Women and Writing, c.1340-c.1650: The Domestication of Print Culture (Manuscript Culture in the British Isles, 2) (Volume 2) 1903153328, 9781903153321

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spine 22.5mm A 14 May 10

Lawrence-Mathers, Adam Smyth, Alison Wiggins, Graham Williams.

Front cover: Miniature of St Genevieve with her book and candle, Reading University Library MS 2087, f. 181v (University of Reading Special Collections Services).

Manuscript Culture in the British Isles 2

Women and Writing,

Eardley, C. b. Hardman, Phillipa Hardman, Elizabeth Heale, Anne

The Domestication of Print Culture

YORK MEDIEVAL PRESS BOYDELL & BREWER Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge IP12 3DF (GB) and 668 Mt Hope Ave, Rochester NY 14620-2731 (US) www.boydellandbrewer.com

c.1340 – c.1650

c.1340–c.1650

Dr Anne Lawrence-Mathers is Senior Lecturer in History, University of Reading; Phillipa Hardman is Reader in English, University of Reading. Contributors: Gemma Allen, Anna Bayman, James Daybell, Alice

LAWRENCE-MATHERS AND HARDMAN

The transition from medieval manuscript to early printed book is currently a major topic of academic interest, but has received very little attention in terms of women’s involvement, an issue which the essays in this volume address. They add female names to the list of authors who participated in the creation of English literature, and examine women’s responses to authoritative and traditional texts in revealing detail. Taking its cue from the advances made by recent work on manuscript culture and book history, this volume also includes studies of material evidence, looking at women’s participation in the making of books, and the traces they left when they encountered actual volumes. Finally, studies of women’s roles in relation to apparently ephemeral texts, such as letters, pamphlets and almanacs, challenge traditional divisions between public and private spheres as well as between manuscript and print.

Women and Writing

YORK MEDIEVAL PRESS

Edited by Anne Lawrence-Mathers and Phillipa Hardman

WOMEN AND WRITING, c. 1340–c. 1650 THE DOMESTICATION OF PRINT CULTURE

The transition from medieval manuscript to early printed book is currently a major topic of academic interest, but has received very little attention in terms of women’s involvement, a gap which the essays in this volume address. They add female names to the list of authors who participated in the creation of English literature, and examine women’s responses to authoritative and traditional texts in revealing detail. Taking its cue from the advances made by recent work on manuscript culture and book history, this volume also includes studies of material evidence, looking at women’s participation in the making of books and the traces they left when they encountered actual volumes. Finally, studies of women’s roles in relation to apparently ephemeral texts, such as letters, pamphlets and almanacs, challenge traditional divisions between public and private spheres as well as between manuscript and print.

YORK MEDIEVAL PRESS York Medieval Press is published by the University of York’s Centre for Medieval Studies in association with Boydell & Brewer Limited. Our objective is the promotion of innovative scholarship and fresh criticism on medieval culture. We have a special commitment to interdisciplinary study, in line with the Centre’s belief that the future of Medieval Studies lies in those areas in which its major constituent disciplines at once inform and challenge each other.

Editorial Board (2005–2010): Professor J. G. Wogan-Browne Dr T. Ayers Professor P. P. A. Biller Dr J. W. Binns Dr Gabriella Corona Professor W. M. Ormrod Dr K. F. Giles

(Dept of English and Related Literature) (Dept of History of Art) (Dept of History) (Dept of English and Related Literature) (Dept of English and Related Literature) (Chair, Dept of History) (Dept of Archaeology)

Consultant on Manuscript Publications: Professor Linne Mooney (Department of English and Related Literature)

All enquiries of an editorial kind, including suggestions for monographs and essay collections, should be addressed to: The Academic Editor, York Medieval Press, University of York, Centre for Medieval Studies, The King’s Manor, York, YO1 7EP (E-mail: gmg501@ york.ac.uk). Publications of York Medieval Press are listed at the back of this volume.

Women and Writing, c. 1340–c. 1650 THE DOMESTICATION OF PRINT CULTURE

Edited by

Anne Lawrence-Mathers Phillipa Hardman

YORK MEDIEVAL PRESS

©  Contributors 2010 All rights reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner First published 2010 A York Medieval Press publication in association with The Boydell Press an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9  Woodbridge  Suffolk IP12 3DF  UK and of Boydell & Brewer Inc. 668 Mt Hope Avenue  Rochester  NY 14620  USA website: www.boydellandbrewer.com and with the Centre for Medieval Studies, University of York ISBN  978–1–90315–332–1

Disclaimer: Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. To view these images please refer to the printed version of this book.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library The publisher has no responsibility for the continued existence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Printed in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

Contents

List of Plates List of Contributors Abbreviations

Introduction Anne Lawrence-Mathers

vii viii ix 1

Domestic Learning and Teaching: Investigating Evidence for the Role of ‘Household Miscellanies’ in Late-Medieval England Phillipa Hardman

15

Domesticating the Calendar: The Hours and the Almanac in Tudor England Anne Lawrence-Mathers

34

‘a briefe and plaine declaration’: Lady Anne Bacon’s 1564 Translation of the Apologia Ecclesiae Anglicanae Gemma Allen

62

Frances Wolfreston’s Chaucer Alison Wiggins

77

Commonplace Book Culture: A List of Sixteen Traits Adam Smyth

90

Women, Politics and Domesticity: The Scribal Publication of Lady Rich’s Letter to Elizabeth I James Daybell

111

‘yr scribe can proove no nessecarye consiquence for you’?: The Social and Linguistic Implications of Joan Thynne’s Using a Scribe in Letters to her Son, 1607–11 Graham Williams

131

Fathers and Daughters: Four Women and Their Family Albums of Verse Elizabeth Heale

146

The Book as Domestic Gift: Bodleian MS Don. C. 24 C. B. Hardman

162

‘like hewen stone’: Augustine, Audience and Revision in Elizabeth Isham’s ‘Booke of Rememberance’ (c. 1639) Alice Eardley

177

Female Voices in Early Seventeenth Century Pamphlet Literature Anna Bayman

196

Select bibliography

211

Index

231

List of Plates 1 Reading University Library, MS 2087, fols. 2v and 3r. Reproduced by permission of the University of Reading Special Collections Services.

38

2 Reading University Library copy of Buckminster, Almanac and Prognostication 1590, Sig. C iii. Reproduced by permission of the University of Reading Special Collections Services.

60

3 Washington DC, Folger Shakespeare Library, STC 5074 copy 2, The workes of Geffray Chaucer: newly printed …, fol. cxix verso. Reproduced by permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

80

4 London, British Library, MS Add. 36529, fol. 29r. © British Library Board.

152

5 London, British Library, MS Add. 36529, fol. 45r. © British Library Board

154

6 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Don. c. 24, fol. 7r. Reproduced by permission of the Bodleian Library.

167

Disclaimer: Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. To view these images please refer to the printed version of this book.

vii

Contributors Gemma Allen Anna Bayman James Daybell Alice Eardley Christopher Hardman Phillipa Hardman Elizabeth Heale Anne Lawrence-Mathers Adam Smyth Alison Wiggins Graham Williams

University of Oxford University of Oxford University of Plymouth University of Oxford University of Reading University of Reading University of Reading University of Reading Birkbeck, University of London University of Glasgow University of Glasgow

viii

Abbreviations BL CEEC CSP CSPD CUL DNB EEBO EETS OS EHR ELR HMC N&Q NLS OED PMLA PRO RES STC TNA

British Library Corpus of Early English Correspondence Calendar of State Papers Calendar of State Papers Domestic Cambridge University Library Dictionary of National Biography Early English Books Online Early English Text Society Original Series English Historical Review English Literary Renaissance Historical Manuscripts Commission Notes and Queries National Library of Scotland Oxford English Dictionary Publications of the Modern Language Association of America Public Record Office Review of English Studies Short Title Catalogue of English Books 1475–1640 The National Archive

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Anne Lawrence-Mathers

Introduction

I

t is particularly satisfying that this volume should be one of the first in the new series on Manuscript Culture in the British Isles. The central issue with which it deals, the transition from manuscript to print, is well studied in terms of its relation to contemporary events in Britain, especially the rise of Protestantism and the absorption of influences and ideas from the Italian Renaissance.1 However, it is only in recent decades that the issue of gender, and its importance in inflecting the impact of these great movements of cultural transformation, have been addressed. Since Joan Kelly famously asked whether women actually had a Renaissance, the early-modern household has sometimes been represented as a male-dominated sphere, in which book-ownership, writing and reading were centred on husbands and fathers, and books for women were restricted to conduct books.2 In marked contrast, late-medieval women have been studied as owners and users of books and especially of the largest category of luxury book, the books of hours; and the libraries and catalogues of medieval female communities such as Syon and Wilton have also received much attention.3 It is thus appropriate to argue that the impact of printing should also be considered as a gendered issue. 1

1979).

The classic study is E. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (Cambridge,

2 Joan Kelly’s article, ‘Did Women Have a Renaissance?’, was first published in Becoming Visible: Women in European History, ed. R. Bridenthal and C. Koonz (New York, 1977). It was reprinted in J. Kelly, Women, History and Theory: The Essays of Joan Kelly (Chicago, 1984), pp. 19–50, and again in Feminism and Renaissance Studies, ed. L. Hutson (Oxford, 1999). A key response was published by R. Kegl, The Rhetoric of Concealment: Figuring Gender and Class in Renaissance Literature (Ithaca NY, 1994). Further studies in the areas opened up by this debate include: Silent but for the Word: Tudor Women as Patrons, Translators and Writers of Religious Works, ed. M. P. Hannay (Kent OH, 1985); ‘The Double Voice’: Gendered Writing in Early Modern England, ed. D. Clarke and E. Clarke, (Basingstoke, 2000). 3 For women religious and their reading a fundamental work is D. Bell, What Nuns Read: Books and Libraries in Medieval English Nunneries (Kalamazoo MI, 1995). For an update see D. Bell, ‘What Nuns Read: The State of The Question’, in The Culture of Medieval English Monas-

1

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Does this then suggest that textual production experienced something of the same transformational effects as occupations such as brewing and weaving, in which women, previously dominant and skilled producers, were marginalized by processes of professionalization and industrialization?4 The introduction of the printing press certainly makes this an attractive hypothesis, at least at first sight; but can cultural production so simply be compared with other industries? Moreover, such an argument would ignore the fact that access to the institutions of higher education, especially the universities, was no more restricted in the early-modern period than in the medieval; the universities simply remained closed to women. This exclusion was central to the processes which not only made it impossible for women to be scholars but also made it extremely difficult for them to achieve recognition as authors. The ongoing effects of these exclusions are visible in the structure and contents of even the most recent and inclusive textbooks on the Renaissance and on literary production across the period from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century. For instance, in the 2007 survey, The Renaissance World, the introductory discussion of scholarship genders it exclusively and unquestioningly masculine, even in the context of challenging stereotypes as to the extent and transmission of new knowledge.5 Whilst the nature of the institutions analysed, and the evidence they produced, clearly makes the inclusion of women as either authors or artists difficult within short survey chapters, it remains unfortunate that the processes of exclusion remain invisible also, and that no space is given to women in the six papers on ‘Making Identities’.6 At the more specialized level of works dealing with English Literature, it is equally apparent how difficult it was (and remains) for late-medieval and early-modern women to achieve canonical status as authors. Volume Two of

ticism, ed. J. G. Clark (Woodbridge, 2007), pp. 113–33. Another pioneering work is Women and Literature in Britain, 1150–1500, ed. C. Meale (Cambridge, 1993). Recent studies include: A. M. Hutchison, ‘What the Nuns Read: Literary Evidence from the English Bridgettine House, Syon Abbey’, Medieval Studies 57 (1995), 205–22; Writing Religious Women: Female Spiritual and Textual Practices in Late Medieval England, ed. S. Powell and C. Whitehead (Cardiff, 2000); M. C. Erler, Women, Reading and Piety in Late Medieval England (Cambridge, 2002); R. Krug, Reading Families: Women’s Literate Practice in Late Medieval England (New York, 2002). A helpful survey is provided by J. Wogan-Browne, ‘Analytical Survey 5: “Reading is Good Prayer”: Recent Research on Female Reading Communities’, New Medieval Literatures 5 (2002), 229–97. 4 On brewing, the fundamental study is J. M. Bennett, Ale, Beer and Brewsters in England (Oxford, 1999). The same author’s article, ‘Misogyny, Popular Culture and Women’s Work’, History Workshop Journal 31 (1991), 66–188, gives a wide-ranging discussion. 5 The Renaissance World, ed. J. J. Martin (New York, 2007), pp. 3–27. 6 Women do appear in the section on ‘The Circulation of Power’ but are central only in Caroline Castiglione’s essay on ‘Mothers and Children’, pp. 381–97.



Introduction

3

the Oxford English Literary History, covering 1350–1547, and published in 2002, gives the biographies of fifty-six ‘broadly literary authors who wrote in the vernacular’, and three of these are women (two of whom are the celebrated visionaries, Margery Kempe and Julian of Norwich).7 Even studies of translation, a field in which women are acknowledged to have made a major contribution, produce similarly depressing results. Volume One of the Oxford History of Literary Translation in English, published in 2008, covers the whole period up to 1550, and gives individual discussions of five canonical translators, all of whom are men.8 This volume gives brief biographies of forty-five translators, and of these three are women.9 Even in this context, women have primarily to be considered as a separate issue, in a brief contribution on ‘Women Translators of Religious Texts’. That more discoveries remain to be made is strongly suggested by the observation that all known women translators in this period (who number fewer than ten) ‘were either members of, or closely associated with, the royal family’.10 Where then does this leave the issue of women and the early impact of printing? Both the title of this book and the opening questions of this introduction have been designed explicitly to raise the lingering ghost of the earlymodern idea of the ‘separate spheres’ of women and men.11 In this model, ironically renewed and repeated by twentieth-century theorists and historians, women’s economic and sociosexual experiences confined them to their own sphere. If the logic of this argument is followed, then the only way to study women as writers and users of texts is to look for them not only outside the literary canon but also within their own, separate sphere. At best, as visualized by twentieth-century feminist theorists, this might make possible the study of women’s literary work within its own terms, freed from the demand constantly to evaluate it in relation to that of men. But the danger of such an ideal of separation is not just that it could only exist at the level of theory. Still more seriously, such an analysis could easily fall into merely reproducing, at an ideological level, the dominant sociosexual relations of the society under discussion.

7 Reform and Cultural Revolution: The Oxford English Literary History: Volume 2, 1350–1547, ed. J. Simpson (Oxford, 2002). The third woman is Eleanor Hull. 8 The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English: Volume 1, to 1550, ed. R. Ellis (Oxford, 2008). 9 These are: Lady Margaret Beaufort, Queen Katharine (Parr) and Margaret Roper. 10 A. Barratt, ‘Women Translators of Religious Texts’, in The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English: Volume 1, to 1550, pp. 284–95 (p. 284). 11 For relevant discussions see F. Somerset, ‘Professionalising Translation at the Turn of the Fifteenth Century’, in The Vulgar Tongue: Medieval and Postmedieval Vernacularity, ed. F. Somerset and N. Watson (University Park PA, 2004), pp. 145–57.

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In other words, the separate sphere to be populated with rediscovered women might as well be labelled in the value-laden terms employed in the moralizing discourses of the early-modern period itself. And yet, if women were allowed neither to be authors or scholars, nor to have any public voice in the evaluation of men’s literary productions, must they and their works not be sought out in whatever sphere they are to be found? This has been the dilemma which has given impetus to the pioneering works both of researchers in archives and of textual editors, who have sought to find women writers and to make them accessible as potential ‘canonical authors’.12 As Danielle Clarke put it in 2000, ‘Editing has been central to gendering the renaissance.’13 And yet, if potential canonicity for female authors is the goal for modern scholarship, how can it overcome the fact that women writers tend only to have left ‘scattered textual remains’ (to use Julia Boffey’s words)?14 At a theoretical level it is convincing to argue that writing the history of earlymodern women as authors entails examining the processes of exclusion as well as analysing the texts which are being recovered from the archives.15 But a history of exclusion would not only be depressing to read; it would also be in danger of being empty of actual women and of being populated largely by villains. Clearly, a key resolution of this dilemma is to broaden the focus of the study and to seek to recover women’s engagement with texts more broadly than simply as authors. This approach has opened up an enormous amount of very positive work on women as translators, copyists and readers. Both medieval and early-modern women as readers have received increasing and very productive scholarly attention since the pioneering work of feminist scholars such as

12

For the Renaissance period, see for instance: The Renaissance Englishwoman in Print: Counterbalancing the Canon, ed. A. M. Haselkorn and B. S. Travitsky (Amherst MA, 1990); Women and Literature in Britain 1500–1700, ed. H. Wilcox (Cambridge, 1996). A pioneering anthology for the medieval period is A. Barratt, Women’s Writing in Middle English (London, 1992); Diane Watt has widened discussion of women and authorship in Medieval Women’s Writing: Writing By and For Women (Cambridge, 2007). A notable discovery has been that of the woman writer, Hester Pulter: see M. Robson, ‘Pulter, Lady Hester (1595/6–1678)’, Oxford DNB (Oxford, 2004), [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/ article/68094, accessed 30 July 2009]. 13 D. Clark, ‘Nostalgia, Anachronism, and the Editing of Early Modern Women’s Texts’, Text: An Interdisciplinary Annual of Textual Studies 15 (2000), 187–210 (p. 187). 14 J. Boffey, ‘Women Authors and Women’s Literacy in Fourteenth- and Fifteenth-Century England’, in Women and Literature in Britain, ed. Meale, pp. 159–82. 15 J. Summit, Lost Property: The Woman Writer and English Literary History, 1380–1589 (Chicago, 2000), adds another complex level to the debate by arguing that the loss of women’s writing was established as a virtual literary trope in the early-modern period itself.



Introduction

5

Susan Groag Bell.16 Building upon the argument that women need not have been simply passive recipients of the truths inscribed in authoritative texts, scholars have worked to reconstruct the multiple strategies of interpretation and resistance which could be deployed by female readers, even in relation to such hortatory texts as devotional treatises and rules for groups of female religious. Jocelyn Wogan-Browne’s study of women as readers of hagiography and virginity literature has produced significant evidence for understanding such texts as sites of complex and political exchange of meaning rather than of one-way transfer of instruction.17 Within this area of work, early-modern discussions (to which both men and women contributed) of women as readers of chivalric romances have provided very fruitful evidence; as also have records of book-ownership and literary patronage by women.18 Even the long-established tradition of explicitly misogynistic writings by men, whether theological, moralizing or humorous, is of interest here since it opened up a legitimate space for women readers and writers, from the thirteenth century onwards, to respond.19 Another productive strategy has been to bring previously marginal categories of texts, such as women’s ‘private’ correspondence or journals, into the analysis.20 This has led to major advances in the study of women’s life-writing and letters.21 Still another possibility is to take genres of text which were very widely distributed, such as prayer books and almanacs, and to seek to recover the ways in which these

16 See especially Groag Bell’s essay, ‘Medieval Women Book Owners: Arbiters of Lay Piety and Ambassadors of Culture’, Signs 7 (1982), 742–68. 17 J. Wogan-Browne, Saints’ Lives and Women’s Literary Culture: Virginity and its Authorizations (Oxford, 2001). 18 Some valuable examples are given in J. Goodman, ‘“That women holde in ful greet reverence”: Mothers and Daughters Reading Chivalric Romances’, in Women, the Book and the Worldly, ed. L. Smith and J. Taylor (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 25–30. 19 The best-known such female respondent is Christine de Pisan, whose role in the ‘querelle de la Rose’ has been well studied. But J. Beer, ‘Women, Authority and the Book in the Middle Ages’, in Women, the Book and the Worldly, ed. Smith and Taylor, pp. 61–70, discusses earlier examples. A selection of texts is given in A. Blamires, The Case for Women in Medieval Culture (Oxford, 1998). 20 A very valuable web-based resource for presenting the results of productive archival work is the Perdita Project [http://human.ntu.ac.uk/research/perdita/index.html, accessed 30 July 2009]. 21 Here, research on early-modern women has been more productive than work on medieval women. See: E. Graham et al., Her Own Life: Autobiographical Writings by Seventeenth Century Englishwomen (London, 1989); Genre and Women’s Life Writing in Early Modern England, ed. J. A. Eckerle and M. M. Dowd (Farnham, 2007); J. Daybell, Women Letter-Writers in Tudor England (Oxford, 2006).

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would have been encountered by women within the social space available to them in the society under analysis.22 These approaches all form parts of the multiple perspectives opened by a very productive area of inter-disciplinary work – namely, book history. This provides much of the terrain to which the present volume seeks to contribute. The essays brought together here look at women as both users and producers of books; and they look at these roles in relation to the complex range of ways in which books were produced, circulated and remade in both manuscript and print.23 Inevitably the main focus is on educated women; but studies of more popular genres, such as almanacs, cover a range of social classes whilst the opening essay brings children as learners and readers into the scope of the discussion. What emerges is a wide-ranging exploration of how women wrote, received and transformed a considerable range of texts and book formats, thus providing new light on the questions outlined above. In the opening essay, ‘Domestic Learning and Teaching: Investigating Evidence for the Role of “Household Miscellanies” in Late-Medieval England’, Phillipa Hardman looks at the role of late-medieval mothers in the early ­education of their children. As casual references in both Chaucer’s Pardoner’s and ­Manciple’s Tales imply, domestic early learning was apparently taken for granted in this period, as was the role of mothers as teachers. Moreover, certain surviving manuscripts do seem to carry evidence of how reading and writing were taught by mothers to their children. It has been suggested that the volumes known as ‘household miscellanies’ played a role in such domestic teaching and learning; and the purpose of this opening essay is to examine the physical evidence for this in a selection of these manuscripts. Starting with the fourteenth-century Auchinleck manuscript, and some new evidence on its family origin and function, this chapter goes on to analyse four fifteenth-century miscellanies that have elements in common with both the Auchinleck volume and each other. Central to the discussion is the interpretation of physical, codicological evidence. Thus this first chapter not only links the volume to recent work by medievalists on the extent of women’s literacy and on the nature of early learning; but it also opens up themes which will be continued by later contributors. 22

Pioneering work has been done here by Nicola McDonald. See N. F. McDonald, ‘Fragments of (Have Your) Desire: Brome Women at Play’, in Medieval Domesticity: Home, Housing and Household in Medieval England, ed. M. Kowaleski and P. J. P. Goldberg (Cambridge, 2008), pp. 232–58; and ‘A York Primer and its Alphabet: Reading Women in a Lay Household’, in The Oxford Handbook of Medieval Literature in English, ed. E. Treharne and G. Walker (Oxford, forthcoming), pp. 181–99. 23 Particularly influential contributions have been M. C. Erler, ‘Pasted-in Embellishments in English Manuscripts and Printed Books, c.1480–1533’, The Library 6th s. 14 (1992), 185–206; A. Grounds, ‘Evolution of a Manuscript: The Pavement Hours’, in Design and Distribution of Late Medieval Manuscripts in England, ed. L. R. Mooney and M. Connolly (York, 2008), pp. 118–38.



Introduction

7

In the second essay, ‘Domesticating the Calendar: The Hours and the Almanac in Tudor England’, two genres which were extremely popular in the late-medieval and early-modern periods are examined from the point of view of women users. The printed almanacs of sixteenth-century England were enormously influential; yet their contents are so formulaic and repetitive as to appear almost empty of valuable information. Their most striking feature is the ubiquity of astrological terminology and information, and this has led to their being considered ‘merely’ the repository of popular superstition. Only in the last decade have the themes of gender and medicine been given serious consideration in relation to a full-length study of almanacs; but that work has focused on the seventeenth century.24 The present chapter centres on a detailed analysis of selected, sixteenth-century almanacs, and of the various kinds of scientific and household guidance which they offered to women readers. Both compilers and users needed to chart a safe course through the religious and scientific battles of the time, and the complexities involved are demonstrated by considering the almanacs in relation to comparable guidance offered by Books of Hours and ‘scientific’ works such as medical calendars compiled by Oxford scholars in the late Middle Ages. A key feature of this chapter is to give ‘practical interpretations’ of this complex information, in order to guide modern readers. In the next chapter, ‘“a briefe and plaine declaration”: Lady Anne Bacon’s 1564 Translation of the Apologia Ecclesiae Anglicanae’, Gemma Allen moves from the analysis of women as users and readers of texts to women as translators of religious works. This study tackles head on the disputed issues of whether translation was a ‘lesser’ activity than actual authorship, and whether women’s activity in religious translation is evidence of the silencing of women’s own voices in print culture. In answer, Gemma Allen shows that Anne Bacon was able to draw upon a strong family network. Her father, Sir Anthony Cooke, was a tutor to Edward VI and, like other royal tutors, himself a translator; and both Anne’s sisters were also recognized translators. Moreover, it was Anne’s husband, Nicholas Bacon, and her brother-in-law, William Cecil, who had asked John Jewel to write his Apologia as a defence of the Church of England. Still more strikingly, Jewel’s crucial text had already been translated into English when Anne began her own version. Yet it was Anne’s translation which Matthew Parker, archbishop of Canterbury, chose to have printed – apparently without notifying Anne, lest her ‘modestie’ led her to ‘staye’ its publication. Gemma Allen here uses careful detective work to shed a new light

24

2008).

L. H. Curth, English Almanacs, Astrology and Popular Medicine, 1550–1700 (Manchester,

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not only on this fascinating case itself but also on the broader issues which it raises. From women as teachers, as users of ‘scientific’ texts and as contributors to theological debate, Alison Wiggins’ essay on ‘Frances Wolfreston’s Chaucer’ moves the discussion on to women as readers of what was coming in the earlymodern period to be seen as ‘English literature’. Like Phillipa Hardman’s chapter, this also focuses on the physical evidence provided by a surviving volume, in this case a recent acquisition by the Folger Shakespeare Library. This is a previously unnoticed copy of The workes of Geffray Chaucer (now Folger STC 5074 Copy 2), edited by William Thynne, printed in 1550. The purchase was motivated by this copy’s provenance: in the seventeenth century this Chaucer was in the private library of Frances Wolfreston. The volume is of further value and interest because it is littered with manuscript marginalia by various earlier readers who, it is demonstrated, can be identified as Wolfreston’s female ancestors and their associates at Haslington Hall in Cheshire. It thus provides an example of how several successive generations of early-modern female readers negotiated their engagement with a literary text within a domestic context. Moreover, Wolfreston and her ancestors are especially significant because they are ‘ordinary people’, members of the minor country gentry. Chaucer’s post-medieval reception is a thriving area of interest, one which has gathered pace in response to the shift away from author- to reader-focused studies. Interest in marginalia as a historical source has also flourished in the context of the development of the history of reading. At the same time, the lack of visibility in the historical record of women as readers and annotators, especially of ‘recreational’ texts, poems, plays and other kinds of literature before 1600, has troubled and challenged feminist historians. This copy of Chaucer offers new, welcome material relating to each of these areas and represents an exciting discovery. With Adam Smyth’s chapter, the discussion moves on to another area traditionally considered primarily as part of a ‘masculine’ world – that of scholarship and higher education – through a fresh analysis of the commonplace books. These already had a long history, but in the period of the transition from manuscript to print, the most influential articulation of what might be called commonplace-book method came in Erasmus’ De Copia Verborum (1513), which was also the basis for many vernacular adaptations. This guide suggested that students draw up in their notebooks a list of subjects or ‘places’: ‘the main types and subdivisions of vice and virtue’, such as ‘Faith and Faithlessness’, ‘arranged according to similar and opposites’. Thus this became a genre which frequently transferred texts from a printed context back into a manuscript one. However, with commonplace-book principles must go a stress on the tremendous variety of manuscripts that were actually produced. Not only was the commonplace book an idea that was in a continual state of modification; but



Introduction

9

the gap between neat prescription and messy practice was also often cavernously wide. The physical reality of these books is often of pages so crammed with text that annotations spill over to the binding and covers, and on to scraps of printed pages glued into the manuscript. They also offer the steady accumulation of notes by several generations of annotators. This chapter reconsiders the term ‘commonplace book’, and suggests that the use of the broader category ‘commonplace-book culture’ is a helpful way to convey this very wide range of texts and practices. It also explicitly addresses the role of women in this culture; whilst critics have tended to assert that women had little place or agency within the commonplace milieu, it is here proposed that we can in fact find significant evidence of women’s activity. A similar act of recovery in relation to intervention by early-modern women in fields largely considered closed to them is undertaken by James Daybell in his chapter on ‘Women, Politics and Domesticity: The Scribal Publication of Lady Rich’s Letter to Elizabeth I’. This essay offers a detailed analysis of a single letter by Lady Penelope Rich (1563–1607) as a means of examining the roles that early-modern women played in both scribal publication and Elizabethan court politics, within the trope of fulfilling familial responsibilities. Penelope Rich served as a Maid of Honour in 1581; well connected and well educated, she was highly versed in the sophisticated kinds of courtly writing indispensable in a patronage society. Working largely through the influence of her brother (the earl of Essex) she acted as a political intermediary in the 1590s; and after Essex’s fall from power she drew on other networks of contacts in an attempt to secure his pardon. This provides the immediate context for the letter in question, which differed strikingly from its predecessors. First, its strong tone offended the queen, who was angered by the letter’s criticisms of the royal person. Secondly, it was well known to court gossips, and was the subject of discussion during Essex’s later trial. A seemingly ‘private’ correspondence with the queen was thus in actual fact highly ‘public’. Indeed, the letter survives in over thirty variant manuscript versions, generating meanings within very different contexts. It was also published in printed form along with Essex’s Apologie (1600), contributing further to its place within scribal networks. This chapter thus raises important issues about the very nature of women’s letters, which have been viewed as quintessentially domestic and private, as well as highlighting the complexities of female, textual intervention in early-modern politics. The next chapter also deals with women’s letters; but Graham Williams, in discussing ‘The Social and Linguistic Implications of Joan Thynne’s Using a Scribe in Letters to Her Son, 1607–11’, provides analysis of the palaeographical evidence of the surviving manuscripts. This chapter also moves away from the world of high politics, and demonstrates how much information can be generated by the study of surviving letters by ‘ordinary’ people. Taken alone, the last

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surviving letter sent from Joan Thynne to her son Thomas (in 1611) appears extremely ordinary. The subject matter is by no means exceptional between a mother and son, and Joan’s apology for ‘scriblinge’ was a common feminine trope. The letter’s bold, easy-to-read italic script is what we would expect of a lady of the time, as are the idiosyncratic spellings. But to conclude that because this letter seems so ‘common’ it must have been ordinary between Joan and Thomas would in fact misplace most of its potential significance. The letter has been preserved within a wider epistolary record left by Joan Thynne and members of her circle, spanning more than thirty-five years of letter-writing (1575–1611). Forty-five letters from Joan have survived, alongside letters to and from other members of the Thynne family and their circle, and providing ample evidence to contextualize Joan’s letter-writing activity to her son. Building upon previous observations made by social historians, this essay aims first to understand why Joan, a literate woman, would have employed scribes. Secondly, the extent to which variation in the linguistic style of the letters relates to Joan’s use of scribes is analysed by way of an examination of lexico-grammatical items found in the letters. In this way, the language – in a very formal sense – found in the texts of Joan’s letters acquires additional meanings when considered in relation to the hand doing the writing. The conclusion discusses what implications might be drawn from these findings, and makes important suggestions about the loss of layers of meaning when manuscript letters are presented in modern, standardized editions. The next chapter moves on from women’s epistolary compositions to the more ‘traditional’ literary topic of poetry. In ‘Fathers and Daughters: Four Women and Their Family Albums of Verse’ Elizabeth Heale considers women’s participation in the copying, transmission and possibly composition of verse as witnessed by three manuscripts belonging to the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Each was used by one or more women to copy and preserve family collections of verse, and each suggests familial, probably particularly paternal, support for daughters’ participation in, and enjoyment of, the circulation and writing of secular verse. The women involved were all daughters of practising poets; and this essay argues that participation in the copying and collecting of verse, much of it written by fathers, may also have encouraged composition by the women themselves. A key problem is that women’s writing in manuscript miscellanies of the period may often leave only elusive and ambiguous traces. Germaine Greer long ago painted an image of the lonely early-modern woman writer whose poetry ‘probably ended … in the fire’. This stereotype has been rebutted by scholars of women’s writing; but familial attitudes and actions can be complex to interpret. The poet Isabella Whitney seems to have benefited from brotherly encouragement when writing and printing her verse in London; but she also records that ‘Friendes’ enforced her departure from London, after which she seems to have written no more poetry. Sir John Davies seems to



Introduction

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have felt that admonitions to virtue rather than wit were a suitable subject of verse for his daughter, and Mary Maitland took care to invoke Diana and the ‘nymphes of chastetie’ to bless her labours in copying her manuscript. This study therefore argues that, whilst hailing the apparently positive instances of the encouragement of women’s intellectual activity uncovered here, we need to acknowledge that, for early-modern women, learning and poetry were encouraged only if they did not interfere, in Rachel Speght’s words, with ‘affairs befitting [their] sex’. In the next chapter, ‘The Book as Domestic Gift’, Christopher Hardman continues the demonstration of how much historical knowledge can be produced from the detailed study of a single surviving piece of concrete evidence. The focus of this essay is a large folio volume (now Bodleian MS Don. C. 24), an autograph manuscript of poems made for Mary Oldisworth in 1644 by her husband, Nicholas. The manuscript begins with a carefully transcribed collection of poems and ends with the first part of a prose romance, The Chronicle of Europe, of which five books are promised. The volume is inscribed: ‘Margaret Man Her Book Given Me By My Dear Mother’, and the second part of the manuscript was turned into a recipe book, presumably by Margaret. To turn a collection of poems into a recipe book may seem to be to turn it into something more like a commonplace or household book, as discussed by Adam Smyth. However, this manuscript is really very different. Its appearance and arrangement have been described as imitating the appearance of a printed book; but the dedication on the title page and an intimate ‘epistle’ suggest a readership even more restricted than that of manuscripts intended for coterie circulation, far less that of printed books. This is a presentation manuscript for one recipient. Here we can see inscribed the tender relationship of a husband and father for his wife and daughters at a politically dangerous time. It is a rarity because it occupies the space between manuscript and print, both in appearance and because some of the poems were already in print when the manuscript was compiled. Finally, it is argued that, in the collection of recipes, the women of the family operate also in the space between manuscript and print, as well as in a tradition validated as the activity not just of early-modern women of rank, but of queens. In the next chapter, ‘“like hewen stone”: Augustine, Audience and Revision in Elizabeth Isham’s “Booke of Rememberance”’, Alice Eardley provides a study of a very unusual autobiographical text. In her ‘Booke of Rememberance’, composed around 1639, Elizabeth Isham presents her narrative as a ‘true’ account of her own life. She also emphasizes the effort expended in revealing that truth, later adding that the ‘cost’ of the labour that went into her task was summoned from both ‘soule’ and ‘body’. In line with this, the work’s chronological narrative of her life is interspersed with devotional meditations and prayers. For Isham, much of the value of her text apparently resided in the

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labour expended in its creation. Some indication of this labour is provided by a comparison of the fair copy text now in Princeton with a series of draft sections preserved in the margins of a letter in the Northamptonshire Record Office. There is also a vademecum, or single large sheet of paper that has been folded into eighteen squares and used by Isham to note down the events of her life, a square per year, for thirty-six years. Analysis of these layers of evidence allows this paper to shed light both on Isham’s construction of her autobiographical narrative and on the personal significance of the process for the author herself. This study also contributes new evidence to recent arguments within the study of early-modern women’s life-writing, which have emphasized the constructed nature of women’s autobiographical narratives. The final crucial element here is the publication in 1631, just a few years before Isham began writing, of an English translation of St Augustine’s Confessions; for Isham’s work suggests that she actually used Augustine’s writings as a means of understanding and living through events in her own life as well as of shaping her narrative. From a single woman, and the complex interrelations of lived experience, lifewriting and printed text in the surviving witnesses to her work, the collection moves to a much broader study, and one focused exclusively on the medium of print, and even on the ‘republic of letters’. Yet this final chapter is also devoted to a subject of challenging, and ambiguous, layers of meaning. Anna Bayman, in ‘Female Voices in Early Seventeenth Century Pamphlet Literature’, focuses on how a ‘new’ popular print medium drew upon an old tradition, the querelle des femmes, and brought a new playfulness about gender identities into a debate which was both popular and deeply conscious of its own pedigree. The ongoing literary debate between detractors and defenders of women had a long pedigree, and attracted contributions that ranged from the learned to the unashamedly popular. The starting point for this essay is a pamphlet that sits squarely towards the populist end of the querelle’s spectrum, Joseph Swetnam’s The araignment of lewde, idle, froward, and unconstant women of 1615, notorious for its scurrilous and titillating style. Three pamphlets were printed in 1617 in direct response to Swetnam’s attack on women; and unusually all three appeared under women’s names. Women had written before in their own defence, especially in manuscript publication. The respondents to Swetnam were, however, among the very first female voices to use the printed pamphlet form to this end. Two of the authors involved used pseudonyms, but the third, Rachel Speght, asserted her own identity. This chapter sets Speght’s work in the context of other ‘female’ voices in the pamphlet querelle, questioning the ways in which female-voiced print could be constructed. It is argued here that print, and pamphlets in particular, offered opportunities for female voices to find strong expression. And yet the ‘female’ voice created by this querelle was very ambiguously gendered, making the liminal, unrespectable form of the pamphlet its ideal home. It may well have been written by men, and was often



Introduction

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a far cry from the serious contribution envisaged by Speght. It appears none the less to have promoted female agency, and to have done so to a wide audience. The collection thus moves from late-medieval ‘household miscellanies’ to the seventeenth-century public realm of pamphlets, and from the peaceful image of mothers teaching their children to a world of quarrels and licensed cruelty. It also moves from manuscript, via mixed-media volumes, to the medium of print and the rapid exchange of texts which it opened up.

Phillipa Hardman

Domestic Learning and Teaching: Investigating Evidence for the Role of ‘Household Miscellanies’ in Late-Medieval England*

‘

T

hus taughte me my dame’ – so characters in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales refer to things they have known from their earliest youth. These words are used by both the narrator of the ‘Manciple’s Tale’ and the tavern boy in the ‘Pardoner’s Tale’, to authorize their quotation of a piece of traditional wisdom.1 The tavern boy refers to his mother’s teaching him always to be prepared to face death (683), an example of the sombre but salutary dicta prominent in the formation of Christian children from medieval to Victorian times. The Manciple recalls his mother’s repeatedly instructing him to be sparing of speech (318–62), in terms that echo Cato’s Distichs, that most celebrated of medieval educational texts. The elementary status of the teaching is made explicit: The firste vertu, sone, if thou wolt leere, Is to restreyne and kepe wel thy tonge; Thus lerne children whan that they been yonge.  (332–4)

As this easy, almost casual reference to maternal instruction implies, the role of mothers as the first teacher of their children and the domestic environment as the place of early learning could be taken for granted among ­Chaucer’s ­fourteenth-century readers and audience. Similarly, Nicholas Orme draws

* I am grateful to Professor T. Takamiya for permission to re-use in this essay material from my article ‘Evidence of Readership in Fifteenth-Century Household Miscellanies’, Poetica 60 (2003), 15–30. 1 The Riverside Chaucer, ed. L. D. Benson, 3rd edn (Boston, 1987).

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attention to a ‘telling phrase in the late-medieval educational treatise Femina (“Woman”) that “woman teacheth child on book”’.2 The books most likely to be used by mothers teaching their children to read and to know the essential prayers for their practice of religion were books of hours or primers which, as Patricia Cullum and Jeremy Goldberg point out, ‘regularly contained the Paternoster, the Ave, and the Creed, which all youngsters were supposed to learn by rote. Some even contain an alphabet.’3 As Orme explains, reciting the alphabet was itself ‘a Christian task … pronounced like a prayer’.4 A few surviving books of hours do seem to allow a glimpse of how they were used by women to teach their children: for example, Julia Boffey describes annotations in Cambridge, Sidney Sussex College, MS 37 that indicate a mother’s using the book to teach her son to read,5 and Cullum and Goldberg argue that the presence in the Bolton Hours (York Minster Library, MS Additional 2) of the alphabet and elementary prayers, texts that from use and custom ‘became a teaching aid for the instruction of young children’, makes it likely that the book was ‘commissioned for the education of [the female owner’s] daughters from an early age’ (p. 232). Elementary education clearly did happen at home, although there is frustratingly little detailed evidence of actual practice in domestic teaching and learning.6 However, it is often suggested that the manuscript collections of mainly vernacular texts known as ‘household miscellanies’, as well as books of hours, played a role in the education of children in the home, and the purpose of this essay is to examine the codicological evidence in a selection of these manuscripts that might throw light on their use. There has been growing interest in recent years in the corpus of late-­ medieval English manuscripts that can be described as household miscellanies.7 2

‘For Richer, For Poorer?: Free Education in England, c.1380–1530’, Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 1 (2008), 169–87 (p. 185). 3 ‘How Margaret Blackburn Taught her Daughters: Reading Devotional Instruction in a Book of Hours’, in Medieval Women: Texts and Contexts in Late Medieval Britain. Essays for Felicity Riddy, ed. J. Wogan-Browne et al. (Turnhout, 2000), pp. 217–36 (p. 231). 4 N. Orme, Medieval Children (New Haven, 2001), p. 253. 5 ‘Lydgate’s Lyrics and Women Readers’, in Women, the Book and the Worldly, ed. L. Smith and J. H. M. Taylor (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 139–49 (p. 147). 6 Records survive of the practice of teaching in schools, and in royal or noble households, but there is little documentation on less elevated instances. See Orme, ‘For Richer, For Poorer?’, and Medieval Children, pp. 238–72; M. Denley, ‘Elementary Teaching Techniques and Middle English Religious Didactic Writing’, in Langland, the Mystics and the Mediæval English Religious Tradition, ed. H. Phillips (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 223–41; J. Coleman, Public Reading and the Reading Public in Late Medieval England and France (Cambridge, 1996). 7 See, for example, several recent collections of essays: The Whole Book: Cultural Perspectives on the Medieval Miscellany, ed. S. G. Nichols and S. Wenzel (Ann Arbor, 1996); Studies in the Harley Manuscript: The Scribes, Contents, and Social Contexts of British Library MS Harley 2253, ed. S. Greer Fein (Kalamazoo, 2000), especially the essays by M. Corrie and T. Stemmler;



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Alternative names for them – commonplace books, household libraries, family anthologies, domestic compendia – indicate the informality, inclusiveness and home-centred concerns typical of such volumes. Considerable light has been shed on the processes of compiling a number of these manuscripts,8 and on the social milieux in which they are likely to have been produced and owned.9 This body of scholarship supports interpretations of the uses and functions of manuscript miscellanies in the domestic context, such as Nicholas Orme’s account of Bodleian Library MS Digby 86 as a representative commonplace book: ‘One can imagine the owners of the book … turning to it (as to an encyclopaedia) for information or entertainment on many occasions … And it is conceivable that some of the items in the book were meant (or used) for educating children or adolescents.’10 However, as the cautious expression of Orme’s comments implies, these are reasonable suppositions, for there is very little documentary evidence of exactly how these household library books were used in the home – who read which texts, for example, and in what circumstances, although rare instances of annotation by owners or readers can give helpful insights.11 Medieval and Early Modern Miscellanies and Anthologies, ed. P. Hardman, Yearbook of English Studies 33 (2003). 8 See, for example, on the Auchinleck manuscript: T. A. Shonk, ‘A Study of the Auchinleck Manuscript: Bookmen and Bookmaking in the Early Fourteenth Century’, Speculum 60 (1985), 71–91; R. Hanna, ‘Reconsidering the Auchinleck Manuscript’, in New Directions in Later Medieval Manuscript Studies, ed. D. A. Pearsall (York, 2000), pp. 91–102; on Robert Thornton and his manuscripts: G. R. Keiser, ‘Lincoln Cathedral Library MS 91: Life and Milieu of the Scribe’, Studies in Bibliography 32 (1979), 158–79, ‘More Light on the Life and Milieu of Robert Thornton’, Studies in Bibliography 36 (1983), 111–19, and ‘“To Knawe God Almyghtyn”: Robert Thornton’s Devotional Book’, Analecta Cartusiana 106 (1984), 103–29; J. J. Thompson, ‘The Compiler in Action: Robert Thornton and the “Thornton Romances”’, in Manuscripts and Readers in FifteenthCentury England, ed. D. A. Pearsall (Cambridge, 1983), pp. 113–24 and Robert Thornton and the London Thornton MS (Cambridge, 1987); R. Hanna, ‘The Growth of Robert Thornton’s Books’, Studies in Bibliography 40 (1987), 51–61. 9 See, for example, K. Harris, ‘The Origins and Make-up of Cambridge University Library MS Ff. 1. 6’ [the Findern manuscript], Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society 8 (1981–5), 299–333; R. Hanna, ‘The Production of Cambridge University Library MS Ff. 1. 6’, Studies in Bibliography 40 (1987), 62–70; F. Riddy, Sir Thomas Malory (Leiden, 1987), pp. 1–30, on the ownership and social context of fifteenth-century household miscellanies. 10 Orme, Medieval Children, p. 276. Orme examines three representative manuscripts from the late thirteenth to the early sixteenth century (Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Digby 86; Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales, MS Porkington 10 [now MS Brogyntyn II.1]; Oxford, Balliol College, MS 354) and discerns similar reflections in all three of the various literary activities of wealthy gentry and merchant families. 11 Cf. the annotations in a different kind of manuscript, the book of hours (Cambridge, Sidney Sussex College, MS 37) described by Boffey in ‘Lydgate’s Lyrics and Women Readers’. For further discussion, see C. Scott-Stokes, Women’s Books of Hours in Medieval England: Selected Texts (Cambridge, 2006), pp. 160–1 and references.

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This essay will examine a selection of domestic miscellanies to demonstrate the range of evidence for readership and use within the household provided by the books themselves. Some of the evidence is difficult to date and some clearly does relate to sixteenth-century use of fourteenth- or fifteenth-century manuscripts, but where this evidence shows reading and use of the texts (rather than opportunistic use of blank writing space for new purposes), it seems reasonable to assume continuity of practice over time within the domestic environment. The five manuscripts selected are all familiar to students of Middle English literature: Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland, MS Advocates 19. 2. 1 (the Auchinleck manuscript);12 Lincoln Cathedral Library, MS 91 (the Thornton manuscript);13 Cambridge University Library, MS Ff. 2. 38;14 Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland, MS Advocates 19. 3. 1 (the Heege manuscript),15 and Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Ashmole 61 (the Rate manuscript).16 Each of these compilations can be described as a ‘household library’, containing a collection of disparate texts suitable for various functions in the private, domestic sphere: devotional reading, literary entertainment and practical use.17 For example, they include saints’ lives, hymns and prayers; chivalric romances and humorous tales; medical recipes and texts inculcating religious or social doctrine. The description ‘miscellany’ can apply not only to the variety of the contents but also to the seemingly haphazard arrangement of texts within some of the collections, though careful examination of the make-up of the volume may reveal a more systematic ordering of material than is immediately apparent. None of these manuscripts has an extant list of contents,18 although they do have titles or text headings that would make a simple finding system of this kind easy to operate. As will be seen, both the physical construction of

12 See The Auchinleck Manuscript: National Library of Scotland Advocates’ MS 19. 2. 1, with an introduction by D. A. Pearsall and I. C. Cunningham (London, 1977); and the NLS Auchinleck manuscript website: [http://www.nls.uk/auchinleck/], ed. D. Burnley and A. Wiggins (2003). 13 See The Thornton Manuscript: Lincoln Cathedral MS 91, a facsimile with introductions by D. S. Brewer and A. E. B. Owen (London, 1975). 14 See Cambridge University Library MS Ff. 2. 38, a facsimile with an introduction by F. McSparran and P. R. Robinson (London, 1979). 15 See The Heege Manuscript: A Facsimile of National Library of Scotland MS Advocates 19. 3. 1, with introduction by P. Hardman, Leeds Texts and Monographs n. s. 16 (Leeds, 2000). 16 See Codex Ashmole 61: A Compilation of Popular Middle English Verse, ed. G. Shuffelton, Middle English Texts Series (Kalamazoo MI, 2008). 17 It must immediately be acknowledged that these are artificial distinctions and that many texts fulfil more than one of these functions. 18 Compare the list in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Eng. Poet. a. 1 and added to MS Fairfax 16, fol. 2r–v. It may be significant that these are better described as coherent anthologies than miscellanies.



