modern commentators, the privacy of the birthroom was essential’ (Common Bodies: Women, Touch and Power in Seventeenth-Century England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 151). > Bedford, A True and Certaine Relation, B2v—B3r.

52 ‘Grossly Material Things them males, halfe females, and the odd one an Hermaphrodite’),'* local knowledge (‘Such was that woman which wee saw heere the last yeere, who wanted hands, and supplied the want of them in many particulars by her feete’), and biblical precedent. This patchwork of sources pos-

sesses its own energetic conversational dynamic, returning us to the world of local lore, unlikely news, and religious observation in which the story had its roots.'” Bedford’s account tests the limits of our understanding of collaboration: the women who alerted him to the monstrous birth go unnamed, and their testimony is revealed as suspect, despite its status as a guarantee of the text’s authenticity. It is impossible to unpick their contributions from Bedford’s moralizing account or to recreate the dynamics of the birth-room conversations in which Bedford took an unexpected part. What this case, along with the other examples in this chapter, goes to show is that women were more often present at the scene of writing and recounting than previous scholarship has acknowledged, and that they made important and varied contributions to a range of texts. The textual relationships I describe in this chapter test the descriptive utility of the term collaboration, usually assumed to describe ‘a co-laboring or working together’.'° Those involved in textual co-creation were sometimes temporally as well as geographically separate, engaged in activities traditionally assumed to be secondary or subsequent to the act of literary creation,

or—on occasion—had little or no discernible impact upon the text. None of the relationships I chart are quite the ‘thoroughgoing, cosigned literary coauthorship’ invoked by Laird. They range from a co-authorship whose precise dynamics and extent are difficult to recover, to scribal transmission, translation, and editorial practice. Taken together, these varied forms suggest the need to adopt a more flexible language to elaborate the dynamics of textual co-presence. That language should be sensitive to the terms in which early modern men and women described their own activities: in the panoply of prefaces, dedications, and compliments that accompany printed texts, the activities of translation, scribal copying, and emendation are described as co-labours and granted a potent originary power.

' On this story, see Jan Bondeson, The Two-Headed Boy and Other Medical Marvels (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004), esp. ch. 4. '° Bedford, A True and Certaine Relation, B3v—B4t. 6 Stephen Dobranski, Milton, Authorship, and the Book Trade (Cambridge University Press, 1999), 9.

%) ‘A dame, an owner, a defendresse Women, Patronage, and Print

In his 1587 Dictionarium Linguae Latinae et Anglicanai, Thomas Thomas included an entry for ‘Patréna: ‘Shee that defendeth: a patronesse, a defendressé.' In 1611, John Florio offered a similar definition of an Italian ‘padrona: ‘a patronesse, a mistris, a dame, an owner, a defendresse’. While Thomas dedicated his elite Latin-English lexicon to William Cecil, Elizabeth I’s Secretary of State, Florio’s dedication lends an additional charge to his definition of the female patron, as he asks Queen Anne to adopt that role, noting: it dare be entitled QUEEN ANNA'S New World of words, as under your protection and patronage sent and set foorth. It shall be my guard against the worst, if not grace with the best, if men may see I bear Minerva in my front, or as the Hart on my necke, I am Diana's, so with heart I may say, ‘This is QUEEN ANNA’, as the Author is, and shall ever be.’

Much of the writing of the early modern period was shaped by the structures of patronage and favour, and recent scholarship has offered a clearer picture of some of the women Franklin B. Williams identified as “The Literary Patronesses of Renaissance England’.’ For Williams, the realization ‘that patronage was more widespread among women than might be suggested’ formed ‘perhaps the most significant finding’ of his Index of Dedications and Commendatory Verses.* ' Thomas Thomas, Dictionarium Linguae Latinae et Anglicanae (Cambridge: Thomas Thomas, 1587), [t5r. * John Florio, Queen Annas New World of Words (London: Melch. Bradwood [and William Stansby], for Edw. Blount and William Barret, 1611), Gg1r, TI2v. > Franklin B. Williams, “Ihe Literary Patronesses of Renaissance England’, Notes and Queries, 9 (1962), 364-6. For influential scholarship on patronage see Guy Fitch Lytle and Stephen Orgel (eds.), Patronage in the Renaissance (Princeton University Press, 1981); Linda Levy Peck, Court Patronage and Corruption in Early Modern England (London: Routledge, 1993). * Williams, ‘Literary Patronesses’, 365; Williams, Index of Dedications and Commendatory Verses in English Books before 1641 (London: ‘The Bibliographical Society, 1962). Williams identified 733 women patrons from dedications. ‘This figure rises to 1,116 if it includes dedications that address a husband and wife, and those that address women as a group.

54 ‘Grossly Material Things New historicist accounts of patronage drew on the anthropology of the gift or potlatch to argue that patrons and clients were bound together in circuits of gift and reward.’ As summarized by Coppélia Kahn, this tradition concludes that ‘essentially, patronage was a form of the socially coded gift-giving that is termed prestation, defined by Louis Adrian Montrose as “a tacitly coercive and vitally interested process predicated on a fiction that it is free and disinterested”’.° Yet the fragmentary and occasional nature of gifts and dedications, alongside a recognition of the broader networks and structures which framed these relationships, suggests that patronage is better described as a network of associations than as a coherent system or structure. Both Lucy Russell, Countess of Bedford and Mary (Sidney) Herbert have been prominent in accounts of women’s patronage.’ Work on Herbert in particular epitomizes the desire to uncover a coherent programme of literary sponsorship, despite some rather tenuous evidence. Mary Ellen Lamb provides a useful caveat when she notes: “Decades of literary historians have gathered writers into her group on the slimmest of pretexts: a dedication to her of one work also dedicated to thirty-four other people; a writer's friendship with another writer she may have patronized; patronage of a writer by her son William after the period of her own residence at Wilton.’® In this chapter, I wish to suggest that any definition of patronage must be a capacious one, reflecting the broader social networks and occasional or contingent aspects of the interwoven discourses and practices of patronage.

> See S. N. Eisenstadt and Louis Roniger, “Patron—Client Relations as a Model of Structuring Social Exchange’, Journal for the Comparative Study of Society and History, 22 (1980), 42-77; Marcel Mauss, The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies, tr. lan

Cunnison (London: Norton, 1967). For the application of these models to early modern books see, for example, Natalie Zemon Davis, The Gift in Sixteenth-Century France (Oxford University Press, 2000); Werner L. Gundersheimer, “Patronage in the Renaissance: An Ex-

ploratory Approach’ in Lytle and Orgel (eds.), Patronage in the Renaissance, 1-20; and Lewis Hyde, The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property (New York: Random House, 1983). ° Coppélia Kahn, ““Magic of Bounty”: Timon of Athens, Jacobean Patronage, and Maternal Power’, SQ, 38 (1987), 42. Kahn cites Louis Adrian Montrose, ‘Gifts and Reasons: The Context of Peele’s Araygnement of Paris’, English Literary History, 47 (1980), 433-71. ” On Russell, see Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, Writing Women in Jacobean England (Cam-

bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), ch. 4; Arthur E Marotti, ‘John Donne and the Rewards of Patronage’ in Lytle and Orgel (eds.), Patronage, 207-34. On Herbert, see Michael Brennan, Literary Patronage in the English Renaissance: The Pembroke Family (London: Routledge, 1988); Margaret Hannay, Philips Phoenix: Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke (Oxford University Press, 1990); Mary Ellen Lamb, “The Countess of Pembroke’s

Patronage, ELR, 12 (1982), 162-79. ° Mary Ellen Lamb, Gender and Authorship in the Sidney Circle (University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), 68.

Women, Patronage, and Print 55 Like the editorial, scribal, and translating activities of the women dis-

cussed in my first chapter, the efforts of women patrons are often described as ancillary. For Tina Krontiris, women found that patronage constituted: ‘an indirect strategy of self-expression and channelling of creative energy. The large number of books dedicated to women shows that the latter responded actively and favourably to authors... Aristocratic patronesses were an exploitable group for male authors, but what apparently made them exploitable was the fact that patronage addressed particular female needs and sensitivities.’ Krontiris’s statement reproduces three problematic assumptions: that women’s patronage was concerned with distinctly ‘female needs’; that it operates as an indirect alternative to authorship; and that dedications are a reliable guide to its operations. As Elizabeth Eisenstein reminds us, ‘All too often, titles and prefaces are taken as evidence of actual readership although they are nothing of the kind.’’® Arthur Marotti correspondingly suggests that many dedications function merely as (misleading) signs of celebrity-endorsement’."' Some early modern writers were equally sceptical. When Michael Drayton addressed part of the 1599 edition of his Englands Heroicall Epistles

‘to his worthy and dearly esteemed friend, Master James Huish’, he complained: It is seated by custome... to beare the names of our friendes vpon the fronts of our bookes, as Gentlemen vse to sette theyr Armes ouer theyr gates...I thinke some after, put the names of great men in theyr bookes, for that men should say there was some thing good; onely because indeede theyr names stoode there.'”

For Drayton, a dedication is a strategy to seduce and direct the reader, who is encouraged to equate the social prestige of the declared patron and the value of the text. The prestige of the dedication is reflected in the occasional practice of recording its details when copy was entered in the Stationers’ Company Registers. In 1587, James le Moyne de Morgues entered his La Clef des Champs, noting that it was “Dedicated to the lady Mary Sidney’, while in

February 1591, Robert Dexter noted that Guillaume du Bartas’s Hebdomadas [sic] was ‘dedicated to her Maiestie’.'? On 19 April 1608, ° Tina Krontiris, Oppositional Voices: Women as Writers and Translators of Literature in the English Renaissance (London: Routledge, 1992), 22. '® Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge University Press, 1983), 33. " Arthur Marotti, “Poetry, Patronage, and Print’, YES, 21 (1991), 2. '2 Michael Drayton, Englands Heroicall Epistles (London: J. Roberts for N. Ling, 1599),

OF Atber Il, 474, 574

56 ‘Grossly Material Things Matthew Lownes entered a book of ‘Essayes Politique and Morall; To the Right Honorable the Lady Anne Harrington’ .'* On the one hand, this may

suggest that the entrants were alert to the cultural capital of particular dedications; on the other, it records dedications which already existed in manuscript copies, and hence suggests that these addresses were seen as part and parcel of the text intended for publication. In the latter example, the printed dedication insists upon a link of service between the author, ‘D. T., Gent’ and his patron, the daughter and heir of Robert Keilwey, and wife of John Harington, First Baron Harington of Exton. John was guardian to the Princess Elizabeth Stuart (I will return to his accounts for this period later in this chapter), and D. T. invokes this relationship, com-

mending Anne as ‘the Governesse, from whom the Princely issue of a royall bed might receive instruction’, whilst noting that he has composed his essays during ‘such idle hours, as remained free to mee from your imployments’, and describing her as ‘the chief and finall end of his [essays’] beeing’."”

Authors sometimes penned individual dedications for presentation copies, creating the sense of an intimate exchange away from what Alexandra Halasz terms ‘the marketplace of print’.’° The possibility that dedications could be added according to occasion highlights the multiplicity

and adaptability of the printed book, and reminds us that dedications may be less enduring or specific than they appear. Samuel Daniel reworked

a verse epistle to Margaret, Countess of Cumberland into a complimen-

tary address to Lady Elizabeth Hatton of Purbeck, leading Margaret Maurer to conclude: “Daniel’s epistles, elevated and apparently so heartfelt, were capable of, if not designed for, dedication to whatever person suited the poet's needs.’'’ Lambeth Palace Library holds six copies of Abraham Darcie’s The Honour of Ladies (1622) which contain blank spaces at the head of the epistles, waiting for the addition of dedicatees who later included Anna Sophia Dormer, Susan Herbert, Bridget Norris, and Elizabeth Stanley. The physician Walter Baley’s medicinal pamphlet, A Short 4 Arber, II, 375. ® D.T., Gent., Essaies Politicke, and Morall (London: Humphrey Lownes for Mathew Lownes, 1608), A3r-—v.

'© Alexandra Halasz, The Marketplace of Print: Pamphlets and the Public Sphere in Early Modern England (Cambridge University Press, 1997). Examples include the UCLA copy of Ben Jonson's The Fountaine of Selfe-love. Or Cynthias Revells (1601), which contains an

added dedication to Lucy Russell (PR2609.A1 160a*); the Huntington Library copy of William Gager’s Viysses Redux (1592) in which the usual dedication to Thomas Sackville is

replaced by an address to Mary Herbert (59892); and the Huntington copy of Richard Brathwaite’s Art Asleepe Husband? A Boulster Lecture (1640), containing a dedication to Mrs Catherine Fletcher (60380). '7 Margaret Maurer, ‘Samuel Daniel’s Poetical Epistles, especially those to Sir Thomas Egerton and Lucy, Countess of Bedford’, Studies in Philology, 74 (1977), 418.

Women, Patronage, and Print 57 Discourse of the Three Kindes of Peppers in Common Vse (1588), contains a

printed dedication with gaps for the appropriate rank, title, and name of his dedicatee so that it might be presented to several recipients as an individualized New Year’s gift.'® The British Library copy bears a manuscript superscription “To the right honorable my very good Ladye the countesse of harforde’, who is addressed in ink additions as ‘your honor and ‘right honorable’ (figure 2.1).'? Other editions of the same text bear an address ‘To the friendly Reader’ in place of the printed epistle, driving home the

status of Baley’s dedications as personalized copies of a public text that nonetheless highlight their off-the-peg nature. In opposition to the usual fully printed dedication, as E P. Wilson points out, ‘the fact that his name was written not printed would indicate to any man [sic] that the dedication was not peculiar to himself’.*° Nonetheless, Marotti’s and Eisenstein’s cautions on the divorce between dedication, patronage, and reading should not be read as absolute. Drayton’s dismissal of patronal authority is as much a persuasive fiction, and a

neat repositioning of the modesty topos, as the claims to noble connections set forth by other writers. Drayton dedicated numerous texts, including other Heroicall Epistles within the same covers as his anti-dedication

to Huish, to ‘the vertuous Lady, the Ladie Anne Harrington’; ‘the Right Honourable and my very good Lord, Edward Earle of Bedford’; ‘my honourd Mistres, Mistres Elizabeth Tanfelde’; ‘the Right Worshipfull Sir Thomas Mounson, Knight’; “The Right Worshipfull Henry Goodere, of Powlesworth, Esquire’; ‘my most deere friend Maister Henry Lucas, sonne to Edward Lucas Esquire’; ‘the modest & vertuous Gentlewoman, Mistres Frauncis Goodere’; and ‘the excellent Lady Lucie, Countesse of Bedford’.*!

Drayton's inclusion of traditional dedications alongside his rejection of empty gestures raises difficult questions of reception, sincerity, and the self-consciousness of readers. It further reminds us that dedications can be at once sites of rhetorical play, peritextual structures designed to constrain and direct the reader, and elements of the complex system of patronage that drew together social, political, and religious, as well as literary, life. Some early modern readers certainly scrutinized prefatory materials as a '® Walter Baley, A Short Discourse of the Three Kindes of Peppers in Common Vse, and Certaine Special Medicines Made of the Same, Tending to the Preseruation of Health (London?:

Eliot’s Court Press?, 1588). '2 Baley, A Short Discourse, BL 546 B. 34, A2r; A2v. °° F. P. Wilson, “Some Notes on Authors and Patrons in Tudor and Stuart Times’ in James G. McManaway et al. (eds.), Joseph Quincy Adams Memorial Studies (Washington, DC: Folger Shakespeare Library, 1948), 559. Wilson terms Baley’s example an ‘honest’ form of the multiple dedication, in opposition to an author like Thomas Jordan who used a hand-stamp to add dedicatees names to pre-printed epistles (558-9). *! Drayton, Englands Heroicall Epistles, D11, Flr, l4v, K6v, L7r, M8r, O2v.

i

58 ‘Grossly Material Things

DP 2 ge ngth (ener 0OEe ¥ Si we Ug sie. EF a, fweiiy Foor aA , ade A. OY Os nee yorF , f atds fh ‘Kathleen McLuskie, “The Poet’s Royal Exchange: Patronage and Commerce in Early Modern Drama’, YES, 21 (1991), 54. °° Steven Mentz, Romance for Sale in Early Modern England: The Rise of Prose Fiction (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 3-4. *” Thid., 1.

76 ‘Grossly Material Things writinge agaynst the londoners in the 83 leafe’.”* In his dedication of Christs Teares over Ierusalem, Nashe notes Elizabeth Carey's existing repu-

tation among poets, showing his customary attention to the paratextual strategies of other writers, and remarking: “Fames eldest fauorite, Maister Spencer, in all his writings hie prizeth you.’ It is worth noting that George Carey appears to have taken seriously Nashe’s promise that ‘more polished

labours of mine ere long shall salute you’, a work intended to take the form of ‘some complete historie... wherein your perfections shall be the chiefe argument .””

Carey's letter is evidence that prodigal dedications could exist alongside, and help in procuring, more traditional modes of protection: Nashe spent the Christmas of 1593 at the Carey's residence on the Isle of Wight, after George Carey helped to secure his release from prison.'”’ Though Nashe was undeniably attentive to the opportunities of print, this did not preclude him appealing to and benefiting from noble patronage. Moreover, the distinction between a market and a patronage economy is tenable only if we understand the early book trades as, in Michael Saenger’s terms, a system of ‘feverish capitalism’'' and ignore the extent to which members of the book trade, as much as the writers whose works were circulated within it, were subject to and influenced by the workings of patronage. Recent criticism reduces the complex economies of dedications, patronage, and print to a straightforward binary. In reality, authors, patrons, and purchasers appear to have been adept at navigating the overlapping structures of proper address, recognition, and reward. Both dedications and anti-dedications, marked by nostalgia for an imagined past, operate as much as attempts to define and solidify flexible and unpredictable structures as reliable accounts of stable textual economies.

Ill] ‘THE TITHE OF MY POORE PRINTING PRESS’: PATRONAGE AND PRINT In May 1592, Sir John Harington received a letter from the Privy Council

remarking: “We are informed that by sinister and indirect meanes you have formerly withdrawn one Thomas Wels from his master, Augustine Rither, printer and graver of London, to serve you in that profession, °® Autograph letter of Sir George Carey to his wife Elizabeth, née Spencer, 17 November

1593. Berkeley Muniments General Series Letters Bundle 4. Reproduced in Katherine Duncan-Jones, “Christs Teares, Nashe’s “Forsaken Extremities”, The Review of English Stuaies, New Series, 49 (1998), 167—80. ” "Thomas Nashe, Christs Teares ouer Ierusalem (London: James Roberts, 1593), I12v.

'°° See Duncan-Jones, “Christs Teares’. ‘Sl Saenger, Commodification, 58.

Women, Patronage, and Print 77 being a matter contrary to your quallity and calling.’'°* Though it is not clear what Harington was attempting to print or why, the apparent dichotomy between his implication in courtly manuscript circles and his sudden determination to run a printing shop may seem less jarring if we understand manuscript and print, patronage and commerce, not as competing but as overlapping spheres. Throughout the early modern period,

patrons commissioned the publication of particular texts, sponsored printers and booksellers, and protected radical or illicit publication. Zachary Lesser charts the career of Thomas Walkley, and notes the sponsor-

ship, as well as the mutual career-building, of James's favourite, Buckingham." Within the established Church, John Day, one of the finer printers of the period, enjoyed the patronage of Archbishop Parker. In 1566, Day commissioned a set of Anglo-Saxon typefaces in order to print Aelfric’s Testimonie of Antiquitie, edited by the Archbishop. Parker granted Day a patent in 1570, giving him sole right to print Alexander Nowell’s popular Catechism; the patent was later extended to include all of Nowell’s writings. Other connections are evident from imprints: Henry Bynneman, for example, signed himself ‘seruant to the right Honourable

Sir Christopher Hatton Vizchamberlaine’.'* In 1581 and 1583, John Charlewood revealed riskier commitments, identifying himself as servant to the Catholic Philip Howard, Earl of Arundel, while the pseudonymous Martin Marprelate alleged that ‘I. C. the Earle of Arundels man’ had an illicit ‘presse and letter in a place called Charterhouse in London’.'”

Women too engaged in the patronage of print and printers. In 1550, the translator Nicholas Lesse dedicated a copy of St Augustine's 7he Twelfe Steppes of Abuses to Mary Fitzroy (née Howard), Duchess of Richmond.

Lesse opens his dedication by reminding the Duchess that he had previously presented her with a ‘most godly and fruitfull exposicion of... father '* John Roche Dasent (ed.), Acts of the Privy Council of England, 43 vols. (London: HMSO, 1901), XXII, 504. '°9 Zachary Lesser, Renaissance Drama and the Politics of Publication: Readings in the English Book Trade (Cambridge University Press, 2004), ch. 5. '04 See George Best, A True Discourse of the Late Voyages of Discouerie (London: Imprinted

by Henry Bynnyman, seruant to the right Honourable Sir Christopher Hatton Vizchamberlaine, 1578); Thomas Churchyard, A Discourse of the Queenes Maiesties Entertainement in Suffolk and Norffolk (London: Imprinted by Henrie Bynneman, seruante to the right Honourable Sir Christofer Hatton Vizchamberlayne, 1578). Alexandra Gillespie traces the earliest English examples of printers’ promotion of their elite connections in Print Culture and the Medieval Author: Chaucer, Lydgate, and their Books, 1473-1557 (Oxford University Press, 2006), ch. 5. '©9 Martin Marprelate (pseud.), Ob Read Over D. John Bridges, for it Is a Worthy Worke (Printed oversea, in Europe [i.e. East Molesey, Surrey: By Robert Waldegrave], within two

furlongs of a bounsing priest, at the cost and charges of M Marprelate, gentleman, 1588), Dlv. While Charlewood prospered, Arundel died in the Tower in October 1595, amid rumours that he had been poisoned by his cook.

78 ‘Grossly Material Things Martin Luther, upon both the Epistles of the blessed Apostell S. Peter, tourned out of the laten in to our vulgar tong for the commodities of those

which are studious of knowledge & right understandyng of the scriptures’.'°° Lesse laments that he has not fulfilled his purpose of wider dissemination to a vernacular readership, demanding: ‘howe can they rede it, & understand it, except they haue bokes? how can they haue bokes except it be put into print?’, and blames himself for not having ‘put your grace in remebraunce thereof, whose mynde was most earnestly bent (after you had once rede it) y‘ it shuld come in to y* handes of y* people’.'°”

Like the women who received dedications of translations and dictionaries, Fitzroy is depicted as having a ‘special relationship with English’,'°® not as a figure whose prefatory presence legitimates the broader dissemination of the translated text, but as an influential woman who is specifically concerned with the development of vernacular religious literacy through print. Drawing a direct link between Fitzroy and a member of the early print trades, Lesse records that the Duchess’s ‘louing seruaunt’, John Bale, had informed him of her intention ‘to haue commoned wyth youre Printer therein’. Fitzroy’s printer was probably John Day, who published Lesse’s Twelfe Steppes and who had also published, in 1549, Thomas Becon’s The Castell of Comfort, dedicated to the Countess. In Lesse’s ac-

count, Fitzroy’s actions establish her as the text’s real point of origin, ‘a more naturall mother to the thynge, than y* brynger forth thereof was hym selfe’.'°’ Such a construction illuminates Jennifer Summit's contention that ‘the author’ in a patronage economy ‘designates less an individual than an authorizing relationship that is characterized by service and reward .''° Tactfully blaming ‘the wickednes of the tyme’ for the Duchess’s delay, Lesse presents his new translation of the apocryphal Augustinian text as an object which will remind her of her intention to print his work. Lesse’s dedication is of interest not only because he establishes a pattern we have already witnessed, in which a woman's enjoyment of a manuscript stands as the ostensible motivation for its broader dissemination, but because he suggests that Fitzroy took an interest in the work of a particular printer, and influenced his programme of publication. Two years earlier Lesse had dedicated his translation of Johann Aepinus’ A Very Fruitful & Godly Exposition vpo[n] the. xv. Psalme of Dauid to another sponsor of print: ‘the right vertuos and gracious Lady’, Katherine 106 The Twelfe Steppes of Abuses, tr. Nicholas Lesse (London: John Day and William Seres, 1550), A2r—-v.

107 Tbid., A3r. '°8 Fleming, “Dictionary English’, 302. '09 ‘The Twelfe Steppes, A3r.

"° Jennifer Summit, Lost Property: The Woman Writer and English Literary History, 1380-1589 (University of Chicago Press, 2000), 76-7.

Women, Patronage, and Print 79 Brandon. As he was to do again for The Twelfe Steppes, Lesse provided a detailed narrative of the text’s creation, which he translated, he says, for the private enjoyment of ‘a certain peculiar deare frind’.'"’ Having ‘red it ouer once or twyse againe’ Lesse became, he explains, aware of the benefits it might bring to a print readership. Brandon was an ideal patron, not only for ‘y® ardent loue & desire that your grace doeth beare to the holy

worde of God: but in specially for the diligent promotinge & settyng furth therof to your greate charges’.''* Lesse’s description of Brandon as one at whose hands ‘the common people hath received alredy many comfortable & spirituall consolations, instructions, & techinges’ indicates the breadth of her sponsorship of vernacular literacy.''? She was a member of the circle of reformers associated with Katherine Parr towards the end of Henry VIII's reign: a group whose members seem to have had a particular interest in print. Her patronage extended to Thomas Wilson, author of The Rule of Reason (1551) and The Arte of Rhetorique (1553), who she appointed as tutor to her sons. In the latter text, Wilson uses Brandon’s children as exemplars in his section on praise, and digresses to describe their mother as being: ‘of birthe noble, and witte great, of nature gentle, and mercifull to the poore, and to the godly, and especially to the learned,

an earnest and good patronesse, and moste helpyng Lady aboue all other’.''* Brandon’s connection to Lesse may have been through John Day and William Seres, the printers of both The Twelfe Steppes and A Very Fruitful & Godly Exposition, who acknowledged Brandon’s influence by

printing her coat of arms in six of their publications.’ One of Brandon's projects was the publication of Parr’s Zhe Lamentacion of a Sinner (1547), which was, according to its title-page, ‘set furth and put in print at the instaunt desire of the righte gracious ladie Caterin Duchesse of Suffolke, & the earnest request of the right honourable Lord,

William Parre, Marquisse of North Hampton’. That formulation was echoed some forty years later, when, in August 1587, one Elizabeth Rous charged John Charlewood with the production of a new edition of one of

Parr’s books; an entry in the Stationers’ Company Registers notes that Parr’s Prayers or Meditations was ‘nowe newlye Imprinted at the request of

mistres Elizabeth Rous’.''® The earlier edition was printed by Edward ''! Johann Aepinus, A Very Fruitful & Godly Exposition vpo[n] the. xv. Psalme of Dauid, tr. Nicholas Lesse (London: John Day, 1548), A2r.

' Tbid., A5r. '® Thid., A5v.

'4 ‘Thomas Wilson, The Arte of Rhetorique for the Vse of all Suche as Are Studious of Eloguence (London: Richard Grafton, 1553), B4v. > John N. King, ‘Patronage and Piety: The Influence of Catherine Parr’ in Margaret Hannay and Margaret Patterson, (eds.), Silent But for the Word: Tudor Women as Patrons, Translators, and Writers of Religious Works (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1985), 56.

"6 Arber, II, 474.

80 ‘Grossly Material Things Whitchurch, another printer with close links to the women of Parr’s circle, described by the translator John Olde as ‘your graces humble seruaunt in a dedication to Lady Anne Seymour, Duchess of Somerset.''” Evidence of the patronage of print in the later part of the period can be found in the sub-genre of stationer-authored dedications and prefaces. As

with authors, we can identify some prodigal dedications. In 1596, for example, the bookseller William Barley offered Giovanni Ciotti’s A Booke of Curious and Strange Inventions Called the First Part of Needleworkes to the Lady Isabel Manners, Countess Dowager of Rutland. Barley’s dedica-

tion makes it clear that he had no connection to Rutland, and that his address was premised on her ‘excellent skill in curious Needlevvorks [which] is made knowvne by many other personages’.''® Barley emphasizes

his ‘great cost and charges’ in preparing and publishing the book in a manner which suggests he may have hoped for financial remuneration. The extent to which the dedication to Rutland also operates as a marketing strategy is reinforced by Barley’s imprint which explains that the book was ‘First Imprinted in Venice, and now againe newly printed in more exquisite sort for the profit and delight of the Gentlewomen of England’.

This text offers ‘the diligent practisers, that shall follow the direction herein contained’ a vision of Italian sophistication along with an assertion of the value of the book as an ‘exquisite’ object. In this context, the dedi-

cation offers imaginative access to gentry circles and a culture of elite needlework. Another bookseller, Henry Olney, was similarly conventional when informing “The most worthily honoured, and vertuous beautified Lady, the

Ladie Anne Gelmnham [sic|’ that it was her ‘many honourable vertues’ which had tied him to her ‘eternall seruice’.'’’ The ‘fewe passionate Sonnets Olney presented to Glemham were, according to the title-page, written by R. L. (probably Richard Linche), but Olney took the opportunity offered by authorial anonymity to use the dedication for his own ends. John Wolfe was explicit about the requirement for appropriate paratexts even when the author wished to remain unknown, explaining that: As Christian modestie (right vertuous Ladye) moued a Gentleman the first authour hereof, not onely to conceale his name, but also to cease from setting foorth any thing in the praise of that, which in duetie deserueth to be commended of euerie one: So Christian iustice & equitie, which willeth vs

"7 Desiderius Erasmus, The Seconde Tome or Volume of the Paraphrase of Erasmus vpon the Newe Testament, tr. John Olde (London: Edward Whitchurch, 1549), IT1v. "8 Giovanni Ciotti, A Booke of Curious and Strange Inuentions, Called the First Part of Needleworkes (London: William Barley, 1596), I1v. "MR. L., Diella, Certaine Sonnets (London: Henry Olney, 1596), A3r.

Women, Patronage, and Print 81 to giue to euery thing his due, woulde not suffer me to let that passe without some commendation.'”°

Wolfe explains that he has selected Frances (Howard) Seymour as patron in order to prevent the text from going ‘like an Orphan abroad, which had a father at home’, though his description of her as ‘his verie good Lady and Mistresse’ and of himself as “Your honors most humble and dutifull seruant’ hints at an established patronage connection.'*' Besides anonymity, several printers used the opportunity of publishing posthumous texts to advertise or forge political, religious, and economic relationships. In 1578, the bookseller Ralph Newberie dedicated Godfrie’s translation of Huberine’s Riche Storehouse (discussed on p. 66 above)

to Katherine (Carey) Howard, Countess of Nottingham, signing himself ‘Your humble servant’ and prefacing the dedication with the Countess’s coat of arms.'** In his dedication, Newberie draws attention to the posthumous status of the book, ‘left into my handes without any patrone’, which it was ‘no lesse conuenient vnto my bounden duetie, then meet for the viewe of your reposed minde, to make a present thereof vnto your honour’.'” In 1618, John Beale appears to have drawn on the renewed interest in Samuel Hieron’s works sparked by his death the year before when he dedicated The Spirituall Fishing “To the Worthy, Religious, and Vertuous Lady, the Lady Margaret [Mary] Yelverton’, commenting: ‘No sooner came this Sermon vnto my hands, (the Author whereof for his approued zeale, worthily deserued the title of an eminent Light and Orna-

ment of our Church) then I vowed the dedication thereof unto your Ladiship.’'”* Thus printers and booksellers showed themselves to be adept in making use of those paratextual sites which Gérard Genette describes

as the province of ‘the author and his allies’.'’? Not every stationer who penned a dedication did so as one of the author's associates or in the service of presenting book and author as a necessary pairing. Instead, stationers balanced commercial concerns and the appeal to the reader with their own recognition of, or bids for, patronal support. Richard Waldegrave took advantage of the possibilities of posthumous publication in a different way, dedicating Richard Greenham’s A Fruitful and Godly Sermon to his sister, Sara Speir, in 1595. The tone of the dedica-

tion shifts between the didactic and the personal, as Waldegrave notes: °° Anon, A Beautifull Baybush to Shrowd Vs from the Sharpe Showers of Sinne (London: John Wolfe, 1589), A2r—A3r.

1 Tbid., A2r, A2v, A4r. '2° Huberinus, Riche Storehouse, A5r. 3 Tbid., Av. '4 Samuel Hieron, The Spirituall Fishing (London: John Beale for widow Helme, 1618), A3r. 9 Gérard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, tr. Jane E. Lewin (Cambridge University Press, 1997), 2.

82 ‘Grossly Material Things ‘Now (deare sister) I partly knowing the present estate of your troubled & perplexed minde, in regard of the want of your greatest outwarde comfort, I thoght it good, to present you with this sweet Sermon.’!*° Waldegraves epistle suggests that dedications could be used to negotiate familial as well as patronage relationships. However, in contrast to the presentation copy of Francis de Sales’s An Introduction to a Devoute Life (1616) which the bookseller Walter Burre prepared for his kinswomen, or that of John Donne's Deaths Duell (1632) which Richard Redmer offered to his sister, Waldegrave’s familial gesture is reproduced for a broader reading public.'”” Fitting the text to the needs of his particular reader, Waldegrave advertises more widely the possibility of its direct applicability, allowing

his sister to stand as a model for the ‘troubled and perplexed’ woman reader.

Though dedications could be and were deployed by stationers as peritextual sites to influence and attract the reader, a number suggest a pa-

tronage relationship in the tradition established by the women of Katherine Part’s circle. Thomas East mentioned the ‘many fauours’ he had received at the hands of Mary Houghton, wife of Peter Houghton, a Sheriff of London, and noted ‘that nothing is more odious in the sight of god & good men, than vnthankfulnes’.'** His text was a version of Nicholas Breton’s The Countesse of Penbrooks Passion, and seems likely to have been

a second edition as the dedication is dated 1594, though the surviving edition was printed in 1599.'”’ East engaged in a more thoroughgoing appropriation than we have seen elsewhere, mentioning neither the author’s name nor the text's provenance, and describing the work as proceeding directly from himself, metonymized as ‘a mind as willing to shew

it thankefull, as whosoeuer els that commends him selfe by a greater present ’.'’? More concrete are the overlapping set of business and patronage relationships between Christopher Barker, who was also the Queen’s printer, and the Bacon family. Barker’s 1582 edition of Theodore de Beéze’s Christian Meditations informs the reader it was ‘Imprinted at London in Bacon House’ which he began renting from the family in 1579 and was to purchase outright from Nicholas Bacon on 23 November 1585.'°! The transaction may have been smoothed by a patronage relationship; Barker 6 Richard Greenham, A Fruitful and Godly Sermon (Edinburgh: Robert Waldegrave, 1595), A3r.

"7 Folger 11319 Copy 2; STC 7031.2. 8 Nicholas Breton, The Passions of the Spirit (London: Thomas East, 1599), A2r. '° Por details of the text’s provenance see Jean Robertson, “The Passions of the Spirit” (1599) and Nicholas Breton’, HLQ, 3 (1939), 69-75. 9 Breton, Passions, A2v. '31 David Kathman, ‘Barker, Christopher (1528/9-1599)’, ODNB, , accessed 15 September 2008.

Women, Patronage, and Print 83 dedicated Béze’s influential book to Lady Anne Bacon, explaining that its

author had dedicated the original to her mother-in-law, and citing his own gratitude for the ‘loue’ he had received from her extended family and from her.'°** Béze’s original dedication had been followed by a gift copy of the book, sent to its dedicatee via her son, Anthony.'’? The case of Simon Stafford offers perhaps the most tantalizing hint of

the benefits that might accrue to a printer from a woman's patronage. Stafford invoked feudal traditions in offering Dorothy, Lady Stafford, Richard Curteys’s The Care of a Christian Conscience (1600) as ‘the tithe of my poore Printing presse’. That this was more than a courteous topos is made clear in the Dean of the Arches of the Court of Canterbury, Sir John Lambe’s 1635 note that, in 1600, ‘Simon Stafford this yeere erected this house by meanes of the Lady Stafford.’'** Simon had been a member of

the Draper’s Company. After extended negotiations, influenced by the intervention of Lady Stafford’s son, Sir Edward, Stafford was set over to the Stationers in April 1599.'° In 1598, Stafford printed one book for William Barley, working out of Valentine Sim’s printing house.'*° By late 1599, he was established at his own house in Adling Hill, as he declared in the imprint to the first extant book printed there, John Bradford’s Two Notable Sermons. Both Bradford and Curteys were strong Protestants, and

their religious sentiments, as well as those represented in a number of Stafford’s other publications, matched those of Lady Stafford, who had spent time in Geneva during the Marian years. Simon Stafford’s house on Adling Hill must have been the property ‘erected’ ‘by meanes of the Lady

Stafford’, though whether she donated the property, funded Staftord’s acquisition, or supported him in some other way (she was an active petitioner) remains unclear. The final examples I wish to offer of women’s patronage of print are not

acknowledged in dedications, since they involved the reproduction of illicit texts. After her husband’s arrest in 1585, Anne (Dacre) Howard, Countess of Arundel continued to shelter seminary priests and Jesuits, '? ‘Theodore de Beéze, Christian Meditations vpon Eight Psalmes of the Prophet Dauid (London: In Bacon house, by Christopher Barker, printer to the Queenes most excellent Maiestie, 1582), A3v. > See Lynne Magnusson, “Widowhood and Linguistic Capital: The Rhetoric and Reception of Anne Bacon's Epistolary Advice’, ELR, 31 (2001), 32. '54 Arber, HII, 703. For a discussion of the status and date of this document see Arber, III, 701. There is no apparent family connection between the two Staffords, though the coincidence of names may have been a factor in inspiring Lady Stafford’s support. ' For details of the dispute see Gerald D. Johnson, “The Stationers Versus the Drapers: Control of the Press in the Late Sixteenth Century’, Zhe Library, 6th ser., 10 (1988), 1-17, ae Nickolas Breton, A Solemne Passion of the Soules Loue (London: Simon Stafford for William Barley, 1598).

84 ‘Grossly Material Things including Robert Southwell, and was part of a network of recusants who

circulated manuscript devotional and polemical texts. Howard also housed a secret press, most probably at Spitalfields.'°’ Another Catholic

press was established by Robert Persons, and a lay gentleman named Stephen Brinkley, at Greenstreet house in East Ham.'*® After a succession

of alarms the press was moved, first to a house provided by Francis Browne, brother of Lord Montague and then, according to Person’s memoirs, to ‘a house belonging to a widow, by name Lady Stonor’.'*’ It was at Stonor Hall that Edmund Campion’s 1581 Decem Rationes was printed. Father William Hartley smuggled copies to Oxford, which he gifted to sympathetic readers and placed upon the seats of St Mary’s church, dis-

tributing over 400 copies in a single night.'*° Campion was eventually captured at the house of Mrs Yates.'*' On 4 August the Privy Council wrote to Sir Henry Neville, ordering him to: search Lady Stonor’s house for copies of the Latin books, which Campion has confessed to have been printed there in a wood, and for other books of Persons, and the press thought also to be there remaining, and to examine such persons as they shall find in the house as to what Masses have been there said, what reconciliations used, and of their conformity in religion.”

Brinkley and his four journeymen were arrested and sent to the Tower. The pursuivants apprehended Lady Stonor’s son, John (who later escaped to Douai) and placed Lady Stonor under house arrest. One of the journeymen recanted and returned to the established Church, while Brinkley, after two years in the Tower, was discharged and fled to Rouen, where he continued to produce Catholic books. Lady Stonor remained under house arrest, and in later years was repeatedly fined for recusancy, until she was eventually taken into custody. She was over seventy years old when she was imprisoned, and there are no further records to attest to her fate.'* Campion was executed at Tyburn on 1 December 1581. It was not only Catholic women who might conceal a secret press and

its workmen. John Strowd, an itinerant preacher and printer, printed Protestant texts ‘one hundred miles off’ from London, from whence they were smuggled to London and ‘published’ by Mrs Dowriche '57 See Pollard Brown, ‘Paperchase’, 122-5. 58 T am indebted to A. C. Southern’s Elizabethan Recusant Prose, 1559-1582 (London: Sands, 1950), 354—9 for the following account.

'° Cited in J. H. Pollen’s ‘Introduction’ to Edmund Campion, Ten Reasons, tr. J. H. Pollen (London: Manresa Press, 1914), 14-15. 40 See Richard Simpson, Edmund Campion: A Biography (London and Edinburgh: Williams and Norgate, 1867), 299.

1 Thid., 314-20. 2 Cited ibid., 344.

‘3 See Robert Julian Stonor, Stonor: A Catholic Sanctuary in the Chilterns From the Fifth Century Till To-day (Newport: R. H. Johns, 1958), esp. 256-67.