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the volume and the use of headings and titles may give clues as to the use and readership of the book. The earliest of the five volumes, the mid fourteenth century Auchinleck manuscript, has been the subject of a number of different hypotheses as to the social status and gender of its original owner(s), ranging from an ‘aspirant middle-class citizen, perhaps a wealthy merchant’,19 to a nobleman of unrefined tastes and his family,20 or, as Felicity Riddy has suggested, to a woman of the nobility.21 The presence in the manuscript of a copy of the so-called Battle Abbey Roll, a list of the Norman knights who supposedly accompanied William the Conqueror, leads Thorlac Turville-Petre to the conclusion that the manuscript was made for one of the families named in the list (p. 137), and this seems highly likely. Particularly interesting, however, is Turville-Petre’s focus on the way the manuscript caters for the needs of the whole family – men, women and children (pp. 135–6)22 – and indeed the name of just such a family is prominently inscribed in a very significant place, immediately following the roll of names: the Brownes. The Anglo-Norman form of the name, Brun, appears at 340 in the list of 551 names (fol. 106r), and in the ample space left at the end of the list, the names of the whole Browne family – father, mother and seven ­children – have been added between the rulings for the two central columns (fol. 107r),23 in a careful and deliberate way that recalls the addition of family names and details in or near the kalendar in many a book of hours. The scribal hand has been dated to the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century;24 19

Pearsall and Cunningham, The Auchinleck Manuscript, p. viii. T. Turville-Petre, England the Nation: Language, Literature and National Identity, 1290– 1340 (Oxford, 1996), p. 138. Turville-Petre suggests an owning family whose name appears among the list of Norman names in the so-called Battle Abbey Roll in the manuscript (fols. 105v–7r), ‘such as the Beauchamps and the Percies’ (p. 136). 21 In ‘The Auchinleck Manuscript: A Woman’s Book?’, a paper given at the Romance in Medieval England conference at Bristol in 1992, Riddy suggested Katerine de la Poole, whose family name occurs in the Battle Abbey Roll (fol. 105v). 22 For discussion of the romances in the manuscript as reading matter for the young, see N. Clifton, ‘The Seven Sages of Rome, Children’s Literature, and the Auchinleck Manuscript’, in Childhood in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: The Results of a Paradigm Shift in the History of Mentality, ed. A. Classen (Berlin, 2005), pp. 185–20, and P. Hardman, ‘Popular Romances and Young Readers’, in A Companion to Medieval Popular Romance, ed. R. Radulescu and C. Rushton (Cambridge, 2009), pp. 150–64. 23 The names are given in full: Mr Thomas Browne, Mrs Isabell Browne, Katherin Browne, Eistre Browne, Elizabeth Browne, William Browne, Walter Browne, Thomas Browne and Agnes Browne. As far as I am aware, the potential link with the name ‘Brun’ in the Roll has not been noted. Clifton draws attention to the inscription of the family’s names and creates a charming, if fanciful, picture of their use of the volume in her article on The Seven Sages of Rome. 24 I am grateful to Peter Beale and Grace Ioppolo for dating the hand. ‘Walter Brown’ appears again on one of the damaged folios restored to the facsimile in quire 48. 20

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however, there are other, marginal ‘Browne’ names in the manuscript that date from the late fourteenth or early fifteenth century.25 If these names all represent members of the same family, it would indicate long ownership of the manuscript in a family whose name implies a relationship (real or imagined) with one of the Norman ancestral names in the Battle Abbey Roll, though it has not so far been possible to identify them further.26 As Turville-Petre points out, the Auchinleck manuscript identifies itself as a book ‘designed for the household’ (p. 136), both by the variety of its texts and by the explicit mention in one of them of an audience consisting of ‘children and wimmen and men / Of twelue winter elde and mare’ (fol. 70r).27 The title usually given to this unique text, ‘On þe seuen dedly sinnes’, is somewhat misleading, for it is considerably more ambitious in scope and offers a programme of essential religious instruction, addressed to ‘Poure and riche, ȝonge and old’ and several times specifically to ‘wimmen and men’, with frequently repeated stress on the fact that each part of the instruction (Seven Deadly Sins, Ten Commandments, Pater, Creed and Ave) is ‘on englissche’, enabling the listeners to learn it by heart (‘Euerichone þai sscholden knowe’), and ‘On englissche to segge what it were / Als holi cherche ȝou wolde lere’. The Church’s teaching on this matter is made plain at the beginning of the programme and again at the end: ‘Þen habbe ȝe herd ȝoure bileue / þat is maked to soule biheue’ (fol. 71r), and is clearly the agenda set by the Fourth Lateran Council’s decrees on the education of the laity (1214). Each part of the programme is presented in the form of a prayer to be recited: the sins patterned on the Confiteor, and the commandments in a similar penitential form. The second part of the text offers, as every Christian ‘sscholden habben in minde’, the Passion of Christ, again presented as a penitential exercise with a four-line prayer for forgiveness at the end of each section of the narration (divided to correspond to the Hours), except for the last, where a longer prayer widens the scope to pray (again in the spirit of Lateran IV) for peace among Christians and grace to defeat the Saracens in the Holy Land, and ends with a plea to Christ at the Last Judgement. The text is prominently placed at the beginning of a quire and is followed by a companion text, ‘Þe pater noster vndo on englissch’ (fol. 72r), where each petition in Latin is marked with a decorated initial and immediately explained 25 Richard Brow[ne] and William Bro[wne] (fol. 183r), William Browne (fol. 204r). The names on folio 183 have been cropped by the binder’s knife. In the facsimile (1977) and the website (2003) they are read as ‘Drow’ and ‘Dro’, although the initial letter is the same as that in ‘Browne’ on folio 204 (a name not noted in 1977 or 2003). 26 In a paper at the Auchinleck Manuscript conference at London in 2008, Nicole Clifton reported on ongoing research into the Brownes of Stamford. 27 The cropped title of this unique text is given as ‘[On þe seuen dedly] sinnes’ (Index of Middle English Verse 1760).



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‘Al on englissch’, with explicit reassurance that salvation is for both ‘lewede and clerkes’. The participating ‘we’ constructed by the text is similarly inclusive, naming ‘maiden’ and ‘wif ’, as well as the ’ȝonge’. Taken together, these two texts provide a programme of basic education in the rudiments of the Christian faith suitable for elementary teaching and learning in the family environment. The decorative design of the manuscript seems not to have included a miniature for this pair of texts, for no space has been left within the column as in all other cases where a miniature heads the text.28 However, apparently to mark the importance of these educational verses, a miniature has been placed in the only available space at the top of folio 72, squeezed beside the end of the first item and against the initial letter of ‘Pater’. It is clear that this was a contemporary addition to the original plan, not a later insertion, because it has displaced the scribal item number (usually placed in the centre of the top margin), and the initial ‘P’ has none of the marginal pen-work flourishes that adorn all the other initials but would have conflicted here. The miniature is provided with the same border design and the same gold background as extant illuminations in the manuscript. It shows Christ seated in judgement, his right hand raised, and holding in his left a long scroll which frames the words ‘Pater noster’ in the text below, thus bringing together the two texts: one ending with a vision of judgement and the other focused on the Lord’s Prayer. The penitential themes that are so prominent in this pair of texts can be traced in many of the longer works in the manuscript, both saints’ lives and romances, and a case can be made for reading these elementary texts, marked for easy identification by the added miniature, as the first stage in a larger educational programme within the manuscript as a whole. The Thornton manuscript (c. 1430–40), in contrast with the Auchinleck manuscript, is clearly prepared for the personal use of its compiler, Robert Thornton. Not only does it bear his name in explicits (fols. 98v, 211v), in pious scribal ejaculations (fols. 98v, 213r) and as part of the decorative scheme (fol. 93v); but his name also appears inserted in the appropriate places, marked ‘N’, in the prayer for deliverance that begins: ‘Domine deus omnipotens Pater’ (fol. 177r).29 This personalized ‘Orysone’ is prefaced by a long introduction in English prose giving assurance of the efficacy of the prayer against all manner of bodily and spiritual harm, and explaining how to use the prayer to produce protective and therapeutic amulets. It is one of a group of pious texts copied at 28

This comment is based on the extant miniatures or sites where miniatures have been excised; in other cases whole folios have been removed. 29 For detailed discussion of Thornton’s religious texts from the point of view of transmission and compilation rather than use, see J. J. Thompson, ‘Another Look at the Religious Texts in Lincoln, Cathedral Library, MS 91’, in Late-Medieval Religious Texts and Their Transmission: Essays in Honour of A. I. Doyle, ed. A. J. Minnis (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 169–87.

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the end of the tenth quire, after the sequence of narratives occupying the first of the three large booklet sections into which the manuscript is divided. These texts include a trio of charms for the ‘Tethe Werke’, two in English and the last in Latin (though titled in English), and a copy of the ‘Epistola Sancti Saluatoris’, a magical prayer allegedly sent by Pope Leo to Charlemagne with the promise that whoever carries it with him, ‘in die qua eam viderit vel legerit’, will not die by the sword, burning or drowning, or be harmed by man, devil or other creature (fol. 176v). After the personalized prayer are ‘A Preyere Off The Fyve Joyes of owre lady [in] Inglys and Of the Fyve Sorowes’, a Latin prayer to be said in conjunction with Psalm 141: ‘Say þis psalme Voce mea ad dominum clamaui with this Colett folowande þat es full merytorye’,30 and a set of brief devotions in Latin, headed ‘Here Bygynnys Fyve prayeres to the wirchipe of the Fyve Wondys of oure lorde Ihesu Cryste’ (fols. 177v–8r). On the last leaf is a fragmentary prayer on the gifts of the Holy Ghost, titled ‘Oracio in Inglys’, followed by three Latin prayers headed ‘A Colett to owre lady saynt Marye’, ‘Oracio in Modo Collectus pro Amico’ and ‘Antiphona Sancti Leonardi cum Collectu’ (fol. 178v). What is interesting about this sequence of pious texts is the evidence it provides to suggest different users. The prayer to accompany Psalm 141 offers another opportunity to personalize the text: ‘libera me Miserum famulum tuum :N: de peccatis meis’, but in this case Robert Thornton has not inserted his name, leaving the direction ‘Say þis psalme’ open to any reader. Many of the prayers on folios 177v–8v seem designed to appeal to readers not proficient in Latin, either advertising the fact that they are ‘in Inglys’ or giving an English description of the Latin contents; they may have been intended for female or child readers, though there are no specific indications of use. The ‘magical’ pious texts on folios 176v and 177r, on the other hand, where Thornton did adapt one for his own personal use, appear to have been heavily used, for the opening is very markedly more soiled and damaged than the folios before and after it in the quire.31 The relationship implied between the compiler/user and other readers of this group of pious texts is that of one with an interest in, or responsibility for, the guidance and spiritual welfare of the others, and this concern is reflected in Thornton’s copying of the text known as John Gaytryge’s Sermon or The Lay Folks’ Catechism in the second of his booklet sections. This section of the manuscript brings together a number of texts appropriate to the devout lay person wishing to follow in some measure the spiritual discipline of a religious life within his or her own lay state. John Gaytryge’s Sermon, an expanded English 30

Psalm 141 is headed in the Douai translation ‘A psalm of David in extremity of danger’. Thornton’s ‘magical’ prayers are discussed in the context of pre-Reformation lay piety and ‘superstition’ in E. Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England c.1400–c.1580 (New Haven, 1992), pp. 267, 272–5. 31



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version of Archbishop Thoresby’s digest of essential Christian doctrine for the instruction of the laity, is not addressed directly to the individual layman: it takes the form of a homily to be given by the parish clergy in accordance with the archbishop’s intention. Thornton’s copy, however, includes a heading indicating a different use: ‘Here begynnes a sermon þat Dan John Gaytryge made, þe whilke teches how scrifte es to be made and whareof and in how many thyngez solde be consederide’ (fol. 213v). The relevance of the text to Thornton’s programme of spirituality may thus be twofold: on the one hand it can be used, as the heading implies, when preparing for the sacrament of penance by self-examination of conscience under the specific categories listed – Thornton has highlighted this function with the word ‘Scrifte’ in the margin beside the heading, and the sermon is prefaced in the manuscript by a brief act of contrition in English verse (fol. 213v). On the other hand, the introduction indicates that parents as well as parish clergy are responsible for educating children in the essential elements of Christian doctrine: And he byddes and commandes in all þat he may þat all þat hase cure or kepynge vndir hym // Enioyne þair parischennes and þair sugettes // þat þay here and lere þise ilke sex thynges // And oftesythes reherse þam till þat þay cun þam // And sythen teche þam þair childir if þay any haue whate tym so þay are of elde to lere þam. (fol. 214r)

The text can thus be seen to address a variety of needs within a household or family context, and besides Thornton’s added emphasis on its penitential function, there are interesting signs in the manuscript of its being used for instructional purposes. The sermon is divided into six sections with numbered descriptive headings, and following the fourth of Gaytryge’s ‘sex thynges’, dealing with the seven bodily and ghostly works of mercy, Thornton has included a set of Latin mnemonics before the heading for the next section: vij opera misericordie corporalia :: vnde versus vestio // cibo // poto // redimo // tego // colligo [//] condo vij opera misericordie spiritualia Consule // castiga // solare // remitte // fer // ora Instrue si poteris sic Christo carus haberis. (fol. 217r)

This page is heavily marked with marginal inscriptions and scribbles, unlike the rest of the text, which is almost entirely unmarked. The usefulness of the mnemonics in helping the reader both to memorize the elements of doctrine and to rehearse the lists of Latin words like a school vocabulary exercise makes them particularly suitable for instructing young boys, and the marginalia surrounding them perhaps support this function. Besides the practice letters and pen trials, there is an elaborately written fragment from the opening verse

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of Psalm 112, ‘PRAyse the Lorde O ye children pra[yse ye the name of the Lord]’, and ‘Pater noster’, in an inexpert display script.32 At the end of Thornton’s large booklet of spiritual reading, another little group of pious texts like those at the end of the first section fills the last few folios, and again gives evidence of personal use while also presenting most of the Latin texts with English headings, making them accessible to readers without Latin. The first demonstrates that the book was in active use a hundred years after it was written, for in accord with the royal proclamation of 16 November 1538, its reference to St Thomas of Canterbury has been crossed out: ‘Ista oracio quae sequitur est de vij gaudia beate marie virginis per Sanctum Thomam Et Martirem Cantuariensem Archepiscopum edita’ (fol. 277v). It is followed by three more Latin hymns and prayers that, like this one, resemble the texts included in contemporary primers: ‘Anoþer Salutacioun till owre lady of hir fyve Ioyes’, ‘Ane antyme to þe Fadir of heuen wt a Colett’, ‘A noþer antym of þe passyoun of criste Ihesu’. A further text, headed ‘A Colecte of grete pardon vn to crist Ihesu’, is copied consecutively with a rubric promising protection from enemies to anyone who reads the prayer ‘Salue sancta facies’ while looking at the picture of the Holy Face (‘inspeciendo Figuram’).33 However, the text that follows immediately overleaf is a different hymn in veneration of the Arma Christi, and then, with the heading ‘A Preyere to þe Wounde in Crystis Syde’, the well-known ‘Salue plaga lateris nostri redemptoris’, both with an anthem and prayer. At the top of this page (fol. 278v) Thornton has inscribed his own personal plea for mercy: ‘Thornton Misereatur mei deu | Miserere mei deus’, and alongside the opening of the final item, Earth to Earth (fol. 279r), has added ‘Perce mihi domine nihil enim | dies mei / quid est homo quia ‘, the beginning of the first reading of ‘Dirige’, in the Office for the Dead. The heading to Earth to Earth is given unusual prominence in a large display script: ‘Memento Homo Quod Cinis Es | Et in cenerem Reuerteris’ (the verse recited by the priest applying the ashes to the parishioner’s forehead on Ash Wednesday), and the poem concludes with the motto ‘Mors Soluit Omnia’. As Eamon Duffy shows, the cult of Christ’s Wounds was closely bound up with the late-medieval approach to death and judgement (pp. 243–8), 32

A similar hand can be seen on an earlier opening, where Edward Thornton has inscribed his name after copying out a line of the text, though this reveals both his lack of Latin and his misreading of Robert Thornton’s script, for he renders the word redempcio as ‘redempao’ (fols. 193v–4r). 33 Neither the prayer nor the image of the Holy Face is present, though the directions require the reader to say ‘hanc salutationem ad faciem saluatoris nostri … cum tota oracione et versus et colecta’ (fol. 278r): presumably these were available elsewhere. Thompson compares the indulgenced Latin devotions with accompanying illustrations in Cambridge, Trinity College, MS O. 3. 10 as typical of the kind of manuscript source behind Thornton’s texts (Thompson, ‘Another Look’, p. 174, n. 19).



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and this personalized opening at the end of Robert Thornton’s compilation of religious texts (fols. 278v–9r) seems to represent his selection of material for the practice of devotions and meditation in preparation for a good death. John Thompson identifies both groups of pious texts at the ends of Thornton’s first and second sections of the volume as ‘filler items’, ‘late additions’ after the assembly of the separate sections ‘to form a major single one-volume household library’,34 but this need not imply a secondary status for these texts in terms of the use of the manuscript. Like the addition of favourite prayers on blank spaces and family birth and death dates in the kalendars35 that are often found in books of hours and primers, these texts, typical of the concerns of pious lay people from top to bottom of late-medieval society, may have been inserted where they would be readily accessible for the frequent use that the state of the pages seems to indicate. At some stage in the assembly process Thornton added the words ‘In nomine Patris et filii et spiritui | Amen par charite amen’ in the upper margin alongside the title of Morte Arthure (fol. 53r). A similar invocation heads the opening page of The Previte off the Passioune (fol. 179r), but whereas this looks like an integral part of the process of copying, supporting Thompson’s suggestion that ‘the act of copying material for Thornton’s “religious” section was, or became, a devotional exercise of some kind’ (p. 174), the invocation at the beginning of Morte Arthure appears to be a later addition. One possible explanation is that it might relate to the practice of reading aloud: just as children were taught to begin their recitation of the alphabet with the sign of the cross and to end with ‘Amen’, making a prayer of the exercise, so the reading aloud of Morte Arthure, which opens with a substantial eleven-line prayer and presents the deeds of ‘elders of alde tym’ who ‘louede god almyghty’ (ll. 13–14), could be appropriately begun with the sign of the cross.36 The reading aloud might be by adult or young readers – Orme suggests an adult reading in a household gathering as one model of young people experiencing narratives while Chaucer’s famous vignette of a maiden reading a romance to a group of ladies in Troilus and Criseyde (II. 81–4) provides another.37 There is a piece of evidence in the Thornton manuscript that may suggest inexperienced practitioners were among the readers of the texts: in the blank column beside the end of the extract from The Prick of Conscience, the last major text in the ‘religious’ section (fol. 277r), an alphabet 34

Thompson, ‘Another Look’, pp. 174–5. Family data of this kind are added in the Thornton manuscript, fol. 49v. 36 For a contemporary example of a text beginning with this formula, see John Russell’s Boke of Nurture, in The Babees Book: Manners and Meals in Olden Time, ed. F. J. Furnivall, EETS OS 32 (1868), p. 117. 37 Orme, Medieval Children, pp. 274–5. For the practice of social reading in the late Middle Ages, see Coleman, Public Reading and the Reading Public. 35

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with the conventional ‘Aa’ opening, alternative letter forms, and Latin abbreviations and ‘Amen’ has been formally set out in two vertical lines in a sixteenthcentury cursive script. This looks rather like the provision of an alphabet not simply for teaching the rudiments of reading, but specifically for using the texts at hand in the manuscript as reading material – a ‘palaeographical’ alphabet perhaps to assist the unfamiliar reader.38 An unusual feature of the layout in Thornton’s copy of The Prose Alexander and in some other of his English prose texts may provide further evidence of the practice of reading aloud. ‘Catchwords’ appear on most pages, both recto and verso, of The Prose Alexander, and on many pages of most of the religious works in English prose between folio 197 and folio 258: a word or phrase written at the end of the text-block in the lower margin of the page, usually enclosed in a bracket, that corresponds to the opening word(s) of the following page.39 In fact, the repetition is not always as precise as this: the repeated material may include words from within the text-block besides the bracketed ‘catchword’. In some cases the lack of a ‘catchword’ coincides with a break in the text, as at fols. 29v–30r, 36v–7r, 200r–v, 204v–5r, for example. Occasionally there is no ‘catchword’ but duplication of text occurs nevertheless, where the last word(s) of the previous page are repeated at the beginning of the next (see, for example, fols. 7r–v, 201r–v, 223r–v, 233v–4r). While these duplications might otherwise be explicable as mere instances of scribal dittography, taken together with such a frequent occurrence of deliberately placed ‘catchwords’, they look like part of a coherent system (even though it has not been completely consistently carried out). There seems no obvious function that this system could have served either in Thornton’s copying of his texts or in the assembly of his quires. However, a possible purpose may be discerned if the texts were being prepared for the practice of reading aloud: the repetition of words was perhaps intended to help the reader, particularly if not a very experienced reader, to follow the continuous sense of the text across the page division or the turn of the leaf, and so to make a smooth transition to the next page in reading the prose text aloud. The Thornton manuscript thus demonstrates through different kinds of material evidence a variety of ways in which it was probably used within the

38

For documentation of alphabets in manuscripts and the use of alphabets in teaching reading, see Orme, Medieval Children, pp. 246–72 and notes. 39 Thompson interprets these ‘puzzling catchphrases’ as part of Thornton’s compilation procedures (Thompson, Robert Thornton and the London Thornton MS, p. 20, n. 4); however, this would not account for the use of catchwords from the recto to the verso of the same leaf. According to R. B. McKerrow, catchwords were not used at all by the earliest English printers, and catchwords at the foot of each page (rather than at ends of gatherings) not until the sixteenth century (An Introduction to Bibliography for Literary Students (Oxford, 1927), p. 83). See also P. Gaskell, A New Introduction to Bibliography (Oxford, 1972), p. 59.



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household, and similar traces of use can be found in other domestic ­miscellanies. Frances McSparran has likened Cambridge University Library, MS Ff. 2. 38 to the Thornton manuscript in terms of its contents, a ‘combination of romances with religious, didactic and informative material’, and its readership of ‘devout and literate layfolk’;40 however, while it is similarly the work of a single scribe who organized his material into a sequence differentiating works of religious instruction and devotion from narrative texts, it bears no signs of personal use. Its purpose is described by Pamela Robinson as ‘a reading book for all the members of a family’ (p. xvii), and the range of its texts does seem designed more directly to meet the needs of both adults and children. For instance, whereas the presence of John Gaytryge’s Sermon in Thornton’s compilation recognizes the duty of parents to provide their children with instruction in the stipulated elements of doctrine, MS Ff. 2. 38 itself contains a group of short texts consisting mostly of versified teaching on each of these six elements (fols. 32r–3v).41 As McSparran argues, ‘Those who could profit from the more sophisticated religious works which precede them could have little use for this kind of material, and it is hard to avoid the conclusion that they were included in this manuscript to provide for the instruction of children’ (p. viii). In accord with pedagogic tradition, the use of verse would make it easier for children to memorize the texts and learn the required basic doctrine, while in the case of one of the two prose texts in this group (two consecutive chapters extracted from the English prose version of St Edmund Rich’s Merure de Seinte Eglise), on the seven sacraments, the scribe has apparently tried to make it easier to understand and learn the text by highlighting the names of the sacraments in display script (fol. 33v).42 Display script is used consistently for the headings of the whole group of nine instructional texts (besides Thoresby’s six items it includes the bodily and ghostly wits and the ghostly works of mercy as a separate item). After the first of them, ‘Here endyþ þe salutacion of oure lady . And begynneþ þe x commandementis of almyȝty god’ (fol. 32r), the scribe ceases his previous practice of noting in the heading the end of one text and the beginning of the next, and just signals each new item with the same formula indicating the number of points to be learned in each category – ‘Here suen þe vij werkis of merci bodili’, and so on – leaving no extra space between items as with previous texts. He also adopts the smaller red lombards, previously used at textual subdivisions, instead of the usual large capital at the start of a new text, so creating the impression that these nine short instructional items form 40

McSparran and Robinson, Cambridge University Library MS Ff. 2. 38, p. vii. As McSparran explains (p. viii), one of these items seems to be a substitute for the text elsewhere, given the heading used here: ‘The vii vertues contrarie to þe vii dedli synnes’. 42 The names of the first two are not noted, and for the sacrament of the altar the scribe has instead highlighted the words ‘The fourthe’. 41

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a single connected sequence. All these details suggest an attempt to present the material as an easily accessible programme of tasks. There are, nevertheless, fewer signs of actual use than found surrounding the mnemonics on the seven works of mercy in the Thornton manuscript. The evidence of this kind in MS Ff. 2. 38 includes: the general grubbiness of the pages in this part of the manuscript as compared with the later gatherings of romances, the crossing out of the whole of ‘þe lyf of seynt thomas’ (fols 38r–49r) – a witness to the continued use of the volume – and an early sixteenth century secretary alphabet inscribed in the lower margin of folio 10v which may suggest that the book was being used to teach reading and/or writing. Unlike the Thornton manuscript, CUL MS Ff. 2. 38 contains no texts in Latin, and where items include Latin lemmata,43 these are written in display script to distinguish them from the body of the text and are translated into English in the adjacent lines. Nevertheless, there is some evidence indicating an expectation of readers proficient in Latin, for in the margins of ‘the markys of medytacyouns’ (the text known as Stimulus conscientie minor) the scribe has included two descriptive annotations: ‘de penis purgatorii’ (fol. 15v) and ‘de miseria humana’ (fol. 16v); but the texts themselves are all equally available to any reader in the household whether or not they are able to read Latin. Both these manuscripts evidently remained unbound in quires for a considerable time during the compilation process, but when they were bound up as single volumes their large folio format and substantial size would have given them some prominence among the household’s possessions. The two other domestic miscellanies selected, the Heege manuscript and the Rate manuscript, present somewhat different impressions. The Heege manuscript, a quarto volume, measures only half the size of the Thornton manuscript and MS Ff. 2. 38, and while it makes quite a thick book as bound, there is a good deal of evidence from the collation, the state of the leaves and the arrangement of the texts to show that it was very probably originally used as a series of small unbound self-contained booklets of between ten and sixty folios.44 The selection of texts in each booklet and, in many cases, signs of minor editorial adaptation in the texts support the view that the booklets were variously designed to meet the different needs of a range of readers within the household, adult and juvenile, male and female. The contrast with the single large family volume need not, however, be taken to imply that the Heege manuscript is witness to a change in reading habits from reading as a social group activity to private reading by solitary individuals. As is implied by the paratextual material in the Thornton manuscript and MS Ff. 2. 38, the books could be used in a variety

43 44

In ‘the markys of medytacyouns’ (fols. 14v–19r) and ‘a tretice of þre arowes’ (fols. 33v–5r). See The Heege Manuscript, pp. 13–39.



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of reading situations: by the single reader engaged in private devotions; by the ‘public’ reader performing for a group of listeners; by learning readers practising and demonstrating their skill; by a teaching adult giving basic religious instruction to one or more children. The Heege manuscript offers opportunities for the same range of activities, except, surprisingly, for the last: it contains none of the didactic texts concerned with the rudiments of the faith that are so characteristic of family miscellanies, despite showing clear signs of having been used for educational purposes.45 Of course, the make-up of the manuscript as a collection of independent booklets raises the possibility that other booklets, once part of the collection, have been lost,46 and it would not be surprising if a booklet of elementary texts for children had survived less well than the extant booklets, some of which do indeed show considerable signs of wear and tear. However, one text in the collection explicitly assumes a readership at the elementary stage of Christian education. Three of the booklets are designed to the same format, having a ‘penitential’ verse romance47 followed by a courtesy poem clearly aimed at young readers.48 Two of the courtesy texts (Urbanitatis and The Lyttyl Childrens Book) are concerned with the child’s behaviour in polite company; the third, titled Þe Masse, an extract from The Layfolks Mass Book (fols. 57r–9v), instructs the reader how to behave at Mass and how to participate in the service as fully as possible, using whatever he or she has already learned. So, as the priest begins the Mass, the reader is told: ‘Sey ye wt hym confiteor / Or ellus in ynglysch þus þerfor’ and a nota in the margin marks the first line of the English translation of the prayer. At the end of the Confiteor, the text directs the reader to say ‘Pater noster and aue’ and Heege has added in the margin ‘pater aue and credo’. Elementary education began with these basic prayers and went on to include the Confiteor and Misereatur from the Mass.49 The reader is then encouraged to listen to the priest ‘yf þu oght of letters kon’ and to make the responses, but if unable to follow the Mass, ‘on a boke þi selfe rede’, or, if ‘þu kan not rede ne 45

See The Heege Manuscript, pp. 39–47. There is a small piece of evidence to suggest this may be so in the title added to the first folio of Sent Kateryne (the Prose Life of St Katherine) to replace the one cropped by the binder: a later hand has written ‘vita margarite’ and then struck out part of the name, substituting ‘cata’ (fol. 30r). Lives of St Katherine and St Margaret are frequently found together (as in, for example, MS Ff. 2. 38), and it is possible that this later reader had copies of both lives in front of him or her and accidentally transposed the titles at first. 47 The term is taken from A. Hopkins, The Sinful Knights: A Study of Middle English Penitential Romance (Oxford, 1990). 48 The Lyttyl Childrens Book is addressed to ‘my son’ (fols. 84v, 86r). 49 See the discussion by Cullum and Goldberg cited above; and see The Winchester Anthology, fol. 120r for a typical primer sequence of alphabet and prayers in English in a schoolmaster’s anthology. 46

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sey / þi pater noster þu reyherse ey’ (fol. 58r). Simple prayers in English are supplied to assist the reader’s involvement at the reading of the Gospel and at the Offertory, and Heege has again added a marginal nota (fol. 58v). The text has thus been presented in a form suitable for a reader who knows the Pater Noster, Ave and Creed and can read the other prayers in English. Like MS Ff. 2. 38, the Heege manuscript contains no texts in Latin, but there is more use of Latin in subsidiary positions; not only in Latin lemmata in Tundale but in lines of Latin in macaronic poems and Latin refrains, in the marginal Latin verses of the Nunc dimittis in Lydgate’s Life of Our Lady and the Latin descriptio at the end of Heege’s copy, and, most tellingly, in two humorous contexts. The first is in a mock sermon (fols. 7v–10r), where the ‘preacher’ takes as his theme ‘Mollificant olera durissima crusta’, adding a further ‘text’: ‘superatibus potatorum nolite tymere’;50 and the other is in a brief tongue-in-cheek truth claim added at the end of a nonsense poem: ‘Secundum Recardum Heeg quia ipse fuit ad istum convivium et non habuit potum’ (fol. 60v). Although the sense of all these texts would be accessible to a reader without Latin, it seems likely that the scribe expected at least some readers to be able to appreciate the full pleasures of the dual-language items. The mock sermon also gives evidence that it was intended to be read aloud, presumably as social entertainment: like the Thornton prose texts, where its pages do not conclude with a period, they have been prepared for easy transition by the repetition of the last word of one page at the beginning of the next (fols. 8v–9r). The only other prose text in the Heege manuscript, The Prose Life of St Katherine, provides more striking evidence of the same preparation for reading aloud, suggesting by the scale on which it has been carried out that it may have been aimed at an inexperienced reader in need of considerable assistance.51 Instead of using catchwords, Heege has employed a variety of methods to indicate to the reader whether the sense is complete at the end of each page or whether it continues overleaf. In some cases a break is marked with a repetition of the usual rubricated period mark (e.g. fol. 35r) or with an additional pause mark (e.g. fol. 38v); in others Heege has left space at the end of the page instead of continuing with the next sentence (e.g. fol. 39v), maybe filling out the space with line-fillers (e.g. fol. 35v); and he has sometimes reduced the size and spacing of his writing (e.g. fol. 35r) or added an extra half line at the bottom of the page (e.g. fols. 42v, 43r) in order to fit in the last word(s) of the sentence.52 50

See M. Jones, ‘The Parodic Sermon in Medieval and Early Modern England’, Medium Ævum 66 (1997), 94–114. 51 See P. Hardman, ‘“This litel child, his litel book”: Some Late-Medieval Narratives for Children’, Journal of the Early Book Society 7 (2004), 51–66 for further discussion of this text. 52 On folio 42, Heege apparently decided to delete the last line and begin the sentence afresh at the top of the following page.



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Where the sense continues on the next page, a hyphen usually indicates the fact (e.g. fols. 30r, 30v), or when the reader is required to carry the sense overleaf, the last word(s) of the recto are often repeated on the verso (e.g. fols. 34r–v, 37r–v). Evidence that verse texts in the Heege manuscript were also intended to be read aloud is slighter: as in the Thornton manuscript, verse texts are given none of the continuation techniques applied to prose. However, Heege does employ an exceptionally clear system of rhyme brackets throughout the manuscript, visually differentiating tail-rhymes from couplets, for example,53 and where a couplet or quatrain continues across a page break the reader’s attention is drawn to the fact by large half-brackets extending into the lower and upper margins of both adjacent pages (e.g. fols. 92r–v, 99v–100r, 160r–v). Sixteenthcentury marginal notes suggest that verse texts continued to be read aloud: ‘thes llesun ys of ser Isembras’ (fol. 49r), ‘thys lesvn is of tvndale that wecked man’ (fol. 123r), ‘Tvndale voys Wyllyam’ (fol. 126r), ‘here ys a lyesun of Tundalle that wykyd man’ (fol. 138v). Even the reader’s gesture is perhaps indicated at some points, where the scribe’s note ‘ihc’ in the margin beside a mention of the name Jesus in Lydgate’s Life of Our Lady may signal that one should bow one’s head on saying the holy name (fols. 179v, 182v). There is other evidence, though, to imply that private reading was also expected. Not only are the Latin annotations in the Life of Our Lady aimed at the studious individual reader but the scribal use of nota bene phrases in this text suggests that the reader should pay particular attention to certain passages that collectively build a picture of ideal, and perhaps specifically female, conduct. For example, in the margins beside and below the line ‘And for þey wold in all þyng obey’ Heege has written ‘nota bene’ and ‘take gud hed’ (fol. 191v); ‘take hede’ appears alongside the description of Mary’s exemplary behaviour ‘most femynyne of chere’: … hur looke cast a down wt al þe port of womonly clennes hur self demenyng and chefly wt mekenes.  (fol. 193v)

Beside the contrast of Mary’s meekness with sinful pride is written ‘mekenes’ (fol. 194r); ‘take gud hede’ is placed in a box in the margin below Lydgate’s advice to use ‘Ysowd Elyn and also feyr polycene’ as a ‘kalendere’, a reminder ‘þat all schall passe // Aray and eke ryches / when ye lest wene // and all your semelynes’ (fol. 195r). Such exhortations are more than marks of emphasis and seem to require the reader to pause and ‘inwardly digest’ the passage in question. 53 The exception is Heege’s copy of Sir Isumbras, where he uses a two-column layout for the tail-rhyme stanza, perhaps adopted from his exemplar (see The Heege Manuscript, pp. 25–8).

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MS Ashmole 61, the Rate manuscript, is remarkably free of scribal nota marks or annotations by users that could be construed as evidence of use or of particular reading practices. One possible instance is a cross, drawn within a square, that appears in the margin on three occasions, twice beside a mention of the devil – ‘The deuyll of hell’ (fol. 63r) and ‘þe fendes felle’ (fol. 65r). Like the crosses that instruct the reader where to make the sign of the cross in liturgical or ‘magical’ texts, this too may be a signal to the reader to bless himor herself. Studies of the idiosyncrasies presented by Rate’s copies of his texts have supported the view that this manuscript was deliberately and thoroughly prepared for family reading, not just in the selection but in the editing of texts.54 In this context, his copy of Stimulus conscientie minor, like that in CUL MS Ff. 2. 38, stands out for its inclusion of a set of Latin, rather than English, marginal notes: ‘de penis purgatorij’ (fol. 121v), ‘De gaudiis celi’ (fol. 122r), ‘De miseria mundi’ (fol. 122v), ‘Vnde venisti’, ‘Quid es’, ‘Vbi es’ (fol. 123v), and so on. As Lynne Blanchfield observes, ‘the slight amount of Latin in the manuscript is at a very simple level’,55 and it seems not impossible that these annotations might have been retained for teaching purposes. Similarly, Rate’s copy of the lyric ‘Wyth scherp thornys þat be kene’ (also shared with MS Ff. 2. 38), headed ‘Sequitur septem peccata mortalia’ (fol. 150v), has been prepared in a manner suitable for didactic use with subdivisions: ‘Aȝens pride’, and so on, to draw attention to the topics of the individual sins and their remedies. The most remarkable physical features of the Rate manuscript are its format and its decoration. As has often been noted, the paper of the manuscript was originally folded for quarto format, like the Heege manuscript, but it was refolded along the length of the sheets, producing the tall, narrow volume that has been described as a holster book. It is a very appropriate and economical format for the texts selected, all of which are in short lines of verse, and indeed each opening presents the same appearance as a page of a folio volume in twocolumn format, such as MS Ff. 2. 38. Without reverting to the early hypothesis that MS Ashmole 61 is a travelling minstrel’s repertory, it is reasonable to suppose that the choice of format was directed both by the intended layout of the selected texts and by the ease of carrying and holding open the volume for reading aloud in a social context. The decoration in the manuscript is of two kinds: on the one hand the illustration of the Shield of the Passion that 54 See R. Ginn, ‘A Critical Edition of the Two Texts of Sir Cleges’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, Queen’s University Belfast, 1967); L. S. Blanchfield, ‘The Romances in MS Ashmole 61: An Idiosyncratic Scribe’, in Romance in Medieval England, ed. M. Mills, J. Fellows and C. M. Meale (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 63–87 and ‘Rate Revisited: The Compilation of the Narrative Works in MS Ashmole 61’, in Romance Reading on the Book: Essays on Medieval Narrative Presented to Maldwyn Mills, ed. J. Fellows, R. Field, G. Rogers and J. Weiss (Cardiff, 1996), pp. 208–20. 55 Blanchfield, ‘Romances in MS Ashmole 61’, p. 79.



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forms the conclusion to the poem ‘The Short Charter of Christ’ (fol. 106r), and on the other hand the drawings of fish and flowers that frequently accompany the scribe’s explicit formula ‘Amen quod Rate’ and also appear in the lower margin of many folios.56 The fish are all on the same model: pointing left and resembling the conventional fish often used to represent the Zodiac sign Pisces. The flowers are either stylized roses with five, six or four petals or stylized sunflowers, on a spray with leaves, buds and/or tendrils. Occasionally the fish has a spray of flowers in its mouth. As Mary Carruthers has shown, both flowers and fish frequently appear in manuscript decoration and marginalia as allusions to the well-known tropes of gathering nectar from the flowers of texts ‘to furnish the cells of memory’ and of fishing for remembered material in the trained memory.57 A possible interpretation of these drawings, then, is that they are visual stimuli, periodically reminding the reader of the importance of committing to memory the lessons of the texts. None of the other manuscripts examined here has illustrations of this kind, but in each of them there is evidence of the scribe’s or a reader’s recognizing the importance of memory in the process of reading. In the Heege manuscript, the scribe’s annotation of the Life of Our Lady with nota bene signs, as described above, indicates memorable passages and thus promotes a particular reading of the text. In CUL MS Ff. 2. 38, the distinctive layout and headings in the section of the manuscript containing instructive texts on the elements of the faith are designed to imprint the structure of the material on the reader’s memory, and in the Thornton manuscript it appears that a sixteenth-century reader in the collection of works by Richard Rolle has marked as memorable the exemplary tale ‘De imperfecta contricione’ with a marginal drawing of a knot, another traditional metaphoric idea for the function of memory. Training the memory was of course central to the idea of a Christian education and, indeed, it could be argued that the fundamental purpose of all these household miscellanies, with their highly conservative programmes of reading and teaching materials, was to construct and preserve the collective memory of the household, and to present it in a form that would facilitate the all-important function of passing it on to the next generation.

56

The description of the images in K. L. Scott et al., An Index of Images in English Manuscripts from the Time of Chaucer to Henry VIII: The Bodleian Library, Oxford, 3 vols. (Turnhout, 2000), I: MSS Additional-Digby, lists them all as ‘text dividers … between units of text’ (p. 34). 57 The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 246–7.

Anne Lawrence-Mathers

Domesticating the Calendar: The Hours and the Almanac in Tudor England*

T

he printed almanacs of sixteenth-century England represent something of a challenge to historians. On the one hand it is clear that, in their own time, these publications were enormously popular and influential; but on the other hand their printed contents are so formulaic and repetitive as to appear almost empty of valuable information. Their most striking feature is the ubiquity of astrological terminology and information. This, together with the scale of their popularity, has led to their being considered in the past as ‘merely’ the repository of what was seen as popular superstition. The Victorian editors and cataloguers who did so much to make the contents of archives known to scholars tended to pass rapidly over the almanacs, and it was only in the first quarter of the twentieth century that one scholar took on the enormous task of cataloguing and discussing all the known and surviving versions of English almanacs up to the year 1600.1 This scholar, Eustace Bosanquet, also traced a brief history of their development in his introduction to a facsimile edition of Thomas Buckminster’s Prognostication for 1598.2 This brief narrative opens with the late fifteenth century enterprises of pioneer printers such as Wynkyn de Worde, who produced almanacs setting out the phases of the moon, and lists of dates of movable feasts, for up to twelve years at a time. As Bosanquet here points out, it was not until the second half of the sixteenth century that the concept of combining an almanac and prognostication, both calculated for

* I am grateful to the University of Reading for a grant from the Research Endowment Trust Fund to support the research on which this essay is based. 1 E. F. Bosanquet, Early English Almanacks and Prognostications: A Bibliographical History to the Year 1600 (London, 1918). 2 T. Buckminster, An Almanack and Prognostication for the Year 1598, ed. E. F. Bosanquet, Shakespeare Association Facsimiles 8 (London, 1935), pp. v–xiv.

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the year immediately following publication, became standardized. This immediately raises questions about the relationship between the rise of the almanacs and the impact of both the new medium of print and of the Reformation; however, both of these are outside the scope of Bosanquet’s brief account. B. S. Capp, in his full-length study of English almanacs, published in 1979, still considers almanacs predominantly as illustrative of the public’s belief in, and fascination with, astrological prediction.3 The title of his monograph is Astrology and the Popular Press: English Almanacs 1500–1800, and the first chapter, on ‘The Development of the Almanac’, focuses primarily on the history of the publication of astrological predictions in the late fifteenth century, and of how these were harnessed into highly popular annual publications which became, by the late sixteenth century, the familiar, annual ‘Almanac and Prognostication’. Capp does discuss the relationship between astrology and medicine, and the extent to which astrology itself was considered as a science in early-modern England; and yet little space is given to the link between the information given in the almanacs and the growing investigation into the exact movements of stars and planets which also characterized the period. The discussion of astronomy occupies thirteen pages and is confined primarily to the seventeenth century, with the almanac-compilers considered as popularizers rather than pioneers.4 In one area Capp does go into important issues not considered by Bosanquet, and that is in considering the relationship between the popularity of the almanacs and the impact and enforcement of the Reformation. However, unsurprisingly in a book published in 1979, he follows the lead of Keith Thomas’s groundbreaking publication of 1971, Religion and the Decline of Magic, and argues that the popularity of both astrologers and almanacs suggests that ‘they were seen as supplying a need apparently ignored by the English Church after the Reformation: the harnessing of supernatural powers to help men avert danger and overcome obstacles in their daily lives’.5 It would be unfair to criticize Capp’s book for being a product of its time; yet this can hardly be considered a full explanation, given that the genre of the almanac took shape and achieved widespread popularity before and during the Reformation, as well as after it. From the perspective of the decade immediately following the calendarfixation of the year 2000, it is striking that the aspect of almanacs which was of least interest to these early pioneers was precisely their function as affordable, highly portable, annual calendars, which could be chosen, personalized

3

B. S. Capp, Astrology and the Popular Press: English Almanacs 1500–1800 (London, 1979). For a survey of the overall scope of writing in this and related fields, see G. R. Keiser, ‘Works of Science and Information’, in A Manual of the Writings in Middle English, 1050–1500, ed. A. E. Hartung et al., X (New Haven CT, 1998), pp. 3593–967. 5 Capp, English Almanacs, p. 20. 4

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and carried for constant consultation. In a society in which all aspects of the calendar are immediately available, from the numbering of the year to the dating of each day, as well as the calculation of the basic units which make it possible to ‘tell the time’ across the whole globe at any given moment, it is hard to imagine a time when knowledge of the calendar was a specialized skill, confined to a highly educated few. Yet, looking anew at the development of the almanac in sixteenth-century England, it is precisely its democratization, its transformation of the written, formal calendar from a product of ecclesiastical computus into a disposable object of consumer choice which appears most revolutionary. The issues of life-writing, and of the almanac as a medium for the recording of events of individual significance within texts which inscribe them into the passage of social as well as familial time, have recently been investigated by Adam Smyth, who has shown that both male and female readers owned and annotated almanacs.6 For this present study, the question is rather different, and the emphasis will be upon the almanac as a practical guide, offering to its owner a quantity of very useful information. As is well known, this information was so wide-ranging that very few almanacs attempted to cover it all. Sailors, farmers, merchants and those interested in the law could all select almanacs which offered specialist information, ranging from detailed tide-tables, through lists of when in a particular year individual crops should be planted or harvested, to advice on the best routes to national and international markets or tables for currency conversion.7 It will be noted that this list focuses upon male occupations, and indeed it is easy to assume that almanacs concentrated upon the needs of male consumers. However, this essay will argue that the almanac offered vital information on areas of household and horticultural activity traditionally assigned to, and carried out by, women. To judge from sales figures cited by Capp, almanac-ownership was so widespread that it is highly likely that even in households of only middling prosperity, both husband and wife could have their own copy. Reliable figures are not available for the sixteenth century; but it is estimated that sales of almanacs outstripped those of any other category of book by the 1620s, and that by the middle of the seventeenth century one in every three families probably owned a copy, with compilers becoming wealthy household names, able to give celebrity endorsements to other products.8 The impact of this on individual knowledge of, and familiarity with, the calendar is a subject worth further attention since, throughout the era of the manuscript book, disposable, written calendars simply do not seem to have existed. Right up to the late fifteenth century, 6 A. Smyth, ‘Almanacs, Annotators and Life-Writing in Early-Modern England’, ELR 38 (2008), 200–44. 7 For more detailed discussion see Capp, English Almanacs, chapter 4, passim. 8 Ibid., p. 23.



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the predominant written calendar, in England as throughout Western Europe, was that of the Church; and it was disseminated as a component of liturgical manuscripts and prayer books which were designed for use over a long period of time (frequently a matter of centuries, rather than years or even decades). The written calendar therefore was ‘perpetual’, and its basic structure was that of the calendar of the Roman Empire. This presented the non-expert medieval user with formidable difficulties. The Roman names for the months were familiar (as they still are), having been generally adopted; but the Roman numbering of days was much more alien. It meant, for a start, that users of these calendars had to become accustomed to a system in which the first of each month was the kalends, which was immediately followed by a set of days (either seven or five depending on the month) which were counted down to the nones of that month. Thus, the second day of the month would be either VII or V nones, and the third day of the month would be either VI or IV nones. The nones was always followed by VIII ides, after which counting proceeded downwards again until the ides itself was reached. From that point on (the thirteenth or fifteenth day of the month by modern reckoning), the days were counted down to the kalends of the next month, with the precise number of these days depending upon the length of the month. Thus, 21 January, for instance, would be XII kal. Feb. The user also had to remember that in this system, the nones, ides and kalends were themselves included in the count, and that the day before each fixed point should be referred to not by number, but as pridie. Thus, the second-to-last day of January (thirtieth in the modern calendar) would be III kal. Feb., and the last would be pridie kal. Feb. (or 31 January). Equally challenging, if less frequently occurring, were the arrangements for inserting the leap day. The extra day was added to February, as in the modern calendar; but it was not simply added at the end of that month. Rather, it was added at VI kal. March, but was not given a number of its own. In leap years, therefore, VI kal. March occurred twice, with the extra day being known as dies bis-sextus, from which leap years were known as bissextiles.9 Just how counter-intuitive this system was, is shown by the facts that several chroniclers and clerks made errors in their calculations of dates, and that from the thirteenth century the English royal chancery tended to number the days of each month in simple sequence, at least in civil records.10 By contrast, the fact that the Roman calendar started each year on 1 January, whilst the early-medieval Church generally used Christmas Day (25 December) and the later-medieval Church preferred Lady Day, the Feast of the Annuncia9 The clearest explanation of the calculations is probably still F. P. Pickering, The Calendar Pages of Medieval Service Books, Reading Medieval Studies Monographs 1 (Reading, 1980). 10 A Handbook of Dates for Students of British History, ed. C. R. Cheney, rev. M. Jones, RHS Guides and Handbooks 4 (Cambridge, 2000).

To view the image on this page please refer to the printed version of this book.

Plate 1.  Calendar pages for the end of February and beginning of March, from the Reading-Eales Hours, c. 1420. Reading University Library, MS 2087, fols. 2v and 3r.

Disclaimer: Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook.



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tion (25 March), seems to have caused less confusion, although it was bewailed by some chroniclers.11 (See Plate 1.) Even from this brief account, it is perhaps clear why many medieval writers (and witnesses quoted in legal records) tended to date by the fixed points provided by festivals and saints’ days. The success of the Church in gaining centralized control of the allocation and promulgation of these commemorations meant that they were to be celebrated on the same days throughout Christendom; equally, this very fact helped to reinforce the universality of the Church’s calendar itself. However, lay users of the Church calendar faced an obstacle even greater than those outlined above, and that was the calculation of the sequence of ‘movable feasts’ centred on the great festival of Easter. This was an issue of considerable complexity since it added to the basic Roman calculations not only a division of each month into weeks (required by the Christian significance of Sundays) but also a need to correlate the solar calendar with the lunar calendar. This latter was because the Church had decided to maintain the link between the timing of Easter and that of Passover, as recounted in the Gospel narratives; and it had also established that Easter must always be celebrated on a Sunday. The result was that Easter was to be the first Sunday following the first full moon on or after the vernal equinox (itself fixed at 21 March).12 Thus, a universally applicable lunar calendar was required, with rules for its correlation with the Roman solar calendar, in order that the Paschal moon should be identically calculated across Christendom. This was all the more complex since the lunar year is shorter than the solar year by approximately eleven days, with the result that the two calendars will rapidly fall out of correlation unless adjustments are made. It was the difficulties that followed from all this which led to the studies on time and dating of first Dionysius Exiguus in the sixth century and then the Venerable Bede in the eighth century, in order to ensure that the necessary adjustments should be made at universally agreed points by all users of the Church’s calendar.13 Thus, the study of the calendar became an ecclesiastical science for specialists, under the title of the computus. All of this seems to have moved a long way from the concerns of secular individuals; but that very fact emphasizes their alienation from the full understanding of calculations which determined the timing not just of Easter itself but also of a whole series of festivals, fasts and ritual observances spread across the year from February to June. The build-up to Easter began, for most people, 11

Ibid., p. 8. See E. G. Richards, Mapping Time (Oxford, 1998), pp. 345–78. 13 Bede’s first work on time and the calendar, De temporibus, is dated to 703. His longer work, De temporum ratione, was completed for the abbey of Wearmouth-Jarrow in 725. For text and translation, see F. Wallis, Bede: The Reckoning of Time (Liverpool, 2004). 12

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on Septuagesima Sunday, and involved changes not only to the content of morning prayers (for those who performed these) but also to patterns of food consumption and fasting. The beginning of the full fast of Lent was marked by Shrovetide and the communal penitence of Ash Wednesday. Parish processions were organized for Palm Sunday, whilst the observance of Easter itself frequently involved a journey to a major church, as well as a powerful combination of ritual and feasting. The sequence continued with Ascension Day and Pentecost or Whitsun, at fixed intervals after Easter itself. Thus, for every household, stocks of special foods were needed for the feasts; and yet their dating could vary by more than a month each year. It would be equally important not to be left with food supplies which could not be consumed during the fast period and yet which would not keep until Easter. Patterns of meat consumption, fish supply, brewing and the management of dairy produce would all be affected; and these were issues which fell within the area of responsibility of women. For both sexes, however, the Church calendar and its arcane calculations were inextricably interwoven with areas of ‘private’ experience. These included not only food consumption but also sexual behaviour and patterns of social contact with relatives and neighbours. The timing of economic activity was also affected, since acceptable days and hours of work time were equally governed by the Church, announced by the ringing of church bells, and affected by the cycle of movable feasts.14 And here we come back once again to the concerns of this essay, since this interpenetration of the personal, the familial and the spiritual was embodied in the book which was the great bestseller of the late Middle Ages, and which can in some ways be seen as the predecessor of the almanac: the book of hours or primer. The popularity of these books, both in manuscript and printed form, has recently been examined by Eamon Duffy in Marking the Hours.15 Duffy, using a database compiled by Nigel Morgan, gives a figure of 789 manuscript books of hours surviving from England alone, and estimates that several thousand printed copies still exist (again from England alone).16 Duffy’s book shows very effectively how great was the demand for the affordable versions of this complex prayer book, generally known in English as the primer, which the arrival of printing made available. Perhaps most striking of all is his demonstration of how enterprising printers very rapidly produced primers in varying sizes, and with differing levels of decoration, to suit a range of price-brackets. The smallest of these books, with a page-size of only 10 x 6cm. (4” by just over 2”) 14 For further discussion see J. Le Goff, ‘Merchants’ Time and Church’s Time in the Middle Ages’, in Time, Work and Culture in the Middle Ages, trans. A. Goldhammer (Chicago, 1980), pp. 29–42. 15 E. Duffy, Marking the Hours (New Haven CT, 2006). 16 Ibid., p. 179, n. 2.