Women, Patronage, and Print 85 Martin.'** In a similar case, when the Puritan printer Robert Waldegraves press was destroyed in 1588, Lord Burghley received report that ‘he saved these letters [type] in a boxe vnder his Cloke and brought them to Mistris CRANEs howse in London, as is allso confessed’.'* A new press was established at Crane’s East Molesey house, near Kingstonupon- Thames, and there Waldegrave printed William Udall’s A Demon-

stration of the Truth of that Discipline (1588) along with another ‘Libell’.'*° Patrick Collinson suggests that it was also at this site that Waldegrave printed the first of the Martin Marprelate tracts, Zhe Epistle to the Terrible Priests.'*’ Soon after this, Waldegrave became disillusioned

with the Martinist programme and moved to Scotland, where he later became King’s printer.'*® His successor, Hodgkins, and his assistants Tomlyn and Symmes, however, were arrested and tortured.'*” Elizabeth

Crane was imprisoned in the Fleet for a short space of time and fined 1,000 marks.'° The examples of Stonor, Arundel, Martin, and Crane have brought us a long way from Lady Kildare’s demand for an epigram upon a straw. Nonetheless, the activities of each of the women discussed in this chapter fall within the capacious definition of ‘padréna offered by John Florio. Patronage operated as a series of transactions pervading the interlinked

literary, political, and religious structures of early modern England. Though there is less evidence than some critics have claimed of women creating coherent literary programmes among favoured writers, there is more, and more diverse, evidence than has been acknowledged of women's commission of texts, and of their negotiation of the financial duties of a dedicatee. The patron—author dyad was only one of the possible forms

‘4 Patrick Collinson, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (London: Jonathan Cape, 1967), 140; Leona Rostenberg, Zhe Minority Press and the English Crown (Nieuwkoop: B. De Graaf, 1971), 172. See also Micheline White, ‘Power Couples and Women Writers in Elizabethan England: The Public Voices of Dorcas and Richard Martin and Anne and Hughe Dowriche’ in Rosalynn Voaden and Diane Wolfthal (eds.), Framing the Family: Narrative and Representation in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods (Tempe, AZ: Atizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2005), 120-38. 145 Lansdowne MS.61, Art. 22, cited in Arber, II, 816. 46 See Julia Norton McCorkle, ‘A Note Concerning “Mistress Crane” and the Martin Marprelate Controversy, The Library, 4th ser., 12 (1931), 276-83. 47 Collinson, Elizabethan Puritan Movement, 391. The suggest is accepted by the tract’s most recent editor (see Joseph L. Black (ed.), The Martin Marprelate Tracts: A Modernized and Annotated Edition (Cambridge University Press, 2008), 3. 48 Dict. I, s.n. 9 Rostenberg, The Minority Press, 180.

9 Collinson, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement, 497, n. 19. Richard L. Greaves, ‘Foundation Builders: The Role of Women in Early English Nonconformity in Greaves (ed.), Triumph Over Silence: Women in Protestant History (Westport, CT and London: Greenwood Press, 1985), 83.

86 ‘Grossly Material Things women’s patronage could take in early modern England, and patronage was rooted in extended social, economic, religious, and political networks.

Women’s ongoing interest in, and association with, the trade in printed books challenges the narrative which sets a democratic, public, and (by implication) male, marketplace of print against an aristocratic, elite, manuscript-based, and (by implication) female tradition of patronage. ‘This chapter complicates any straightforward tale of the decline of patronage in the face of a booming print marketplace. If the diffuse networks of support and exchange that constituted the early modern patronage system were gradually (though never entirely) displaced by the commercial trade

in books, it was in part because of patronal involvement in the book trades. Aristocratic and noble patrons played a substantial part in financing and shaping early print, and noble women’s key role in the sponsorship of early vernacular texts broadened in the last part of the sixteenth century into a keen interest in particular texts and the careers of favoured printers.

‘A free Stationers wife of this companye Women and the Stationers In Dekker and Webster’s Northward Hoe (1607), when the prostitute Doll determines to seduce the poet Bellamont, it is Bellamont’s son, Phillip, who suggests an appropriate venue for the pair's appointment: ‘Come

my little Punke with thy two Compositors to this vnlawfull painting house, thy pounders a my old poeticall dad wilbe here presently, take vp thy State in this chayre, and beare thy selfe as if thou wert talking to thy pottecary after the receipt of a purgation.’' ‘The play’s editor, Fredson Bowers, notes the absurdity of ‘painting house’ and affirms that the text should read ‘printing house’: a site where one might expect to encounter a jobbing poet and a number of print workers (the compositors who set the type, and the pounders, or pressmen, who beat leather balls against the typeface to work the ink onto the metal: an act lent a bawdy signifcance in Phillip’s formulation). For Bowers, ‘it seems most probable that we have here a compositor’s sophistication based on his misreading, painting. Not recognizing the printing reference (the dolt), he took pounders to be messengers, who pounded on Bellamont’s door, and he thus not only neglected the necessary comma after pounders but also supplied the rationalizing a.’* It is ironic (if not necessarily ‘doltish’) that it was in reproducing a description of his own trade that one compositor read ‘painting’ for ‘printing’, and set the type accordingly. The page registers the space of the printing house on two levels: it declares it as the dramatic location of the scene, but also materializes the labour of the staff of George Eld’s London print shop. The early modern printing house was a site in which texts could change, whether through compositorial error or adjustments, the interventions of proofreaders and correctors, or the influence of annotating or censoring ' ‘Thomas Dekker and John Webster, North-vvard Hoe (London: By G. Eld, 1607), E2v.

, Fredson Bowers (ed.), Zhe Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker, 4 vols. (Cambridge University Press, 1955), II, 483.

88 ‘Grossly Material Things agents. Io understand the book as a material object is to place it in the centre of overlapping webs of commerce and exchange, as well as to read the resulting product within the networks called into being by the particularities of the book’s expressive form.’ In Shakespeare and the Rise of the Editor, Sonia Massai argues that print house practices were not inherently degenerative processes taking us, at each stage, one step further from the author's original. Instead, Massai demonstrates that many stationers, and

the agents who worked with and for them, took pains to produce ‘perfected’ texts.* Zachary Lesser studies the outputs of particular booksellers to demonstrate the ways in which publishing agents constructed and marketed a corpus of texts. Lesser suggests that literary critics rarely pay attention to details of publication since they are not seen to alter the interpretive possibilities of the text, save where they create puzzling cruces like Doll’s ‘painting house’. He argues, however, that stationers’ paratexts contain some of the first readings of particular books, reflecting distinctively early modern interpretations of the text. For Lesser, ‘the plays of Shakespeare,

Marlowe, Beaumont and Fletcher, and their contemporaries...take on new meanings if we pay attention to the people who published them’.’ Read in parallel with Massai’s painstaking reconstruction of early editorial agents, Lesser’s work encourages us to reconceptualize the printing house as a productive space in which texts, as well as the physical books

that supported them, were crafted. The problem of meaning gains an additional dimension, however, when it comes to the study of women in the book trades: there is little evidence of women stationers emending copy or penning interpretive paratexts. The one prefatory item that was almost certainly written by a woman bookseller is the address to the reader in the 1591 edition of John Lyly’s Endymion, which makes no comment on the play itself. “The Printer’ (a term which in this context more usually invoked the publisher or bookseller) explains that: ‘since the Plaies in Paules were dissolued, there are certaine Commedies come to my handes by chaunce, which were presented before her Maiestie at seuerall times’.° > See D. KF McKenzie, “Ihe Book as an Expressive Form’ in McKenzie, Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts (London: The British Library, 1986; rpt. Cambridge University Press,

1 —21.

°e Sonia Massa, Shakespeare and the Rise of the Editor (Cambridge University Press, 2007).

> Zachary Lesser, Renaissance Drama and the Politics of Publication: Readings in the English Book Trade (Cambridge University Press, 2004), 10. ° John Lyly, Endymion, the Man in the Moone (London: J. Charlewood f. the widdowe Broome, 1591), A2r. Franklin B. Williams suggests that the unsigned address prefacing a collection of epigraphs for Ben Jonson, Jonsonus Virbius (1638) was written by Elizabeth Purslowe, but if we accept that epistles from ‘the printer to the reader’ are usually a product of the publishing agent rather than the printer, it is more likely to be by Henry Seile (/udex of Dedications and Commendatory Verses in English Books before 1641 (London: ‘The Bibliographical Society, 1962)).

Women and the Stationers 89 This phrasing suggests an accidental acquisition of Lyly’s popular comedies, but is followed by an offer to print more if Exdymion ‘may passe with thy good lyking’. If ‘in any place it shall dysplease I will take more paines to perfect the next’.’ The address is unsigned, but the writer is identifiable from the imprint, which records that the play was ‘Printed by I. Charlewood, for the widdowe Broome’. Since Joan Broome went on to publish another three of Lyly’s plays, as part of a distinctly literary list, we can assume that her advertising strategy was a successful one.® In this chapter, I argue that women and their labour were central to the early modern book trades, and that a woman’s name on the title-page can be appropriated as an interpretive act, challenging us to rethink our readings of the gendered dynamics of early modern texts. Though Broome offers no readerly gloss on Endymion, her courtship of the purchaser undermines the play’s already ambiguous elevation of the chaste and unapproachable Cynthia, and complicates the comic misogyny of the subplot. Moreover, Broome’s title-page appearance as ‘the widdowe Broome’ suggests the contingent nature of Cynthia’s fetishization of ‘the fairness of virginity, and takes the reader beyond the multiple betrothals that close the play to the mercantile realities of the death of a spouse.’ In her study of a later period Paula McDowell declares: ‘it should no

longer be news that women have long played a significant role in the making and transmission of the printed word’.'° Her work, along with a series of groundbreaking essays by Maureen Bell, has revealed women’s

presence in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century book trades, and offers a compelling picture of women negotiating the dual authorities of the Stationers’ Company and the law.'' This chapter adds to McDowell’s

’ Massai suggests that the emphasis on the ‘displeasing’ is a marketing strategy, advertising Broome’s responsiveness to complaints (Shakespeare and the Rise of the Editor, 7). The play’s modern editor notes that ‘Q is an excellent text, with very few printing errors... It reads like a text prepared by the author himself for publication’ (David Bevington, ‘Introduction to John Lyly, Endymion, ed. Bevington (Manchester University Press, 1996)), 3. * John Lyly, Gallathea (London: I. Charlewoode f. the widdow Broome, 1591); Midas (London: T. Scarlet f. J. Broome, 1592); Sapho and Phao (London: T. Orwin f. W. Broome, 1591). ° Lyly, Endymion, ed. Bevington, 4.2.74. '° Paula McDowell, The Women of Grub Street: Press, Politics, and Gender in the London Literary Marketplace, 1678-1730 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 26. '! Maureen Bell, “Women in the English Book Trade 1557-1700’, Leipziger Jahrbuch zur Buchgeschichte, 6 (1996), 13-45; “Hannah Allen and the Development of a Puritan Publishing Business, 1646-51’, Publishing History, 26 (1989), 5-66; ‘Elizabeth Calvert and the “Confederates”, Publishing History, 32 (1992), 5—49; ““Her Usual Practices”: The Later Career of Elizabeth Calvert, 1664-75’, Publishing History, 35 (1994), 5-64; ‘Seditious Sisterhood: Women Publishers of Opposition Literature at the Restoration’ in Kate Chedgzoy et al. (eds.), Voicing Women: Gender and Sexuality in Early Modern Writing (Keele University Press, 1996), 185-95.

90 ‘Grossly Material Things and Bell’s accounts of women in the print trades by moving to an earlier period, beginning with the incorporation of the Stationers’ Company in 1557, and providing new details of the extent and type of women’s booktrade work. Where McDowell ‘focuses on the politically dissident or “oppositional” activities of women in the London book trade’ to argue for women's participation in a burgeoning public sphere, my concern is primarily women’s participation in the day-to-day activities of the Stationers’ Company.” Widows frequently inherited their husbands’ printing houses; in 1536, for example, John Rastell bequeathed ‘my house in St. Martyns, with my presse, notes and lettres comprised in the same’ to his wife Elizabeth, sister of Sir Thomas More.'* The receipt of an inheritance was generally not a matter of taking on a new business, but a moment at which women already engaged in publishing lost a business partner, as well as a spouse. The extent of women’s business engagements is difficult to determine: an October 1634 list of master printers noted that George Purslowe ‘died lately and his wife keepeth the Printing house’ and used the same formula to describe Mary Dawson's position. The “‘Widdow Aldee’ was listed under her own name, having ‘succeeded her husband who was a Master Printer’,

while ‘Widdow Griffin succeeded her husband, an ancient Erection’."4 Evidence that these women took an active role can be found in the contrast provided by the note that “William Jones farmeth his printing house of widdow Blore, an ancient Erection. Here is a case in which a widow derived an income from allowing another stationer to ascend to the ranks of master printer by renting her printing house and material. This arrangement was sufficiently unusual to be noteworthy, and suggests that Dawson, Griffin, and Purslowe kept their printing houses themselves. In autumn 1635, however, another list included Allde, Griffin, Dawson, and Purslowe, and again noted that William Jones paid a stipend to the widow Blower. This document notes that Allde “keepes her trade by her

sonne, remarks of Griffin and Purslowe that “Haviland, Yong, and Fletcher [i.e. John Haviland, Robert Young, and Miles Flesher] haue this’,

and records of all four women that they were ‘neuer admitted [to the Stationers Company] neither capable’.’’ The term ‘capable’ does not refer to the women’s business ability, but to the terms under which they might

be admitted to the Company: they had not served an apprenticeship or worked as journeymen. However, the list is determinedly factual: many senior stationers, including Felix Kingston, then Master of the Stationers’ Company, are noted as never having been admitted, while Young’s former ‘2 McDowell, Women of Grub Street, 30. 'S Plomer, 5.

4 Arber, IL, 700. 'S Arber, III, 701.

Women and the Stationers 91 partner is also described as not capable. There is, as I discuss below, good evidence of Purslowe’s and Griffin's active involvement in the businesses run in their names, and the note of Haviland’s (who was Griffin's partner), Young's, and Flesher’s interests reveals overlapping networks of collaboration and responsibility, centred around the Eliot's Court Press. Both

Mary Dawson and Elizabeth Allde appear to have ceased printing in 1636—7. Griffin and Purslowe, however, continued in business into the 1640s; in October 1649, Purslowe, along with numerous other stationers, including Gertrude Dawson and Joy Phillips, was bound by a series of recognizances preventing her from printing or causing to be printed ‘any seditious scandalous or treasonable pamphlet paper booke or picture’.'® Though, for the purposes of this chapter, I describe women in the book trades as an identifiable group, it will be evident from the variety of incidents detailed here that women experienced their afhliations in varied ways, and that, for many, sex is unlikely to have been the most significant category of identity. Recently, scholars have suggested that early modern subjectivity was formed in relation to external rather than interior commitments and identifications.'’ Women like Anne Griffin, Joan Orwin, and Elizabeth Toye identified themselves as members of the community of stationers, as well as, at various points, wives, mothers, widows, and members of political and religious communities. Their determination to print or publish particular texts was sometimes driven by what was to hand, or what they had inherited; on other occasions they were informed by more complex motivations, reinforcing Peter McCullough’s objection to ‘the received orthodoxy that stationers pursued financial success without reference to religious or political ideology’."

Women in the book trades may, perhaps unsurprisingly, have been highly literate. A number signed their names in the Stationers’ Company Registers. In June 1625, for example, Ellen Boyle signed the entry book to confirm that she was assigning her rights in four works to Nicholas

Bourne.'” Others used writing to communicate their intentions to the court, clerk, or wardens. In 1636, the widows Moore and Allott transferred their livery and yeomanry parts by means of letters which were read '© "TNA: SP 25/120, 6, ff. 9-10. Purslowe also entered copy on 30 July and 27 November 1643 (G. E. B. Eyre, H. R. Plomer, and C. R. Rivington (eds.), A Transcript of the Registers of the Worshipful Company of Stationers from 1640 to 1708, 3 vols. (London, privately

printed, 1913-14), I, 59, 87. '7 See Debora Shuger, “The “I” of the Beholder: Renaissance Mirrors and the Reflexive Mind’ in Patricia Fumerton and Simon Hunt (eds.), Renaissance Culture and the Everyday (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 21-41. '§ Peter McCullough, ‘Print, Publication, and Religious Politics in Caroline England’, The Historical Journal, 51 (2008), 286.

Arber, IV, 143.

92 ‘Grossly Material Things out in court.*’ In July 1609, John Budge entered three copies ‘by consente

of Helen ftayrbrand widdow late wyfe of William ffyrbrand Deceased vnder her handwritinge’, while in February 1626 William Stansby was assigned the rights in 105 copies ‘by vertue of a note vnder the hand of Mistris Snodham’.*' From late 1633 it became relatively commonplace for women’s assignments to be made in writing, as when Abigail Wright passed four copies to Andrew Kembe ‘by vertue of a noate vnder [her] hand and seale’.””

Further evidence of literacy can be found in the October 1628 exami-

nation of Elizabeth Josselyn, who gave evidence in the trial of John Felton, assassin of the Duke of Buckingham. Josselyn testified that she

had lent books to Felton, who lodged in the same building, and duly returned all of them, except ‘the history of the Queene of Scotts’.** The loan was made before Josselyn’s marriage to the stationer Samuel Josse-

lyn, whilst she was living with her mother, indicating that the books belonged to her personal collection. In another case, the bookseller Richard Kele ensured the literacy of his children by including testamentary provision for the tuition of his son William, and daughters Judith

and Margaret, by John Tull, Robert Fryer, and Robert Toye respectively.* Anna Bill, first wife of John Bill, was a skilled reader and writer.

A volume of commendations and epitaphs printed by John Hodgets after her premature death in 1621 contains repeated puns on the material forms of the text (Bill is described as “a Booke / Of goodly Monuments, or faire Manuscript and ‘A Tract well mixed, and each part, / The best Edition of the Mart’). The Peplum Modestiz is hagiographical in tone, and several contributors emphasize Bill’s literacy. One demands ‘what will become / Of learning now? all must be dumbe, while another remembers her as: Modest though young, no talker, though she knew To speake, nay write, as well as most men doe.

°° Jackson, 286. *!’ Arber, II, 414; IV, 152. In some cases it is not clear whether the women wrote the notes themselves or used an amanuensis and subscribed their signature. Even if this was the case, however, dictation and the ability to write a signature both suggest participation in certain modes of literacy. See James Daybell, Women Letter-writers in Tudor England (Oxford University Press, 2006), ch. 4. 22 Arber, IV, 456. See also IV, 238, 271, 312, 296, 299, 368, 359, 367, 458. This formula also becomes more usual for men, and may reflect either a change in the procedures by which copies were assigned, or a change of clerk. 5 "TNA: SP 16/118, 16. Samuel is listed as a ‘stationer’ though he does not appear in the STC Index or the Plomer and McKerrow dictionaries. 4 Plomer, 10. ° Peplum Modestia, The Vaile of Modestie (London: John Hodgets, 1621), A2v, A4v.

Women and the Stationers 93 A louer of good letters, which she read, Not for discourse but daily practised.°°

Though written within a discursive field which prized women’s silence, the poem suggests Bill was a confident reader and writer, and she is credited with the composition of an ‘epitaph... found in her Closet, intended (as it seemes) for her selfe’. The verse is conventional in content, with Bill describing herself as ‘a sad and sencelesse lumpe, / Till the last summons of

that dreadfull trumpe’, but suggests the centrality of religious practice, marriage, and sociability to Bill’s textualized identity.” As McDowell points out in her account of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries: “The “community” of women printworkers... was a matter of positioning rather than of an identity of interests. Their community was not yet grounded in a shared sense of gender identity; rather, community was made by their different but overlapping relationships to the new political print marketplace and to socio-economic and cultural élites.’** Relational networks operate in more than one direction, however, and I argue that where the women described here identi-

fied themselves through their marital status, religious and_ political commitments, economic standing, literacy, and relationship to the trade and social rituals of the Stationers’ Company, their social and professional activities were important to the status and operations of the Company, and the institutional and genealogical structures that underlay the London book trades.” In the final section of this chapter I examine the overlap between domestic and business space to show that women were enmeshed in the structures of company life. The Stationers’ Company Registers and court records provide an insight into aspects of women’s labour and sociability which are ostensibly separate from the act of textual production, but which remain part of the work of social reproduction. Women’s work, I

argue, allowed for the perpetuation of institutional life, and the selfconstruction of the Stationers’ Company as a corporate and civic body.*° An attention to the different forms of women’s labour adds an additional

layer of complexity to ‘the far from straightforward relation between *6 Thid., Adv. *” |bid., A8r—v. *8- McDowell, Women of Grub Street, 11.

*? For an important contextual study of the corporate identity of the Stationers’ Company, see Ian Anders Gadd, ‘Being Like a Field’: Corporate Identity in the Stationers’ Company 1557-1684, unpublished D.Phil. thesis (Pembroke College, University of Oxford,

1oD ;On the social structures and civic community of the London guilds see especially Ian

W. Archer, The Pursuit of Stability: Social Relations in Elizabethan London (Cambridge University Press, 1991), ch. 4.

94 ‘Grossly Material Things women’s production—both material and cultural—and canonical writing’.°' The ‘comprehensive logic’ which D. E McKenzie identifies as intrinsic to bibliographical study suggests that women’s work forms an important matrix for the functioning of the early modern book trade and its products.”

I ‘CYTIZEN AND STACIONER OF LONDON’: GENEALOGIES OF THE TRADE The term ‘publisher’ would have been unfamiliar to members of the early book trades, who described themselves as stationers, or, more specifically, as printers, booksellers, or sometimes both.” Either the printer or book-

seller could take on the role of publisher, determining what was to be printed and venturing the costs of the impression. Over the course of the period, the balance of trade power shifted away from printers and into the hands of booksellers, who assumed greater control of copy, creating an ‘increasing divergence between financial and artisanal interests’.** By

1663, a group of printers could complain that while booksellers were once ‘very few and served ‘but as an Appendix to the Printers... now they

are grown so bulkie and numerous...that there is hardly one Printer to ten others that have a share in the Government of the Company’.”’ These overlapping professions had their own stratifications: a printer started out as an apprentice, and hoped to become a journeyman, working for wages. Only a few became master printers, in possession of their own printing house and presses. Booksellers could range from indigent ballad sellers,

chapmen, and mercury women to wealthy and influential figures who sponsored the production of major editions.

Though the City of London approved the formation of a guild of stationers in 1403, it was not until 1557 that the Company was granted a charter of incorporation by Mary I. A Company member could assert rights in a text, or ‘copy, by recording the details in the ‘entry book’ °! Dympna Callaghan, ‘Looking Well to Linens: Women and Cultural Production in Othello and Shakespeare's England’ in Jean Howard and Scott Shershow (eds.) Marxist Shakespeares (Routledge, 2000), 53. °° McKenzie, Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts, 29. °° Peter Blayney offers an overview of the structures and terminology of the early print-

ing trades: “The Publication of Playbooks’ in John D. Cox and David Scott Kastan (eds.), A New History of Early English Drama (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), ae ‘Alecandra Halasz, Zhe Marketplace of Print: Pamphlets and the Public Sphere in Early Modern England (Cambridge University Press, 1997), 25. ° A Brief Discourse Concerning Printing and Printers (London: Printed for a society of printers, 1663), B2v.

Women and the Stationers 95 (now known as the Registers) and paying a fee of Gd. (4d. for a pamphlet or ballad). Peter Blayney has challenged the assumption that entry in the Registers was a compulsory part of the process of ecclesiastical licensing,

and demonstrated not only that it was commonplace for printers and booksellers not to enter copy, but that they were most likely to make entries when they believed their texts to be valuable or timely.*° Like other livery companies, the Stationers operated according to a complex hierarchy, and members occupied a variety of offices including beadle, steward, warden, and master. Disputes and grievances were aired at regular meetings of the Court of Assistants. Women were never officially excluded from the freedom of the Stationers Company, although it was not until the 1660s that four women were admitted to the company by redemption, and Elizabeth Latham became

the first to be admitted by patrimony.’’ Only in 1936, thanks to an administrative error, were women admitted to the livery and thereby entitled to hold office. The late formal extension of the franchise to women should be read as a symptom of the increasing exclusion of women from the seventeenth century onwards, and should not obscure the extent of women’s activity during the first century of the Company's existence. Stationers' widows were automatically made free of the Company with the right to take apprentices and hold shares in the English Stock, established in 1603.°° ‘These shares were limited in number, and subject to competitive election whenever they became available. If women remarried within the company, they retained the parts and rights held by their husbands,

but surrendered them if they married outside the trade. Adrian Johns notes that by 1644, over 25 per cent of shares in the English Stock were held by women.” Rather than creating a distinct, and perhaps troubling, grouping of ‘freewomen’, widows were subsumed within categories of citizenship and

trade identity. In 1564, both Anne Heister and Jone Marten were described in company records as ‘Cytizen and stacioner of London’, while in °° Blayney, “The Publication of Playbooks’, 396-405. °” Cyprian Blagden, The Stationers Company: A History, 1403-1959 (Stanford University Press, 1977), 162. Elizabeth Latham was made free of the Company in 1668, two years after Joanna Nye became the first female apprentice to be formally bound to a member of the Company. Neither Nye nor any of the thirty-four other women bound as Stationers’ apprentices before 1700 appear to have been freed from their indentures. See Margaret

Hunt, ‘Hawkers, Bawlers, and Mercuries: Women and the London Press in the Early Enlightenment’, Women and History, 9 (1984), 41-68. °8 The English Stock was a collection of monopolies held jointly by Company members, and in part used to provide work for poorer stationers. See Blagden, The Stationers’ Company, 92-101. * Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 260.

96 ‘Grossly Material Things 1566, the recently deceased Elizabeth Toye was identified as “‘Wydowe late of London stacioner Deceassed’. It is clear that Toye was an active member

of the Company.” In early 1556 she gave 2s. as part of a collection ordered by the Lord Mayor of London to repair the Bridewell, and a further 20s. as a ‘benevolence... towardes our [In]corperation’.*' Toye was one of sixteen members out of ninety-two listed who paid 2s. or more in the first instance, and one of only nine of the seventy listed who paid 20s. or above in the second. These figures indicate both the extent of Toye’s personal wealth, and her significant economic presence as a Company member. In

October 1638 an Act of Common Council required the Company to raise the sum of £80 ‘for renewing the Citties Charter’. Beneath the list of assistants appears a list of assistants’ widows, Mrs Joyce Norton, Mrs Jane

Norton, and Mrs Leake, each of whom donated 26s., the same amount donated by all but one of the assistants.” The trade commitments explored in this chapter tend to be at the level of the financial and proprietorial: women owned businesses, managed apprentices, and ensured the safe transmission of copy. It is more difficult

to ascertain the extent to which women participated in the mechanical work specific to book production. In contrast, women booksellers engaged directly with purchasers, while, as I show in my next chapter, those lower down the social scale experienced the physical demands of peripatetic trade. Continental illustrations sometimes depict women as members of the print-trade workforce, most notably in Jan Luyken’s 1694 image of a typefounder in which the man casts the type and the woman files them smooth (see figure 3.1). Hieronymus Hornschuch’s 1608 Orthotypographia shows a woman entering the printing house carrying a large jug, though she is, quite literally, a liminal figure, poised on the threshold (figure 3.2). The earliest English printing manual is Joseph Moxon’s 1683-4 Mechanick Exercises on the Whole Art of Printing, which establishes the printing house as a decidedly homo-social environment.”

What little evidence there is for the particularities of women’s work comes in the form of punishment and prohibition. In 1635, it was ordered ‘that noe Master Printer shall hereafter permit or suffer, by themselves, or their Journeymen any Girles, Boyes, or others, to take off anie Sheetes from the Tinpin of the Presse, but that hee that pulleth at the Presse shall take off every Sheet himself’.** This proclamation genders the press worker male, but suggests that girls as well as boys may have found employment removing the wet sheets from the press. Perhaps more tell-

40 Arber, I, 251, 257, 390. “1 Arber, I, 46, 49. * Jackson, 428. *® Joseph Moxon, Mechanick Exercises on the Whole Art of Printing, ed. Herbert Davis and Harry Carter (1683-4; rpt. New York: Dover Publications, 1962). “ Arber, IV, 23.

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* =) Pa vo‘‘4 — ANNie = Tbid., IH, 727. ' Tbid., 249, 730. 7 Stationers’ Company Court Book C, f. 27a. '°8 Stationers Company Court Book D, f. 222a. '° On similar events hosted by the Drapers’ Company, see Orlin, Locating Privacy, 136-41.

ee Arber, I, 554. *°l Thid., 86, 103, 130.

128 ‘Grossly Material Things These festivities also required the presence of women workers, as did the ongoing work of cleaning and domestic management. In 1556, the Company Registers record a payment ‘to the bedelles wyf [Mistress Fayreberne] for her paynes takynge as sco[u]rynge of the vessell dressyng of dyners and dyuers other thynges’.*’’ In 1559, a similar payment was made ‘to a woman for Skowrynge the vessell and Dressynge the howse by vj Dayes and for hyr meate and Drynke’, and in 1594, 12d. was given ‘to the woman at the hall’: a one-off payment the wording of which may nonetheless suggest an ongoing arrangement.*”’ The persistence of female employment is evident from a 1676 payment “To Judith Gally for cleaning the Hall’.** These records suggest that women were a common domestic presence at Stationers’ Hall; the recognition that women’s labour was part

of the ‘diverse, material practices that underpinned the early modern book trade should encourage us to conceptualize the early market in printed texts as anchored not only in ‘complex and heterogeneous forms of commerce’ but as grounded in particular places, and in specific forms of sociability and exchange.*” The court books reveal that in 1608, ‘Mystres Bysshop’, wife of the bookseller George Bishop, who published at least three titles after her husband’s death in 1618, ‘hathe of her owne motion & voluntary good will freely gyven to the Company. A table cloathe, A towell, and Twoo Dozen of napkyns, wrought with white Lady woorke / The whiche were Delyuered to mr Seton and mr Standish Wardens, at a court holden this daye /’.°°° When Mary Bishop’s will was read out on 4 October 1613, she ‘did give and bequeath to the Company of Staconers in London being at her funerall, ten poundes foure arras wrought cushens a cubberd cloth and two long flaxen table-clothes of her owne spinning’.””” This entry insists that these gifts are the products of Bishop’s own labour, distineuishing them from comparable presentations by male stationers. They were also valuable: in her study of the Drapers’ Company Orlin notes that ‘the most valuable of the Company's goods were textiles—napery, table carpets, and cushion covers’.””* Moreover, these goods suggest that Bishop

established herself as an enduring presence through the presentation of gifts which had both a useful, but, more importantly, a livery function, proclaiming the status of both giver and Company. In 1562, Mistress White gave the Company a tablecloth, while a 1558 list of Hall fixtures and fittings noted that the Buttery was furnished with 202 Thid., 56. 203 Thid., 109. 204 Stationers’ Company Court Book D, f. 267b. Cited in Ann Saunders, “The Stationers Hall’ in Myers and Harris (eds.), The Stationers Company, 9. *°9 Natasha Korda, ‘Labours Lost’, 195.

06 Jackson, 33. 207 Thid., 62. °° Orlin, Locating Privacy, 121.

Women and the Stationers 129 ‘a newe tabull clothe for one old by mistress Toye’ and ‘1 Dozen napkins gyven by mistress Toy pleyne’.”” In a list of seventy-four items, four are distinguished by the name of their donor, but they suggest what Catherine Richardson terms ‘the sensory qualities of memories’ in the period: Elizabeth Toye’s gifts bore their association with her as part of their endur-

ing meaning.”'? The memorial function is particularly marked where goods bore the donor’s name or initials, as was the case with a ‘dyaper table clothe of Damaske worke’ given by a now anonymous donor couple in 1562 or 1563, which was decorated with the ‘letter of his name and of hyrs’.*'' Richardson argues that at the level of the household early moderns experienced ‘a close interaction between the “household human’ and the “household physical”, one which was negotiated both ideologically and in practice through objects and spaces’.*'* A similar dynamic operated within Stationers’ Hall, as the objects detailed in inventories and accounts

retained the charge of their donation, and proclaimed the generosity of the giver and the status of a Company with a richly furnished Hall whose contents possessed an armorial function (literally in the case of two gilt spoons inscribed ‘with the armes of the howse’).*'’ Paying attention to the furniture of the Hall anchors early modern printed books in a richly significant material world. That world was literally material: the fabrics which made up the cloth goods of the Company also constituted the books produced by its members, as John Taylor notes in “The Praise of Hemp-seed’:

For when I thinke but how is paper made Into Phylosophy I straightwayes wade: How here, and there, and euery where lyes scatter'd, Old ruind rotten rags, and ropes all tatter‘d. And some of these poore things perhaps hath beene The linnen of some Countesse or some Queene.

Playing with the idea of the book as support for the text and a material object in its own right, Taylor reflects: ‘I in forme of paper speake to you. /

And paper now’s the subiect of my booke.”*'* When that subject is laid alongside the fabrics and other material objects recorded in the Stationers’ Company records it provides a forceful reminder of the material networks, 209 Arber, I, 190, 89. *!® Richardson, Domestic Life and Domestic Tragedy, 194. “MH Arber, I, 224. ** Richardson, Domestic Life and Domestic Tragedy, 194. “5 Arber, I, 224. On Company plate in other London guilds see Ian W. Archer, “The Arts and Acts of Memorialization in Early Modern London in J. E Merritt (ed.), Jmagining Early Modern London: Perceptions and Portrayals of the City from Stow to Strype, 1590-1720

(Cambridge University Press, 2001), 98. 214 ‘The Praise of Hemp-seed (London: For H. Gosson, and are to be sold at ChristChurch gate, 1620), D4r-v.

130 ‘Grossly Material Things and the numerous agents, which constituted the early modern book trade, and disrupts ‘the gender-coded taxonomies of private and public, work and leisure, art and artifact which constitute the framework of fullblown capitalism’.*” Each part of Stationers’ Hall was connected with the generosity of its members: between 1554 and 1557, shortly after the Company moved to new premises at Peter’s College, Toye’s husband was one of several station-

ers to pay for wainscoting for the council chamber, while Elizabeth Toye ‘payd for one new glasse wyndowe in our halle’, and left £4 towards the ‘maintenaunce of their halle’ in her will.?!° Widows also ensured the safe transmission of their husbands’ bequests: the widow Dockewray passed on 20s. ‘which hyr husbonde gave to our hall by his Last will / and also a spone of sylver all gylte’, while Mistress Harrison gave a gilt spoon bequeathed by her husband.*’” These latter bequests were part of the social ritual surrounding the death of a Company member; Harrison also paid 10s. to the Company as a token of thanks for members’ attendance at her husband's funeral. *'* The Company paid for at least one woman's funeral: that of the impoverished widow Crowe in June 1627.7"’ At funerals, the Company was visibly present within the extended community, deriving an income from renting out its hearse cloth ‘of golde powderyd with blew veluet and borderyd a bought with blacke veluet Imbroydered and frenged with blew yellow Red and grene’, the gift of John Cawood, which was valued at £4 23s. 4d.**? Widows acknowledged their husbands’ and their

own identity as stationers through the bequest of memorial gifts and money. On happier occasions, the Hall space was occupied by the community: as is the case today, Stationers’ Hall could be rented to celebrate weddings. Elizabeth Toye gave money to the Company both for attending her husband Robert's funeral in 1556 and for ‘occupynge of our hall at a weddynge of mistress Toye hyr mayde’ in 1558 or 1559.7”! Some bequests were charitable in intent: in 1608, for example, Elizabeth Burby paid £20 to the Company in accordance with her husband, Cuthbert’s, will, which was ‘to be lent from 3 yeres to 3 yeres. to 2. poore yongemen booksellers free of the Comp[any]’.”** Women were frequent “19 Callaghan, ‘Looking Well to Linens’, 78. 216 Arber, I, 61; Plomer, 15. *I7 Arber, I, 103, 223. Blagden notes that in 1629 the dividends payable to widows of former Masters were withheld until the Company was satisfied that the women had presented the silver gifts bequeathed by their late husbands (The Stationers’ Company, 100).

“18 Arber, I, 221. *19 Jackson, 195. °20 Arber, I, 62. *! Tbid., 35, 102. Weddings may have been riotous occasions: in 1590 or 1591 the Company paid 2s. 6d. ‘to a bricklayer for layeinge tyles in the hall after a weddinge’ (ibid.,

my Jackson, 32.

Women and the Stationers 131 recipients of Company charity, whether in the form of one-off payments like the 7s. ‘gyven to Richard dayes wydowe for her relief’ in 1606, or a

quarterly pension.*” Relief was not restricted to widows: in 1582 the Company gave money to the wife and children of one of John Day’s journeymen, and to William Jackson's wife, while in 1592, they paid 10s. ‘to Roger Ward’s wife when he was in prison to relieve him’, despite the fact

that his imprisonment came at the Stationers’ instigation.*’* Women could be donors, as well as recipients, of charitable bequests: on 10 June 1616 ‘Mr Swinhowe receiued of ffrances Burton, 40s giuen by mrs Binge to be distributed among poore workemen of the Company’.*” These gestures suggest the extent to which the Company was the locus for a particular community, and complicate any characterization of the early book trade as inherently capitalist. Instead, the performance of charitable acts was crucial to the Company’s self-construction as a livery company, and marked its public role within the City. On occasion, monetary transactions were less philanthropic. In 1613, Winifred Hatfield paid £100 to the Hall account on the understanding that she would receive a pension of £12 a year, and her daughter Martha would receive £10 a year after her mother’s death.””® This is an unusual arrangement, and one that demonstrates women's self-identification with

the Stationers: in order to secure her daughter’s well-being Hatfield turned to the formal structures of the Company. Sara White similarly placed £160 ‘in the handes and Chardg of the Master wardens and assistantes of the Company of Stationrs of the Cittie of London’ to be held in trust for her four grandchildren until they reached their majority.°°’ The Company was to provide for the education and maintenance of the children at a rate of £5 per annum, and if they did not comply the legacy was to be invested elsewhere. Anne Boler took a different route to secure her children’s future, assigning copies ‘which were the Copies of the said James Boler and Anne his wife lately deceased’ in whole or in part to the Master and Wardens ‘in trust onely for James and Thomas *°3 Tbid., 24. Pension recipients listed in Jackson include Helen Hoskins (11), Alice Wright (115), Alice Reade (99), Mary Lufeman (92), Widow Haies (85), Mistress Tripp (56), Widow Oswald (22), Elizabeth Seager (195), Mrs Gilmyn (202), Agnes Fidling (92), Alice Bamford (86), Mistress Chard (139, 143), and Anne Snodham (88); and in Greg and Boswell, Joan Danter (78), Widow Duffeild (79), Mistress Crowley (43), Widow French (16, 17), and Mother Sutton (14). 224 Arber, I, 500, 555. See Blagden, The Stationers’ Company, 112. *25 Jackson, 86.

26 Tbid., 59. Katherine Vincent left “her stocke of money in the stationers hall London’ in the custody of the warden and masters until her son, George, came of age, at which point he would receive both the capital and ‘such profitt as the M' and wardens shall thinke fitt’ (ibid., 105). “7 Thid., 80.

132 ‘Grossly Material Things Boler’.**? That the Company took seriously their role as the guardians of inheritances (as well perhaps as the capital the role secured) is shown by their pursuit of one case to the court of Chancery, where it was decreed that Mr Turner, who had married Elizabeth Burby, was to pay the Company not only the £600 of Edward Burby’s legacy to be returned to the child when he came of age, but the Company’s damages in the suit. As

Burby’s executrix, Elizabeth was to receive £5 per annum towards the bringing up of Cuthbert’s children.” The Company could also use property as a mode of poor relief. An entry in the court records for 1607 notes that Katharine Dawson successfully sued for a room that had previously been occupied by one of ‘the Almesfolk of mr Lambes foundacion’.*”” Orlin notes the ‘dense social lives’ of buildings in the capital ‘with its urgent issues of proximity and jurisdiction’..**' Both the Stationers’ Hall at St Peter’s College and its later incarnation in the former Abergavenny House were complex spaces, with

unclear boundaries, and parts of the properties were rented out.”” The Company accounts for 1555 record the receipt of 2s. 4d. ‘of the wedow for halfe a yeres Rente’, while in 1615 Mistress Fairebrother secured a new

lease for rooms in the Hall on the same terms that had previously been granted to her husband.”* The rights of wives and widows were recognized when leases were agreed: in September 1621 Master Locke was granted a 31-year lease of ‘the Corner house’, and it was noted that ‘the Companie are Content, that he shall haue a back doore in to the yard during his owne life and his wiues they themselves dwelling in the said house’.*** This concern for boundaries and access illuminates the complexities of corporate and domestic space, as does the provision that if a City commandment were to require the overhanging upper stories of the house to be taken down, Locke would undertake the work ‘at his owne proper Costes and Charges’, but would be entitled, upon the payment of an additional £50, to extend his lease by twenty years. When the Stationers acquired their first hall, at least one room was already let out to the Dean of St Paul’s, and his widow continued in residence until 1561 or 1562, when the Company paid 28s. ‘for hyr good will of departure out of a Roome which she had of this howse’.*” In 1598, the Company made a similar ‘gift’ of 20s. to Widow Smith ‘at her goinge out of the possession of the hall house’.**° In the marginal space used to list

28 Arber, IV, 435. 2) Jackson, 71. 230 Tbid., 27. °°! Orlin, Locating Privacy, 131. ** See Blagden, 206-8, 212-15. 33 Arber, I, 33; Jackson, 83, 119. 34 Jackson, 138. 99 Arber, I, 189. The rent for the room was 4s., hence 28s. was equivalent to seven years’ rental. °° Greg and Boswell, 65.

Women and the Stationers 133 names, Smith is described as “Wydowe Smyth of the hall’, a formula which highlights Smith’s identification with the physical spaces of the Company's activity. In 1587, it took an annual pension of 40s. to persuade the widow Rider, who had lived with her husband, the Company beadle, in ‘the house in the hall’, to move out by Michaelmas and allow the new beadle, John Wolfe, to occupy the residence.” Women were not only renters but owners of significant property: Stephen and Jane Kevall gave a house to the Company, with half of the profit to be given to the poor of the parish of St Mary at Hill, ‘and the other half of the said tenement and the profit thereof vnto the poore of my Company the Stacyoners of London for ever’.”’® As in the case of the furniture described above, donated houses carried with them the memory of their former owners: in 1589, Hugh Woodcock was offered priority in securing a lease upon ‘the house & all other Rowmes w“ m* Iane Kevall

conveied to this Company’.*”’? Bonham Norton rented property from Mary Bishop which was bequeathed to the Company upon her death, in return for a rent of ‘one Pepper corne yearely (yf yt be demaunded)’ to be paid to her heirs or assigns.**° Elizabeth Toye inherited her husband’s ‘messuage of tenement wherein I now dwell, and my shoppe withe the signe of the bell nexte adioininge to Master Petitts house’, with a reversion to their son, Humphrey, and also ‘my house with appurtenances wherein Richard Jugge now inhabiteth’. The Toyes’ daughter Rose received houses

in Paternoster Row and St Paul’s Churchyard, the two centres of the London book trade, and ‘all such interest...as I have of and in two shoppes under one roufe nowe being in the several tenures of John Cawood and John King’.**! The businesses of Jugge, Cawood, and King were de-

pendent upon the continued good will, and contractual obligations, of the Toye women, and reveal the extent to which the book trade was shaped by patterns of property ownership and real estate, much of which was held by, or passed through the hands of, women.””

*57 Thid., 23, 28-9.

88 Stephen Kevall made the bequest in his will, dated 28 October 1570, with the caveat that Jane Kevall could sell the tenement if she ‘should have need and necessity before her decease’ (Plomer, 18). Jane, however, conveyed the house to the Company, and it was the subject of continuing negotiation after Stephen’s death (see Arber, I, 460, 491, 494, 528, 554, 560, 566, 578).

39 Greg and Boswell, 31. 49 Jackson, 45-8. 41 Plomer, 12. *2 ‘The extent of Joan Wolfe’s holdings in St Paul’s Churchyard are evident from her desire not only that John Hun should continue to rent “all that shoppe in Pawles church yarde aforesaide’, but that Luke Harrison and his wife, and Francis Coldocke’s executors and assigns, should be allowed to continue their leases on tenements and rooms ‘adioyning or belonging to the said chappell’, and from her bequest of ‘all the saide Chappell howses etc. to her son, Robert (ibid., 21-2).

134 ‘Grossly Material Things The woman in Hornschuch’s illustration of the early modern printing house is, as noted above, a liminal figure, and the evidence presented in this chapter suggests that her marginalization is twofold. By confining the woman to the space of the doorway, Hornschuch denies the real presence of women within the early modern book trades. Women inherited and ran businesses, traded in copies, and pursued their rights. They sometimes printed what they could find or hoped would be profitable, but could also be identified with particular categories of print, whether generic, as in the case of Margery Trundle who specialized in ballads or “Widdow Sherleaker [who] lives by printing of pictures’, or motivated by political and religious commitments, as in the examples of Jacqueline Vautrollier, Anne Griffin, and the Dawson women.**?

Hornschuch’s image both acknowledges women’s role as domestic workers and positions it as secondary to the business of the male-dominated print shop. Yet the variety of women’s labour, and their involvement in finance and property ownership, were crucial to the ongoing functioning of both the print shop and the Stationers Company. Dympna Callaghan reminds us: ‘the invisibility of women’s work as well as the crea-

tion of an absolute distinction between aesthetic and productive labor is a relatively new phenomenon, and one which certainly postdates the Renaissance’.*“* An attention to women’s work and to women’s relations to the Stationers Company, both as a corporate body and a particular place, disrupts the lines between aesthetic and productive labour, and reveals ‘precisely what the canonical construct we have inherited occludes, namely women’s material and cultural production’. Both as the owners of print-

ing and bookselling businesses, and as the undertakers of ‘dyuers other things’, women were present in the spaces of print production. The texts thus produced are in part made intelligible as the result of women’s work. If ‘there is no text apart from the physical support that offers it for reading (or hearing)’, women’s labour is one of the material subtexts of the books we have inherited, and should be read alongside those books as a provocation and a challenge to the work of interpretation.’

*43 The reference to Sherleaker comes in the February 1636 list of printers made by Sir

John Lambe, reprinted in Greg, Companion, 259-60. For Trundle’s ballads see ch. 4 below.

“4 Callaghan, “Looking Well to Linens’, 78. 45 Tbid., 55. *6 Roger Chartier, Zhe Order of Books: Readers, Authors, and Libraries in Europe between

100 and Eighteenth Centuries, tr. Lydia G. Cochrane (Stanford University Press,

‘Certaine women brokers and peddlers’ Beyond the London Book Trades In 1584, a new edition of Richard Eden’s translation of Martin Cortés’s The Arte of Nauigation—the guide which Sir Francis Drake used to navigate around the world—declared that it was ‘printed by Iohan Iugge Wydowe’.' Its colophon bears the additional information that it was ‘Imprinted at Lon-don, by the Widowe of Richarde lugge, late Printer to the Queenes Maiestie. 1584. CVM PRIVILEGIO’. The book is an elaborate production, with a decorative title-page and numerous diagrams, tables, and illustrations, including a fold-out map and volvelles. The material page is pushed to its limits in order to encompass the technologies of global exploration. Some fifty years later, a 1633 edition of John Stow’s survey of London, revised by Anthony Munday, Humphrey Dyson, and others, informed the reader that it was ‘Printed by Elizabeth Purslovv, and are to be sold by Nicholas Bourne, at his shop at the south entrance of the Royall Exchange’. Stow’s nostalgic tour of London offered a street-bystreet guide to the capital which drew on an idealized past to critique the present. In Munday’s expanded edition, numerous additional descriptions of tombs and funeral inscriptions, as well as an enlarged cityscape, offer a more celebratory civic vision, though one that remains rooted in a reinvented past.* The imprint, however, places Nicholas Bourne, and by extension his associate, Purslowe, at the heart of London's new commercial centre. Jugge’s and Purslowe’s editions register women’s productive engagement in a conceptual shift which critics have described as ‘a new kind of ' Martin Cortés, The Arte of Nauigation, tr. Richard Eden (Imprinted at London: By the widowe of Richard lugge, late printer to the Queenes Maiestie, 1584), tp. For Drake, see Elizabeth Nash, Seville, Cordoba, and Granada: A Cultural History (Oxford University Press, 2005), 85. * For a sympathetic account of Munday’s ‘ungainly if fascinating’ edition see J. F. Merritt, “The Reshaping of Stow’s “Survey”: Munday, Strype, and the Protestant City’ in Merritt (ed.), Imagining Early Modern London: Perceptions and Portrayals of the City from Stow to Strype,

1598-1720 (Cambridge University Press, 2001), 52-88 (66).

136 ‘Grossly Material Things imaginative inhabitation’ of the city and the world beyond.’ On the one hand, Stow’s Survey captured a London which was, according to Andrew Gordon, ‘enacted before it was visualised... walked before it was drawn’, while on the other, Cortés’s navigational aids opened the globe to imaginative, as well as literal, exploration and possession.* Whereas, for Michel

de Certeau, mapping the city inevitably creates ‘a “theoretical” (that is, visual) simulacrum...whose condition of possibility is an oblivion and a misunderstanding of practices’, I read Eden's translation and Stow’s Survey as constitutive rather than descriptive moments in a series of encounters which transform place into space.’ As Joanne Woolway Grenfell notes, early modern topographical projects were ‘often characterized by competing viewpoints rather than by the supposedly single perspective of cartographic discourse which recent historical-theoretical criticism has taken as a defining feature’.° If, in de Certeau’s terms, ‘space occurs as the effect produced by the operations that orient it, situate it, temporalize

it, and make it function’, then the early modern passion for cartography and topographical description participates in the practices of situation and orientation which constitute space.’ In this chapter, I discuss the strategies of habitation which located women stationers within the shifting structures of early modern London, but also move beyond the London book trades, looking past the corporate, geographical, and legislative boundaries charted in my last chapter. I map acts of production and dissemination that were remote from the capital as well as those which took place outside, and sometimes in opposition to, the structures and hierarchies of the Stationers’ Company. These concerns lead me, finally, beyond the book trades as a catch-all model for the economies of production and dissemination in the early modern period, and into a consideration of ideological motivations, as well as financial concerns. I explore the geographies of provincial and > Donald Kimball Smith, 7he Cartographic Imagination in Early Modern England: Rewriting the World in Marlowe, Spenser, Raleigh and Marvell (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 56.

* Andrew Gordon, ‘Performing London: The Map and the City in Ceremony’ in Gordon and Bernhard Klein (eds.), Literature, Mapping and the Politics of Space in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge University Press, 2001), 70. See also the essays collected in Ian Gadd and Alexandra Gillespie (eds.), John Stow (1525-1605) and the Making of the English Past: Studies in Early Modern Culture and the History of the Book (London: British Library, 2004). For an account of early modern mapmaking that links the cartographic and the mercantile, see Jerry Brotton, Trading Territories: Mapping the Early Modern World (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998). > Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, tr. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 93. ° Joanne Woolway Grenfell, “Significant Spaces in Edmund Spenser’s View of the Present State of Ireland’, Early Modern Literary Studies, 4 (1998), 6, para. 7, , accessed 25 October 2011. ” de Certeau, Practice, 117.

Beyond the London Book Trades 137 peripatetic trade as well as the social space which, according to Henri Lefebvre, ‘contains a great diversity of objects. ..including the networks and pathways which facilitate the exchange of material things and information’.® In accordance with the ‘archipelagic perspective on the relationship between politics and print culture’ urged by Joad Raymond, I investigate the travels of particular printed books, and how those texts describe their own location and circulation in ways that also remind us of the archipelagic nature of the early modern British Isles and the expatriate or sympathetic spaces of Northern Europe.’ This chapter thus moves beyond the London-centric focus of much early modern book

history and complicates the current emphasis on the economic and mercantile aspects of the book trades.

The various Star Chamber decrees on printing detailed in my last chapter were designed to restrict printing to London, and limit the number of master printers and presses operating within the capital. These

restrictions suited both the state and the Stationers’ Company, as the latter sought to restrict printing and bookselling to its own members and to protect its interests through increased regulation and trade scrutiny,

yet they were never wholly successful. In this chapter I turn first to patents for the printing of particular texts. As the cases of Jane Yetsweirt and Hester Ogden demonstrate, women could be determined in pursuing privileges, and they drew on a rhetoric of family and female weakness in order to do so. Women also exploited representations and conceptions of space to establish both their textual rights and their distance—social and imaginative, as well as geographical—from the London home of the Stationers Company. In my second section I turn to provincial and peripatetic book-trade activity, exploring the movements of books and sellers to elucidate one aspect of the ‘two-way cultural flow between London and the country’ identified by Tessa Watt.'® I explore the ways in which London-based women operated within geographically wide-ranging networks of distribution and exchange, as well as women’s trade commitments outside the capital. Questions of geographical and sometimes social mobility bring me back to the streets

of London and the ‘desperate, vulnerable, and hazardous lives’ of mercury * Henri Lefebvre, 7he Production of Space, tr. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 77. > Joad Raymond, Pamphlets and Pamphleteering in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge University Press, 2003), 172. On the four nations as archipelago see John Kerrigan, Archipelagic English: Literature, History and Politics 1603-1707 (Oxford University Press, 2008). My study extends the boundaries of that archipelago to draw in British exiles and their allies in Northern Europe. '° Tessa Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550-1640 (Cambridge University Press, 1991), 323.

138 ‘Grossly Material Things women and hawkers.'' These women experienced the city very differently from those printers and booksellers who located themselves more securely by their profession and place of trade.'* In the final section of this chapter, I address women’s role in the production, importation, and dissemination of seditious and illicit texts from Northern Europe.

I TH’TEARS / OF WIDOWS OR OF ORPHANS’: PATENTS AND PRIVILEGES While most printers and booksellers established their rights in texts by registering copy in the Stationers Company entry books, some sought patents to print particular texts or classes of books. Towards the most influential end of the scale lay John Day's privileges for printing the Psalms

in meter and the ABC with the little catechism, inherited by his son, Richard.'? At the humbler end, in early 1610, John and Jane Daniel successfully applied to King James for a patent to publish three works detail-

ing a complex set of Chancery proceedings: Danyells Disasters, The Varyable Accidents in a Private Mans Lyffe, and A Declaration of the Fatal Accidents of Jane Danyell. Only the first sixteen pages of The Varyable Ac-

cidents survive, filed among the State Papers Domestic along with the Daniels’s petition.'* Women stationers could profit from their interest in patents: in December 1619, the Stationers’ Company agreed to buy Bonham Norton's patent to print all Greek and Latin grammars for a down payment of £300 and an annuity of £300 during the life of his cousin’s widow, Joyce Norton, and £200 thereafter.'? Norton secured an annuity of £200 for himself, and £100 for the widow of his relative and former partner. Women’s rights in patents are sometimes only fleetingly apparent: in 1614 Mistress Twist, Mr Gibbons, and Mr Sanford, none of whom appear to have been stationers, were paid £600 for the Psalm patent by the Master and Wardens of the Stationers’ Company, in order for it to be incorporated into the English Stock, offering a brief glimpse of a woman's interest in a '' Paula McDowell, Zhe Women of Grub Street: Press, Politics, and Gender in the London Literary Marketplace, 1678-1730 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 58. '? As Lefebvre notes, ‘social spaces interpenetrate one another and/or superimpose themselves upon one another’ (The Production of Space, 86). 'S See Cyprian Blagden, The Stationers’ Company: a History 1403-1959 (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd, 1960), 63; Elizabeth Evenden, Patents, Pictures and Patronage: John Day and the Tudor Book Trade (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 49-53.

4 TNA: 14/52, 33. '9 Jackson, 117. In 1624, Bonham Norton took over the patent again, in return for his existing stock of grammars and an annuity, paid by Norton to the Company, of £22 during the life of Joyce Norton (ibid., 164).

Beyond the London Book Trades 139 major monopoly.'® Another hint of one woman’s pursuit of a privilege is provided by two variant issues of Parthenia or the Maydenhead of the First Musicke that Euer was Printed for the VIRGINALS, the first printed book

of English keyboard music, by William Byrd, John Bull, and Orlando Gibbons, published between December 1612 and February 1613. One issue contains a dedication from the engraver William Hole to the betrothed Princess Elizabeth and Frederick, Elector Palatine, and bears the engraved imprint: ‘Lond: print: for M" Dor. Euans. Cum priuilegio. Are to be sould by Geo Lowe print’ in Loathberry’.'” In the other issue, the engraved title concludes with the information that the text was ‘Ingrauen by William Hole for DORETHIE EUANS. Cum priuilegio’, while the imprint notes the text was ‘printed at LONDON by G. Lowe and are to be soulde at his howse in Loathberry’.'® ‘There is no record, however, of

any patent being granted to Dorothy Evans. It is possible that after Thomas Morley’s death, in c.1612, she attempted to take advantage of the

confusion surrounding the music patent originally granted to Byrd and Thomas Tallis. Morley’s widow nominated Edward Allde as the successor

to the patent, and this moment of transition may have allowed other agents to enter briefly into the field of music publishing.” Alternatively, this brief collaboration between Evans, Hole, and Lowe may have been an attempt to profit from the wider circulation of a text originally intended as a wedding gift to the royal couple. Byrd, Gibbons, and especially John Bull, all had links to Elizabeth, who was a keen virginal player, as is indicated by payments to ‘Hazard the keeper of her eraces virginalles’, as well as to Bull for lessons.“ It is possible that Elizabeth sponsored the production of the first issue herself, since her guardian John Harington recorded a payment of 48s. ‘for paper printing ruling & binding of a booke wherin her lessons for the virginalls are’.*' Further evi-

dence for a broader patent, however, is found on the title-page of the subsequent Parthenia Inviolate (c.1614), engraved by Robert Hole, and printed ‘at London for John Pyper, and are to be sold at his / shop at Pauls gate next unto Cheapside at the crosse keies / Cum priuilegio’.“* Despite

its celebration of Protestant England’s first couple, the Parthenia had a '© Tbid., 68.

'7 STC 4251.5. Only one copy survives, in the Huntington Library (Huntington Library Rare Books 14176). '8 STC 4252.

See Jeremy L. Smith, Zhomas East and Music Publishing in Renaissance England (Oxford University Press, 2003), 113.

°° "TNA: E407/57/2, fF. 12, 3. *1 "TNA: E407/57/2, f. 1. *? ‘The single extant copy of this text is described by Ernest Brennecke, Jnr, ““Parthenia Inviolata’: The Second Book of Keyboard Music Printed in England’, Zhe Musical Times,

75 (1934), 701-6.

140 ‘Grossly Material Things potentially subversive message: its cover featured a young woman playing the virginals, an image which Otto Erich Deutsch has identified as a copy

of an image of St Cecilia produced by Hendrick Goltzius in around 1588.” This invocation of the patron saint of musicians and Church music, though possibly only a convenient recycling, reminds us of Byrd’s recusancy and the charges of Catholicism which John Bull claimed as his motive for fleeing to the Continent in 1613. Patents were frequently the subject of dispute, particularly as, over time, the Company livery succeeded in engrossing many profitable monopolies to themselves.” By the late 1570s, some stationers and booksellers had begun to pirate patented books in an attempt to undermine the privilege system. Those stationers and other parties who held royal patents were beneficiaries of a patronage system which others, led by John Wolfe, John Charlewood, and Roger Ward, felt to be unjust within a mercantile economy regulated by the complex registration and honour protocols of the Stationers’: Company.” In 1581 the three men joined with other members of the Company to print

and distribute titles which fell within the most lucrative patents. When Christopher Barker, then Queen's printer, remonstrated with Wolfe for his continued insistence on printing Francis Flower’s Latin Grammar as well as such popular books as Day's ABC and Little Catechism, Wolfe allegedly retorted that the Queen did not have the right to grant privileges, and that he would reform the printing trade just as Luther had reformed religion.” In 1583, the Privy Council established a Commission on Privileges to

investigate the dispute between the patentees and the Company. In its instructions, the Council declared that patent holders were to be ‘drawne within the compasse of the Lawes, and thereby the poorer sort relieved’. In the end, however, the Commission upheld the rights of the patentees, although they were compelled to surrender some of their copyrights to the Stationers’ Company, establishing the English Stock as a system of poor relief. According to Arnold Hunt: The real winner was the company itself, which, by reconciling its members,

had succeeded in consolidating its own authority. The instrument of that authority was the English Stock... Not only did it give the senior members of the Company a vested interest in maintaining the status quo, but there was enough money left over to provide charitable relief for its poorer members, and to buy off any malcontents who might try to break into the club.”

> Otto Erich Deutsch, “Parthenia and Cecilia, The Musical Times, 100 (1959), 591. *4 See Blagden, The Stationers’ Company, esp. ch. 4.

> See Dict. I, s.n. 6 Arber, H, 773.

*7 Arnold Hunt, ‘Book Trade Patents, 1603—1640’ in Hunt et al. (eds.), Zhe Book Trade and Its Customers, 1450-1900: Historical Essays for Robin Myers (Winchester: St Paul’s Bibliographies, 1997), 28.

Beyond the London Book Trades 141 Despite these concessions, the Commission declared: ‘we think her maiesties grauntes most meete to be mainteined aboue all other’.** This ruling could mean that the rights of patentees were protected even when others

had a more compelling claim to ownership of the disputed texts. The struggles gained a particular edge when they pitted the interests of the Company against non-stationers who attempted to secure an income through entry into a protectionist trade. On 12 January 1559, the printer and bookseller Richard Tottel’s patent to print books of English Common Law, first granted by Edward VI in 1553, was renewed for life by Elizabeth I. Eighteen years later, the Queen granted a similar patent, effective upon Tottell’s death, to Nicasius Yetsweirt, Secretary for the French tongue and Clerk of the Signet. Several stationers resented Tottell’s comprehensive monopoly, and in 1577, the year in which Yetsweirt received his patent, though sixteen years before he succeeded to it, certain ‘printers glasse sellers and cutlers’ complained to

Lord Burghley that Tottel had engrossed ‘the printinge of all kindes of lawe bookes, which was common to all Printers’, not only damaging their trade, but also, since he sold ‘the same bookes at excessive prices, to the

hinderance of a greate number of pore studentes’.”” After the death of Nicasius Yetsweirt, his son Charles, the third holder of the patent, found himself embroiled in a complex dispute. In 1593, the year of Nicasius’s death, the deputies of the Queen’s printer, Christopher Barker, were engaged in printing William Rastell’s and Ferdinando Pulton’s abridgements of the statutes. The right to print books of statutes belonged to Barker’s office, and during Tottell’s lifetime the discrepancy between the two patents was resolved by the decree that the abridgements should be shared between the two printers, though only the Queen's printers should be cited in the imprint.*” However, when

Elizabeth transferred Nicasius Yetsweirt’s patent to Charles, in March 1594, her grant contained what Peter Blayney describes as: ‘a quite extraordinary passage in which Elizabeth claimed to remember having meant to

include the two abridgements in the reversion of 1577’.°' The conflict with Barker's assigns escalated, and on 27th March 1595, the Earl of Essex wrote to Lord Keeper Puckering in support of Yetsweirt’s grievance against

the stationers, which was, he indicated, the substance of a case due to come before the Lord Keeper in the near future.°? *8 Cited ibid., 29. * Lansdowne MS 48, ff. 180-1, cited in Arber, I, 111. °° See Peter Blayney, “William Cecil and the Stationers’ in Robin Myers and Michael Harris (eds.), Zhe Stationers Company and the Book Trade, 1550-1990 (Winchester: St Paul’s Bibliographies, 1997), 18.

>! Tbid., 18. ** BL MS Harley 6997, f. 2.

142 ‘Grossly Material Things Yetsweirt's suit was successful, and Puckering ordered that Barker’s assigns should ‘forbeare...the impression they are nowe in hand with’. The stationers, however, continued to print law books. Before he could pursue his case further, Charles Yetsweirt had followed his father to the grave. On 7 May, the Earl of Essex wrote again to Puckering, this time appealing for justice on behalf of Charles's widow, Jane Yetsweirt. ‘The first

of Essex’s letters, written for Charles, is in the hand of a secretary, albeit with a scribbled postscript in Essex’s own hand, stating, ‘My L. I pray of you favor this gentlemans cause for he is my very good frend and his cause very just.’** The second, designed to plead for Jane, is entirely in Essex’s

own hand, indicating perhaps a greater commitment to her cause. He informs Puckering: Mrs Yetsweirt the poore widow of my honest frend is to have the cause betweene her and the incroching printers of London herd before yr Lp. very shortly, for the cause your Ls prerogative, (her title being derived from her

maties...patents and the clearnes of the question)... These I say for her cause do pleade sufhciently, for her self her poverty, sex, and widowhood do speak.*

Essex’s invocation of Yetsweirt’s ‘poverty, sex, and widowhood’ suggests

the privilege accorded to widows’ voices, exemplified in the speech of Justice in Dekker’s Troia-Nova Triumphans (1612): Let not Oppression wash his hands ith’ Teares Of Widowes or of Orphans; Widowes prayers Can pluck downe Thunder, & poore Orphans cries Are Lawrels held in fire.°°

Biblical precedents encouraged an understanding of the widow as a compelling petitioner, a conceit which was at odds with popular representations of the lusty remarrying widow, but could fruitfully be appropriated by women suing for favour or redress.*” °° This agreement is cited by Jane Yetsweirt (ibid., f. 10) to William Cecil, discussed below.

4 Tbid. > Tbid., f. 9. °° Thomas Dekker, Troia-Noua triumphans London Triumphing (London: Printed by Nicholas Okes, and are to be sold by Iohn Wright dwelling at Christ Church-gate, 1612),

DIr.

°” On the status and representation of widows see Sandra Cavallo and Lyndan Warner (eds.), Widowhood in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (New York: Longman, 1999); Amy Louise Erickson, Women and Property in Early Modern England (London: Routledge, 1993); esp. 153-222; Jennifer Panek, Widows and Suitors in Early Modern English Comedy (Cambridge University Press, 2004). James Daybell notes that in a 1601 letter to Cecil, Frances Devereux, Countess of Essex wrote that she presented him with ‘the image of the importunate widow mentioned in the scriptur[e]’ (BL, Lansd., 88, f. 28, cited in Women Letter-writers in Tudor England (Oxford University Press, 2006), 254).

Beyond the London Book Trades 143 The Earl of Essex’s invocation of Jane Yetsweirt’s sex, marital status, and economic vulnerability was thus carefully judged to lend force to his petition, and he was not alone in his deployment of these tropes. On the same day that Essex wrote to Puckering, Jane Yetsweirt composed a letter, writ-

ten by a secretary, to the Lord Treasurer, William Cecil, informing him that her estate was running dangerously low at ‘eight or nine hundred poundes’, and claiming that she expected further losses of ‘fower or fyve hundred poundes...which my poore estate which I am left will hardlie beare’.*® The ‘evidently capable’ Jane Yetsweirt had a clear grasp of her fi-

nancial and business situation, and of previous agreements and negotia-

tions connected with the case.’ She also displayed a sophisticated knowledge of the connected rhetorical structures of ethos (the presentation of a spotless reputation) and pathos (the appeal to emotion), the two forms which Carol Mejia-La Perle notes were considered most appropriate to women.*° As Lucio teaches Isabella (though with unforeseen consequences) in Measure for Measure:

Go to Lord Angelo, And let him learn to know, when maidens sue, Men give like gods; but when they weep and kneel, All their petitions are as freely theirs As they themselves would owe them.*!

Isabella is here instructed to enact the rhetoric of pathos, conveying her sorrowful humility through the bodily acts of kneeling and of tears; the appeal to the emotions could be equally carefully staged within the space of the page. In a brief discussion of the genres of supplication and complaint, Jennifer Richards and Alison Thorne note: “The suffering (pathos) on which these speech forms are predicated may invest the speaker’s accusations, pleas or laments with a compelling moral authority and aftective eloquence (pathos in its other sense) that serves, ironically, to restore the very agency they seemed to erase.”* At around the same time as she wrote to Cecil, Yetsweirt also wrote to Puckering, in a letter subscribed ‘from my poore house at Sunberie 1595’. Yetsweirt’s appeal to multiple patrons is characteristic of women’s suits: °8 BL MS Harley 6997, f. 10. * Blayney, ‘William Cecil’, 19. “© Carol Mejia-La Perle, ‘Domestic Rhetors of an Early Modern Family: Female Persuasions in A Woman Killed with Kindness in Rosalind Voaden and Diane Wolfthal (eds.), Framing the Family: Narrative and Representation in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods (Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2005), 39-54. ‘| William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure in Richard Proudfoot et al. (general eds.), Complete Works (London: The Arden Shakespeare, 1998), 1.4.79-83. © Jennifer Richards and Alison Thorne, Rhetoric, Women and Politics in Early Modern England (London and New York: Routledge, 2007), 16.

144 ‘Grossly Material Things James Daybell notes that ‘women seldom wrote to a single person, but rather solicited the favours of a range of well-placed individuals’.*? The inclusion of Yetsweirt’s place of writing is conventional, but works to locate her within an appropriately domestic sphere at some remove from the commercial concerns of the London printers. Equally, the term ‘poore’ is rhetorically motivated: the Yetsweirts leased the Manor of Sunbury, and Jane also held the lease of the parsonage from the Dean and Chapter of St Paul’s. Nicasius Yetsweirt built a house on the estate which, Jane noted in 1606, ‘will be all she has to live on, should she outlive Sir Philip Boteler [her second husband]’.** Yetsweirt consistently represented her Sunbury home as a meagre one: in an April 1595 letter to Cecil she described ‘her

estate of this poor thing of Sunbury she now dwells in’. Such poverty was, however, relative. Ihe hearth tax of 1664 (before the house was rebuilt by Sir Roger Hudson in 1712) indicates that Sunbury House was a substantial one, with twenty-seven hearths.*° Yetsweirt represents her ‘estate’ in economic and spatial terms, in both cases emphasizing its reduced status even as she indicates her position among the lower ranks

of the landed elite, in possession of a significant, though reduced, household. It is in the letter to Puckering that Yetsweirt’s determination and ability in political manoeuvring are most evident. Recognizing the importance of ethos, she stresses her probity, insisting that she has always attempted to work in line with the principles of “Truth and peace’, and has never ‘lacked

to give [the dispute] ...dilligence in following and care to bring it to an honest christian ende’.*’ Yetsweirt declares her humility by signing herself

Puckering’s ‘servant and handmayden’ in a relatively common late sixteenth-century formula of subservience and dependence that emphasizes Yetsweirt’s suppliant position by its spatial organization at the foot of the page.*® At the same time, however, as she states her reliance on Puckering’s good will, Yetsweirt admits to an awareness that several influential figures, including the Queen, as well presumably as Cecil and Essex, have already intervened on her behalf:

® Daybell, Women Letter-writers, 234.

“ R. A. Roberts (ed.), ‘Cecil Papers: December 1606’, Calendar of the Cecil Papers

in Hatfield House, XXIV: Addenda, 1605-1668 (1976), 94-112, , accessed 12 December 2009. ® Tbid., ‘April 1595, 16-30’, V: 1594-1595 (1894), 173-95, , accessed 12 December 2009. *6 Susan Reynolds (ed.), “Sunbury: Manors’, A History of the County of Middlesex, 12 vols. (Oxford University Press, 1962), III, 53-4. “7 BL MS Harley 6997, f. 10. “8 Daybell, Women Letter-writers, p. 249. See also Jonathan Gibson, ‘Significant Space in Manuscript Letters’, Zhe Seventeenth Century, 12 (1997), 1-9.

Beyond the London Book Trades 145 If in this my...carefullnes your Lp have ben much importuned by her mattie my good ladie and Mrs. and other my honorable good Llp and frendes it

may please you, impute it not to any diffidence that might be in me or them, of your honorable forewardnes and readiness to yeald unto me all possible favor.”

The apologetic tone of this communication suggests the difficulty of balancing a rhetoric of dependence with the active pursuit of particular ends, and her not unsuccessful manoeuvrings may have undermined Yetsweirt’s self-positioning as a needy widow. Yetsweirt’s declaration to Cecil that he was ‘the sole authour of my good, and staie of living’ must be read as part of a carefully calculated discourse of weakness, and neatly illustrates Daybell’s observation that ‘many widows’ requests for favor and annuities appear to have accentuated the extent of their poverty, stressing their vulnerability and isolation from the support of family and friends’.”° In Yetsweirts case the strategy was successful: she continued to print books of common law until shortly after her remarriage to Philip Bottoler in 1597, at which time she resigned the letters patent into the hands of the Queen. The discourse of widowhood is invoked again in a 1621 patent which James I issued to Helen Mason to print an abridgement of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs and other ecclesiastical histories compiled by her husband: wee are credibly informed that before the said Thomas mason could cause any more of the said bookes to be imprinted he departed this life leaving his wife and children in necessitie and want And whereas helen mason widowe late wife of the said Thomas mason hath thereuppon made her humble petition unto us to be releved of the labours and studies of her said husband, knowe ye that wee in tender commiseration of the said widdowe and her children and for the incouragement of other our loving subiecte to imitate the said Thomas mason in the like godly and pious indeavoures of our especiall grace certaine knowledge and meere motion...doo give and graunte full free and sole liberties licence power priviledge and authoritie unto the said helen mason widowe her Executors Administrators and Assignes.”!

A monopoly on printing becomes, in James's grant, a mechanism by which a deceased husband can continue to support his otherwise destitute wife and ‘releve’ her of the financial pressures of maintaining the family.

“ BL MS Harley 6997, f. 11. These letters are cited by Susan Allen who describes this letter as having preceded both Yetsweirt’s letter to Cecil, and Essex’s to Puckering (‘Jane Yetsweirt (1541-2) Claiming her Place’, Printing History, 9 (1987), 5-12). There is no evidence to confirm this chronology, and Yetsweirt’s recognition of Puckering’s awareness of her other petitions suggests that this letter was subsequent to that of Essex and her own missive to Cecil. °° BL MS Harley 6997, f. 10. Daybell, Women Letter-writers, 254. >! Patent Rolls C66/2258/1.

146 ‘Grossly Material Things The work itself is cast as a national endeavour, and a pattern to be imitated by other Christian subjects, though the abridgement does not appear to have ever been printed.” Yetsweirt’s and Mason's negotiations over textual property illuminate women’s use of the common tropes of womanhood, economic vulnerability, and (missing from Yetsweirt’s, but often present) the sufferings of the writers children. Hester Ogden deployed precisely these terms when in 1616 she applied to James for a patent to print her father, William Fulke’s,

Confutation of the Rhemish Testament. In a petition to the Bishop of London she explained: one Adams a Stacioner in London hath printed divers of the said bookes, hauing by sinister meanes, gotten a Copie of them from yo" Supp‘ father in law (who had no right in them, they being giuen by will as aforesaid) to the preiudice of his Ma" for the moytie of the benefit of the said license; and to the vtter vndoing of your poore Suppt*, and her 8. small children; 2 of w® haue perished even through famine (as God and her neighbo* can witnesse) to the vnspeakable troble & torment of her heart.”

Ogden’s narrative downplays both her determination and the tenuous nature of her claim. While she insisted that her father had bequeathed the book to her, the stationers Thomas Adams, John Bill, and Bonham Norton asserted that, as successors to Fulke’s original publisher, George Bishop, the copy was theirs. Bill drew on the connections between the printing house and the space of domestic hospitality (discussed in my previous chapter) in order to

emphasize the stationers’ intimate interest in the book. He explained that: Doctor Fulke being not sufficiently stored with bookes to performe [The Confutation| cam[e] to London...where he and two of his men with their horses were mayntained by Bishop for 3. quarters of a yeares space and of Bishop he had such bookes for ye making of the treatise as he wanted. When it was finished Bishop in consideracon of his former charge and for ye diett Doctor Fulkes fri[e] nds likewise had ...as also for 40 which Bishop gaue to Doctor Fulke and for diuers bookes giuen him he had ye printing of yat copie to him and his Assignes.™

>? Hunt speculates that the privilege was bought by the Stationers’ Company in order to suppress it (“Book Trade Patents’, 33).

>> Folger MSS G.b.10, f. 105v. Ogden was not the only daughter to attempt to secure a patent for her father’s works: in 1615 Alice, Cicely, and Margaret Hooker sought a patent for Richard Hooker's The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, though they may have done so with the object of gaining financial compensation from the printer William Stansby, rather than with the intention of undertaking publication (see Hunt, ‘Book Trade Patents’, 32). 4 TNA: SP 14/109, 106-7, cited in Arber, IH, 39-40.

Beyond the London Book Trades 147 For Bill, space is both physical—Bishop’s house and the books it contained—and temporal: Fulke gestated his book for the ‘space’ of a full

nine months. Both of these spaces create compelling proprietorial and economic links. Bills pits this material and temporal connection against Ogden’s repeated attempts to secure noble favour in her pursuit of the patent. He also describes Ogden as ‘a mar[r]ied woman’. This detail never emerges from Ogden’s own suits, as she instead emphasizes her isolation and the vulnerability of her children. In 1618, after a protracted dispute, Ogden was awarded the patent in the names of two assigns, Henry Sibdale and Thomas Kenithorpe, although the stationers had a long-established right to print translations of the Bible, and Fulke’s text had been entered in the Registers, as had its assignation for a ‘very great [and] valuable’ sum to Norton, Adams, and Bill.”? Because, as Bill complained, ‘ye words of the patent are doubtfull whether they looke backwards and forwards or only for the tyme to com[e]’,”° Ogden also sued Bill, Adams, and Norton for the stocks of the book which the three already possessed, and lobbied James for a royal proclamation ‘for the furnishinge of every Parish Church with one of the said Bookes’, in order to ensure their widespread purchase.”’ In her preface to subsequent editions of Fulke’s text, Ogden makes no reference to her actions against the stationers, although the note on the title page of the second edition that there are ‘many grosse absurdities corrected’ can be read as a sly criticism of previous editions. ‘This

claim may have been particularly galling to Bill, who noted that Fulke had made ‘some few further annotacons to ye sayd worke’, subsequent to its first publication, which were sold to Bishop by Fulke’s executor, allowing for the emendation and improvement of the text.

In an appeal, at the front of the fourth edition of the Testament, to Charles I to continue his father’s patronage and protection, Ogden stresses family ties, claiming that, as Fulke’s daughter, she is ‘the neerest allyed to this Everliving Issue of his Mind’.?® Having written out her husband in order to appropriate the rhetoric of vulnerable widowhood, Ogden emphasizes her position as Fulke’s daughter as a means of establishing her legitimate possession of textual rights. Ogden further notes that the book is intended as a defender of, and pattern for, the Christian faith, describing it as ‘one among others of those prime Forts and strongest Bulwarks

your Maiesties Kingdome hath to withstand the common in-rode and °° Arber, II, 510; II, 39-40, 278. For the printers’ rights to the edition, see also W. W. Greg, A Companion to Arber (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), 57-9.

© Arber, III, 39-40. *” BL Add MS 69915, ff. 1-2. Cited in Hunt, “Book Trade Patents’, 47. 8 William Fulke, The Text of the New Testament of lesus Christ (London: Augustine Mathewes on of [sic] the assignes of Hester Ogden. Cum priuilegio Regis, 1633), I1r.

148 ‘Grossly Material Things invasion of a Troupe of Romish and Rhemish Iesuites, who endeauoured

by this, as the most subtill and plausible way that euer yet they enterprised, to build up the walls of Rome in England’.’ Like James's comments on the exemplary function of Thomas Mason's ‘godly and pious indeavoures’, Ogden’s description establishes the book, and its connected patent, as an object whose profit is less personal and financial than it is national and spiritual. By invoking a religio-political geography which stresses England’s vulnerability to Catholic missionaries, Ogden removes the text from the material space of Bishop’s London printing house, and locates it within an imagined biblical and chivalric landscape.®° Ogden deploys what Woolway, in a discussion of Spenser's The Faerie Queene,

identifies as ‘a spatial vocabulary with which to describe the nature of English nationhood, particularly as it manifests itself through the symbols of political power’.°' As we shall see in the final two sections of this chapter, the landscape of Britain was imagined and experienced in very different ways by those who worked to transport texts around its highways and byways or to distribute the literature of “Romish and Rhemish Iesuites’ in an inhospitable religious and political climate.

Il ‘THE WOMAN / THAT HOLDS THE BALLADS’: PROVINCIAL AND PERIPATETIC TRADE In 1649, Mary Pope’s pro-monarchist tract, Behold, Here is a Word or, An Answer to the Late Remonstrance of the Army (1649), advertised its topi-

cality as well as its topography with the information: ‘it is to be sold by Mrs Edwards, the Book-binders widdow in the Old Baillie, and that of the Treatise of Magistracy [Pope's first pamphlet]; accquint your neighbours here with, without delay’. The imprint is painstakingly descriptive, but also creates a sense of familiarity, establishing Mrs Edwards, as well as the Old Bailey, as a known landmark.®’ Though Adrian Johns suggests °° Fulke, New Testament, I11v.

°° For Romance and chivalric space see Christopher Burlinson, Allegory, Space and the Material World in the Writings of Edmund Spenser (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2006). Ogden may have been mindful of Isaiah 25—6: “We have a strong city; salvation will God appoint for walls and bulwarks.’ °! Joanne Woolway ‘Spenser and the Culture of Place’, unpublished doctoral dissertation (University of Oxford, 1997), 6. °° "The effect is that described by Walter Ong in his discussion of Ernest Hemingway’s interpellation of the reader characterized by ‘his use of the definite article as a special kind of qualifier or of the demonstrative pronoun “that,” of which the definite article is simply an attenuation (“The writer's audience is always a fiction’, PMLA, 90 (1975), 13). Edwards’ imprint— ‘the Book-binders widdow’—renders her instantly familiar and on a level with another London landmark, ‘the Old Baillie’.