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and with narrow margins, could be printed on relatively few sheets of paper, although they would generally have at least 100 folios/leaves (or 200 pages).17 They were thus light to transport, a crucial issue in a period when they were often printed in Rouen or Paris before being carried as bales of unbound sheets to England and then distributed across the country. Such a level of demand raises questions as to just why these books were so popular, given that private observance, by secular individuals, of this simplified version of the Office was not a requirement of the Church. That the books were used and valued has been demonstrated again by Duffy, amongst others, in his examination of the various sorts of ‘marks’ made by owners, who inscribed both their political allegiances and their familial relationships on to the pages of their primers. This practice itself links the primers to the more transitory almanacs. There can be no doubt that the spiritual significance of their contents, and the ‘serious interior religious life’ which these supported, were central to the high value placed upon these books.18 Added to this was the social cachet with which the Horae were endowed by their origin as luxury books for rulers and aristocrats and by their capacity, through bejewelled bindings and exquisite illuminations, to function as impeccably pious objects of display. This aspect was openly linked by medieval commentators to their particular popularity with women, who were perceived as liking to make a display of both their piety and their disposable wealth. It is clearly important to avoid simply accepting these stereotyped descriptions; and yet the evidence of female ownership of these books is indisputable. What is important is not to fall into a sort of optical illusion produced by the evidence. Ownership of books of hours, frequently in multiple copies, was high amongst men as well as women, and book-ownership by women, including women religious, remained much smaller than that by men. But, if a woman was going to own any books at all, then it would be extremely likely that books of hours would make up a high proportion of her collection.19 In a period when piety was almost a familial responsibility for women, and when the spiritual benefits accrued were expected to be shared with other family members, it is perhaps unsurprising that many such books seem not to have been directly commissioned by women themselves but rather given to them as gifts, marking key points in their lives. As Duffy 17

Ibid., p. 122. Ibid., p. 6. 19 There is now a vast literature on book-ownership by women in the late Middle Ages. Some key studies are: Women and Literature in Britain, 1150–1500, ed. C. M. Meale, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature 17 (Cambridge, 1993); M. C. Erler, Women, Reading and Piety in Late Medieval England, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature 46 (Cambridge, 2002); S. G. Bell, ‘Medieval Women Book Owners: Arbiters of Lay Piety and Ambassadors of Culture’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 7 (1982), 742–68. 18

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emphasizes, this practice could also turn books of hours into enduring tokens of connection to powerful employers or patrons, important for the aspirations of a whole family. Equally, the fact that the contents were suitable for private recitation within the household, and for the inculcation of patterns of religious observance from one generation to another, may help to explain their popularity as gifts from husbands to wives. It is at this point that discussion of primers links directly to that of almanacs, since primers also contained calendars, as well as a potentially large range of other ‘practical’ information which has not received much attention from book-historians. Indeed, it is arguable that the very name ‘primer’, which has come to emphasize the educational uses of these books, was derived from the way in which their calendrical contents were used. The origin of the name has been the subject of some dispute, and the evidence is not sufficiently clear for any argument to be conclusive. Nevertheless, early uses of the term ‘primer’ are suggestive, especially as the usage seems to have been exclusively an English one, whether as ‘premar’, ‘prymmer’ or ‘primere’, or in the Latin equivalents of primaria or libri primarii. Christopher Wordsworth, in his edition of the York Horae of 1536, noted that the terms ‘primer’ and primarium occur interchangeably in the wills of lay testators from as early as 1323.20 By the late fifteenth century even manuscript examples seem to have been both numerous and affordable to the urban middle classes. In 1450–51 Hawisia Aske of York owned five primaria whilst a York goldsmith, one J. Colan, owned a premarium priced at 6d., at a time when his jet prayer-beads were priced at 2d. Wordsworth also points out that such lay sources frequently refer to the primer by the alternative name of ‘matyns-book’ (a usage supported by the title-pages of the books themselves, which frequently use the formula ‘Matins with prime and the hours’). However, the term ‘prime-book’ or ‘book for prime’ surprisingly never occurs.21 This does make it unlikely that the name derives from the service of prime. Instead, it seems at least possible that the reference was to the English custom of calling the ‘golden number’ for each year the ‘prime’, and the experience of reading through several of these books underlines this point. One case in point is the English primer issued in the name of King Edward VI in 1553. The title-page of the copy in the Bodleian Library (Douce B B 41) calls the work ‘A Prymmer or boke of private prayer’, and the very first section of the actual contents (after the Royal Privilege to ‘William Seres and to his assigns, to print or cause to be printed all manner of books of private prayers, called and usually taken for primers, both in great volumes and little’) is an

20 Horae Eboracenses, ed. C. Wordsworth, Surtees Society 132 (Durham, 1920 for 1919), p. xxxviii. 21 Ibid.



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explanation of ‘The Order of the Kalendar’.22 This begins: ‘first you shall have the golden number or prime printed with red ink’. How fundamental this was is shown by the next section, ‘A Rule teaching you to find out for ever the five moveable feasts’, which begins: ‘Under the mark of every one of the said feasts, which is noted with a letter in the top of the page in that row of black primes seek out the prime of that year, and on the next Sunday immediately following shall be the said moveable feast.’ Helpfully following this is ‘A Rule, enduring for ever, which teacheth to find out verily the Prime or Golden Number for the year present’. What follows is the rule also noted by Bede, namely that the reader should: ‘Mark the number of the present year of our Lord, and put one [i.e. add one] unto it. And then divide it by nineteen, and that number that remaineth is the Prime for all that year. But if nothing remain after the division [is] made, then nineteen must be the Prime for that year.’ This may not sound wholly user-friendly to the modern reader but it represents a real attempt to empower the user of this primer in relation to the calendrical complexities outlined above. Any lay reader capable of carrying out a division by nineteen was now able to work out the prime or golden number for any year, and then to apply that to this carefully designed version of the ecclesiastical calendar, in order to find out for themselves, without having to understand the mysteries of the nineteen-year Metonic cycle, the dates of the movable feasts for any year they wished. For early owners, the compiler helpfully went even further by next giving a circular diagram setting out the years from 1553 to 1571 and directly showing their primes. The sheer extent of the guidance thus given underlines the point: knowledge of the prime was the key to knowing the dates of the movable feasts and thus being able to plan all the activities which they regulated. Another, less scientific, approach was taken by the York Horae of 1536 (edited by Wordsworth). The title is Hore beate Marie virginis, and the very first section, on the back of the title-page, is an ‘Almanake for XVIII Yeres’, covering the years 1535–52, and declaring ‘Vvho that wyll knowe Ester day, The golden nombre, The dominical letter, And the leape yere … beholde this table.’ Once again, the point is that one of the very first things the user of the book will wish or need to know is the golden number or prime, and the dates of the movable feasts to which it provided the key. What this book also demonstrates is the use, in sixteenth-century England, of the word ‘almanac’ to designate such a calendrical table, designed to communicate these necessary dates. The overlap between the book of hours and the almanac, as ways of approaching the calendar, is thus emphasized. Moreover, this overlap may help to explain not

22 See The Two Liturgies AD 1549 and AD 1552: With Other Documents Set Forth by Authority in the Reign of King Edward VI, ed. J. Ketley, Parker Society (Cambridge, 1844), pp. 357–484.

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only the oddities of the English terminology for the books themselves but also the curious fact, noted by Linne Mooney, that the earliest English almanacs, of c.1500, were not only fully fledged almanacs ‘much like those to be printed over the next century’ but were also ‘significantly different from the last manuscript calendars’.23 Mooney’s suggested explanation, that they were based upon Continental exemplars developed over two generations, must clearly be at least part of the story. However, one strand of the argument of this present essay is that the ‘missing link’ in the development of the English almanac was provided by the calendrical information which prefaced the primers that were so popular in precisely this transitional period. If the importance of the information about the dates of the movable feasts in any particular year needs further demonstration, then this can easily be provided by one of Wynkyn de Worde’s successful ventures, namely the Almanacke for xii yere, which was first issued in 1508 (to cover the period up to 1520).24 This little booklet has only fifteen leaves and is small enough to be easily carried in a pocket. Its scientific credentials are established by the facts that the introductory text, on the verso of the title-page, is in Latin; and that the considerably longer English version of the preface declares that the ‘almanacke and table […] is calked after the latitude of Oxenforde and it is taken out of the grete ephymerides or almanacke of xxx yere’ (though no further information to identify the latter is given). This Almanacke provides the key to two major issues for any year: the dates of the movable feasts, and the days of new and full moons in each solar month. Valuably for the modern reader, the text also explains that the technical term ‘conjunction’ is used for the day of the new moon, whilst ‘opposition’ is used for the full moon. It is also interesting that the presence of this explanation, and the language in which it is couched, suggest again that this booklet is aimed at a non-expert audience, and one which would probably have little contact with expensive astrologers. The second important topic briefly explained in the preface is, as noted above, the dating and significance of the major movable feasts. For each year, the reader is promised, the length of the ‘flesshe tyme’ or intervallum between Christmas and Lent is set out in weeks and days. Septuagesima, the precursor of ‘clene lent’ is identified for the reader by the opening words of the key Latin texts for its liturgy (Gloria in excelsis and Te Deum). Interestingly, Advent Sunday is also shown. This was not a part of the ‘Easter cycle’ but its exact date would vary each year, due to the necessity for it to be a Sunday. This almanac is like its annual successors in going much further than giving simply the day of the new or full moon month by month for each of its twelve 23 L. Mooney, ‘English Almanacks from Script to Print’, in Texts and their Contexts: Papers from the Early Book Society, ed. J. Scattergood and J. Boffey (Dublin, 1997), pp. 11–25 (p. 21). 24 STC 387.



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years. Instead, the exact time, not just to the hour but even to the minute, is given, a fact which will be discussed further below, and which is emphasized in the preface to the booklet itself, as is the listing of eclipses. However, it is unlike them in that it is not a full calendar for any year. Instead, each year is given simply two tables, one of ‘Conjunctions’ and one of ‘Oppositions’, and two lists of key dates for movable feasts. These tables and lists are all given in Latin, and roman numerals are used throughout for the dates; interestingly, however, the dates themselves are silently ‘modernized’ to the secular form of giving simply a number. Moreover, the term ‘almanac’, both here and in the context of the primer mentioned above, denotes a table and/or list of key dates for a specific year or years. The usefulness for women running households of the information on dates relating to food consumption has already been emphasized, and does not need to be repeated. What is striking however is that the very precise information on the times of lunar transitions was also of relevance for women, since it was significant in relation to the timing of familial medical and healthrelated customs; and it is closely related to information also given, by the early sixteenth century, in the calendars prefixed to primers. A printed primer of the use of York, issued in 1520 (York Minster Library, XVI 0 36) illustrates this point. The title-page is missing, so that the book now opens with the calendar, which is still in Latin, and using roman numerals, but with days simply numbered, rather than being calculated in the Roman style. The saints’ days picked out as ‘red letter days’ include the translation of William of York and the two feasts of John of Beverley (both as duplex feasts), emphasizing that this is a northern calendar. As was common by this stage, the traditional KL monogram, used in medieval calendars to emphasize the first day of the Roman month (the kalends), has here been detached from signifying any particular day, and is simply the first element in the heading for each month. However, there are errors here in the headings for several months. For instance, the number of daily hours of daylight and darkness is included in the heading for each month, as had been standard since the thirteenth century; but the entry for February in this volume mistakenly says that there are xiii hours of dark and x of light (the correct standard figure is xiv hours of dark). Equally, the display of astrological information is rather patchy and variable from month to month, with the worst-served month being June. The assumed audience was thus generally familiar with the calendar and with saints’ days of regional importance, but unfamiliar with astrological or calendrical information of any detail. This makes the additional materials in this York primer particularly interesting, and the first of these is a tide-table for (southern) English ports. The link to the calendar is that this table, based as it is upon the movements, phases and positions of the moon, uses days of lunation (or lunar month) rather than days in the solar month. Secondly, and all in English, comes a ‘canon for lettynge of

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blode’, followed by the traditional ‘Zodiac Man’ illustration (whose text is here in Latin), and finally a short Latin text on the Distinctiones quattuor complexionum hominis. What links these additional elements to one another and to the calendar is thus the complex interaction of the sun and the moon; which brings us back to the fundamental importance of the prime. For it is the prime of any year which is the key to finding the occurrences of new moons in that year; and thus both new lunar months and the days on which the moon will exert maximum effect on the tides at any point on the English coast. Equally, knowledge of the prime is needed to use such tables for blood-letting as that in the York primer of 1520. The reason for this was that the Church had, as explained above, disseminated a universal system for tracking the lunar calendar in relation to the solar calendar, in order that the adjustments required to keep the two in correlation were made uniformly throughout Christendom. To implement this system, extra lunar months (or lunations) had to be added into the basic lunar year at specified points over a period of nineteen years.25 The result was that those drawing up and using medieval calendars needed to keep track of cycles of nineteen years, and to know in which year of a cycle they currently were, in order to insert the extra lunations at the correct points; and the prime (or golden number) simply represented the number of a year, from one to nineteen, in one of these cycles. These numbers represented a significant additional tool for users of the calendar, once a uniform system for entering them into the ‘perpetual calendar’ had been designed (to which Bede made important contributions). By the tenth century, it was standard to find the primes entered in their own column, down the left-hand side of the calendar page for each month. The numbers were entered against the dates on which a new moon would fall in a year having that prime. Thus, a calendar page for December should have the number x entered in the lunar column at pridie nones (4 December), the number ix entered at XVIII kal. Jan. (15 December), and so forth. Knowledge of the prime was thus fundamental to ‘reading’ the calendar for any given year, in relation to the movable feasts, calculating high and low tides, and deciding on favourable times for health-related practices such as blood-letting, bathing and purging. If this last point needs further demonstration, it can best be provided by reference once again to the York primer of 1520. As the ‘canon for lettynge of blode’ explains, it was necessary to know in which sign of the zodiac the moon was on any given day. For modern readers it may be helpful to explain that the moon, as seen from earth, transits across a whole astrological ‘house’ (i.e. 25 For a fuller explanation and helpful table of the Paschal Cycle, see J. Moreton, ‘Before Grosseteste: Roger of Hereford and Calendar Reform in Eleventh- and Twelfth-Century England’, Isis 86 (1995), 562–86.



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changes sign) far more rapidly than does the sun. The moon’s pull upon bodies of water is still a well-known fact and had already been commented upon by Bede in the eighth century. For calculating tidal movements, the zodiac sign occupied by the moon on any given day was not of major significance. But the moon also had an effect, according to medieval and early-modern science, upon the bodies of living beings, and it was here that the sign occupied by the moon was important, since the signs of the zodiac were also held to have significant ties to particular parts or organs of the human body. These links were very directly shown in the ‘Zodiac Man’ illustrations, in the forms of ribbons or lines connecting the symbols for the twelve signs to their respective body parts. Thus Aries, the first in the sequence, was particularly associated with the head, and therefore the moon’s presence in the sign of Aries could be significant when dealing with a problem affecting that part of the body. However, an additional complication was that the nature of each sign also had to be taken into account. Aries, a fire sign, is hot and dry; it is also masculine in gender, and it is cardinal in quality. These characteristics were relevant when calculating treatments intended to have effect upon the humours of the body, which were also hot or cold, dry or wet. For a woman responsible for the healthcare of her household, it would be very helpful to have a table of good and bad days for various treatments, based upon tracking the movements of the moon through the use of the well-known system of the prime. However, such a table required relatively complex calculations if it were to be used seriously, and these can be hard to follow (especially when given only in Latin). Here again is part of the appeal of a reliable annual almanac, which took responsibility for these calculations, and the health treatments which depended upon them, into the hands of the compiler (who often stressed his medical credentials).26 This point can best be illustrated by examining first the somewhat opaque instructions given in the printed primer. The York primer of 1520, in its ‘canon for lettynge of blode’, promises that ‘This present table showeth daily what sign and degree of the zodiac that the mone is in which signs have respect to xii parts of mans body.’ However, even this is somewhat laborious to adjust for any given year, since the user is required to count lettered days down the columns of the table and then to correlate this with the prime for the relevant year, to be found in a separate column. A system of whole or partial crosses, in red or black, then supposedly shows whether a day is good, bad or indifferent for a particular purpose. However, the complexities of layout appear to have defeated the printer/compositor, since the red crosses have not been printed and neither 26

Recently, new work has been done on the medical contents of the almanacs, though with a focus upon the seventeenth century. A good introduction is L. H. Curth, ‘The Medical Content of English Almanacs, 1640–1700’, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 60 (2005), 255–82.

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have the explanatory headings for the columns where crosses do appear. Thus a reader who attempted to use this table could, at best, simply obtain a general impression of whether a day was ‘good’ or not. More successful is the next section, which is introduced by an updated version of the traditional ‘Zodiac Man’, here with a fool kneeling at his feet. The flesh of the man’s torso is, as had become customary, shown ‘peeled back’ to reveal versions of the internal organs, which are connected by lines to the Seven Stars, diagrammatically shown on the left side of the image. On the right are the more traditional signs of the zodiac, also indicating to which body-parts they relate. An accompanying Latin text lists the astrological signs and their characteristics as well as the ‘Distinctiones quattuor complexionum hominis’. Such a Latin text is challenging in itself, and additional complexity is added by the fact that its heading is entered at the top of the page, and thus within the previous text, rather than at the start of the text to which it actually relates. Nevertheless, at least one owner made serious use of this material, since sets of symbols, including the glyphs for the astrological signs, have been entered in the margins of the York Minster copy. All of this is in considerable contrast to the reassurance and guidance offered by Master Henry Low in one of the earliest successful series of almanacs produced entirely in England for the English market. Low presents himself as a ‘doctor of Astronomie and Phisike’ in ‘Sarum now called Salisbury’ (a placename very familiar to users of primers) in his Almanacke and Prognosticacion for 1554.27 Learning, medical training and religious associations are thus all promised by one modest 16mo booklet. The direct, reassuring style continues on the reverse of the title-page, where a ‘declaracion’ specifies that the prime for the year is xvi; the dominical letter is G; the ‘flesh time’ between Christmas and Shrovetide is six weeks and two days; Ash Wednesday is on vii Feb.; Easter is xxv March; Ascension Day is iii May; Whitsun is xiii May. On the same page is the key to this almanac’s use of the familiar system of red and black crosses in relation to choosing days for bleeding, bathing or physicking. Helpful additions here are that an S will indicate a good day for sowing seed and a P a good day for planting (or grafting), whilst * denotes a risky day for any new undertaking. There is also no need to hunt through the calendar for primes to calculate lunations. Instead, the exact days of each new moon, first quarter, full moon and last quarter are marked by appropriate symbols. Equally, the opacities of the primer’s table for tracking the moon in relation to the signs of the zodiac are here replaced by something far more user-friendly. The entry for each day throughout 1554 shows the moon’s position at noon, not just by sign but by degree within the sign. Preparation for church service is also aided,

27 Henry Low, Almanacke and Prognosticacion for the Yere of our Lorde M.D.LIIII, STC 481, survives in two imperfect copies in Cambridge University Library, Syn 7. 55. 8 and Syn 8. 55. 175.



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since the epistle and gospel for each Sunday throughout the year are noted, in English. The final element of the guidance offered by this helpful little book is the forecasting of the weather and of eclipses for the year. The latter are set out on their own page, with diagrams demonstrating the extent of each eclipse; in 1554 there are two, both partial, and the reader is advised to use a bowl of water for observing the solar eclipse. Weather predictions (the main element of ‘Prognosticacion’) are entered within the calendar and are correlated to the phases of the moon. The results of all this can be demonstrated by looking at January. January i is labelled as New Year’s Day, and can be identified as a Monday by reference to the information given as to the dominical (or Sunday) letter for the year (which was G). It has the moon in its final quarter and at 6 degrees of Sagittarius. The new moon falls on iii Jan., at 10 degrees of Capricorn, and frost and snow are predicted. The v Jan. is St Simon’s Day, with the moon at 15 degrees of Aquarius, and is a good day for taking medicine and sowing seed. ‘Twelfth Day’, vi Jan., with the moon in Pisces, is also good for medical purposes; but Sun. vii Jan. is a risky day for anything new, as is x Jan., when the sun enters Aquarius and the moon (in Aries) ends its first quarter. The weather, however, will be temperate, following cold winds. A final point to note is that the almanac uses the traditional language of Latin when entering familiar saints’ days, but English is used for the newer element of biblical references. Equally, roman numerals are still used for numbering each day (even though there is no trace of the Roman style of handling dates), but the more scientific and up-to-date arabic numerals (or algorisms) are used for the astrological/astronomical information. Even in this summary, the contrast between this detailed, day-by-day guidance through the year and the calculations required to interpret a perpetual calendar is clear. For this reader, at least, the experience of reading Low after the primers is akin to being reassuringly advised by the good doctor, and being given the benefit of his advertised learning. That this impression is not coincidental, and that successful compilers of almanacs targeted specific readerships, is reinforced by turning to the more ambitious works of Alexander Mounslowe, whose Almanacke and Prognostication for 1561 immediately signals its aspirations by its larger size.28 The titlepage declares it to be a work ‘wherein the entrie of the seven Planetes into every signe of the Zodiacke is … set forth’, together with the movements of the moon and the relationships between the ‘seven planets and certain notable fixed Starres of the first and second honor or magnitude’, either in the ascendant, the mid-heaven or the seventh house. ‘Moreover the variable alteration of the ayre,

28 This is a variant of STC 488, and survives as fragments in Cambridge University Library Syn 5. 56. 3.

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the changes and quarters of every Moone be expressed.’ As seems fitting, this parade of scientific learning is ‘referred to the meridian of Oxforde’. A table on the verso of the second leaf still informs the reader that the golden number (prime) of the year is 4 (in scientific arabic numerals), the dominical letter is G, the flesh time (intervallum) is vii weeks and ii days, Easter is vi April, Ascension is xv May and Whitsun is xxv May. The reader is also advised that no eclipses may be seen in ‘our parts’ of Europe this year. A reader with a far more advanced grasp of the basic terms and concepts of astrology is thus assumed by Mounslowe; it is impossible to comment on his actual readership, but it seems fair to surmise that purchase of Mounslowe’s almanac would have a different significance from purchase of Low’s work. Nevertheless, it was perfectly possible, in the mid sixteenth century, for all almanacs to be scornfully dismissed by the impressively learned Leonard Digges (‘Gentylman’) in his Prognostication everlasting. This appears to have been first issued in 1553, and was re-edited and reissued numerous times, including by Digges’ son; indeed, it seems to have rescued the family’s fortunes after Digges’ political disgrace and the confiscation of his property.29 It is in the dedicatory letter to his patron, Sir Edward Fines, that Digges dismisses the ‘manifest imperfections and manifold errors yearely committed … in many volumes by others, eche for one yeares profit only, whereby the authors were of necessity compelled to make a yerely renewing of them with yearly increase of errors’. In contrast Digges, calculating for the metropolitan meridian of London, confidently offers ‘the truth’, as well as ‘conclusions not attempted before’; he also promises, in his address to the reader, to produce an exposure of bad almanacs as well as a helpful textbook on mathematics. Indeed, by the mid sixteenth century, the latter was needed by the user of a standard calendar even more badly than has been argued so far, because the traditional calendar had fallen visibly out of synchronization with the movements of the sun. This was the problem which was to lead to the Gregorian reform of the calendar later in the century (something which added to the need for annual almanacs, since England did not accept the papal ruling and continued with the ‘old’ Julian calendar, leading to a considerable difference of date between England and most of Europe). Consultation of medieval ‘perpetual’ calendars shows that they mark the equinoxes on the 21st of the relevant months (and thus close to the point used in modern calendars). Linked to this, medieval calendars, again like modern practice, showed the sun as moving from one sign of the zodiac to the next around the 20th of the month. However, in early sixteenth century calendars the dates are adjusted to a range of alternatives, from 11th at

29 For a facsimile of the 1555 edition see A Prognostication: of right good effect, ed. R. T. Gunther, Old Ashmolean Reprints 3 (Oxford, [1926]).



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the earliest to 16th at the latest. More troubling, certainly in relation to calculations of the date of Easter, was that the actual vernal equinox fell considerably earlier than the canonical date of 21 March. The York primer of 1520 marks it at 11 March, without making any comment. A small error in the nineteen-year cycle for calculating lunations had also built up, which added to the complexities. Thus, the application of the primes themselves needed some adjustment. In the York primer of 1536 (edited by Wordsworth), the ‘Almanacke for XVIII Yeres’ includes a note which advises that the actual new moon (and thus the start of a new lunation) will fall five days before the appearance of the prime for the year in any relevant month. In a similar fashion, a Sarum primer, printed by Richard Pynson c. 1513 (York Minster Library, XVI. N. 17), adjusts the zodiacal transitions to the 10th–15th of each month, whilst the equinoxes and solstices are marked on the 12th of the relevant months. However, Pynson also provides a set of red primes down the right-hand side of the calendar pages for March and April. A Latin text printed also in red, and inserted between the calendar pages for March and April (on aaVv), explains that the user should find the red prime for the current year in this column, and that the Sunday immediately following will be Easter Sunday. This suggests that readers were well aware of the growing problem and were consciously in need of this innovative guide. Both Leonard Digges and the compiler of the calendar information in the Edward VI primer go considerably further in their attempts to give guidance to their readers. Indeed, the calendar of the 1553 Edward VI primer deserves rather more attention than it has received, not least because the price of the book was regulated by royal decree, and it was thus aimed at a relatively wide public. That the calendar was scrutinized in its own time is demonstrated by the fact that the Marian editions of the primer entirely rejected both the calendar and its accompanying materials (which constituted one of the book’s major modernizations). The ‘Order of the Kalendar’ supplies a full and clear guide to the interpretation of the calendar, and takes the reader through the uses of no less than eight columns of computistical information per calendar page. As usual, the first column on each page was to show the primes, which were to be printed in red. In the months from January to June further columns are given, keyed to the primes, for finding Septuagesima, Quadragesima, Easter, Ascension and Pentecost (each with its own, headed column). The scientific modernism of the calendar is shown particularly by the clarity with which it sets out the start of each new lunation (or ‘Change of the Moon’) and gives daily times for sunset, calibrated to quarters of an hour. That all this is aimed at the general reader rather than the learned is suggested by the determined use of everyday language in this ‘Order’. The arabic numerals used for the dates are here referred to as ‘cyphers’ rather than the more technical ‘algorisms’; equally, the dominical letters are called ‘Sunday letters’. Those readers able to perform arithmetical calculations are also told how to calculate the prime for themselves

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by using the same rule propounded by Bede (as explained above). Those for whom this would be difficult are given a diagram setting out the primes for the nineteen-year cycle starting in 1553, and the advice that this can be used ‘for ever’. Still more unusual is that the reader is next told how to calculate the Sunday letter for themselves, by adding nine to the AD date, dividing by twenty-eight and noting the remainder. A table is then given, supplying the Sunday letter for each possible remainder. Even the complication caused by leap years is clearly tackled, so that users understand why a leap year has two Sunday letters, and when the change happens. As would by now be expected, the term used is leap year, not bissextile; and for the arithmetically challenged, a table follows which gives the Sunday letters for 1553–80. The next improvement provides a perpetual version of something offered year by year in later almanacs, namely information on hours of darkness and daylight. These are set out not just month by month, as was traditional in English Church calendars from the early thirteenth century, but with actual times of sunset and sunrise made available for each day throughout the year. Sunset times, as noted above, are here shown in their own column at the right of each calendar page. For those who can do the calculations, the ‘Order’ also explains that sunrise will be the same number of hours and minutes after midnight as sunset is before. A real scientific innovation comes next, as the reader is guided on how to track new lunations (‘Changes of the Moon’) through this perpetual calendar. A special column is provided, which appears to have been newly calculated (and was perhaps related to the work on the calendar and accompanying tables first provided in the Book of Common Prayer of 1552). An exact figure, in hours and minutes, is given against the relevant days in this column. However, since nothing in the computus is that simple, the ‘Order’ explains that the calendar follows the ‘Astronomer’s reckoning’ that the moon never changes before noon; therefore, these hours and minutes must be added to noon, a procedure which may mean that the actual change happens after the following midnight. The final step is to explain that these times for the change of the moon must be re-calculated, like the lunar calendar itself, each nineteen years. The times given will work without adjustment from 1553 to 1568, inclusive. Thereafter, fifty minutes must be subtracted for each nineteen-year cycle and thus, as the ‘Order’ concludes, ‘this rule will serve for ever’. Clearly, this is a world away from the calendars of the traditional primers, with their sometimes haphazard lunar tables and their mnemonic rhymes to help with the order of major saints’ days in each month. A determined attempt is made to demystify the ecclesiastical calendar, and to do so in everyday language. However, it is equally noteworthy that the Edward VI primer rejects all the health-related material which was traditional in earlier primers. There is no Zodiac Man, no tables for bleeding or bathing, and no mention of the relationship between the moon’s position and physical health. Equally, there



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are no mnemonics on healthy foods to eat each month. Even the presentation of the sun’s movements is simplified. At the 11th–15th of each month, the new sign of the zodiac is marked; but of the equinoxes and solstices only the vernal equinox is shown, placed at 11 March. The only entries related to traditional ideas on health are those for the Dog days, starting on 7 July and ending on 5 September. Care for the body is not condemned; it is simply not mentioned in this calendar. This makes the information offered by Leonard Digges in his own perpetual calendar and Prognostication all the more interesting. Digges was an opponent to Mary’s accession to the throne, and also both a leader in scientific astronomy and a critic of all attacks on astrology. He appears to have been familiar with the calendar of the Edward VI primer, or at least with the work which it represented, since he effectively reproduces it in his own work (which, as noted above, first appeared in the same year). Indeed, Digges’ collection of material is eclectic, and ranges from traditional prognostications of the weather for the year (of a type already found in Anglo-Saxon manuscripts of the tenth and eleventh centuries30) to scientific analyses of meteorological phenomena, couched in a version of the Aristotelian and astrological language used also by alchemists. Amongst this, he inserts detailed versions of the traditional materials and tables relating to the moon’s movements and their impacts upon human health and activity. A simplified version of the ‘Egyptian Days’, with their warnings about ‘evil days’ for each month, common in Church calendars up to the end of the twelfth century, is also given, as are the mnemonics on recommended foods. It is in a separate section, headed ‘Profitable Rules and Tables’, that Digges places tables and explications on primes, movable feasts and Sunday letters which are strikingly similar to those in the Edward VI primer. However, Digges places these up-to-date tables in the traditional company of the Zodiac Man, the lunar tables for phlebotomy, purging and bathing, and also the tide-table, all of which were so completely expunged from that primer. Thus, Digges offers something for everyone; and if the democratization of the computus was controversial in the context of the primer, it here becomes much less conspicuous, a point which may be linked to the long period of popularity enjoyed by Digges’ work. What emerges, then, is a picture of a period in which the calendar was not simply in transition but was the site of numerous, overlapping contests. What was at issue was not just saints’ days, or the language in which they were identi-

30

For the Anglo-Saxon versions see L. S. Chardonnens, Anglo-Saxon Prognostics, 900–1100, Brill Studies in Intellectual History 153 (Leiden, 2007). For a short discussion see R. M. Liuzza, ‘What the Thunder Said: Anglo-Saxon Brontologies and the Problem of Sources’, RES n.s. 55 (2004), 1–23.

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fied in the calendar (itself a complex matter which has received little attention), but also the representation of the scientific basis of the calendar itself, and its inter-relations with cycles affecting both the sublunary world and the human body. Moreover, by the end of the sixteenth century the English calendar was self-consciously different from that applied in most of Europe, requiring travellers and traders to deal with further complexities. Under such competing pressures, which also led to the slow death of the primer in England, it is hardly surprising that the English calendar, and the range of information which it offered, split away from its traditional context and took up the annual form already familiar in almanacs imported from Europe. For a very reasonable price, an almanac offered its purchaser a guide through the complexities of the year and its calculations. More than this, it offered a cheap alternative to the sometimes arduous, and always expensive, process of consulting professional astrologers and physicians. The almanac made available, for use in the domestic context, scientific guidance on the best times to undertake medical treatments, and how these should be adapted for the age and humour of the patient. That the wealthy preferred individual consultations with highly regarded practitioners to self-medication guided by almanacs is suggested by a range of evidence. One such case is recorded in the diary of Lady Margaret Hoby (London, British Library, MS Egerton 2614).31 As a child (and an heiress) Margaret was placed in the puritan household of Catherine, countess of Huntingdon, a woman known for her success in the training of young gentlewomen. Margaret’s diary makes it clear that she learned to read and write, keep accounts, play an instrument, run a household, manage an estate, perform basic surgery and prepare salves. This was an education calculated to produce highly skilled wives for English gentlemen, and one which would also equip the student to provide both first aid and actual medical care. Margaret’s education is comparable to that of Grace Skerrington (born 1552), the daughter of Sir Henry Skerrington of Lacock Abbey, as well as of her cousin, Mistress Hamblyn. As an adult, Grace’s medical skill appears to have exceeded what was usual even for educated married women in this period, since she not only read herbals and ‘books of phisick’ but also wrote up her own ‘Book of Simples’. This was preserved by her daughter, Mary, who also recorded that Grace used two retorts or stills.32 At a still higher social level, Lady Anne Clifford wrote of her own mother, Margaret, that she read widely and studied and practised ‘Alchimy, by which she found out excellent medicines, … delighted in Distilling

31 Diary of Lady Margaret Hoby, 1599–1605, ed. D. M. Meads (London, 1930). See also The Private Life of an Elizabethan Lady: The Diary of Lady Margaret Hoby, 1599–1605, ed. J. Moody (Stroud, 1998). 32 Diary, ed. Meads, p. 53.



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of waters, and other Chymical extractions, for she had some knowledge in most kinds of Minerals, herbs, flowers and plants’.33 Similarly, Margaret Hoby, whilst she rarely names a book other than a religious one, records reading a herbal. However, when it came to her own health, she preferred to travel to York to consult a ‘phesition’ there, a successor to one Dr Brewer. These professionals provided Lady Margaret with ‘phesick’, which she took along with other medicines; for her husband’s tenants, she provided treatment herself. None of these diarists mentions an almanac, either for self-medication or when providing care for others. However, the issue of times of sunrise and sunset is reflected in Margaret Hoby’s diary, as she adjusts the times for morning and evening prayers, and alters her evening timetable for winter in late October. No mention of the moon’s position is made in relation to her use of physick, medicines and clysters; but little can be made of this since her diary is not detailed enough for the reader to expect such entries. Phlebotomy is rarely mentioned; but there is an intriguing entry in December 1604: ‘This morninge Sir Antonie Cooke was Cutt, and died, havinge an Artrie Cutt wher of he was tould before.’34 Thus, whilst women such as these do not mention almanacs, there can be little doubt of their ability to use such books, nor of their relevance for both household concerns and proto-scientific activity. Women with such strong medical and scientific interests are unlikely to have been uninterested in the movements of the planets, and especially in the complex movements of the moon; and these are effectively impossible to observe directly. Thus, either an almanac or something providing equivalent information would be of value; and it is hard to imagine these women being satisfied with the clumsy tables provided by the primers, even if they had no religious objections. At this point it is important to look at another source for such scientific information, which may have been available to high-status women and should certainly have been so to the professionals whom they consulted. Late-medieval England had seen the production, for scientific circles and powerful patrons, of a small number of computistical/astronomical calendars, which circulated in manuscript in association with prognostics and other medical information. These calendars have been studied by Linne Mooney.35 They were based on the work of two fourteenth-century Oxford friars, John Somer and Nicholas of Lynn. Mooney records that thirty-seven late-medieval copies of Somer’s calendar are known and twenty copies of that by Nicholas of Lynn, as well as further conflations and compilations.36 Both calendars have been edited,

33 34 35 36

The Diaries of Lady Anne Clifford, ed. D. J. H. Clifford (Stroud, 1990), pp. 57–8. Diary, ed. Meads, p. 214. Mooney, ‘English Almanacks’, passim. Ibid., p. 12, n. 6.

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Somer’s by Mooney herself, and consultation of the editions shows that these are challenging, scientific works.37 They provide not only tables of leap years and movable feasts, but also calculations of eclipses, and guides and tables for various sorts of medical practice. Rather like the Edward VI primer, they offer information on times of sunset and sunrise, and on ‘conjunctions’ of the sun and moon (i.e. changes of the moon, or new lunations), here over no less than four nineteen-year cycles (up to 1462). They also chart the positions of the sun through the cycle, and the planetary rulers of each hour of the day. All this material was (of course) in Latin, as were the medical/scientific texts with which, as Mooney notes, these calendars mostly circulated.38 Professionals capable of using these were also likely to be able to update them, and Mooney points out that at least ten surviving manuscript copies have been updated to 1519 (i.e. a further three cycles) or even later.39 Moreover, the social circles for which these calendars were originally calculated were very elevated. Somer composed his Kalendarium at Oxford in 1380, following a request from Joan, princess of Wales and mother of Richard II; he seems to have remained ‘on retainer’ to the royal court until 1409. In this capacity he would have been able to transmit related specialist knowledge such as that to be found in the Exafrenon prog­nosticacionum temporis and the Canon supra Kalendarium of Richard of Wallingford, the famous fourteenth-century astronomer and clock-builder.40 Indeed, one of the oldest surviving copies of Somer’s calendar is somewhat surprisingly found at the beginning of Cambridge, St John’s College, MS K. 26, an illuminated psalter probably copied c. 1397–1400 for Thomas Holland, duke of Surrey and earl of Kent, the grandson of Joan, princess of Wales.41 This is part of a late revival of the older fashion for luxury psalters, at a time when demand for books of hours was considerably greater, and it is interesting that Somer’s calendar here replaces the more traditional, liturgical calendar. Somer’s advice was perhaps primarily medical, since his calendar gives more of this type of information, whilst that of Nicholas of Lynn occurs more frequently with astronomical materials. As Mooney shows, both men were claimed as authors of later astrological, medical and prognostic texts which, like the calendars themselves, were copied through the fifteenth and into the sixteenth century.42 37 The Kalendarium of John Somer, ed. L. R. Mooney (Athens GA, 1998); The Kalendarium of Nicholas of Lynn, ed. and trans. S. Eisner and G. MacEoin (Athens GA, 1980). 38 Mooney, ‘English Almanacks’, p. 15. 39 Ibid., p. 17, n. 29. 40 For Richard of Wallingford, see J. D. North, God’s Clockmaker: Richard of Wallingford and the Invention of Time (London, 2005). 41 See Kalendarium of John Somer, p. 18. 42 Mooney, ‘English Almanacks’, p. 16.



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The relationship between works such as these and the annual almanacs was however not as direct and unilateral as Mooney argues; as this essay has attempted to show, the lines of transmission of calendar and astrological information were complex and multiple. Nevertheless, this brief examination of the scientific calendars has shown that they, the texts associated with them, and their authors (actual or alleged) had, like the books of hours, exalted origins and glamorous associations with royal patronage. The scientific belief that planetary and astrological phenomena influenced meteorological patterns as well as the natural world and the humours of the human body was both well established and widely disseminated. The production of tools and tables for charting and interpreting these movements and their influences was thus a very valuable, and also rare, skill. Equally, the idea that prognostics for forecasting the weather were simply a part of popular tradition is clearly challenged not only by Leonard Digges’ use of them in his money-making work but also, and perhaps more convincingly, by Richard of Wallingford’s learned treatise. Royal patronage brought together the court astrologers whose employment is traced by Capp, the medically learned compilers of calendars, and leaders of the English Church and its spiritual guidance. The appeal of the Tudor almanacs, then, was not simply due to the glamour of their magic, but also to the glamour of their élite associations. This, combined with their wide range of practical functions and their capacity to transcend the struggles of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, made them as attractive as they were affordable. Those able to read Latin could purchase printed copies of the prognostications of the Laet family, of Amsterdam, from as early as 1469; but Latin was a skill for middle-class schoolboys, and English translations were rapidly produced for a wider audience. The demand for the translated prognostications of Nostradamus, which arrived from 1559, was also high.43 The near-universal appeal of almanacs and prognostications meant that, at least from the middle of the sixteenth century, English compilers like Dr Low could begin to target specific sections of the overall market. This point brings the enquiry back to the question of women as users of almanacs. Women were not directly targeted as a separate audience for almanacs until the seventeenth century. Nevertheless, it is clear that the almanacs provided information relevant for the roles and responsibilities of women; and the arguments of this essay may be brought to a conclusion by a brief look at the work of one of the most successful Elizabethan compilers, Thomas Buckminster, whose career lasted from 1564 to 1599. His Almanack and Prognostication for the Year

43

See Capp, English Almanacs, p. 42.

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1598 was selected by Bosanquet for a facsimile edition;44 and the University of Reading has recently acquired the only known fragments of Buckminster’s Prognostication for 1590. These works were issued in the more expensive 8vo format, which sold at 2d. in London, as opposed to the 16mos for 1d.; and the information offered is targeted primarily at the metropolis and its inhabitants. This address to Londoners is apparent already in the table of calendar information on the verso of the title-page, which includes not only the usual movable feasts but also the statement that there are eight weeks and three days between Midsummer and ‘Bartholomewtide’. We move from this straight to concerns about healthcare, in the form of ‘Short notes for letting of Blood, Purging, Bathing, etc’ (sweating is also covered). These ‘notes’ list the moon-signs favourable for each activity; and they distinguish clearly between medical bathing and washing ‘for clenlines sake’. A simplified, and rather old-fashioned, version of the Zodiac Man follows.45 Equally simple is the handling of the calendar, where each month has one page, and there are no KL monograms in the headings, no notes of the number of days in the lunation for the month, and no times for sunset. It appears that this almanac is aimed at a readership of no more than moderate learning, an impression reinforced by the reappearance at the head of each month of old-fashioned, four-line verses of simplified dietary and health advice. The reader is told in March, for instance, to ‘bleede and bathe if thou desire And purge also, if need require’. The calendar itself has only five columns, with the day numbers given in oldfashioned roman numerals; nevertheless, the sign and degree of the moon are given for each day, whilst the dates and times of the moon’s quarters are given their own column. Thus, the more scientific reader would be able to apply the information from the ‘Notes’ at the start of the book. Indeed, a self-diagnosed melancholic might pick March as a good month for bleeding and, since Libra and Aquarius were the best moon signs for this purpose, they could choose 13 and 14 March, or 22 and 23 March in 1598. For bathing, the phase as well as the sign of the moon was important. In 1598, 27 March would be the best day, since this was two days after the change, and with the moon in the fire sign of Aries. However, if all this was too tedious, the heading for April simply advised that the whole month was helpful for bathing and blood-letting. Unusually, Buckminster placed information on eclipses not in the almanac section but in the prognostication, which had a separate title-page. This section offered further ‘rules and notes’ as well as a ‘declaration of the state of the .iiii. quarters of this yeere’, and daily weather forecasts throughout the

44 45

See note 2 above. Sig. Aii v.



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year. The ‘notes’ here relate to the moon-signs favourable for gardening activities, amongst other things; and management of gardens and their produce was frequently considered an area of activity for women in literature such as the conduct books. More metropolitan concerns reappear, however, with the lists of days for sittings of the Court of Arches in Bow Church, of the Admiralty Court at Southwark, and of the courts of the archbishop of Canterbury and the bishop of London at St Paul’s. Perhaps the most exciting section of the prognostication is that dealing with the eclipses, since the two lunar eclipses and one solar eclipse of 1590 are set out in some detail, including the signs and houses occupied by the two ‘planets’. The first lunar eclipse is the most threatening, since the moon will be in Virgo, in the seventh house, and placed near the ‘Dragon’s tail’; and the eclipse will be total, involving the moon changing colour. It is perhaps unsurprising that the predictions are for cloudy and close weather, with rain and strong winds, unhealthy to ‘men and beasts’. Swellings and tumours of the liver and spleen are threatened, with mouth ulcers and eye inflammations, as well as pestilent fevers. The rest of the weather forecasts are rather more mundane; and Buckminster reassures his readers by placing at the head of each month another set of four-line verses, here effectively reviving the medieval tradition of the ‘Occupations of the Months’. Thus, using sickles for the hay harvest is the recommendation for July, echoing the traditional image for this month in medieval calendars. If this were indeed a relevant activity for the reader, then consultation of the prognostication for 1590 would suggest that the period following the moon’s last quarter, on 13 July, up to the new moon on 21 July, would be the best for this purpose. The full moon, on 7 July, and the new moon, were both predicted to bring in days of thunder and rain, something of concern to all readers. For the urban woman, it might be relevant to read that fruit and nut trees should be tended in October, and that hedges should be cut in the same month. Once again, in 1590, the full moon on 3 October brings in stormy weather, which does not really improve until the new moon on 18 October. By contrast, the activity for December is to care for the poor; and 1590 was to end on a sensational note, since the evening of 30 December was to see an eclipse of the full moon. (See Plate 2.) Finally, there is evidence that Buckminster sought to match the competition since, whilst the prognostication for 1590 is short and simple, that for 1598 is more ambitious. In this year, the reader is given a list of sunrise and sunset times through each month; and more detailed, medical advice is added for most months. This, however, is still of a sort which could be followed at home by almost everybody. For instance, in August the reader is warned to eat moderately, and that sleeping in the afternoons will bring on headache, catarrh and loss of lustiness. In December ‘let thy Kytchyn be thyne Apothicarye’, use ‘good dyet’, and indulge in ‘good hospitalyty’ and ‘merry company’. Thus, the ‘good housewife’ of the conduct books is here equipped with the advice and

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Disclaimer: Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. To view the image on this page please refer to the printed version of this book.

Plate 2.  Prognostication for October. From the Reading University copy of Buckminster, Almanac and Prognostication 1590, Sig. C iii.



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information needed to care for her household through the year.46 Still more reassuringly, she is given medical and scientific support which could claim to be both up to date and comfortingly familiar.

46 For an introduction to the conduct books, and their success in the early-modern period, see S. W. Hull, Chaste, Silent and Obedient: English Books for Women, 1475–1640 (San Marino CA, 1982).

Gemma Allen

‘a briefe and plaine declaration’: Lady Anne Bacon’s 1564 translation of the Apologia Ecclesiae Anglicanae

Madame, according to your request I haue perused your studious labour of translation profitably imploied in a right commendable work … And now to thende bothe to acknowledge my good approbation, and to spread the benefit more largely, where your Ladishippe hathe sent me your boke writen, I haue with most hearty thankes returned it to you (as you see) printed.1

T

hus wrote Matthew Parker, archbishop of Canterbury, in a letter to ‘the right honorable learned and vertuous Ladie A.B.’. The ‘Ladie A.B.’ in question is Lady Anne Bacon (1528–1610) and the letter was appended to her translation of John Jewel’s Apologia Ecclesiae Anglicanae, published in 1564. The translation deserves closer attention than it has so far received. At first sight, Parker’s dedicatory epistle portrays the translation as a semi-private manuscript work by a woman, which only accidentally found its way into print. Closer analysis reveals that whilst this translation was produced by a woman within a domestic setting, Anne Bacon had always envisaged a wider readership and was addressing concerns far beyond her own household in the work. This was a translation designed to remedy the dearth of preaching in the 1560s, providing a creed for the nascent Church of England. Anne deliberately wanted her message to appeal to as wide a readership as possible and so she turned to contemporary theories of translation to produce an authentically ‘English’ voice in her text. Female religious translations have often been considered as evidence of the silencing of women’s voices in print culture. This essay will instead argue that detailed analysis of Anne Bacon’s translation of the Apologia

1 M. C. [Matthei Cantuariensis], dedicatory epistle to the ‘Ladie A. B.’, in An Apologie or answere in defence of the Churche of Englande, trans. A. Bacon (London, 1564) [ii]r, [iii]v. The manuscript version of Anne’s translation is not extant.

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Ecclesiae Anglicanae reveals her ability to speak clearly on behalf of her own religious priorities. I An Apologie or answere in defence of the Churche of Englande was not the first published translation by Anne Cooke Bacon; between 1548 and 1551, her translations from Italian into English of nineteen sermons by the Italian reformer, Bernardino Ochino, were published in three different volumes.2 Knowledge of the classical and modern languages necessary for these acts of translation derived from the humanist education Anne and her sisters received from their father, Sir Anthony Cooke.3 The sisters’ marriages to influential members of the Elizabethan élite were perhaps facilitated by their unusual education. In 1545, Anne’s eldest sister, Mildred, wed William Cecil, who would become Elizabeth I’s principal secretary and Lord Burghley, whilst Anne herself married Nicholas Bacon, later Lord Keeper of the Great Seal, in 1553. Their younger sister, Elizabeth, married first the diplomat and translator, Thomas Hoby, in 1558 and later, John, Lord Russell, heir to the earldom of Bedford, in 1574.4 Anne’s sisters also engaged in the task of religious translation. Mildred Cooke Cecil translated and circulated a manuscript translation of St Basil’s homily on Deuteronomy in around 1550, whilst her sister, Elizabeth Cooke Hoby Russell, published a translation of Ponet’s Diallacticon viri boni et literati, de veritate, natura, atque substantia corporis et sanguinis Christi in eucharistia in 1605.5 2

An Apologie or answere in defence of the Churche of Englande, trans. A. Bacon (London, 1564); Sermons of Barnardine Ochine of Sena, trans. anon. [A. Cooke] (London, 1548); Fouretene sermons of Barnardine Ochyne, concernyng the predestinacion and eleccion of god, trans. A. C. [A. Cooke] (London, ?1551); Certayne sermons of the ryghte famous and excellente clerk master Barnardine Ochine, trans. anon. [A. Cooke and R. Argentine] (London, ?1551). A later composite edition of the sermons was also published in 1570: Sermons of Barnardine Ochyne, (to the number of. 25.) concerning the predestination and election of god, trans. A. C. [A. Cooke and R. Argentine] (London, 1570). See also M. A. Overell, ‘Bernardino Ochino’s Books and English Religious Opinion: 1547–80’, Studies in Church History 38 (2004), 201–11. 3 For Sir Anthony Cooke, see M. K. McIntosh, ‘Sir Anthony Cooke: Tudor Humanist, Educator, and Religious Reformer’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 119 (1975), 233–50. 4 Two other Cooke sisters, not discussed in this essay, Margaret and Katherine, also made influential matches, marrying respectively the Hertfordshire landowner, Ralph Rowlett, in 1558 and the diplomat, Henry Killigrew, in 1565. 5 ‘A Homilie or Sermon of Basile the great, Archebishopp of Caesaria vpon ye saying of Moyses in the fifteenth Chapiter of Deuteronomie’, London, British Library, MS Royal 17 B. XVIII; A way of reconciliation of a good and learned man, touching the trueth, nature, and substance of the body and blood of Christ in the sacrament, trans. E. Russell (London, 1605).