Beyond the London Book Trades 149 that the Old Bailey ‘proved a ready source of select customers’ it was more

probably the variety of passers-by and their appetite for news that Edwards hoped to exploit.®? Like the numerous other imprints that preface early modern printed texts, Edwards's title-page calls into being the social

and spatial topographies of London even as it describes them. Early modern stationers used their imprints to establish London as an inhabited city, navigable by shop signs, significant buildings, and an expanding infrastructure.“ Both Johns and Peter Blayney have examined the geogra-

phies of the London book trade, identifying clusters of stationers with their own specializations around St Paul’s, the Little Old Bailey, Westmin-

ster Hall, the main concourse leading from Cheapside to Cornhill, and the less salubrious areas of Little Britain and Smithfield. As Johns notes, ‘different metropolitan areas possessed identifiable characteristics’, and were associated with particular trades and afhliations, as well as being characterized by the socio-economic statuses of their inhabitants.” Women stationers, like their male counterparts, identified themselves with particular locales in imprints, wills, and other documents, signalling not only their habitation but their likely associations and types of publication. In doing so, they participated in the ‘fictions of settlement’ described by Lawrence Manley, which are ‘tied to the task of producing and reproducing the socio-economic relationships essential to urbanization’.°° Edwards’s practice of advertising her trading location, and her use of the title-page as a marketing device participate, in Manley’s terms, in ‘modes of ideological innovation that actually contributed to the process of sedentarism’. Though they reproduced and hence produced the perception of London as a settled and navigable location, women stationers were themselves mobile, moving through the streets their books invoked. They also entered sites of social assembly; in 1615, Henry Parrot begged his printer to: deigne my Booke to dignifie; As first it bee not with your Ballads mixt, Next, not at Play-houses, mongst Pippins solde.*” °° Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (University of Chicago Press, 1998), 67. ° See Helen Smith, “Imprinted by Simeon Such a Signe”: Reading Early Modern Imprints in Smith and Louise Wilson (eds.), Renaissance Paratexts (Cambridge University Press, 2011), 17-33. °° Johns, Nature of the Book, 64; Peter W. M. Blayney, “Ihe Bookshops in Paul’s Cross Churchyard’, Occasional Papers of the Bibliographical Society, 5 (1990). °° Lawrence Manley, Literature and Culture in Early Modern London (Cambridge University Press, 1995), 127. °’ Henry Parrot, The Mastiue, or Young-whelpe of the Olde-dogge Epigrams and Satyrs (London: Printed by Tho: Creede, for Richard Meighen, and Thomas Iones, and are to be solde at S. Clements Church, without Temple-Barre, 1615), Blv.

150 ‘Grossly Material Things Natasha Korda notes that “Apple-wives’ were among the women traders who operated in the early modern theatre, and women sellers may also have encouraged theatre audiences to “Buy a new Booke!’ as they watched the play.®

The book trade extended beyond London, though the restriction of printing to the capital and the universities meant that London dominated the provincial trade and that many city stationers had links with booksellers across the country.°’ For the five years prior to her death in 1601, Joan Broome was the London agent for the sale of books printed in Oxford.” Anne Griffin produced an edition of Niccolo Balbani’s popular The Italjan Convert (1635) of which variant issues were sold by ‘H. Hammond of Salisbury’, “W. Browne of Dorchester’, ‘J. Cartwrit of Coventry’, ‘E. Dight of Exeter’, and *P. Whaly of Northampton’, as well as ‘M. Sparke’ [Michael Sparke senior] and ‘Anne More’ in London.” A True and Certaine Relation

of a Strange-birth which was Borne at Stone-house in the Parish of Plimmouth was produced in two variant issues, one sold by Ann Boler, ‘dwelling at the Marigold in S. Pauls Church-yard’ and another intended for the local audience catered for by “William Russell in Plinmouth’.” This range of sellers suggests that Griffin’s press was at the centre of a distribution network bringing together the major trading centres of the West Midlands and south-west of England. The name of Margery Trundle was also recognized beyond her London bookshop. Trundle published a range of ephemeral works, and special-

ized in cheap print and ballads. Her trading address, near the hospital gate in Smithfield, indicates a close link with the pedlars and petty chapmen who ‘stocked up seasonally, in spring’ from the chapbook and ballad publishers clustered around Smithfield market and on London Bridge, close to the major routes out of London.” After Trundle’s death in 1629, 8 Natasha Korda, ‘Labours Lost: Women’s Work and Early Modern Theatrical Commerce’ in Peter Holland (ed.), From Script to Stage in Early Modern England (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 219. © Paul Morgan, “The Provincial Book Trade before the End of the Licensing Act’ in Peter Isaac (ed.), Six Centuries of the Provincial Book Trade (Winchester: St Paul’s Bibliographies, 1990), 31. 0 ‘Index 1: Printers and Publishers’ in STC, II], s.n. “1 Niccolo Balbani. The Italian Convert (London: Anne Griffin, 1635; STC 1235-— 1235.7 for variant issues). ” ‘Thomas Bedford, A True and Certaine Relation of a Strange-birth which was Borne at Stone-house in the Parish of Plimmouth, the 20. of October. 1635 (London: Anne Griffin, 1635; STC 1791, 1791.3). > John Barnard and Maureen Bell, “The English Provinces’ in Barnard and D. E McKenzie (eds.) with Bell (assistant ed.), Zhe Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, IV: 1557-1695 (Cambridge University Press, 2002), 675. See also Margaret Spuftord, Small Books and Pleasant Histories: Popular Fiction and its Readership in Seventeenth-Century England (London: Methuen, 1981), map 1; and Watt, Cheap Print, 76.

Beyond the London Book Trades 151 the ballad partners acquired many of her copies, including the bawdy Green Sicknes Greife, The Bold Begger, and Three Maids Coosened, texts

whose cheerful misogyny is complicated by the paratextual influence of a woman bookseller.”* Trundle’s ownership of the rights in a fourth ballad, A Womans Worke’s Never Done, which details a series of domestic duties, also highlights the disjunction between social commentary on the

appropriate forms and spaces of women’s work, and the reality of their trade engagements.” Ballads were widely characterized as holding a particular appeal for illiterate or semi-literate women. Shakespeare’s Mopsa, for one, exclaims: ‘T love a ballad in print, alife, for then we are sure they are true.’””° Richard Brathwaite described the fate of ‘stale Ballad-newes’, exiled from the city to

the country where ‘every poore Milk maid can chant and chirpe it under her Cow, which she useth as an harmelesse charme to make her let downe her milk’.”” Recent work on the productive role of the singer suggests that ‘chanting’ and ‘chirping’ were not the passive, almost contentless, processes Brathwaite describes. In Bruce Smith's terms, ‘what ballads offer the singer and the listener is the possibility of becoming many subjects, by internalizing the sounds and rhythms of those subjects’ voices’.’”* The rural or pro-

vincial singer appropriated the text by adopting a range of both male and female—as well as sometimes bestial or object-based—subject positions within occasionally lengthy narratives or dialogic forms. Sellers also sang their stock in order to attract customers; as Tessa Watt notes, “There was no question of just setting the ballad sheets out in a stall like books; they were

written for oral performance.”’ By the seventeenth century the ballad woman was a stock figure of satire. In 1625, John Davies complained of the ‘snuffling throat’ of ‘the noselesse Ballad-woman’, a figure who displays the physical marks of poverty and sexual disease.*° The association between the peripatetic work of the ballad singer and sexual licence is reinforced in James Shirley’s The Lady of Pleasure when a steward, seeking servants for the newly elevated Mr Fredericke, notes: ™ Arber, IV, 213.

” Michelle M. Dowd discusses the ballad briefly in Womens Work in Early Modern English Literature and Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 2. © William Shakespeare, The Winters Tale in Proudfoot et. al. (general eds.), Complete Works, 4.4.258-9.

” Richard Brathwaite, Whimzies, or a New Cast of Characters (London: Ff[elix] K[ingston] and are to be sold by Ambrose Rithirdon at the signe of the Bullshead in Pauls Church-yard, 1631), B4yv. ’® Bruce Smith, The Acoustic World of Early Modern England: Attending to the O-factor (Chicago University Press, 1999), 201. ” Watt, Cheap Print, 24. 8° John Davies, A Scourge for Paper-persecutors (London: for H. H[olland] and G. G[ibbs] and are to be sold at the Golden Flower Deluce in Popes-head Alley, 1625), A3r.

152 ‘Grossly Material Things I could save charges, and employ the Pye wench That carries her intelligence in whitepots, Or tis but taking order with the woman That holds the ballads, she could fit him with A concubin to any tune.®!

As well as reproducing the association between the urban mobility of tradeswomen and developing networks of intelligence, Shirley suggests a woman ballad seller was liable to deal in female flesh as well as bawdy tunes. In less charged terms, a doctor in Richard Brome’s The Antipodes (performed 1638), describes a world turned upside-down: Looke you sir, A sicke-man giving counsell to a Physitian: And there's a Puritan Trades-man, teaching a Great Traveller to lye: That Ballad-woman Gives light to the most learned Antiquary In all the Kingdome.*’ The ballad woman proceeds to lead a line of stock figures across the stage, but is the only one given her own, brief, cry—‘Buy new Ballads, come’-— a line which may have been subject to improvization and a rich performance in theatrical practice. That women’s names appeared on or in texts as the sources of ballads and of their print authenticity suggests the variety of female literacies and productive roles in this period. Margery Trundle’s name appears not only

on her own publications, whether as ‘M. T. widdow’, ‘M. Trundle, Widdow’,, or ‘M. Trundle, at her Shop in Smithfield’, but also in one ballad with which she had no publishing connection, and which, like Autolycus’s song detailing “Lawn as white as driven snow, / Cypress black

as eer was crow, was designed to be sung by chapmen or women to advertise their stock and attract an audience.*? The punchline of this particular verse was a reassurance to the potential purchaser: “Heer’s no sussex

serpent to fright you here in my Bundle, / nor was it ever printed for the

*! James Shirley, 7he Lady of Pleasure (London: Printed by Tho. Coles, for Andrew Crooke, and William Cooke, 1637), G2v. ®° Richard Brome, The Antipodes a Comedie (London: Printed by I. Okes, for Francis Constable, and are to be sold at his shop in kings-street at the signed of the Goat, and in Westminster-hall, 1640), I1v. °° Shakespeare, The Winter's Tale, 4.4.219-20. For Trundle’s surviving imprints see STC 1811, 6809.2, 19684, 20319.5.

Beyond the London Book Trades 153 widow Trundle.’** The ‘Sussex Serpent’ is a reference to the notoriety of Trundle’s husband, John, who in 1614 published a report by ‘A. R.’ on the appearance of ‘a monstrous serpent (or Dragon)’ near Horsham in Sussex. Not all of Trundle’s readers were as prepared as Mopsa to accept such an unlikely appearance, with Ben Jonson referring in News from the New World (acted 1620) to ‘news that, when a man sends them down to the shires where they are said to be done, were never there to be found’.” The precise identification offered in the ballad’s final line suggests that a wide audience was expected not only to be familiar with Trundle’s name (and

that of her husband before her), but also to recognize her association with the production of ephemeral works, and understand this tongue-in-cheek invocation of the improbable contents of her publications. Trundle’s notoriety may also be the subject of an arch reference in Henry Glapthorne’s The

Hollander (pertormed 1636) in which Captain Pirke concludes a list of London low-lifes by noting ‘the woman that sings ballads, has her name trunled at the taile of it’.®° It seems plausible that even as late as the mid 1630s an audience would recognize Trundle’s practice of ‘trundling’ her name at the end of the printed ballad. Glapthorne’s jest, moreover, while suggesting the widespread presence of female ballad singers also suggests that Trundle herself may have been remembered as having adopted a performative role to sell her wares. Whereas Griffin and Trundle operated in London but saw their books dispatched to a variety of locations, some women operated in provincial towns and cities, or as rural pedlars. The scarcity of evidence surrounding

provincial booksellers suggests one reason for their relative scholarly 8 “Will You Buy a New Merry Booke’. Though the text does not survive as a broadside it is reproduced in John Hilton's collection Catch that Catch Can, or, A Choice Collection of Catches, Rounds & Canons for 3 or 4 Voyces (London: Printed for John Benson & John Playford

and to be sould in St Dunstans Churchyard, and in the Inner Temple neare the Church doore, 1652), Flv—F2r, where it is attributed to Thomas Holmes, organist, singer, and composer, who died in 1638. The ballad probably dates from the period 1626-9 when ‘Trundle was active as a bookseller after her husband’s death. For further examples of a ballad singer's scripted approach to an audience see Natascha Wiirzbach, The Rise of the English Street Ballad, 1550-1650, tr. Gayna Walls (Cambridge University Press, 1990), 44-5, 59-64. ®> Ben Jonson, News from the New World in Stephen Orgel (ed.), Ben Jonson: The Complete Masques (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969), Il. 45—7, also cited in Gerald D.

Johnson, ‘John Trundle and the Book Trade 1603-1626’, Studies in Bibliography, 39 (1986), 193. The Sussex serpent is the subject of satire in John Fletcher’s Wit without Money (London: Printed by Thomas Cotes, for Andrew Crooke, and William Cooke, 1639 [i.e. 1640]), Dlv, and Brathwaite’s Whimzies (B3r), as well as the Mercurius Democritus in November 1653, and the Mercurius Fumigosus as late as January 1655 (Hyde E. Rollins, An Analytical Index to the Ballad-Entries (1557-1709) in the Registers of the Company of Stationers of London (Hatboro, PA: Tradition Press, 1967), 144, no. 1661). 86 Henry Glapthorne, The Hollander (London: Printed by I. Okes for A[nne] Wilson, and are to be sold at her shop at Grayes-Inne Gate in Holborne, 1640), E4r.

154 ‘Grossly Material Things neglect.*” Much of the available evidence links women to the major booktrade centres outside London, and particularly to Oxford and Cambridge,

where, as Barnard and Bell note, ‘the book trade...was on a larger scale than anywhere else outside London, and organized quite differently’.** In Cambridge, Joan Greene continued her husband’s bookselling business for at least two years after his death of the plague in 1631, before moving to London and eventually assigning her copies to Ann Boler.® Elizabeth Birckman, widow of Arnold Birckman of Cologne, was resident in Cambridge in the early 1640s and may have conducted business there.”” In Oxford, Elizabeth Crosley inherited her husband’s ‘dwelling house in S. Mary’s parish and all the household stuff and plate’, including the ground floor ‘Shoppe’, along with books valued at £323 17s. 4d., in September 1612.”' Joseph Barnes’s wife, Barbara, who, with her husband, was

licensed to sell wine, inherited ‘all the rest of my goodes, leases, householdestufte, shoppe and bookes’, worth a total of £1128 2s. 9d., upon Joseph’s death.” Her inheritance was substantial, comprising not only a dwelling house but a paper chamber, print house, little print house, and wine cellar. The bookbinder Jane Cavey appears as ‘goodwife cavie’ in the returns of privileged persons for Oxford as a stationer in 1595, although her husband, Robert, had bequeathed ‘to my nephew and servant Edward Miles all my tooles belonginge to my science and trade of booke bindinge’ in 1593, while the bookseller Joyce Pegrim was the subject of a 1510 suit by John Walke, who alleged he had not received due payment for the carriage of books.”’ Pegrim is listed as a bookseller in the will of Henry Jacobi of which she was appointed one of three overseers.”

In an attempt to secure local custom for his sister, Anne Herks alias Garbrand, Robert Challoner gave £20 to the Bodleian Library in 1603, *” For a summary of the field, see John Feather, “Ihe History of the English Provincial Book ‘Trade: A Research Agenda’ in Barry McKay et al. (eds.), Light on the Book Trade: Essays in Honour of Peter Isaac (New Castle and London: Oak Knoll Press and the British Library, 2004), 1-12. Barnard and Bell make a significant contribution to our understanding of the early modern provincial trade (“The English Provinces’).

8 Barnard and Bell, “Ihe English Provinces’, 668. ® Dict. I; Arber, IV, 393. °° David McKitterick, A History of Cambridge University Press, 3 vols. (Cambridge University Press, 1992-2004), I, 409, n. 45. °! Strickland Gibson, Abstracts from the Wills and Testamentary Documents of Binders, Printers, and Stationers of Oxford, from 1493 to 1638 (London: Bibliographical Society, 1907), 24-5. Crosley’s stock included forty copies of Samuel Daniel’s The First Part of the Historie of England (1612), called in by the Stationers’ Company after they took over the rights in the text in January 1613 (Jackson, 57). °? Gibson, Abstracts, 27.

* David Pearson, Oxford Bookbinding 1500-1640 (Oxford Bibliographical Society, 2000), 129; Gibson, Abstracts, 18, 7—8, xvi. Gibson also lists Jehan Allere, Rose Cater, Mar-

garet Johnson, and Margaret Page as possible, though doubtful, Oxford stationers (53-4). * Gibson, Abstracts, 6.

Beyond the London Book Trades 155 apparently expecting it to be spent in his sister’s shop, though Bodley protested, ‘I am persuaded, you could not find to that value in [her] shoppe.” Despite Bodley’s negative assessment of Garbrand’s business, she was clearly prosperous, and her will indicates that she was imbricated in the social and material fabric of the town as well as in that of North Crawley

in Buckinghamshire. Garbrand bequeathed the ‘advowson, patronage, right of patronage, guifte, nomination, presentation and free disposition of in and to ye Rectorie and parish Church of North Crawley in the Countie of Buckes...vnto my sonne John Harkes’, along with ‘all those my howses and garden in Catte streete being betwene the house wherein my brother Hollowaie dwelleth and the house and backeside which Henrie Jackson holdeth of Magdalin Colledge’.”® Women were also active in the Scottish book trades, and the burghs of

Edinburgh, Glasgow, and Aberdeen recognized trade and contractual practices, including the rights of a widow to inherit the office of burgh printer.”’ Helen Ross was a skilled embroiderer who produced magnificent bookbindings, including a binding and cloth bag for James V’s personal Biblein 1538, crafted from ‘purpure welvet...sewing gold... purpure silk [and] crammesy [crimson] sating’. The following year she produced

similar bindings and pockets for the ‘mating bukes’ of the King and Queen, presumably intended to celebrate the marriage of James and Mary of Guise.”® Issobel Aitcheson continued her husband George’s Edinburgh and Glasgow businesses, while Katherine Norwell, the widow of Thomas Bassandyne, and the printers and booksellers Isobel Harring; Jonet Kene (the widow of Andro Hart, chosen by the Edinburgh magistrates to print

a presentation volume for Charles I’s coronation in 1633); Margaret Kene; Agnes and Jonet Mayne; Jonet Patterson, and her daughters Marian and Jeanet Harrower; Agnes Readick; Mary Waldegrave; and the bookbinder Katherine Boyd were all members of the Edinburgh book trade.” » ‘Thomas Bodley, Letters of Sir Thomas Bodley to Thomas James, First Keeper of the Bodleian Library, ed. G. W. Wheeler (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1926), 55. See also letters 51, 56, and 58; Pearson, Oxford Bookbinding, 131. °° Gibson, Abstracts, 23. *” Alastair J. Mann, The Scottish Book Trade, 1520-1700 (Edinburgh: Tuckwell Press, 2000), 12. °S 'T. Dickson and J. B. Paul (eds.), Accounts of the Lord High Treasurer of Scotland, 13 vols. (Edinburgh: H. M. General Register House, 1877-1916), VII, 113, 142, 161, cited

in Alastair Mann, ‘Embroidery to Enterprise: the Role of Women in the Book Trade of Early Modern Scotland’ in Elizabeth Ewan and Maureen M. Meikle (eds.), Women in Scotland c.1100-c.1750 (Edinburgh: Tuckwell Press, 1999), 137. ”” For Norwell, see Mann, ‘Embroidery to Enterprise’, 138. The others appear in Mann’s Checklist (Scottish Book Trade, 146). Outside the bounds of this study, Agnes Campbell, Lady Roseburn, who succeeded her husband as King’s printer, ‘was by some distance the most wealthy Scottish book maker in the early modern period, with an estate valued at over £78000 Scots at her death in July 1716’ (143).

156 ‘Grossly Material Things Like the London stationers of my previous chapter, some of these women

engaged in legal battles over copy and privilege: in 1632, Jonet Kene appealed to the Lords of Exchequer to contest a twenty-year licence naming Robert Young as Scotland’s royal printer.'° Evidence for other British towns is scarce. As early as 1526, before the Star Chamber decrees restricted provincial printing, ‘Mrs Warwyck of York’, the widow of John Warwick, was ‘paid for printing 1000 breyffes’,'’ while Elizabeth Gent has tentatively identified one Mrs Walch working as a publisher in Newcastle in 1510—11.'* Ian Maxted records one ‘Alice Sope alias Bookebinder’, whose name records her profession, who died in Exeter in 1557; Joyce Oliver alias Vitar also worked as a bookbinder, in Suffolk.'°? Women in less populous centres, or who engaged in peripatetic trade, are less likely to have left records, particularly where their activity was retail-based, and they did not commission publications. One Lowestoft widow held seventy-nine books, mainly ABCs and primers, alongside a variety of goods in her shop at the time of her death in 1590.'% Other women had no established retail location but worked as peripatetic chapwomen, and probably carried a few books among their wares. Elizabeth Sturton may have been a northern chapwoman: in 1622, Lady Elizabeth (Dacre) Howard of Naworth Castle in Cumbria paid 3s. ‘for books bought of Eliz. Sturton’.'°? On 13 March 1633, Margaret Austin was buried in Banbury, and the records note that she was a widow, a chapwoman, and a ‘stranger’.'°°

The description of Austin as a stranger reinforces her insecure status as a woman who operated outside the bounds of her own parish under the

‘brutal... principle of parochial responsibility for the indigent’ which resulted in a ‘personalised and watchful approach to the problem of '09 Mann, “Embroidery to Enterprise’, 138. '8! York City Archives, CC3, f. 188”. See Stacey Gee, “The Coming of Print to York, c.1490-1550’ in Peter Isaac and Barry McKay (eds.), The Mighty Engine: The Printing Press and its Impact (New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press, 2000), 79-88. '° British Book Trade Index, ‘Walch, Mrs’. , accessed 14 December 2009. '® Tan Maxted, ‘Exter. Surnames: S’, Exeter Working Papers in British Book Trade History;

7. The Devon Book Trades: A Biographical Dictionary, , accessed 14 December 2009; Tony Copsey, Book Dis-

tribution and Printing in Suffolk 1534-1850 (Ipswich: Ipswich Book Co., 1994), 77. Copsey improbably lists Joyce Oliver as Richard Oliver’s son. '04 Spufford, Small Books, 125.

' Lord William Howard, ‘Selections from the Household Books of Lord William Howard of Naworth Castle’, Surtees Society LCVIII (Durham, 1878), 161. Sturton was probably a local seller, but may have been a member of the London book trade, as the family made frequent visits to the capital. '06 Strickland Gibson (ed.), Baptism and Burial Register of Banbury, Oxfordshire (Banbury Historical Society, 1966), 222.

Beyond the London Book Trades 157 poverty .'°’ The relative frequency of chapmen and women in the list of vagrants who were issued passports to leave the Salisbury area between 1598 and 1669 suggests the connection between a peripatetic lifestyle and accusations of disorderly wandering.'”* However, the fact that Austin is named suggests that she may have been a familiar figure in the local area, and stands in marked contrast to the burial records of London vagrants recovered by A. L. Beier, which include ‘a poor woman, being vagrant, whose name was not known, she died in the street under the seat before Mr Christian Shipman’s house called the Crowr’ and ‘a maid, vagrant, unknown, who died in the Street near the Postern’.'*’ These nameless women are located by the names and shop signs of more substantial members of society or by built features, including the Postern gate. Unlike the London or provincial stationers, Margaret Austin could not be identified by her shop sign and address, but she could be located through her name, marital status, and profession, and was not reduced, as the vagrant women were, to the physical and social locations of her death. Hellen Carleton of Ripon had a clear sense of both topographical and social place, describing herself in her will as “Hellen Carleton of Rippon in the Countye of yorke Chapman [sic]’ and, having bequeathed her soul to God, asking to be buried in the Churchyard at Aldbrough.'"” There is no clear evidence that Austin or Carleton necessarily sold printed texts but, as Natascha Wiirzbach argues, the practice of pedlars and chapmen carrying books ‘received such frequent and casual mention that we can assume that the process was institutionalized’.""!

Ill ‘A WOMAN THAT USES TO SELL BOOKS ABOUT THE STREETS’: ‘SCANDALOUS’ TOPOGRAPHIES On the streets of the capital, women sold ‘wax or wafers’, often overlooked ele-

ments of the stationers’ trade, while from at least the early 1640s, in the expanding print marketplace of the civil wars and interregnum, mercury women and street hawkers sold pamphlets, tracts, and books around the city."'* The '°” Laura Gowing, Common Bodies: Women, Touch and Power in Seventeenth-Century England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 118. '°8 Paul Slack (ed.), Poverty in Early-Stuart Salisbury (Devizes: Wiltshire Record Society, 1975). For the punishment and deportation of chapwomen see ibid., 28, 31, 32, 43, 53. ' A. L. Beier, Masterless Men: The Vagrancy Problem in England, 1560-1640 (London: Methuen, 1985), 46. "6 Will of Hellen Carleton, York Registry, vol. 30, f. 396. "Nl Wirzbach, Rise of the English Street Ballad, 250. "2 See Sean Shesgreen (ed.), The Criers and Hawkers of London: Engravings and Drawings by Marcellus Laroon (Stanford University Press, 1990), 96, for one of the earliest engravings of a female ‘flying stationer’. See also Johns, Nature of the Book, 154.

158 ‘Grossly Material Things terminology was precise, according to Thomas Blount: “Those people which go up and down the streets crying News-books, and selling them by retail, are also called Hawkers and those Women that sell them wholesale from the Press are

called Mercury Women.” Blount’s description indicates that by 1656 mercuries were commonly women, though a 1643 Act ‘for the prohibiting of all persons whatsoever, from crying or putting to sale about the streets within this city, and Liberties, any Pamphlets, Bookes, or Papers whatsoever’ suggested a more diverse constituency of ‘vagrant persons, men, women, and children, which after the manner of hawkers, doe openly cry about the streets, pamphlets, and other books, and under colour thereof are found to disperse all sorts of dangerous Libels’.''* As the terms of the Act suggest, some traders crossed into the murkier world of seditious, illicit, or otherwise ‘scandalous’ texts. The women who engaged in illicit printing and distribution experienced the capital in markedly different terms to those who located themselves securely by shop signs and significant buildings or social spaces. Like ballad singers, street sellers could improvise around and add to the material they sold, creating their own readings as a method of attracting customers within a culture in which, in Bruce Smith's terms, ‘systems of communication... maintained a contact with the human body that seems remarkably different from communication systems today’.'””

The bodily presence of pamphlet and news sellers is rendered more vivid by the accounts of arrests and interrogations that became more frequent during the 1640s. Women could be among those held responsible for authoring, printing, or disseminating ‘scandalous texts. In November 1649, Elizabeth Ratcliffe was committed to Newgate for dispersing dangerous and treasonable pamphlets, while constables were granted the power to search carriers’ packs for the Declaration of Charles Stuart which

she had distributed.''° In April 1642 an anonymous woman was ordered to appear before the House of Commons to be interrogated about printing the Kentish Petition, in which the non-aligned gentry of Kent asked for accommodation between the King and Parliament.'"’ The printer of the 1642 petition has not been identified, and appears in the records only as ‘the woman who printed the petition but her actions were a catalyst for erowing parliamentary disquiet about the output of London presses, and prompted the Commons to ask the Committee for Printing to produce

"3 Thomas Blount, Glossographia: or A Dictionary (London: Printed by Tho. Newcomb, and are to be sold by Humphrey Moseley, at the Prince’s Arms in St Pauls Church-yard, and George Sawbridge at the Bible in Ludgate-hil., 1656), T3r. 4 BL, Thomason Tracts, 669, f. 7.49, cited in Raymond, Pamphlets and Pamphleteer-

M8 mith, Acoustic World, 19. "6 "TNA: SP 25/3, 8, 13. "7 Journal of the House of Commons (London, 1802), II, 514.

Beyond the London Book Trades 159 an order to hinder ‘this liberty of printing’. In 1648, Hannah Allen signalled a link with her ‘seditious’ predecessor by publishing a new Kentish Petition which called upon the Commons to bring to justice ‘the Person of Him, who as a King ought to haue defended us, but as a Tyrant hath actually levied Arms and waged War against us ."'°

On 30 April 1647, the Earl of Northumberland arrived in the House of Lords, and informed his fellow peers: “That, as he came, a Man delivered his Lordship a Book, with an Intention that this House might be made acquainted with [it]. The Book was intituled, “7he Unlawfullnes of Subjects taking up of Armes against their Soveriange |sic]”.”''? Under ques-

tioning, the man who gave Northumberland the Royalist tract revealed that ‘he had it of a Woman that uses to sell Books about the Streets’. The

Lords ordered Northumberland ‘to make diligent Enquiry after this Woman, and the Author of the said book’, offering him the assistance of ‘all Constables and other Officers, for the apprehending of them’ should they be discovered. By 11 May, the author had been identified as the deceased Sir Dudley Digges, whose ‘detailed and closely reasoned debate over the respective authorities of the king and parliament’ had first been published in Oxford shortly after his death, in late 1643.'*? A Commons committee was appointed to discover the printers, sellers, and publishers of the pamphlet, to commence legal proceedings in the King’s Bench, and to imprison those involved if they saw fit. This case offers a telling glimpse into parliamentary concerns about the circulation of printed texts and the role women played in the production and dissemination of a variety of forms of illicit print. The “Woman that uses to sell Books about the Streets’ is a nameless but habitual figure. In her mobility, she stands in imaginative opposition to the ideal “Huswife, that is, house-wife, not a street-wife, one that gaddeth up and down, like Thamer: nor a field-wite, like Dinah’.'*' Her experience of London is "8 ‘The Kentish Petition (London: Printed for Hanna Allen, at the Crown in Popes head Alley, 1648).

' Journal of the House of Lords (London, 1767-1830), IX, p. 163. I am indebted for the discovery of this case, and several others, to D. EF McKenzie and Maureen Bell, A Chronology and Calendar of Documents Relating to the London Book Trade, 1641-1700, 3 vols. (Oxford University Press, 2005), I.

°° Journal of the House of Commons, V, 167; David Stoker, ‘Digges, Dudley (16131643)’, ODNB, , accessed 13 April 2009. 7! Robert Cleaver, A Godlie Forme of Householde Government (London: Printed by Felix Kingston, for Thomas Man, 1598), O8r. As Mark Jenner and Paul Griffiths note, “Women who walked through the streets selling clothes or fruit, or who strolled in the fields outside the city for their recreation, were liable to be condemned as disorderly, and this disorder was articulated through strongly gendered languages of sexual promiscuity’ (‘Introduction to Jenner and Griffiths (eds.), Londinopolis: Essays in the Cultural and Social History of Early Modern London (Manchester University Press, 2000), 13.

160 ‘Grossly Material Things represented as an oscillation between the dangerous openness of the streets and the restrictions of the prison system. That ‘carceral archipelago’ had its own geography: in October 1648, the Committee of both Houses met at Derby House, and, among other business, ordered the release of Eleanor Passenger, in Bridewell for ‘dispersing scandalous and unlicensed pam-

phlets’, into the custody of Francis Bethan or Francis Deakins, and provided a warrant to the Keeper of Peterhouse, to receive Passenger into his prison.'** For women pamphlet sellers, London appears at once as a place of potentially uncontrolled dispersal and distribution characterized by the openness of the streets, and as a closed series of penal institutions, with their own topographies, hierarchies, and movements.'” The anonymous ‘woman who sells books’ was of interest to the House primarily as a means to discover the printer, bookseller, and publisher, as well as, crucially, the author of the text. Thus in November 1648, the Lords and Commons ordered the release of two women imprisoned for dispersing ‘scandalous books’ once they had identified ‘the men from whom they had them’.'** The women are identified only as ‘the mercury women’ and ‘the two women in prison in Peterhouse for selling scandalous books’, just as, in her first appearance in the records, Eleanor Passenger is described as ‘the mercury-woman apprehended by the marshal and committed to Bridewell’ and only later named.'” As Marcus Nevitt points out: the overlap between authorship, publishing and printing had certain economic and strategic advantages for contemporary workers in the news trade... How was a seditious intention to be traced amid such a complex network of creative activity, when even hawkers selling the newsbooks at street level could be found politicizing the texts they sold in radical and seditious ways?’!*° The position of mercuries in the 1640s reflects Michel Foucault’s suggestion that, “Texts, books, and discourses really began to have authors... to the extent that authors became subject to punishment,

'% ‘TNA: SP 24/3, 11, 14, 15. Michel Foucault uses the term ‘carceral archipelago’ to describe the expansion of disciplinary control beyond the institution of the prison (Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, tr. Alan Sheridan (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), 297); I use it to delineate the material constitution of London’s penal spaces as a series of distinct locations linked by the movement of bodies, information, and goods. 9 ‘That closure was not necessarily complete; in 1626 John Tendring complained that Catholics in New Prison had the keys to their cells, left the prison without a keeper to visit taverns, received guests in their cells, and even operated a printing press, producing Catholic books which were ‘freely vended and uttered to all parts’ (SP Dom 16/22/111, cited in Lisa McClain, Lest We Be Damned: Practical Innovation and Lived Experience Among Catholics in Protestant England, 1559-1642 (New York and London: Routledge, 2004), 146).

124 "TNA: SP 25/3, 6. 25 Tbid., 3. '6 Marcus Nevitt, Women and the Pamphlet Culture of Revolutionary England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 91.

Beyond the London Book Trades 161 that is, to the extent that discourses could be transgressive.’'’’ The interests of the mid seventeenth-century authorities prompted an increased concern for the author: a similar effect to that which McDowell identifies as the privileging of authorial authority prompted by ‘twentieth-century literary critics’ interest in bourgeois subjectivity and the rise of individualism’.'*° Historical sources and historiographical concerns combine to elide the role of mercury women and pamphlet sellers in the search for the originating author. Yet the bodily presence of women can still, sometimes, surface. In December 1646, Abigail Rogers was brought before the House of Lords for selling ‘a scandalous book, intituled, “A Resolve of the Person of the Kinge, or a Corrector of the Answerer to the Speech out of Doores, &c”’.'”° According to the Journal of the House of Lords Abigail was questioned on only one theme: ‘of whom she had the said Books’, which she ‘refused to discover; only said,

“she bought them of a Stranger”’. The books were ordered to be burnt, while Rogers, ‘for refusing to discover of whom she had them’ was committed to Bridewell. Her imprisonment was short-lived. On 23 December, the House heard that Rogers was pregnant, and on the 29th they ordered ‘that Abigall Rogers, now in Bridewell, shall be released presently; she being with Child’.'°° Though Rogers is unlikely to have been executed for her crimes, her appeal to the evidence of her swelling womb to escape imprisonment is

contiguous with the practice of pleading the belly by which pregnant women could avoid capital punishment. Frances Dolan charts the gendered discrepancy between the intellectual requirement that a man should read scripture to escape hanging (even if this simply meant learning the ‘neck verse’ by heart), while a woman relied on the evidence of her productive body to escape her fate.'?’ In this instance, the physical evidence of Rogers's changing body transformed her relationship to the carceral spaces of early modern London, redefining her place within the city and the social order. The discourse of women’s vulnerability and family responsibility could also be appropriated by men in the book trades as part of a lexicon of adult

masculinity. In August 1645, Richard Royston, imprisoned in the Fleet, petitioned for his release, explaining that he had ‘no-one to follow his trade and support his wife and children’.'°* More dramatically, Simon Stafford 27 Michel Foucault, “What is an Author?’ in Paul Rabinow (ed. and tr.), The Foucault Reader (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984), 108. 8 McDowell, Women of Grub Street, 84.

Journal of the House of Lords, VIII, 615. °° Tbid., VII, 624, 634. '°! Frances Dolan notes that in 1626, women were allowed benefit of clergy for the theft of goods valued at less than 10s. (Reading, Writing, and Other Crimes’ in Valerie Traub et al (eds.), Feminist Readings of Early Modern Culture: Emerging Subjects (Cambridge University Press, 1996), 125-6). '* HMC, VI, 74; For Royston’s release see the Journal of the House of Lords, V1, 538.

162 ‘Grossly Material Things described an occasion in early 1598 upon which Cuthbert Burby, Thomas Dawson, ‘and diuerse others... being armed and arrayed w* seurall weapons...did very riotously and wantonly and unlawfully enter into yor sayd subiect Simon Stafford his workinge howse in the parish of St Peters aforesayd within foure days after his wife was...in childbirth to her greate feare in that case’.'*? Stafford’s account is designed to persuade the Star Chamber of the severity of his complaint, and must be read accordingly as hyperbolic and affective. Nonetheless, the safety of his wife and unborn child is crucial to the appeal of his narrative. Men as well as women used the rhetoric of pathos to appeal to the emotions of a reader or listener. In both cases, however, the narratives are predicated on a model of female poverty and vulnerability, which must, for women, be relieved by those to whom the petition is directed, while men seek their freedom in order to assume their responsibilities as husbands and fathers.’

IV ‘ONE THAT TRADES MUCH TO S. OMERS’: THE GEOGRAPHY OF ILLICIT PRINT The widows of Continental printers, like their English counterparts, could inherit and continue their husbands’ businesses, and were sometimes engaged in producing texts for an English or English-speaking audience. These connections remind us, in Maureen Bell’s formulation, that ‘geographical interdependence within the book trade stretches beyond the British Isles’.'”’ Before the Reformation, and under Mary, the centres of French religious printing also served an English market. Until her death in 1556, Madeleine Boursette worked at the sign of the Elephant on the Rue St Jacques in Paris, and issued a number of English service books. Boursette initially used illustrations from her husband’s collection, but in 1552 and 1555 commissioned two devices of her own, both including her initials, and acting as visual markers of her business responsibility.'°° Annet Briere also worked in Paris from 1551 to 1556, as did the widow of the bookseller Guillame Le Bret (1550-4), while Yolande Kerver (Bonhomme) printed large numbers of English service books between 1522 and her death in 1557.!9%”

3 "TNA: STAC 5/27/22. '54 On early modern conceptions of proper masculine conduct see Alexandra Shephard, The Meanings of Manhood in Early Modern England (Oxford University Press, 2003). '9 Maureen Bell, ‘Introduction’, to McKay et al. (eds.), Light on the Book Trade, xiii. '86 Susan Broomhall, Women and the Book Trade in Sixteenth-Century France (Aldershot:

Ashgate, 2002), 56. For a more general survey of women working in the French book trades see ibid., ch. 2. '°7 “Index 1: Printers and Publishers’ in STC, III, s.n.

Beyond the London Book Trades 163 After Elizabeth’s accession to the English throne, the relation of many Northern European printers to the English market changed, as the service books and devotional texts they had previously supplied became heretical. Pre-Reformation books continued to circulate, and some owners deleted prohibited material and emended their texts to render them acceptable to the new regime.'’® Tessa Watt provides the example of one pre-Reformation pieta on which the woodcut of Mary mourning the crucified Christ remains intact, but the inscription, noting that “Who ever devoutly beholdeth these arms of Christ’s passion hat...years of pardon’, has been scored through, though it remains clearly legible.'*’ One English primer, held in the York Minster library, claims to be printed in accordance with the demands of the Church but contains a number of Henrician prayers. In an act of alteration and re-appropriation, a Protestant reader has scored through the ‘Ave Marias’ that punctuate the text, and eliminated references to the Pope.'””

As the lines of confessional afhliation became more clearly drawn during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, some Continen-

tal stationers showed a commitment to producing texts either for illicit dissemination within England and Scotland, or for distribution among English and Scottish religious exiles. In Brussels, the widow of Hubert Antoine-Velpius printed St Peter of Alcantara’s A Golden Treatise of Mentall Praier and Pierre Matthieu’s The Historie of S. Elizabeth Daughter of

the King of Hungarie, while in Wurzburg in 1628, Anne Marie Volmar printed Alexander Baillie’s virulent True Information of the Unhallowed Offspring, Progresse & Impoisoned Fruits of our Scottish-Caluinian Gospel &

Gospellers.'*' Marie Courant, widow of Nicholas, was another Catholic printer, producing The Progenie of Catholics and Protestants (1633); Certain Selected Spirituall Epistles of St John of Avila (1631); John Floyd’s A Paire of Spectacles for Sir H. Linde to See his Way Withall (1631); James Anderton's Virginalia, a series of sonnets in praise of the Virgin Mary; and Hieremias Drexelius’s Nicetas or the Triumph over Incontinencie (1633).'”

During the same period, Francoise Blageart in Paris printed a string of Catholic texts including Francis de Sales’s Introduction to a Devout Life (1637), some of which appeared either without her name in the imprint or with a false imprint, suggesting that even publishers working from the relative safety of the Continent might wish to be discreet about their location and activities.'** Marguerite Kellam, who inherited '°8 See Eamon Dufty, Marking the Hours: English People and their Prayers, 1240-1570 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), ch. 9.

'39 Cheap Print, 131; 133. '40 York Minster Library STC 16085. Ml STC 19794, 17663, 1202. 2 STC 579, 985—985.5, 11112, 3608.5, 7238. 43 STC 4554, 922.5, 16162, 23992, 11322, 25403.5, 911, 914, 6844.4, 16828, 1019.

164 ‘Grossly Material Things her husband’s printing business in Douai, engaged in an extensive pro-

eramme of English-language publishing, with an anglicized imprint declaring that one translation of Alfonso de Villegas’s The Lives of Saints

(1614) was printed ‘by the widow of Laurence Kellam’.'** Also in Douai, the widow of Pierre Auroi probably completed her husband’s work on Anthony Batt’s translation, A Hive of Sacred Honeycombs (1631), for John Heigham, ‘the most productive English Catholic publisher of the early seventeenth century after the English College press’, while the widow of Jacques Boscard and her daughter-in-law, Jeanne Boscard, printed all or part of at least twenty-five Catholic texts, many sold by Heigham.'* The widow of Marc Wyon anglicized her imprint

in nine extant works printed in English between 1630 and 1640, including Richard Broughton’s Ecclesiastical History of Great Britain

(1633).

The intertwining of religious and geo-political affiliations is evident in Martine Mommaert’s printing of Gerat Barry's A Discourse of Military Discipline (1634). The text is a military manual, distinguished by its detailed examples of infantry battle formations, but its author’s nationality is declared on the title-page which describes him as “Gerat Barry Irish’, and his religious sympathies are made clear in the dedication to David fitz David Barry, first Earl of Barrymore, as Barry describes his ‘thirty three yeares in this my presente profession of armes, in his Catholike Majesties service amonghste [sic] the Spaniard, Italian, and Irish’.'4” The book was designed largely as a primer for Irish soldiers fighting for the Spanish, but formed a useful recruiting tool at a moment when Barry was attempting to muster Irish troops. Not all Continental printing for the British market was Catholic in its sympathies. Another martial text, the Laws and Ordinances Touching Military Discipline (1631), was printed by the widow and

heirs of Jacobs van Hillebrant in The Hague, and reflects England’s 4 STC 24731.5. See also STC 17197, 25290, 24731a, 25290.3, 24675.5, 19203.7. 8 STC 1922; Paul Arblaster, ‘Heigham, John (b. c.1568, d. in or after 1634)’, ODNB, , accessed 17 August 2009. For the Boscard women see STC 742.7, 743, 17506.3, 18482, 21144, 24734, 25774, 985.5 (five final contents leaves only), 13037, 16099, 16100, 24748.5, 986 (added contents leaves only), 16922a.3, 21147, 21150, 1844, 25071, 10676.5, 13033.8, 12144.5, 1841, 1842, 5645.5, 4572.5. 46 STC 3894. See also STC 6929, 22809a.5, 4911.5, 22810, 24522.5, 1056; 3898,

4552, 4553, 15347.5, 15349, 23630, 15351, 12350, 12450.5, 1020, 1589.5, 15350, 17567. One other woman, the widow of Lodewijk de Winde, is listed in STC as inheriting her husband’s printing business in Douai, before moving to Antwerp, but no STC texts are attributed to her. '47 Gerat Barry, A Discourse of Military Discipline Devided into Three Boockes...Composed by Captaine Gerat Barry Irishn (At Bruxells: By the vvidovve of Jhon Mommart, M.DC.XXXIV [1634]), A2r.

Beyond the London Book Trades 165 ongoing, though often vexed, embroilment in the wars of the Spanish Netherlands.'*®

Where the printing centres of Northern France and the Spanish Netherlands allowed for the transport of illicit texts to English ports, those of the Low Countries, producing Protestant or Puritan texts, had strong links to Scotland, particularly during the 1620s and 1630s.'”? In Nirnberg, Katharina Dietrich printed a number of polyglot New Testaments in 1599-1600, while the widow of Joris Veseler in Amsterdam, who later remarried the printer Jan Frederickz Stam, printed the Reformist Heidelberg Catechism (1626) and The Answere of a Mother unto hir Seduced Sonnes Letter (1627) by ‘Ez. W.’??° That link is reinforced on five titlepages printed by the Puritan Cloppenburg press in Amsterdam or their associates, which feature ‘Margery Marprelate’ as their publisher. Two are attributed to the Scottish Army, and concern The Lawfulnesse of our Expedition into England Manifested (1640) and Our Demands of the English Lords (1640), while the others offer Vox Borealis, or the Northern Discoverie: by way of a Dialogue between Jamie and Willie |i.e. James I and Archbishop Laud] (1641), ask Questions to be Disputed in Counsell of the Lords Spirituall (1641), and reproduce A Sermon Preached in London by a Faithfull Minister of Christ (1642).'°' The Vox Borealis and the Questions play

complex games with the topographies of print; the latter claims to be printed ‘at London: by Pasquin, Deputy to Margery Mar-prelate’, while the former borrows from Martin Marprelate’s earlier playful and puzzling

imprints to locate the press ‘Amidst the Babylonians...in Thwackcoatlane at the signe of the Crab-tree Cudgels; without any priviledge of the Cater-Caps’. While refusing to locate the text, this imprint hints that the book was printed illicitly in England or Scotland (Amidst the Babylonians’) rather than at a secure distance in Amsterdam, whilst the particulari-

ties of the printer’s address at once mimic the complex detail of many early modern imprints, signal the text's satirical and punitive intent, and reinforce the link to the earlier Puritan campaign of Martin Marprelate 48 United Provinces of the Netherlands. Staten Generaal, Lawes and Ordinances Touching Military Discipline (Imprinted at the Haghe: By the widowe & heires of the deceased Hillebrand Iacobs van Wouw, ordinarie printer to the high and mightie Lords the Stats Generall, Anno 1631). 9 Mann, Scottish Book Trade, ch. 3. '° Por Dietrich, see STC 2792.5—2792.7; for Veseler, see 13031.7, 24903.5. Pl STC 21924, 21926; Donald Goddard Wing, Short-title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales and British America, and of English books Printed in Other Countries, 1641-1700, 3 vols. (New York: Index Society, 1945-51), V712, Q187, W363. The first two of these items are identified with the Cloppenburg press in STC; the third is attributed to the same press by A. F. Johnson (“The “Cloppenburg” Press, 1640, 1641’, The Library, 5th ser., 13 (1958), 282). On Martin Marprelate, and his revival during the 1640s, see Raymond, Pamphlets and Pamphleteering, 27-49, 177-81, 204-5, 229-33.

166 ‘Grossly Material Things and Martin Junior, whose 7heses Martinianae (1589) had also been printed

‘without any priuiledge of the Catercaps’, a mocking metonymy which identified university-educated preachers with their square academic headgear.'°? Marcy L. North notes that: ‘Along with Piers, Colin and Pasquil, Martin came to symbolize a distinct authorial personality that functioned independent of an actual author's name.’!”’ Here, that authority broadens to include the agents of print. Reflecting the importance of publishing networks to collaborative authority, as well as the culture of anonymity and false attribution prevalent in the early 1640s, Martin Marprelate’s female successor was proclaimed as a printer's widow, rather than the authorial force her fictive husband of the 1580s and 1590s had been.'” Some Continental printers recognized an English or English-speaking market for non-denominational texts. In Rotterdam the widow of Matthijs Bastiaenz printed the fourth edition of an English—Dutch dictionary (1639), while in Middelburg, the widow and heirs of Symon Moulert printed a dictionary in six languages, including English.” When one of the best-known printers of the early modern period, Christophe Plantin, died in 1589 his business passed to Jean Moretus, who had married Plantin’s second daughter, Martine. The name of Plantin’s wife, Jeanne, appears in several imprints alongside that of Moretus, as in a 1591 edition of Matthias de LObel’s Lcones Stirpium Seu Plantarum, which concludes, as do several other editions, with an added “Table oft suches names off Herbes vsed in Engelland’.!°° The irregular orthography of this title suggests something of the problems of printing for the English market; although the compositors of the Plantin-Moretus printing house were highly skilled in the production of Latin and learned texts, their English was less accomplished. Women were not only involved in the production of Continental texts, but could be engaged in the more dangerous activity of dissemination. In

1602, John Rhodes attempted to define the mechanisms through which Catholic texts reached an English readership. According to Rhodes: there are many such Pamphlets, together with other like Romish wares, that are sent abroad amongst the common people, both Protestants and Papists

in London and in the countrey, & that, by certaine women Brokers and

'2 OED, ‘Catercap’. 3 Marcy L. North, Zhe Anonymous Renaissance: Cultures of Discretion in Tudor-Stuart England (University of Chicago Press, 2003), 134. '4 For additional examples of playful or pseudonymous title-pages and author attributions see David Cressy, England on Edge: Crisis and Revolution, 1640-1642 (Oxford University Press, 2007), 296-7. 9 STC 24869.5, 1431.32. 6 Matthias de UObel, cones Stirpium, Seu, Plantarum Tam Exoticarum (Antuerpiae: Ex officina plantiniana: Apud Viduam et loannem Moretum,1591).

Beyond the London Book Trades 167 Pedlers (as of late in Staffordshire there was) who with baskets on their armes

shall come and offer you other wares vnder a colour, and so sell you these.'?”

Rhodes was confident that women peddlers were key to the dissemination

of printed texts, and their possible—though fleeting—notoriety is evident in his confident evocation of recent provincial news. More visible are the four women John Gee, himself a recent convert from Catholicism, included in the list of ‘such as disperse, print, binde or sell Popish Bookes about LONDON’ which he appended to the fourth edition of The Foot Out of the Snare (which went through four editions in 1624): ‘Mistris Fowler in Fetter-Lane, “Mistris Bullock in Fetter-Lane’, ‘Mother Truck, dwelling in South-warke’, and “Widow Douce, a famous dealer’.'°® Mistress Bullock was probably the widow of the bookbinder

Peter Bullock, who was executed on 19 April 1601 for selling Popish books.’ Anne Douce was frequently indicted for recusancy and was noted by Sir Julius Caesar in August 1608 as ‘a widow in High Holbourne

against the turning stile into Lincolnes Inn Fields. She selleth Popish Books’; in 1610, Lewis Owen seized Catholic books in her house.'® The Middlesex County Records identify a number of other recusant stationers: John and Margaret Coe, as well as Elizabeth and Helen (or Ellen) Coe, appear on a number of occasions, as do the printers Peter and Joan Smith, and George Beswicke. That neither Coe’s nor Beswicke’s names appear in the STC Index of printers, and that Peter Smith is included as the printer of only one item, interrupted when his press was seized near Bunhill in 1623, is indicative of the shadowy nature of domestic Catholic printing, and the difficulty of determining its full extent. The scrivener

Thomas Foold and his wife were also indicted for recusancy, as were Thomas and Joan (or Jane) Knight, along with their son John, also a scrivener, his wife Joan, their son, John, and a servant.'®' The Coes and Knights, were, like Anne Douce, parishioners of St Andrews in Holborn, "7 John Rhodes, An Ansvvere to a Romish Rime Lately Printed (London: Simon Stafford, 1602), sig. A2r.

8 John Gee, The Foot Out of the Snare... The Fourth Edition (London: Printed by H. L[ownes] for Robert Milbourne, and are to be sold at his shop at the great South-dore of Pauls, 1624), T1r—v.

Dict. I, s.n.

‘60 Lansdowne MS 153 ff. 30, 31. For Douce’s recusancy indictions, see J. C. Jeaffreson (ed.), Middlesex County Records, 3 vols. (London 1974 (1886—92)), H, 79, 107, 110, 114

(twice!), 127, 128, 134, 144, 146, 237. For Owen’s seizure of books see Westminster Cathedral Archives, Main series, [X, 52. '6l Jeaffreson (ed.), Middlesex County Records, 11, 79, 107, 110, 114, 120, 127, 128, 134, 144, 146, 237, 238. It is possible that there was more than one John Coe (father and son) and that this accounts for the three women’s names appearing at different points in the indictments.

168 ‘Grossly Material Things while Foold lived in High Holborn, suggesting that the area was a centre of Catholic book production, while the Smiths were located in St-James'’sat-Clerkenwell, a short walk further to the east of the city. Bills are also recorded against ‘John Fowler stationer, his wife Anne alias Anne Fowler spinster, Katherine Ashley spinster (servant of the same

John Fowler)...for not going to church, chapel or any usual place of Common Prayer during the six months next following the 10th December’.!° In April 1606, Sir Julius Caesar was informed that John Fowler was sending his wife ‘fowr cases of books from Paris’ which he had already

transported as far as St Omer. Under interrogation, Anne Fowler admitted that she had received ‘a portmanteau’ of Catholic texts, including works by Thomas More, and Robert Persons’s Christian Directory.'® Like Bullock and Douce, Anne Fowler appears to have continued in business after her husband’s death. Her religious commitments were not confined to her trade in Catholic books. In a list of ‘the Romish Priests and Iesuites now resident about the City of London’, John Gee included ‘Two Priests, lodging in Mistris Fowlers house in Fetter-Lane, whose names | cannot learne’.' The notoriety of Fowler and Douce is further evidenced by an episode in the career of the informer, William Udall, who had previously identified both women as Catholic dealers. In 1610, Udall was imprisoned, having made numerous enemies among the pursuivant community, and was accused of having been bribed to turn a blind eye to books held by Douce, Fowler, and one Henry Oven.'” In 1609, Joan and John Daubrigscourt were imprisoned, along with their maidservant, for importing the scurrilous Prurit-anus, printed at St Omer by Francois Bellet. Joan identified ‘Wilson’ as the source of the books, but Udall complained: ‘the woman doth zquivocate. ‘There are ii Wilsons and she may receve bokes from them both and name but one, whom she supposeth freest from danger.’'°° The practice of equivocation allowed clandestine Catholics to avoid the sin of a direct lie, while refusing to answer incriminating questions, and had become particularly visi-

ble around the time of the Gunpowder Plot, and the arrest of Henry Garnet.'® Taking issue with Foucault’s emphasis on the pervasiveness of disciplinary technology, Michel de Certeau argues for the necessity of '©2 Jeaffreson (ed.), Middlesex County Records, 11,10.

'63 Leona Rostenberg, The Minority Press and the English Crown (Nieuwkoop: B. de Graaf, 1971), 102. See HMC, Salisbury, XVII, 94. '©4 Gee, The Foot Out of the Snare, V3r.

'©> PR. Harris, “The Reports of William Udall, Informer 1605-1612’, Recusant History, VIII (London, 1966), 205. '66 Thid., 244. '°7 See Olga L. Valbuena, Subjects to the Kings Divorce: Equivocation, Infidelity, and Resistance in Early Modern England (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), esp. ch. 3.

Beyond the London Book Trades 169 discovering ‘the clandestine forms taken by the dispersed, tactical, and make-shift creativity of groups or individuals already caught in the nets of “discipline” ’.'°8 In the case of Joan Daubrigscourt, state control is materi-

alized through the Elizabethan and Jacobean networks of spies and informers that tracked Catholics, recusants, and Jesuits, and her equivocation can be understood as one of the ‘innumerable practices by means of which

users reappropriate the space organized by techniques of sociocultural production’, creating a doubled mental map where the two Wilsons took each other’s places in order to secure their safety.'°” Daubrigscourt negotiated her own imprisonment and the demands of her interrogators through a flexible interpretation of notions of truth and identification. In October 1609, Udall declared, “There hath not any boke of state or

otherwyse bin brought into England or printed beyonde the seas but it hath bin performed by one Roger Higham or his wyfe.’'” John (alias Roger) Heigham usually, Udall implied, distributed his books by means of Joan Daubrigscourt, but ‘because Dobscote his wyfe is in restraynt and by that meanes Higham wanteth sale for his bokes he hath sent over his wyfe [Marie Boniface] under the habite of a Duchwoman who hath dispersed numbers of bokes since hir comming into England, especially that most seditious boke of the Irish Jesuitt’s called Fitzsimons’.'”’ In his report Udall declared of Boniface and Daubrigscourt that ‘two more dangerous women for thees causes are hardly to be found’.'”” The sale of Catholic books could be profitable; Tessa Watt notes that in 1624 ‘a Douai Bible could cost up to 40s. and a Rheims New Testament 16s. or 20s.’ Watt takes these figures from Gee’s The Foot Out of the Snare, a partial and polemical account, and we may treat with some caution her conclusion that: ‘It is unlikely that these printers harboured recusant sen-

timents: they took the risk of printing papist literature because of the highly lucrative nature of the trade.’'” The frequent recusancy convictions of those women who imported and distributed Catholic books, along with the risks they took and the games they played with the pursuing authorities, make it clear that these women’s commitments were as much religio-political as mercantile, and remind us that the early modern book trades were not always straightforwardly predicated on models of profit and loss. This becomes more apparent when we note that it was not only stationers who were involved in the importation and movement of

religious and seditious texts. When Joan Daubrigscourt confessed to smuggling Catholic books, Sir William Waad, Lieutenant of the Tower, 68 de Certeau, Practice, xiv—xv. 169 Tbid., xv. '79 Harris, ‘Reports’, 262. '71 ‘The book is Henry Fitzsimon’s, A Catholike Confutation of M. John Riders Clayme of Antiquitie (Roan [i.e. Douai: Pierre Auroi and Charles Boscard], 1608).

' Harris, ‘Reports’, 262; 264. ' Watt, Cheap Print, 51-2.

170 ‘Grossly Material Things who secured her confession, noted that the books had been sent to her from St Omer, and stored in the porter’s lodge of the house of the Venetian ambassador.'”* Another ambassadorial residence was the subject of scrutiny in 1640 when Mary Silvester, a laundry maid in the house of the Spanish ambassador, was revealed as a ‘dealer in printed works imported

from “forraine parts’: among nearly two hundred texts discovered in a trunk in 1640 were “Jesus psalters, Invectives and rimes against Luther and Calvin”’.'” Where Walsham uses the term ‘dealer’, it may be more appropriate to assume that the laundry maid was part of a network keen to ensure the wide availability of Catholic devotional and controversial material, whose members’ primary motivation was not necessarily profit. When, in 1609, William Udall wrote to Sir Julius Caesar complaining about the shady profiteering of other pursuivants, he alleged that as well

as allowing priests to escape in return for payment, some confiscated books only to be bribed for their return (a crime of which he was himself accused, as we have seen). His list of ‘places where they have taken bokes and sold them back agayne’ includes not only ‘Mr Dawbrigcourt’s, twise’ and ‘Widowe Dowce’s’ but ‘Lady Graye’s’.'”° Catherine (Neville) Gray was the widow of Sir Thomas Gray of Chillingham, Northumberland, and a well-known recusant, alleged in 1606 to have three houses in and

about the City of London where she sheltered priests.'’”’ Like Cecily Stonor, discussed in my second chapter, Gray's motives were religious and

political, rather than mercenary, and the discovery of large numbers of Catholic books among her possessions illustrates the extent to which networks of dissemination were at times structured according to ideological rather than economic commitments.

There is, however, some evidence that the authorities tolerated the importation of small numbers of Catholic texts. In August 1617, Mabella

Griffith, the widow of Dr John Griffith, was examined at Dover. She explained that she had left England under licence in 1611, and had been

living at Malines in France, but was travelling to Bath for her health. Griffith was a practicing Catholic who refused to go to Church while in England or to swear the Oath of Allegiance. She carried with her the material resources of her religious practice, but confirmed, in a standard formula, that ‘her crucifix, books, &c. are for her own use’.'”® In July 1623, Mary Bachelor similarly pledged that the Catholic books she was '4 Harris, ‘Reports’, 202. '? Alexandra Walsham, ““Domme Preachers?” Post-Reformation English Catholicism and the Culture of Print’, Past e& Present, 168 (2000), 86, citing TNA: SP 16/453, 105.

'76 Harris, ‘Reports’, 244. 7 HMC, Salisbury, XVUIL, 336-7. '78 "TNA: SP 14/93, 9. This may be the Mabel Griffeth who was indicted for recusancy in 1617 (VJeaftreson (ed.), Middlesex County Records, I, 119).

Beyond the London Book Trades 171 bringing in to the country were for her own use, while in August 1623 the ‘Popish pictures, books, &c.’ which had been seized from Joan Milbree on her re-entry into England were redelivered to her, at the suit of Lord

Wallingford.'” Though the spectre of Catholic texts loomed large in the early to mid seventeenth century, Puritan and other radical religious texts could also be subject to scrutiny and suspicion. Robert Persons recalled that in the 1520s and 1530s: a certayn foul fusteluggs, dishonest of her body with base fellows, as was openly reported, whose name was Ioan knell alias Burcher, if I forget not, who beginning to be a great reader of Scriptures her self became a principall instrument also in that tyme to deuulge such Bibles as were sent, especially in the courte, where she became known to certayn women in authority, and to conuey the bookes more safly, she vsed to bynde them in strings under her apparell, and so to pass them into the courte.'*°

Persons collapses the reformist Joan Bocher’s lack of sexual discrimination

into her appetite for Protestant texts, a connection made all the more compelling by her smuggling of books about her body. Though Persons is the only source for this story, and for the charge that Bocher was involved in bringing Tyndale’s translation of the New Testament into England, his allegations, said to be based on the testimony of someone who was present at her trial for heresy in 1549, reveal that women were believed to have been engaged in the importation and dissemination of Reformist texts. In the late 1630s, several women were instrumental in conveying writings by

the imprisoned Puritan—and later Quaker—leader, John Lilburne, out of the King’s Bench to be printed in Holland, while in 1639 one of those women, Katherine Hadley, threw copies of the secretly printed petition ‘To all the brave, courageous, and valiant Apprentices of the honourable City of London’ and A Cry for Justice among apprentices and others enjoying a holiday in Moorfields, an act for which she was herself imprisoned until Lilburne secured her release in December 1640.'*' Hadley thus moved from the space of the prison to the open, recreational spaces of Moorfields at the edge of London’s urban sprawl, before being forcibly returned to the penal spaces of the Poultry Compter and Bridewell. Women’s dissemination of religious books also formed an important

part of a more licit godly life, and brings us back to the patronage of '? "TNA: SP 14/149, 22; SP 14/151, 24. '®° Robert Parsons, A Temperate Ward-word, to the Turbulent and Seditious VVach-word of Sir Francis Hastinges (Antwerp: A. Conincx, 1599), B8v. '8! Pauline Gregg, Free-born John: A Biography of John Lilburne (London: Harrap, 1961), 69-71, 77-8, 84. Maureen Bell cites Gregg in “Women in the English Book Trade 1557— 1700’, Leipziger Jahrbuch zur Buchgeschichte, 6 (1996), at 26.

172 ‘Grossly Material Things devotional and reformist print charted in chapter 2. The mores of charitable housewifery and patronage extended to the distribution of reading matter as an act of didactic household and estate management. Lady Anne Clifford bought twenty-four books for £4 2s. from William Smith of Appleby which she gave to servants at Easter 1670 when they received the sacrament with her, and thirty-five books of divinity on 22 June of the same year, at a cost of £6 4s. 7d., which she distributed to the servants of Lady Alethea Compton as well as her own. In 1675, she purchased ‘55: Bookes of Devotion of Mr John Rawlet’s writeing who is now minister of Kirby Stephen which I buy to give away comes to Three Pounds Five Shil-

lings & Four Pence’. Similarly, on 10 January 1676, some two months before her death, Clifford recorded in her diary that ‘about 5 of ye clock this evening did George Goodgion bring me 28 bookes of Devotion hee bought for mee at Penrith, and I then saw them paid for & gave them all away but six to my domestick servants’.'*’ Also in the mid seventeenth century, Mary Rich, Countess of Warwick, was said to have busied herself ‘In scattering good Books in all the common Rooms and places of attendance, that those that waited might not lose their time, but well employ it, and have a bait laid of some practical, useful Book, and fitted to their capacity, which might catch and take them’.'*’ The language of ‘bait’ allies Rich’s practice with the techniques of spiritual conversion, suggesting that

the space of the household was stocked with material temptations to Godly meditation, placed carefully to hand. Looking beyond the London Stationers’ Company to discover women’s roles as patentees, as printers and booksellers beyond the capital, and as the disseminators of a range of texts reminds us of the spatial, material, and bodily bases of the early modern book trade. Books were smuggled in barrels of fish or under skirts, transported by carriers or in peddler’s baskets, or set alongside other goods in a provincial shop. Moreover, investigating the range of women’s textual commitments in this period reminds

us that the book trades were only partly concerned with questions of profit and loss, and suggests the extent to which women’s religious and political identities shaped their relationship to the printed book. The trade with Continental printers reminds us that, in Robert Darntons terms: ‘books themselves do not respect limits either linguistic or national. They have often been written by authors who belonged to an '®° George Charles Williamson (ed.), Lady Anne Clifford, Countess of Dorset, Pembroke e Montgomery, 1590-1676: Her Life, Letters and Work (Kendal: Titus Wilson, 1922), 159,

510; Anne Clifford, The Diaries of Lady Anne Clifford, ed. D. J. H. Clifford (Thrupp: Sutton Publishing, 1990), 235. '8S Anthony Walker, Eureka, Eureka the Virtuous Woman... Examined in a Sermon Preached at Felsted in Essex (London: Printed for Nathanael Ranew, 1678), G3r.

Beyond the London Book Trades 173 international republic of letters, composed by printers who did not work in their native tongue, sold by booksellers who operated across national boundaries, and read in one language by readers who spoke another.’!™ Though books, as Darnton points out, are seldom confined by the geo-

political boundaries that structure much of the work of historical and literary inquiry, the study of their movements can serve to bring those boundaries—be they physical, linguistic, cartographic, or social—into focus. Particular texts can, in this analysis, take the place of the wolf or crocodile in de Certeau’s fable of the frontier: ‘this actor, by virtue of the very fact that he is the mouthpiece of the limit, creates communication as well as separation; more than that, he establishes a border only by saying what crosses it, having come from the other side’.'® Texts which came

from the Continent to circulate within England and Scotland, which travelled from Oxford to London and back again, or which moved in and out of prisons, render de Certeau’s aphoristic assertion that ‘what the map cuts up, the story cuts across’ startlingly literal.'®° The book which proclaimed its foreign origins in the English marketplace helped to produce boundaries, even as it flaunted their inability to contain the text. Books, in short, describe space not only through their textual engagements but by their physical presence as objects in motion, and by the bibliographical and linguistic codes that constitute, even as they declare, their origins. '8 Robert Darnton, The Kiss of Lamourette: Reflections in Cultural History (London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1990), 135. '®9 de Certeau, Practice, 127. '86 Tbid., 129.

‘No deformitie can abide before the sunne )

Imagining Early Modern Women’s Reading In his 1555 translation of Juan Luis Vives’ The Office and Duetie of a Husband, Thomas Paynell echoed the concerns which Richard Hyrde, the translator of Vives’s earlier The Instruction of a Christen Woman (c.1529), had already set forth. In Englishing Vives’s advice on the best way to manage a wife, Paynell returned to the vexed question of a woman's reading: Yf she can reade, lette her haue no bookes of Poetrye, nor suche tryfelynge

bookes as we haue spoken of before, for nature is ynoughe inclined to noughtines, although we put not fier to towe...Such vertuous and holy bookes as may learne her to be wyse, & inflame her to liue vertuouslye muste be delyuered vnto her, wherein yet, a certayne iudgemente and prudencye muste be vsed, that is, that they delyuer her no vayne, no chyldyshe, no barbarous, nor no superstitious bookes.!

This advice tallies neatly with our understanding of the ways in which early modern women’s reading was understood to be a path to temptation, rendering women vulnerable to the flames of ‘noughtines’ or the distractions of childishness and superstition. Injunctions against women’s

immoderate reading were reproduced in law as well as conduct texts. When a number of Catholic books were seized in December 1641, for example, some were deemed ‘good and vendible’, some so ‘superstitious’ they were condemned to be burnt, while the middle sort—neither good nor wholly bad—were ‘to be sold to Noblemen, Gentlemen, and Scholars, but not to Women’.’ At the same time, however, Vives suggests women's susceptibility to the written word could kindle a desire for a virtuous life, meaning that not all texts need be forbidden.

' Juan Luis Vives, Zhe Office and Duetie of a Husband, tr. Thomas Paynell (London: John Cawood, 15552), P8v—QIr. * Journal of the House of Lords, IV, 457.

Imagining Early Modern Women’ Reading 175 The writings of Vives and other conduct-book authors have proved fertile ground for students of early modern women, who have discovered in them evidence that mechanisms of repression and a quasi-panoptical cultural scrutiny operated even within what we anachronistically tend to see as the private and individuated space of reading. Mary Ellen Lamb argues that instructions to women readers engaged in ‘ideological work’ which limited a woman's reading and ensured her conformity to patriarchal culture.’ In sources such as the diary of Lady Margaret Hoby we find evidence that women both internalized and enacted such injunctions and prohibitions: Hoby’s reading is religious and repetitive, and she is often

read to by men whose presence conflates the text on the page with the expository rhetoric of the authorized male reader. On 1 October 1599 she recorded: ‘After priuat praier | wrought a whill and hard Mr Rhodes read:

then I brake my fast, then I walked: when I Cam in, I took a Lector, praied, and went to diner: after that I walked abroade, then I Cam in and wrought, hard Mr Rhodes read, then I praied with Mr Rhodes.”* I will return later in the chapter to Hoby’s conjunction of reading and needlework, but at this point my interest lies in the presence of Hoby’s chaplain as a mediating figure. In hearing Rhodes read, and in praying with him, Hoby followed, wittingly or not, Vives’s counsel that ‘as touchyng some [books] / wyse and sad men must be asked counsayle of in them. For the woman ought nat to folowe her owne iugement / lest whan she hath but a lyght entryng in lernyng / she shulde take false for true / hurtful in stede of holsome / folishe and peuyshe for sad and wyse.” The importance lent to companionate didactic reading is further suggested by a telling moment in the Diaries of Lady Anne Clifford, who, on 27 March 1617, recorded that “My Lord found me reading with Mr Ran & told me it would hinder his Study, so as I must leave off reading the Old Testament till I can get somebody to read it with me.’ There is clear evidence elsewhere in the Diaries that Clifford was able to read alone, suggesting that her husband’s concern was for proper interpretation rather than for basic reading practice. Two trends in the history of reading come together in investigations of these autobiographical accounts of women’s socially structured engagements > Mary Ellen Lamb, “Constructions of Women Readers’ in Susanne Woods and Margaret P. Hannay (eds.), Teaching Tudor and Stuart Women Writers (NY: Modern Language Association, 2000), 24. * Margaret Hoby, The Private Life of an Elizabethan Lady: The Diary of Lady Margaret Hoby, 1599-1605, ed. Joanna Moody (Thrupp: Sutton Publishing Ltd, 1998), 24. > Juan Luis Vives, A Verie Fruitfull and Pleasant Boke, Called the Instruction of a Christen Woman, tr. Richard Hyrde (London: Thomas Berthelet, 1529), F2r. ° Anne Clifford, The Diaries of Lady Anne Clifford, ed. D.J. H. Clifford (Thrupp: Sutton Publishing, 1990), 52.

176 ‘Grossly Material Things with texts. One is concerned to understand how the text constructs its readers and polices the experiences of those who adventure in its pages. Work in this field by scholars including William Slights, Peter Stallybrass, and Evelyn Tribble asks us to attend to the mise-en-page and to both paratextual and

rhetorical strategies of ordering the text and directing the reader.’ Other scholars turn from this ‘ideal’, ‘imagined’, or ‘encoded’ reader to the reading practices of particular historical subjects, seeking ‘a knowledge of the kinds of people reading those texts, the forms their reading took, and the meanings they ascribed to them’.® This model too divides neatly: on one side, particularly in the work of the Avnales school, we see quantitative studies enumerating the extent of book distribution, categories and genres, and the

people who could read them. On the other lie microhistorical analyses of particular readers in their social and intellectual contexts.” Work on women’s reading in the early modern period participates in each of these traditions. Some critics have identified a corpus of women’s reading: those texts which, according to Suzanne Hull, were ‘specifically directed to women (that is, to women in the abstract or in multiple dedications), had separate sections ‘on women’s duties or roles’, offered histories or biographies of exemplary women, or were on ‘subjects clearly within a woman's province’, a problematic category given the range and complexity of women’s experiences, interests, and work.'® It is partly in contesting such broad-brush categorizations that the histories of identifiable women readers offered by Sasha Roberts and Heidi Brayman Hackel, among others, come into their own."’ ’ William Slights, “Ihe Edifying Margins of Renaissance English Books’, Renaissance Quarterly, 42 (1989), 682—716; Peter Stallybrass, “Books and Scrolls: Navigating the Bible’ in Jennifer Andersen and Elizabeth Sauer (eds.), Books and Readers in Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 42—79; Evelyn Tribble, Margins and Marginality: The Printed Page in Early Modern England (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993). * James Raven et al. (eds.), The Practice and Representation of Reading in England (Cambridge University Press, 1996), 8. > See, for example, Kevin Sharpe, Reading Revolutions: The Politics of Reading in Early Modern England (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000), esp. chs. 2 and 4; William Sherman, John Dee: The Politics of Reading and Writing in the English Renaissance

(Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995); Lisa Jardine and Anthony Grafton, “Studied for Action”: How Gabriel Harvey Read his Livy’, Past and Present, 129 (1990), 30-78; Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980). '© Suzanne Hull, Chaste, Silent, and Obedient: English Books for Women, 1475-1640 (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 1982), ix. '' Heidi Brayman Hackel, Reading Material in Early Modern England: Print, Gender, and Literacy (Cambridge University Press, 2005); Sasha Roberts, Reading Shakespeares Poems in Early Modern England (London and New York: Palgrave, 2003). See also David McKitterick, “Women and their Books in Seventeenth-century England: The Case of Elizabeth Puckering’, Zhe Library, 1 (2000), 359-80.

Imagining Early Modern Women’ Reading 177 These ‘microhistories’ of ‘readers, who have left material traces of both the common and the idiosyncratic practices in which they engaged’

reveal that women were not bound by, or obeyed only partially, the strictures of conduct books; in his Memoirs, Sir Hugh Cholmley proudly recalled that when his wife was ‘first a house keeper she imployed her selfe and mades much with their needles but her chiefe delight was in her booke being addicted to reade and well versed in history’.'* Good housekeeping and voracious reading are here presented as complementary ‘imployments’ for a new wife. Anne Clifford, prevented from read-

ing the Old Testament without appropriate guidance, nonetheless possessed and read books as diverse as The Faerie Queene, the Arcadia,

the Bible, ‘a book of the preparation to the Sacrament’, “The Turkish History and Chaucer’, St Augustine’s Of the City of God, Saragol’s Of the Supplication of the Saints, ‘my Lady’s Book, In Praise of a Solitary Life’, Ovid's Metamorphoses, “The History of the Netherlands’, ‘Montaigne’s Essays, the London Gazette, ‘a Book called Leicesters Common Wealth’, and a text described as ‘Montaigne’s Plays’.'° To assume that Clifford’s example exposes a contrast between ‘those books women were encour-

aged to read and the fiction they actually enjoyed’ would, however, be to impose an anachronistic hierarchy and separation of genres, and situ-

ate women’s reading as explicitly contestatory rather than broadly inclusive. '*

In contrast, the theories of reading elaborated by Michel de Certeau suggest that we do not need to look for evidence of readers consciously flouting social dictates in order to find rules being manipulated, resisted, or ignored. In describing contemporary mass consumption, de Certeau points out: [T]he elite upset about the ‘low level’ of journalism or television always assumes that the public is moulded by the products imposed on it. To assume that is to misunderstand the act of ‘consumption’. This misunderstanding assumes that ‘assimilating’ necessarily means ‘becoming similar to’ what one absorbs, and not ‘making something similar’ to what one is, making it one’s own, appropriating it or reappropriating it.”

' Hackel, Reading Material, 141; Jack Binns (ed.), The Memoirs and Memorials of Sir Hugh Cholmley of Whitby, 1600-1650, The Yorkshire Archaeological Society Record Series, 153 (Boydell Press, 2000), 119.

'° See Clifford, Diaries, 48, 61, 54, 68, 70, 76, 41, 232, 81, 48. ‘4 Jacqueline Pearson, “Women Reading, Reading Women in Helen Wilcox (ed.), Women and Literature in Britain, 1500-1700 (Cambridge University Press, 1996), 83. '° Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, tr. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 166.

178 ‘Grossly Material Things Though it is problematic to align early modern literate Englishwomen with a consuming ‘public’, or early print with modern newspapers or the broadcast media, studies of commonplace books and manuscript transmission suggest that women responded to their reading in a variety of ways, sometimes internalizing its injunctions, sometimes appropriating or altering texts to suit particular contexts or ends. In an analysis of Ann Bowyer’s early seventeenth-century commonplace book (Bodleian Library Ashmole MS 51), Victoria E. Burke traces the ways in which Bowyer extracted particularly pithy moments from the

passages she read, appropriating them further through the alteration of pronouns, gender markers, narrative voice, and rendering particular observations more generally applicable. Bowyer reworked the 1598 text of Chaucer’s The Assemblie of Foules, for example altering the lines ‘And out

of old bookes, in good faieth / Cometh all this newe science, that men lere’ to read ‘out of oulde bookes in goud fay / comes our new learning day by day’.'® The masculine realm and novelty of humanist learning is translated into a daily practice which emphasizes the utility of tradition—

a tradition in which Chaucer is presumably included—and opens the realm of learning to a wide, and not gender-specific, audience."” My approach in this chapter synthesizes the methodologies described

above. Though I draw on the evidence of marginalia, self-writing, and commonplace books, which offer tantalizing evidence of women’s reading and their adaptations of particular texts, I deal primarily with exemplary accounts by male authors, including dedications, conduct books, and ser-

mons as well as lyric verse and prose romance, to explore the ways in which the woman reader is imagined within the space of the text. By attending to representations of women caught in the act of reading, it is possible to probe the physiological and social dynamics of the reading process as described by authors who surrendered their text to the operations of reading even as they set in place textual and material strategies to

direct acts of appropriation. Reading, I argue, was understood to be a '© Victoria E. Burke, ‘Ann Bowyer’s Commonplace Book (Bodleain Library Ashmole MS 51): Reading and Writing Among the “Middling Sort”’, Early Modern Literary Studies, 6 (2001), 1.1-28, , accessed 7 May 2007. ‘7 Por an earlier example of a woman copyist reworking Chaucer, including a change from “The cursydnesse yet and disceyte of women’ to “The faythfulnes yet and prayse of women, in a mode which ‘transcends the largely artifical distinction... between the production of new compositions...and more conscientiously scribal reproduction’, see Paul

G. Remley, ‘Mary Shelton and her Tudor Literary Milieu’ in Peter C. Herman (ed.), Rethinking the Henrician Eva: Essays on Early Tudor Texts and Contexts (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 56—7; on the layered readings of several genera-

tions of women see Alison Wiggins, ‘Frances Wolfreston’s Chaucer’ in Anne Lawrence-Mathers and Phillipa Hardman (eds.), Women and Writing, c.1340-c.1650: The Domestication of Print Culture (York Medieval Press, 2010), 77-89.

Imagining Early Modern Women’ Reading 179 bodily and embodied practice: an act of consumption that was productive and reproductive in physical as well as intellectual terms. As Sasha Roberts complains: ‘even where we know something about the consumption of books—whom they were acquired from, belonged to and were read by—we rarely know /ow they were actually read’.'® One way to attempt Roberts's question is to turn from issues of interpretation to how a reader accessed and understood printed or written material: the act of reading which preceded or accompanied the text's availability for hermeneutic engagement. This approach is informed by de Certeau’s salu-

tary insistence on examining ‘the act itself’, though his emphasis is on walking rather than reading. Like the ‘surveys of routes’ de Certeau describes, even the most precise analyses of marginalia or instructions to the reader ‘miss what was: the act itself... The trace left behind is substituted for the practice’.'’? How was the practice of reading understood in early modern Britain? In the words of Adrian Johns, what was it that the historical subject ‘thought actually occurred at the decisive moment of faceto-face confrontation between reader and read’?’®

I ‘SHE SHALL NOT ONELY READE WOORDES’: TECHNIQUES OF READING One answer is offered in Christopher Goodwin's 1542 The Maydens Dreme. The narrator of Goodwin’s text, the titular maiden, is defined as courteous, attractive, and full of youthful innocence. In a dream, this exemplary maiden is approached by two women, and it is only through a detailed analysis of their clothing—which is literally text, as well as textile—that she is able to identify her interlocutors: Also what were these Ladyes, I toke busy kepe That had with me reasoned, in so straunge wyse Then theyr apparell, I dyd well aduyse Wherein were gret letters, which I dyd rede with ease Alwayes newe thynges, both meruaylously please. These letters forthwith, I began for to spell And set them togyther, with all myne entent As a mayden that coulde not, rede very well Yet at the last, I knewe what they ment.’ 'S Roberts, Reading Shakespeares Poems, 5. 19 de Certeau, Practice, 97. °° Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (University of Chicago Press, 1998), 386.

*! Christopher Goodwin, The Maydens Dreme (London: Robert Wyer for Richard Bankes, 1542), A2v—A3r.