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Religious translation has long been perceived as the most acceptable way in which early modern Englishwomen could engage with print culture; Richard Greaves has argued that before 1650, most religious works published by women were in the form of translations.6 It has been suggested that translation was seen as an appropriate task for women because it was thought of as a ‘defective’ and ‘degraded’ activity, involving only ‘the “simple” transmission of the words and thoughts of others – usually men – from language to language in such a way that the direct agency of the translator was thought to be minimal’.7 As an activity, therefore, translation has been characterized as a primary stage in women’s progression towards more independent and sophisticated literary expression.8 Previous critical considerations of Anne’s translation of the Apologia have therefore viewed it as another example of the silencing of women’s voices within a patriarchal society. Mary Ellen Lamb characterized it only as work of ‘transliteration’ of the original male author, concluding that ‘Jewel’s Apologie for the Church of England … carried too much official weight to allow tampering’.9 Alan Stewart similarly declared that Anne had no independent voice in her translations, only the ‘doubled voice of Anne and whatever man she was translating’.10 How, then, should we explain C. S. Lewis’s praise for the language of Anne’s translation in his volume on sixteenth-century literature? Whilst only briefly discussing Anne’s work, he comes to the following conclusion: Anne Lady Bacon deserves more praise than I have space to give her … Again and again she finds the phrase which, once she has found it, we feel to be inevitable … If quality without bulk were enough, Lady Bacon might be put forward as the best of all sixteenth-century translators.11 6

R. Greaves, ‘Foundation Builders: The Role of Women in Early English Nonconformity’, in Triumph over Silence: Women in Protestant History, ed. R. Greaves (Westport, 1985), pp. 75–92 (p. 81). See also E. V. Beilin, ‘Current Bibliography of English Women Writers, 1500–1640’, in The Renaissance Englishwoman in Print, ed. A. M. Haselkorn and B. S. Travitsky (Amherst, 1990), pp. 347–60. 7 M. E. Lamb, ‘The Cooke Sisters: Attitudes toward Learned Women in the Renaissance’, in Silent But for the Word, ed. M. Hannay (Kent OH, 1985), pp. 107–25 (p. 116); K. Morin-Parsons, ‘Introduction’, in A Meditation of a Penitent Sinner: Anne Locke’s Sonnet Sequence, ed. K. MorinParsons (Waterloo ON, 1997), pp. 11–37 (p. 26). 8 L. Schleiner, Tudor and Stuart Women Writers (Bloomington, 1994), p. 51; D. Bornstein, ‘The Style of the Countess of Pembroke’s Translation of Philippe de Mornay’s Discours de la vie et de la mort’, in Silent But for the Word, ed. M. Hannay, pp. 126–34 (p. 134). 9 Lamb, ‘Cooke Sisters’, p. 124. 10 A. Stewart, ‘The Voices of Anne Cooke, Lady Anne and Lady Bacon’, in This Double Voice: Gendered Writing in Early Modern England, ed. D. Clarke and E. Clarke (Basingstoke, 2000), pp. 88–102 (p. 89). 11 C. S. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century (Oxford, 1954), p. 307.



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Lewis highlights several of Anne’s phrases for particular praise, such as translating ‘quidam ex asseclis et parasitis’ as ‘one of his soothing pages and clawebackes’ and ‘magnum silentium’ as ‘all mum, not a word’.12 He is quite right in praising Anne’s use of language in her translation: it is extraordinarily vivid. Yet in this essay I want to argue that such vividness was consciously sought for and employed in her translation; whilst seeming so natural to the English reader as to appear almost ‘inevitable’, her phrases have instead been actively selected to advance Anne’s own priorities through the act of translation. This can be demonstrated through comparison of the translation with the original text, by analysing the language Anne used and any deviations from the Latin work. The task is made easier due to the existence of another contemporary translation into English of the Apologia, completed in 1562, two years before Anne’s work, although finding a much more limited distribution.13 Comparison between the original work and the vernacular renderings is illuminating, as sixteenth-century translators carefully considered their methods. In his Interpretatio Linguarum published in 1559, Laurence Humphrey suggests that the least successful sort of translations adhered to the purely literal, word-for-word method, followed by those which were too loose, which he believes are selfindulgent. He argues that the most desirable type of translation was one which fell between the two extremes, considering both the words in question and the spirit of the passage.14 Although Anne herself offers no written discussion of her theory of translation, charting the choices she makes in the text allows an insight into her own priorities for the work. II Matthew Parker’s prefatory letter to the translation makes many claims about Anne’s engagement with print culture that have been too long accepted without questioning. First, Parker suggests that Anne’s work of translation was essentially conceived as a semi-private act, that she only personally intended her translation for a very limited readership. He writes of receiving Anne’s manuscript translation: whereof for that it liked you to make me a Iudge, and for that the thinge it selfe hath singularly pleased my iudgement, and delighted my mind in reading it, I

12

ibid. An apologie, or aunswer in defence of the Church of England, trans. anon. (London, 1562). 14 L. Humphrey, Interpretatio Linguarum, seu de ratione convertendi et explicandi Autores tam sacros quam profanos, Libri tres (Basel, 1559), sigs. B7v–C7v; J. W. Binns, Intellectual Culture in Elizabethan and Jacobean England (Leeds, 1990), p. 210. 13

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haue right heartely to thanke your Ladieship, both for youre owne well thinking of me, and for the comforte that it hathe wrought me.15

He then tells Anne that he has also sent the manuscript to the ‘chiefe author of the Latine work’, John Jewel, the bishop of Salisbury, for perusal.16 Parker’s narrative finishes with the suggestion that in order to make the work more ‘publikely beneficiall’ he has had the manuscript version of Anne’s translation published, without her knowledge, stating such action was necessary ‘to preuent suche excuses as your modestie woulde haue made in staye of publishinge it’.17 There are many elements of this narrative that do not ring true. First, it fails to acknowledge that Anne would have been fully aware of female scribal publication of translations in this period; even in manuscript form, Anne would have intended her translation to find a sizeable readership. Modern scholarship has tended to draw too sharp a distinction between private and public writing, aligning manuscript with the former category whilst print is seen as a public medium.18 Anne would have drawn no such distinction. Her sister, Mildred, had already completed her manuscript translation of St Basil’s homily on Deuteronomy in around 1550 and she dedicated the bound work to Anne Stanhope Seymour, the duchess of Somerset.19 It was likely to have then been circulated around the duchess’s courtly circle, in a manner similar to Catherine Parr’s manuscript of The lamentacion of a synner around three years earlier.20 Anne’s younger sister, Elizabeth Cooke Hoby Russell, may have published her translation of Ponet’s Diallacticon in 1605, yet it too had been circulating in manuscript form for many years prior to its publication. In her dedication to the work, Elizabeth suggests that ‘at the first I meant not to haue set it abroad in Print’; however, as she had been circulating a manuscript copy, she was driven to print the work for fear that it would otherwise be published after her death.21 15

Parker, epistle, [ii]r. ibid., [ii]v. 17 ibid., [iii]r–v. 18 For further discussion of this point, see J. Stevenson, ‘Women, Writing and Scribal Publication’, English Manuscript Studies 1100–1700 9 (2000), 1–32. 19 BL MS Royal 17 B XVIII, fols. 1v–2v. 20 J. N. King, ‘Patronage and Piety: The Influence of Catherine Parr’, in Silent But for the Word, ed. M. Hannay, pp. 43–60 (p. 50). The lamentacion of a synner was introduced in print by Mildred’s husband, William Cecil. See C. Parr, The lamentacion of a synner, made by ye most vertuous Ladie, Quene Caterin (London, 1547). 21 A way of reconciliation, trans. Russell, sig. A2v. For further discussion of the earlier dating of this work of translation, see G. F. Allen, ‘“Labour for right reformation”: The Cooke Sisters and the Power of the Word’ (unpublished M.St. dissertation, University of Oxford, 2006), pp. 6–7. 16



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Secondly, it is extremely unlikely that Anne’s work on the translation was simply a happy coincidence later utilized by Parker. This underestimates both Anne’s personal awareness of the initial intentions for the Latin Apologia and the significance of a vernacular translation. The original production of the Latin Apologia had been overseen from its genesis by members of Anne’s circle. Faced with the forthcoming Council of Trent, the initial idea for the Apologia took place at a meeting attended by both Anne’s husband, Nicholas Bacon, and her brother-in-law, William Cecil.22 It was Cecil who then commissioned John Jewel, the bishop of Salisbury, to write two defences of the Church of England.23 The first was an anonymous letter to be published on the Continent and designed to appear as if written by a lay Englishman; the second was the Apologia.24 Published in 1562 for a foreign, scholarly audience, the Apologia justified the secession from Catholicism using scriptural and patristic sources. The national significance of the text was immediately perceived, with an anonymous English translation also being published in 1562.25 Parker’s dedicatory letter makes no specific reference to this earlier translation, although he does allude to the unwillingness of both Jewel and himself to have this important work ‘not truly and wel translated’. He similarly applauds Anne’s ‘cleare translation’ as it frees the original Apologia from the ‘perrils of ambiguous and doubtful constructions’.26 The suggestion is that the 1562 English translation was flawed and this is still the accepted explanation.27 The conclusion is, however, unsubstantiated by analysis of the text. The 1562 version is a largely literal translation. So why, then, did Anne decide to do another translation and why was it presented as a largely serendipitous act by Matthew Parker? Alan Stewart has suggested that the presentation of Anne and her act of translation in the dedicatory letter is a deliberate framing device, designed to obscure any suggestion that this translation fulfilled official needs.28 Yet it is important to go further and to ask what exactly were these needs which were beyond the scope of the earlier translation and designed to be met in Anne’s work? By returning 22

I, 201. 23

Calendar of State Papers, Spanish 1558–1567, ed. M. A. S. Hume, 4 vols. (London, 1892–99),

J. E. Booty, John Jewel as Apologist of the Church of England (London, 1963), pp. 42–5. Epistola cuiusdam Angli, qua asseritur consensus verae religionis doctrinae & caeraemoniarum in Anglia, contra vanissimos quorundam cavillos, quibus eandem suis ad plebeculam contionibus impugnare conantur (n.p., 1561). Gary Jenkins suggests the Epistola may also have been commissioned by Cecil in response to libels about the Church of England circulating in France, following the Colloquy of Poissy: G. Jenkins, John Jewel and the English National Church (Aldershot, 2006), p. 86. 25 An apologie, trans. anon. 26 Parker, epistle, [ii]v, [iii] r. 27 Booty, John Jewel, p. 56. 28 Stewart, ‘Voices of Anne Cooke’, p. 94. 24

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to her actual translation, it becomes apparent that it is far from being simply a private, domestic act of translation.29 Instead it was intended to provide a creed for the Church of England, written for a wide readership in plain English. III Anne’s first departure from Jewel’s original occurs on the title-page and makes clear her didactic intentions for the translation. Jewel’s title, Apologia Ecclesiae Anglicanae, is expanded to read An Apologie or answere in defence of the Churche of Englande, with a briefe and plaine declaration of the true Religion professed and vsed in the same. Whether Anne herself entitled the printed edition is unclear, but the additional second clause accurately sums up the intent of her following translation: this work will offer ‘a briefe and plaine declaration’ of the tenets of the Church of England. Such an objective is made clear by Anne’s singular addition of an extra line of her own text to the translation. From Jewel’s original ‘Credimus ergo unam quandam naturam esse & vim Divinam, quam appellamus Deum’, translated in the 1562 version as ‘Wee beleue therfore that ther is one diuine nature & power, which we do cal God’, Anne interpolates two lines: This therefore is oure Belieffe. We beleeve that there is one certaine nature and divine Power, whiche wee call God.30

Anne’s extra line is inserted to signal the end of the introductory section of the Apologie and emphasizes what for her is the most important section of the work: the creed for the Church of England. Jewel had already suggested the credal nature of the second section of his Latin tract, by beginning the first four paragraphs of this part with the verb, ‘Credimus’ (‘We believe’).31 Whilst this echoes, in the plural, the first word of the Apostles’ and Nicene Creed, it should be remembered that Jewel’s tract was aimed at a hostile Continental audience. The Apologia Ecclesiae Anglicanae was designed to respond to Catholic accusations that Protestantism caused division and faction. The Apologia was therefore written to prove to a European audience that the clergy of the Church of England were united in belief and loyalty

29

For another study which links a female act of translation with contemporary religious issues, see M. White, ‘Renaissance Englishwomen and Religious Translations: The Case of Anne Lock’s Of the Markes of the Children of God (1590)’, ELR 29 (1999), 373–400. 30 J. Jewel, Apologia Ecclesiae Anglicanae (London, 1562), sig. A8v; An apologie, trans. anon., sig. C1v; An Apologie, trans. Bacon, sig. B7v. 31 Jewel, Apologia, sigs. A8v–B1v.



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to the queen; it was a strong declaration of doctrinal unity.32 ‘Credimus’ therefore has a very different significance within the Latin work. Moreover, whilst Jewel initially highlights the role of this section of his Apologia by his unusual word order, he then returns to the usual Latinate structure, where such verbs are incorporated into the sentence or omitted from the doctrinal discussions. Anne, translating for a native audience, instead continually uses this structure, prefacing sentences with affirmative statements, even when Jewel’s original does not include such verbs. A comparison of the 1562 translation on the conception of the sacraments, which is largely a literal translation of Jewel’s original, with Anne’s version will reveal the latter’s insistence on affirmative group statements. The earlier version places its emphasis on the subject, the sacraments, in direct translation of the original Latin, beginning ‘Of the sacraments which are proprely to be reckened vnder that name, we do acknowledge twoe’.33 Anne’s line not only begins with a group assertion, but also includes an additional affirmation of belief: ‘Besides wee acknowledge there be two sacramentes, which wee iudge proprely ought to be called by this name’.34 Jewel’s text and the 1562 translation then discuss the sacrament of Baptism without even prefacing it as a collective statement.35 Anne’s version instead continually reiterates the group belief, stating ‘We saye that Babtisme is a sacrament of the remission of sinnes, and of that washing which we haue in the blood of Christe’.36 Anne’s approach in this passage, which is to include almost double the number of repetitions of group belief compared with Jewel’s treatise and the 1562 translation, is adopted by her throughout the credal section of her translation. The credal emphasis in Anne’s translation reveals her grasp of issues far beyond the domestic setting in which she produced her text. It reflects the major challenge faced by the nascent Church of England during that period: the task of ensuring the preaching of the new Church’s message to the laity. During the 1560s and 1570s the provision of religious instruction in England became particularly pressing. There was a dearth of preachers in the Elizabethan Church that was not resolved until the early Stuart period.37 The evangelical preacher, Edward Dering, described the effects of the preaching dearth at this time, arguing that ‘Scarce one of a great many can giue an accompt of their 32

Booty, John Jewel, p. 45. An apologie, trans. anon., sig. D2r. 34 An Apologie, trans. Bacon, sig. C8r (my italics). 35 Jewel, Apologia, sig. B4v; An apologie, trans. anon, sig. D2r. 36 An Apologie, trans. Bacon, sigs. C8r–v (my italics). 37 See, for example, C. Haigh, English Reformations: Religion, Politics and Society under the Tudors (Oxford, 1993), pp. 268–76; F. Heal, Reformation in Britain and Ireland (Oxford, 2003), pp. 290, 433–4. 33

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faith’.38 The English translation of the Apologia offered by Anne could therefore be used to fulfil this lack of preaching, to provide a creed for the Church of England. The centrality Anne affords the credal element in her translation is in keeping with episcopal thinking at the time. By 1563, the year before Anne’s translation was published, there were calls from within the Church of England for the Apologia to be disseminated for a native audience. In preparation for the Convocation of 1563, Edmund Grindal, the bishop of London, suggested that the articles of doctrine should be drawn out of the Apologia by royal authority. Matthew Parker further thought that the Apologia should be appended to the Articles of Religion, the two in one book, ‘by common assent to be authorised, as containing the true doctrine’.39 But their intentions for the Apologia were not officially met and the Thirty-Nine Articles, as the Convocation’s confession of faith, did not fulfil the same role; they did not adopt a credal structure and moreover were not available in the vernacular until they were endorsed by Parliament in 1571. It is also possible that Anne’s credal guidance was inspired by a Continental model. The opening of Bullinger’s Decades was an existing example of an expositional text anchored in the Creeds.40 Anne’s father, Sir Anthony Cooke, was a close friend of Bullinger whilst in exile and the men corresponded after Cooke’s return to England.41 Cooke praised Bullinger for his continuing advice concerning the fledging Church of England, whom he treated ‘like a nurse who cherishes her children … anxious that no evil should hurt us’ and it may be that Anne was introduced to Bullinger’s credal model through her father.42 Whatever the inspiration, it is clear that Anne intended her translation to compensate for the laity’s lack of spiritual direction in this period by expounding the creed of the Church of England. The credal function Anne envisaged for her translation is also demonstrated by her extremely close translation of the theological terms of the tract, as well as the text’s awareness of a potential oral dissemination. The traits of early modern preachers are repeatedly used within her translation. Thus the 1562 version closely follows Jewel in beginning the third section of work with ‘These be those heresies for the which a good parte of the world is condemned at this

38

E. Dering, A Briefe and Necessary Instruction (London, 1572), sig. A4v. J. Strype, Annals of the Reformation, 4 vols. in 7 (Oxford, 1820–40), I, part I, 474. 40 H. Bullinger, The Decades of Henry Bullinger, trans. H. I., 5 vols. in 4 (Parker Society, Cambridge, 1849–52), I, 12–35. I am grateful to Prof. Diarmaid MacCulloch for this information. 41 The Zurich Letters, ed. H. Robinson, 2 vols. (Parker Society, Cambridge, 1842), II, 1–2, 13–14, 76; Original Letters, ed. H. Robinson, 2 vols. (Parker Society, Cambridge, 1846–7), I, 139–40. 42 Zurich Letters, ed. Robinson, II, 1. 39



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daye, vnheard’.43 Anne, however, begins this section of the translation with the following words: Beholde these are the horrible heresies for the whiche a good parte of the world is at this day condemned by the Byshop of Rome, and yet were never hearde to pleade their cause.44

Anne not only develops the entire secondary clause out of Jewel’s original word ‘inaudita’, but she also uses the verbal trait, ‘Beholde’, absent in Jewel’s work and the 1562 version. The 1562 version similarly offers a literal translation of Jewel’s line, ‘This is the power of darkenes’; Anne instead again incorporates a verbal trait in her version, writing ‘This, lo ye, is the power of the darkenes’.45 The potential oral dissemination of the work is also reflected in the absence of marginal translations, which in Anne’s version are incorporated into the text, in contrast to the 1562 translation. This was a common technique for spoken tracts; Jewel uses the same method within his ‘Challenge Sermon’, his oral rehearsal of the Apologia.46 Thus Anne’s language suggests that she intended her translation from the outset to have an oral quality, borrowing the persuasive traits of sixteenth-century preachers and accessing language not normally used by women in a household setting. IV Anne also engaged with contemporary theories of translation in order to make her text more convincing to a wider readership, again highlighted by her extended title. There she states that the work will be a ‘plaine declaration’, revealing her awareness of the national and largely masculine debate about the purity of the English tongue. Many of Anne’s contemporaries felt that English was a poor language in comparison with the classical tongues, or even the current Romance languages. Thomas Haward in the preface to his translation of Eutropius, also published in 1564, compared the ‘puritye of the Greke and

43

An apologie, trans. anon., sig. E2r. An Apologie, trans. Bacon, sigs. D8r–v. 45 An apologie, trans. anon., sig. B1r; An Apologie, trans. Bacon, sig. A7r. 46 J. Jewel, The Copie of a Sermon pronounced by the Byshop of Salisburie at Paules Crosse (London, 1560). It is possible Anne may have heard the sermon, either at Court or at Paul’s Cross. Her experience of Paul’s Cross is demonstrated by a later letter to Lord Burghley from 1585, where she wrote of ‘hearing odd sermons at Powles well nigh 20 yeres together’; London, British Library, MS Lansdowne 43, no. 48, fol. 119r. 44

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Latine toungues’ with the ‘barbarousnesse’ of English.47 The main criticism was of the limited vocabulary which English offered translators. One response to this was to appropriate terms from other languages, as demonstrated by Thomas Elyot’s The boke named the Gouernour.48 Yet others condemned such techniques for needlessly diluting a perfectly adequate vernacular; Thomas Wilson, for example, deemed such appropriations ‘ynkehorne termes’.49 Anne reveals her own allegiance in this debate by using Old and Middle English words, as well as colloquialisms, to give an authentically ‘English’ feel to her translation. Parker’s dedicatory letter reveals a contemporary recognition of Anne’s stance, by stating that her translation has ‘defended 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 speache’.50 Anne thus turns to words with Old English origins when addressing members of the Roman Catholic Church as ‘folk’, with their beliefs referred to as ‘tales’.51 C. S. Lewis praised Anne’s translation of ‘parasiti’ as ‘clawebackes’, but her use of this word is again dictated by its Old English origins.52 Similarly, the Middle English ‘huckermucker’ is offered as her translation of Jewel’s ‘dissimulanter’, rather than the Middle French choice of ‘colorably’ in the 1562 version.53 The use of this vocabulary is calculated to give her translation a native feel, as is her reliance on colloquialisms. Whereas the 1562 version translates one of Jewel’s lines as ‘Sworde and Fyer they haue had alwayes at hande: but of olde Councels and Fathers no worde at all’, Anne instead turns to more informal language, writing that as ‘for the olde Councels and the fathers, al mum, not a word’.54 Similarly, Anne translates that ‘God will not suffer him selfe to be mad

47

Eutropius, A briefe Chronicle, where in are described shortlye the Originall, and the successiue estate of the Romaine weale publique, trans. T. Haward (London, 1564), sig. B2v. 48 T. Elyot, The boke named the Gouernour (London, 1531). 49 T. Wilson, Arte of Rhetorique, ed. G. H. Mair (Oxford, 1909), p. 162. See also, for example, C. Shrank, ‘Rhetorical Construction of a National Community: The Role of the King’s English in Mid-Tudor Writing’, in Communities in Early Modern England, ed. A. Shepard and P. Withington (Manchester, 2000), pp. 180–98; F. Heal, ‘Mediating the Word: Language and Dialects in the British and Irish Reformations’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 56 (2005), 261–86. 50 Parker, epistle, [iii]r. 51 See, for example, An Apologie, trans. Bacon, sigs. A6r–v, A7v, B6v, C5r, F8v, G7r. 52 Lewis, English Literature, p. 307. See An Apologie, trans. Bacon, sig. E1r. 53 An Apologie, trans. Bacon, sig. N1r; Jewel, Apologia, sig. F6v; An apologie, trans. anon., sig. D2r. 54 An apologie, trans. anon., sig. L2r; An Apologie, trans. Bacon, sig. K3v. This was another phrase noted for particular praise by C. S. Lewis, English Literature, p. 307.



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a mocking stock’ by the Roman Catholic Church, again turning to language in contemporary parlance to push home her message more forcibly.55 One of the most significant contemporary advocates of ‘plain English’ was John Cheke. His programme for the English language was that ‘our own tung shold be written cleane and pure and unmangeled with the borrowing of other tunges’.56 Cheke’s translation of the gospel of Matthew was thus marked by conscious Anglicizations, such as ‘hundreder’ instead of centurion.57 Anne would have had first-hand contact with this theory at many points. Her father, Sir Anthony Cooke, was a tutor to Edward VI alongside Cheke and a 1541 translation of St Cyprian by Cooke reveals that at this early date he was already eschewing eloquence in favour of simple language, suggesting a later nexus of opinion with Cheke. In the dedication to his translation, Cooke argued for the superiority of Cyprian’s linguistic style, for he ‘attended not so moche to the perswadyng wordes of manys wysedom’, in comparison with Chrysostom, who is ‘moche in the apparell of wordes’.58 Anne’s husband and two of her brothers-in-law, Thomas Hoby and William Cecil, were part of Cheke’s circle at Cambridge and Cheke appended his statement on ‘plain English’ to Thomas Hoby’s 1561 translation of The courtyer. Anne’s adoption of this ‘plain English’ style in her translation was moreover a conscious decision. Her sister, Mildred, appended her own understanding of the debate to her Edwardian translation of St Basil’s sermon on Deuteronomy: I haue somwhat superstitiously obseruid the nature of the greke phrase not omittyng the congruety of english speche but rather the vse, that the treatye of so good an Author shold not in so moch serving the english tonge lese his owne efficacies & value. thynkyng it lesse faute that thautor sholde speake grekish english and saue his owne sence, than english greke and confound it with a doubtfull. in this sheweng the propertie of the tonge, in the other the veritie of the matter.59

Mildred thus rejected Anne’s methods and instead argued that the translator should prefer scrupulous accuracy to fluency in the English language. For both sisters, however, the act of translation reveals their awareness of current, intellectual debates and their contribution to such discussions. This is not the only theory Anne uses to make her translation more persuasive, for the classical rhetoric which formed part of her childhood education is 55 An Apologie, trans. Bacon, sig. Q6v. For further use of the word ‘mocking-stock’, see also sigs. A4r and N5r. 56 J. Cheke, ‘A Letter of Syr I. Cheekes’, in B. Castiglione, The courtyer of Count Baldessar Castilio, trans. T. Hoby (London, 1561), unpaginated appendix. 57 J. Cheke, The Gospel according to St Matthew, ed. J. Goodwin (London, 1843), p. 41. 58 Richmond, TNA, State Papers 6/12, fol. 16r. 59 BL MS Royal 17 B. XVIII, fol. 2v.

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also revealed as an influence upon her work. The use of verbal ornamentation was advised by rhetorical manuals to amplify the emotional persuasion of a text. Anne, for example, thus adds force to her argument through the use of doublets, the repetition of nouns. The 1562 version therefore offered the literal translation of the phrase, ‘without lawe, without example’, yet it is amplified in Anne’s text to ‘without any exaumple, vtterly without lawe or righte’.60 Anne’s classical training meant that she would have fully understood the power of verbal tropes, extolled in rhetorical manuals by Cicero and Quintilian. Although it is difficult to reconstruct fully her own personal library, Anne’s love of Cicero is confirmed in a poem written by her husband, Nicholas Bacon, earlier in their marriage. In the poem, dating from 1557 or 1558, Nicholas recalls the couple sitting together discussing ‘your Tullye [Cicero] and my Senecke’.61 Similarly, Anne would have had access to Quintilian’s rhetorical writings at her country estate, Gorhambury, during this period; George Puttenham recorded seeing Nicholas Bacon at work in the house and ‘found him sitting in his gallery alone with the works of Quintilian before him’.62 Yet even Anne’s utilization of classical rhetoric in her translation has a particularly English interpretation. Alliterative repetition was seen as a stylistic vice by classical and Continental renaissance rhetoricians; Susenbrotus calls the practice ‘ludicrous’.63 Many English rhetoricians, however, felt that alliteration suited their native language. George Puttenham, already cited as an acquaintance of the Bacons, thus praises the sparing use of alliteration, as does Henry Peacham, who argues that it made ‘the sentence more ready for the tongue and more pleasing for the ear’.64 Thus translating for an English audience, Anne frequently turns to alliteration to make her message more persuasive. The Roman Catholic Church therefore tells ‘fonde fables’ in her translation, whilst the abbots are the Pope’s ‘deere darlinges’ and the canonists are the ‘Popes parasites’, all phrases designed to appeal to an English audience far beyond Anne’s own household.65

60

An apologie, trans. anon., sig. B3r; An Apologie, trans. Bacon, sig. B3r. N. Bacon, The Recreations of His Age (Oxford, 1919), p. 27. 62 G. Puttenham, The Art of English Poesie, ed. G. D. Willcock and A. Walker (Cambridge, 1936), pp. 139–40. 63 Susenbrotus, cited in P. Mack, Elizabethan Rhetoric: Theory and Practice (Cambridge, 2002), p. 97. 64 ibid., pp. 97–8. 65 An Apologie, trans. Bacon, sigs. K6v, N2r, P4v. 61



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V There is, however, a final way in which Anne imposes her personal agency within the translation. The importance of the character of ‘Ladie A.B.’ to the Apologie is established through the dedicatory epistle from Matthew Parker. There he makes clear ‘the honour ye haue done to the kinde of women and to the degree of Ladies’, recommending Anne for commendation by the queen and as an example to all womankind; Jewel, on the other hand, is not named on the title-page and only alluded to by Parker as the ‘chiefe author of the Latine worke’.66 In the later editions of Anne’s translation, from 1600 and 1635, the title is appended to read ‘Published by the most Reverend Father in God, Iohn Iuell, Bishop of Salisbury’ and these versions are not prefaced by the epistle to Anne.67 Anne, therefore, is an important figure in framing the 1564 translation and she builds upon this identification to establish an authorial presence within the work, absent in Jewel’s original text. The initial use of the first person pronoun ‘I’ comes swiftly in the second sentence of Anne’s work and is inserted by her, in contrast to Jewel’s abstract question: It hath been an olde complaint … that ye Truth wandereth here and there as a straunger in the world, & doth redily fynde enemies and slaunderers amongst those that knowe her not. Albeit perchaunce this may seeme vnto some a thinge harde to bee beleeued, I meane to suche as haue scante well and narowly taken heed thereunto.68

From the very beginning of her translation, Anne emphasizes the role of the author, highlighting the personal nature of this defence of the Church of England and its condemnation of the Papacy. Anne repeatedly establishes an authorial presence, for example incorporating individual questions and pleas into the text. Literally translating Jewel’s text, the 1562 translation asks this question of the Roman Catholic Church: ‘But of so many and so grosse errors, what error haue these menne purged at any time?’69 Anne’s version instead makes the phrase into a direct question: ‘But yet tell me, of so manye and grosse errours, what one haue these men at anye time refourmed?’70 Where the 1562 version, again literally translating Jewel, asks the Papacy for written proof of their arguments, saying ‘For wher did Zuinkfelde euer write them?’, Anne instead adds in a personal appeal: ‘For tell me where hath Zwenkfeldius euer 66

Parker, epistle, [ii]v. J. Jewel, The Apologie of the Church of England, trans. A. Bacon (London, 1600); J. Jewel, The Apology of the Church of England, trans. A. Bacon (London, 1635). 68 An Apologie, trans. Bacon, sig. A1r (my italics). 69 An apologie, trans. anon., sig. K1r. 70 An Apologie, trans. Bacon, sig. I2v (my italics). 67

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written them?’71 The persona of the ‘Ladie A.B.’ may be designed to distract attention from the wider aims of this translation, but it is a persona Anne exploits to the fullest within her text. VI By engaging with the nature of Anne’s text, I want to suggest that several assumptions about female translations and early modern print culture need to be reappraised. By looking beyond the rhetorical stance in Parker’s dedicatory epistle, Anne’s aims for her translation are revealed as far from private or limited in nature. Whilst Anne produced the translation within a domestic setting, the text reveals the extent to which Anne engaged with, and responded to, national issues. She asserted a form and created a vocabulary for her translation which were vital to the recognition the text received, whilst establishing a role for herself within the translation. Instead of being evidence for the silencing of early modern women, this was a translation designed to find an audience in print. The readership reached by the translation is moreover remarkable, if the longevity of her text is fully realized. By the time Anne died in 1610, she had in fact seen her translation circulate as a quasi-official publication for over forty-five years. In the years after the publication of this translation, John Jewel and the Catholic Thomas Harding engaged in a bitter debate, both using Anne’s text as the basis of their arguments; it was therefore printed again as the core text in Jewel’s 1567 A Defence of the Apologie of the Churche of Englande. Throughout the 1570s, there were moves from within the episcopate to make the Defence a requisite item in all parishes.72 In 1609, the Works of Jewel were published in one volume, so that every parish church should have a copy, again including Anne’s translation within the Defence.73 Thus by fully comprehending the nature of Anne Bacon’s Apologie, translation is revealed as one way in which early modern women could demonstrate their own personal agency in print.

71

An apologie, trans. anon., sig. K2v; An Apologie, trans. Bacon, sig. I5v (my italics). The Correspondence of Matthew Parker, ed. J. Bruce and T. T. Perowne (Parker Society, Cambridge, 1853), pp. 416–17; W. P. M. Kennedy, Elizabethan Episcopal Administration, 3 vols. (London, 1924), II, 79. 73 Booty, John Jewel, p. 7. 72

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Frances Wolfreston’s Chaucer*

I

n July 2005 the Folger Shakespeare Library acquired a previously unnoticed copy of The workes of Geffray Chaucer (Folger STC 5074 Copy 2), edited by William Thynne, printed in 1550. The ‘flashpoint’ for the purchase was its provenance: in the seventeenth century this copy of Chaucer was in the private library of Frances Wolfreston and the Folger now holds thirteen of her books. The volume is of further value and interest because it is littered with manuscript marginalia by various earlier readers who, as will be shown, can be identified as Wolfreston’s female ancestors and their associates at Haslington Hall in Cheshire.1 It provides an example of how several successive generations of early modern female readers negotiated their engagement with a literary text within a domestic context. Moreover, Wolfreston and her ancestors are especially significant because they are, to use Paul Morgan’s term, ‘ordinary people’, members of

* This research was enabled by a Folger Shakespeare Library Research Fellowship undertaken during 2005 and I am extremely grateful to the librarians at the Folger Library for their encouragement, generosity and knowledgeable responses to questions and queries. It is part of a larger project to survey annotations in Renaissance printed copies of Chaucer, described in my ‘What Did Renaissance Readers Write in their Printed Copies of Chaucer?’, The Library 7th s. 9 (2008), 3–36. 1 See the Folger Library Recent Acquisitions catalogue for the fiscal year 2006; the entry is dated 7/22/05. Frances Wolfreston was featured in ‘Thys Boke is Myne’, an exhibition at the Folger Library, 2002–3 (see the exhibitions section of the Folger website for further details: http://www.folger.edu). Bibliographical details of the volume are provided in the Folger catalogue, accessible online through Hamnet [http://shakespeare.folger.edu/], [durable url: http://shakespeare.folger.edu/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon.cgi?BBID=169390, accessed 5 April 2008]. For accounts of Wolfreston’s book-collecting activities, see J. Gerritsen, ‘Venus Preserved: Some Notes on Frances Wolfreston’, English Studies 45 (1964), 271–4; P. Morgan, ‘Frances Wolfreston and “Hor Bouks”: A Seventeenth-Century Woman Book-Collector’, The Library 6th s. 11 (1989), 197–219, and ‘Frances Wolfreston’, The Library 6th s. 12 (1990), 56; T. Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550–1640 (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 311, 315–17; J. McElligott, ‘Wolfreston, Frances (bap. 1607, d. 1677)’, Oxford DNB (Oxford, 2004), [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/68912, accessed 17 August 2005].

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the minor country gentry.2 The purpose of this essay is to provide an account and analysis of the annotations. It is a particularly fortuitous moment for this copy of Chaucer to have come to light as its contents correlate with a number of current critical themes and concerns. Chaucer’s post-medieval reception is a thriving area of interest, one which has gathered pace in response to the shift away from author- to reader-focused studies.3 Interest in marginalia as a historical source has also flourished in the context of the development of the history of reading as a field of study.4 At the same time, the lack of visibility in the historical record of women as readers and annotators, especially of ‘recreational’ texts, poems, plays and other kinds of literature before 1600, has troubled and challenged feminist historians.5 This copy of Chaucer offers new, 2

Morgan, ‘Frances Wolfreston and “Hor Bouks”‘, p. 198. Recent key studies include A. Gillespie, Print Culture and the Medieval Author: Chaucer, Lydgate, and Their Books 1476–1557 (Oxford, 2006); S. Lerer, Chaucer and his Readers: Imagining the Author in Late Medieval England (Princeton, 1993), and Courtly Letters in the Age of Henry VIII: Literary Culture and the Arts of Deceit (Cambridge, 1997); J. J. Thompson, ‘Reception: Fifteenth to Seventeenth Centuries’, in Chaucer: An Oxford Guide, ed. Steve Ellis (Oxford, 2005), pp. 497–511; S. Trigg, Congenial Souls: Reading Chaucer from Medieval to Postmodern, Medieval Cultures 30 (Minneapolis MN, 2002). The seminal study of Chaucerian reception is C. F. E. Spurgeon, Five Hundred Years of Chaucer Criticism and Allusion, 1357–1900, 3 vols. (London, 1960); see also the update to Spurgeon, Chaucer’s Fame in England, STC Chauceriana 1475–1640, ed. J. Campbell Boswell and S. Wallace Holton (New York, 2004). Studies that specifically discuss Renaissance marginalia in printed copies of Chaucer include: J. A. Dane and A. Gillespie, ‘Back at Chaucer’s Tomb – Inscriptions in Two Early Copies of Chaucer’s Works’, Studies in Bibliography 52 (1999), 89–96; R. C. Evans, ‘Ben Jonson’s Chaucer’, ELR 19 (1989), 324–45; S. Lerer, ‘Latin Annotations in a Copy of Stowe’s Chaucer and the Seventeenth-Century Reception of Troilus and Criseyde’, RES n.s. 53, 209 (2002), 1–7. 4 On the topic of Renaissance reading in general see W. H. Sherman, ‘What Did Renaissance Readers Write in Their Books?’, in Books and Readers in Early Modern England: Material Studies, ed. J. Andersen and E. Sauer (Philadelphia PA, 2002), pp. 119–37. The classic study of marginalia is L. Jardine and A. Grafton, ‘“Studied for Action”: How Gabriel Harvey Read his Livy’, Past and Present 129 (1990), 30–78. 5 On the problems of finding examples of actual women readers and how they interacted with texts, see S. Reynolds Jayne, Library Catalogues of the English Renaissance (Berkeley CA, 1956), p. 46; H. Brayman Hackel, Reading Material in Early Modern England: Print, Gender, and Literacy (Cambridge, 2005), and ‘“Boasting of Silence”: Women Readers in a Patriarchal State’, in Reading, Society and Politics in Early Modern England, ed. K. Sharpe and S. N. Zwicker (Cambridge, 2003), pp. 101–21; G. Ziegler, ‘Lost in the Archives? Searching for Records of Early Modern Women’, in Teaching Tudor and Stuart Women Writers, ed. S. Woods and M. P. Hannay (New York, 2000), pp. 315–47. An overview of the issue is provided by J. Pearson, ‘Women Reading, Reading Women’, in Women and Literature in Britain, 1500–1700, ed. H. Wilcox (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 80–99. As Pearson points out, ‘hardest to find, especially in the earlier periods, is evidence of recreational reading’; and as she goes on to argue, this is not because women were not reading fiction, plays and love poems, they certainly were, but because of anxiety about recording this kind of reading (p. 83). 3



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welcome, material relating to each of these areas and represents an exciting new discovery, a genuine gem from the Folger collection. The earliest traceable owner of Folger STC 5074 Copy 2 is Dorothy Egerton of Betley, in Cheshire. She became the wife of Sir Thomas Vernon (fl. 1580, 1613) of Haslington in Cheshire before c.1578, with whom she went on to have a son and nine daughters.6 That she signs both her maiden name, Dorothy Egerton, and her married name, Dorothy Vernon, in the book, indicates that she took the volume with her to Haslington when she married Sir Thomas.7 It was used by ‘Anne Vernon’, who inscribes her name several times in the volume and may have been Dorothy’s sister-in-law, or her daughter or even her grand-daughter as there was an Anne in every generation. The book then continued to remain in the possession of the women. It passed into the ownership of Dorothy’s niece Mary Egerton (the daughter of her brother Ralph Egerton and his wife Frances).8 Mary Egerton married Henry Wolverstone (1554–1663) in 1593. They lived in the neighbouring county of Staffordshire and had a son, Francis (bap. 1612, d. 1666), who married Frances Middlemore (bap. 1607, d. 1677) in 1631. At some point after the marriage, Mary gifted the book to her daughter-in-law Frances, who spelt her new surname ‘Wolfresston’ or ‘Wolfreston’ and inscribed the volume: ‘Frances Wolfresston her bouk given her by her motherilaw mary wolfreston’ (fol. cclxxvii verso). It is a remarkable unbroken sequence of female ownership and exchange stretching over a century from before 1578 until 1677. It indicates how women could be the conduits for domestic property.9 And it is an example of the way Renaissance books could function as, to use Natalie Zemon Davis’s term, ‘carriers of relationships’.10 (See Plate 3.)

6 For details of the family see G. Ormerod, The History of the County Palatine and City of Chester, rev. T. Helsby, 2nd edn (London, 1882). Also D. X. Powell, ‘Vernon, Sir George (c. 1578– 1638)’, Oxford DNB (Oxford, 2004), [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/28240, accessed 4 April 2008]. I am grateful to Eilidh Kane for advice on these family relations. 7 At least one twentieth-century owner believed this to be the legendary Dorothy Vernon of Hadden Hall – the Elizabethan heroine of local Derbyshire ballads said to have eloped with John Manners, the son of her father’s arch rival. She became the inspiration of a novel of 1902 by Charles Major and then a film in 1924 starring Mary Pickford, but she is not the same Dorothy Vernon who wrote in this book. 8 At the head of the Knight’s Tale, next to the woodcut image of the knight, written horizontally in a brown ink, in an italic hand not seen elsewhere in the book, is the name ‘Raphe Egge’. This can be identified as Ralph Egerton; however, it is certain the book was owned by his daughter Mary because she gifts it to her daughter-in-law Frances, as described below. 9 Cf. the examples of women as owners of Chaucer manuscripts and ‘conduits of domestic property’ discussed in N. F. McDonald, ‘Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women, Ladies at Court and the Female Reader’, Chaucer Review 35 (2000), 22–42 (p. 34). 10 Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Cambridge, 1987), p. 192; cited and discussed in Sherman, ‘What Did’, p. 126.

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Disclaimer: Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. To view the image on this page please refer to the printed version of this book.

Plate 3.  Annotations by Dorothy Egerton, Anne Vernon and others in The workes of Geffray Chaucer: newly printed …, Washington DC, Folger Shakespeare Library, STC 5074 copy 2, fol. cxix verso.



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The extent to which women were a major constituent of Chaucer’s Renaissance readership is difficult to assess in any sort of precise statistical sense. Yet this example, and the others known, indicate that women, including gentry women and those of the ‘middling sort’ within provincial households, continued to be amongst Chaucer’s readership in the early modern period.11 But this volume is especially valuable because it contains not only signatures but also various hints and clues as to how the book was actually used by the Vernon women and how they interacted with Chaucer’s texts. First of all, the book contains a series of moralizing mottos and biblical extracts inscribed by Dorothy and Anne. Dorothy adds the following manuscript notes on the Epistle of James in the originally blank verso of the title page to The Romaunt of the Rose: Saynct james in hys epistle sayeth vy are all offendours manye wayes but those that offende not in ther tongues Are trulye blessed , the tongue sayeth he , is a small membr[cropped] but it worketh wonders , Hitherto saynct james,  (fol. cxix verso)

There is an echo here of James 3. 5: ‘The tongue is a little member, and boasteth great things.’ Dorothy blends this with a more general summary of the chapter which concerns the pre-eminent importance of good speech and virtuous words. A number of the inscriptions are specifically concerned with female conduct and learning, such as Dorothy’s citation from the Old Testament book of Proverbs: Fauour is decetfull and beautye is a vayne thynge but the woman that feareth god she shall be blessed prouerb 30  (fol. cxix verso)

Similarly, Anne inscribes the mottos: thou shal no plesure comparabel find to the inner gladenes of a vertues mind  (fol. cviii verso)

11 From a survey of fifty-four Renaissance printed copies of Chaucer undertaken so far, of the seventy-six names in Renaissance hands, fourteen are the names of women; see Wiggins, ‘What Did’, pp. 28–33, and note 5 above. There are other known examples of Renaissance women reading Chaucer. There is the case of Anne Bowyer, another Midlands woman of the middling sort, who copied extracts of Chaucer into her commonplace book, discussed by V. E. Burke, ‘Ann Bowyer’s Commonplace Book (Bodleian Library Ashmole MS 51): Reading and Writing Among the “Middling Sort”’, Early Modern Literary Studies 6 ( January, 2001), 1.1–28, [http://purl.oclc. org/emls/06–3/burkbowy.htm, accessed 13 September 2005]. There is also Lady Anne Clifford, whose reading of Chaucer is known from her diary, discussed in The Diary of Anne Clifford 1616–1619: A Critical Edition, ed. K. O. Acheson (New York, 1995), pp. 81, 164–5.

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the feare of god is the beging of wisdon a  (fol. cccxxxix recto)

These are accompanied by another proverb, written in the blank space at the end of the General Prologue either by Dorothy’s husband Sir Thomas or by her brother-in-law Robert, which seemingly gives a seal of approval to such displays of virtuous and industrious female reading:12 A good woman is a crown of gould to her husbande and the ivell women is the stinge of a sarpente Robeart V[ernon] Thomas Vernon Dorothee Vernon.

These mottos and biblical extracts correlate with contemporary views of women’s reading and the ideal wife as prescribed in conduct books, sermons and religious tracts. The ideal wife, in the construction of traditional femininity, is chaste, silent and obedient.13 The reference in the inscription to the tongue and to holding one’s tongue (the inscription states that the blessed ‘offende not in ther tongues’) is precisely chosen and resonates with contemporary orthodox ideology. The idea of being loose-tongued or sharp of tongue is a very common one and popularly presented as antithetical to ideals of wifely or feminine virtue. The notion that the virtuous and educated wife is an ornament and a support to her husband (‘a crown of gould’) is also common in contemporary discourse on marriage.14 These mottos and extracts, then, serve to situate this 12 I have not so far been able to identify which version of the Bible these proverbs are from. The quotation from Proverbs 12. 4 differs from both the 1560 Geneva Bible (which has ‘A verteous woman is the crowne of her housband: but she that maketh him ashamed, is as corruption in his bones’) and the 1568 Bishops’ Bible (which has ‘A huswifely woman is a crowne vnto her husbande: but she that behaueth her selfe vnhonestly, is as corruption in his bones’). 13 The triad ‘chaste, silent and obedient’ in relation to women’s reading and education is discussed by S. W. Hull in her now classic Chaste, Silent, and Obedient: English Books for Women, 1475–1640 (San Marino CA, 1988). See also L. Hutson, ‘The Housewife and the Humanists’, in The Usurer’s Daughter: Male Friendship and Fictions of Women in Sixteenth-Century England (London, 1994), pp. 17–51; M. E. Lamb, ‘Constructions of Women Readers’, in Teaching Tudor and Stuart Women Writers, ed. S. Woods and M. P. Hannay (New York, 2000), pp. 23–34, esp. p. 32; D. Willen, ‘Religion and the Construction of the Feminine’, in A Companion to Early Modern Women’s Writing, ed. A. Pacheco (Oxford, 2002), pp. 22–39. 14 For a discussion of both of these points see L. Jardine, Still Harping on Daughters: Women and Drama in the Age of Shakespeare (New York, 1983), on the idea of silence see especially pp. 37–67, 103–13. As Jardine points out: ‘If the definition of the virtuous wife is as chaste, obedient, dutiful and silent, then the definition of the wife without virtue is as lusty, headstrong, and talkative … Women’s moist humours, which make her lascivious, also loosen her tongue. The tongue is the symbol of impudence, that is, modesty, to be carefully covered by the teeth (so gentlewomen are advised)’ (p. 104). Jardine also discusses the ‘double bind’ of women’s education in the Renaissance.