180 ‘Grossly Material Things The letters which Goodwin's maiden uncovers in the fabric prompt us to consider textiles ‘as alternative sites where literacies might originate, be registered, or be contested’.** The names of the two women are ‘Amours’ and ‘Shamfastnes’, and their characters are reflected and expressed in the texts of their garments, with the “Rychely arayed’ Amours standing in stark contrast to the ‘Symple rayment’ of her chaste counterpart. In his

authorial prologue, Goodwin insists that his text should be used as a mirror in which his readers, whom he identifies as ‘yonge virgyns, of eche degre’ should enact, even while they read, the processes of interpretation. His prologue to the text makes its exemplary and didactic status explicit, explaining: ‘Here is a pamphlet, euen mete for your age / Where as in a myrrour, you maye lerne and se.” The process of learning to read had several stages. Margaret Spufford

contests David Cressy’s figures for early modern literacy, which are based on the evidence of marks and signatures, pointing out that reading was a skill taught prior to writing, so that someone unable to sign his or her name might nonetheless be able to read fluently.** This was particularly true for women, who had less access to formal education, and whose training often ended once they had attained a basic proficiency in reading but before they had learnt to write.” Developing this insight, Keith Thomas explores the extent to which even reading literacy had different levels of attainment and exclusion, and concludes that: ‘in the early modern period there was an elaborate hierarchy of literacy skills’.*°

*? Bianca E-C. Calabresi, ““You sow, Ile read”: Letters and Literacies in Early Modern Samplers’ in Heidi Brayman Hackel and Catherine E. Kelly (eds.), Reading Women: Literacy, Authorship, and Culture in the Atlantic World, 1500-1800 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 81. Wendy Wall describes other sites of domestic literacy that ‘signified in their own right as forms of “writing” within a functional theory of making [and] ...enabled women to be socially and creatively expressive’ (“Literacy and the Domestic Arts, HLQ, 73 (2010), 387). *> Goodwin, The Maydens Dreme, Alv. *4 Margaret Spufford, Small Books and Pleasant Histories: Popular Fiction and its Readership in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge University Press, 1981), esp. ch. 2. *> Diane Willen, “Women and Religion in Early Modern England’, in Sherrin Marshall (ed.), Women in Reformation and Counter-Reformation Europe (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1989), 145-6. °° Keith Thomas, “The Meaning of Literacy in Early Modern England’ in Gerd Baumann (ed.), The Written Word: Literacy in Transition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 99-100. For an illuminating reading of the nostalgia inherent in critical accounts of black letter see Zachary Lesser, “[ypographical Nostalgia: Play-Reading, Popularity, and Black Letter’ in Marta Straznicky (ed.), Zhe Book of the Play: Playwrights, Stationers, and Readers

in Early Modern England (University of Massachusetts Press, 2006), 99-126. Francis Dolan explores the implications of women’s literacy in ‘Reading, Writing, and Other Crimes’ in Valerie Traub et al. (eds.), Feminist Readings of Early Modern Culture (Cambridge University Press, 1996), 142-67.

Imagining Early Modern Women’ Reading 181 The gendered nature of that hierarchy is made explicit in the earliest English dictionaries. In his address “To the Reader’, Thomas Blount explained that his Glossographia (1656) was ‘chiefly intended for the more-knowing Women, and less-knowing Men’.’’ The title-page to Henry Cockeram’s English Dictionary explained that it would enable ‘as well Ladies and Gentlewomen, young Schollers, Clarkes, Merchants, as also Strangers of any Nation, to the understanding of the more difficult Authors already printed in our Language, and the more speedy attaining of an elegant perfection of the English tongue’.** The earliest monolingual dictionary was Robert Cawdrey’s Table Alphabeticall of Hard Usual English

Words (1604), which explains on the title-page that the words are ‘gathered for the benefit & helpe of Ladies, Gentlewomen, or any other vnskilful persons. Whereby they may the more easilie and better vnderstand many hard English wordes, which they shall heare or read in Scriptures, Sermons, or elswhere, and also be made able to vse the same aptly themselves.’ The title-page offers the dictionary as an explanatory companion to help women interpret the difficult terms they may find in the course of religious reading and hearing. Cawdrey, however, embraced several readerships. He dedicated the dictionary to five sisters, the Ladies Hastings,

Dudley, Montague, Wingfield, and Leigh, explaining his intention to open the English language to ‘strangers’ (foreigners) and children, who might find it a useful step towards Latin learning. In his address “To the Reader’, Cawdrey suggests a third possibility: the book will be of most use to those who wish to write an English free of inkhorn terms and foreign borrowings. The switch of tone between title-page and dedication—one addressing an undifferentiated mass of ladies and gentlewomen explicitly assumed to require the Zable, the other addressing five specific women, implicity assumed not to—illuminates the extent to which hierarchies of literacy skills overlapped with, and were impacted by, social hierarchy, religious commitments and familial and kinship networks. Even, or perhaps especially, the most basic act of reading, accomplished by Christopher Goodwin's ostensible addressees as well as his subject, is shown to be not one but several. The maiden starts by ‘spelling’ the words in the dresses before her. To ‘spell’ is “To read... letter by letter; to peruse, or make out, slowly or with difficulty’.*? In Faire and Fowle Weather, John Taylor proclaims:

*” ‘Thomas Blount, Glossographia (London: Thomas Newcomb, 1656), AGr.

°° Henry Cockeram, The English Dictionarie (London: Nathaniel Butter, 1623). *? Robert Cawdrey, A Table Alphabeticall of Hard Usual English Words (London: I.R. for Edmund Weaver, 1604). 30 “Spell v’, OED, def. 2 1.a.

182 ‘Grossly Material Things Not unto every one can read, I write; But only unto those that can read right, And therefore if thou canst not read it well, I pray thee lay it down, and learn to spell.*’

The maiden is, in Hackel’s terms, possessed of abecedarian literacy, a model for ‘the most elementary vernacular reader, someone unable to write and able to read only haltingly and aloud’.** The painful process of deciphering letters, then joining them to form words—'‘setting them together’, in the maiden’s terms—undermines her boasting triumph at de-

ciphering ‘with ease’ the ‘gret letters’ of the text, and reminds us that ‘learning to read is not a result of learning to decipher: reading meaning and deciphering letters correspond to two different activities, even if they intersect’.*’ As the title-page of Cawdry's Table Alphabeticall reminds us in

a tag from Cato, which, reproduced in both Latin and English, itself enacts the complexities of reading hierarchies: “Legere, et non intelligere, neglegere est. / As good not read, as not to vnderstand’. The maiden’s struggle to spell out individual letters stands as a compelling reminder of how unintuitive reading could be.

It was not only questions of literacy which made books difficult of access. Other material factors impinged on both women’s and men’s opportunities to decipher particular texts. In a letter to the imprisoned Jesuit Henry Garnet, written after the discovery of the Gunpowder Plot, Anne Vaux not only sought spiritual guidance and reassurance, she thanked Garnet for the spectacles he had sent, which allowed her to continue her Catholic reading.** By the early seventeenth century, reading glasses were relatively commonplace, and manufactured in England as well as overseas.’ Their use, however, reminds us of the variety of technologies which foster or allow for reading, as well as of the complex hierarchies of hermeneutic work, since Vaux and Garnet filled the blank spaces of their appar-

ently mundane letters with secret writings in orange juice. Further evidence of material constraints can be found in an account of Elizabeth, Viscountess Falkland’s, childhood in the 1580s and 1590s. One of Falkland’s daughters, identified by the text’s most recent editor as Lucy Cary, informed the reader: She having nether brother nor sister, nor other companion of her age, spent

her whole time in reading, to which she gave herself so much that she *! John Taylor, Faire and Fowle Vveather (London: R. Blower for W: Butter, 1615), A2v.

** Hackel, Reading Material, 63. °° de Certeau, Practice, 168. * Anne Vaux to Henry Garnet, 3 April 1606, TNA: SP 14/20, Gunpowder Plot Book, 246. °° For the history of eyeglasses, see Vincent Ilardi, Renaissance Vision from Spectacles to Telescopes (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 2007).

Imagining Early Modern Women’ Reading 183 freqvently redd all night; so as her mother / was faine to forbid her servants to lett her haue candles, which command they turnved to their own profitt, and lett themselves be hired by her to lett her haue them, selling them to her

att half a crown a peece...and in this fashion was she indebt a hundred pound afore she was twelfe yeare old.*°

Reading is, as Sharpe and Zwicker remind us, ‘literally physical’, and Falkland’s late-night encounters with her books were only possible thanks to the flickering lights of tallow candles, and the associated technology of wick trimmers and snuffers.°’

Later in life, her daughter records, Falkland went to live with her mother-in-law who ‘vsed her very hardly, so farre, as att last, to confine her to her chamber; which seeing she little cared for, but entertained herself with reading, the mother in law tooke away all her bookes, with command to haue no more brought her’.*® At first reliant on profiteering servants to provide the candles that made reading possible, and afterwards forbidden books, Falkland, despite her advanced literacy, found her access to texts fraught with difficulty. In this instance, reading and writing are explicitly opposed, even as proficiency in the former is recognized as a precondition of the latter. It was only when Falkland was finally deprived of books that she ‘set herself to make verses’, suggesting that the creative impulse was stimulated by the frustration of readerly desire.

The separation between deciphering or spelling letters and reading meaning, made explicit in Zhe Maydens Dreme and reinforced by dictionaries like Cawdrey’s, is also reflected in Thomas Salter’s A Mirrhor Mete for

all Mothers, Matrones, and Maidens (1579), a translation of Giovanni Bruto’s anti-courtly La Insitutione di una Fanciulla Nata Nobilmente (1555). At the end of a long list of inadvisable reading matter, including ‘lasciuious Songes, filthie Ballades, and vndecent bookes’, Salter enjoins his sober matrons to make sure that their charges not only spell out the contents of appropriate texts, but take the next step to interpretive practice: “Lette her in readyng, consider what she reade, for in theim she shall not onely reade woordes, which if thei bee not garnished with good exam-

ples, be naught worth. But also godly deedes and holie enterprises of vertuous Uirgines and worthie Women, by which she maie increase and augmente her vertue by immytatyng their liues.”’ Reading is at once °° Elizabeth Cary, Elizabeth Cary, Lady Falkland: Life and Letters, ed. Heather Wolfe (Cambridge: Renaissance Texts from Manuscript no. 4, 2001), 108. °” ‘Introduction’ to Kevin Sharpe and Stephen Zwicker (eds.), Reading, Society, and Politics in Early Modern England (Cambridge University Press, 2003), 15. 8 Elizabeth Cary, 105. *» ‘Thomas Salter, A Mirrhor Mete for all Mothers, Matrones, and Maidens, Intituled the Mirrhor of Modestie (London: J. Kingston for Edward White, 1579), B3v.

184 ‘Grossly Material Things understood as the ability to decipher individual words and as the meditative capacity to reflect on the sense of the text, descrying the didactic and exemplary patterns of the narrative line. This meditative capacity could still, of course, be structured by encounters with others. In A Profitable Memoriall of the Conuersion, Life, and Death of Mistris Marie Gunter, which was appended to Thomas Taylor’s 1622 funeral sermon, Humphrey Gunter recalled that: ‘She did not read carelesly or negligently, but alwayes kept a note of what places she did not vnderstand, and would still bee inquiring the meaning of them, as shee met either with Ministers, or such as she thought were able to informe her in the same.”° This idealized representation of Gunter’s reading serves a larger purpose. She was a former Catholic, whose conversion was effected

by her guardian, Lettice Dudley, Dowager Countess of Leicester and Essex, who ‘tooke from her all her Popish bookes, Beades and Images, and all such trumpery’.*! Gunter’s Bible reading, undertaken to strengthen her resolve at a time of religious doubt, is shown as being of a different order

than her early indulgence in Catholic texts. As a 1653 commentator acknowledged in a later addition to John Duncon’s 1648 The Vertuous, Holly, Christian Life and Death of the Late Lady Letice, Vi-countess Falkland, such

exemplarity brings the factual nature of the account into question, leading the reader to suspect: “Surely this is but a Romance, or an Idea drawn (Painter-like) better then the life, by a flattering Chaplain.’ Just as we should remember that the Life of Lady Falkland ‘was composed in a place [Cambrai] permeated by the stories of saints, martyrs, and other exemplary men and women’,* we should be cautious of the elegiac model offered by the Memoriall ‘to be looked vpon both by Protestants and Papists’,

and assume that it is at best a partial description of Gunter’s reading practices.*4

© Thomas Taylor, The Pilgrims Profession....To which (by his Consent) also Is Added, A Short Relation of the Life and Death of the Said Gentle-woman (London: I. Dawson for Io: Bartlet, 1622), H4v—H5. ‘l Thid., G5v. © ‘The Holy Life and Death of the Lady Letice, Vi-countess Falkland (London: for Richard Royston, 1653), D4r.

Elizabeth Cary, 48. “ Taylor, Pilgrims Profession, G1r. Heidi Brayman Hackel notes in her study of “The Countess of Bridgewater’s London Library’ that the pious reading described in the Countess’s funeral sermon presents a restricted picture of the texts she owned, which did include the devotional works for which she was praised, but also featured plays, jest books, and coney-catching pamphlets (in Andersen and Sauer (eds.), Books and Readers, 138-59). Mary Ellen Lamb notes ‘the deep irony that pious books advocating an ethic of regulated consumption became even more profitable commodities than prose romances’ (‘Inventing the Early Modern Woman Reader through the World of Goods: Lyly’s Gentlewoman Reader and Katherine Stubbes’ in Hackel and Kelly (eds.), Reading Women, 28).

Imagining Early Modern Women’ Reading 185 What is described, however, is an active reading. Gunter, we are told, ‘kept a note’ of difhcult moments in the text. It is not clear whether she did this by copying out the relevant passage, or by using the array of available marginal tools deployed by early modern readers, including pointing hands, marks made with a fingernail or pin, underlining, and annotations.” In his funeral sermon for Susanna Howard, Edward Rainbowe recalled that: “She had marks of severall kinds, some for difficulties, some for Memorialls of choice places, or pertinent to some peculiar purposes...and besides that she noted such Places as she intended to confer with Divines or others about the

meaning of them.’ Rainbowe further revealed that ‘amongst some Places in her bible, at which she set a Memento, and a Mark to be often

read, there yet sticks a pin which she fastned with her own hands in the Margent against that Place in the third of the first of St. Peter, where the Duty of Christian Wives to their Husbands is prescribed’.*° Howard’s devotional practice of marking exemplary moments gains an added charge in its description, as it directs readers and hearers to follow her practice in contemplating Peter 1:3 and establishes the pin as itself a remarkable and sacred object, operating close to the forbidden culture of the relic.

Further evidence of women’s note-taking practice can be found in Hoby’s diary, where she records herself writing in numerous books, including her Bible, sermon book, table book, testament (a separate volume from her Bible), commonplace book, and household book.” The extent of her note-taking, and the interrelated status of reading and writing, is revealed in her diary entry for 11 October 1599, in which the entire day is structured around repeated writing: After praers I wret awhill some notes in my testemente, then I did eate my breakfast: then I walked tell allmost dinner time, then I wret a whil some notes in my testament, and then dined: after, I walked with Mr Hoby, and then againe wret some notes in my testement: then I went about the house

and talked a whill with Mr Rhodes, and, sonne afte, Came vnto priuat praier and examenation.*®

The repetitiveness of Hoby’s descriptive formula for her writing underlines its importance as a spiritual exercise, as well as its extent. ® See William H. Sherman, Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), esp. 25-52. “6 Edward Rainbowe, A Sermon Preached at Walden in Essex, May 29th (London: W. Wilson for Gabriel Bedell, M. Meighen and T: Collins, 1649), D3v, D2v. “” Hoby, Private Life, 47, 45, 43, 34 31. For the significance of Hoby’s copying practice, see ch. 1 above. ‘8 Tbid., 28.

186 ‘Grossly Material Things None of Hoby’s writing books, tables, or annotated copies are known to have survived, though three printed books once owned by Hoby, and with her signature on the title-page, are now held in the York Minster library. Only one is annotated, though not in the same hand as the diary.” Each of the three books, however, as well as one belonging to Hoby’s

husband, is marked with a series of coloured ink dots and trefoils so minute as to look like accidental blots.’® It is not possible to definitively establish these marks as Hoby’s, although they do distinguish passages Hoby seems likely to have found of particular interest. On page 115 of Philippe de Mornay’s Treatise of the Church, a pale green dot marks St Jerome's instructions to a woman reader, of potential interest to Hoby both as a literate woman and as an instructor to others. Let her first of all learne the Psalter, and hauing diuerted her selfe from vanitie by those songs, let her frame her life by the Prouerbes. In Ecclesiastes, let her accustome her selfe to despise the world. In \ob, let her learne by hart, the Prophets, the fiue bookes of Moses, the Kinges, the Chronicles : But let her take heede of all the Apocriphas. And this lesson he giueth to Leta, for the

institution of her daughter.”!

In Donne’s Pseudo-martyr, a brown dot marks a long passage which draws

on Hippocrates to develop an extended metaphor about the physiology and health of the Church. The dot stands opposite the observation that ‘the rest of the Statutes were onely medicinall and preparatory, to lead them to

Church sometimes, and so to mollifie their obduratenes, by making diuine seruice their physicke, since they would not admit it for their ordinary dyet .” Did Hoby, if indeed it was Hoby, mark this passage for its religious or for

its medical content, or for its neat bringing together of two fields of knowledge—the theological and the physiological—which fascinated her, as her diary frequently attests?

Although it uses the same tools as those employed by the male humanist reader, the technique of marking items that need further explication suggests a divide in the purposes of male and female ‘noting’: ® Both Andrew Cambers and Julie Crawford attribute these marginalia to Hoby in the context of stimulating discussions of her reading practice. However, a comparison of this hand with Hoby’s diary and signature suggests this attribution is not secure, though the marginalia may have contributed to or derived from Hoby’s communal reading practice. See Cambers, “Reader's Marks and Religious Practice: Margaret Hoby’s Marginalia in John N. King (ed.), Tudor Books and Readers: Materiality and the Construction of Meaning (Cambridge

University Press, 2010), 211-31; and Crawford, ‘Reconsidering Early Modern Women's Reading, or, How Margaret Hoby Read Her de Mornay’, HZQ, 73 (2010), 193-223. °° York Minster Library, Hackness, 45, 47, 57, 66. >! Philippe de Mornay, A Treatise of the Church (London: L. S. for George Potter, 1606), P2r. 92 Toh Donne, Pseudo-martyr (London: Walter Stansby for Walter Burre, 1610), C4r.

Imagining Early Modern Women’ Reading 187 humanist men collected topics and sententiae to be deployed at a later date, while godly women marked materials for further, guided, interpretation and meditation. In a brief exemplary biography appended to her funeral sermon, Nicholas Guy reported that Elizabeth Gouge, wife of the minister William Gouge, spent ‘much time in reading English books of diuinity, whereof shee had a pretty Library. She carefully put in practice this precept of the Apostle to wiues, Let them Aske their Husbands at Home.’ Gouge was highly literate, educated by a minister’s wife who ‘had a great name, and that not without just desert, for skill, and faithfull care in training vp yong Gentlewomen’, and herself assuming the role of a domestic instructor, teaching her children ‘so soone as they were capable, the Principles of Religion, wherein some of them so profited, as before they were three yeares old, they were able distinctly to answer all the questions of a Catechisme which her Husband published’.** Guy also notes that ‘with her owne hand shee penned sundry deuout Prayers [and] hath also left written by her selfe many diuine directions for Deuotions’.” Although Gouge consulted with her husband there is no suggestion that she lacked understanding, and her reading is depicted as frequent, outward-looking, and intensive, as well as a stimulus to devotional writing. This is a Protestant model of reading. The last seven articles of advice contained in a Ramist table in editions of the Geneva Bible incite good readers ‘to take opportunity to read interpreters, to talk to those who can open scripture, to hear preaching’.” In contrast, the ‘dubiously Catholic’ Vives, outlining a programme of study for a young girl in a letter which was later appended to Erasmus’s De Ratione Studii, allowed his female pupil to use her commonplace book in an active, rather than a meditative fashion, though one in which exemplarity remains key: She should have a fairly large notebook in which she should note down in her own hand any words occurring in her reading of serious authors which are either useful for everyday purposes or unusual or stylish; also to be noted down are forms of expression which are clever, well worded, smart, or learned; also, pithy remarks which are full of meaning, amusing, sharp, urbane, or witty; also, stories and anecdotes, from which she may draw lessons for her own life.”

°> Nicholas Guy, Pieties Pillar: or, A Sermon Preached at the Funerall of Mistresse Elizabeth Gouge (London: Printed by George Millar, dwelling in Black-Friers, 1626), D5r.

4 Tbid., D1r; DAv. °° Tbhid., D5v.

© Cited in Edith Snook, Women, Reading, and the Cultural Politics of Early Modern England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 72. >” Cited in Ann Moss, Printed Commonplace-books and the Structuring of Renaissance Thought (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 116.

188 ‘Grossly Material Things It is her concentration on the practice of copying which keeps Vives’s female pupil occupied and free from idle or lascivious thoughts, yet the text's gendered specificity is illusory: Vives’s advice is heavily reminiscent

of Erasmus’s guidance for young men in The Education of a Christian Prince.®

The possible intensity of women’s reading practice is exemplified in a short letter from one ‘R. M.’ instructing his wife on how she should use her book. This printed letter is now to be found in the Folger Shakespeare Library, and is believed to have accompanied a copy of John Norden’s A Progresse of Pietie (1596). Drawing his wife’s attention to Norden’s dedication to Elizabeth I, ‘the worthiest of your sexe in this world, and the wisest of all women living under the heavens’, R. M. suggests his wife should “Use

it, turne it, teare it with turning, to God’s glory and your owne comfort.” This intimate yet opaque document is baffling, blurring the boundaries of print and script, public and private, dedicatory epistle and personal letter. It is yet more intriguing, perhaps, in its invocation of destruction, rather than preservation, as a devout reading practice. While Hackel plausibly suggests that it was a lack of formal humanist training in the practices of commonplacing, commentary, and adversaria, alongside ‘limitations on linguistic proficiency’ and injunctions against public speech, that rendered women less likely than men to annotate their books, the cryptic R. M.’s instructions to his wife gesture towards the possibility that the lack of remaining records is a result of the material intensity of women’s reading practice, rather than of their reluctance to sully the text.®

Il ‘TICKLIING] THE EARES’: PHYSIOLOGIES OF READING The repeated handling which Norden’s book is supposed to undergo chimes with de Certeau’s emphasis on the embodiedness of reading practice. According to de Certeau, ‘we should try to rediscover the movements of this reading within the body itself’, both in its physical situation and in its physiological processes, including ‘subconscious gestures, grumblings, tics, stretchings, rustlings, [and] unexpected noises’.°' New work has begun to track the unexpected movements of the reader’s eye and monitor neural

8 Tbid. °° Folger Shakespeare Library, STC 18863, copy 2. °° Heidi Brayman Hackel, “Boasting of Silence”: Women Readers in a Patriarchal State’ in Sharpe and Zwicker (eds.), Reading, Society, and Politics, 101. On the destruction of books as part of reading practice see Adam Smyth, “Rend and teare in peeces”: Textual Fragmentation in Seventeenth-century England’, The Seventeenth Century, 19 (2004), 36-52. °! de Certeau, Practice, 175.

Imagining Early Modern Women’ Reading 189 responses to reading activity, while Paul Saenger draws on modern physiol-

ogy to illuminate the changing graphic conventions that produced both space between words and the practices of silent reading.®? Michael Schoen-

feldt, Adrian Johns, and Katharine Craik each take a different approach, however, asking how early modern, rather than modern-day, physiology understood the bodily processes involved in the act of reading.°’ Both sets of commentators insist on the importance of understanding reading as an embodied practice, but where modern science directs our attention to neurological and synaptic activity, the early modern accounts privileged by Johns, Schoenfeldt, and Craik see reading as a somatic process which engages not only the brain, but the blood, heart, and stomach. Recent work on what Gail Kern Paster terms the ‘ecology of the passions’ emphasizes the permeability of early modern bodies, and their responsiveness to, as well as participation within, the environment.“ An examination of the reading body allows us to recover a historical moment at which the physical situation and physiological operations of reading were central to the processes of cognition and understanding, and in which texts enacted corporeal change. Women’s ‘impressionable’ reading may, therefore, be reconceived as an openness to interaction and exchange involving books, readers,

and the world around them. For many readers, the book was primarily an object of vision. Conceptions of seeing in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries drew on two traditions. One was the Platonic, as refined by Galen, in which the eye projects a ‘visual pneuma or beam of ‘spirit’ into the air, mixing with it, and rendering it capable of perception. The lively qualities of the eye transform the air into an extension of the visual apparatus. As Helkiah

Crooke, who, following Avicenna, retained many features of Galenic anatomy whilst largely rejecting the theory of extramission, describes it: °? See, for example, Andrew Roberts, with Jane Stabler et al., “The Visual Impact of Byron’s Ottava Rima, The Byron Journal, 32.1 (2004), 39-44; Piers L. Cornelissen et al., ‘Activation of the Left Inferior Frontal Gyrus in the First 200 ms of Reading: Evidence

from Magnetoencephalography (MEG)’, PLoS ONE, 4 (2009), doi:10.1371/journal. pone.0005359; Paul Saenger, “Ihe Separation of Words and the Physiology of Reading’ in David R. Olson and Nancy Torrance (eds.), Literacy and Orality (Cambridge University Press, 1991), 198-214. °° Katharine Craik, Reading Sensations in Early Modern England (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); Johns, 7he Nature of the Book, ch. 6; Michael Schoenfeldt, “Reading Bodies’ in Sharpe and Zwicker (eds.), Reading, Society, and Politics, 215-43. Femke Molekamp offers an account of women’s devotional reading as a passionate activity in “Early Modern Women and Affective Devotional Reading’, European Review of History: Revue europeenne d histoire, 17 (2010), 53-74. For medieval women’s reading as ‘a sensorial operation’ see Helen Solterer, ‘Seeing, Hearing, Tasting Woman: Medieval Senses of Reading’, Comparative Literature, 46 (1994), 129-45. Gail Kern Paster, Humoring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage (Chicago and London, 2004), 9.

190 ‘Grossly Material Things ‘The Sight answereth in proportion to the Element of Starres whose obiect

is shining... [The eye] is the couch or bed out of which the Sight shineth.’® For Augustine it was not merely the physical element of fire which

shone out from the eyes but spiritual light, a modification of Plato's scheme which accounts ‘for the survival of the old Platonic theory of extramission long after the victory of the intromission theory had laid the foundations of modern optics’. Dedicating his Aurora (1604) to Agnes Douglas, Countess of Argyll, William Alexander, a poet, dramatist, and politician who was later created first Earl of Stirling, insisted that ‘as no deformitie can abide before the Sunne, so no defect can be found in those papers, over which your eyes have once shined’.®” Extending the active force of the Galenic model of extramission, Alexander assigns the Countess’s eyebeams a transformative power: the ability to shape and improve the text. In similar terms, Samuel Daniel informed Mary (Sidney) Herbert that her ‘sweet fauouring eyes’ would lighten his ‘darke defects’, allowing a puzzled Anthony (a figure for the reader) to recognize Daniel’s Cleopatra.®* Marta Straznicky argues that this is a passive construction, and that ‘if Sidney’s power as a reader nevertheless emerges in the dedication, it does so in spite of Daniel’s conspicuously vague representation’. Yet Daniel describes his play as ‘worke the which she did impose, / Who onely doth predominate my Muse’,”’ and, earlier in the volume, begs Herbert:

y8

O leaue not, still to grace thy worke in mee: Let not the quickning seede be ouer-throwne, Of that which may be borne to honour thee. Whereof, the trauaile I may challenge mine, But yet the glory, (Madam) must be thine.”’ In a striking metaphor, Daniel claims the pains of childbirth for himself, but grants Herbert masculine agency as the source of the ‘quickning seede’ which was ‘begotten by thy hand, and my desire’ .””

°° Helkiah Crooke, Mikrokosmographia (London: William Jaggard, 1615), Zz4r. °° David Summers, The Judgment of Sense: Renaissance Naturalism and the Rise of Aesthetics (Cambridge University Press, 1987), 116. 67 William Alexander, Aurora (London: Richard Field for Edward Blount, 1604), A2v. 8 Samuel Daniel, Delia and Rosamond Augmented Cleopatra (London: [James Roberts and Edward Allde] for Simon Waterson, 1594), H5v.

° Marta Straznicky, ‘Reading Through the Body: Women and Printed Drama’, in Straznicky (ed.), Zhe Book of the Play, 64.

” Daniel, Delia, H5r. ™ Daniel, Delia, A2r.

” On male authors’ negotiation of the class politics of print through the assumption of a feminized subject position see Wendy Wall, The Imprint of Gender: Authorship and Publication in the English Renaissance (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993).

Imagining Early Modern Women’ Reading 191 To the modern reader the idea that Douglas’s or Herbert's reading could physically remake the error-marked page seems an empty compliment,

albeit one that wittily reworks the Petrarchan conceit of the irresistible female gaze which informs both authors’ subsequent sonnets. In the early modern period, however, the evidence of errata lists; prefatory invitations to correct any ‘faults escaped in the printing’ or to inform the writer of errors and emendations; the practice of selling books unbound; and, particularly in the early part of the period, spaces for the manuscript addition of capitals or headings, demonstrate that the book was deemed essentially incomplete as it left the printing press. Sonia Massai argues that ‘even recent scholars who regard the early modern printed text as fluid and unstable normally stop short of grasping the extent to which such instability was due to the fact that its perfection was regarded as an open-ended process’.” In William Alexander's account of an early modern woman’ reading practice, the process of perfectability has a distinct endpoint: the text is both authorized and newly authored by its reader, who does not mark it but makes it. Earlier in the period, Elizabeth Tudor wrote to Katherine Parr, explaining that she had translated A Godly Medytacyon of the Christen Sowle ‘out of French rhyme into English prose, joining the sentences together, as well as the capacity

of my simple wit and small learning could extend themselves’. She did not, however, present her ‘simple wit’ as a product of her gender, arguing that ‘the wit of a man or a woman wax dull and unapt to do anything perfectly unless it be always occupied upon some manner of study’, and complimenting Parr with the hope that ‘the file of your excellent wit and godly learning in the reading of it...shall rub out, polish, and mend (or else cause to mend) the words’. Once again, the force of a woman's reading is understood to remake the text in an elision of reading practice and material correction. The reading body works upon the text in a powerful, outwardly directed process.”

> Sonia Massai, Shakespeare and the Rise of the Editor (Cambridge University Press, 2007), 199. ” “Princess Elizabeth to Queen Katherine, Prefacing her New Year’s Gift of an English Translation of Marguerite of Navarre’s Miroir de lame pécheresse’, 31 December 1544, in Leah S. Marcus et al. (eds.), Elizabeth I: Collected Works (University of Chicago Press, 2000), 7.

After her accession, Elizabeth was the subject of a similar compliment, though one presented in a more playful manner. In an epigram “To hir Maiestie’, Sir John Harington is concerned not with vision but with verbal reproduction: For euer deare for ever dreaded Prince You read some vearse of mine a little since, and so pronounct each word and evry letter, your gratious reading, gract my vearse the better, Since then your highnes doth by guift exceeding make that you reade the better in your reeding Let my poore Muse your paynes thus far importune to leaue to reade my vearse, and reade my fortune.

192 ‘Grossly Material Things The most powerful alternative tradition to the kind of Galenic extramission imagined by Alexander was the Aristotelian model, refined by Islamic scholars including Avicenna and Ibn al-Haitham, and then by early modern anatomists, including Crooke. In this account, rather than being emitted from the eye, light travels into the eye, as in a camera obscura. This is a more passive account of vision, although the air re-

mains active, taking on the colours and shapes of the things observed before penetrating the vision. “Vision therefore or sight’, explains Crooke, ‘is made by the Reception of visible forms, when the light affected with those formes entreth into the eies through their translucid bodies.’”° There is, however, a difference between involuntary vision and

the determination to view an object which we associate with reading. For Crooke, the eyelids are useful because they allow for a greater focus,

which, in the context of deliberate looking, returns us to the more dynamic language of Galenic theories: ‘if they be not quite shut vp they direct our sight, if we desire to take a true ayme at any thing which is somewhat farre off’.’” Some early modern texts suggest that women’s reading was not always a voluntary practice. In Sidney’s Arcadia, Pamela, having discovered a

letter left by the disguised Musidorus, ‘concluded, it were not much amisse to looke it ouer, that she might out of his words pick some further quarrell against him. Then she opened it, and threw it away, and took it vp againe, till (ere she were aware) her eyes would needs read it.’”°

Betrayed by her vision (although Sidney’s tone is ironic, allowing us to register her readerly desire), Pamela reads without intention. Nor is she given the opportunity to make the move from deciphering to interpretation, since ‘before her Reason could moderate the disputation betwene Fauour & Faultines, her sister, and Miso, called her downe to entertaine Zelmane .”

The verse (cited here from Sir John Harington, The Epigrams of Sir John Harington, ed. Gerard Kilroy (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009), IV, 88) appears in Folger MS V.a.249 and British Library Add. MS 12049 but also in Harington’s presentation manuscript for Lucy Russell, Countess of Bedford, dated 19 December 1600, which now survives in a transcript among the collections of William Petyt (Inner Temple, Petyt MS 538, vol. 43, ff. 284-303). In this new incarnation, the epigram is reshaped as a more oblique reminder of the poet’s request for ‘fortune’, as well as his intimacy with the monarch.

The textual history of this poem, and the larger collection, is discussed in Jason Scott-Warren, Sir John Harington and the Book as Gift (Oxford University Press, 2001),

151-3.

’”° Crooke, Mikrokosmographia, Ccc3r. ” Tbid., Aaa4r. ’® Sir Philip Sidney, 7he Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia (London: Iohn Windet for

William Ponsonbie, 1590), IiGr. ” |bid., li8r.

Imagining Early Modern Women’ Reading 193 According to early modern anatomists, Pamela’ vision would have passed first through the optic nerves to the sensus communis, which translated the inputs of the eyes into intelligible representation.* The sensible species, ‘an image impressed on the surrounding medium’, is received by the eye and stamped upon ‘the vaporous spiritus filling the sense organs and the nerves. In this form they can travel throughout the body: to the uterus, for example, where they can stamp themselves on the flesh of a developing foetus; to the heart, where they provoke passional reactions; or to the brain.’*’ For Aristotle, and some of his early modern followers, the sensus communis was located in the heart, though most post-Galenic physiologists followed Plato in locating it in the brain.** As Crooke explains it: ‘The faculty of seeing is in the braine, but the sight is accomplished in the eye. °° Just as in the late seventeenth century ‘seeing an object, imagining one, and reasoning with the resulting ideas and memories could never be

separated from the circulation of the blood and the movements of the body’, in the late sixteenth century seeing and reading could not be separated from the physiologies of humoral medicine.™ The affective power of Galenic eye beams is perhaps most forcefully expressed in accounts of love. Castiglione, or rather Sir Thomas Hoby, translating and elaborating on The Book of the Courtyer, explains it thus: For those liuely spirites that issue out at ye eyes, bicause they are engendred nigh the hart, entring in like case into the eyes that they are leueled at, like a shaft to the pricke, naturallye perce to the hart...and with the moste subtill and fine nature of bloode whyche they carie with them, infect the bloode about the hart, where they are come to, and warme it: & make it like vnto themselues, and apt to receiue the imprintinge of the image which they haue caried away with them.*

This account draws on both Galenic and Aristotelian theories: the loved one sends forth motile eye-beams which strike irresistibly into ®° On vision and reading, see Stuart Clark, Vanities of the Eye: Vision in Early Modern European Culture (Oxford University Press, 2007); Alberto Manguel, A History of Reading (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1996), 27-39; Sergei Lobanov-Rostovsky, “Taming the Basil-

isk: The Eye in the Discourses of Renaissance Anatomy’ in David Hillman and Carla Mazzio (eds.), The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern Europe (New York and London: Routledge, 1997), 195-219; Schoenfeldt, “Reading Bodies’, 222; Bruce Smith, The Key of Green: Passion and Perception in Renaissance Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2009), 68-72. *! Katharine Park, “The Organic Soul’ in Quentin Skinner and Eckhard Kessler (eds.), Zhe Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, 1988), 471-2. ®* See Summers, The Judgment of Sense, esp. ch. 5.

°° Crooke, Mikrokosmographia, Qtr. 8 Johns, The Nature of the Book, 397. ®> Baldassare Castiglione, Zhe Courtyer of Count Baldessar Castilio, tr. Sir Thomas Hoby (London, 1561), Kk4r-v.

194 ‘Grossly Material Things the receptive eyes of the lover. Yet where love is concerned, vision by-

passes the brain and penetrates directly to the heart. There it is ‘imprinted’ and made available for cogitation and imagination, just as, as Aristotle notes, ‘wax receives the imprint of the signet-ring apart from the iron or gold of which it is made’.*° The act of seeing, and hence the act of reading, is revealed to consist of multiple, separable stages: the vision of the eyes, the understanding or sight of the brain, and the possible ‘imprinting’ of the image on the memory or heart. One of Crooke’s

disciples, Alexander Read, who produced a tabulated digest of the Mikrokosmographia in 1616, makes the visual processes of reading explicit in an account of the operations of his own text, which, ‘presenting all the partes of the body of man by continuation to the eie, impresseth the Figures firmely in the mind’.*’ In Goodwin’s The Maydens Dreme, when the maiden wakes, having seen and deciphered the texts laid before her, she makes a deliberate effort to convert her vision to a lasting memory located in the heart, stating: [M]any tymes in my mynde, I dyd it remembre For I would thereof faine, perfyte to haue been Thus at the last I had it so grauen In my harte that I coulde not put it awaye.* The process of imprinting is reminiscent of Aristotelian understandings of conception in which the male form stamped its image on the inert matter

of the mother’s womb (a consequence which Shamfastnes reminds the maiden may befall her if she listens too closely to the seductive advice of Amoutrs).®” The physiology of imprinting elides doctrinal differences over the purposes of devout reading. As Alexandra Walsham points out, Cath-

olic ‘devotional works like A Methode, to Meditate upon the Psalter, or Great Rosarie of our Blessed Ladie (1598) cultivated “habits of visualisation’, modes of mental apprehension involving the ability to “imprint” images of Christ’s passion on one’s consciousness’.”” In this model, the Catholic reader is understood to grant the text iconic significance, creating an image as a mode of meditation and remembering, whereas the Protestant reader imprints the text as a subject for further hermeneutic engagement. 8° Aristotle, De Anima, ed. and tr. R. D. Hicks (New York: Arno, 1976), 424a, 15-20. 8” Alexander Read, Somatographia Anthropine (London: Printed by W. laggard dwelling in Barbican, and are there to be sold, 1616), A3v. 88 Goodwin, The Maydens Dreme, B3v. ®° See Katharine Park, Secrets of Women: Gender, Generation, and the Origins of Human Dissection (New York: Zone Books, 2010), 142. °° Alexandra Walsham, ““Domme Preachers”? Post-Reformation English Catholicism and the Culture of Print’, Past e Present, 168 (2000), 115.

Imagining Early Modern Women’ Reading 195 Descriptions of women’s reading generally privilege the Aristotelian heart over the Galenic mind. In 1565, Katherine Seymour, who had received a book from her husband, thanked him for sending it and told him she had ‘read it with her heart as well as her eyes’.”’ Descriptions of reading processes which to us seem metaphorical were, to borrow Paster’s formulation, a ‘bodily reality for the early moderns’.” In 1646, William Gouge praised his recently deceased parishioner, Margaret Ducke, for a commitment to pious and devotional reading which ‘made her heart Bibliothecam Christi, a library of christ’.”” Gouge cites St Jerome who wrote to Heliodorus that ‘by careful reading and daily meditation his heart should construct a library for Christ’.** In translating the Latin genitive as ‘of’ rather than ‘for’ Gouge suggests that Ducke internalized Christ as a library, assimilating her saviour through devotional reading. The library was itself understood to function according to the processes of memory, establishing Ducke’s heart as the site of imprinted remembering.” The distinction between shaping, masculine form, and receptive female matter suggests one reason for male concerns about women’s unrestrained reading: the impressionable nature of their ‘verie delicate’ minds.”° Thomas

Salter comments that: many vnwise Fathers... beyng more daintye, and effeminate in followyng

their pleaseures, then wise and diligent in seekyng the profite of their Daughters, doe giue them, so sone, as they haue any vnderstandyng in readyng, or spellyng, to cone and learne by hart bookes, ballades, Songes, sonettes, and Ditties of daliance excityng their memories thereby, beyng then most apt to retayne for euer, that which is taught theim.””

Excitement here is a physiological process, drawing on the available etymology ‘to set in motion, to stir up’.”* The more ‘excitying’ the matter, Salter suggests, the more likely the reading material is to pass beyond the sensus communis and be retained ‘for euer’.