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copy of Chaucer within the context of the management of the education of the women in the Vernon household. Reading, and here reading Chaucer, is firmly presented as an activity that will benefit a woman’s mind and be a resource for self improvement. That Chaucer’s Works were being used by Dorothy and Anne in this way, as sources of morals, wisdom and virtuous learning, is further suggested by the kinds of passages selected for underlining. In the same black and brown inks used for these signatures and biblical inscriptions, a number of passages have been underlined or bracketed in the Canterbury Tales. Most often these are passages offering moral or proverbial wisdom and, as is well known, this kind of proverb-hunting – the annotational method of ‘commonplacing’ – was virtually ubiquitous in the sixteenth century, not least in relation to Chaucer.15 Many readers regarded Chaucer’s Works as a gold-mine for tag lines, aphorisms and sententious sayings, so the Vernons were very much of their time in this respect. Nevertheless, it is tempting to see the choice of moralizing extracts as particularly appropriate to the context of a godly household. Several of the sententious sayings picked out in ink emphasize the value of virtuous words, the dangers of idleness and the evils of drunkenness.16 There are also a number 15

On the Renaissance practice of commonplacing as an annotational method see S. N. Zwicker, ‘The Constitution of Opinion and the Pacification of Reading’, in Reading, Society and Politics in Early Modern England, ed. K. Sharpe and S. Zwicker (Cambridge, 2003), pp. 295–316 (pp. 297–8). On commonplacing in copies of Chaucer, see Wiggins, ‘What Did’, p. 17. 16 There is underlining in black and brown inks in twelve out of the twenty-five Canterbury Tales (but not elsewhere in the book). In most cases a Tale will have just a few proverbial phrases or sententious couplets underlined. This is the case in The Reeve’s Tale (ll. 4026–8 ‘nede has na peer / Hym boes serve hymself that has na swayn, / Or elles he is a fool, as clerkes sayn’); The Merchant’s Tale (ll. 1417–18 ‘She shal nat passe twenty [Thynne: fyftene] yeer, certain; / Oold fissh and yong flessh wolde I have fayn’ and ll. 1793–4 ‘For in this world nys worse pestilence / Than hoomly foo, al day in thy presence.’); The Clerk’s Tale (l. 857 ‘Love is noght oold as whan that it is newe’); The Canon’s Yeoman’s Prologue and Tale (ll. 648–9 ‘For whan a man hath over-greet a wit, / Ful oft hym happeth to mysusen it’ and ll. 962–5 ‘But al thyng which that shineth as the gold / Nis nat gold, as that I have herd told; / Ne every appul that is fair at eye / Ne is nat good, what so men clappe or crye’); The Tale of Melibee (l. 1263 ‘The proverbe seith that ‘for to do synne is mannyssh, but certes for to persevere longe in synne is werk of the devel’’ and l. 1325 ‘an hound [Thynne: lytel hounde] wol holde the wilde boor’). In the case of The Wife of Bath’s Prologue, in addition to four proverbial phrases (at ll. 401–2, 465–6, 521–2, 572–4) two longer passages are bracketed in black ink (ll. 609–26 beginning ‘For certes, I am al Venerien’ and ll. 692–712 beginning ‘Who peyntede the leon, tel me who?’). More extensive underlining, motivated by different kinds of interests, appears in the General Prologue (four passages from the portraits of the Clerk, Wife of Bath and Parson, and from l. 725 of Chaucer’s conclusion concerning the correspondence of word and deed); The Knight’s Tale (ll. 1798–812 beginning ‘Now looketh, is nat that an heigh folye / Who may been a fool but if he love?’); The Cook’s Tale (ll. 4406–10) and Physician’s Tale (ll. 76–80, 83–8, 93–102); and The Man of Law’s Introduction and Tale (two passages from the Prologue concerning loss of time and one from the Tale concerning drunkenness, plus three

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of longer sections of text underlined to do with advice on the everyday practical running of a household. So, the annotators selected the passage on the management of servants in the household from the Cook’s Tale and there is extensive underlining in the passages relating to child-rearing and the duties of parents at the start of the Physician’s Tale.17 Apart from these pieces of practical domestic advice and moral wisdom, passages are picked out in two tales relating to the trials and tribulations experienced by virtuous yet suffering female Christian heroines. In The Second Nun’s Tale, the life of Saint Cecile, a bracket in black ink encloses the stanza that features Cecile’s verbal sparring with Almachius: Almachius seyde, ‘Ne takestow noon heede Of my power?’ and she answered hym this: ‘Youre might,’ quod she, ‘ful litel is to dreede, For every mortal mannes power nys But lyk a bladder ful of wynd, ywys. For with a needles point, whan it is blowe, May al the boost of it be leyd ful lowe.’  (ll. 435–41)

Cecile harnesses the power of virtuous words to deflate and deflect her male adversary. The decision to single out this stanza is intriguing as it seems compellingly consistent with the proverbs and mottos inscribed by the women elsewhere in the book that deal with the theme of virtuous speech and wise words. But the tale which seems to have been of most interest to these annotators is the story of Constance, told by the Man of Law. When Constance is told by her parents that she must marry against her will (and against her Christian religion) she lets out an extended lament and only accepts her fate with the reflection that (and this is the part underlined and bracketed in ink in the Vernons’ copy): Wommen are born to thraldom and penaunce, And to been under mannes governaunce  (ll. 286–7) more from the Tale discussed below) and The Second Nun’s Prologue and Tale (most of the first three stanzas of the Prologue dealing with the theme of idleness, and one stanza from the Tale, discussed below). For ease of reference all line numbers and quotations are from The Riverside Chaucer, ed. L. D. Benson, 3rd edn (Oxford, 1988). 17 The Cook’s Tale, ll. 4406–10, ‘Wel bet is rotten appul out of hoord / Than that it rotie al the remenaunt.’ / So fareth it by a riotous servaunt; / It is ful lasse harm to lete hym pace, / Than he shende alle the servantz in the place.’ The Physician’s Tale, ll. 93–102, ‘Ye fadres and ye moodres eek also, / Though ye han children, be it oon or mo, / Youre is the charge of al hir surveiaunce, / Whil that they been under youre governaunce. / Beth war, if by ensample of your lyvynge, / Or by youre necligence in chastisynge, / That they ne perisse; for I dar wel seye / If that they doon, ye shul it deere abeye. / Under a shepherde softe and necligent / The wolf hath many a sheep and lamb torent.’



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The next passage underlined is a lament on the way that the Devil uses women to cause trouble; in this case a woman (Constance’s mother-in-law) will be used to destroy a Christian marriage.18 In a third example, on a similar theme, in the stanza describing the marriage debt the word ‘though’ is underlined. The stanza states that ‘even though’ a wife is holy, she must set her holiness aside when it comes to fulfilling the marriage debt (she must take in patience at night, such things as are necessities and sources of pleasure).19 The passages picked out here, then, in the Man of Law’s Tale, are not proverbial or sententious but are all to do with the theme of the role of women in marriage. The marginalia and underlining depict a method of reading Chaucer which is industrious and is concerned with drawing wisdom from the texts, often wisdom that has a domestic application. It is a method of reading which attends to models of good and virtuous women from history, a topic recommended by contemporary conduct books. It is reading that takes place in the context of and with reference to the Bible and contemporary religious tracts. And it is an approach to Chaucer approved of by the men of the household. Taking all of this together, these are annotations that depict a method of reading that corresponds with the sanctioned, conservative model, proposed in contemporary conduct books and Protestant teaching on the purpose of female education.20 It is also possible to detect here, in the tone of the various transcriptions, the influence of John Foxe, in whose Actes and Monuments (which circulated widely around this time) Chaucer is promoted as a beacon of Protestantism. It is ‘by reading of Chaucer’s Works’, states Foxe, that men ‘were brought to the true knowledge of religion’.21 The perceptions, on the one hand, of Chaucer as a reformer, and, on the other, of Chaucer’s works as quotable source of ‘wisdom’, coalesce in this book. The result is an attitude to Chaucer’s Works as suitable instructive reading matter for the godly household, especially the women of that household. That is to say, one conclusion would be to argue that here we have annotations and underlining by a group of readers who have ‘missed the meaning’ of Chaucer’s texts. Whereas the Canterbury Tales present a lively debate with a range of different views of marriage, here we find the Vernon

18 The Man of Law’s Tale, ll. 367–71: ‘Wel knowestow to women the olde way! / Thou madest Eva brynge us in servage; / Thou wolt fordoon this Cristen marriage. / Thyn instrument so – weylawey the while! – / Makestow of women, whan thou wolt bigile.’ 19 The Man of Law’s Tale, ll. 709–14: ‘For thogh that wyves be ful hooly thynges, / They moste take in pacience at nyght / Swiche manere necessaries as been plesynges / To folk that han ywedded hem with rynges, / And leye a lite hir hoolynesse aside, / As for the tyme – it may no bet betide.’ 20 For further discussion of the issue of women’s reading and the prescriptions of conduct and education works, see Pearson, ‘Women Reading’, pp. 81ff. 21 J. Foxe, Actes and Monuments, 2 vols. (London, 1583; STC 11225), II, p. 839.

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women drawing passages out of context to be appropriated within Protestant teachings on the family and the ideal role of women within marriage. Chaucer has been purposefully domesticated and the female readers are complicit in the perpetuation of a paternalistic model of womanhood.22 In their annotations Dorothy and Anne negotiate their response to Chaucer through the conventional, prescribed, male-voiced models of reading. Much as we may have hoped to find, in the annotations of Dorothy and Anne, some kind of corrective to these prescriptive sources, none appears to be there.23 And yet, there is a need for some degree of caution here and there are certain potential problems or limitations with this view in relation to this particular volume. One point, of course, is that although the hands and inks help to link together signatures and inscriptions, ultimately it is difficult to know for certain who was responsible for the underlining. Is it Dorothy Vernon? Is it her husband? Is it someone else altogether? Or does it represent some kind of group consensus? What does seem certain is that this was a shared resource within the household. The margins were not private places for women, or even for husbands and wives together. The manner in which the mottos and quotations themselves are set out – in a very bold and clear way – suggests they were intended for display and circulation.24 It would therefore be mistaken to think of the annotations as in any sense a transparent record of how the Vernons read their Chaucer. They must be seen, as least to some extent, either as a statement about how the Vernons wanted to be seen to read their Chaucer, or as a guide to how they wanted other, perhaps more junior, members of the household to interact with Chaucer’s Works. The other reason for caution when interpreting these readers’ marks is that these are not the only set of annotations made on the book at Haslington in 22 A similar argument has been proposed in relation to the Findern anthology in the fifteenth century and the re-casting of Chaucer’s texts there makes an interesting comparison with the Vernon Chaucer; see McDonald, ‘Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women’, pp. 37–9, n. 49; S. McNamer, ‘Female Authors, Provincial Setting: The Re-versing of Courtly Love in the Findern Manuscript’, Viator 22 (1991), 279–310. The argument is that the Findern women ‘missed the meaning’ of Chaucer’s lyrics and legends by reading them as sincere, earnest expressions of female passion and pain. Excised from a courtly social context, the texts are related to the realities of the lives of fifteenth-century provincial gentry women and lose altogether their ludic, playful, flirtatious and erotic qualities. 23 As James Daybell points out, in Women Letter-writers in Tudor England (Oxford, 2006), ‘recent generations of women’s and social historians working on early modern women and the family have trawled the archives for “autobiographical” sources written by women – diaries, journals, household accounts, and commonplace books as well as letters – in order to provide a corrective to male-voiced prescriptive sources, such as conduct books, sermons, and religious and political tracts, and to shed new light on women’s lives and experiences during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries’ (p. 8). 24 Images are available in Wiggins, ‘What Did’, pp. 27, 30.



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the sixteenth century. In addition to the Vernon annotations, there is a second set of annotations by Timothy Kendall. Timothy Kendall grew up in Oxfordshire, was educated at Eton College, and attended Oxford University before 1572. He left the university without a degree to join Staple Inn in London, where he compiled a collection of verses called Flowers of epigrammes, published in 1577.25 Unfortunately, there is no will or other information about Kendall’s life. However, we now know that, in 1578, Kendall was at Haslington Hall and while he was there, he elegantly inscribed the Vernons’ copy of Chaucer with his own detailed annotations, including verses mourning the death of Chaucer. This nine-quatrain poem is written in an effusive style, with undiluted expressions of praise for Chaucer and grief at his death.26 Chaucer is celebrated for his learning and as a refiner of the language, and his death is described as a loss on a national scale which can only be consoled by the knowledge that his Works survive and live on. It is very much a humanistic view of Chaucer and the poem is written in Kendall’s distinctive italic script and grey ink. Kendall also systematically went through the book and annotated the texts. Again, he does so in a typically humanistic style, so he uses underlining and clover leaves to point out features of scientific learning, to flag up different kinds of discourse or rhetoric, to point out lines that are repeated or echoed between different texts, to note classical sources, and he also adds summary lists of famous people, places or natural features. There is, then, a direct and immediate contrast between the congenial, humanistic and literary contribution of Timothy Kendall and the rather pragmatic interests of the Vernons. It is a contrast between, on the one hand, the perception of Chaucer as laureate poet and father of English and, on the other, of Chaucer as a reformer and a source of moral wisdom and domesticated advice. The question is whether there is any real reason to think that these two sets of annotations can or should be separated or separable. The annotations by the Vernon women with their clear sense of propriety and decorum were certainly designed to visually display and demonstrate a recognizable, commendable and sanctioned brand of female reading practice. But Timothy Kendall’s contribution to the book would also have been accessible to Dorothy

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Flovvers of epigrammes, out of sundrie the moste singular authours selected, as well auncient as late writers. Pleasant and profitable to the expert readers of quicke capacitie: by Timothe Kendall, late of the Vniuersitie of Oxford: now student of Staple Inne in London (Imprinted at London : [By John Kingston] in Poules Churche-yarde, at the signe of the Brasen Serpent, by Ihon Shepperd, 1577). STC (2nd edn) / 14927. Available through EEBO, [http://gateway.proquest.com/ openurl?ctx_ver=Z39.882003&res_id=xri:eebo&rft_id=xri:eebo:citation:99843684, accessed 4 April 2008]. Many of these ‘flowers’ are translations made when Kendall was a schoolboy. 26 Kendall’s poem is currently being edited. For further information about Kendall, see the entry in The Origins of Early Modern Literature database, hosted by .

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and Anne. Dated ’1578’ and inscribed ‘at Haslington Hall’, Kendall’s notes have, in fact, the appearance of an invited intervention, perhaps associated with a particular event or visit. They are a very strong indication of what might be called literary or aesthetic interests at Haslington Hall in the 1570s and, as such, are a reminder that different perceptions of Chaucer are not sealed off from one another and that reading practices, like annotations, could be layered. To put it another way, they are suggestive of the way that the reading roles performed by the Vernon women, and depicted in their marginalia, are not necessarily a complete or transparent record of how they read their Chaucer. Early modern women are often thought of as having been excluded from literary culture, which is seen as a masculine, homosocial realm. The Vernon’s Chaucer suggests the household to be a locus where women could participate in a national literary culture as part of a circle of both male and female readers.27 The women are restricted in terms of what they can commit to paper and the readings they can reveal in their annotations. But the way the volume was passed between the women, as a treasured heirloom, and Kendall’s contribution, suggest they were part of a lively literary culture not fully reflected in their own more limited marginalia. Years later, some time after 1631, Frances Wolfreston was gifted this copy of Chaucer by her mother-in-law Mary. There is no indication as to whether Mary or Frances placed particular value on the book because of its marginalia. Nor is there any indication as to whether they had a preference for either of the two alternative routes through the texts offered by the two sets of marginalia: the Vernons’ annotations pointing out domestic and moral readings or Kendall’s tracking literary themes. But, certainly, these competing layered alternatives would seem to make this Chaucer an entirely appropriate gift for a daughter-in-law who managed to combine the role of being a ‘good wife’ with a life-long enthusiasm for what we would now call ‘English literature’. Frances began assembling her library after her marriage in 1631. As far as we know the copy of Chaucer’s Works is unique among her books for being a family-owned volume; her other books she apparently acquired on her own initiative from local booksellers, trips to London, and from travelling chapmen.28 It is not possible to say exactly when she received the copy of Chaucer from Mary; perhaps it was a wedding gift in 1631, or she may have received it later, or in Mary’s will. Either way, it would have been available to her within the family and was perhaps one of the stimuli to her bibliophilic activities. Wolfreston is exceptional not because she is a gentry book-collector from the Midlands, of which there are multiple examples, but because she is the 27 See V. E. Burke, ‘Reading Friends: Women’s Participation in “Masculine” Literary Culture’, in Early Modern Women’s Manuscript Writing: Selected Papers from the Trinity/Trent Colloquium, ed. V. E. Burke and J. Gibson (Aldershot, 2004), pp. 75–90. 28 Watt, Cheap Print, pp. 315–16.



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only known female one at this time.29 There has always been the question of the extent to which she should be regarded as a special case, some sort of anomaly. The copy of Chaucer, then, ultimately contributes to our view of Wolfreston because it makes it possible to situate her within the context of a family in which several generations of women read and owned books of English literature within a domestic context. It suggests that, although she was exceptional for her enthusiasm for, and success at, book-collecting, her interest in literature was continuous with the interest of the women around her.30

29 Morgan, ‘Frances Wolfreston and “Hor Bouks”‘, pp. 209–10, cites many examples of male contemporary book-collectors from among the Midlands squirearchy, including Thomas Hall, Thomas Warde, Nathaniel Crynes, Ralph Sheldon and Captain Cox. 30 As Morgan states in ‘Frances Wolfreston and “Hor Bouks”‘, the question raised by her library is ‘whether the English literature and drama represent an exceptional preoccupation, or whether many ladies of her social class shared it’ (p. 208) and, as he notes, ‘What is difficult to determine is how typical she was of her time and class in the absence of comparative evidence’ (p. 210).

Adam Smyth

Commonplace Book Culture: A List of Sixteen Traits

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ork on commonplace books has had a problem with definitions. Sometimes, particularly in library catalogues, the term ‘commonplace book’ is used in an unhelpfully loose sense to describe almost any early seventeenth century manuscript of a miscellaneous character. At other times, scholarly discussion has focused on printed prescriptions – on guides to commonplacing rather than the products of that method. As a result of this concentration on theory, the commonplace book in criticism is a largely disembodied text, a set of ideals rather than enactments.1 But a quick forage through the archives shows that extant commonplace books rarely conform to such neat templates: commonplace books are, overwhelmingly, messier texts – messier in terms of the kinds of inclusions they present (everything from lines of Ovid to recipes to cure an ailing horse) – and in terms of their material form. The experience of reading manuscript commonplace books is often an experience of baffled delight – delight at pages so crammed with text that annotations spill over to the binding and covers; at devotional aphorisms jostling with bawdy epigrams and recipes (‘Unto the lorde haue I lyfte up my soule’; ‘to preserve plumes or Damsins’);2 at scraps of printed pages glued into the manuscript; at prose merging with verse merging with financial accounts merging with illustrations; at blank pages, and gaps; at entire printed books bound into the centre of manuscripts; at the construction of a single manuscript out of many

1 This is not true of all accounts: E. Havens, Commonplace Books: A History of Manuscripts and Printed Books from Antiquity to the Twentieth Century (New Haven CT, 2001), sets out in part to provide a corrective to scholarship’s prior focus on ‘learned theories’ of commonplace books, as opposed to ‘everyday practice’ (p. 9). William Sherman’s detailed study of Sir Julius Caesar’s massive, 1200-page commonplace book provides a rich account of one particular text: W. H. Sherman, Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England (Philadelphia PA, 2008), pp. 127–48. 2 University of Pennsylvania, Annenberg Rare Book Library, MS Codex 823, n. p.

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different sized pages; at the recycling of old, often medieval texts in the binding of manuscripts; at the steady accumulation of notes by several generations of annotators; at texts that simultaneously ‘begin’ from various points within their pages and proceed in various directions, so that it becomes meaningless to talk of a front or back, a beginning or an end.3 Because criticism has yet to turn fully to commonplace books in the archives, it has conveyed neither this eclecticism of inclusions nor this rampantly inventive materialism. In this essay I wish to reconsider the term ‘commonplace book’, and to suggest that the use of the broader category ‘commonplace book culture’ is a helpful way to convey this very wide range of texts and practices. I wish, also, to think about the role of women in this culture: while critics have tended to assert that women had little place or agency within the commonplace milieu, I propose that by considering a broader commonplace book culture, we can find significant evidence of women’s activity. If commonplace books can only partly be explained through a reliance on early modern didactic expressions of method, those expressions of method are, of course, still crucial: I am not proposing the replacement of pedagogical theory with archival practice, but rather the co-existence of the two. Certainly, if we want to establish an opening definition of the commonplace book as a form, those expressions of method present a useful starting point, providing an ideal which the archives can finesse.4 In what we might call ‘its purest or most classic form’,5 the commonplace book presents a series of thematic headings under which aphorisms are distributed, gathered from reading or, more rarely, from conversation, and deemed in some way useful or exemplary. By deploying these collected quotations in spoken or written discourse, compilers will be led to an eloquence of expression, and through this eloquence to a good moral life. 3 For texts that run over covers, see Folger V. a. 148; for scraps, Folger M. a. 169, fol. 89r; for a printed book bound into a manuscript, Folger V. a. 95, a later seventeenth century commonplace book bound around a Book of the Forme of Common Prayers, Administration of the Sacraments, &c (Middelburgh, 1587); for the layering of inclusions, Folger V. b. 199, fols. 5r and 6v; for loose pages, Folger V. a. 219; for several different sizes of paper bound together, Folger M. a. 187; for the recycling of old texts as new manuscripts, Folger V. a. 130; for different generations of writers, Folger V. a. 180; for texts that start from different points and proceed in different directions, Folger V. a. 115, Folger V. a. 169 and Folger V. a. 260. 4 The most helpful guides to the commonplace book are A. Moss, Printed Commonplace Books and the Structuring of Renaissance Thought (Oxford, 1996); Havens, Commonplace Books; M. T. Crane, Framing Authority: Sayings, Self, and Society in Sixteenth-Century England (Princeton NJ, 1993); W. H. Sherman, John Dee: The Politics of Reading and Writing in the English Renaissance (Amherst MA, 1997), pp. 60–5; P. Beal, ‘Notions in Garrison: The Seventeenth-Century Commonplace Book’, in New Ways of Looking at Old Texts, ed. W. S. Hill (New York, 1993), pp. 131–47; J. M. Lechner, Renaissance Concepts of the Commonplace (New York, 1962). Note also R. Darnton, ‘Extraordinary Commonplaces’, New York Review of Books (2000), 82–7. 5 Beal, ‘Notions in Garrison’, p. 134.

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While this textual form has a history dating back to Aristotle, Cicero and Quintilian,6 and found expression in medieval florilegia (collections of literary ‘flowers’), it was in the early modern period that the commonplace book flourished as a crucial component in the humanist educational system, and as the principal technology for retaining, organizing and epitomizing a large body of information. The most influential articulation of what we might call commonplace book method came in Erasmus’ De Copia Verborum (1513), which was not only directly influential in itself but was also the basis for many vernacular adaptations.7 This guide suggested that students draw up in their notebooks a list of subjects or ‘places’: ‘the main types and subdivisions of vice and virtue’, such as ‘Faith and Faithlessness’, or ‘Reverence and Irreverence’, ‘arranged according to similar and opposites’. These headings should then be subdivided into ‘subordinate types’: different varieties of ‘Reverence’, for instance, such as ‘reverence towards God, patriotism towards one’s country, love for children’, and so on. Under each of these ‘subordinate types’, the compiler should add ‘commonplaces and maxims; and … whatever you come across in any author, … if it is rather striking … be it an anecdote or a fable or an illustrative example or a strange incident or a maxim or a witty remark … or a proverb or a metaphor or a simile’. As a result of this reading, extracting and gathering, Erasmus confidently asserts, a ‘whole field of illustrative examples and judgments opens up’.8 With this ever-expanding storehouse in place, the compiler could develop ‘the habit of using the riches supplied by your reading’9 to produce his or her 6 The founding classical texts are Aristotle’s Art of Rhetoric; Cicero’s Topica, De Oratore and De Inventione; and Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria. For this history, see Havens, Commonplace Books, pp. 13–18; Moss, Printed Commonplace Books, pp. 1–23; Beal, ‘Notions in Garrison’, p. 135. 7 For English educational texts that are informed by commonplace book systems, see Thomas Wilson, Arte of Rhetorique (London, 1560) STC 25800; William Baldwin, Treatise of Morall Philosophie Contayninge the Sayinges of the Wise (London, 1584) STC 1261; Thomas Blage, Schole of Wise Conceytes (London, 1572) STC 3115; Henry Peacham, The Garden of Eloquence (London, 1577) STC 19497; Obadiah Walker, Of Education: Especially of Young Gentlemen (Oxford, 1673) Wing W400. For a discussion of sixteenth-century English classroom texts that encouraged these methods, see Crane, Framing Authority, pp. 77–92. 8 Erasmus, De Copia, in Collected Works of Erasmus, XXIV, ed. C. R. Thompson, trans. B.  I. Knott (Toronto, 1974), pp. 635–9. Other central early modern texts are Rodolphus Agricola, De Formando Studio (Cologne, 1539); Philip Melanchthon, Loci Communes Rerum Theologicarum (Basle, 1521); and Juan Luis Vives, Epistolae and De Disciplinis (1531), printed together in Opera, 2 vols. (Basle, 1555). Composite volumes De Ratione Studii, featuring work by all of these compilers, appeared in northern Europe after 1531 and were widely used in schools. In the eighteenth century, John Locke provided perhaps the most complete printed description of a commonplace book system in his widely read A New Method of Making Common-Place-Books (London, 1706). 9 Erasmus, De Copia, p. 638 (my italics).



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own persuasive discourse: he who ‘will flit like a busy bee through the entire garden of literature’ will ‘acquire an ample supply of examples … ready in our pocket’10 from which to build eloquence. Different authors suggest different ways in which a compiler will generate discourse from commonplaces, and all descriptions are characterized by an imprecision and a fondness for metaphor which meant that enactments of prescriptions varied wildly: commonplacing was extensively but imprecisely theorized, and a sense of approximation and adaptability accompanied a great self-consciousness of method. Erasmus’ De Copia sought to encourage elegant, classical Latin through the ‘expressive variation of any proposition’;11 this guide prescribed endless variations on gathered examples to produce an abundant linguistic expressivity – an abundance, in other words, born from imitation. The copia of Erasmus’ title thus suggests both copiousness and the idea of the copy,12 and the commonplace book provides ‘a mode of [abundant] improvisation within a set of norms’.13 This description of commonplace book principles needs to be accompanied by a stress on the tremendous variety of manuscripts that were actually produced. Not only was the commonplace book of theory an idea(l) that was in a continual state of modification; the gap between neat prescription and messy practice was also often cavernously wide: where commonplace books end and where other textual forms begin (the note-book, pocket-book, miscellany, table-book, diary, thesaurus (‘treasure chest’), sylvae (‘forest’), florilegia)14 is often difficult to discern. It is certainly possible to locate ‘correct’ manuscript commonplace books, in the sense of texts that closely enact printed prescriptions such as Erasmus’. The 1670–1716 collection of Matthew Wood, vicar of Bowdon in Cheshire, for example, records theological prose extracts carefully organized under an extensive list of alphabetical headings, ranging from ‘Apocrypha’ and ‘Adultery’ to ‘Temptations’, ‘Warr’ and ‘Witchcraft’.15 It is hard to imagine much in a rural vicar’s life extending beyond these parameters. But much more typical is the manuscript that offers a blurring of numerous kinds of writing: gatherings of 10

Ibid., pp. 639, 635. Moss, Printed Commonplace Books, p. 107. 12 T. Cave, The Cornucopian Text: Problems of Writing in the French Renaissance (Oxford, 1979), pp. 3–4. 13 Moss, Printed Commonplace Books, p. 208. 14 Beal, ‘Notions in Garrison’, pp. 132–3, 139. Other terms such as vade mecum, adversaria, coucher and libri amicorum are also related. See Havens, Commonplace Books, pp. 65–7. The very term ‘commonplace’ overlapped with the aphorism, sententiae, maxim, proverb, sentence and apothegm. Crane, Framing Authority, p. 7, uses the catch-all term ‘saying’ as a way of dealing with this slipperiness of terminology. 15 Folger W. a. 217. There is some doubt whether Wood was indeed the compiler. For another ‘correct’ commonplace book, see Folger V. a. 115, a collection compiled by Francis Stringer, c. 1628. 11

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commonplaces (in various states of order), along with, most commonly, financial accounts, recipes, notes of husbandry, social appointments and poetry. Sir Robert Southwell’s commonplace book (British Library, MS Additional 58219) slides easily and repeatedly between travel diary, commonplace book, letter collection and agenda. Early modern writers and readers generally treat genres as loose, tentative and negotiable – as momentary frames for holding a text together, which yield quickly to other frames – and scholarship that insists on too restrictive a definition of the commonplace book (and, I think, of early modern categories of genre more generally) anachronistically betrays this spirit of invention. This early modern imprecision is less a problem for criticism to clear up than it is an insight into how commonplace books actually operated: an open-ended capacity to take on other forms was a central trait of commonplace books.16 So if, in the words of one recent study, the ‘immense constitutional diversity [of commonplace books] resists generic description’,17 it might be helpful to switch terms and replace the exacting ‘commonplace book’ with the more capacious ‘commonplace book culture’. And by commonplace book culture I mean to signify the sum of expectations, textual practices and approaches to language that the commonplace book – as theory, process and text – created or encouraged. Under this category we might include the following sixteen traits – which I list and discuss, giving particular attention to the role of women amid this culture. 1. reading as an active, interventionist practice with connotations – as the Latin verb legere suggests – of collecting, gathering, picking out.18 2. an intimate connection between reading and writing; a sense that ‘neither writing nor reading can be identified as the “primary” activity involved in the composition of a commonplace book’;19 a sense that reading generates writing. Early modern readers read with a pen in hand, and we see the inseparability of reading and transcription in the ink-spattered pages of early modern books. 3. a subtle, double-edged sense of ownership of the transcribed materials by the compiler: a sense of ownership which strikes a balance between the 16

For a discussion of early modern generic instability and its relationship to women’s autobiographical writing, see S. C. Seelig, Autobiography and Gender in Early Modern Literature: Reading Women’s Lives, 1600–1680 (Cambridge, 2006), pp. 6–8. 17 Havens, Commonplace Books, p. 65. 18 Ibid., p. 8. 19 M. W. Thomas, ‘Reading and Writing the Renaissance Commonplace Book: A Question of Authorship?’, in The Construction of Authorship: Textual Appropriation in Law and Literature, ed. M. Woodmansee and P. Jaszi (Durham, 1994), pp. 401–16 (p. 412).



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appropriation of materials as the compiler’s own, and a recognition that excised aphorisms can always be passed on, can always be taken up, by later readers. Something of this relationship is caught in Henry King’s poem ‘Upon a Tablebook presented to a Lady’, which describes how the female recipient might use the unfilled blanks of her ‘Little Book’. When your faire hand receaves this Little Book, You must not there for Prose or Verses look. Those empty regions which within you see, May by your self planted and peopled bee. And though wee scarce allow your Sex to prove Writers (unlesse the argument be Love) Yet without crime or envy You have roome Here both the Scribe and Authour to become.20

King’s little poem is interesting for many reasons, but what is perhaps most striking is that final conflation of ‘Scribe’ and ‘Authour’, that sense that the ‘Lady’ is both transcribing materials (which suggests a more distant relationship) and authoring them (which suggests a greater sense of ownership). And while King’s poem acknowledges a cultural unease with female authorship (‘wee scarce allow your Sex to prove / Writers’), his verse suggests that the blur of ‘Scribe and Authour’, typical of commonplace book culture, presents an opportunity for female agency within manuscript culture. A double-edged sense of ownership, in other words, seems to have offered women a chance to write. Constance Aston Fowler (d. 1664) of Staffordshire produced a manuscript of poetry written largely to and by her circle of generally Roman Catholic family and friends, including Lady Dorothy Shirley, Katherine Thimelby and Gertrude Aston, in addition to Fowler’s brother Herbert Aston and the Cavalier poet Sir Richard Fanshawe.21 The text is important for the way it upsets a series of expectations about manuscript verse miscellanies and commonplace books: that these collections are the product of young male compilers, working in university or Inns of Court contexts, gathering misogynistic, anti-Catholic texts. Fowler’s collection is also significant because it contains several instances of Fowler apparently altering verses, and enjoying, therefore, the kind of agency

20 The Poems of Henry King, ed. M. Crum (Oxford, 1965), p. 154. Quoted in Beal, ‘Notions in Garrison’, p. 132. 21 A. F. Marotti, Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric (Ithaca NY, 1995), p. 51.

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a ‘transcriber’ might perform.22 Poem 57 in Fowler’s manuscript is a verse beginning ‘O loue whoes powre and might could neuer be wthstood’. This poem also appeared in a number of popular printed collections of verse (including Wit and Drollery (1656), The Marrow of Complements (1655) and The New Academy of Complements (1669)), and in several manuscripts (Margaret Crum’s First-Line Index of English Poetry 1500–1800 in MSS. of the Bodleian Library lists thirteen appearances). A comparison between Fowler’s text and these printed versions yields important points of difference; most noticeably, Fowler’s text cuts many of the bawdier lines (including ‘A Turd in Cupid’s teeth’ and ‘I’ll rend her smock asunder’) and, as a consequence, offers a relatively decorous verse. But rather than seeing this as a dampening down of the verse, a kind of lessening, we might frame such alterations as an expression of agency. Fowler’s text also omits several lines that construct a female object of love: in her text, only one reference to ‘Her’ remains. Fowler’s transcriptions, then, were active, even creative acts, rather than straightforward mechanisms of duplication.23 Some commonplace books contain transcriptions, by women, alongside their own original verse compositions. The commonplace book of Anne Southwell (née Harris) (1574?–1636) presents numerous examples of this kind of agency: the manuscript suggests a woman whose capacity to write original verse appears to have been, in part, enabled by that sense of authority developed through the collection of other people’s writing. In her manuscript, Southwell augments Walter Raleigh’s ‘The Lie’ with lines that are, perhaps, her own; she adds her own aphorisms alongside apothegms appropriated from other people; and she includes several verse epistles, elegies and epitaphs of her own composition.24 Guides to commonplacing talk at length, and with rich ambiguity, about the nature of the relationship between compiler and gathered text. Different metaphors are used to imagine the process of commonplacing, and suggest different kinds of relationship between compiler and text: metaphors of bees, pollen and honey – which are very common – suggest the complete consumption of extracts to produce something new.25 As Montaigne writes: ‘The bees 22

The Verse Miscellany of Constance Aston Fowler: A Diplomatic Edition, ed. D. AldrichWatson (Tempe AZ, 2000); V. E. Burke, ‘Aston, Herbert (bap. 1614, d. 1688/9)’, (including Constance Fowler), Oxford DNB (Oxford, 2004), [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/ 68247, accessed 12 June 2008]. 23 For another example, see poem 24: Fowler’s reworking of Henry King’s popular ‘My Midnight Meditation’, beginning ‘Ill busied man! why dost thou take such care.’ 24 The Southwell-Sibthorpe Commonplace Book: Folger MS. V. b. 198, ed. J. Klene (Tempe AZ, 1997), pp. xxiii, xxiv, 21, 24, 27, 28, 95. 25 As noted in G. W. Pigman III, ‘Versions of Imitation in the Renaissance’, Renaissance Quarterly 33 (1980), 1–32 (p. 5), apian metaphors are not univocal, and have been deployed to stress a more passive, non-transformative gathering: Seneca’s Epistulae Morales 84, for example, expresses uncertainty as to ‘whether the bees collect honey from flowers or change what they



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plunder the flowers here and there, but afterward they make of them honey, which is all theirs.’26 Other metaphors construct different relationships: one commonplace book describes itself as ‘a fair garment … made up out of the shreds’;27 another opens with the note, ‘All poets steale from Homer; he spues, they lick it up’. A third compiler [Francis Daniel Pastorius] neatly catches this sense of ambiguous ownership with his opening record: ‘this Book all is mine, & Nothing is mine’.28 4. an approach to language that privileges the sentence, aphorism or little block of text; the collection and deployment of fragments, not wholes; a conception of ‘coherent’ texts as collections of fragments; a valuing of texts (such as the Bible) that might easily yield aphorisms; an interest in crumbling texts into parts, and in the production of new texts out of old parts. We can see this culture at work in the poem ‘A Perswasive Letter to his Mistress’, printed in a popular printed miscellany, The Mysteries of Love and Eloquence (1658). Sweetest, but read what silent Love hath writ With thy fair eyes, tast but of Loves fine wit, Be not self will’d; for thou art much too fair, For death to triumph o’re without an heir; Thy unus’d beauty, must be tomb’d with thee, Which us’d lives thy Executour to be; The Flowers distill’d , though they with Winter meet Lose but their show, their substance still is sweet. Nature made thee her seal, she meant thereby: Thou shouldst Print more, not let the Copie die.29

These first ten lines are actually a stitching together of couplets from five different Shakespeare sonnets (23, 6, 4, 5, 11): or, to be more exact, five different sonnets from John Benson’s heavily reworked 1640 edition of Shakespeare’s

gather into honey by some process of their own’ (4). Francis Pastorius called his huge twovolume commonplace book ‘his Alphabetical Hive of more than two thousand Honey-Combs, began in the year 1696’ (Annenberg MS Codex 726, vol. 1, p. 51). This use of ‘hive’ indicates a ‘storehouse of sweet things’ (OED, 2). 26 Michel de Montaigne, ‘Of the education of children’, in Essais, quoted in Havens, Commonplace Books, p. 25. 27 Of Common Places, or Memorial Books, A Seventeenth-century Manuscript from the James Marshall and Marie-Louise Osborn Collection, ed. E. Havens (New Haven CT, 2001), p. 2. 28 University of Pennsylvania, Annenberg Rare Book Library, MS Codex 726, vol. 1, p. 2. 29 The Mysteries of Love and Eloquence (1658), Wing P2066, pp. 138–9.

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poems. Shakespeare’s lines, reworked by Benson, are combined with other lines, perhaps written by compiler Edward Philips, or perhaps borrowed from some other text. Mid seventeenth century printed miscellanies like The Mysteries of Love and Eloquence represent a flourishing in popular print of this interest in pieces of language, in what Dekker calls ‘small parcels’ of discourse which one might ‘fling about’,30 in the combining and recombining of chunks into new combinations. In manuscripts, compilers sometimes title single poems as plural forms: they call a poem ‘These verses’, and I think this perhaps reflects the idea that a single poem is composed of several smaller potential texts.31 5. the ordering of fragments according to thematic consistencies; the pursuit of excerpts that provide various expressions of the same theme; the pursuit of similarity more than difference. 6. the presence in commonplace books of many different genres of writing. The commonplace book of Anne Southwell contains letters, poems (by Southwell, and by others including Walter Raleigh and Henry King), aphorisms, inventories (including lists of books), a mini-bestiary, psalm translations, scriptural commentary and financial receipts.32 While an orthodox commonplace book structure is evident in the grouping of poems by thematic allegiances, the manuscript is eclectic and sprawling. Southwell’s editor Jean Klene calls it ‘an uncommon commonplace book’,33 which is a helpful phrase, except that it suggests such diversity is exceptional. It is extremely common to find a manuscript that started life as a dutiful enactment of commonplace principles – the neat arrangement of quotations under headings – but which proceeds to blur into different forms. This is perhaps the most striking difference between printed prescriptions to commonplacing and the manuscripts actually produced. Thomas Medcalf ’s 1625 manuscript, for example, now in the Folger, is structured around a series of alphabetical headings: under A, Medcalf lists ‘Amicas’, and has gathered several unattributed quotes (‘much water cannott quench loue nor flouds drowne it’ [Song of Solomon 8. 7]); under C, Medcalf lists ‘Combat’, ‘Conqueror’, ‘Crocodile’ (and the quote, ‘Contrarye to all other creature and plants ^ the Crocodile groweth euer bigger and bigger even till death’); under J, ‘Justice’; and so on. But all kinds of other material is included: prayers; recipes; remedies for sick horses; memoranda; property settlements; financial 30

Thomas Dekker, The Guls Horne-Booke (London, 1609) STC 6500, p. 23. Folger V. a. 345, ca. 1630, p. 88 is ‘Part of ye former verses sup pag 6 on a woman disfigured wth ye smal pocks’. 32 Southwell-Sibthorpe Commonplace Book, ed. Klene, p. xi. 33 J. Klene, ‘Southwell, Anne, Lady Southwell (bap. 1574, d. 1636)’, Oxford DNB (Oxford, 2004), [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/68084, accessed 12 June 2008]. 31



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receipts34 – sometimes written in gaps under unfilled commonplace headings; sometimes layered over prior entries; sometimes scrawled across the covers. It would be a mistake to see this as a failed, or collapsed, or broken down commonplace book – principally because this merging of notionally distinct kinds of writing is so common in extant manuscripts. While it is possible to identify ‘correct’ manuscript commonplace books, much more typical is the manuscript that offers a bleeding together of various kinds of writing. 7. the creation of a private (or semi-public) text through the appropriation of public texts (whether printed, manuscript, oral); the sense that excerpts are blocks out of which a new text or discourse might be built; a consequent idea of literary creativity resistant to post nineteenth century expectations of ‘originality’, ‘imagination’, ‘self-expression’, ‘voice’.35 8. a willingness to rework material; a tendency to cut, add or alter text. The case of Margaret Bellasys provides one striking example of a woman’s agency within commonplace book culture and, more particularly, a woman’s willingness to introduce changes to transcribed texts. British Library, MS Additional 10309 appears to be a fairly conventional manuscript commonplace book or miscellany from around 1630. This compact duodecimo volume, written in a single, careful italic hand, contains much material typical of commonplace books assembled by young men at Oxford or the Inns of Court: love lyrics, describing dashed male hopes (‘An Elegie: reflecting on his passion for his mistresse’); mock epitaphs – which enjoyed tremendous popularity in the first half of the seventeenth century – on pun-friendly names like Ben Stone (‘My selfe a tombe-Stone to my selfe will be’); bawdy verse, including a version of Thomas Nashe’s infamously erotic ‘The Choise of Valentines’, often called ‘Nashe’s Dildo’ in manuscripts; political poetry, including libels on George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, and a version of ‘The Parliament Fart’; and many examples of misogynist verse (‘upon a woman whose name was Nott a whore’; ‘We men haue many faults, women but two / No good can they speake, no good can they doe’).36 There are a small number of authorial attributions – ‘Compasse. Dr Dun’; ‘Gnash his Valentine’37 – but most of this material is, like the majority of poetry in commonplace books, unattributed. The manuscript opens with a section titled ‘Characterismes of Vices’, a series of Theophrastian prose char-

34 35 36

Folger V. a. 130. Crane, Framing Authority, p. 92. London, British Library, MS Additional 10309, fols. 96v, 149v, 135v, 42r–4v, 123r–4v, 109r,

103r. 37

Ibid., fols. 126r–7r, 135v.

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acters – ‘Of the Couetous’; ‘Of the Prodigall’; ‘Of the Lustfull’; ‘Of the brainesicke’ – of the sort popularized by Joseph Hall, Thomas Overbury and John Earle. The source, here, is Diseases of the Soule: A Discourse, Divine, Morall, and Physicall (1616), a collection of vignettes by the popular London preacher Thomas Adams.38 This bracketing together of diverse genres of writing – prose characters with a great range of poetry – is itself a common feature of manuscript compilation. What makes this manuscript significant is that it seems to have been a compilation produced by, or perhaps for, a young woman. The evidence for this is slim but none the less suggestive. At the foot of the final page is the signature of one ‘Margrett Bellasys’.39 Such marks are common, often taking the form ‘Anne Milles her Book’.40 Precisely who this Margaret Bellasys was is not entirely clear. The name was long assumed to refer to Margaret, daughter of Thomas Bellasys, Lord Fauconberg; but this Margaret died in 1624, before some of the volume’s inclusions, and in fact changed her name upon marriage in 1610. More recently, Sasha Roberts has argued persuasively that Margaret was in fact the eldest daughter and co-heir of Sir George Selby of Whitehouse, and wife, from 1610–11, of Sir William Bellasis of Morton House, County Durham.41 This places Margaret in a well-to-do and well-connected gentry family, based in the North Riding with associations with Cambridge. Is it reasonable to assume that Margaret is the compiler on the basis of this signature and the match between her dates and the manuscript’s? She seems not to have written the volume herself: the neat, consistent italic hand, and the presence of catchwords, suggest a scribal copy, produced by a professional hand.42 But this was not exceptional, and Margaret might still have functioned as compiler, gathering and ordering the transcription of materials. It is certainly the case that a man’s signature in a commonplace book (like the looping letters of ‘Tho: Oliver Burfield’, or ‘Richard Millward’43) would generally be regarded by scholars as sufficient evidence for the compiler: to doubt this attribution to Margaret, then, is to ask different questions of potential women compilers. One

38 Joseph Hall, Characters of Vertues and Vices (1608) STC 12648a; Thomas Overbury, A Wife. Now the Widdow … The fourth impression, enlarged, with more characters (1614) STC 18906; John Earle, Micro-cosmographie. Or, a peece of the world discovered, in essayes and characters (1628) STC 7439. For a discussion of the characters in this manuscript, see L. Ennis, ‘Margaret Bellasys’ “Characterismes of Vices”’, PMLA 56 (1941), 141–50. 39 BL MS Add. 10309, fol. 153v. 40 Folger W. a. 86, a commonplace book, c. 1715. 41 S. Roberts, Reading Shakespeare’s Poems in Early Modern England (Basingstoke, 2003), pp. 180–1. 42 Ibid., p. 180. 43 Folger V. a. 322, back fly-leaf; Folger E. a. 3, front fly-leaf.



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can fall into a circular argument: commonplace books are generally compiled by men; but we can find signs of women’s involvement; but this evidence does not convince because commonplace books are generally compiled by men.44 Perhaps the signature suggests not Margaret’s compilation, or overseeing of compilation, but rather her inheritance of the volume. Certainly some women’s signatures on manuscript commonplace books indicate precisely this: ‘Elizabeth Scattergood her Boke 1667 / 8’, is, like Margaret’s signature, penned at the end of a commonplace book, but this is a text undoubtedly produced by her father, Anthony, while he was at Trinity College, Cambridge, in the 1630s.45 However, even this fact of subsequent ownership is significant, since it suggests that women were reading texts traditionally associated with men: the category of the inheritor might be one of agency rather than passivity. Indeed, one of the defining traits of the early modern commonplace book was that it was often owned by (and sometimes augmented by) several generations of owners. A woman inheriting a family commonplace book is a woman exerting ownership over the text, making it her own. If Margaret Bellasys was the compiler, then a number of important implications spring forth. Most fundamentally: here is a woman compiling the kind of manuscript critics normally, and unquestioningly, bracket with men. Bellasys was reading, gathering and, as we shall see, probably reworking poetry that is at various points erotic, bawdy, misogynistic, voguishly comic and overtly political. The inclusion of verse hostile to women is particularly striking since it implicates Bellasys in a culture of misogyny – or, to put it another way, gives Bellasys agency in that world – and upsets the assumption that misogyny in literary culture was a male preserve.46 Criticism has often assumed a male audience for such materials, but Bellasys, in her collection of poems such as the fierce antiBuckingham attack, ‘upon the Dukes goeing into Fraunce’, or the popular bawdy epitaph on Mr. Prick of Christ Church College, upsets this assumption.47 ‘The Parliament Fart’ is a similarly striking inclusion, associated with a series of allmale contexts: the poem describes that moment in Parliament in March 1607 when Henry Ludlow, MP for Ludgershall, Wiltshire, farted as Sir John Croke 44

As Roberts notes, to assume a male compiler ‘would be to let prevailing notions about men’s and women’s reading (both early modern and modern) determine our interpretation of the volume – instead of allowing the volume to shape, perhaps challenge, our ideas about reading and manuscript culture in the period’ (Reading Shakespeare’s Poems, p. 183). 45 London, British Library, MS Additional 44963, fol. 130v. 46 See Roberts, Reading Shakespeare’s Poems, p. 182. 47 BL MS Add. 10309, fols. 42r, 145v. The Buckingham poem is discussed, as poem Oii5, in ‘Early Stuart Libels: An Edition of Poetry from Manuscript Sources’, in Early Modern Literary Studies, ed. A. Bellany and A. McRae, Text Series 1 (2005) [http://purl.oclc.org/emls/texts/ libels]. Bellany and McRae suggest ‘This is by far the sharpest and widest-circulated of the attacks preceding Buckingham’s expedition to the Ile de Ré in the summer of 1627.’

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delivered a message from the Lords during a debate on the naturalization of Scots; the poem was linked with members of the dining and drinking societies that met at the Mermaid and Mitre taverns; and the verse proved hugely popular with men at the Inns of Court and universities.48 Indeed, the way in which ‘The Parliament Fart’ stages its own convivial, collective composition, and invited improvised additions, served to shore up these homosocial bonds. Bellasys’s role as a compiler also shows that here is a woman who somehow had access to materials associated with the contexts of university and Inns of Court. This access might have come from the scribe or, more likely, from a male relative. Furthermore, a close examination of the texts included by Bellasys shows that she penned versions of poems with significant variations. The variations were perhaps the work of the scribe, or were perhaps present in the manuscript’s source texts. But it is certainly possible that Bellasys was herself the agent in the creation of these variants. The opening prose ‘Characterismes of Vices’ is drawn largely from Thomas Adams but Bellasys presents many differences: ‘the Hypocrite’ is a conflation of Adams with Joseph Hall; Adams’s sentence order is reworked throughout the manuscript; and, as Lambert Ennis notes, Bellasys consistently substitutes recherché or inkhorn words for simpler originals – in one character alone, ‘fulginous’ for ‘cloudy’; ‘cimeriousness’ for ‘night’; ‘insipient regulator’ for ‘foolish governor’; and ‘periclitaminous’ for ‘dangerous’.49 This is not only agency, but agency that draws attention to its learned interventions: indeed, one wonders whether there is not a kind of satirical exaggeration in the use of these esoteric terms. Bellasys’s treatment of poetry is similarly interventionist. As Ian Moulton notes in his discussion of early modern erotic writing, Bellasys’s version of Thomas Nashe’s ‘Choice of Valentines’, while including depictions of sex, omits the poem’s scandalous description of the dildo that Francis, the poem’s female protagonist, uses to satisfy herself after the disappointment of her male lover Tomalin. The effect is to change the tenor of the whole verse: the poem ‘becomes a narrative that stresses female sexual frustration rather than focusing – as more complete versions of the poem do – on male anxiety about sexual performance’.50 Bellasys’s version of ‘The Parliament Fart’ also contains significant textual variants which, in general, produce a more regularized, grammatically smoother text.51

48 M. O’Callaghan, ‘Performing Politics: The Circulation of the “Parliament Fart”’, Huntington Library Quarterly 69 (2006), 121–38. 49 Ennis, ‘Characterismes of Vices’, p. 143. 50 I. F. Moulton, Before Pornography: Erotic Writing in Early Modern England (Oxford, 2000), p. 63. 51 O’Callaghan, ‘Performing Politics’, p. 136, n. 25.



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9. the creation of non-linear, non-narrative compositions that encourage cross-referencing and a multiplicity of ways of being read or navigated. When commonplace books often distribute their quotations under thematic headings, they are not concerned with generating a narrative or a linear progression. Sometimes headings are paired with their antonyms (‘Faith and Faithlessness’, as Erasmus suggested); sometimes they are organized by an alphabetical listing (‘Baal … babbling … Babylon … bacchanals … backbiting … bacon …. Fr. Bacon’).52 If one were to read Henry Oxinden’s manuscript in alphabetical order, one would proceed from ‘Adultery’ to ‘Ale’, through ‘Apples’ and then ‘Atheisme’.53 Which sounds interesting enough – but it is an inappropriate way to consume Oxinden’s non-narrative text. Many commonplace books present little apparent system at all, or an opening sense of system that dwindles as the manuscript proceeds: aphorisms are piled on, perhaps transcribed at the time of first encounter, perhaps dashed down in the first available space; different forms of writing knock against each other.54 While such juxtapositions can generate bathos and even comedy for a linear, narrative-craving twenty-firstcentury reader, early modern compilers surely would not have responded in this way. 10. the creation of texts which occupy more than one manuscript, that refer to other manuscripts, that locate themselves within a broader network of texts. Early modern record keeping was built around a continual process of transferring, or shunting, materials between different manuscripts: notes that began as a marginal record in an almanac might be transferred to a commonplace book, and then might be moved to a diary. An aphorism marked in a printed book might be shifted to a commonplace book. And so in some ways, it is helpful to think of the commonplace book as a conduit, a temporary storehouse for records which are then passed on – to imagine the commonplace book as one point in a dense field of texts. This process of transfer meant that women, excluded from all-male sites of commonplace book production (the grammar school, university, Inns of Court), might none the less encounter materials as texts circulated beyond these restricted confines. 11. the construction of texts that are never finished; a resistance to ideas of coherent, completed wholes; and so a kind of restlessness, a constant sense 52 53 54

Annenberg MS Codex 726, vol. 1, p. 9. Folger V. b. 110, p. 534 supplies an alphabetical index of this manuscript. For a manuscript whose adherence to a system seems to decline, see Folger E. a. 6.

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There is a paradox about the raison d’être of the commonplace book: a central function of these texts was to provide a pragmatic way of coping with what Ann Blair has called ‘information overload’:55 first, to distil Greek and Latin literature into a series of manageable extracts, and then, later, to manage the flood of vernacular printed material. But even as commonplace books were employed as pragmatic short cuts, compilers and theorists were aware of the endless process that had been begun. There was a tension between copia as copy (something controlled, managed) and copia as copiousness (unbridled, endless).56 While Erasmus declared that anyone with aspirations to be ‘thought educated’ should ‘cover the whole field of literature … at least once in his life’, that field was forever expanding: Erasmus himself emphasizes that ‘no discipline is so remote from rhetoric that you cannot use it to enrich your collection’.57 Every text was potentially profitable. One consequence of this is that compilers often frame their efforts as failed attempts at something total: collections appear exhausted, rather than exhaustive, and declarations of intent are accompanied by guilty admissions of imperfect enactments: one compiler notes, ‘In Reading I should observe … this Method … but my broken Minutes, will not permitt it.’58 Another, quoting from Florio’s Montaigne: ‘Bookes are delightfull, but … by continuall frequenting them, we in ye end loose both health & cheerfulness.’ Even Erasmus himself, not known for his indolence, wished he had ‘carried … out’ a commonplacing method ‘long ago in my own youth (for it occurred to me even then), as I see how much my first efforts at writing would have gained in weight had I done so’.59 Many material features of extant commonplace books convey this sense of a text in process, of an event, still unfolding: blank pages that invite future augmentation;60 unfinished entries that suggest an interrupted transcription 55

A. Blair, ‘Reading Strategies for Coping with Information Overload ca. 1550–1700’, Journal of the History of Ideas 64 (2003), 11–28. 56 Cave, Cornucopian Text, pp. 3–4. 57 Erasmus, De Copia, p. 635. 58 Austin TX, Harry Ransom Center, Pforzheimer MS 2k Box 71. Whitelock Bulstrode, Commonplace book, f.1 (from the end of the book), ‘Observanda Sept 1689’. 59 Erasmus, De Copia, p. 635. 60 The theological commonplace book of Henry Fairfax (1634–1702), dean of Norwich, features large, unfilled spaces that sit under its many headings, awaiting the next stage in the production of the text (Folger V. b. 108). Folger V. b. 186 is a lawyer’s commonplace book, c. 1630, which carefully indexes its blank pages. See also Folger V. b. 15. John Foxe’s Pandectæ locorum communium (London, 1572) STC 11239 is a printed, blank commonplace book – that is, a volume of some thousand pages of printed theological headings and large, folio pages of blank space,



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that might resume; loose notes of excerpts which the compiler intended, but failed, to transcribe;61 pages that have been cut or augmented with glued in papers;62 bindings and covers made from earlier printed books and medieval manuscripts, which foreground the process of construction;63 the layering of writing over writing (neatly transcribed Latin moral commonplaces overlaid by later financial accounts),64 which has the effect not of cancelling underlying entries but of suggesting an ongoing process of marking and remarking; the addition of later marginal marks of favour or distaste (flowers, crosses, pointing hands), which suggest the commonplace book is not a finished epitome but rather a resource which itself can be sorted and resorted; countless recipes for ink that prescribe, literally, how to keep writing and writing.65 (There is more to be done on the significance of ink recipes: they are so common in manuscripts that I suspect they had a significance beyond the merely practical.) These features – salient characteristics of most commonplace books but not contained in printed guides to the form – meant that when a seventeenth-century reader held a commonplace book in her hands, she was surely particularly attuned to the ongoingness of the manuscript. To read a commonplace book today is to awaiting manuscript additions. (Most extant copies, it should be said, are largely and somewhat sadly blank, suggesting unfulfilled good intentions.) Peter Stallybrass’s February 2006 Rosenbach Lectures argued that printing, far from effacing manuscript culture, in fact encouraged manuscript additions; his third lecture, ‘Blank Pages, or why printing is a revolutionary incitement to writing by hand’, considered the role of blank space in printed books. 61 Folger V. a. 130. 62 Folger M. b. 12, ‘A Collection of Poems and Lampoons &c Not yet Printed’, c. 1700–5, features pages that have been cut away (fol. 6r) and blank paper that has been pasted across inclusions to obscure the text (fols. 7r, 10r, 33r and passim). 63 Folger V. a. 193 is a collection of notes relating to the manor of Winslow in Buckinghamshire, 1660–3, with a front cover made from a vellum leaf from a biblical manuscript of Italian origin from about 1450, containing parts of II Corinthians 11 and 12. See also Folger V. a. 115 (a 1628 manuscript bound in covers made from a twelfth-century service book); Folger V. a. 267; Folger V. a. 130; Coventry City Archives BA / J /1 / 1. Christopher Parkes bound his later seventeenth century commonplace book around a Book of the Forme of Common Prayers, Administration of the Sacraments, &c. (Middelburgh, 1587): Folger V. a. 95. 64 Folger V. b. 199, fols. 5r and 6v. Some of these later records are written over the Latin text; others appear in the margins. 65 Recipes for making ink are extremely common: see, for example, Folger V. b. 110, p. 8 (‘To make excellent Inke’: mix ‘2 ounces of Gume Arabick, 2 Ounces of Galls, halfe an ounce of Coparas, & they will make a Gallon of Inke’); Folger V. b. 260, fols. 56r, 18v and 19r (‘A Quart of strong ^ stale Beer 4 Ounces of Dyers Galls 2 Ounces of Green Coperis 1 Ounce of Gum Araback 1/2 an Ounce of Loaf Sugar 1/4 of a Pint of Vinegar’); Folger V. a. 125 Part I, fol. 2v; Annenberg MS Codex 823, n. p.; Folger E. a. 3, p. 72; Folger V. a. 159, fols. 60r and 76v; Folger V. b. 300, fol. 71v (‘To take blotts out of paper or parchment or any letter’; ‘To make white Ink to write on black pap as is comonly used in sending mourning letters’; ‘To write invissible’; ‘To make powder Ink’).

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encounter a text which is not only unfinished but which possesses a quality of existing, very vividly, in the present tense – awaiting the next pointing hand to be drawn in the margin. 12. the presence, in texts, of several hands; the production of texts by more than one compiler; the piecing together of texts that might accumulate over many years, generations or even centuries. This notion of the commonplace book as the product of a group of friends or family members, sometimes over time, has particular significance for women: if women were excluded from the all-male loci of commonplace book production at grammar school, university and Inns of Court, other communities provided alternative circles of manuscript circulation and compilation: at court, for example, or in the houses of the provincial nobility.66 Anne Vavasour’s prominence at court, as one of Elizabeth’s six maids of honour, and also, scandalously, as the mistress of Edward de Vere, seventeenth earl of Oxford, and subsequently Sir Henry Lee, in part explains the presence of her verse, including ‘Thoughe I seem straunge sweet friend be thou no so’, in ‘male’ commonplace books and miscellanies.67 Some women’s commonplace books call attention to their origins in a community: the manuscript produced by Anne Denton (1548–66) is titled ‘Sum Annae Denton & amicorum’, that is ‘I am Anne Denton’s and friends’.68 As Victoria Burke notes, the masculine genitive plural of ‘friends’ suggests a community of both men and women, and it seems subsequent male members of Denton’s Herefordshire family added to Denton’s opening inclusions: this is a community through time, ‘a historical rather than contemporary literary circle’.69 The commonplace book of poems, jests and financial accounts that is now Folger Library X. d. 177 was initially composed by a young male Oxford University student, but it later passed to female compilers who left their signatures on the text: Katharin Hordinant and Elizabeth Clarke – who introduced textual alterations that might be read as proto-feminist.70 The history of this 66

Moulton, Before Pornography, pp. 54–5. Roberts, Reading Shakespeare’s Poems, pp. 184–6. J. Stevenson, ‘Women, Writing and Scribal Publication in the Sixteenth Century’, English Manuscript Studies 1100–1700 9, ‘Writings by Early Modern Women’, ed. P. Beal and M. J. M. Ezell, 1–32 (p. 13). There are doubts about Vavasour’s authorship of the lyrics sometimes ascribed to her: see S. W. May, ‘Anne Vavasour (fl. 1580–1621)’, Oxford DNB (Oxford, 2004), [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/68083, accessed 30 October 2007]. 68 Folger MS E. a. 1, fol. 1r. 69 V. E. Burke, ‘Reading Friends: Women’s Participation in “Masculine” Literary Culture’, in Early Modern Women’s Manuscript Writing: Selected Papers from the Trinity / Trent Colloquium, ed. V. E. Burke and J. Gibson (Aldershot, 2004), pp. 75–90 (p. 75). 70 Ibid., pp. 80–1. 67



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manuscript shows how women might gain access to materials that have been linked with all-male contexts, particularly if they had, for example, a brother at an Oxford college. Folger V. a. 162 is a commonplace book of poems by Donne, Jonson, Raleigh and others, compiled by Elizabeth Wellden and other family members, who built upon an earlier compilation produced by a young man at Oxford University, perhaps a member of the Wellden family.71 Commonplace books are full of contributions by later compilers: deletions, very commonly,72 and comments on previous gatherings. In Henry Oxinden’s manuscript, the observation ‘The Bible is more antient then any authentique stories of the Heathen by 3000 yeares’, recorded in the centre of the inside cover, has been caveated with ‘some say’, in a later hand.73 Next to a copy of Edward Sherburne’s ‘Salmacis. Out of Italien’, a reader of a Restoration miscellany has added: ‘This Poem is very ord^enery’.74 In a poetical commonplace book from about 1630, an earlier transcription of Thomas Carew’s infamously erotic ‘A Rapture’, beginning ‘I will Inioye thee now my Celia, come’, has been supplemented with a later reaction: ‘Mr Rose … for Sr I thought you to bee of a Better temper’.75 (In another poetical commonplace book, Carew’s poem has been furiously scrawled out.76) Such reflections may appear to us as anomalous intrusions but they were surprisingly common. They represent not a shutting down of the process of manuscript compilation but rather quite the opposite: they signal a debate and a process of construction that is ongoing. So too do commonplaces which reflect on and enable the act of commonplacing: ‘Poets … must be used like Flowers, some … only smelt unto, but some are good to be throwne into a limbique to be distilled’;77 ‘The humble bee hauinge sucked honnie of a flowre leaueth it & loaths it’;78 ‘Hee that speakes sows, and he that holds his peace gathers.’79 These aphorisms prescribe a method for the collection of further aphorisms: the commonplace book is composed out of instructions that enable its continual evolution. Many commonplace books are multi-generational compositions – like the 1655 manuscript composed by Sir Francis Fane, offered as a depository of the wisdom of five generations of one family. Because commonplace books are non71 Ibid., p. 81. For a list of manuscripts showing evidence of women’s agency, see Marotti, Manuscript, Print, pp. 49–50. 72 Folger V. a. 260, passim. 73 Folger V. b. 110. 74 Folger V. a. 85, n. p. (first poem). 75 Folger V. b. 43, fol. 13v. For another instance of a revising later hand, see Folger V. a. 381. 76 Folger V. a. 322, pp. 196–7. 77 Folger V. a. 381, pp. 11, 24. 78 Ibid. 79 Folger V. a. 180, fol. 41r.

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linear texts, there is rarely a sense of a later hand replacing an earlier hand, but rather the simultaneous presence of compilers from different times. The dynamic of a compiler assembling a commonplace book for their child is also common. One Royalist prisoner introduced his manuscript: ‘I bequeath this booke to you my only sonne, as the trophie of my sufferings … obtained by my phansie and my penn’; another urges his sons to read the gathered aphorisms ‘over, & over, & over’.80 13. a connection between commonplacing and improvement (whether linguistic, moral, social, financial, spiritual). Joseph Baildon wrote that he gathered commonplaces ‘To Adorne Discourse, Mainetaine Argument, Beautifie both Speech & Writeinge And, To make a Man Liue Happily, and Dye Blessedly’.81 This emphasis on improvement bred an interest in future uses of excerpts (in what excerpts can mean) rather than a concern with authors or origins. We see this looking forward to future deployments in the lack of attributions in many commonplace books. 14. a self-reflexivity, an interest in method, a foregrounding of the process employed to produce the manuscript, the collection of commonplaces that reflect on commonplaces. Manuscripts often gather commonplaces that reflect on commonplaces: a 1660 manuscript includes a series of aphorisms relating to the gathering, ordering and deploying of pieces of eloquence, many of them extracted from Francis Bacon’s Essays: ‘Discretion of speech is more then Eloquence’; ‘Discourse ought to be as a field, without coming home to any man.’82 15. an inventive materiality: to twenty-first-century eyes, a strikingly creative approach to the physical construction of the commonplace book. It is unhelpful to think of these material traits as aberrations or anomalies. Erasmus implied this creative materiality when he urged pupils to surround themselves in language, to add pithy remarks to blank spaces in their textbooks, and to the windows and walls – as Montaigne did, and, later, Lady Anne Clifford. There is a parallel, too, between the recycling of quotations

80 81 82

BL MS Add. 37719, fol. 167v. Annenberg MS Codex 726, vol. 1, p. 50. Folger V. a. 134. Folger E. a. 6.



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in commonplace books and the physical construction of manuscripts out of medieval manuscripts. 16. the compilation of commonplace books was sometimes accompanied by a sense of unease about the methods employed. The need to conceal one’s reliance on commonplaces is a refrain in many guides. Even Erasmus’ prescriptions register the potential for shame at a dependence on commonplaces: ‘one’s discourse’ should, he wrote, ‘not appear to be some sort of cento or mosaic, but an image breathing forth one’s mind or a river flowing from the fountain of one’s heart’83 – but the words ‘cento’ (a patchwork of scraps) and ‘mosaic’ are in fact very good descriptions of commonplace books. And while Erasmus prescribes that the aphorism should be ‘transfused into the veins … [so it] appears to be a birth of one’s intellect, not something begged and borrowed from elsewhere’,84 commonplace book compilers are concerned precisely with advertising their reliance on prior texts: on begging, and on borrowing. Certainly in drama, the commonplace book is consistently a marker of the buffoon – or at least the pedant, the purveyor of a culture of aphorisms and proverbs that, as Hamlet says, ‘is something musty’. The tendency for commonplace books to bleed into other kinds of writing or collection is perhaps in part a consequence of this unease. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the commonplace’s capacity to convey the familiar ceased to be a virtue, and modern pejorative associations of the platitudinous grew dominant.85 But some sense of the need to conceal one’s participation in this culture, to conceal one’s dependence on someone else’s words, was discernible much earlier. This list, then, presents a pool of attributes that might be grouped under the capacious title ‘commonplace book culture’; it supplements the ideals conveyed in guides to commonplacing with some attention to the many, varied and messy manuscript enactments. By expanding the range of texts and activities we group under the heading ‘commonplace book’ – by replacing a narrow definition with a broader consideration of commonplace book culture, an expansion that is 83

Erasmus, Il Ciceroniano, ed. A. Gambara (Brescia, 1965), p. 290, quoted in Pigman, ‘Imitation’, p. 9. 84 Ibid., quoted in Pigman, ‘Imitation’, pp. 8–9 (my italics). 85 See, for example, OED, ‘commonplace’, n. 5: ‘A common or ordinary topic … Slightingly: A platitude or truism’, which quotes Swift (1745), ‘The trite common-places of servile, injudicious flattery’; and n. 6: ‘Anything common and trite’, which cites Wordsworth (1802), ‘Thou unassuming Common-place Of Nature, with that homely face’. These negative connotations of the general and familiar were of course present earlier (see adj. 1, ‘devoid of originality or novelty; trite, trivial, hackneyed’, which quotes Ben Jonson (1609), ‘Ther’s Aristotle, a mere common-place fellow’), but they were accompanied and held in check by an interest in how this recognizability might be applicable to particular cases.

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driven by a historically sensitive assessment of how early modern men and women actually understood and deployed ideas of the commonplace – we can welcome into the critical frame a range of manuscripts and textual practices that demonstrate women’s agency.

James Daybell

Women, Politics and Domesticity: The Scribal Publication of Lady Rich’s Letter to Elizabeth I*

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his essay studies a single letter by Penelope, Lady Rich (1563–1607) as a means of examining the roles that early modern women played in scribal publication and Elizabethan court politics. Written in the aftermath of the earl of Essex’s disgrace in 1599, the letter interceded with Queen Elizabeth on her brother’s behalf. It came in the wake of a series of epistolary solicitations for royal clemency which flowed from Penelope Rich’s pen, a performance of sisterly duty. In this manner, the letter highlights the intersection of ‘domestic’ and ‘political’ spheres during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and particularly the ways in which upper-class women were inevitably drawn into a world of high politics through performing conventional familial tasks. Yet Lady Rich’s letter differed in several important aspects from its predecessors. First, because of its notoriety: the strong tone offended the queen, who was angered by the letter’s defence of Essex, its castigation of his enemies, and above all by criticisms of the royal person for refusing to receive the earl. Indeed, Lady Rich’s epistle caused a great stir among court gossips, and was the subject of discussion during Essex’s later trial. A seemingly ‘private’ correspondence with the queen was in actual fact made highly ‘public’ for political, even propagandist purposes, and it attains added interest because of the complex ways in which it circulated. Surviving in over thirty variant manuscript versions, it represents one of the most widely scribally disseminated Elizabethan texts, rivalling Leicester’s commonwealth and Philip Sidney’s A letter to Queen Elizabeth. Lady Rich’s letter thus had a textual afterlife that existed alongside its initial presentation; it was also published in printed form along with Essex’s Apologie (1600), which perhaps hastened or confirmed its place within the scribal network. * I would like to thank Andrew Gordon, Arthur Marotti, Steven May, Adam Smyth, Alan Stewart and Henry Woudhuysen for discussing this essay.

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The sophistication of this text and its scribal status raise important issues which this essay seeks to examine about the very nature of women’s letters, which are often viewed as quintessentially domestic, private and singular. It also reveals the complexities of early modern authorship and female subjectivity, since the circulation of the letter and subsequent textual and scribal variations distanced it from a simplistic notion of a two-way epistolary exchange. The essay explores three main areas in examining the light that Lady Rich’s letter to the queen sheds on her role as letter-writer as well as on early modern women’s involvement in scribal culture more generally.1 First, it considers Penelope Rich’s education, epistolary skills and immersion within a vibrant cultural and political world. Secondly, it examines the letter itself, its dating, immediate context, reception and the controversy it generated, and lastly it investigates the nature of its print publication and scribal circulation. Education, Scribal Culture and Epistolary Practice The daughter of Walter Devereux, first earl of Essex and his wife Lettice (née Knollys) and sister of Robert Devereux, second earl of Essex, Lady Rich was well connected and highly educated. She was a skilled linguist, and well versed in the literary arts and sophisticated forms of courtly writing indispensable in a patronage society.2 As was customary for young girls of her social standing, she and her younger sister Dorothy were tutored at home by the Cambridge scholar Mathias Holmes until their father’s death in 1576 and during the three months in early 1577 that they stayed at Greys, the Oxfordshire home of their maternal grandfather, Sir Francis Knollys. In addition to being taught to write an italic hand, both girls received linguistic training in French, Spanish and Italian, and rudimentary lessons in history, philosophy, rhetoric and arithmetic,

1

A. F. Marotti, Manuscript, Print and the English Renaissance Lyric (Ithaca NY, 1995), pp. 48–61; G. L. Justice and N. Tinker, Women’s Writing and the Circulation of Ideas: Manuscript Publication in England, 1550–1800 (Cambridge, 2002). 2 The best and most recent biographical studies of Lady Rich are A. D. Wall, ‘Rich [née Devereux], Penelope, Lady Rich (1563–1607)’, Oxford DNB (Oxford, 2004), [http://www. oxforddnb.com/view/article/23490] and on her earlier life, M. Margetts, ‘Stella Britanna: The Early Life (1563–1592) of Lady Penelope Devereux, Lady Rich (d. 1607)’ (unpublished Ph.D dissertation, Yale University, 1992); ‘A Christening Date for Lady Penelope Rich’, N&Q 238 (1993), 153–4. See also S. Freedman, Poor Penelope: Lady Penelope Rich, An Elizabethan Woman (Bourne End, 1983); J. M. Purcell, Sidney’s Stella (Oxford, 1934); M. S. Rawson, Penelope Rich and Her Circle (London, 1911); S. Varlow, The Lady Penelope: The Lost Tale of Love and Politics in the Court of Elizabeth I (London, 2007); G. Klawitter, ‘Barnfield’s Penelope Devereux, Exalted and Reviled’, in The Affectionate Shepherd: Celebrating Richard Barnfield, ed. K. Borris and G. Klawitter (London, 2001), pp. 62–82.



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as well as a large dose of reformist theology.3 From early 1578 onwards, Penelope and Dorothy moved to the ‘puritan’ household of their guardian, Henry Hastings, where their education and upbringing were overseen by his wife, Catherine, countess of Huntingdon. While religious strictures naturally formed a substantial part of the Devereux girls’ pedagogical programme, they were also furnished with the kinds of practical skills and cerebral refinements suitable for entry into court and life as noblewomen. Thus, they continued in their study of foreign languages but also received lessons in dancing and singing and were instructed in household management.4 During childhood and adolescence Lady Rich clearly developed the refined literary and cultural tastes in poetry and entertainments for which she has long been praised; and in 1581 she served as a Maid of Honour. As a patroness she received numerous dedications.5 Her cultural interests continued throughout her life, and in James’s reign she participated in Queen Anna’s court masques. In 1604, she performed the role of the Goddess Venus in Daniel’s Vision of Twelve Goddesses and as the nymph Ocyte (meaning ‘swiftness’ and expressing purity) in Jonson’s The Masque of Blackness at the court at Whitehall on 6 January 1605.6 Beyond these educational accomplishments and cultural interests, Penelope Rich gained prior first-hand experience of the intricacies of scribal and print publication. Indeed, she appears to have been intimately involved in the circulation of Philip Sidney’s verse.7 H. R. Woudhuysen conjectures that Sidney himself may have provided Lady Rich a manuscript copy of A Defence of Poetry, which, via the intermediary of Henry Constable, might have been passed to James Roberts, who printed Henry Olney’s edition of the work in 3 Margetts, ‘Stella Britanna’, pp.73–8, 115. London, British Library, MS Lansdowne 24, fols. 205, 209. 4 C. Cross, The Puritan Earl: The Life of Henry Hasting, Third Earl of Huntingdon, 1536–1595 (London, 1966), p. 55; Margetts, ‘Stella Britanna’, pp.124–5, 130–6. 5 H. R. Woudhuysen, Sir Philip Sidney and the Circulation of Manuscripts, 1558–1640 (Oxford, 1996), p. 93; G. Alexander, Writing After Sidney: The Literary Response to Sir Philip Sidney, 1586–1640 (Oxford, 2006), pp. 139–40, 141. 6 Ben Jonson, ed. C. H. Herford and P. and E. Simpson, 11 vols. (Oxford, 1941), VII, 178, X, 443, 446, 448, 449; A Book of Masques in Honour of Allardyce Nicoll, ed. J. Rees (Cambridge, 1967), pp. 17–42 (p. 42). 7 On Penelope Rich and Philip Sidney, see: H. H. Hudson, ‘Penelope Devereux as Sidney’s Stella’, Huntington Library Bulletin 7 (1935), 89–129; W. W. Ringler, Astrophil and Stella, The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney (Oxford, 1962), pp. 443, 446; J. Robertson, ‘Sir Philip Sidney and Lady Rich’, RES 15 (1964), 296–7; K. Duncan-Jones, ‘Sidney, Stella and Lady Rich’, in Sir Philip Sidney: 1586 and the Creation of a Legend, ed. J. van Dorsten, D. Baker-Smith and A. F. Kinney (Leiden, 1986), pp. 170–92; J. A. Roberts, ‘Sir Philip Sidney and Lady Penelope Rich’, ELR 15 (1985), 59–77; C. Hulse, ‘Stella’s Wit: Penelope Rich as Reader of Sidney’s Sonnets’, in Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe, ed. M. W. Ferguson, M. Quilligan and N. J. Vickers (Chicago, 1986), pp. 272–86.

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1595. ­Similarly, he suggests Lady Rich as the source for the sixth song from Astrophil and Stella which was printed in William Byrd’s Psalmes, sonets, & songs of sadnes and pietie (1588) and for the Certain sonnets included in the 1594 and 1595 editions of Henry Constable’s volume Diana. There is also strong evidence that Sidney provided Penelope Rich her own manuscript copy of Astrophil and Stella, and again that she was the possible source for the first quarto edition in 1591.8 Although conjectural, this evidence suggests Lady Rich as a woman operating within a literary milieu, one who was familiar with the peculiarities of manuscript culture and enjoyed close connections with those active in printing. An examination of Penelope Rich’s own correspondence powerfully shows her mastery of the complexities of epistolary culture. She enjoyed a wide-ranging correspondence with writers across Europe; she conducted secret correspondence (employing ciphers and codes) and utilized her letters to patronage and diplomatic ends.9 Her letters register an awareness of courtly and rhetorical conventions, and use of stylistic and structural epistolary forms. Uniformly autograph, the letters are penned in a neat italic presentation hand – similar to Arbella Stuart’s formal hand – and they bear all the hallmarks of a familiarity with letter-writing conventions, such as elaborate modes of address on the address leaves and wax seals, incorporating ribbon or floss. As Grace Ioppolo has argued, Lady Rich’s letters also show a concern with the ‘visual impact of her writing’.10 As is customary with such letters of petition, her missives rarely extend to more than a single side of a bifolium manuscript, although occasionally longer letters spilled over into the left-hand margin where writing continued lengthways. Above all, Lady Rich was clearly aware that a singlesided patronage letter formed a materially effective part of a petitioning strategy. Her outgoing business letters highlight her role as a political intermediary, operating through the influence of her brother and powerful court connections. Several letters of request survive written to Essex, one for an office for a Mr Harvey, another for a poor gentlewoman and a third on behalf of a former

8

Woudhuysen, Philip Sidney, pp. 234–5, 249, 252–4, 257, 290–1, 293, 353, 360, 373–5. Lady Rich’s foreign correspondents included Jean Hotman, former secretary to the earl of Leicester, and his wife Jeane, her servant, to whom she wrote in French: Haarlem, Teylers Stichting, Hotman Letters, Nos 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46. She also corresponded in Spanish with Antonio Pérez, the exiled former secretary of Philip II of Spain: A Spaniard in Elizabethan England: The Correspondence of Antonio Pérez’s Exile, ed. G. Ungerer, 2 vols. (London, 1974), I, Nos 41, 42, 44, 45, 48, 50, 51. 10 G. Ioppolo, ‘“I desire to be helde in your memory”: Reading Penelope Rich Through Her Letters’, in The Impact of Feminism in English Renaissance Studies, ed. D. Callaghan (Basingstoke, 2007), pp. 299–325 (p. 305). 9



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steward wishing to be appointed as an undersheriff.11 Her involvement in her brother’s patronage affairs is further indicated by a request she made on behalf of a female servant to one of his secretaries, Edward Reynoldes, asking him to draw up a letter in Essex’s name to the Lord Mayor for a place that has fallen in his gift.12 Other letters indicate that she effectively mobilized wider political relationships. In 1588 she petitioned Lord Burghley for the wardship of Robert Jermine’s son, reinforcing her suit in support of which the earl of Leicester had already moved the queen.13 Lady Rich also employed her pen to mediate suits on behalf of others. She wrote to Robert Cecil in 1595 for a knighthood for one Mr Tasburgh, following this up a few days later with a letter of social courtesy thanking him for his favour.14 In other letters she sought Cecil’s assistance in gaining military posts; supported the suit of her servant Mericke; and asked Cecil to favour her uncle William Knollys.15 In May 1599 when Essex was in Ireland she wrote to Sir Julius Caesar on military matters, forwarding the suit of Captain Isarde and promising that she would be exceedingly beholden, testimony of her assuredness that she could requite the favour in kind.16 Her perceived influence transcended Essex’s death and her standing at court was restored under James, when she was awarded the precedence of the earldom of Essex.17 In early 1606 she forwarded the suit of one Mr Wakeman for the vicarage of Canforde to the earl of Huntington, and the year before had petitioned Salisbury on behalf of a gentlewoman.18 Sir Humphrey Ferrers also considered Penelope Rich to have sufficient power to ask her to move the king or queen on his behalf for a barony.19 Penelope Rich’s considerable epistolary skills are further demonstrated by her intimate involvement in Essex’s overtures to James VI, Elizabeth’s eventual successor, in 1589. At this time, Lady Rich secretly corresponded with the Scottish king through the auspices of Richard Douglas (nephew of the Scottish 11

Warwick Record Office, ‘Essex Letter Book c.1595–1600’, unfoliated: June 1596, June 1596,

n. d. 12 Hatfield House, Cecil MS 109, fol. 24, n. d. The letter is incorrectly endorsed in a later hand ’1604’. 13 British Library, MS Lansdowne 57, fol. 51: 10 September 1588. 14 Cecil MS 32, fols. 87, 95: 7 and 12 June 1595. 15 Cecil MS 33, fol. 67, MS 30, fol. 96, MS 103, fol. 50, MS 40, fol. 42, MS 43, fol. 30, MS 48, fol. 49: July 1595, Feb. 1596, [c. April 1603], April 1596, July 1596, 1596. See also MS 55, fol. 56, 24 September 1597. 16 London, British Library, MS Additional 12506, fol. 421. 17 Calendar of State Papers Domestic: James I, 1603–1610, ed. M. A. Everett Green (1857), pp. 32, 42, [http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=14988]. 18 San Marino CA, Huntington Library, HEH (Hastings Papers), HA 860: [c. early 1605]; Cecil MS 111, fol. 22: 31 May [1605]. See also, Cecil MS 193, fol. 15: [September 1606]. 19 London, British Library, MS Stowe 150, fols. 192r–3v.

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ambassador to England, Archibald Douglas) and Jean Hotman, a former secretary of the earl of Leicester, who acted as an emissary. The weekly letters written in secret code – Lady Rich using the name ‘Ryalta’ – ­­­were on Essex’s behalf and addressed to Douglas to be passed on to James VI, who ‘commended much the fineness of her wit, the invention and well writing’.20 The whole episode, however, failed and James lost interest when Douglas, whose credit had always been poor with the Scottish king, proved indiscreet and Burghley soon learned of the moves from his agent in Edinburgh, Thomas Fowler.21 While the escapade was without success, it illustrates to good effect Lady Rich’s intercession in politics at the very highest level on her brother’s behalf. The sophisticated manner by which Lady Rich operated through letters is further illustrated by her correspondence with Anthony Bacon, one of Essex’s followers. These letters reveal not only an appetite for newsletters, but also involvement in the semi-public circulation of correspondence for propagandist purposes. When away from the court in May 1596 as her brother prepared for the Cadiz expedition, Lady Rich wrote to Bacon, ‘I must intreat you to let me hear something of the worlde from you, espectially of my brother, and then what you knowe of the Frenche affaires.’22 His reply promised to keep her updated with ‘any good newes’ of her brother, and informed her about the preparations for the Treaty of Greenwich, which Elizabeth signed with France on 24 May.23 A second letter from Bacon relates more precisely to Essex’s exploits on the Cadiz expedition, and moreover evidences her role in the manuscript circulation of materials connected with her brother’s reputation and political career. Bacon enclosed with his missive a letter Lady Rich had lent him, sent to her by her step-father Christopher Blount, containing a first-hand account of the Cadiz expedition.24 In return, Bacon promised that she would receive ‘the true relation … of your most deere and matchless brother my singular good lo[rdship] his actions and successes’.25 This presumably referred to Henry Cuffe’s ‘True relacion’, a partisan account of the victory at Cadiz penned for propagandist purposes by Essex’s secretary and circulated in manuscript form to drum up 20

Cecil MS 18, fol. 51. HMC, Salisbury, 24 vols. (1883–1976), III, 438; Cecil MS 18, fol. 51; P. E. J. Hammer, The Polarisation of Elizabethan Politics: The Political Career of Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, 1585–1597 (Cambridge, 1999), p. 91; Woudhuysen, Philip Sidney, pp. 289–90. 22 Lambeth Palace Library, MS Bacon 657, fol. 61: 3 May 1596. 23 MS Bacon 657, No. 88: 15 May 1596. Lady Rich also sought news of her brother from Robert Cecil during his expeditions in 1596 and 1597: Cecil MS 43, fol. 30 ( July 1596), MS 55, fol. 56 (24 September 1597). 24 MS Bacon 658, fol. 300: 5 August 1596; MS Bacon 658, fol. 198. 25 MS Bacon 658, fol. 300. P. E. J. Hammer, ‘Myth-Making: Politics, Propaganda and the Capture of Cadiz in 1596’, Historical Journal 40 (1997), 621–42 (p. 626); P. E. J. Hammer, ‘New Light on the Cadiz Expedition of 1596’, Historical Research 70 (1997), 182–202. 21



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support for the earl and his advocacy of war policy.26 It is therefore highly likely that Lady Rich was a recipient of Cuffe’s manuscript version of events and perhaps also played her own part in disseminating a positive account of her brother’s adventures in Cadiz by circulating Blount’s letter. Overall, the cumulative effect of these diverse epistolary activities – the patronage broking, the clandestine correspondence using secret codes, the consumption of news­letters and the circulation of manuscript propaganda – demonstrates quite clearly that Penelope Rich was an immensely skilled correspondent, one immersed in the politics of early modern letters and letter-writing. Lastly, the close relationship between Lady Rich and her brother, which may have motivated her to write to the queen on his behalf, is shown by Essex’s two surviving ‘fantasticall’ letters addressed to his sister.27 The playful ‘literariness’ of the letters has been noted by several literary critics; Katherine Duncan-Jones, for example, detects in their studied stoicism echoes of Sir Edward Dyer’s ‘aphoristic, gloomy, coded-seeming poetry’; Michele Margetts remarks on the signs of sibling closeness generated by jovial references to female ‘constancy’.28 Such readings reinforce the assumed sophistication of Lady Rich’s literary tastes, her shared cultural understanding and intimacy with her brother. Yet the letters are also capable of a complementary reading, as representative, however analogously, of the political uncertainty of court life. Although undated, as with much Devereux correspondence, strong evidence locates the correspondence to before 1593 and Essex’s appointment to the Privy Council, a period during which he experienced distinct political frustration. Themes of alienation and thwarted ambition undergird these literary conceits: ‘Ambition fitt for hartes that allready confess themselues to be base, Enuy is the humor of him that willbe glad of the reuersion of another mans fortune and reuenge the remedy of such fooles as in iniuries know not how to keepe themselues afore hand’.29 These tropes of unfulfilled aspirations are repeated in a second letter, which can perhaps be dated to late winter, early spring of 1589 after the death of Penelope’s new-born daughter and speculatively intended to cheer his sister and relieve his own spirits: ‘I am melancholy’, he wrote, ‘mery, some tymes happy and often 26

P. E. J. Hammer, ‘The Uses of Scholarship: The Secretariat of Robert Devereux, Second Earl of Essex, c.1581–1601’, EHR 109 (1994), 26–51 (p. 38). 27 London, British Library, MS Additional 64081 [mid-1580s onwards]; Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Don. c. 188 [early 1589; before 1593]. See A. Freedman, ‘Essex to Stella: Two Letters from the Earl of Essex to Penelope Rich’, ELR 3 (1973), p. 248; M. Margetts, ‘“The wayes of mine owne hart”: The Dating and Mind Frame of Essex’s “fantasticall” letter’, Bodleian Library Record 16 (1997), 101–10; K. Duncan-Jones, ‘Notable Accessions: Western Manuscripts’, Bodleian Library Record 15 (1996), 308–14. 28 Duncan-Jones, ‘Notable Accessions’, p. 312; Margetts, ‘Wayes of mine owne hart’, pp. 105–6. 29 BL MS Add. 64081.

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discontented. The Court of as many humors as the rayne bow hath collores. The tyme wherin wee liue, more vnconstant then women’s thoughtes, more miserable then old age ytself, and breedeth both people like \to/ ytself that is violent, desparate and fantasticall.’30 The coded nature of these highly stylized fraternal missives, while rendering their meaning rather elusive, is also suggestive of Lady Rich’s role as political confidante to her brother, and her interest and involvement in his court career. What emerges then is a compelling motive for Lady Rich’s letter to the queen, which, combined with her sophisticated knowledge of scribal and epistolary culture, presents a strong case of her as a woman perfectly capable of penning and circulating such a missive. Contemporary authorities and documentary evidence clearly identify Lady Rich as the author of the letter to the queen, and certainly she was interrogated over its publication.31 ‘Lady Rich to the Queen’: Context and Controversy Lady Rich’s letter itself is testimony of her letter-writing prowess, representing a highly polished exercise in classical epistolary rhetoric and employing an essentially ‘female’ rhetorical form to plead the case of her brother. Indeed, the letter, infused throughout with classical tropes and images (‘charriots’, ‘divine oracles’, ‘giants’), opens by acknowledging Elizabeth’s displeasure and lamenting the miseries of Essex’s fall from favour. It then belabours Essex’s ‘dejected’ state and the harshness of his misfortune, before criticizing what are described as his ‘combining enemyes’ who ‘labour upon false grounds to build ruyne urging his faults as criminall to yo[u]r divine honor’, and by ‘mallice’ and ‘councells’ seek to ‘glutt themseleues in theire priuate revenge’, and for their own ‘ambicous ends to rise by his ouerthrowe’. Fearful that by ‘evill instruments’ his enemies intended to take ‘his last breath’, Lady Rich warned of the ‘poyson in theire harts to infect ye service’. The letter then makes an extended and impassioned plea for royal mercy, utilizing a consciously ‘female’ voice of lament to plead for his life. It simultaneously stresses the disgraced earl’s plight and suffering, while implicitly criticizing the queen by holding up to her a mirror of just queenship and imploring her not to let her power be ‘eclipsed’ by those of Essex’s enemies who would ‘abuse’ it.32

30 Bodleian, MS Don. c. 188. On the dating and interpretation of this letter, see Margetts, ‘Wayes of mine owne hart’, p. 108, passim. 31 Cf. Ioppolo, ‘I desire’, pp. 313–18. 32 Quotations are taken from Washington DC, Folger Shakespeare Library, V. a. 164, fols. 121–3.



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The precise dating of the letter is hard to establish, since the original does not survive. In most cases, copies of the letter are undated, except in a couple of instances. A copy among the Burghley Papers (BL MS Lansdowne 87, fol. 154) is endorsed rather vaguely, ‘My Lady Riches letter to the Queens Majesty of my lord of Essex troble in the yeare 1599’, which could either refer to late 1599 or early 1600. A second dated scribal copy (BL MS Stowe 150, fol. 140) assigns the letter to 1 January 1599, a date accepted by several scholars.33 Such a dating might suggest that Lady Rich’s epistle was in fact intended as a New Year’s gift for the queen, which carries echoes of William Lord Paget’s advice letter to Protector Somerset of 2 January 1549 written in the style of a ‘mirror for a magistrate’.34 Intriguing though this date may appear it does not fit with external evidence. Other scholars have variously dated the letter from November 1599 (following the lead of the Calendar of State Papers) through to late February 1600, when Lady Rich was commanded to keep to her house.35 The most likely dating for the letter, however, seems to be late January 1600, since immediately before this date Lady Rich was still pursuing the more conventional suitor’s path of petitioning Robert Cecil and seeking an audience with the queen.36 Furthermore, by the very start of February, news of Lady Rich’s ‘piquant’ letter was a matter of some interest at court. On 2 February 1600, Rowland Whyte informed his master Robert Sidney, ‘I hard my lady Rich was called before my Lord Treasurer or Mr Secretary for a letter she had wrytten to her maiestie: what yt was I know not’.37 A few days later, Dudley Carleton informed Sir Edward Norris that ‘the La[dy] Rich hath written againe to her Ma[jes]tie but in other kind of language’, distinguishing it from earlier, more supplicatory letters to Elizabeth.38 The letter itself came amidst a welter of petitioning activity on Essex’s behalf conducted by his mother, wife and sisters in the aftermath of his ignominious return from Ireland in September 1599 and subsequent arrest. During this period, Penelope Rich importuned Elizabeth to gain access to her brother, and she and her sister Dorothy (both dressed in black) were at court in December petitioning for their brother to be moved to a ‘better air’.39 On 24 November, the countess of Essex sent the queen a jewel, which the sovereign refused to 33

Freedman, Poor Penelope, p. 131; A. Wall, ‘Rich, Penelope, Lady Rich (1563–1607)’, Oxford DNB (Oxford, 2004), [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/23490]. 34 ‘The Letters of William, Lord Paget of Beaudesert, 1547–1563’, ed. B. L. Beer and S. M. Jack, Camden Miscellany 25 (London, 1974), 1–141 (pp. 19–20). 35 CSPD, Addenda 1580–1625, pp. 398–9; T. Birch, Memoirs of the Reign of Queen Elizabeth (London, 1754), p. 442; A. Strickland, The Life of Queen Elizabeth (London, 1906), pp. 658–9. 36 Margetts, ‘Stella Britanna’, p. 438. 37 HMC, De L’Isle and Dudley, 6 vols. (1925–66), II, 435. 38 Kew, TNA, SP12/274/ 37: 8 February 1600. 39 Cecil MS 75, fol. 83: 1599; De L’Isle and Dudley, II, 422: 8 December 1599.

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accept. A few days later Lady Essex attended court again dressed all in black and sought to move the countess of Huntingdon on her husband’s behalf; the countess refused to see her, and Lady Essex was informed that she should ‘attend her Majesty’s pleasure’ and ‘come to court no more’.40 By December, however, she was allowed to visit her husband, apparently through the mediation of Robert Cecil, and it was to the Principal Secretary that Lady Rich and Dorothy Northumberland wrote in January 1600 for similar leave to visit their brother.41 By late January 1600, Essex’s mother the Lady Leicester petitioned for her son’s liberty, and Rowland Whyte reported that she and her daughter Lady Rich ‘were at Mr Beckes house upon Richmond Green, and were humble suters to her Majestie to have access unto her; but they were turned back again without comfort’.42 In late February, Lettice Dudley sent the queen a gift of a gown, reputed to have cost her at least £100.43 The kinds of activities engaged in by the women of the Essex circle were entirely conventional for aristocratic women of the period, who as mothers, wives and kinsfolk were able to operate legitimately in the relatively fluid public sphere.44 Where Lady Rich crossed the boundaries of what was considered normal and acceptable female intervention was in the manner of her writing and the way in which it was circulated. The tone of Lady Rich’s letter clearly incensed the monarch, and she was repeatedly called before the Privy Council to answer for her actions, something she studiously avoided. On 22 February, John Chamberlain informed Dudley Carlton: ‘Lady Rich has been called up again about her letter, but excused herself by sickness.’45 In late March she met another summons with feigned sickness and stole into the country, and at the end of May she had still not accounted for herself.46 In June when Essex was interrogated at York House, reference was made to ‘a letter presumed to be written to her Majesty herself by a lady to whom though nearest in blood to my lord it appertained little to intermeddle in matters of this nature, otherwise than in course of humility to have solicited her grace and mercy’. Interestingly, Lady Rich was not mentioned

40

De L’Isle and Dudley, II, 417–18: 23, 24 and 29 November 1599. Cecil MS 74, fol. 79: 12 December 1599; De L’Isle and Dudley, II, 422, 424: 13 and 22 December 1599; Cecil MS 68, fol. 10, MS 178, fol. 110: [ January] 1600; Cecil MS 178, fol. 11: [ January] 1600. 42 De L’Isle and Dudley, II, 434, 435: 24 January 1600, 2 February 1600. 43 Ibid., II, 443–4: 25 February 1600, 3 March 1600. 44 B. J. Harris, ‘Women and Politics in Early Tudor England’, Historical Journal 33 (1990), 259–81 (pp. 272–4); Women and Politics in Early Modern England, 1450–1700, ed. J. Daybell (Aldershot, 2004), pp. 1–17. 45 SP12/274/48: 22 February 1600. 46 SP12/274/86: 29 March 1600; SP12/274/150: 28 May 1600. 41



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by name in this account, presumably a sign of male disapproval of her actions. The account of the York House hearing continues: in which letter, in a violent and mineral spirit of bitterness, remonstrance and representation is made to her Majesty, as if my Lord suffered under passion and faction, and not under justice mixed with mercy; which letter though written to her sacred Majesty, and therefore unfit to pass in vulgar hands, yet was first divulged by copies everywhere (that being as it seemeth the newest and finest form of libelling) and since committed to the press; her Majesty in her wisdom seeing manifestly these rumours thus nourished had got too great a head to be repressed without some hearing of the cause and calling my lord to answer, and yet on the other side being still informed touching my lord himself of his continuance of penitence and submission, did in conclusion resolve to use justice, but with the edge and point taken off and rebated.47

The circulation of a private letter to the queen both in manuscript and print was a cultural taboo. That it transgressed the bounds of acceptable female intercession added further to its unacceptability; and in taking the form of a libel at the same time that Essex was pressing his own case in letters of penitent submission sent mixed messages to Elizabeth and her privy councillors.48 Print Publication and Scribal Circulation Lady Rich’s letter to the queen has an interesting and complex circulation history. From comments of court commentators, it seems highly likely that the letter was initially sent to the queen herself, although this original copy appears not to have survived.49 Thereafter the letter was circulated scribally before appearing in printed form in May appended alongside the 1600 edition of Essex’s Apologie, which took the form of a letter to Anthony Bacon.50 Penelope Rich’s own involvement in the manuscript and print circulation of the letter, however, is rather complicated and hard to piece together. On 25 February 1600, Rowland Whyte reported to Robert Sidney: ‘My Lady Rich is commanded to 47 The Letters and Life of Francis Bacon, Including all His Occasional Works, ed. J. Spedding, 7 vols. (London, 1861–74), II, p. 178. According to Fynes Moryson, An Itinerary, 4 vols. (London, 1617), II, 70, the attorney general referred to Lady Rich’s letter to the queen which ‘was pressed with very bitter and hard termes’ and described as ‘an insolent, saucy, malipert action’. 48 Many of Essex’s submission letters are printed in W. B. Devereux, Lives and Letters of the Devereux, Earls of Essex in the Reign of Elizabeth I, James I and Charles I, 1540–1646, 2 vols. (London, 1853). 49 Cecil MS 181, fol. 62. 50 Robert Devereux, earl of Essex, [An Apologie of the Earle of Essex], [London, 1600] (STC 6787.7). Lady Rich’s letter is, however, absent from the 1603 version of the text.

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keep her house; the cause is thought to be that by her means certain copies of a letter she writ to the queen is published abroad’, by which he meant the scribal publication, adding, ‘She denies it.’51 This denial refers not to the authorship of the letter but to her role in its circulation, and should not be taken at face value. When the letter was printed alongside Essex’s Apologie, Lady Rich was once again sent for, this time ‘to interpret her riddles’, suggesting that the Privy Council suspected that she was implicated in her letter’s dissemination.52 While Essex disowned any part in the circulation of the letter, his sister was questioned on the matter, probably in August 1600, by the Lord Treasurer, Lord Buckhurst at the behest of Robert Cecil.53 Buckhurst wrote to Cecil describing his meeting with Lady Rich: It was Tuesday before the Lady Rich came unto me, for she was gone to Barn Elms and thither was I fain to send for her. I took that course with her which your letters prescribed. She seemed very glad of this riddance and prayed me to give Her Majesty most humble thanks for her favour, which she acknowledged with her follies and faults committed and assured that this should be a warning to her for ever not to commit the like.54

Further details of the interrogation can be gleaned from Cecil’s reply to Buckhurst, in which he reported the queen’s great interest in Lady Rich’s answers, which he claimed ‘it please her to read deliberately herself ’. The letter then administered a reprimand on the queen’s behalf for deferring so long in the matter and because ‘you were still so apt to excuse my lady’s course in her former answers by imputing that to fear only in her of giving further offence, which rather showed a proud disposition, and not much better than a plain contempt of her Majesty and yourself that was used in the cause’. Ultimately though, Elizabeth was willing to accept Lady Rich’s humble contrition: Her Majesty hath noted in her declaration her sorrow for her Majesty’s displeasure, her fear to offend further, her humble and obedient spirit to satisfy all doubts and her great desire to recover her Majesty’s favour ... it is true her Majesty was displeased, as she had cause to see that she being a lady to whom it did not appertain so to meddle in such matters, would be so bold to write in such a style to her especially when the best interpretations, which she doth make, cannot free her from stomach and presumption when she writ, and when her former careless and dry answers shewed how little she valued her Majesty’s commandments; but 51

Freedman, Poor Penelope, p. 135. HMC, De L’Isle and Dudley, II, 459, 461: 10 May 1600, 13 May 1600; SP12/274/150: 28 May 1600. 53 P. E. J. Hammer, ‘Devereux, Robert, second earl of Essex (1565–1601)’, Oxford DNB (Oxford, 2004), [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/7565]. 54 CSP Ireland, 1600, March–October (London, 1903), p. 346: 13 August 1600. 52



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her Majesty saith that as she may well perceive by her manner of proceeding with her, that she hath been far from desire to improve her faults, having given her all advantages to make the best excuses which time or new counsel could afford … she is pleased now … to give her leave to dispose of herself as may best agree with her own health or other respect.