The affective power of the text is illustrated in an anecdote told by Sir John Spencer in his Discours of Divers Petitions (1641). Spencer describes himself as repeatedly cajoling and threatening an unfilial young woman who had run away from home and refused to speak to her father: °*' HMC, Bath, Il, 17, cited in James Daybell, Women Letter-Writers in Tudor England (Oxford University Press, 2006), 117. ** Paster, Humoring the Body, 26. °° William Gouge, A Funerall Sermon Preached by Dr Gouge of Black-Friers London (London: A. M. for Joshua Kirton, 1646), E2r.

Cited in Sherman, John Dee, 33. > See Sherman, John Dee, 32-3. °° Salter, Mirrhor, sig. B3r. On the psychophysiologies of early modern women see Paster, Humoring the Body, esp. ch. 2; and The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993).

7 Salter, Mirrhor, B2v—B3r. °8 “Excite, v’, OED, def. 1.

196 ‘Grossly Material Things I used many perswasions to her, but could not prevaile, I sent out her father into another roome, but it would not be: then I called for pinsers and opened her mouth, and dealt very roughly with her, as though I would have plucked out her teeth, but it would not be: then I took a Bible and bad her read the first commandment, and then she fell a reading and into a passion of weeping, and afterward spake to her father.”

Where threats and torture have no effect, Bible reading allows the divine word to work directly on the passions through the medium of the eye, sparking further ocular activity: the tears which are, according to Crooke, ‘the excrements of the Braine’.'" The change described is as much physiological as psychological, as the impeded passions are released through weeping, unblocking the young woman's mouth, and allowing her reentry into the social order. In 1602 William Harrison reported of his exemplary woman reader, Katherine Brettergh, that: Many times also she would reade some godly writer, or expositer of Scripture, or in the booke of Martyrs; and was seene to weepe most bitterly, when either shee had read of that which touched her affections neere, or of the cruell matyrdome, which the deere children of God were put vnto, by the cruell and wicked tyrants of former daies.'°’

Brettergh’s ‘affections are the internal effects of her reading; by prompting tears, they return the physical effects of that reading to the eyes, a key site

for the interaction between the body and its environment. A form of humour, tearful ‘excrements’ could either be drawn out by heat or light, or forced out by external prompts or the internal pressures of the mind. Once the tears held in the eye are exhausted, more follow ‘by consequution, euen as phlegme doeth fall out of the braine’, and are expressed from small holes in the corners of the eye.'** Anatomical study reveals that ‘in the inward and greater angle these holes are larger and easie to be perceiued if we marke them well especially in women’, which may in part explain the greater susceptibility of women to weeping, though Crooke figures this propensity in terms which suggest it is in part duplicitous, explaining ‘whence haply it is that they haue teares at command’.'” When Thomas Lodge instructed his verse collection Phillis to seek out the woman who was its subject and inspiration, he suggested both that it ” John Spencer, A Discours of Divers Petitions (London: H. Dudley, 1641), Llv. '°° Crooke, Mikrokosmographica, Z25v.

'! William Harrison, Deaths Aduantage Little Regarded (London: Felix Kingston, 1602), N8v—Ol1r. Molekamp helpfully places Brettergh’s devout tears within a tradition of the ‘literature of tears...as a specifically feminine pattern of pious weeping (‘Early Modern

Women, 64).

'* Crooke, Mikrokosmographia, Z20v. 3 Tbid., Zz5r.

Imagining Early Modern Women’ Reading 197 is a woman's susceptibility to emotional release that leads her to read, and that her reading is liable to trigger further sympathetic tears: “Then lay you downe in Phillis lap and sleepe, / Vntill she weeping read, and reading weepe.’' Lodge’s deployment of the figure of antimetabole (Puttenham’s ‘counterchange’) recreates the mutually constitutive processes of body and book. In Paster’s terms, ‘In the dynamic reciprocities between self and environment imagined by the psychophysiology of bodily fluids,

circumstance engenders humors in the body and humors in the body help to determine circumstance by predisposing the individual subject to a characteristic kind of evaluation and response.’'”’ The book is instructed to find an intimate home in the lap of its eponymous reader, where the

prospect of its comfortable sleep undermines the erotic charge of the physical familiarity enjoyed by books in other accounts of women’s reading.'° Phillis’s unrestrained emotion, for which the book acts as both solace and

cause, stands in marked contrast to Cordelias reading practice in the Quarto edition of King Lear (1608). A messenger informs Kent that Cordelia:

read [Kent's letters] in my presence, And now and then an ample teare trild downe Her delicate cheeke, it seemed she was a queene ouer her passion, Who most rebell-like, sought to be King ore her.'"” Cordelia’s emotional response to her reading is both controlled and abundant (‘ample’), staging the contest between passion and restraint in the very nature of her few but copious tears. The gentleman’s account moves into two extended descriptions of the expressive beauty of the weeping Cordelia, reminding us of the extent to which descriptions of women’s reading could operate as voyeuristic fantasies for the male reader.'°* At the same time, the image of women’s emotional reading could act as a potent

'4 "Thomas Lodge, Phillis (London: James Roberts for John Busbie, 1593), A4v. '® Paster, Humoring the Body, 14. '°6 In The English Gentlewoman, for example, Richard Brathwaite famously described ‘light’ books as “Nurseries of wantonnesse’, concluding “Venus and Adonis are vnfitting Consorts for a Ladies bosome’ (The English Gentlewoman (London: B. Alsop and T. Favvcet, for Michaell Sparke, 1631), T2v). Fora full discussion of the perceived eroticism of women’s reading, especially during the 1630s, see Roberts, Reading Shakespeares Poems, esp. 42. '°7 William Shakespeare, M. William Shak-speare: His True Chronicle Historie of the Life and Death of King Lear and his Three Daughters (London: Printed [by Nicholas Okes] for Nathaniel Butter, and are to be sold at his shop in Pauls Church-yard at the signe of the Pide Bull neere St Austins Gate, 1608), H4v.

'° Helen Hackett reminds us to ‘look at women in Renaissance texts less as mirrorimages of women in real life than as figures who stand for something metaphorically, and are being used for some rhetorical and ideological purpose’ (Women and Romance Fiction in the English Renaissance (Cambridge University Press, 2000), 18).

198 ‘Grossly Material Things demonstration of the affective power of the text, licensing a physical and emotional response in other readers. In an elegiac account of a different queen's reading practice, Richard Mulcaster rendered his royal subject, Elizabeth I, doubly vulnerable to the written word, reminding us that women’s reading was as much the province of the ear as of the eye: ‘[S]he was addicted still to heare / Or priuatly to read some learned booke.’'®’ Though men as well as women were read to (and social class was a significant factor in the attainment of aural or visual literacy), Hackel argues that, in contrast to men’s ‘active’ notetaking which required both visual and bodily contact with the materials of reading, women were likely to be ‘passive’ hearers of texts.'!? Where Bruce Smith notes that a book is ‘prominent among the things that you can see, but not hear’, a letter from Anne Southwell to her friend Lady Ridgway complicates our expectation that reading establishes a distinction between sight and sound.''' Addressing Ridgway’s distaste for poetry, Southwell speculates: “Some wanton Venus or Adonis hath bene cast before your chast eares.’'!* Southwell’s language implies that the text is a material object, which can be ‘cast’ in front of a reader, but the reader’s response is an aural one, involving ‘chast eares’ rather than eyes. For Helkiah Crooke, hearing and seeing a book cannot be separated. Complaining about the seductive nature of Julius Casserius’s 1609 anatomy of the five senses, he conflates reading and hearing, suggesting that ‘many of these nice and fine points... tickle the eares of a man when he reades them, and delight his eye when hee sees the resemblances of them printed before him’.'’’ At this point Crooke seems to suggest that the act of reading engages the ears as much as, if not more than, the eyes.''* The senses are not divided but work together, immersing the reader in a sensory world that engages ears, eyes, and mouth. George Puttenham too

' Richard Mulcaster, In Mortem Serenissimae Reginae Elizabethae (London: Edward Aggas, 1603), A4v. "° Hackel, “Boasting of Silence’, passim. "! Bruce Smith, 7he Acoustic World of Early Modern England: Attending to the O-Factor (Chicago University Press, 1999), 10.

"2 Anne Southwell’s Commonplace Book, Folger MS V.b.198, f. £3v, reproduced in Jean Klene, C.S.C. (ed.), The Southwell-Sibthorpe Commonplace Book: Folger MS. V.b.198

(Tempe, AZ: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1997), 4-5. The book is discussed in Victoria E. Burke, “Medium and Meaning in the Manuscripts of Anne, Lady Southwell’ in George L. Justice and Nathan Tinker (eds.), Women’s Writing and the Circulation of Ideas: Manuscript Publication in England, 1550-1800 (Cambridge University Press,

2002), 94-120. '® Crooke, Mikrokosmographia, D1v. '4 For the history of silent reading see Guglielmo Cavallo and Roger Chartier (eds.), A History of Reading in the West (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999); Manguel, A History of Reading, ch. 2.

Imagining Early Modern Women’ Reading 199 links reading and hearing, explaining: “Likewise it so falleth out most times your ocular proportion doeth declare the nature of the audible: for if it please the eare well, the same represented by delineation to the view pleaseth the eye well and é converso: and this is by a naturall simpathie, betweene the eare and the eye, and betweene tunes & colours.’'””

Elsewhere, however, Crooke displaces the process of reading aloud onto another, explaining that hearing a book is always superior to reading since ‘wee haue opportunity to demaund a reason of some doubts from him which speaketh to vs; and thence we receiue more profit then by bare reading, from which profit a certaine delight doth arise... Bookes cannot digresse from their discourse for the better explication of a thing, as those may which teach by their voyce’.'!® Such an argument returns

us to the exemplary reading practice of Marie Gunter who supplemented her ‘bare reading’ with the ‘better explication’ of ministers and learned men. Crooke’s privileging of the aural undermines the distinction Hackel makes between active male reading, and passive female

hearing. Men as well as women, according to Crooke, prefer to hear books than to read them, and hearing allows for a more direct and immediate engagement with the demands of interpretation than does an equally receptive visual reading which delays the possibility of consultation and clarification. Rather than being a mode of passive consumption opposed to creative or productive work, as in the Life of Lady Falkland, oral transmission, in numerous accounts, stimulates women’s productivity. Margaret Hoby, for example, mentions reading and needlework as complementary activities. On 12 August 1599, she recorded that ‘after priuat praier I reed of the bible and wrought tell dinner time’, while on 21 November, she noted that ‘after dinner I wrought and hard Mr Rhodes read tell all most supper time’. On 26 March the following year she described having ‘wrought, reed, and wrett tell diner tim’, in a seamless elision of all three activities.''”

In her Urania, Lady Mary Wroth offers a scene of collective women’s reading in which text consumption and textile production are explicitly aligned: Here was Dalinea sitting vnder a Cloth of Estate, of Carnation Veluet, Gold made in Sunnes, the Siluer in Starres, Diamonds, Rubies, and other Stones plentifully and cunningly compassing them about, and placd as if for the Skye where they shind... Her Ladies who attended her, were a little distant from her in a faire compasse Window, where also stood a Chaire, wherein it

'19 ‘The Arte of English Poesie (London: Richard Field, 1589), M1v. On ‘hearing green’ in the early modern period see Smith, Zhe Key of Green, ch. 5.

"© Crooke, Mikrokosmographia, Ooo1v. "7 Hoby, Private Life, 12, 39, 69.

200 ‘Grossly Material Things seemed she had been sitting, till the newes came of his arriuall. In that Chaire lay a Booke, the Ladies were all at worke; so as it shewed, she read while they wrought.''®

In Mary Wroth’s description any easy dichotomy between consumption and production is undermined: the women consume a text read by one of their members as they work to produce tapestries and feats of luxurious needlework.

Helen Hackett’s analysis of popular English translations of Iberian romances suggests that women’s private rooms are frequently figured as productive spaces, since ‘women’s chambers or private gardens are the locations where future heroes are conceived’.'” Parselius’s penetration of the labyrinthine corridors that lead to Dalinea’s room situates the text

within a tradition of masculine sexual production, but the labour that takes place is the work of a homo-social female sewing group. Wroth’s needleworkers absorb the text as part of the process of cultural work, and the lush descriptions of the tapestries which decorate Dalinea’s castle reveal the extent to which the needleworkers appropriate the literary text and rework it in a series of dazzling ‘hangings of Needle-worke,

all in Silke and Gold, the Story being of Paris his Loue, and rape of Helen .'*° Within Wroth’s text, the Ovidian narrative is recreated in visual form. As Bianca Calabresi reminds us, ‘we need to begin to consider needlework as the site of potential intersection of visual and what have been thought of as more traditionally verbal literacies’. Not only the ‘sewn letters’ of samplers, but the narratives reproduced pictorially in tapes-

tries and needlework, should persuade us of the need to ‘read sewn pieces, asking what would be legible and to whom in these sites’.'”! While John Taylor engaged in typically misogynist banter to suggest ‘It will increase [women’s] peace, enlarge their store, / To vse their tongues lesse, and their Needles more’, he also suggested that needlework par-

ticipated in a narrative economy, noting that women’s embroidery contained:

"8 Mary Wroth, The Countess of Montgomeries Urania, (London: Augustine Mathewes? for Iohn Marriott and Iohn Grismand, 1621), O3v. "Hackett, Women and Romance Fiction, 71. 0 Wroth, The Countess of Montgomeries Urania, O3v. Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass offer a helpful reading of this passage in the light of women’s needlework practice in Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory (Cambridge University Press, 2000), 145-8. For an account of the textile contexts of Wroth’s romance see Susan Frye, Pens and Needles: Womens Textualities in Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), ch. 4. '21 Calabresi, “You sow, Ile read’, 99.

Imagining Early Modern Women’ Reading 201 Poesies rare, and Annagrams, Signifique searching sentences from Names, True Historie, or various pleasant fiction

In sundry colours mixt, with Arts comixion.'”

The fabrics he describes have an explicitly narrative effect, while also operating at the level of the rebus and demanding a careful search for meaning. Furthermore, Taylor aligns different levels of needlework skill with different levels of writing and reading ability, insisting that his book will be of use to ‘“Gentlewomen, skil’d / In this rare Art’? who wish to produce ‘cunning workes...(Too hard for meane capacities to reach)’, but noting that for ‘weake learners, other workes here be, / As plaine and easie as are A B C’.'”° John Lyly too stressed the narrative aspect of needlework. In Endymion, the misguided Tellus is banished ‘to the castle in

the desert, there to remain and weave’. Corsites’s question is telling: ‘Shall she work stories or poetries?’, suggesting the possibility of histori-

cal or fictional narratives created by the needle rather than the pen.'” Elsewhere, women reproduced, in tapestries, cushion covers, and other textile forms, the moral and didactic sentiments of the texts they read aurally while working; Anne Clifford, for example, recorded in her Diaries that she had both Montaigne and Ovid read aloud by her ladies as she sewed.'”

Elizabeth I, at least according to Mulcaster, had a more squeamish motive in turning to the voice of a companion to mediate the messages transmitted through her eyes and ears: If ought came by the way while she did read, Which smelt of blood or cruell tyrants hand, Her selfe rejected straight, and willed him That red with her, to read the same alone, And after tell it her in milder phrase.'°

Gory moments in the text return us to a mode of reading, or rather the refusal to read, that requires an interpretative male intermediary, albeit one who is subject to the commands of his royal mistress. Despite her

' John Taylor, Zhe Needles Excellency (London: for lames Boler, 1631), Alv, A3r-—v. "9 ‘Taylor, The Needles Excellency, A3v.

ae Lyly, Endymion, ed. David Bevington (Manchester University Press, 1996), * 12 Clifford, Diaries, 41, 67. For an example of the textile production of ‘certain Emblems’, see Jennifer Summit's account of Mary, Queen of Scots’ needlework response to her cousin Elizabeth’s “The Doubt of Future Foes’ (Lost Property: the Woman Writer and English Literary History, 1380-1589 (University of Chicago Press, 2000), 198-9). 6 Mulcaster, In Endymion Reginae Elizabethae, A4v.

202 ‘Grossly Material Things susceptibility, Elizabeth, like Cordelia, is shown to be able to control the physiological processes of her reading. What remains in her memory is the Queen's choice, as she decides whether to enter into the commonplacing tradition, noting materials for future use, or reject her reading matter, not only erasing it from her mind, but dismissing it from her organs of reception: So what she found to be sincere and pure, That did she note and laid it vp in store, What was not such, as sorie she had red That she exil’d both from her eie and eare. In a rare account of her own reading practice, however, Elizabeth described a mode of textual engagement which bypassed the treacherous agency of the eye or ear, offering an alternative physiology of reading. Inside a 4%

by 3% inch copy of the Epistles of St Paul with an embroidered cover probably worked by the Queen herself, Elizabeth wrote: I walke manie times into the pleasant fieldes of the Holy Scriptures, where I plucke up the goodlie greene herbes of sentences by pruning, eate them by reading, chawe them by musing, and laie them up at length in the hie seate of memorie by gathering them together, so that having tasted thy swetenes I may the less perceive the bitterness of this miserable life.!?7

Elizabeth describes a series of separable processes: finding the sentences, reading for meaning, musing to extract a larger significance, and inscribing the text in the book of her memory, preserved against future occasion. This appears to be a humanist ‘reading for use’ rather than a devout reading for further explication. The full extent of the Queen’s participation in the practice of commonplacing is revealed if we turn to chapter 21 of A Right Christian Treatise, Entituled S. Augustines Praiers (1581). Translating Augustine (the attribution is not generally accepted), Thomas Rogers reveals, in familiar terms, that his author too was a gustatory reader: I walke manie times into the pleasant fields of the holie Scriptures, where I plucke vp the goodlie greene herbes of sentences by pruning; eate them by reading; chawe them by vsing; and laie them vp at the length in the hie seate of memorie by gathering them together; that so hauing tasted thy sweetenes, I may the lesse perceaue the bitternes of this miserable life.'”° 7 See Cyril James Humphries Davenport, English Embroidered Bookbindings (London: Kegan Paul, 1899; rpt. Teddington: The Echo Library, 2007), 55-7. 8A Right Christian Treatise, Entituled S. Augustines Praiers, tt. Thomas Rogers (London: Henry Denham, 1581), Clv.

Imagining Early Modern Women’ Reading 203 Describing the activity of commonplacing by engaging in it, Elizabeth enacts the practice she portrays: plucking and pruning the extract from Augustine, but meditating—musing—upon it, rather than ‘using’ it as Rogers's translation suggests.

The figurative physiology of reading as eating was unique neither to Elizabeth nor to S. Augustines Praiers. As Mary Carruthers notes: ‘Metaphors which use digestive activities are so powerful and tenacious that “digestion” should be considered another basic functional model for the complementary activities of reading and composition, collection and recollection.’'”’ If we recognize the extent to which early modern reading was understood as an embodied practice, we can see the description of gustation as more than metaphorical, rooted in an understanding of the effects

of reading upon the body. Richard Hyrde, dedicating Margaret Roper’s translation of Erasmus’s A Devout Treatise vpon the Pater Noster to Frances

Staverton, explained that those who opposed women’s education feared that if women discovered reading matter that: is happely somtyme more swete vnto the eare / than holsome for y* mynde / it wolde of lykelyhode / bothe enflame their stomakes a great deale the more / to that vice / that men say they be to moche gyuen vnto of their owne nature

alredy / and enstructe them also with more subtilyte and conueyaunce / to sette forwarde and accomplysshe their frowarde entente and purpose.'’°

Hyrde, like other commentators, associates the activity of reading with the world of hearing, but in this instance, rather than affecting the mind, inappropriate material is liable to incite the woman reader to lust. The effect is all-encompassing; as Schoenfeldt notes, ‘the stomach is at the center of an organic system demanding perpetual, anxious osmosis with the outside world’.'?' It is significant that Hyrde’s imagined readers are on the cusp of sexual maturity, a moment which was understood to involve a marked ‘increase of bodily heat and of the aggressive agency such heat

entails’, and which might be triggered or quickened by the physical changes occasioned by exciting reading.’ Male authors who expressed concern about women’s reading of lighter or leisure texts described suspect reading matter in the terms of over-indulgent appetite. In Thomas Middleton’s A Mad World, My Masters (1608), the jealous husband, Harebrain, explains that he has taken away his wife's ‘wanton '9 Mary Carruthers, Zhe Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge University Press, 1990), 165-6. ‘°° Desiderius Erasmus, A Deuoute Treatise vpon the Pater Noster (London: Thomas Berthelet, 1526), A2r.

'! Michael Schoenfeldt, Embodiment and Interiority in Early Modern England (Cambridge University Press, 1999), 13. '? Paster, Humoring the Body, 87.

204 ‘Grossly Material Things pamphlets, as Hero and Leander, Venus and Adonis; oh, two luscious marybone pies for a young married wife’.'’? Marrow-bone was believed to act as an aphrodisiac, so that Mrs Harebrain’s indulgence in appetitive reading is likely to kindle an appetite for other sensual pleasures.'** Consumption was not necessarily a negative act, however, and could be part of a regime that, like the dietetics discussed by Schoenfeldt, helped to regulate and control

the body. Edward Rainbowe described Susanna Howard’s reading of the Bible as ‘the daily bread and food of her soul’, while in his translation of Luis de Granada’ Devotions, Francis Meres reports: ‘this is that Saint Hierome perswadeth vnto a certaine Virgin, saying; Let the fare of a Virgin be a few hearbes, and sometimes a few small fishes. Let her so eate, that she may alwaies be hungry, that foorthwith after meate she may bee able to read, and

pray.’'°? Leaving her stomach barely satisfied allows the virtuous female reader to fully digest the devout text. In this example, consumption is literalized: the appetites for reading and for food become one and the same. This physiology underlies the emphasis laid on reading during Lent in the Cambrai monastery occupied by Lady Falkland’s daughters. Nuns were encouraged to ‘each one take a booke out of the Librarie, reade it all ouer in order; and let these bookes be giuen them in the beginning of Lent’, the period at which their appetite for food was most rigidly controlled, rendering them urgently appetitive readers.'*° This account chimes with early modern medical doctrine, which held that a surfeit of meat altered the balance of bodily humours and created thick vapours which ascended to the brain, leaving it unapt for study. In his 1613 AHygiasticon, an international bestseller first translated into English in 1634, Leonardus Lessius insisted: ‘those vapours and fumes; which cloud and overshadow the clearenesse of the Brain, are chiefly caused by the meat taken down into the stomack’.'’ The over-indulgence of physical appetite renders the subject ‘unfit for the duties and offices belonging to the Minde, such as are Prayer, Meditation, Studies of learning, and the like’.'°* As the epigraph to Lessius’s book, his English printer or translator chose three verses from Ecclesiastes 37:

'3 "Thomas Middleton, A Mad World, My Masters, ed. Michael Taylor (Oxford University

Press, 1995), 1.2.45-6. ' Roberts, Reading Shakespeares Poems, 31. See also Richard Halpern, “‘Pining their Maws”: Female Readers and the Erotic Ontology of the Text in Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis in Philip C. Kolin (ed.), Venus and Adonis: Critical Essays (New York: Garland, 1997), 377-88. 159 Rainbowe, A Sermon, D3r; Luis de Granada, Granados Deuotion, tr. Francis Meres (London: E. Allde for Cuthbert Burby, 1598), M2r. '6 Cited in Wolfe (ed.), Elizabeth Cary, 48. '°” Leonardus Lessius, Hygiasticon (Cambridge: Roger Daniel, 1634), Clr. '°8 [bid., Bl 1v.

Imagining Early Modern Women’ Reading 205 Be not unsatiable in any daintie thing, nor too greedie upon meats. For excesse of meats bringeth sicknisse, and surfeting will turn into choler.

By surfeting have many perished, but he that taketh heed prolongeth his life.!%°

The dictate that readers should eat sparingly thus drew on medical thinking, which was in turn associated with biblical traditions of asceticism. The general acceptance of this doctrine is indicated by Margaret Hoby’s diary entry for 29 October 1599, where she notes: ‘after I had rested a while, I wrett my sermone, and then took a Lector, and, after, I hard praier and a Lector, because, in regard of mens dullnes

after meat and being winter, it was thought more conuenient to be before supper ’.'*°

Each of the often-prescriptive accounts of women’s reading described above depicts textual engagement as a process of bodily assimilation,

whether the reader devours the text or imprints it on her memory. In establishing consumption as the end result of production, we also risk establishing it as its passive opposite, assuming, in de Certeau’s terms that: ‘To write is to produce the text; to read is to receive it from someone else

without putting one’s own mark on it, without remaking it.’'*! Women readers in early modern Britain, despite the evident diversity of their experiences, were understood to assimilate and transform the text as part of their bodily regimen in ways that both responded to and altered their emotional and physical state.

III ‘THE PLEASANT FIELDS OF THE HOLIE SCRIPTURES’: TOPOGRAPHIES OF READING As discussed above, Elizabeth I offered a physiology of reading as a process

of tasting and chewing. The metaphor she extracted from A Right Christian Treatise, is also, however, topographical: Elizabeth depicts the holy scriptures as ‘pleasant fieldes’ in which she can walk. In this instance, geography functions as a metaphor, reminiscent of de Certeau's ‘liberated spaces that can be occupied...a second, poetic geography on top of the geography of the literal, forbidden, or permitted’, one created by repeated encounters and the material interaction between walker and city, or, by analogy, between reader and text.'*” The poetic topography of reading is, for Elizabeth, distinctly open, allowing the Queen imaginative access to a

'39 Thid., TI2v. 4° Hoby, Private Life, 32. 41 de Certeau, Practice, 169. 2 Tbid., 105.

206 ‘Grossly Material Things cultivated rural idyll that stands in marked contrast to the closets and chambers so prominent in some early modern, and modern, accounts of women’s reading.

Around 1611, John Davies of Hereford, commenting on the popularity of Shakespeare’s narrative poem, Venus and Adonis, remarked: ‘the coyest Dames, / In priuate reade it for their Closset games’.'* The erotic

charge of the poem is reinforced by its apparent invocation of Peter Woodhouse’s 1605 ode, ‘Democritus, his Dream’, in which the flea boasts his superiority to the elephant, explaining:

The coyest dames in Citie or in Court Affoord the Flea fre scope him selfe to sport In their soft bosomes: and without denay, At his best pleasure he may lower stray.'“* For Davies, the book, figured as both intimate and explicit, takes the place

of the flea in stimulating erotic desire; its lines, like the tickling of the insect, draw women readers on to ‘venerian speculation’.'” The literary context of the popular early seventeenth-century flea poem also reminds us of the extent to which Davies’s look at women readers, imagined here as a general class, rather than particular individuals, is a voyeuristic fantasy.

This fantasy in part motivates Richard Brathwaite’s complaint in The English Gentleman, that women carry ‘about them (even in their naked Bosomes, where chastest desires should only lodge) the amorous toyes of Venus and Adonis’.'*° Brathwaite also employs the commonplace metaphor of digestion, suggesting that members of ‘that Sex, where Modesty should claime a native prerogative’ are insufficiently developed readers to have dis-

covered a taste for the ‘herbs’ of scripture. He complains of Venus and Adonis: ‘which Poem, with others of like nature, they heare with such atten-

tion, peruse with such devotion, and retaine with such delectation, as no Subject can equally relish their unseasoned palate, like those lighter discourses. “Yea, he goes on, ‘(which hath struck me to more admiration) I have knowne divers, whose unriper yeers halfe assured me, that their greene

Youth had never instructed them in the knowledge, nor brought them to conceit of such vanities, excellently well read in those immodest Measures; yea, and prompt enough to shew proofes of their reading in publike places.’

3 John Davies, A Scourge for Paper-persecutors (London: for H. Holland and G. Gibbs, 1625), A4r. ‘4 Peter Woodhouse, The Flea Sic Parua Componere Magnis (London: Edward Allde for

John Smethwick, 1605), D2r. 5 Davies, A Scourge, A4r. 46 Richard Brathwaite, 7he English Gentleman Containing Sundry Excellent Rules or Exquisite Observations (London: Iohn Haviland, sold by Robert Bostock, 1630), E2v.

Imagining Early Modern Women’ Reading 207 Though hyperbolic, Brathwaite’s lament at the number of women hearing and reading erotic poetry suggests the belated nature of the prohibitions of conduct books like his own, railing against behaviours which are perceived to be already widespread and, to some extent, normative. The last clause of Brathwaite’s complaint, however, remains opaque: are the women simply willing to demonstrate the immorality learnt from ‘light’ texts in public, or is their reading itself an inappropriately public activity? For some commentators, women’s public reading was both exemplary and creative. According to Edward Rainbowe, Susanna Howard ‘took an excessive delight to be conversant in Mr Herberts Temple, in which she

found out such fit and significant elegancies, that when she read or repeated them, it was hard to determine whether the Author or she made the sence, such innumerable descants would she make upon every single expression there’.!*” Familiar enough with Herbert’s poems to be able to

recite them as occasion demanded, Howard both made the poems into music and glossed them as she spoke, creating new beauties, and a new ‘sence’, for her listeners. Rainbowe’s invocation of her practice offers us a mode of intense interpretive reading that would leave no trace upon the material page.

In contrast to those authors who posited women’s public reading as happily influential, Michel de Montaigne, in Florio’s translation, noted that women were content to read his Essays in public, and complained in his chapter “Vpon some verses in Virgill’: ‘It vexeth me, that my Essayes serue Ladies in liew of common ware and stuffe for their hall: this Chapter will preferre me to their cabinet: I love their societie somwhat private; their publike familiaritie wants fauor and sauor.’*® Montaigne aligns his book with domestic, functional goods, which are also objects of display, but suggests that his theme—sexual reproduction—is one that will persuade women to retire to their ‘chambers’ in order to read unobserved. The evidence of the 1594 translation of Juan Huarte’s The Examination of Mens Wits also suggests that it is social observation which legislates what is and is not appropriate reading matter. Seven pages into his chapter explaining ‘In what maner Parents may beget wise children, and of a wit fit

for learning’, the text launches into a discussion of genital anatomy, marked with a printed marginal note: “This is no chapter for maids to read in sight of others.’'#? Such a prohibition suggests that either the translator, '47 Rainbowe, A Sermon, C3r. 48 Michel de Montaigne, The Essayes or Morall, Politike and Militarie Discourses, tr. John Florio (London: V. Sims f. E. Blount, 1603), Vv4v. “9 Juan Huarte, The Examination of Mens VVits... Translated out of the Spanish Tongue by M. Camillo Camili. English out of his Italian, by R. C. Esquire (London: Adam Islip for Richard Watkins, 1594), S17. I thank Jason Scott-Warren for drawing this to my attention.

208 ‘Grossly Material Things Richard Carew, or another of the agents involved in the production of the text, deemed it acceptable reading matter even for unmarried women. To

say that maids should not read the book in sight of others is not to say they should not read it at all, even if the note’s coy invocation of discreet reading may serve to titillate the male reader. Both The Examination’s advice on the visibility of reading and Davies's

and Montaigne’s easy conflation of privacy and the space of the closet may give the modern reader a misleading sense of the spatial and social dynamics of privacy in the early modern period.’ Until the middle of the seventeenth century, ‘private’ held few of the connotations of solitude it possesses today. As Hackel reminds us, ‘In this period of emergent notions of privacy, scenes of “private” reading warrant particular care...as

they may not capture moments familiar or transparent to modern readers. '?' Lady Lettice Falkland, for example, found privacy impossible to attain in her own room. In his account of “The holy life and death of the Lady Falkland’, John Duncon at first establishes Falkland’s closet as the default space of study: she was, he reports, ‘oft-times at a book in her Closet, when she was thought to be in bed’.'"? Nonetheless, during the daytime, he reminds her parents: how constant she was then at her private Praiers, I ghesse, by what I have heard from the keeper of your house; when strangers were in her own room where she ordinarily had her retirements, He was called to give her the key of some other chamber for that purpose, at her howr of Praier; she would procure a new Oratory, rather then omit, or defer that duty.'”

Katherine Brettergh was, according to her popular funeral sermon, similarly devout. Once again, however, her chamber was not a space in which she found solitude: At the exercises of Religion, as prayer and instruction in her family, she would not be wanting: besides priuate prayer, and meditation which she omitted not, but vsed dayly, both in her chamber, as also abroad secretly and solitarily in the Orchard, Garden, or Fields, as Isacks manner was. In reading the Scriptures she vsed euermore to taxe her selfe, eight chapters a day at the least.!*

°° On the closet as a ‘transactive’ space, see Alan Stewart, Close Readers: Humanism and Sodomy in Early Modern England (Princeton University Press, 1997), esp. 161-87. For a sensitive account of the particularly religious content and context of godly women’s closet reading see Andrew Cambers, Godly Reading: Print, Manuscript and Puritanism in England, 1580-1720 (Cambridge University Press, 2011), 45-54. ! Hackel, Reading Material, 35. See also Lena Cowen Orlin, Private Matters and Public Culture in Post-Reformation England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994). '? John Duncon, the Returnes of Spiritual Comfort and Grief in a Devout Soul (London: for Richard Royston, 1648), H1r.

3 Duncon, Returnes, H1v. 4 Harrison, Deaths Aduantage Little Regarded, N8v.

Imagining Early Modern Women’ Reading 209 For Brettergh, meditative space is not available in the domestic privacy of the house but in the more open, though still cultivated, landscape of ‘Orchard, Garden, or Fields’. The practice of outdoor meditation helps to illuminate the frequency with which Margaret Hoby recorded walking as part of her Diary of devotional reading and reflection, as for example on 28 August 1599, when: ‘In the morninge, after priuat praier, I Reed of the bible, and then wrought tell 8: a clock, and then I eate my breakfast: after which done, I walked in to the feeldes tell: 10 a clock, then I praied.’'” Cambers has even discovered women engaging in the more perilous activity of reading whilst walking: Margaret Clifford, for example, read her Bible whilst walking in the woods, and balanced it ‘in some faire tree’ in order to meditate upon her reading, whilst her daughter, Anne, spent a ereat deal of time reading and meditating in her ‘standing’ in the garden.'” For Brettergh and for Hoby, the poetic geography which Elizabeth borrowed from Augustine becomes a real space of meditation as an extension of devout reading, returning us to de Certeau’s conception of reading as an embodied, as well as physiological, process.

Elizabeth too found a limited solitude in outdoor reading, not only in the figurative sense of her scriptural explorations, but in her custom of reading on the royal barge. Evidence for this practice comes from an incident on 15 July 1579, when Thomas Appletree, a servant of privy councillor Henry Carey, began firing a gun ‘at randone very rashly’ from a small boat upon the Thames. A bullet passed within six feet of the Queen,

shooting one of her bargemen ‘cleane throughe bothe hys armes’.'”’ Though condemned to death for his actions, Appletree received a dramatic reprieve upon the scaffold. According to John Stow, Sir Christo-

pher Hatton prefaced his delivery of the pardon with the following account of the crime, which Stow ‘set downe worde for worde so neare as coulde be gathered’: It liked her Highnesse, in respecte of the greate heate, to take the ayre of the water, where in graue and waightie negotiation, she passed the time in discourse with the French Embassador by ye space of an houre or two. In hir returne it pleased hir to take dyuers pauses, and the rather, bicause she earnestly read a Booke, wherein it seemed for recreations sake she tooke some delight. By meanes whereof, (euen as it pleased God wth his holy hande, as it were, to directe hir safetie) she commaunded the Bargemen to slacke their

'9 Hoby, Diary, 11. Cambers and Molekamp both note Mary Rich, Countess of Warwick’s habit of reading and meditating in the ‘wilderness’ (Cambers, Godly Reading, 113; Molekamp, “Early Modern Women’, 55). '© Cambers, Godly Reading, 112-13. "7 John Stow, The Chronicles of England from Brute vnto this Present Yeare of Christ (London: Henry Bynneman for Ralphe Newberie, 1580), FFf2r—v.

210 ‘Grossly Material Things labour, and slowly to passe on, where, if they hadde hasted but two strokes more, they had brought hir Royal person to the shotte it selfe.'®

As Lena Cowen Orlin notes, “because it was usually assumed that household walls had ears, it was also generally accepted that the domestic interior could not be trusted for what was called “private conference”. Seekers

of intimate exchange found the obvious solution: to go outdoors.’ In this socially authored account of Elizabeth's use of the royal barge, two modes of privacy are possible: confidential negotiations with the French ambassador, away from the overlooked spaces of the court, and the solitariness of the Queen’s ‘earnest’ reading. Stow’s text stresses the dilated time of the Queen’s leisure reading: the boat makes “‘dyuers pauses’ as the Queen commands the bargemen to ‘slack their labour’ and travel ‘slowly’. Even Appletree’s bullet appears to travel in slow motion, hanging in the air two unhurried oar strokes from the Queen's vulnerable body. This sense of expanded and flexible time tallies with de Certeau’s sense of reading as a practice of consumption that stands outside the teleological and progressive rhythms of organized production. Reading is the example par excellence of ‘everyday practices that produce without capitalizing, that is, without taking control over time’.'°° Though the work described in this passage is scarcely the temporally regulated mass production invoked by de Certeau, the rhythmic ‘labour’ of the bargemen and the Queen’s ‘graue and waightie negotiation’ with the French ambassador stand in marked contrast to the escape from time and its fatal consequences allowed by recreational reading, here revealed to be part of the operations of divine providence. For the early modern reader,

the concept of recreation was complex, and the term returns us to the Queen’s reading body and its location on the royal barge. Recreation embraced the sense of ‘pastime’, but was also insistently corporeal, conjuring a mode of ‘refreshment by eating; nourishment; a meal’ and ‘physical refreshment or comfort produced by something affecting the senses or body’.'°! The Queen’s ‘delight’ is as much in the restorative—and prophylactic—properties of the text as in its entertaining contents. It is corporeal, regenerating her reading body as much as her reading mind. Descriptions of reading women in the early modern period situate textual engagement within a broader ecology, and establish books as part of the sensible world which acts on the body even as it is acted upon. It is this transformative, psychophysiological impact that renders reading an 8 Tbid., Fff5r. '° Lena Cowen Orlin, Locating Privacy in Tudor London (Oxford University Press, 2007), 231. '©° de Certeau, Practice, xxi. '©l “Recreation, 7. 1’, OED, defs. 1, 2a.

Imagining Early Modern Women’ Reading 211 urgently social concern, and makes it an object of sustained scrutiny. The bodily regimens of reading and its imbrication with other forms of social and spatial practice offer a challenge to contemporary conceptions of consumption as inherently passive. In early modern England, the process of assimilation was physical before it was mental: reading was converted into bodily substance ‘as the bodily organs convert food into blood, and thence into animal tissue’.'©? Readers’ bodies were moulded and altered by the

texts they read, even as corporeal experience affected the individual’s capacity for reception. The act of reading came prior to the act of understanding or interpretation, yet the process of reading engaged the will as well as the senses, and women could choose which parts of what they read should be allowed beyond the sensus communis. Early modern women, as recent studies of commonplace books and manuscript transmission suggest, appropriated and transformed their reading matter in a rich variety of ways. Part of that transformation was physical: even the least contestatory of readings could reform and recreate the woman reader in a process of corporeal assimilation that at once absorbed the book and transformed the body.

162 ‘Assimilate, v, I’, OED, def. 7.a.

Epilogue Books on the Body In A dialogue concerning witches (1593), George Gifford recalled a curious case: A woman had bleare eies that were watery. The knaue lodging there, promised for certainty that hee would heale them: hee did hang a litle writing about her necke, charging strictlie, that it should not be taken from thence nor read, nor opened, for if any of these were done, she could haue no help at all by it. The woman had such a confidence in the thinge, and was so merry and glad, that she left weeping (for her often weeping and teares had spoiled her eies) and so by little and litle, the moysture stayed, and her eies were whole. It fell out that she lost the writing, whereat she was in such griefe and sorrowe, and weeping, that her eies were sore againe. Another founde the writing, opened it, and read it. It was written in the Germane tongue, to this effect translated into English: The deuill pluck out thine eies, and fill their holes with his dung. Was not this, thinke you, a proper salue for to cure her eies?’

Tanya Pollard offers another version of this tale, contained in the physician John Cotta’s 1612 critique of ‘such as cure by spels and words’. In Cotta’s version the particular location of the spell has been erased, and it has gained the status of an entertaining tale or jest: It shall be no error to insert a merrie historie of an approued famous spell for sore eyes. By many honest testimonies, it was a long time worne as a iewell about many necks, written in paper, and inclosed in silk, neuer failing to do soueraigne good when all other helps were helplesse. No sight might dare to

read or open. At length a curious mind while the patient slept, by stealth ripped open the mystical couer, and found the powerful characters Latin, which Englished were these: The diuell digge out thine eyes, and fill vp their holes with his dung.’ ' George Gifford, A Dialogue Concerning Witches and Witchcraft (London: lohn Windet for Tobie Cooke and Mihil Hart, 1593), G4v. * John Cotta, A Short Discouerie of the Vnobserued Dangers of Seuerall Sorts of Ignorant and Vnconsiderate Practisers of Physicke in England (London: [by R. Field] for William Iones, and Richard Boyle, 1612), H1r—v, cited in Tanya Pollard, ‘Spelling the Body’ in Mary Floyd-Wilson and Garrett A. Sullivan (eds.), Environment and Embodiment in Early Modern England (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 175.