Elizabeth was less magnanimous over the matter of the printing of the letter, arguing that she could prove when Lady Rich gave copies and how it was printed: if it was no worse than that she was only so negligent that others might come by it, her error was not so excusable but that shrewd circumstances might be inferred upon such a voluntary negligence (whereupon has fallen so strange a consequence) if it were not that by her sincerity of obedience she hath sought to make amends.55

At the very least, Lady Rich’s ‘voluntary negligence’ facilitated the letter’s publication. Lastly, Cecil’s letter refers to another version of the letter that Lady Rich had personally sent to the queen, this time mentioning Essex’s enemies by name. Upon reading this new letter the queen burned it without mentioning the decoded names to Cecil, who suspected that he was the main target of Lady Rich’s complaints. None the less, the upshot of Lady Rich’s change of tone and humble submission was that she was acquitted. The unofficial print publication of Lady Rich’s letter alongside Essex’s apology probably had a relatively small circulation. Rowland Whyte informed Robert Sidney that 200 copies were printed, only eight of which were seized; and John Chamberlain opined that Essex’s apology with Lady Rich’s letter was printed ‘not from friendship or faction, but hope of gain’, presumably by an enterprising printer, adding ‘a few were sold, but it was soon suppressed’.56 Readership in the early modern period, especially for political and libel material, is rather hard to establish with any degree of certainty beyond generally delineated environments – at the universities, court and the Inns of Court. Yet one reader of this printed version was the Yorkshire-based puritan gentlewoman Lady Margaret Hoby, who recorded in her diary having Essex’s Apology read to her in 1600, suggesting a female and provincial readership beyond the ambit of the male-dominated capital.57 Essex-related texts clearly found their

55

Cecil MS 181, fol. 62: [August] 1600. De L’Isle and Dudley, II, 461: 13 May 1600; SP12/274/150: 28 May 1600. For a later example of Essex’s letters being forged by John Daniel and the scrivener Peter Bales, see SP12/279/126, SP12/281/34. 57 The Private Life of an Elizabethan Lady: The Diary of Lady Margaret Hoby, 1599–1605, ed. J. Moody (Stroud, 1998), p. 99. 56

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ways into the provinces: Margaret Hill, for example, sent her West Country cousin Richard Carnsew a copy of Essex’s funeral sermon, and John Chamberlain enclosed to Dudley Carlton absent from London at Witham, ‘a passionate letter of Essex, the last he wrote to the Queen from Ireland’.58 There was obviously a ready market for Essex material and Lady Rich’s letter certainly seems to have circulated with other notorious texts relating to Essex’s fall from power. While the print run of Lady Rich’s letter may have been small, and its publication suppressed very quickly, the fact that it was printed at all would have hastened or secured its place within the scribal network. The manuscript circulation of Lady Rich’s letter to the queen worked in several different ways. At first its scribal publication appears to have been deliberate and orchestrated, presumably to drum up support for the beleaguered earl. Multiple copies were distributed as separates, as is made clear in the interrogations of Essex at York House: it ‘was first divulged by copies everywhere (that being as it seemeth the newest and finest form of libelling)’.59 One such example survives as BL MS Stowe 150, fol. 140r–v, a single folio text that resides among a collection of sixteenth and early seventeenth century historical letters and papers, many of which relate to Sir Humphrey Ferrers of Tamworth, Norfolk, and his brother Thomas, both of whom were ‘cousins’ of Essex.60 The thickness and quality of the paper on which it was copied suggest its importance as a manuscript; the family connections allude to possible dissemination among Essex supporters. The degree of Lady Rich’s involvement in this kind of ‘libelling’ activity beyond ‘negligence’ can only be surmised, but certainly members of Essex’s circle, among them his secretariat, were not strangers to utilizing manuscript channels as a form of propaganda.61 Irrespective of original scribal intentions, once the text was unleashed in the public realm in this manner its progress was impossible to direct due to the relatively organic nature of early modern manuscript circulation; it was also difficult to police since manuscript writings often operated below the radar of the state censor.62 None the less, in examining the various textual copies of Lady Rich’s letter, clear patterns do 58

SP46/71/223: 10 May 1601; SP12/274/5: 13 June 1600. Letters and Life, ed. Spedding, II, p. 178. 60 On the Devereux/Ferrers connection, see Margetts, ‘Stella Britanna’, p. 414. 61 For the manuscript circulation of other Essex-related material (Essex’s advice to the earl of Rutland, the ‘True relacion’ of the victory at Cadiz, Essex’s Apology, letters between Essex and Lord Keeper Egerton), see Woudhuysen, Philip Sidney, p. 148; Hammer, ‘Uses of Scholarship’; P. E. J. Hammer, ‘The Earl of Essex, Fulke Greville, and the Employment of Scholars’, Studies in Philology 91 (1994), 167–80. 62 On scribal publication, see H. Love, Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford, 1993); Woudhuysen, Philip Sidney, pp. 1–203; Marotti, Manuscript; P. Beal, In Praise of Scribes: Manuscripts and Their Makers in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford, 1998); M. Hobbs, Early Seventeenth-Century Verse Miscellany Manuscripts (Aldershot, 1992). 59



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appear which offer clues relating to its dissemination, political application and reapplication within distinct local reading networks.63 First, at least six of the surviving texts of Lady Rich’s letter to the queen exist as individual manuscripts, representing possibly circulated or confiscated separates as well as scribal copies prepared as minutes for discussion by members of the Privy Council.64 One copy survives among Burghley’s papers in the British Library, a bifolium separate measuring 198mm by 301mm, the standard size of a manuscript letter.65 It is endorsed in the hand of the copyist, ‘My Lady Ricthes letter to the Quenes Majesty in the tyme of my lady lord of Essex troble in the yere 1599’ (fol. 155v) and shows signs of folding, suggestive of its status perhaps as one of the early circulating ‘libels’. Although now gathered in a volume among which are included other Essex letters (Egerton’s letter to Essex and his reply, Essex’s exchange with Anthony Bacon and a copy of a severe letter of remonstrance from the queen to Essex), these appear to have been collected separately. A further copy in an early seventeenth century mixed hand survives in Bodleian, MS Tanner 76 fols. 31–2 which presumably circulated as a separate before subsequently being collected with letters and papers relating to the period 1600–2, among which are included some other Essex texts: his apology (fols. 20–27) and letter to Anthony Bacon (fol. 12). A final separate copy is located among the State Papers, headed with the emotive title, ‘Lady Rich her lre to ye Quene / for ye life of her brother Essex’.66 A fragment of original verse on the verso of the letter commenting on Essex’s later execution – ‘Not to haue law, is iniquitye / Not to mitigate law, is tiranny / Mercy wthout iustice, is parti63

Thus far I have located the following manuscript copies of the text. In New Haven CT, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library: Osborn MS fb. 117, pp. 14–16; Osborn MSS Files 12562; Osborn MS fb. 220.1. In Oxford, Bodleian Library: MS Ashmole 781, fols. 84–5; MS Don. C. 54, fols. 18v–19; MS Eng. Hist. c. 272, fols. 39–41; MS Rawlinson C. 744, fol. 60r–v; MS Rawlinson D. 924, fol. 2r–v; MS Tanner 76, fols. 31–2 and fols. 94v–5r; University College MS 152, fols. 38–42. In London, British Library: MS Additional 4130, fols. 58r–61r; MS Add. 6704, fol. 146b; MS Add. 25707, fol. 146b; MS Add. 34218, fol. 186b; MS Add. 40838, fol. 9b; MS Lansdowne 87, fol. 154; MS Royal 17 B. L, fol. 18; MS Stowe 150, fol. 140. In Cambridge University Library: MS Ee. 5. 23 (C.), pp. 435–6. In Chester, Cheshire Record Office: MS DLT B8, pp. 99–101. In Manchester, Chetham’s Library: MS Mun. A. 4. 15 (Farmer-Chetham manuscript). In Washington DC, Folger Shakespeare Library: MS V. a. 164, fols. 120–3; MS V. b. 214, fols. 205r–v; MS V. a. 321, fols. 6v–7v. In San Marino CA, Huntington Library: MS 1205i; MS HM 102. In London, Inner Temple: MS Petyt 538/36, fols. 109r–10r. In Nottingham University Library: MS Cl C 596 (Clifton correspondence). In Kew, TNA, SP15/34/18. In Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland: MS Adv. 34. 2. 10, fols. 90–101. 64 BL MS Lansdowne 87, fols. 154–5; BL MS Stowe 150, fol. 140r–v; Bodleian MS Tanner 76, fols. 31–2; TNA SP15/34/18; Beinecke, Osborn MSS Files 12562; Nottingham UL MS Cl C 596. 65 BL MS Lansdowne 87, fols. 154–5. 66 SP15/34/18.

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ality / Iustice without mercy, is plaine extremity’ – indicates a later engagement with and commentary on the text. Furthermore, the addition of underlinings in the text as well as marginal annotations for insertions and clarifications (e.g. the phrase ‘Viz: Southampton and Essex’ to decode associations) indicate perhaps secretarial notes or decoding in preparation for subsequent discussions. The manuscript apparently had different uses at different times. Indeed, each of these letters has its own unique elements – different paper, slight textual variations and different hands – they are certainly not the products of some kind of late-Elizabethan scribal production line or carefully orchestrated scriptorium. Rather, the differences shed light on the distinct ways in which each worked. Secondly, Lady Rich’s letter to the queen also circulated along with other Essex-related material, including the Lord Keeper Egerton’s famous letter enjoining the earl to swallow his false pride and show due obedience to her majesty, and Essex’s equally well-known reply, as well as his Apologie. These epistolary texts, as Paul Hammer has persuasively argued, were first passed among Essex supporters, especially at the Inns of Court, before wider dissemination, and together ‘formed a kind of political manifesto’ in order to shape public opinion.67 One such grouping of Essex texts – which includes ‘The Lady Rich to the Q[ueens] Ma[jes]t[y]’ (fol. 2r–v), Essex’s letters to and from the Lord Keeper (fol. 3r–v) and ‘The order of the moste Christian and honourable Earle of Essex to his deathe’ (fols. 9v–12v) – is now collected in Bodleian MS Rawlinson, D. 924, a large volume made up of miscellaneous material. Analysis of the construction of the volume, however, reveals that folios 2r–12v are a separate gathering, on different size and quality of paper, with a watermark distinct from elsewhere in the manuscript, suggesting that these examples of Essexiana circulated as a unique body of texts with a particular agenda. Moreover, Lady Rich’s letter also crops up in several manuscript collections dedicated to letters and poems closely associated with Essex’s fall. It appears, for example, alongside Essex’s Apologie, two of his letters to the queen, his exchange with Egerton, and Essex verses in BL MS Royal 17 B. 50; among similar texts in NLS MS Adv. 34. 2. 10, fols. 90–101 and in BL MS Add. 40838. In Bodleian MS Rawlinson C. 744 it is copied with other pro-Essex texts with King James’s ‘a kings dutie in his office’; and is included in Bodleian MS Tanner 76, fols. 44r–99v, a separate gathering composed of Essex-related texts, now collected within a larger volume. Lastly, in Folger MS V. a. 164 it is gathered with accounts of Essex’s arraignment, trial and execution, purported to have been ‘Written by Francis ap Rice [in 1601] and by him aproued of ’ (fol. 23r).68 This small presentation volume in particular, given its date of 1601, appears to have been compiled at 67

Hammer, ‘Devereux, Robert’; Marotti, Manuscript, pp. 97–8. S. W. May, ‘The Poems of Edward DeVere, Seventeenth Earl of Oxford and of Robert Devereux, Second Earl of Essex’, Studies in Philology 77. 5 (1980), 25–64, 84–114 (pp. 94–6). 68



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the time of Essex’s fall, perhaps as a form of rehabilitation, the texts circulating as a part of a ‘deliberate strategy’.69 Thirdly, the letter also exists in larger early seventeenth century manuscript miscellanies collected with other Essex texts, alongside items of historical interest, letters, libels, speeches and verse. In Folger MS V. a. 321 Lady Rich’s missive is included among texts associated with Essex’s fall, as well as other letters by noteworthy individuals, and in Bodleian MS Ashmole 781 it is part of a series of pro-Essex texts within a larger collection.70 Likewise, in a small manuscript volume of twenty-two pages (Beinecke MS Osborn fb. 117), ‘a collection of many learned letters’, apparently dating from the early seventeenth century, it appears with letters from the earl of Arundel, Elizabeth I, Philip Sidney, Robert Cecil, Fulke Greville, Essex and Egerton; and is also included in CUL MS Ee. 5. 23 (C.), a volume endorsed ‘John Peck his book’, where it sits beside a letter from Essex to the queen, Egerton’s letters, Ralegh’s letter to James and other petitions. All too often the actual identities of the compilers, owners and readers of manuscript miscellanies remain frustratingly elusive. In certain instances, however, more can be deduced about the provenance and context of individual volumes. Bodleian MS Don. C 54, for example, a miscellany of verse and prose – which includes Lady Rich’s letter (fol. 18v) with Essex’s exchange with Egerton (fols. 17r–18r) and ‘a dreame alludinge to my L: of Essex and his adversaries’ (fol. 19r) – was owned by the Welsh judge Richard Roberts, an Essex sympathiser and one of a network of lawyers in Jacobean London involved in the exchange of verses and libels.71 Likewise, Inner Temple Petyt MS 538/36 is associated with the seventeenth-century lawyer and political propagandist William Petyt,72 and the Dr Farmer-Chetham MS, where Lady Rich’s letter is framed by prose relating to Essex’s trial, is known to date from the 1620s and has been linked to the Inns of Court.73 Individual owners of manuscripts copied Lady Rich’s letter into personal volumes of miscellanea: Sir Francis Fane, first earl of Westmoreland (1583/4– 69

A. Gordon, ‘“A fortune of Paper Walls”: The Letters of Francis Bacon and the Earl of Essex’, ELR (2007), 319–36; ‘Circulating Letters at Court’, unpublished paper delivered at The Renaissance Society of America Annual Meeting, Chicago 2008. 70 A Seventeenth-Century Letter-Book: A Facsimile edition, ed. A. R. Braunmuller (Cranbury NJ, 1983). 71 Marotti, Manuscript, pp. 36–7, 93; P. Croft, ‘Libels, Popular Literacy and Public Opinion in Early Modern England’, Historical Research 68 (1995), 266–85 (p. 280); The Poems of Sir John Davies, ed. Robert Krueger (Oxford, 1975), p. 438. 72 J. Greenberg, ‘Petyt, William (1640/41–1707)’, Oxford DNB (Oxford, 2004), [http://www. oxforddnb.com/view/article/22074]. 73 Chetham’s MS A. 4. 15; Woudhuysen, Philip Sidney, p. 166; Marotti, Manuscript, pp. 36, 82; The Dr. Farmer Chetham MS, ed. A. B. Grosart, 2 vols., Chetham Society 89–90 (Manchester, 1873).

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1629), who was associated with Essex, preserved her letter among his political notes and papers, which also contained an account of Essex’s arraignment and the speeches of Sir Charles Danvers and Sir Christopher Blount at their execution on Tower Hill, as well as epitaphs, satires and entertainments, including a Jonsonian masque.74 It was also copied during the mid-seventeenth century by the antiquarian Sir Peter Leicester, and is collected along with Essex’s exchange with Egerton in the folio entry book of Henry and Richard Wigley of County Derby, the only material of this nature to appear among miscellaneous memoranda, including ‘a preservative from the kings Matie againste the plague’, dates of children’s births, and accounts, as well as assignments of leases and forms of deeds.75 While the precise dating of individual manuscripts is notoriously difficult, manuscript copies of Essex’s writings achieved wide currency in the decades after his death, especially after the accession of James when supporters could freely mourn for Essex and his reputation received something of a revival, and these texts, including Lady Rich’s letter, found fresh application in different political contexts.76 The memory of Essex’s aristocratic martial values and nostalgic image as the defender of Protestantism, for example, as Paul Hammer has argued, exemplified militant Elizabethan Hispanophobia during the 1620s in direct contrast to Jacobean and Caroline foreign policy; this increased during the early 1640s when Essex’s son became a leader of parliamentarian forces.77 In the decades after Essex’s execution, the text of Lady Rich’s letter to the queen experienced some degree of instability, though more often than not textual variations are easily explained by scribal practice or error. In certain instances, though, additions or emendations reflect a broader engagement with the text and subject matter. Several copies of the letter (e.g. Bodleian MS Rawlinson C. 744, fol. 60r–v; Chetham’s MS A. 4. 15) include an account of what Lady Rich is rumoured to have said in response to questioning by the Council: ‘This letter beinge shewed at the councell table and willed her to make exposicon thereof what shee meant by yt shee answered presently “what I meant I wrott / and what I wrott I meante”.’78 Without external evidence corroborating the authenticity of Lady Rich’s supposed riposte, her defiance appears entirely fictitious, an embellishment added by later generations of copyists. Finally, Lady Rich’s missive achieved considerable notoriety on its own terms and was collected in manuscript compilations separately from other Essexiana 74 BL MS Add. 34218; M. Mercer, ‘Fane, Sir Thomas (d. 1589)’, Oxford DNB (Oxford, 2004), [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/9143]. 75 Cheshire Record Office, MS DLT B8, fols. 99–101; BL MS Add. 6704, fols. 146v–7r. 76 On the application of texts to different periods, see A. H. Tricomi, Anti-Court Drama in England, 1603–1642 (Charlottesville VA, 1989). 77 Hammer, ‘Devereux, Robert’. 78 MS Rawlinson C. 744, fol. 60v ; Grosart, Farmer Chetham MS, I, 47.



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for its intrinsic political and historical interest. A copy is included in the Folger commonplace book MS V. b. 214, fol. 205r–v, which also has ‘The queen to Lady Norris’ (fol. 68r), a letter of condolence written on the death of her son, the military commander John Norris, a text that was itself widely copied and circulated during the first half of the seventeenth century.79 In Bodleian MS Eng. Hist. c.  272, it appears among miscellaneous military, historical and political materials dating back to 1544. Another copy appears alongside letters from Ralegh and Charles II in BL MS Add. 25707, a verse and political miscellany dating from the first half of the seventeenth century. These letters are no longer anchored to a specific context or purpose, but were copied and recopied, collected for general interest, perhaps in some cases, as Peter Mack has argued, as exemplars for practical emulation.80 Copies of letters by other women circulated and were copied into early modern manuscript miscellanies. Oxford, University College MS 152 includes Elizabeth’s letter to Lady Norris (fols. 1–2) as well as ‘The Lady Alice Countesse of Derbie to Queene Anne, immediately after the death of Queen Elizabeth’ (fols. 96–7). In addition to Essex texts and letters from Ben Jonson and George Chapman, the seventeenth-century letter-book Folger MS V. a. 321 includes numerous epistolary exemplars from women, including Mary Cavendish, Mary Lady Wingfield, Marie Wither, Dorothy Moryson and possibly Elizabeth Brooke. Whether this indicates a distinct interest in women’s letters in particular is unclear; the letters appear to have been collected because of the social status of writers and recipients and the political or historical significance of the letter-writer. Certainly, Lady Rich was a figure of some public interest, not only for her letter to the queen but also for her widely known affair and scandalous later marriage to the earl of Devonshire, which is recorded in the epitaph verse ‘Heere lyes Penelope the Ladie Rich’.81 In conclusion, a detailed contextualization of Lady Rich’s letter highlights the ways in which the kinds of women’s social activities traditionally connected with the family intersected with court politics and could be instrumental in the formation of public opinion. It also illustrates a high degree of female conversance with the peculiarities of early modern epistolary practices and women’s involvement more generally in scribal culture as writers, disseminators and readers. Furthermore, textual and manuscript analysis of the circulation of this single letter text demonstrates the complexities of letter-writing. It disrupts notions of epistolarity as a simple two-way closed exchange and women’s letters 79

S. W. May, Queen Elizabeth I: Selected Works (New York, 2004), p. 227. P. Mack, Elizabethan Rhetoric: Theory and Practice (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 114–16. 81 Marotti, Manuscript, p. 85; Adam Smyth, ‘“Reade in one age and understood i’th’ next”: Recycling Satire in the Mid-Seventeenth Century’, Huntington Library Quarterly 69 (2006), 1–16 (pp. 10–11). 80

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as intrinsically private and domestic. Indeed, the surviving copies of the letter tell us much about the ways in which the text was disseminated both intentionally and, once it entered print and manuscript networks, the ways in which it was consumed. Circulating at different times as separates, as well as along with other Essex materials and collected by itself within larger manuscript miscellanies, Lady Rich’s letter was read within local reading communities, generating meaning within different contexts. It was circulated contemporaneously among Essex supporters; copied for discussion by privy councillors; formed part of a nostalgia for Elizabethan militant Protestantism and Hispanophobia; was later consumed by those interested in salacious political intrigue; and stood as an exemplary model of female letter-writing to emulate and entertain. While initial composition and dissemination show the political nature of women’s scribal activities, once it entered the scribal network the letter attained a life of its own separate from its initiator, its circulation plural and organic.

Graham Williams

‘yr scribe can proove no nessecarye consiquence for you’?: The Social and Linguistic Implications of Joan Thynne’s using a Scribe in Letters to her Son, 1607–11

To the Right wor shipfull my Loving Sonne Sir thomas thin Long Let gve this wth speed

now and euer your ashured Louinge mother     Ioane Thynne

Good sonn your Leter was expeicited Longe be fore I hard from you. which made me doutfull. what couse your sister ??? showld take for her mony ???? seinge you cam not acording to your promys ^whch^ gaue both her and my selfe much discontenment: where apon she hath made her atornes to reseaue her the mony to her youse: yett neuer the less. if you will haue the hole som. all to gether for thre weakes or ^a month^ Longer if you please. geu= inge her what she and you shall agree a= pon ? at your and her nexst meteinge ???? geuinge her atornes good secureite for the hole thosen pondes. to be pade vnto her at London or other wise ? ^where^ she shall apount [this entire line crossed out in the manuscript] [most of this line crossed out] but to breake the some shee is very vnwilinge and there= fore good sonn haue abrotherly care for her good for that she is very wilinge you shold haue it afore astranger for the Lone of your house I hartely thanke you and doe take it

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Graham Williams very kindely from you wishinge I had ??? knone your minde afore for then I wold not atrobeled my sister kneueit as I did but now god wilinge if it please god to sende me any reasenabell helth I will see both you and yours to my greate comfort for your sonne heare he is in good health and is much altred for the beter I prase god: I thanke you for your sister cristen praing ^you^ that she may haue the continunance of your Loue vnto her and this prayeng you to beare with my scri= blinge Leter beinge not well at this tyme beinge very well satesfied by your Leter which I pray god euer to kepe and bless both you and youres remembringe my beste Loue vnto you? I rest

Taken alone, this, the last surviving letter sent from Joan Thynne to her son Thomas in 1611,1 affords little out of the ordinary from what we know about letter-writing practice in the early seventeenth century. The subject matter is familiar and discussion of a dowry, health and living are by no means exceptional topics to have passed between a mother and son. The value placed on writing one’s own letters to loved ones is reflected here, and Joan’s apology for ‘scriblinge’ was in fact a common feminine trope.2 The bold, easy-to-read italic script in which it is written is as we would expect of a lady, and while the spellings are not the farthest afield as far as early modern letter-writers go, they are peculiar enough to modern readers to reinforce the generally held assumption that women at this time were idiosyncratic spellers.3 But to conclude that because this letter seems so common within the wider context of historical generalization, it must have been ordinary between Joan and Thomas would in fact misplace most of its potential significance. Luckily, this letter has been preserved within a wider epistolary record left by Joan Thynne. The letters are held at Longleat, Wiltshire, and span more than thirty-five years of letter writing (1575–1611) in a variety of different scripts – many of which are clearly Joan’s own, others by scribes, and a few examples that are more difficult to place. It is clear that the record is not complete in the sense that it contains only a fraction of what must have been a much larger 1

Longleat Library, MS Thynne Papers 8, fol. 37. Where dates are not given in the letters themselves, I have referenced those suggested in Two Elizabethan Women: Correspondence of Joan and Maria Thynne 1575–1611, ed. A. D. Wall, Wiltshire Record Society 38 (London, 1983). 2 J. Daybell, Women Letter Writers in Tudor England (Oxford, 2006), pp. 100–2. 3 V. Salmon, ‘Orthography and Punctuation’, in The Cambridge History of the English Language, Volume III: 1476–1776, ed. R. Lass (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 13–55.



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epistolary output; however, the forty-five letters from Joan that have survived, alongside letters to and from other members of the Thynne family and their circle, provide ample evidence to contextualize Joan’s letter-writing activity to her son. Among the letters written from Joan, six are to Thomas.4 The majority of Joan’s other letters (almost all of which are to her husband, John) were written under her own hand; however, the letter transcribed above is the only surviving authorial letter to Thomas, where the five preceding were all scribal.5 By the time of the first surviving letter to Thomas in 1607, Joan had been writing with the same, blocky italic script in her authorial letters for a very long time. Although her earliest script of the 1570s was a scrawling mixture of secretary and italic features, she had by the 1590s – after some obvious experimentation – begun to write exclusively in the italic we find in her final letter to Thomas. In contrast, all the scribal letters are in extremely neat and accomplished secretary scripts, clearly written by professionals. These five letters, one written in 1607,6 two in 16087 and two in 1611,8 appear to be in four different hands, with the two in 1611 apparently penned by the same person. These were not quick, 4

MS Thynne Papers 8, fols. 26, 28, 30, 34, 36, 37. A distinctive terminology for describing the compositional features of early English letters has yet to be defined. The terms ‘holograph’ and ‘autograph’ are often used interchangeably among editors of medieval and early modern texts, and even the OED defines them analogously. This is a problem, particularly in the late medieval and early modern period, when one person’s output could contain letters written wholly by themselves, or by scribes, written by a scribe and signed, perhaps even post-scripted, by the author – or any mixture of these. Furthermore, it is important to distinguish between the types of handwriting involved, as a person often wrote in a different sort of script from their scribe(s) or might write a letter in one script and then sign in another. It seems to me that such a terminology requires at least six basic terms. Here the word scripts refers to the styles of handwriting, such as ‘secretary’ or ‘italic’, while hand designates (by way of metonymy) a person physically involved in writing the document, whether Joan herself or a scribe, when their contribution is identifiable. Furthermore, holograph refers to letters where the script is the same in both the body and signature, but this does not mean that the letter is written by the person in whose name it appears, as secretaries are known to have done signing, even when the author was fully capable of doing so themselves. Autograph designates letters that contain a signature in a different script from the body of the letter; however, it is important to remember that in the early modern period many authors writing and signing their own letters wrote in one hand (usually secretary) and signed in another (often italic). In this way, the distinction between holograph and autograph is merely a way of describing the script(s) involved in any one letter. Of course, identifying hands is much more difficult. In cases where the evidence suggests that the letter was written by the person in whose name it appears, the letter is referred to as authorial. Likewise, scribal letters are those thought to have been written by a scribe, where ‘scribe’ is a generic term for anyone but the author involved in composition. 6 MS Thynne Papers 8, fol. 26. 7 Ibid., fols. 28, 30. 8 Ibid., fols. 34, 36. 5

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angular workaday secretary scripts but straight, bold, well rounded and with clear and deliberate pen lifts: Dawson and Kennedy-Skipton have described a very similar example from Richard Broughton in 1597 as ‘firm, confident, and controlled, represents the secretary almost at its best’.9 This distinction reflects the handwriting practices of the time in that in the last quarter of the sixteenth century italic was fashioned as particularly feminine,10 so Joan learnt and used it in her authorial correspondence; and although many men were still using secretary scripts at the beginning of the seventeenth century, they were seldom so carefully written in familiar letters as they are here by Joan’s scribes. In this way, hands and scripts coincide with one another in a coherent way that makes authorial and scribal letters immediately distinguishable, with implications that extend beyond the interest of palaeographers.11 However, while it provides an excellent social history, the modernized edition of these letters published by the Wiltshire Record Society12 gives no indication as to the hands and scripts involved in particular examples of Joan’s letters. Furthermore, historical sociolinguists at Helsinki have allowed for the distinction between authorial and scribal letters in the Corpus of Early English Correspondence (CEEC), but this facility is limited by the fact that inclusion of letter collections into the corpus is taken from pre-existing editions that often lack the palaeographical detail to make this function useful (as is the case with the Thynne letters taken from Wall’s edition). The current investigation therefore aims at two things in reference to the manuscript letters to Thomas. Building upon previous observations made by social historians, the first will be to contextualize the Thynnes’s familial circumstances in order to better understand why Joan would have employed scribes, considering the fact that this discursive act had sociocultural meaning and pragmatic consequences – Joan being fully capable, even in the habit of, writing letters herself. Following this, the way in which textual language variation corresponds with Joan’s use of scribes will be illustrated by way of an examination of lexico-grammatical items found in the letters. In this way, the language – in a very formal sense – found in the texts of Joan’s letters is described as dependent upon the discursive environments in which the letters were created – that is, 9 G. E. Dawson and L. Kennedy-Skipton, Elizabethan Handwriting 1500–1650: A Guide to the Reading of Documents and Manuscripts (London, 1966), Letter 24. 10 J. Goldberg, Writing Matter: From the Hands of the English Renaissance (Stanford CA, 1990), pp. 138–9. 11 A complete survey of the development of Joan’s handwriting and how it coincided with historical developments in handwriting practice is beyond the limits of the current chapter; however, Joan’s record does seem to offer unique examples of how a woman might have altered her scripts to fit the fashions of the last quarter of the sixteenth century. 12 Two Elizabethan Women, ed. Wall.



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under whose hand they were written. The conclusion discusses what theoretical implications might be drawn from these findings. The Historical Context The marriage that – more than any other event – defines the context of Joan’s letters to her son between the years 1607 and 1611 actually happened over a decade before the letters were written. In 1594, a teenage Thomas secretly married Maria Touchet, young attendant to Queen Elizabeth I, but more significantly the daughter of the Thynnes’s local arch-rival, Lord Audley. Mysteriously, the match seems to have been arranged by Maria’s kin, and took place at The Bell Inn outside the city of London, in Beaconsfield, where a first meeting, courtship, marriage and bedding-together all took their course in one evening.13 Needless to say, this was all very scandalous and Joan took it as a great betrayal against herself. But despite her and her husband’s many efforts to annul it, including prolonged proceedings at the Court of Arches, the marriage was officially recognized in 1601. Thomas’s apparent defection to his wife’s family led to an estrangement between mother and son that lasted for the remainder of Joan’s life. For the purposes of the current analysis, this also had a clear effect on the conducting of necessary business between the two, and particularly to do with Joan’s expectation that after his father’s death (in 1604) Thomas would provide a dowry for his sister Dorothy. All but one of the six letters sent to Thomas were written expressly on this purpose (the one exception had to do with the family’s legal holding of lands). The emotional strain that surrounded these exchanges is reflected in a mediative letter from Dorothy to her brother in 1606 that begins: Good Brother, Albeit there wanteth that (as it seemeth) ^that^ inuiolable loue betweene my Mother and you, which I wishe were not: yet I hope your loue towards me (your euer louinge sister) shalbe still continued as I hartely pray.14

Such circumstances were undoubtedly compounded by earlier events and a precedent in epistolary contact between Thomas and Joan would have been set in which Joan had letters composed by scribes due to a mixture of circumstantial and emotional influences. An intemperately subversive response from

13 A. D. Wall, ‘For Love, Money, or Politics? A Clandestine Marriage and the Elizabethan Court of Arches’, Historical Journal 38 (1995), 511–33. 14 MS Thynne Papers 8, fol. 25.

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Maria in 1605 strongly suggests that Joan was using scribes with the intention of legitimizing her claims, to however little effect: I wyll not wthowt leaue tell you that yf you gave anye fee to a Cownceller to indighte yr letter, ytt was bestowed to lyttle purpose, for ther Should haue binn Consyderation that mr Thynne lookes in to waste & Spoyle on yr Ioynter, as to a tennante for terme of lyfe, & So yr Scribe Can proove no nessecarye Consiquence for you to wryghte disgracefullye or Contemptyouslye in bussines wch Concerns you not.15

Responses such as this could not have done much to ameliorate relations between Joan and Thomas, and, despite Maria’s chiding, Joan continued to use scribes in all surviving correspondences that follow, with the exception of the last. This purposeful use of a third party, particularly in matters of legal sensitivity, was not uncommon and is reflected in the larger corpus of women’s letters from the period.16 It might seem exceptionally sad that a mother and son’s relationship could be strained to such formality; however, research into other aristocratic families shows that it was not so exceptional. Barbara Harris has described how, upon the death of their husband, widows oftentimes had to remain delicate when dealing with eldest sons who frequently were reluctant to accept the responsibility of providing for them and their siblings.17 Therefore, the emotional buffering a scribe could afford by displacing Joan’s involvement in the letter-writing process was probably welcome to her alongside the fact that the subject matter (to do with court proceedings, dowries, land, etc.) warranted a scribal interface according to early modern convention. Given these circumstances, why would Joan have written a letter herself in 1611? The last letter (transcribed above), which is also the latest remaining letter from Joan in the Thynne papers, was probably written from London, where Joan was to die the following spring. She was already quite ill at this point and it seems that the physical aspect of writing a letter by herself was difficult; but it is highly unlikely that she would have written to her son in the absence of available help. In fact, in London, it is likely that she had access to more aid than she had at her previous residency of Caus Castle – and surely access to resources was one of the reasons she had moved to London in the first place. The fact that she did have scribal assistance available is evidenced by the fact 15

Ibid., fol. 10. J. Daybell, ‘Female Literacy and the Social Conventions of Women’s Letter-Writing in England, 1540–1603’, in Early Modern Women’s Letter Writing, 1450–1700, ed. J. Daybell (Basingstoke, 2001), pp. 59–76. 17 B. J. Harris, ‘Property, Power, and Personal Relations: Elite Mothers and Sons in Yorkist and Early Tudor England’, Signs 15 (1990), 606–32. 16



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that the letter’s address was written by a scribe, in a script (secretary) and with spellings (for instance, ‘thin’ versus Joan’s consistent use of ‘Thynne’) unlike any of Joan’s own. This seems ironic considering that most people would have used illness as an excuse to have a letter penned by a scribe; Joan herself used tiredness as justification for sending a scribal letter to her husband in March 1579,18 so surely the excuse of being deathly ill would have been warranted. From such evidence, it is clear that Joan was making an extra effort to write the letter herself: a gesture that would have communicated a significantly different disposition from preceding scribal ones. Motivations for Joan’s extra effort in penning letter 8. 3719 would have come from several coinciding forces. For one, mother and son relations were significantly altered by Maria’s death in childbirth that same year. Joan’s mention of Thomas’s son (who survived) even in the more formally worded scribal letters written after Maria’s death (in August and September 1611 (8. 34 and 36, respectively)) show that he was with her at Caus Castle, perhaps warming her sentiments and creating a reason for reuniting as a family. Likewise, Joan’s own illness, so near to Maria’s death, may have hastened reconciliation, as both became increasingly conscious of her mortality. Thomas did after all loan his house in London for his mother to stay in: a ‘kindely’ gesture that seems to have come as a surprise to Joan, who ‘wold not atrobeled my sister kneueit as I did’ had she at all expected that Thomas would have made her such an offer. It is unlikely that this offer would have been conceivable if Maria were still alive and it was probably one of the few times Joan had visited one of Thomas’s estates. Furthermore, it appears that Thomas had written a letter to his mother that affected her in such a way as to elicit a response in her own hand; for, after thanking him for the accommodation, she expresses her ‘beinge very well satesfied by your leter’. This might suggest that Thomas too had been using scribes in epistolary communication and had only recently written one under his own hand. It is also possible that he was more comfortable in composing formalized letters himself and had simply written in a more intimate and affectionate way in the letter to which Joan refers. Either way, it is evident that he somehow inscribed the letter with a pragmatic device to Joan’s liking. Joan’s apology for her handwriting is also significant in that although it was a repeated trope for many women writers of the period to excuse their writing (whether it was poor or not), Joan makes no mention of her hand in any of the other authorial letters, even when she was young and still experimenting with different scripts. There is nothing exceptionally illegible about her handwriting here; several lines are crossed out but the italic itself is no worse than 18

MS Thynne Papers 5, fol. 23. From here on in the text I shall refer to individual letters from the Thynne Papers at Longleat by giving the volume followed by the folio number. 19

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anything else she had written in past years. Instead, it would seem that Joan is referencing this trope as an understood way of expressing a conventionalized feminine humility – a purposeful gesture imbued with respect for Thomas as the family’s patriarch in contrast to the more detached, neutral tone of the scribal letters. Given the sociopragmatic context of the letters, what then might be seen in the actual language itself? Beyond the differences in handwriting and the inclusion of the feminine trope of humility, what readable clues were inscribed into the letters? Lexico-Grammatical Variation: Anaphoric Language and Discourse Markers The use of compound adverbs and other anaphoric reference terms (e.g. thereto, the said, etc.) was a much more frequent occurrence in legal statutes than in other types of texts throughout late middle and early modern English, before their near extinction – save the grammaticalized therefore – in the seventeenth century.20 Using the CEEC database, Matti Kilpio has shown that, by the early modern period, what he calls ‘participle adjectives’ such as aforesaid occur 14.6 times per 2000 words in ‘official letters’ but only 9 times per 2000 words in ‘private letters’.21 Considering the legal nature of Joan’s concerns it is perhaps not surprising that we find a number of these legally derived terms used by her scribes when writing about her daughter, Dorothy, and the predicament of her marriage prospects. There are a considerable number of compound adverbs of the there- variety alongside some other anaphoric words in all of the scribal letters. The highest proportions are found in 8. 26, with instances of ‘herby’, ‘thereof ’, ‘thereto’, ‘therein’, ‘forthwth’ and ‘whereof ’, and in 8. 34 that contains ‘therewth’, ‘aforesaid’ and three occurrences of ‘thereof ’. In statutes, the terms were used as reference markers and helped ensure that the subject would not be misinterpreted; however, they also seem to have been part of a rote method of composition that professionally trained scribes would have carried over into familiar correspondence.22 They therefore add a stylistic formality not found in Joan’s authorial correspondence. For example, in 8. 26, of 1607 (my italics): 20 M. Rissanen, ‘Standardisation and the Language of Early Statutes’, in The Development of Standard English 1300–1800: Theories, Descriptions, Conflicts, ed. L. Wright (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 117–30 (p. 127). 21 M. Kilpio, ‘Participial Adjectives with Anaphoric Reference of the Type The Said, The (A) forementioned from Old to Early Modern English: The Evidence of the Helsinki Corpus’, in To Explain the Present: Studies in the Changing English Language in Honour of Matti Rissanen, ed. T. Nevalainen and L. Kahlas-Tarkka (Helsinki, 1997), pp. 77–100 (p. 94). 22 M. Richardson, ‘The Dictamen and Its Influence on Fifteenth-Century English Prose’, Rhetorica 2 (1984), 207–26 (pp. 218–19).



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a match moconed to be had betweene mr Whitneys sonne and yor Sister Dorothie not brought to anie head till now; soe that I could not write to yow what I woulde, but now I haue thought good hereby to aduertize yow thereof, and that I haue a good likeing thereto

The information in the latter part of the extract refers to the subject matter given before by using three compound adverbs: ‘hereby’ refers generally to the present moment, at which time things have come to an ‘head’; ‘thereof ’ and ‘thereto’ – used in succession – both refer to the proposed match between Thomas’s sister and Whitney’s son, ‘a gentleman of a verie anncient & worll house’. In letter 8. 34, several years later, presumably to do with another match, we come across another collocation of anaphoric words (my italics): yow not yet come hether to me according to yor promise when I might haue signified soe much in person to yow I thought good haueing this fitt oppurtunity to acquainte yow therewth; because I wold not any vnkindnesse shold be taken for not giveng yow notice thereof; desyring that at the time aforesaid the mony may be ready for her to be put forth for her best proffit as I haue already taken a corse to doe

‘Therewth’, ‘thereof ’ and ‘aforesaid’ all refer to the same information: ‘the day of paiement of yor sister dorothies mony’. Letter 8. 28 to Thomas, being a summary of the legal holding of Caus Castle and its grounds, naturally contains a number of these terms as well. This, the longest of Joan’s communications to Thomas, was written by a secretary with a highly professional tone and formatting: Good Sonne lettres are come to myselfe […] whereof th’effect is That wee must appeare before their honors the xxth daie of this present to shewe our estates & titles howe we hold the same lands: And the better to haue the same made knowne to their lops

Scribal letter 8. 34 also uses ‘the same’ in this way, on three occasions. Under her own hand, Joan very rarely, if ever, wrote like this. She tends to use ‘of it’ where the scribal letters prefer to use the compound adverb ‘thereof ’ (or other analogous terms, as seen above). Both of these features have been categorized as conservative for the period in comparison with the incoming possessive determiner its;23 however, ‘of it’ is not only used in the authorial letters in instances where we would use the possessive its, and likewise ‘thereof ’ is not normally used as a replacement of the possessive in the scribal letters. 23

62–3.

T. Nevalainen and H. Raumolin-Brunberg, Historical Sociolinguistics (London, 2003), pp.

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Instead, Joan uses the construction of it, as we would today, and the secretarial letters use a stuffy-sounding legalism. In letter 5. 84, from 1595, discussing the need for secrecy in a court case over some disputed land, Joan writes to her husband, ‘I am shure he is so onest and his Loue to vs both such that he will not for a thosen pounde speake any thinge of it’. Also, in letter 5. 97–8 of 1600, telling John about the costs required ‘for the careg of the mellstone’, she writes, ‘I haue reseaued ahondered and forescore pounde fife sheleinges and fore pences, there is a greate parte of it owinge’. There are many more instances of this usage in the authorial, but none in the scribal letters; as in scribal letter 8. 34, where we find ‘to the end I maie take order for the receiving thereof yf yow will paie it, or send to take yor new bond for the same wth the vse thereof’. In contrast, no such anaphoric reference terms occur in Joan’s last letter to Thomas. The only recurring compound adverb found in the whole of Joan’s authorial letters is therefore; and this is used not as an anaphoric subject marker, as were those employed in legal language, but as a conjunction. In the authorial letter to Thomas, in a continued attempt to secure Dorothy’s inheritance money to be used as dowry, Joan discusses the amount, time and place of the proposed transaction, and then expresses her request ‘and therefore good sonn haue abrotherly care for her good’. This grammaticalized usage of therefore is one with which we are familiar today and although we probably would not use it familiarly in everyday speech, it occurs commonly in writing. It also seems to have been a fairly set way for Joan to organize the overall rhetoric of letters she wrote herself. Therefore occurs frequently in the authorial letters, sometimes more than once per letter, when Joan is making requests – which she does quite frequently – usually as some variation of the phrase ‘and therefore I pray you’. In the authorial letter to Thomas, the entire first half hinges on the ‘therefore’ clause that occurs about halfway down. In rhetorical terms, this phrase would have been used, according to dictaminal theory, as an injunction to the final clause.24 The phrase links the narrative part of the letter to the request itself, leading the reader from what has happened to what action (of the recipient) is desired (by the author) because of this. The word therefore does not occur once in the scribal letters to Thomas, although occurring in the majority of Joan’s authorial letters, regardless of date or recipient. Significantly, the conjunction also occurs in a letter to Lucy Audley in 1602, where Joan is explaining her dislike of Thomas’s clandestine marriage to Lucy’s daughter, Maria: ‘therfore blam me not, if I can not att the first concar my oune pacience, which hathe binne to much vrged, by lousinge him that once I loued 24

Richardson, ‘The Dictamen’, pp. 213–14.



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mor then my selfe’.25 Despite the fact that Joan felt deceived by the actions of Lucy Audley and her kin, the woman was still her social superior, which is acknowledged in the letter when Joan repeatedly refers to her ‘Ladishipe’ or ‘an honorable Lady’. The italic, spacing and punctuation of this letter are much neater and more consistent than in all of Joan’s other authorial letters, signifying that she was attempting to make an impression and therefore would not have used terminology she herself perceived as informal or overly familiar. Clearly, this was a ubiquitous feature of Joan’s writing and not something prone to stylistic variation, making its absence in the scribal letters to Thomas all the more significant. There is also an observable difference in the authorial and scribal use of present participles to begin clauses. Present participles, although text types other than letters afford more examples, were a common element of early modern English texts.26 Norman Davis has suggested that their use in early English letters comes from Anglo-Norman letter-writers, who advise using participles in the epistolary construction of narrative.27 Joan, when writing for herself, very often uses a present participle to begin a phrase, in reference to herself (where the subject I is often omitted) or in reference to a subject/person previously mentioned (omitting the subject with the participle). There are nine examples of phrase-initial participles in the authorial letter to Thomas alone, with a sizeable cluster at the end, part of which contains the trope discussed earlier: ‘prayeng you to beare with my scriblinge Leter beinge not well at this tyme beinge very well satesfied by your leter’. An example of how it is used in the second person comes at the beginning: ‘if you will haue the hole som. all to gether for thre weakes or ^a month^ longer if you please. geuinge her what she and you shall agree apon ? at your and her nexst meteinge ???? geuinge her atornes good secureite for the hole thosen pondes’. Although there are instances of the present participle scattered throughout the scribal letters to Thomas, they are much fewer and there are only three instances in which the participle alone is used to open a new phrase in which the subject has been omitted (whereas eight out of nine omit the subject in the authorial letter). For example, we find a different method of using the participle in scribal letter 8. 34, where it introduces a new subject: ‘This bearer yor kinsman craveing to be accepted in yor fauor’ or in 8. 30, describing one of Dorothy’s suitors, ‘his liveinge being verie great’.

25

MS Thynne Papers 7, fol. 237. T. Kohnen, ‘Text Types as Catalysts for Language Change’, in Towards a History of English as a History of Genres, ed. H. Diller and M. Gorlach (Heidelberg, 2001), pp. 203–24. 27 N. Davis, ‘Style and Stereotype in Early English Letters’, Leeds Studies in English 1 (1967), 7–17 (p. 8). 26

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Throughout her authorial letters, Joan also has the tendency to open clauses with some type of for phrase. Four of these are contained in the authorial letter to Thomas, appearing almost consecutively. Two of these are used as discourse markers to open new subject matter, as in ‘for the Lone of your house I hartely thanke you’ and ‘for your sonne heare he is in good health’ (the former being a tricky example, as the ‘for’ is also a preposition). The other two form subordinate clauses: ‘haue abrotherly care for her good for that she is very wilinge’ and ‘wishinge I had ??? knone your minde afore for then I wold not atrobeled my sister kneueit’. Not one instance of such a structure occurs in the scribal letters to Thomas, although it is clear in other authorial letters (to her husband). Due to these differences of linguistic variation in the authorial and scribal letters, it would appear that scribal letters were not taken down completely verbatim from dictation, or at least if they were, it was in a language with which Joan did not engage when writing herself. Regarding anaphoric legalisms, the findings seem to support what Malcolm Richardson has described regarding late medieval English letters: the legalistic, more ‘public style’ learned by professional scribes is carried over into the work they did even in more familiar circumstances.28 This language was – at least in the case of Joan’s letters to her son Thomas – not undesirable as it carried with it sociopragmatic significance associated with power and superiority in the tradition of the Royal Chancery and the monarch’s secretariat (although the display was not always successful, as is clear from Maria’s disparaging comments quoted above). Furthermore, the lack of Joan’s characteristic discourse markers in the scribal letters to Thomas may have given these letters an alternate voice, in the impressionistic sense, from authorial productions. Conclusion and Theoretical Implications Several aspects of this study have confirmed previous characterizations of early modern letter writing. In particular, the sociopragmatic significance of authorial and scribal composition reflects Joan’s employment of scribes in that she uses them in a legally sensitized context: a common characteristic of women’s writing in James Daybell’s extensive survey analysis.29 The fact that such a level of formality was reached was due to years of legal disputation and emotional estrangement between a mother and a son. But consideration of the preceding scribal examples is crucial in properly contextualizing Joan’s final authorial letter as a reconciliatory gesture; otherwise, an authorial letter from a highly

28 29

Richardson, ‘The Dictamen’, pp. 218–19. Daybell, ‘Female Literacy’.



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literate woman to her son would have been no special occurrence – conventionally, it would have been expected. The palaeographical distinctions between authorial italic and scribal secretary scripts provide no surprises but serve as a good example of the fashions of the day and the pragmatic significance different scripts would have taken on in use. In relation to this, Joan’s incorporation of the apology trope in her final letter to Thomas, in which she references the poorness of her hand, may be interpreted as an act of feminine submission. But again, these characteristics can only be recognized in consideration of the hands and scripts involved. Perhaps the most revelatory findings of this study have been to do with specific aspects of lexico-grammatical language variation. Whereas it has been agreed that graphological and orthographic features of a manuscript are wholly dependent upon the individual actually penning the letter,30 recent consideration of morphosyntactic variables in the Paston letters (albeit brief ) seems to suggest that scribes had little influence on language otherwise. Nevalainen and Raumolin-Brunberg have described how the distribution of the relative pronoun which in the Paston letters provides evidence that the women’s letters were taken down verbatim – as it is known that male scribes, who were often Paston men themselves, used the incoming which much more frequently in their own letters, where the women’s letters (sometimes written by the very same man) contain more instances of the conservative the which.31 Morphosyntactic variation is also considered in Alexander Bergs’s social network analysis of the Paston letters. Here, he has convincingly shown that personal pronoun variation between h- and th- forms (i.e. hem and here versus them and their) does not coincide with the use of a scribe, concluding that ‘scribes may have had some influence on morphosyntactic items, but in general took down faithfully what was dictated to them’.32 For the early Tudor period, Muriel St Clare Byrne subtly suggests the possibility for lexical borrowings between Lord Lisle and one of his scribes, but with regard to his wife, Honor Lisle, notes a ‘consistency of style’ regardless of which of her scribes she used.33 In the current study, however, clear differences can be observed between authorial and scribal productions with respect to anaphoric legalisms. Furthermore, the rhetorical organization facilitated by Joan’s authorial use of phrases involving grammaticalized therefore, as well as clause-initial present participles and for phrases, has shown to be lacking in scribal compositions to Thomas, 30 N. Davis, ‘The Language of the Pastons’, in Middle English Literature: British Academy Gollancz Lectures, ed. J. A. Burrow (Oxford, 1989), pp. 45–70. 31 Nevalainen and Raumolin-Brunberg, Historical Sociolinguistics, pp. 197–8. 32 A. Bergs, Social Networks and Historical Sociolinguistics: Studies in Morphosyntactic Variation in the Paston Letters (1421–1503) (Berlin, 2005), p. 80. 33 The Lisle Letters, ed. M. St Clare Byrne, 6 vols. (Chicago, 1981), IV, 228–30.