Epilogue 213 In a stimulating account of early modern ‘word-medicines’, Pollard argues that the efficacy of spells consumed by or worn on the body stemmed from ‘a belief that language and the imagination have a material force, a force

that translated symbolic meanings into physical consequences’. Yet if things are, in Lorraine Daston’s formulation ‘those nodes at which matter and meaning intersect’, Gifford’s ‘litle writing’ asks us to think twice about where meaning is located.* According to the linguistic codes of the paper (the one element of the story that remains constant in both versions), the meaning of the spell is malefic. Yet its action is prophylactic and curative. As long as it remains unread, the object has an effect which is independent from the intentions inscribed upon it (themselves graphic and material).’ The lively force of the written paper (even if, for Gifford, that force is the product of a misplaced ‘confidence’) calls to mind Bruno Latour’s insistence that things possess agency, an insight designed to prevent us from separating the world into objects and subjects: ‘on the left... knowledge of things; on the right, power and human politics’. In Latour’s formulation, the ‘litle writing’ can be understood as one of the numerous objects which populate, but also construct, the ‘social dimension’: ‘those objects are real but they look so much like social actors that they cannot be reduced to the reality “out there” invented by the philosophers of science’.° By refusing the content of its inscription, the spell reveals its material force, while its different versions, and transformation from cautionary tale to ‘merrie’ fable, remind us of the narrative’s own physical presence and liveliness in a culture in which texts moved within the overlapping spheres of orality, print, and manuscript.’ The spell to cure sore eyes is one of a series of practices which attest that

early modern texts had material effects that could be but were not necessarily, linked to their semantic content. Eamon Duffy notes that by the early sixteenth century, the prayer beginning Deus Propicius esto michi had a variety of possible effects: “recited over water in a storm it will calm the tempest, worn on a paper into battle it would protect the bearer. It would > Pollard, ‘Spelling the Body’, 172. On the materiality of both the spoken and the written word, see also Rayna Kalas, Frame, Glass, Verse: The Technology of Poetic Invention in the English Renaissance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007). * Lorraine Daston, ‘Speechless’ in Daston (ed.), Things That Talk: Object Lessons from Art

and Science (New York: Zone Books, 2004), 9. > As Margaret Aston notes, “We must not forget the ability of letters to be arcane: that is to conceal rather than reveal: to be symbols that enclosed a mystery rather than transmitting a message’ (Lollards and Reformers: Images and Literacy in Late Medieval Religion (London: The Hambledon Press, 1984), 108). ° Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, tr. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 4, 6. ’ D. E McKenzie encourages us to see these spheres intersecting, rather than competing (‘Speech—Manuscript—Print’ in Making Meaning: Printers of the Mind’ and Other Essays, ed. Peter D. McDonald et al. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002), 237-58.

214 ‘Grossly Material Things

guarantee safe delivery in childbirth, dry up a bloody flux, secure safe travel for voyagers, and, not least, at St Peter’s direct request it would bring a year of pardon for every recitation.”* Some element of this magical thinking may linger in the well-attested practice of women wearing books

upon their bodies, sometimes in highly decorated covers designed to be tied to their girdle, like the unknown lady from the court of Edward VI shown in figure 6.1.’ The elaborate decoration of some miniature bindings

|‘ atsi

g. “a Bs ta:

Ps

ie

yey Pa

‘ 5 > “a EE = Mi

; ¥ 2. 7 i} = "Ss

Fig. 6.1. Unknown Lady from the court of King Edward VI (possibly Lady Jane Grey) c.1550—5 (oil on panel) by Eworth or Ewoutsz, Hans.

* Eamon Duffy, Marking the Hours: English People and their Prayers, 1240-1570 (Yale University Press, 2006), 105. ’ For a wide-ranging discussion of images of women readers, see James Conlon, ‘Men Reading Women Reading: Interpreting Images of Women Readers’, Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, 26 (2005), 37-58. On girdle books and other items see Alexandra Walsham, ‘Jewels for Gentlewomen: Religious Books as Artefacts in Late Medieval and Early Modern England’ in R. N. Swanson (ed.), 7he Church and the Book (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2004), 123-42.

Epilogue 215 and girdle covers locate the books in the space between reading text, symbolic object, and site of alternative literacies: like Cotta’s spell they could be ‘worne as a iewell... written in paper, and inclosed in silk’. John Lyly ostensibly commended the practice of his compatriots, when he instructed his fictive Italianate women readers to ‘Imitat the Englysh

Damoselles, who have theyr bookes tyed to theyr gyrdles, not fethers, who are as cunning in ye scriptures, as you are in Ariosto or Petrarck or anye booke that lyketh you best, and becommeth you worst’.'° As Mary Ellen Lamb notes, ‘despite their alleged country of origin, the striking resemblances between these non-English women to the gentlewoman reader of Lyly’s preface reveal Lyly’s own readers as the objects of criticism’, and suggests that the location of the book in the usual place of a purse or jewel, hanging from the girdle, lends it a sexual charge.'' Despite Lyly’s allegations, girdle books were frequently religious in content: when William Heale complained of ‘those too too holy women-gospellers, who weare their testament at their apron-strings’, his words seem to have been more than a figure of speech.'* Such practices reveal the multiplicity of book uses in early modern England, and the overlapping significance of

text, symbol, and object, suggesting a mutuality of social display and godly or medicinal effect as texts and books work upon their wearers.

Women, like men, used books to build or reinforce social relationships, passing them to friends, potential patrons, or dependents, and enclosing them, alongside other gifts, with letters.'? For James Daybell, such transactions are of secondary interest: he celebrates those occasions when ‘women discussed books in a more sustained way than merely as gifts or objects, referring to the actual contents of the books they read’.'* Rather than being ‘merely’ material, however, books as things possessed a significant charge. Worn on the body, texts may be understood not as accessories but as prosthetics, items which, in Will Fisher’s formulation, '° John Lyly, Euphues and his England (London: [T. East] for Gabriell Cawood, 1580), Geg?2r.

'' Mary Ellen Lamb, ‘Inventing the Early Modern Woman Reader’ in Heidi Brayman Hackel and Catherine E. Kelly (eds.), Reading Women: Literacy, Authorship, and Culture in the Atlantic World, 1500-1800 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 24. '* William Heale, An Apologie for VVomen (Oxford: loseph Barnes, 1609), Flr. Dufty notes that the practice of wearing or visibly carrying devotional books has a long history, referring to medieval Books of Hours as ‘this most chic of devotional fashion accessories’ (Marking the Hours, 22). 'S Jane Donawerth, ‘Women’s Poetry and the Tudor-Stuart System of Gift Exchange’ in Mary Elizabeth Burke et al. (eds.), Women, Writing, and the Reproduction of Culture in Tudor and Stuart Britain (Syracuse University Press, 1999), 3-18; Natalie Zemon Davis,

The Gift in Sixteenth Century France (University of Wisconsin Press, 2000); Jason Scott-Warren, Sir John Harington and the Book as Gift (Oxford University Press, 2001). ‘4 James Daybell, Women Letter-writers in Tudor England (Oxford University Press, 2006), 118.

216 ‘Grossly Material Things ‘are both integral to the subject’s sense of identity or self, and at the same time resolutely detachable or “auxiliary”’.'? Queen Elizabeth is reputed to have worn a ring no larger than a silver penny in which ‘Mr Peter Bale a London Writing-Master... [had] Written the Creed, Lords Prayer, Ten Commandments, a Prayer for the Queen, Day of the Month and Date of the Year’.'° As Susan Stewart notes: ‘Minute writing experiments with the limits of bodily skill in writing... Nearly invisible, the mark continues to signify; it is a signification which is increased rather than diminished by its minuteness.’'” At the same time, the miniscule writing creates a fable of interiority, of meaning encapsulated within physical bounds, which is reinforced by the ring’s circularity. Enclosing the finger, Bale’s act of miniature writing reproduces and reinforces the boundedness of the human body. In investigating the ways in which books and bodies—particularly

women's bodies—interact, this book has participated in what Elaine Scarry describes as the ‘collective... labor’ required to ‘arrive at an understanding of making and unmaking’. As Scarry notes, the work of manufacture, which is, in this book, exemplified in the graphic acts of writing and the physical and economic structures of commissioning, editing, and printing, has the effect of altering ‘the felt-experience of sentience rather

than merely... populat[ing] the external world with shapes and mechanisms already dwelling within us’.'* Attempting to trace the totality of books’ voyages around the web that ties together, rags, wainscotting, spectacles, and paper with moments of creative desire and commission, acts of

writing and production, and moments of consumption and use that are themselves productive, this book suggests that the work of production is distributed across networks of human actors, material goods, institutions, and environments in ways which complicate the division between subjects and objects, those who act and that which is acted upon.

9 Will Fisher, Materializing Gender in Early Modern English Literature and Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2006), 26. '© John Ayres, A Tutor to Penmanship (London: sold by ye author, 1698), unpaginated, cited in Jonathan Goldberg, Writing Matter: From the Hands of the English Renaissance (Stanford University Press, 1990), 68. '7 Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984; rpt. Duke University Press, 2003), 38. 'S Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford University Press, 1985), 280, 279, 283. For Scarry, the distribution of ‘the facts and responsibilities of sentience out onto the external world’ is a result of ‘fictional extensions of sentience’, projecting ideas of agency and liveliness into the world in the form of made objects: ‘all the material and verbal artifacts the imagination creates are created on behalf of the small sentient circle of living matter in the thick midst of which it itself resides’ (325).

Epilogue 217 As Jennifer Summit puts it: ‘the layers of textual mediation that intervene between the moment of composition and that of reception... raise important questions in turn about the very processes through which writing comes to be assigned gender at all’.'” The numerous acts and occasions of making in which women participated during this period reinforce Summit's wariness about categories of male or female authorship, however useful the political charge offered by such categories may remain. The gender of the text can only be the result of the numerous sexed encounters and acts which constitute its making and reception, and which make it a peculiarly hybrid form. This recognition, in turn, can stimulate new ways of reading, charting the inter- and extra-textual resonances offered by the presence of women workers or noble patrons; other modes of production, including needlework, pot-washing, and domestic labour; or the elusive sites and lost conversations that structure composition. In A Room of Ones Own, Virginia Woolf speculates not only about the material circumstances which prevent women from writing, but about the possibility that sexed identity is neither fixed nor finite. In a playful meditation on the androgynous brain, she asks ‘whether there are two sexes in the mind corresponding to the two sexes in the body.” Whilst Woolf’s dualism now seems problematic, not only men and women but books may nonetheless be conceived of not as ‘purely masculine’ or ‘purely feminine’ but as the objects and subjects of numerous sexed encounters.*!

Woolf’s conclusion, then, remains pertinent: ‘it would be well to test what one meant by man-womanly, and conversely by woman-manly, by pausing and looking at a book or two’.” The aim of this book has been to look again at the books of the English Renaissance. Women, and the material traces of their social and cultural labour, shaped the pages of numer-

ous books which circulate beneath the name of a male author; our interpretive practice must now begin to take women’s formative presence into account.

Jennifer Summit, Lost Property: The Woman Writer and English Literary History, 13801589 (University of Chicago Press, 2000), 8. *” Virginia Woolf, A Room of Ones Own (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1928, rpt. 1993), 96. *' For insightful commentary on biology and popular psychology and a more flexible understanding of sexed identity, see Anne Fausto-Sterling, Myths of Gender: Biological Theories about Women and Men (New York: BasicBooks, 1992); Cordelia Fine, Delusions of Gender: The Real Science Behind Sex Differences (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 2010).

* Woolf, Room, 97.

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Index Adams, Thomas 146—7 Balbani Niccolo

Adams, Thomas R. and Barker The Italian Convert 150

Nicolas 7, 8 Bale, John 35, 78

Aitcheson, Issobel 155 Bale, Peter 216

Alexander, William, first Earl of Baley, Walter 56-7, 58

Stirling 190-1 ballads 49, 95, 101-2, 107, 119-20, 124

Allde, Edward 73 n. 87, 139 n. 181, 134, 149, 150-3, 183, 195 Allde, Elizabeth 90-1, 99, 106 n. 90 Barker, Christopher 82—3, 140-2

Allen, Hannah 100, 159 Barley, William 80, 83, 110

Allott, Mary 91-2 Barnes, Barbara 154 ambassadors’ houses, sites for Barret, Hannah 115

book-smuggling 170 Barry, Gerat 164

Amsterdam 165 Bastiaenz, widow 166

Anne of Denmark 53, 61-2 Bathoe, Elizabeth 110, 127 Antoine-Velpius, widow 163 Beale, John 81, 117 Appadurai, Arjun 10, 11 n. 39 Becon, Thomas 78 Apprentices 94, 110, 116, 127, 171 the Displaying of the Popish Masse 118 bound to women stationers 95, 102, Bedford, Thomas 103-4, 108-9, 110-11, 122, 127 A True and Certaine Relation of a marriage to stationer’s widow 102, Strange-birth 50—2, 116, 150

107, 123 Bertie, Katherine, duchess of Suffolk 36, archipelagic England 137, 162 78-9 aural reading 175, 198-201 Béze, Theodore 67, 82-3

Auroi, widow 164 Bible reading 26, 169, 171, 177, 184—5, Ascham, Margaret 41-2, 45 187, 196, 199, 202, 204, 206, 208,

Ascham, Roger 41 209, 215

Augustine, St 77, 177, 190, 202-3 Bill, Anna 92-3

Austin, Anne 41—2 Bill, John 92, 114, 146-7

Austin, Margaret 156-7 Bing, Alice 131, see also Coldock, Alice;

Austin, William 41-2 Waterson, Alice

authors, living with printers 124-6, Birckman, Elizabeth 154

146-7 Bishop, George 128, 146-7

authorship 27, 34, 55, 70, 80-1, Bishop, Mary 128, 133

159-61, 166 Blageart, Francoise 163

and posthumous publication 42-3 Blount, Thomas 158, 181

and translation 37-8 Bount, widow 100 n. 56 and sexed identity 9, 19-20, 178, 217 Blower, widow 90

as material practice 12 n. 43 Bocher, Joan 171

collaborative 4—6, 16, 17, 18-19, 21, Bodleian library 154—5

48—9, 52, 100 Bodley, Thomas 155

patronage as 78 Boler, Anne 116, 117, 119, 131-2,

Awdley, Elizabeth 103 150, 154 Boniface, Marie 169 Bachelor, Mary 170-1 books

Bacon, Anne 30, 33-4, 37, 38-9, 83 as material objects 2—4, 8—9, 20, 25,

Bacon House 82 87-8, 124, 129-30, 134, 135, 163, Badger, Mrs 99 172, 173, 177, 182—3, 184—5, 188, Baker, Augustine (Father) 28-9, 191, 198, 210-11, 213-16 Baker, Richard (Sir) 116, 117 sold at playhouses 149-50

248 Index Boscard, Jeanne 106 n. 90, 164 Charlewood, Alice 106—7 Bostock, Robert, and wife 112-13 Charlewood, John 77, 79, 89, 101-2, 140

Bounst, Mrs 105 Chaucer 177, 178

Bourne, Elizabeth 67 Cholmley, Elizabeth 177 Bourne, Joan 108 Cholmley, Sir Hugh, first Baronet 177 Bourne, Nicholas 91, 118, 126, 135 Clarke, Danielle 4, 45 n. 130

Boursette, Madeleine 162 Clifford, Anne 172, 175, 177, 201, 209

Bowyer, Ann 178 Clifford, Margaret see Russell, Margaret

Boyd, Katherine 155 Cloppenburg press 165-6

Boyle, Ellen 91 closets 20, 93, 206, 208

Brandon, Katherine see Bertie, Katherine Coe, Jane 50 Brathwaite, Richard 16-17, 56 n. 16, 68 Coldock, Alice see Bing, Alice n. 63, 151, 153 n. 85, 197 n. 106, collaboration 4—6, 17—21, 32, 34, 37,

206-7 45-9, 52, 166

Bret, widow 162 in the book trade 91, 109-17, 119, 139 Brettergh, Katherine 196, 208-9 commission of texts 61—2, 64—5, 68, 69,

Briere, Annet 162 73,77 Brome, Richard committee for printing, 158-9

The Antipodes 152 commonplace books 5, 19-20, 69, 74, Broome, Joan 88—9, 150 communications circuit 6-7, 60 Browne, Jane, viscountess congers 115 Montague 62-3 consumption, as productive 10, 177, 179, Brooke, Elizabeth 25-6, 27, 28, 31 178, 185, 187-8, 202-3, 211

Brussels 30-1, 163 199-200, 204, 205, 210-11 Bull, John 139-40 Cooke, Anne see Bacon, Anne

Bullock, Mistress 167 Cooke, Joan 114

Burby, Elizabeth 115, 130, 132 copying 17, 21-3, 24, 26, 28-30, 40, 41,

Burton, Mrs 104 108, 178, 185, 187-8, 216 Byrd, William 63, 139-40 coterie verse 17

Cotta, John 212, 215

Caesar, Julius 73-4, 167, 168, 170 Cotton, ‘Mistres’ 127 Callaghan, Dympna 93-4, 130, 134 Courant, Marie 163

Cambridge book trades 154 coverture 112 Campbell, Agnes 155 n. 99 Crane, ‘Mistress’ 85 Campion, Edmund 84 Crooke, Helkiah 22—3, 189-90, 192, Carey, Elizabeth, Lady Hunsdon 75-6 193-4, 196, 198, 199 Carey, George, Lord Hunsdon 75-6 Crosley, Elizabeth 154

Carleton, Hellen 157 Crowe, widow 130 Cary, Elizabeth, Viscountess Falkland 33,

57, 182—3, 184, 204 Daniel Jane 138

Cary, Lettice, Viscountess Falkland Daniel, Samuel 56, 154 n. 91, 190

184, 208 Hymens Triumph 61-2

Castiglione, Baldessar 64—5, 193 Danter, John 74, 125

Catholic printing 77, 83-4, 160 n. 123, Darnton, Robert 6—7, 172-3

163-4, 174 Daubrigscourt, Joan 168-9

Catholicism 63, 67, 140, 147—8, 166-71, Davies, John 151-2, 206

182-7, 194 see also Nuns Davies, John (Sir)

Cavendish, Margaret, duchess of Nosce Teipsum and Hymnes of Astrea 106

Newcastle upon Tyne 19, 50 Dawson, Gertrude 91, 100, 117

Cavey, Jane 154 Dawson, Katharine 132

Cecil, William, first Baron Burghley 41, Dawson, Mary 90-1, 105, 117

53, 63, 142 n. 37, 143, 144-5 Day, Alice 124-5

Certeau, Michel 10, 136, 168-9, 173, Day, John 39, 77, 78, 79, 125, 131,

177, 179, 188, 205, 209, 210 138, 140

chapwomen 156-7 Dekker, ‘Thomas

Charlton, Anne 110, 127 Troia-Noua Triumphans 142

Index 249 and Webster, John Erasmus 35, 66-7, 68, 187-8, 203

Northward Hoe 69-70, 87 Evans, Dorothy 139-40 dedications 36—40, 53-9, 62-5, 67-8,

70-6, 80-3, 176, 181 Fayrbrand, Helen 92

Devereux, Frances see Howard, Frances Fayreberne, ‘Mistress’ 128

Devereux, Robert, Earl of Essex 141-3 Felton, John 92

Dexter, Abigail 113-14 Field, Nathan 74 Dexter, Robert 43, 55 Fisher, Benjamin 115

dictionaries 53, 68, 78, 166, 181 Fitzroy, Mary, duchess of Richmond 77-8

Dietrich, Katharina 165 Fletcher, Catherine 56 n. 16 Digges, Dudley 159 Florio, John 32, 46, 53, 63-4, 85, 207 Dockewray, widow 130 Foucault, Michel 45 n. 128, 160-1, domestic labour 33, 97-8, 124-6, 128, 168-9 134, 151, 180 n. 22 Fowler, Ann 167, 168 Donne, John 18, 24, 54 n. 7 Foxe, John

“The Canonization 18 Book of Martyrs 145 Deaths Duell 82 French book trades 109, 162, 163-4

Pseudo-martyr 186 Fulke, William

‘A Valediction: of the Booke’ 16-18, 21 Confutation of the Rhemish

Douai 84, 164, 169 Testament 146-8

Douce, Anne 167-8, 170

Douglas, Agnes, countess of Argyle Gally, Judith 128

190-1 Garnet, Henry 41, 168, 182

Douglas Margaret, countess of Lennox 71 Gee, John 167, 168

Drayton, Michael 55, 57 gender 4, 9, 17, 32, 36-7, 68, 89, 93, 96,

Ducke, Margaret 195 130, 159 n. 121, 161, 178, 181, 217 Dudley, Anne, countess of Warwick Gibbons, Orlando 139

65-6, 73 Gifford, George 212-13

Dudley, Lettice, countess of Leicester gifts 36, 54, 57, 70, 83, 128-30, 191

and Essex 184 n. 74, 215

Dudley, Theodosia 181 girdle books 214—5 girls East, Lucretia 110-11 as print house workers 96

East, Thomas 82, 110 Glapthorne, Henry

editing 4, 5, 20, 35, 42-9, 88, 99, The Hollander 153

147, 191 Glemham, Anne 80

as grieving 42—3, 45-8 Godfrie, Marie 66 editor functions 45 Goldberg, Jonathan 21-2, 23 n. 33, 30,

Eeles, Robert, and wife 111 216 n. 16

Egerton, Elizabeth Cavendish, countess Goodere, Francis 57

of Bridgewater 184 n. 44 Goodwin, Christopher

Egerton, Sir Thomas 73 The Maydens Dreme 179-80, 181, 194

Eld, Frances 110 Gosson, Alice 106, 127 embodiment 11-12, 15 n. 51, 20, 22-3, Gouge, Elizabeth 187

178-9, 188-9, 203, 209-11 Gouge, William 195

environment 6, 11—12, 15, 20, 22, 189, Granada, Luis 73 n. 87, 106, 204

196, 197, 210-11 Gray, Catherine 170

Eliot’s Court Press 91, 115 Greene, Joan 154

Elizabeth I 41, 46, 70, 73, 141,145, Griffin, Anne 51 n. 150, 90-1, 99, 108,

188, 216 114, 115-21, 134, 150, 153

reading 198, 201-3, 205, 209-10 Griffith, Mabella 170

translations 34-5, 191 Gunter, Marie 184—5, 199 Elizabeth of Bohemia 44, 56, 67, 71-3,

139-40 Hackel, Heidi Brayman 3 n. 7, 176, 177 equivocation 168-9 Hadley, Katherine 171

English Stock 95, 99, 120, 138, 140 n. 12, 182, 184 n. 44, 188, 198-9, 208

250 Index hands 51, 142, 185, 190 Howard, Elizabeth 156

and property 40 Howard, Frances, countess of and writing 21-5, 27, 30-1, 62, Somerset 142 n. 37

126, 187 Howard, Katherine, countess of

Harring, Isobel 155 Nottingham 81

56, 57 26-7, 185, 204, 207

Harington, Anne, baroness Harington Howard, Susanna, countess of Suffolk Harington, John,1* Baron 56, 71, 72, 139 Huarte, Juan 207-8

Harington, John, poet 60-1, 63, 65-6, Huberinus, Caspar 66, 81

69, 70, 76-7, 191 n. 75 Hume, Anna 43

Harrison, ‘Mistress’ 130 Hyrde, Richard 35, 174-5, 203 Harrison, William 196

Harrower, Jeanet 155 Inglis, Esther 24—5

Harrower, Marian 155 Ingold, Tim 9 n. 34, 10 n. 35, 11, 12, 22 Harvey, Gabriel 125-6

Hastings, Katherine, countess of Jaggard, Elizabeth 115

Huntingdon 67 Jaggard, William 106-7 Hatfield, Winifred 131 145-6, 147, 148, 165

Hastings, Susan 181 James I and VI 43, 61, 77, 113-14, 138, Hatton, Christopher 77, 209 James V 155

Hatton, Elizabeth 56 Jerome, St 186, 195, 204

Haviland, John 90-1, 115-16 Jesuits 40, 41, 83-4, 148, 169, 182

Hawes, Elizabeth 108 Johns, Adrian 95, 112 n. 127, 124, 126

hawkers 157-8 n. 188, 148-9, 179, 189, 193

Hawkins, Ursula 127 Jones, widow 100 n. 56 Heigham, John 164, 169 Jones, William 117 Heister, Anne 95 Jonson, Ben 23, 56 n. 16, 88 n. 6, 153

Helme, Anne 115 Josselyn, Elizabeth 92 Herbert, George 40, 207 Judson, ‘Mistress’ 127 Herbert, Mary 32 n. 70, 36, 45-7, 54, Jugge, Joan 108, 135 55, 56 n. 16, 190

Herks, Anne alias Garbrand 154-5 Kellam, Marguerite 163-4

Hieron, Samuel 81, 101 Kene, Jonet 155, 156 Hillebrant, widow and heirs 164—5 Kene, Margaret 155

Hoby, Margaret 24, 26, 175, 185-6, 199, Kentish Petition 158—9

205, 209 Ker, Jean, countess of Roxborough 61-2

Hoby, Thomas Kerver, Yolande 162 The Courtyer of Count Baldessar Kevall, Jane 133

Castilio 64—5, 85, 193-4 Kildare, Elizabeth 60-1, 85

Hodgets, Margaret 104 King, Henry (Bishop) 17, 19-20 Hole, William 139 King James his ludgement of a King and

Holinshed, Raphael 100 of a Tyrant 113-14

Holland, Elizabeth 43 Kingston, Joan see Orwin, Joan

Holland, Henry 43 Knatchbull, Lucy (Elizabeth;

Hollins, Margery 108 Abbess) 29, 40

Hooker, Alice, Cicely, and Margaret Korda, Natasha 9, 19 n. 12, 107, 128, 150 146 n. 53

Hornschuch, Hieronymus 96, 98, 134 Laird, Holly 19, 52

Houghton, Mary 82 Lambe, John, dean of the Arches 83, 108,

household 67, 69, 118, 129, 144, 154, 110, 111, 117—20, 132, 134 n. 243

207, 208, 210 Latin Stock 105

as site of textual production 1, 20, 84, Latour, Bruno 9-11, 213

124—6, 146-7 Laud, William (Archbishop) 118-19, 165

housewifery 42-3, 124 n. 183, 125, 159, Law patent 141-6

172, 177, 185 Leake, Mrs 96

Howard, Anne, countess of Arundel 83-4 — Lefebvre, Henri 137, 138 n. 12

Index 251 Leigh, Frances 181 Middleton, Thomas Lennox, Margaret see Douglas, Margaret A Mad World, My Masters 203-4 Lesse, Nicholas 77—9 midwives

Lesser, Zachary 77, 88, 116-17, as metaphor for publication 27, 49-50

180 n. 26 and monstrous birth pamphlets 50-1

Lessius, Leonardus 204—5 Milbree, Joan 171

letters 17, 18, 23—4, 28, 30, 35, 41, 50, Milton, John 7, 99-100 63, 64, 66, 67, 75—6, 91-2, 100 n. modesty topos 37, 39, 44, 48, 57, 144 57, 117, 122, 123, 125, 141—5, 165, Mommaert, Martine 164 182, 187, 188, 192, 197, 198, 215 monstrous births 49—52, 116

Lewkenor, Lewis 65—6 Montagu, Eleanor (or Elizabeth) 181

Lilburne, John 171 Montague, Jane see Browne, Jane,

Lily, Dorothy 48-9 viscountess Montague Lodge, Thomas Montaigne, Michel 63, 207

Phillis 196-7 Moore, widow 91-2

Locke, Anne (later Prowse) 36-7, 39-40 Morini, Massimiliano 31, 33, 36, 37,

London 23, 83, 84-5, 94-6, 121, 133, 38, 39

135-8, 148-50, 157-62, 167-8, 171 Mornay, Philippe 36, 186 Luther, Martin 78, 122-3, 140, 170 motives for printing/dissemination

Luyken, Jan 96-7 77-80, 91, 116, 119-20, 136, Lyly, John 88-9, 201, 215 169-70, 172 Moulert, widow and heirs 166 M., R. 188 Mowle, Peter 63

Macham, Joyce 101, 104 Moxon, Joseph 96, 123-4

Man, Joan 115 Mulcaster, Richard 198, 201 Manners, Isabel, dowager countess of Munday, Anthony 135 Rutland 80 music 63, 71, 139-40, 153, 207 marginalia 51-2, 71-2, 102 n. 70, 132-3, printing 110, 139-40 179, 185, 186, 207

margins, printed too large 99 Nashe, Thomas 74, 75—6, 125-6 Marotti, Arthur 5, 17, 18, 55, 57 Navarre, Marguerite Marprelate, Margery 165-6 A Godly Medytacyon of the Christen

Marprelate, Martin 77, 85, 165-6 Soule 34-5, 191

Marten, Joan 95 needlework 80, 128-9, 130, 155, 175,

Martin, Dowriche 84-5 177, 180, 199-201 masculinity 4, 161-2, 178, 190, 195, Neville, Elizabeth 63

200, 217 Newbery, Joan 105

Mason, Helen 145-6 Newbery, Ralph 81

Massai, Sonia 45, 88, 89 n. 7, 191 news 49, 149, 153, 158, 160, 167

Masten, Jeffrey 4-5, 19, 21 Norton, Bonham 133, 138, 146-7

masques 61-2 Norton, Jane 96

material culture 8-12, 15, 20, 128-34, Norton, Joyce 96, 114-15, 116, 138 137, 170-2, 182-3, 213-16 see also Norwell, Katherine 155

books, as material objects Nuns 184

Matthew, Tobie 29 as copyists 28-30 Marx, Karl 8-10, 22 as dedicatees 31, 40 Maxwell, James 72 as readers 204 Mayne, Agnes 155 as translators 31

Mayne, Jonet 155 Niirnberg book trades 165 McKenzie, D. EF 2 n. 5, 8 n. 26, 88, 94,

101 n. 63, 213 n. 7 objects, agency 11, 23, 88, 210-11,

memory 26—7, 129-30, 133, 185, 193-5, 213-14

202-5 Ogden, Hester 137, 146-8

Meres, Francis 204 Okes, Mary 119 n. 156

Middelburg 166 Okes, Nicholas 117 Middleton, Jane 121-2 Oliffe, widow 106

252 Index Oliver, Joyce alias Vitar 156 illicit or secret 77, 83-5, 112-13, 126,

Olney, Henry 80-1 158-9, 163, 165-6, 167, 171

orality 23 n. 33, 49-52, 75, 143, 151-2, prisons 75-6, 84, 85, 111, 112, 113-14,

199, 213 see also reading aloud 116, 131, 160-1, 168-9, 171, 182 Orlin, Lena Cowen 126 n. 188, 128, privacy 51 n. 152, 126 n. 188, 175, 188,

132, 210 200, 207-9, 210 Orwin, Joan 91, 102, 108, 109 prodigality 70-1, 74, 76, 80

Orwin, Thomas 102, 121-2 prosthetics 215-16 Overton, Mary 98 provincial book trades 150-1, 153-7 Ovid 119, 177, 200, 201 Prowse, Anne see Locke, Anne Oxford book trades 84, 113, 150, Prynne, William 119

154-5, 159 public reading 62, 206-7

Puckering, John 73, 141-5

Paget, Briget 44—5, 48 Purslowe, Elizabeth 88 n. 6, 90-1, 109,

paratexts 36, 39, 42-3, 45, 48, 51-2, 57, 118, 135-6

63, 76, 80, 81-2, 88, 89, 147, 151, Puttenham, George 69, 197, 198-9 176, 191

Parkhurst, Nathaniel 25-7 quantitative analysis Parr, Elizabeth, marchioness of book trades 100-2

Northampton 64—5 reading 176

Parr, Katherine 35, 79, 80, 82, 191

Parrot, Henry 149 Rainbowe, Edward 26, 185, 204, 207 Passenger, Eleanor 160 Ratcliffe, Elizabeth 158

Parthenia 139-40 Rastell, Elizabeth 90 Paster, Gail Kern 189, 195, 197, 203 Raworth, Ruth 99 patents 77, 106-7, 110, 122, 138-48 Read, Alexander 194

piracy of 140 Readick, Agnes 155

patronage 24, 27, 37, 44, 53-5, 59-60, reading 55, 57-8, 59, 68, 75, 78, 88, 99, 74, 85-6, 117-18, 140, 143-4, 147, 161, 163, 172, 182 see also women,

155, 171-2, 215 as readers

as authorial 78 aloud 128, 158, 198-202, 207 as payment 69-76 as eating 202—5, 206 of printers 77—86 companionate 175, 187

Patterson, Jonet 155 embodied 3, 158, 178-9, 182-3, 188-9, Paul’s churchyard 103, 133, 139, 149, 150 192-3, 195, 196, 203-5, 210-11

Pegrim, Joyce 154 exemplary 31, 62, 82, 180 Persons, Robert 84, 168, 171 history of 7, 175-8 petitionary rhetoric 114, 137, 143-6, 162 outdoors 209

Phillips, Joy 91 spaces of 183, 206-10

Pindley, Ellen 108 n. 99 recreation 23, 171, 209-10

Plantin, Jeanne 166 recusancy 83-4, 140, 167-9, 170 Pole, Margaret (Lady) 66-7, 68 165, 171-2 Pope, Mary 148 religion 12—13, 25-33, 57-9, 83-5, 116,

pleading the belly 161 Reformation 35-7, 67, 79, 140, 162-4, posthumous publication 41—9, 81-2 123 see also Catholicism, prayer 28-9, 36, 40, 79, 106, 116, 120, Reformation 142, 163, 168, 175, 185, 187, 199, and reading 175, 208, 215 202, 204—5, 208-9, 213-14, 216 Reynes, widow 103-4

presentation copies 24, 25, 35, 56-7, 61, Rhodes, John 166-7 62, 63, 72 n. 84, 82, 155, 191 n. 75 Rich, Barnaby 71-2 printing house 8 n. 29, 83, 90, 96, Rich, Mary, countess of Warwick 172,

103-5, 109, 118-19, 123-6, 209 n. 155

as domestic space 124—5, 146 Rider, widow 133 as site of text creation 87—8, 99, 112 Robinson, Joan see Orwin, Joan printing see also printing house, women as __ Robinson, Richard 70-1, 73-4

printers Rockett, Katherine 126—7

Index 253 Rogers, Abigail 161 spiders 10-11

Rogers, Thomas 202-3 Stafford, Dorothy 83

romance 32-3, 45-6, 70, 148, 177, 178, Stafford, Simon 83, 161-2

184, 192, 197 n. 108, 200 Star Chamber Roper, Margaret 35-6, 203 decrees on printing 117, 119, 120,

Ross, Helen 155 121-2, 137, 156

Rotterdam 166 Stationers Company 60 n. 26, 83, 90-6, Rous, Elizabeth 79 106, 111, 114, 118, 121-2, 140 Rowe, Katherine 23, 27, 30 guild identity 126-34 Royston, Richard 161 and poor relief 130, 131-2 Russell, Elizabeth 37-8, 63 Stationers Hall 97, 126-30, 132-3 Russell, Lucy, countess of Bedford 17, 54, as wedding venue 130

56 n. 16, 57, 63, 191 n. 75 Staverton, Frances 203 Russell, Margaret, countess of Stephens, John 74

Cumberland 56, 209 Stonor, Cecily 84, 170 Stow, John 135-6, 209-10 St Omer 106 n. 90, 168, 170 Strowd, John 84 Sales, Francis 82, 119 n. 156, 163 Sturton, Elizabeth 156

Salter, Thomas 183, 195 Sussex serpent 152-3

Scottish book trades 24, 85, 112, 155-6, Sylvester, Joshua 44, 72—3

163, 165 Sylvester, Mary, wife of poet 44

Seres, William 79 Seymour, Anne, duchess of Somerset 80 Tanfield, Elizabeth see Cary, Elizabeth

Seymour, Frances, countess of Taylor, John 181-2

Hertford 81 “The needles excellency’ 200-1 Hertford 195 Throckmorton, Anne 66

Seymour, Katherine, countess of “The praise of hemp-seed’ 129

Shakespeare, Judith 1-2, 15 topography 135-6, 147-9, 157, 160, Shakespeare, William 2, 12 n. 43, 88, 123 161, 165, 171, 173, 205-10

King Lear 197 Tottell, Richard 141

Measure for Measure 143 touch 11, 22-3

Venus and Adonis 198, 204, 206 Toye, Elizabeth 91, 96, 101-2, 104 n. 74,

The Winters Tale 50, 151, 152 107, 115, 127, 129, 130, 133

Shelton, Mary 178 n. 17 Toye, Rose 133

Sherleaker, widow 134 translation 31—40, 44, 45-7, 63-8, 78-9, Sidney, Mary see Herbert, Mary 191, 195, 212-13

Sidney, Philip 47 trenchers 69

The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia 32 Truck, ‘Mother’ 167

n. 70, 45-6, 177, 192 Trundle, John 153

sight see vision Trundle, Margery 101, 134, 150-3 Silvester, Mary, laundry maid 170 Twist, Mistress 138

Simson, Frances 108 Tyler, Margaret 32-3, 38 Smith, widow ‘of the hall’ 132-3 typefounding 96-7, 109 Snodham, Anne 92, 111, 131 n. 223

Sope, Alice alias ‘bookebinder’ 156 Udall, William 85, 168, 169, 170 Southwell, Anne 17, 198

Southwell, Robert 84 vagrancy 157-8

Sowle, Tace 99 Vautrollier, Jacqueline 111-12, 121,

space 20, 87-8, 123-30, 132-8, 144, 169, 122-3, 134 200, 205-10 see also topography Vaux, Anne 41, 182

Sparke, Michael 119, 150 Veseler, widow 165

spectacles 163, 182 Villiers, Barbara 48

Speir, Sara 81-2 Vincent, Katherine 108, 131 n. 226 Spencer, John vision, theories of 189—90,192, 193-4, 212 Discours of divers petitions 195-6 Vives, Juan Luis 174-5, 187-8

Spenser, Edmund 70, 148 Volmar, Anne Marie 163

254 Index Walch, Mrs 156 as bookbinders 97—8, 103, 122, 148,

Waldegrave, Mary 155 154, 155, 156, 167 Waldegrave, Richard 81-2 as editors 42—9, 99

Waldegrave, Robert 85 as hawkers 157-8, 160 Waller, Margaret 21-2 as mercuries 137—8, 157-8, 160-1 Ward, Helen 109, 131 as patrons 37, 53-5, 56, 59-60, 62, Ward, Roger 131, 140 63-4, 68, 77, 79, 82—3, 85-6, 171-2

Warwick, Mrs 156 see also patronage

Waterson, Alice see Coldock, Alice as readers 29, 31, 40, 62-4, 67, 74-5,

Watson, Thomas 67-8 82, 92—3, 156, 170-1, 174-9, 183-8,

Whitaker, Anne 106 197, 206, 211

Whitaker, Richard 106, 114-15, 116 as scribes 20—2, 24—5, 27, 28-9 see also

Whitchurch, Edward 79-80 copying White, ‘Mistress’ 128-9 as sellers of illicit texts 158-60, 166—70 White, Sara 131 see also printing, illicit or secret widowhood 41, 43-4, 142-3, 145 as stationers 50, 89-94, 95, 96-9, 109, and the book trade 90, 95, 99 n. 53, 120, 134, 149 see also Stationers

102—3, 107, 109, 117, 120, 155, Company

162-6 as translators 30—40, 191

Wilcox, Catherine 30-1 selling wax or wafers 157 Williams, John (Bishop) women's literacy 23, 67, 91-3, 113, The Holy Table 118, 126 126, 152, 179-84, 186, 187, 195, Wilson, Thomas 79, 102 200-1, 203 Wingfield, Anne 66 women’s writing 2 n. 4, 4, 19-20, 32, 93,

Wingfield, Mary 181 183, 185, 187, 205 Winnington, Elizabeth 106 Woodhouse, Peter 206

Wolfe, Alice 104 Woolf, Virginia 1-2, 3, 4, 9-10, 15, 217 Wolfe, Joan 100, 103, 133 n. 242 Wright, Abigail 92 Wolfe, John 80-1, 104, 125, 126, Wroth, Mary 23

133, 140 Urania 199-200 women Wiurzburg book trades 163 and estate management 42-3, 48, 103, Wyon, widow 164 104, 114, 143-4, 172

and property 40, 83, 103, 108, 124, Yelverton, Margaret 81

132-3, 134, 146, 155 Yetsweirt, Charles 141

and text transmission 26-7, 40-2, 89, Yetsweirt, Jane 137, 142—5, 146

96, 106 Yetsweirt, Nicausius 141

and vernacular literacy 34, 37, 38, 59, Yonge, Walter 59 67-8, 69, 78-9, 172, 182

as amanuenses 24, 27 Zouche, Richard 72