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although they are common in her authorial letters to her husband and maintained in the surviving authorial letter to her son. It may be argued that what remains in the correspondence between Joan and Thomas is limited in that there were undoubtedly more letters, possibly even authorial examples, which would have made the last surviving letter seem less significant than the case made here. However, it is clear from internal evidence, particularly the comment made by Maria to do with Joan’s scribal efforts, that there was in fact a larger group of scribal letters composed under precedence of the circumstances, which were clearly being written and interpreted to pragmatic effect. Furthermore, in regards to the language variation, the fact remains that although only one authorial letter to Thomas has been preserved, the text of this letter corresponds with other authorial letters (to John) while exhibiting clear differences from preceding scribal compositions (to Thomas). These observations, although limited to one small group of letters among the thousands surviving from early modern England, have significant implications for historical sociolinguistics (where textually derived language is paired with its author’s gender, age, etc.), as well as historians of rhetoric and epistolary composition. This is especially true in cases of corpus-based research that do not distinguish between authorial and scribal letters, perhaps based on the assumption that such factors played no large part in language variation. But it seems significant that previous studies of this kind, upon which such assumptions may be based, have been limited to Lady Lisle or the medieval Paston letters: women for whom no clear authorial examples exist.34 If, as Joan’s letters to Thomas suggest, scribal composition was a factor in lexico-grammatical variation, as it clearly was with orthography, it follows that the variable authorial/scribal needs to be recognized in historical linguistic as well as rhetorical analyses of early modern letters. The fact that scribal influence on morphosyntactic items has not been detected in the Paston letters could have something to do with the degree to which the variables being studied were socially marked (by gender, for example) in the medieval period, whereas the lexico-grammatical items discussed here were prone to a different sort of stylistic variation. It could also be due to the circumstances in which the letters were composed: it is possible that some scribes were allowed more liberty (perhaps even encouraged to formalize) in some instances while other authors required that letters be copied verbatim. Methods of composition varied: some scribal letters may have been composed in the vocal presence of the author; 34

Norman Davis’s conclusion that none of the Paston women’s letters are authorial has been challenged, notably in the essay ‘“In the Absence of a Good Secretary”: The Letters, Lives, and Loves of the Paston Women Reconsidered’, in D. Watt, The Paston Women: Selected Letters (Cambridge, 2004), pp. 134–58. Also, J. K. Tarvers, ‘In a Woman’s Hand? The Question of Medieval Women’s Holograph Letters’, Post-Script 13 (1996), 89–100.



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others from drafts, notes or even vague oral instruction on what to write.35 The availability of different compositional methods paired with the common lack of reference to such methods in period letters themselves make doing analyses of this kind complex and case-specific. Further studies using collections from which both authorial and scribal letters are available are needed to make broader claims on how these preliminary findings relate to the linguistic implications of using a scribe in late medieval and early modern England.

35

For a more detailed discussion of compositional methods in Tudor England, see Daybell, Women Letter Writers, pp. 61–90; for the medieval period, M. Camargo, ‘Where’s the Brief?: The Ars Dictaminis and Reading/Writing Between the Lines’, Disputatio 1 (1996), 1–17, and M. Richardson, ‘Women, Commerce, and Writing in Late Medieval England’, Disputatio 1 (1996), 123–45.

Elizabeth Heale

Fathers and Daughters: Four Women and their Family Albums of Verse

T

his essay considers women’s participation in the copying, transmission and possible composition of verse as witnessed by three manuscripts belonging to the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Each of the manuscripts was used by one or more women to copy and preserve family collections of verse, and each suggests familial and, in these cases, particularly paternal, support for daughters’ participation in, and enjoyment of, the circulation and writing of secular verse. The women involved were all daughters of practising poets: Francis and Ellina Harington, daughters of Sir John Harington; Mary Maitland, daughter of Sir Richard Maitland, and Lucy Davies, daughter of Sir John Davies. I shall argue in each case that participation in the copying and collecting of verse, much of it written by fathers and, in the case of the Harington daughters, a grandfather, not only fostered familiarity with the writing of verse, but may also have encouraged composition by the women themselves. However, women’s writing in manuscript miscellanies of the period may often leave no more than elusive and ambiguous traces. Sara Dunnigan, writing on Mary Maitland’s manuscript, admits that ‘in reconstructing women’s role in the production of … literature, a measure of creative licence must be allowed’.1 In what follows I shall have to claim my fair share of ‘creative licence’. Family support and writing women Women poets often acknowledge, explicitly or implicitly in their work, the importance of familial support for their writing. Germaine Greer long ago painted an image of the lonely early-modern woman writer whose poetry ‘probably ended … in the fire, burned by their authors if not by the people 1 S. M. Dunnigan, ‘Scottish Women Writers c.1560–1650’, in A History of Scottish Women’s Writing, ed. D. Gifford and D. Macmillan (Edinburgh, 1997), pp. 15–43 (p. 29).

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they addressed’.2 This stereotype has long since been challenged by scholars of women’s writing.3 We cannot know about the poetry that perished in the fire, but works that survive often point to the crucial importance of social and/or familial support for women writing.4 Well-known cases can be easily adduced, most notably Mary Wroth’s debts to the writings of her father and uncle and to the role model of her aunt, the countess of Pembroke.5 Although she did not acknowledge the support of her own family members, Aemilia Lanyer paid tribute to the supportive encouragement of an employer and her daughter, the countess of Cumberland and Anne Clifford.6 In the prefatory epistles to Salve Deus Rex Judeorum (1611) she praises a series of eminent women who have had care for the education of their own daughters and urges them to act as patrons to other intellectually aspiring women.7 Rachel Speght, in ‘A Dream’ prefacing her Mortalities Memorandum (1621), dedicated her account of her own quest for education to her godmother, Mary Moundford, whose ‘fruitfull loue’ she acknowledged.8 In the ‘Epistle Dedicatorie’, Speght refutes the suggestion, apparently circulating, that her earlier publication, A Mouzell for Melastomus (1617), was the work of her father not of herself. Nevertheless, the sophisticated familiarity with theological terms of argument and techniques of biblical criticism she displays in that work, as well as its appearance in print when she was only nineteen, imply at least some measure of male instruction and support.9 2 Kissing the Rod: An Anthology of Seventeenth-Century Women’s Verse, ed. G. Greer et al. (London, 1988), p. 6. 3 See especially M. J. M. Ezell, ‘The Myth of Judith Shakespeare: Creating the Canon of Women’s Literature’, New Literary History 21 (1990), 579–92 (p. 588). 4 Two essays by Kenneth Charlton on mothers’ roles in education in the early-modern period are helpful: K. Charlton, ‘“Not publike only but also private and domesticall”: Mothers and Familial Education in pre-Industrial England’, History of Education 17 (1988), 1–20, which looks at theoretical statements; K. Charlton, ‘Mothers as Educative Agents in pre-Industrial England’, History of Education 23 (1994), 129–56, which lists many examples. 5 For a study of Mary Wroth in the context of her family, see G. Waller, The Sidney Family Romance: Mary Wroth, William Herbert, and the Early Modern Construction of Gender (Detroit MI, 1993), and for Wroth’s creative reuse of motifs used by her father and uncle, see N. J. Miller, Changing the Subject: Mary Wroth and Figurations of Gender in Early Modern England (Lexington KY, 1996), esp. pp. 42–4, 82–4, 156–60. 6 Aemilia Lanyer, ‘The Description of Cooke-ham’, in Renaissance Women: The Plays of Elizabeth Cary and the Poems of Aemilia Lanyer, ed. D. Purkiss (London, 1994), pp. 327–32. 7 See the series of prefatory epistles to Salve Deus Rex Judeorum reprinted in Renaissance Women, ed. Purkiss, pp. 241–69. 8 Rachel Speght, Mortalities Memorandum, with a Dreame Prefixed (London, 1621), ‘The Epistle Dedicatory’. 9 Speght’s father, James Speght, was a clergyman who had printed his own sermons in 1613 and 1615. For information on the Moundfords and some suggestive notes on Speght’s background

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Speght’s ‘Dream’, however, makes clear that such support had its limits. Having described in allegorical terms her quest for knowledge and the various setbacks and encouragements she received, Speght brings her quest to a sudden halt: ‘For I my time must other-wayes bestow’.10 In A Mouzell, she says that what learning she has is ‘the fruit of such vacant hours as I could spare from affairs befitting my sex’.11 The poet Isabella Whitney seems to have benefited from brotherly encouragement when writing and printing her verse in London, but in the mock ‘last will and testament’ included in her 1573 collection, A Sweet Nosgay, she records that ‘Friendes’, no doubt older male relatives, are responsible for her enforced departure from London to what may have been considered a safer ‘feminine’ milieu, perhaps in marriage, and among relatives, probably in Cheshire.12 She seems to have written no more poetry. The ­Scottish poet Alexander Hume dedicated his Hymnes, or Sacred Songs to Elizabeth Melville, whom he praised as the ‘learned daughter of a faithful father’ and an accomplished poet: ‘I haue seene your compositiones so copious, so pregnant, so spirituall, that I doubt not but it is the gift of God in you.’13 Nevertheless, he concluded by admonishing her to put more traditional female concerns first: ‘Let nothing be done vpon ostentation. Loue your Husband: haue a modest care of your familie, and let your cheefe care be casten vpon the Lord Iesus.’ The limits and handicaps imposed by society on female learning were often, of course, internalized by women themselves. A notorious example is the learned Elizabeth Joceline, a woman educated to a high level by her grandfather, the bishop of Lincoln. In a preface to her The Mothers Legacie, To her vnborne Childe, printed after her death in 1624, Thomas Goad describes her learning, her knowledge of languages and her many compositions, ‘not without a taste

and education, see Early Modern Women Poets (1520–1700), ed. J. Stevenson and P. Davidson (Oxford, 2001), pp. 198–9. 10 Speght, Mortalities Memorandum, p. 9. 11 ‘To the Reader’, prefacing ‘Certain Queries to the Baiter of Women’, appended to A mouzell, repr. in The Women’s Sharp Revenge: Five Women’s Pamphlets from the Renaissance, ed. S. Shepherd (London, 1985), p. 74. 12 Isabella Whitney, Mary Sidney and Aemilia Lanyer: Renaissance Women Poets, ed. D. Clarke (Harmondsworth, 2000), p. 18. For what is known of Whitney’s life, see B. S. Travitsky, ‘Whitney, Isabella (fl.1566–1573)’, Oxford DNB (Oxford, 2004), [www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/45498, accessed 3 May 2009]. 13 Alexander Hume, ‘Prefatory epistle’ to Hymnes, or Sacred Songs wherein the right vse of poësie may be espied (Edinburgh, 1599). Melville published Ane Godlie Dreame in 1603 and took an active role in supporting dissenting ministers in the early 1600s. Her father was the memoirwriter, Sir James Melville of Halhill, and one of her sons, Samuel Colville, was a poet.



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and faculty in Poetry’.14 Joceline nevertheless, in The Mothers Legacie, warns her husband not to give the same kind of education to her as yet unborn daughter: I desire her bringing vp may bee learning the Bible, as my sisters doe, good houswifery, writing, and good workes: other learning a woman needs not: though I admire it in those whom God hath blest with discretion, yet I desired not much in my owne, hauing seene that sometimes women haue greater portions of learning, than wisdome, which is of no better vse to them than a maine saile to a flye-boat, which runs in vnder water … though she have all this [learning] in her, she will hardly make a poore mans wife.15

Lucy Davies, whose manuscript I shall be considering, was herself famously learned and educated a famously learned daughter, Lady Elizabeth Langham, whom she nevertheless advised on marriage ‘to make her self fit conversation … for her Husband’.16 Familial encouragement of women’s education and writing, then, might seem, from a modern perspective, a mixed blessing, providing opportunities but also inculcating or imposing limits. Pious reading, books of moral admonition or even, exceptionally, biblical scholarship, might have been considered appropriate, but it is more surprising to find parents encouraging their daughters to enjoy and collect, and in so doing learn to compose, amorous or profane verse. Such poetry was often considered in the period to be potentially corrupting, especially for women. Thomas Salter, writing in 1578, warned parents against encouraging their daughters to become ‘cunning and skilful writers of ditties, sonnets, epigrams and ballads’: such activities taught them to be ‘subtle and shameless lovers’.17 Even Lady Anne Southwell, in her eloquent defence of poetry written in the early seventeenth century, implicitly acknowledged that women’s enjoyment of poetry needed defence. The female friend to whom she wrote clearly regarded poetry as an activity unsuitable for women, and perhaps also for men. Southwell works hard to rescue true poetry, ‘the worldes true vocall Harmonye, of wch all other artes are but partes’, from its profane abuse: ‘a Hero & Leander or some such busye nothing’.18

14 Goad’s ‘Approbation’ prefacing Elizabeth Joceline, The Mothers Legacie, To her vnborne Childe (London, 1624), Sig. A7r. 15 The Mothers Legacie, Sig. B4r–v. 16 Simon Ford, Hesychia Christianou, or, A Christian’s acquiescence in all the products of divine providence […] a sermon preached […] at the interment of […] the Lady Elizabeth Langham (London, 1665), p. 125. 17 Quoted from The Mirror of Modesty, in Renaissance Woman: A Sourcebook, ed. K. Aughterson (London, 1995), pp. 177–8 (p. 178). 18 The Southwell-Sibthorpe Commonplace Book: Folger MS. V.b.198, ed. J. Klene (Tempe AZ, 1977), pp. 4–5.

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Nevertheless, as the three manuscripts I shall examine suggest, some daughters were lucky enough to have families, in some cases fathers, who encouraged them to read and enjoy verse, even secular verse, and thus to learn to compose themselves. Particularly suggestive for the women studied in this essay is the experience of Lady Jane Cavendish and Lady Elizabeth Brackley, daughters of William Cavendish, first duke of Newcastle (1593–1676). Heidi Towers, in her discussion of the poetry of these women, describes how Newcastle ‘constructed and sustained a fertile and encouraging literary environment not only for those to whom he was patron but also for his family’.19 His daughters as well as his sons were encouraged to copy and preserve their father’s verse and to compose themselves. In one manuscript, for example, Newcastle addresses a couplet to each of his children in turn, soliciting a response from the child in the space left below his lines. Jane in particular is praised for her skill in verse: ‘Sweet Jane. / I knowe you are a rare Inditer. / Ande hath the Pen of a most redye writer.’20 After her death, the preacher Adam Littleton noted that ‘she took, when Young, special delight in her Father’s Excellent Composures. And she hath left in Writing a considerable Stock of Excellent ones of Her own.’21 None of the women whose manuscripts are studied in this essay left ‘a considerable Stock’ of her own writing, but I suggest that all three manuscripts point to a similar environment in which literate and educated fathers were helping to enable literate and educated daughters to value, enjoy and become familiar with the composition of verse. In the cases of at least two of the four women studied, the tradition of education and a love of poetry were passed down to the next generation. Mary Maitland’s son, George Lauder, became a published poet. Lucy Davies was lauded for the education of both her sons and her daughters, one of whom, Lady Elizabeth Langham, was described as ‘a living Bible Polyglot’.22 Francis and Ellina Harington and British Library MS Additional 36529 The first manuscript I shall discuss is British Library MS Add. 36529, a poetic miscellany that was once one of a number of manuscripts of sixteenth-century verse belonging to the family of Sir John Harington of Kelston in Somerset 19

H. I. Towers, ‘Early Modern Women Dramatists and their Literary Networks: Four Case Studies’ (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Nottingham Trent University, 2004), p. 139. 20 Portland MS PwV 25, fols. 21r–v, cited by Towers, ‘Early Modern Women Dramatists’, p. 146. 21 Quoted by Towers, ‘Early Modern Women Dramatists’, p. 192. 22 Quoted by R. M. Warnicke, ‘Langham, Lady Elizabeth (1635–1664)’, Oxford DNB (Oxford, 2004), [www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/71779, accessed 3 May 2009].



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(1560–1612). Among the most famous of these are Egerton MS 2711, now in the British Library, containing Wyatt’s poetry, much of it in Wyatt’s own holograph, and the Arundel Harington MS, now at Arundel Castle, which collects the poetry of John Harington of Stepney, Sir John’s father, as well as poems by Wyatt and Surrey and others. Ruth Hughey considers MS Add. 36529 to be largely derived from the Arundel Harington MS.23 These three Harington manuscripts are important sources for the verse of Wyatt and Surrey. For the purposes of this essay, the primary interest of MS Add. 36529 lies in the presence of two italic signatures, those of Ellina and Francis Harington. Hughey has identified these names as belonging to two of the daughters of Sir John Harington.24 Francis was the eldest daughter, married in 1606 to Sir Raphe Egerton, and Helena or Ellina was the third daughter, baptized at Kelston on 3 May 1591. She died in 1628.25 It thus seems likely that the two women were using MS Add. 36529 in the first decade of the seventeenth century. The women sign their names on folio 29v and Ellina again signs her name on what is now the last written folio in the manuscript (fol. 82r).26 A number of different handwritings appear in the manuscript, using both secretary and italic scripts. The signatures of the two women allow two of the italic hands to be identified, reasonably confidently, as those of the two women, particularly that of Ellina. Hughey comments on Ellina’s handwriting: ‘This is a very immature hand; the look of it and the nature of the corrections suggest that a copy was being made from the Arundel MS as a kind of exercise, or that it was a dictation exercise.’27 (See Plate 4.) MS Add. 36529 largely contains copies of ‘English poetry composed before 1565’; poems by Wyatt and Surrey, Thomas Challoner and Thomas Phaer, and the sisters’ grandfather, John Harington of Stepney.28 Hughey describes the manuscript as evidence of the concern by Sir John Harington and his father 23 R. Hughey, ‘The Harington Manuscript at Arundel Castle and Related Documents’, The Library 4th s. 15 (1935), 388–444 (p. 414). 24 The Arundel Harington Manuscript of Tudor Poetry, ed. R. Hughey, 2 vols. (Columbus OH, 1960), I, 41. In this, Hughey corrects her identification of the two women as sisters of Sir John Harington in Hughey, ‘The Harington Manuscript at Arundel Castle’, p. 413. The identification of the women as daughters not sisters is based on the pedigree given by F. J. Poynton in Miscellanea Genealogica n.s. 4 (1884), 191–3. 25 Poynton, ‘Pedigree’. Francis seems to have named her daughter Helena or Eleanor in honour of her younger sister. 26 Hughey notes that ‘the Add. MS 36529 has less than half its original number of leaves’; Hughey, ‘The Harington Manuscript at Arundel Castle’, p. 414, n. 2. 27 ibid., p. 413, n. 3. The formation of letters by both women is very similar, but Ellina’s hand is consistently less upright and evenly spaced and some letters, particularly ‘r’, are less carefully formed. 28 Hughey, Arundel Harington Manuscript, I, 40.

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Disclaimer: Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. To view the image on this page please refer to the printed version of this book. Plate 4.  Signatures of Francis and Ellina Harington on London, BL MS Add. 36529, fol 29r.

‘for the orderly preservation of material’ from an earlier Tudor generation of poets.29 Ellina and Francis are clearly part of this project, helping to copy a revered family collection of verse. Ellina copies Wyatt’s satire ‘Myne owne John Poins’ (fols. 30r–31r) and some Surrey poems, mainly the paraphrases of Ecclesiastes (fols. 57r and 58v–62v), and Francis copies Surrey’s psalms (63r–65v). Ellina also copies poems attributed to her grandfather (fols. 44r and 67v–68r).30 None of the copies has the appearance of being merely an exercise in penmanship, although Ellina usually carefully draws lines to guide her writing. Ellina also copies a number of poems that are unique to this manuscript and which are unattributed. Most of these are translations from Petrarch’s sonnets. Many, perhaps all, of these may be by her grandfather. Two Petrarchan translations copied without attribution earlier in the manuscript in a secretary hand (fol. 35v) are attributed to John Harington of Stepney in Nugae Antiquae (1769). The poems in Nugae Antiquae were largely made up of poems torn by the then fifteen-year-old son of the Harington family from the Arundel Harington MS (the copy text for much of MS Add. 36529). Not all the poems torn out were used, and it is thus possible that unique poems in MS Add. 36529 once appeared in, and were copied from, the Arundel Harington MS. Nevertheless, Virginia Woolf once suggested that the search for traces of women’s writing might begin with anonymous poetry.31 Drawing on the allowance of creative 29

Ibid. In my view, and I concur with Hughey, Ellina enters poems on folios 30r–31r, 44r–46v, 48r, 57r–62v and 66v–68r, and Francis, less frequently, on folios 63r–65v. According to Hughey, Ellina’s handwriting also appears in the Arundel Harington MS (fol. 17v, nos 7 and 8), copying a pair of poems on the choice of a wife, answered, in a woman’s voice, on the choice of a husband (Arundel Harington Manuscript, I, 29). 31 A Room of One’s Own. Three Guineas, ed. M. Barrett (London, 2000), p. 46. E. S. Newlyn suggests manuscripts with a fair number of unique copies of anonymous poems indicate ‘the potential for women-authored poems’; see ‘A Methodology for Reading Against the Culture: 30



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licence Dunnigan claimed for those searching for traces of women’s writing (see p. 146 above), I want to suggest that one at least of the Petrarchan translations may show signs of Ellina contributing to the improvement, perhaps even the composition, of a poem that she copies into MS Add. 36529. One of the unique translations from Petrarch in MS Add. 36529, ‘Some kind of creaturs’ (fol. 45v), written in Ellina’s handwriting, is extensively annotated and altered in ways that strongly suggest composition into the manuscript, or at least improvement of a pre-existing translation after it has been copied. A translation by Wyatt of this sonnet may once have been in the Arundel Harington MS.32 The translation in MS Add. 36529 appears to be freshly made from the Italian, although influenced by close familiarity with Wyatt’s translation. Three different hands emend the sonnet. (See Plate 5.) The first version of line 6 was ‘Hopes of great sport wt in the fire to flie’. That is metrically smooth but does not make obvious sense. Ellina then appears to try out an alternative in the margin, inserting ‘through vain ^ lust’. She then seems to realize further change is needed and scratches out the marginal annotation as well as the first part of the original line, and writes above: ‘through vaine lust hopes of sport in fire to flie’. Another annotator in a rather more fluent hybrid secretary/italic hand has inserted alternative adjectives for ‘glistring’ (line 2), ‘shining’ (line 5) and ‘lightning starres’ (line 9), and strengthened the turn at the beginning of the tenth line with ‘yet’ instead of ‘and’. What appears to be a third, secretary, hand strikes out the emendation of ‘lightning starres’ in line 9 and writes ‘two bright’, but then strikes this out and tries ‘two faire eyes’, finally striking out ‘eyes’ and deciding on ‘two faire starres’. The following sonnet ‘Cesare poiche’, a translation of Petrarch’s Rime 102, is also copied by Ellina, but another hand, possibly the hybrid hand that emended the previous sonnet, has made a couple of changes, apparently to improve the sense. Like ‘Some kind of creaturs’, this sonnet is also influenced by a translation made by Wyatt.33 It is possible that Ellina is here copying from dictation by someone who is composing as ‘he’ dictates, with the sonnet then receiving new suggestions from a third person. However, Ellina’s emendations at line 6 of ‘Some kind of creaturs’ suggests that she herself may be contributing to the attempts to improve the sonnet. It is possible that Ellina is here either joining with others in an attempt to improve a translation by one of them, or that she is, in these Anonymous, Women Poets, and the Maitland Quarto Manuscript’, in Women and the Feminine in Medieval and Early Modern Scottish Writing, ed. S. M. Dunnigan, C. M. Harker and E. S. Newlyn (Houndmills, 2004), pp. 89–103 (p. 95). 32 Collected Poems of Sir Thomas Wyatt, ed. K. Muir and P. Thomson (Liverpool, 1969), no. iii. A copy appears in Nugae Antiquae and was thus probably in the Arundel Harington MS. 33 Collected Poems, ed. K. Muir and P. Thomson, no. xxiv. A copy is in the Arundel Harington MS.

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Disclaimer: Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. To view the image on this page please refer to the printed version of this book.

Plate 5.  Sonnet ‘Some kind of creaturs’, in Ellina Harington’s handwriting, BL MS Add. 36529, fol. 45v.

two cases, copying into the manuscript her own translations from Petrarch, finding fault with what she has written, attempting a correction, and receiving additional help from others (probably men given the more fluent hands). While Petrarch’s sonnets often seem to us to express a highly masculine point of view, it may be that verse translations of Petrarch’s sonnets were sometimes regarded as suitable exercises for well-educated women who were learning Italian. Petrarch’s verse was clearly highly valued in the Harington household and whoever made the corrections may have felt the existence of versions of these sonnets by Wyatt offered sufficient assistance to Ellina to make a useful



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exercise in translation and composition.34 Although frequently absent from Kelston, Sir John may have taken an interest in his daughters’ as well as his sons’ education. In a memorandum to himself, he notes with considerable satisfaction, ‘I came home to Kelstone, and founde Mall, my childrene, and my cattle, all well fedde, well taughte, and well belovede.’35 Such an interest might well have extended to encouragement of his daughters as well as his sons to make new copies of his valued family collections of verse and try their hands at translations from Petrarch, perhaps with the help of their brothers, or their brothers’ tutors. A suggestive analogy for such a use of Petrarch’s sonnets is offered by a manuscript at Berkeley Castle in which two Petrarchan sonnets were translated into accomplished verse by Elizabeth Berkeley, the well-educated daughter of Elizabeth (Spencer) Carey, Lady Hunsdon. They were preserved with some of his own sonnets by her tutor, Henry Stanford.36 Whether Ellina is composing her own translations or assisting in the process of translation by someone else, it is clear that in the household of Sir John Harington of Kelston, daughters were being encouraged to copy, familiarize themselves with, and perhaps even compose verse. While the sisters seem to have been assigned mainly Surrey’s religious verse to copy, the sonnets Ellina copies into the manuscript are often highly political and amorous. Interestingly, it is not the modern fashionable verse of their father and his contemporaries that they copy, but the very old fashioned verse of the Henrician and Edwardian courts from their grandfather’s manuscript. Perhaps it was felt that such verse was rendered relatively safe for daughters by being out of date. Whatever the case, it is clear that, in this family, literate daughters were being encouraged to participate in a family love and enjoyment of verse, and perhaps in its composition.

34

Neither of the correcting hands is that of Sir John Harington himself. Sir John’s own handwriting is evident only once in MS Add. 36529, when he crosses out and recopies a stanza on fol. 46v, possibly composed by the elder Harington. The hand that is crossed out appears to be the hybrid hand that corrects Ellina’s sonnet ‘Some kind of creaturs’. For Sir John Harington’s fondness for Petrarch’s sonnets, see John Harington, Nugae Antiquae, ed by Henry Harington (1779), 3 vols. (Hildesheim, 1968), II, 81, 142, where Harington twice adds to a letter a request for his volume of Petrarch to be sent to him. 35 Harington, Nugae Antiquae, II, 209. 36 K. Duncan-Jones, ‘Bess Carey’s Petrarch: Newly Discovered Elizabethan Sonnets’, RES n.  s. 50 (1999), 304–19. This family offers an example of one in which education and a love of books were largely fostered through at least three generations by the mothers.

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The second manuscript I wish to consider is the Maitland Quarto MS now preserved in the Pepys Library at Magdalene College, Cambridge. The manuscript is inscribed on its first folio with the name Mary Maitland, written twice, each time followed by the date 1586. The manuscript largely contains the verse of Mary’s father, Sir Richard Maitland (1496–1586). He died in the year inscribed on the Quarto. As in the case of MS Add. 36529, the poetry in the Maitland Quarto is largely copied from another Maitland family manuscript, the Maitland Folio MS, which contains verse by Sir Richard and his contemporaries. Like MS Add. 36529, the Maitland Quarto also contains a number of unique copies of anonymous poems. Most of the manuscript is copied in either a very neat italic, or a secretary hand with italic titles. A number of scholars have proposed that at least the italic hand is Mary’s own, although W. A. Craigie, the manuscript’s early twentieth century editor, contested this suggestion, proposing instead that the manuscript was copied for her.37 Whether or not Mary actually copied parts of the manuscript, a number of the poems seem to be written either with her in mind or directly about her. Her name is worked into a couple of lines of one poem which describes a vision of Mary (Maitland) accompanied not only by Venus, Juno and Diana, but also by Pallas, Minerva, Clio and Tersiphone (sic).38 This is presumably Terpsichore, the muse of music and dance, not Tisiphone, the Fury. Such uncertain mythological allusions, with Pallas and Minerva as separate goddesses and confusion of the name Tersiphone, suggest an insecure classical education and may point to a woman author, a possibility to which I shall return shortly. Mary’s learning, and by implication her powers as a poet, seem again the subject of what might originally have been one of the concluding poems in the manuscript, entitled ‘To your self ’. In this, Mary is compared to ‘Sapho’ and to ‘Olimpia o lampe of latine land’. 39 Dunnigan has suggested that the latter is the Italian poet Olympia Morata, who was famously learned.40 ‘Maistres Marie’ is urged to use ‘This buik’, that is, the manuscript:

37 The Maitland Quarto Manuscript, ed. W. A. Craigie, Scottish Text Society n. s. 9 (Edinburgh, 1920), ‘Introduction’. The suggestion that the manuscript was at least partly copied by Mary Maitland was made by its first editor, John Pinkerton. More recent supporters of Mary Maitland as a copyist of the poems are Dunnigan, ‘Scottish Women Writers’, pp. 29–31; Newlyn, ‘A Methodology’, p. 93; P. Bawcutt, ‘Scottish Manuscript Miscellanies from the Fifteenth to the Seventeenth Century’, English Manuscript Studies 1100–1700 12 (2005), 46–73 (p. 53). 38 Maitland Quarto Manuscript, ed. Craigie, no. lxix (p. 225). 39 Ibid., no. lxxxv (p. 257). 40 Dunnigan, ‘Scottish Women Writers’, p. 29.



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  beat your branis therin a plesant poet perfyte sall ye be & lytill labour lost the laurell Win adorn’d with cumlie croun of poesie.

The following poem, apparently intended to be the last one in the manuscript, and also written in the italic sometimes attributed to Mary Maitland, certainly seems to point to a female copyist: Ze heauinlie goddis & goddessis ze most celestiall Vnto my muse zour helpis doe bend & for zour aydis I call & thow diana ladye bricht with nymphes of chastetie Graunt me your favours I requeist to end this worthelie. FINIS.41

Evelyn S. Newlyn suggests that the manuscript contains poetry not only by Mary, but also by a group of Mary’s female friends whose poetry is entered anonymously ‘at the back of the book’ in what was originally to have been the final section of the manuscript.42 ‘Creative licence’ must as usual be allowed when making such claims. It is, nevertheless, notable that a number of the poems in the manuscript seem to have been selected with a female readership in mind.43 There is a defence of women by Alexander Arbuthnot in answer to an attack on women which is not included; a poem in praise of a woman’s eloquence and her singing voice, attributed elsewhere to Alexander Montgomerie, and an elegy that claims to be translated out of the French, in which a woman complains about an unfaithful husband.44 Best known is a striking poem about the faithful love of the speaker, a woman, for another woman. The poem has been hailed as one of the earliest expressions of female homoerotic desire in English (or in this case, Scots) in the Renaissance period.45 It also,

41 42 43

Maitland Quarto Manuscript, ed. Craigie, no. lxxxvi (p. 258). Newlyn, ‘A Methodology’, p. 95. Bawcutt, ‘Scottish Manuscript Miscellanies’, p. 53, describes the manuscript as a ‘woman’s

book’. 44

Maitland Quarto Manuscript, ed. Craigie, nos. xxxv, xlviii, lxvi. Ibid., no. xlix (pp. 160–2). See J. Mueller, ‘Lesbian Erotics: The Utopian Trope of Donne’s “Sapho to Philaenis”‘, in Homosexuality in Renaissance and Enlightenment England: Literary Representations in Historical Context, ed. C. J. Summers (New York, 1992), pp. 103–35 (pp. 103–24), and Jane Farnsworth, ‘Voicing Female Desire in “Poem XLIX”‘, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 36 (1966), 57–72. 45

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once again, celebrates female learning. The beloved is described as ‘In sapience superlative / Indewit with vertewis sa devine / as leirned pallas rediviue’. The Maitland Quarto is dated by Mary Maitland to the year of her father’s death. It is thus possible that he encouraged Mary to select poems for her own manuscript from his personal collection, the Maitland Folio MS. Although blind, it is even possible that he composed the poem ‘To your self ’ for his daughter’s manuscript collection. Newlyn argues that a series of elegies on the death of Sir Richard, including two on his wife, Mary’s mother, were added after the main structure of the manuscript was completed.46 It is clear that Mary had a love of verse which was, at least partly, nourished by her father’s own poetry and his manuscript collection, and seems likely to have been encouraged by her father. She herself had a reputation among some of those whose poetry is contained within the Maitland Quarto both for learning and for the ability to compose poetry herself. Lucy Davies and Edinburgh University, MS Laing III. 444 The final manuscript I shall consider belonged to Lucy Davies (1613–79), daughter of Sir John Davies, lawyer and poet, and Lady Eleanor Davies, who became notorious after 1625 as a prophetess.47 The most recent editor of Sir John Davies’s poetry, Robert Kreuger, describes the manuscript as ‘the most important single collection of Davies’s poems’, and speculates that it ‘was begun during Davies’s lifetime by one of his scribes [and that] attempts to complete it with his poems were probably made by his daughter as she came upon his verse in loose papers’.48 This seems to me a plausible explanation. My own researches show that only one entry is actually in Lucy’s own hand; interestingly one of the few entries that is not in verse nor by her father: a brief prose history, ‘The state of England before the conquest briefely / By Henry Lord Hastings amongst his notes found’.49 This is Lucy’s father-in-law from her marriage to Ferdinando, Lord Hastings, later earl of Huntingdon. Lucy’s name is written on folio 28v of the manuscript. Kreuger also suggests that a Hebrew inscription on the first page of her father’s psalm paraphrases is Lucy’s own. Lucy was formidably learned. According to Bathsua Makin, whom she employed to teach her daugh-

46 Newlyn, ‘A Methodology’, pp. 93–5, makes a persuasive argument that the manuscript as first planned ended at poem 89. 47 For Lucy’s relations with her mother, see E. S. Cope, Handmaid of the Holy Spirit: Dame Eleanor Davies, Never Soe Mad a Ladie (Ann Arbor MI, 1992). 48 The Poems of Sir John Davies, ed. R. Kreuger (Oxford, 1975), pp. 440, 441. 49 Edinburgh University, MS Laing III. 444, fol. 35v.



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ters and who seems to have tutored Lucy herself, she understood Latin, Greek, Hebrew, French and Spanish.50 There are a number of hands in the manuscript. In the early part, two different secretary hands, the first possibly that of Sir John Davies himself, have copied out Sir John Davies’s psalm paraphrases.51 These psalm paraphrases are interrupted on folio 27r–v (before Lucy’s name on folio 29v) by two poems in a very clear, largely italic hand which Kreuger designates Hand 2. After the second group of psalm paraphrases, a number of hands copy out a miscellany of Sir John Davies’s poems. Lucy’s own copy of her father-in-law’s prose notes on England before the conquest interrupts this series of poems. The majority of poems in this section are copied by a mixed italic hand that Kreuger designates Hand 4. This hand also copies out ‘An Elegiecall Epistle on Sir John Davies’s death’. The poems copied by Hand 2 that interrupt the psalm paraphrases seem particularly chosen for a young female reader. The first is a sonnet: ‘Of faith the first / Theologicall vertue’, and the second is a four-part poem entitled: ‘A songe of contention betweene foure / Maids concerning that wch addeth most perfection to that sexe’.52 Predictably, Beauty, Wit and Wealth give way before Virtue. I suggest that this manuscript may have been given to Lucy by her father after 1624, when the psalms are dated, and before his death in 1626. In 1623 Lucy was married to Ferdinando, Lord Hastings (she was eleven years old), but she continued to reside with her parents for another two years. A copy of her father’s psalm paraphrases would have been an appropriate memento from her father for her to take to her new home, and he may have had copied in for her two poems from his earlier work that seemed to contain suitably admonitory advice for a young girl. Hand 2 only copies poems on folio 27r–v, and the two folios that follow are left blank, perhaps for additional poems in the same vein. Lucy’s first name in a childish hand is written on the reverse of the second blank folio. The second tranche of Sir John Davies’s psalms, in a new secretary hand, concludes on folio 30v, with the final valedictory Psalm 150 rather squeezed in at the bottom of the page as though to bring a distinct section of the manuscript to a close, ending with the words ‘Sing Alleluya, amen, amen’. Hand 4 begins on folio 31r, copying the miscellany of poems and pieces in various hands that fill up the rest of the manuscript. Whether or not Sir John Davies designed the first part of the manuscript as an appropriate selection of his verse to be taken by Lucy on her marriage, the manuscript certainly shows that Lucy treasured and collected copies of 50

p. 246. 51 52

Makin’s words are quoted in Early Modern Women Poets, ed. Stevenson and Davidson, Poems, ed. Kreuger, p. 441. MS Laing III. 444, fol. 27r–v.

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her father’s verse. Sir John and Lady Eleanor Davies seem to have instilled a love of learning in their daughter, a love which, as we have seen, Lucy passed down to at least one of her daughters, Lady Elizabeth Langham. Her surviving son, Theophilus, wrote that he was educated ‘according to the direction of his mother, being wholly domestic’.53 Bathsua Makin praised Lucy (Davies) Hastings in a manuscript poem addressed to her: Illustrious Lady, where shall I begin To speak your praises? Or your merit in Such rare perfections of both sexes joind, And here epitomiz’d? Where shall we finde Your parallel? For learning humane and divine? … For French, Italian, Hebrue, Latin, Greek The ornament of our sex.54

If Sir John Davies did encourage his daughter’s interest in verse, it produced results. Lucy wrote a fine elegy on the death of her son Henry, who died at the age of nineteen. The poem is carefully copied in Lucy’s holograph on to the flyleaf of a printed collection of elegies, Lachrymae Musarum (1650) that marked the young man’s death.55 That Lucy habitually and readily composed in verse is suggested by a detail in the funeral sermon preached for Lady Elizabeth Langham. The preacher, Simon Ford, describes how Lucy, in order to instruct her daughter in ‘those Principles that might qualify her for a vertuous life’: took the pains to digest all the parts of it into Verse, whereby she both consecrated an excellent vein of Poetry of her own, and in the most facile manner insinuated them into the hearts and heads of both her, and her Lady-Sisters.56

Perhaps Lucy was remembering the poems by her father on faith and female virtue copied into her own manuscript of his verse. Once more claiming ‘creative licence’, I want to float the possibility that there may be an early composition by Lucy in MS Laing III. 444. The first of the miscellaneous poems in the second half of the manuscript, titled ‘A maids hymne in praise of virginity’ (fol. 31r), is normally attributed to her father, but it is unique to this manuscript and may just possibly be by Lucy herself, although 53

Quoted by Charlton, ‘Mothers as Educative Agents’, p. 131. Reprinted in Report on the Manuscripts of the Late Reginald Rawdon Hastings, ed. F. Bickley, 4 vols., HMC (London, 1928–47), IV, 348. 55 Lucy’s copy of the Lachrymae is in the Huntington Library (RB 102354). I am very grateful for the kindness of the Library’s staff in sending me a photocopy. The elegy is reprinted in Early Modern Women Poets, ed. Stevenson and Davidson, pp. 246–7. 56 Ford, Hesychia Christianou, p. 99. The italics are in the original. 54



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highly derivative from her father’s work. The speaker is female and the poem, consisting entirely of epithets, many of which echo Sir John Davies’s ‘A Contentation between a wife, a widow and a maid’ (written for an entertainment in 1602), may suggest an exercise in composition for a precocious daughter.57 It concludes: O more then humane spirit, of Angells kind O white vnspotted garment of the mind Which first cloathd man before hee was forlorne And wherein god himselfe choase to bee borne Within my soule O heavenly vertue rest Vntill my soule with heaven it selfe bee blest.58

May we have here a poem composed by a woman slipped in anonymously in a manuscript largely devoted to the work of a parent (as in the case of Mary Maitland)? Even without taking advantage of creative licence, I suggest the manuscripts that I have examined offer evidence of a more complex and varied picture of women’s participation in the copying, enjoyment and, on occasion, composition of verse than appears to be the case if printed verse and orthodox views on women’s education alone are taken into account. It also confirms that for some fortunate women, there was familial, even paternal, encouragement not only to acquire skills in modern, and sometimes ancient, languages, or familiarity with works of piety, but also to enjoy, and even compose, secular verse. Of course, there are always limits to such encouragement. Sir John Davies may have felt admonitions to virtue rather than wit were a suitable subject of verse for his daughter, and Mary Maitland (if it is she) took care to invoke Diana and the ‘nymphes of chastetie’ to bless her labours in copying her manuscript. In the case of the Harington sisters, the poems they copy or, perhaps, translate, had long been rendered respectable by antiquity. In the case of Surrey’s verse, they are assigned the religious pieces. While hailing these apparently positive instances of the encouragement of women’s intellectual activity, we need to acknowledge that for early-modern women, learning and poetry were only encouraged if they did not interfere, in Speght’s words, with ‘affairs befitting [their] sex’. As Alexander Hume admonished the poet Elizabeth Melville: ‘Let nothing be done vpon ostentation. Loue your Husband: haue a modest care of your familie.’

57 58

Poems, ed. Kreuger, pp. 419–20, notes the extensive echoes. MS Laing III. 444, fol. 31r.

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The Book as Domestic Gift: Bodleian Ms Don. C. 24

M

ary Oldisworth, ‘late of the parish of Batsford’ in Gloucestershire, the widow of priest and poet Nicholas Oldisworth and, like him, a member of a well-established local gentry family, died in 1684 and was buried in Tewkesbury Abbey. Mary died intestate and formal arrangements were therefore made under the provisions of the Act for the better settling of Intestates Estates involving her elder surviving daughter Mary Sherwood, John Mann of Tewkesbury (the husband of her younger daughter Margaret), and Margaret herself.1 There are no details of the deceased’s goods and chattels at her death or of the subsequent disposal of her possessions. For posterity, her most significant possession was the autograph manuscript of her husband Nicholas’s poems made for her in 1644.2 The volume passed from her to her daughter Margaret. Manuscripts of poetry owned by women in mid seventeenth century England are sufficiently uncommon to be of interest and this one is especially so. It would be reasonable to think it was by chance that the manuscript was inherited by Margaret rather than by her elder sister, and it has often been assumed that this was the case. However, an inscription on the first blank in the manuscript: ‘Margaret Man Her Book Given Me By My Dear Mother’ suggests either that the gift may have preceded her mother’s death or that her mother, though she left no will, had nevertheless indicated while she was still living that the volume was intended for her daughter Margaret. Perhaps the volume went to Margaret rather than to her sister Mary, who was three years older, because her father dated the transcription and the ­dedicatory epistle to his wife in the year and month Margaret was born, February 1644. The epistle is from Willington in Warwickshire where Nicholas Oldisworth went (apparently) to escape the plague, which was particularly rampant in that

1 2

Gloucester County Record Office, 314. Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Don. c. 24.

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year at Bourton-on-the-Hill, where he was the incumbent. It is not clear if his family went there with him, though it has usually been assumed that they did. However, the inscription: ‘From Willington 1644. Febr: 17’ might suggest that they were separated. It is, as will be seen, a very tender, sensitive and personal piece of writing about his and his wife’s happy married life, mentioning his two little daughters and the threatening events, war and lack of money which surround them. It would have been particularly poignant since Nicholas himself died of the plague soon after. He had very recently given again a sermon, first delivered in 1637, taking his text from Chronicles 21. 14: ‘So the Lord sent pestilence upon Israel’, in which he saw pestilence as an affliction for sin and warned those living in ‘a fresh village [...] a pretty steppe from London’ not to be complacent.3 By this time, however, the villages in Gloucestershire were not immune to the visitation of plague. Nicholas died on 25 March. Perhaps for Mary the volume of poems was consequently for ever associated with the year of her younger daughter’s birth. Mary Oldisworth’s husband Nicholas had been baptized at Bourton-onthe-Hill in 1611,4 the son of Robert Oldisworth and Murial, daughter of Sir Nicholas Overbury and Mary (née Palmer). Both his parents, particularly his mother, came from families well established in the area. His maternal uncle was the Sir Thomas Overbury murdered in the Tower in 1613. Nicholas was educated at Westminster and Christ Church, and both were important nurseries of poetical talent in the first decades of the seventeenth century. It was, according to the dedication of his collection, as an undergraduate at Christ Church that he wrote his poems. The convention that such things are the products of youth and in maturity one gives oneself to more serious concerns and writings (in his case sermons) seems here to be largely true, though some poems were clearly written later than his time as an undergraduate. He married around 1640, about five years after he had been presented to the living of Bourton-on-the-Hill by his maternal grandfather. Both he and his wife were approaching thirty, a quite normal age for marriage in their class in the middle of the seventeenth century. His wife, Mary, was the daughter of Thomas Chamberlayn of Oddington. Her father’s tomb in the church there displayed the family arms, which are also impaled with those of Oldisworth on the tablet in Tewkesbury Abbey recording Mary’s death and burial.5 The family was obvi-

3 This is Sermon 12 in the manuscript collection ‘Eighteene of the First Sermons that were Preached by Nicolas Oldisworth’ (Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Eng. th. f. 20). 4 Register, Gloucester County Record Office, PFC 54 in 1/1, p. 12. 5 See Tewkesbury Abbey: History, Art and Architecture, ed. R. K. Morris and R. Shoesmith (Little Logaston, 2005), p. 227.

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ously proud of its honourable descent, which is rehearsed in some detail over Thomas Chamberlayn’s tomb.6 The marriage sadly lasted a brief five years and Mary’s widowhood was long. Two of their three daughters survived: Mary, who married one John Sherwood, rector of St Martin Orgar in the city of London, at Moreton-in-Marsh on 3 December 1672, and Margaret, who married John Mann of Tewkesbury in the same church three days later.7 Presumably the marriages were conducted by Giles, Nicholas’s brother, who had succeeded him as incumbent at the parishes of Bourton-on-the-Hill and Moreton-in-Marsh. The Manns were, it would seem, a family of some substance in Tewkesbury who figured amongst the families assessed at the highest level for Ship Money, and John and his father are probably the Manns who held Council office there.8 At some point after the death of her husband in 1680, Mary Sherwood joined her sister in Tewkesbury, where she died in 1713.9 So by 1684, when Mary Oldisworth died, both sisters and their mother were in Tewkesbury. The inscription on Mary’s monument once again reinforces the importance of the family as well as expressing the usual pious sentiments: To the Happy Memory of Mary Oldisworth, Daughter of Thomas Chamberlayne of Oddington Esq. Wife to Nicholas Oldisworth Gent. Son of Robert Oldisworth of Fairford Esq. mother of Mary the wife of John Sherwood Gent. and also of Margarite wife of John Mann Gent. She lived a virgin 29 yeares, a wife 5 and a widow 39 and died 4th of August 1684 aged 73. She was a pattern of Piety, Charity, Modesty, Chastity Temperance, and Frugality, of a pleasant Conversation, Beloved by all, and now Wanted by Many, all that was mortal lyes interred near this place expecting a joyful Resurrection.10

6

The monument is still in place. The inscription is recorded by Richard Parsons: ‘Here lyeth the body of Thomas Chamberlayn Esq. descended from the earls of Tangrevil […] high chamberlains of Normandy. He was the 3rd son of Sir Thomas Chamberlain of Presbury in the County of Gloucester, Kt., embassador from Henry VIII, Edward VI, Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth to the queen of Hungary, the king of Sweden, to the king of Portugal and to Philip II king of Spain. He married Margaret daughter and heyr of Edward Badgehott of Presbury aforesaid, gentlewoman, who also lyes here interred. By her he left five sons, Thomas, John, Leonard, George and Edward, and five daughters, Anne, Margaret, Mary, Francis and Elizabeth. He died 4 Dec. 1640 aged 72.’ See Notes on the Diocese of Gloucester by Chancellor Richard Parsons, c. 1700, ed. J. Fendley, Bristol and Gloucestershire Archaeological Society ([Gloucester], 2005), p. 346. 7 Moreton-in-Marsh, Marriage Register, 1672–1770. For John Sherwood’s will, see Kew, TNA, Will of John Sherwood Clerk of Saint Martins Prob.11/364. 8 A John Mann was a bailiff in 1635, 1648, 1662 and 1674, and mayor in 1678 ( John Mann senior died in 1669). See Tewkesbury, Borough Records, TBR A1/1. The list of valuations for Ship Money is printed in They Used to Live in Tewkesbury (Stroud, 1991), pp. 140–3. 9 Will of Mary Sherwood, Gloucester County Record Office, 314. 10 W. Dyde, The History and Antiquities of Tewkesbury, 2nd edn (Tewkesbury, 1795).



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Both the Oldisworths and the Chamberlayns seem to have been determined to ensure their reputation was preserved, as memorials in several local churches testify.11 Bodleian MS Don. c. 24 is a large folio volume, the first part of which begins with a carefully transcribed collection of poems and ends with The Chronicle of Europe, the first part of a prose romance of which five books were promised. It has been described as an enigmatic roman à clef, though it is not easy to be sure exactly what it is, and of course we do not know whether Oldisworth was making a copy of something that already existed complete or if it was unfinished, as no other copy has been found. The second part of the volume ‘was turned into a recipe book’,12 presumably by Margaret. The poems have not received very much attention and the recipes, perhaps naturally, have received even less, though there is now a growing interest in the place of recipe books in cultural history. To turn a collection of poems into a recipe book may seem to be to turn it into something more like a commonplace or household book, of which there are many examples; however, this manuscript is really very different. It started out as a collection of folios gathered in eights. There is a modern pencil foliation and an earlier ink pagination as follows: Blank (fols. 1–4). Blank and title (fols. 5–6). Q18 (fols. 7–14), first folio: dedication with verso blank; second folio: letter with verso blank, pp. 1–2; poems begin on third folio, pp. 3–14. Q28 –Q48 (fols. 15–38), pp. 15–62. Q58, lacks 3, 4 (fols. 39–44), pp. 63–76. 2 folios originally paginated 67–70, torn out; 4 folios originally paginated 71–8 and re-numbered 67, 68, 69, 71, 72, 74, 75, 76. Q68 (fols. 45–52), 8 folios originally paginated 79–94 and re-numbered 79 (crossed out) 78, 79, 82–94. Q78–Q118 (fols. 53–92), pp. 95–174.

11 In Fairford church there are wall memorials to Nicholas Oldisworth’s brother William and to William’s son James, rector of Kencot, Oxfordshire, from 1666 to 1722. At Kencot there is a double wall monument to James’s mother Mary and his mother-in law, and in the floor several diamond-shaped black memorial stones for his children. At Upper Swell there is a memorial to John Chamberlayn, who died in 1668, placed there by his sister Mary Oldisworth. There are a number of Chamberlayn memorials in the parish church at Stow-on-the-Wold. Also, just as the poems were preserved for posterity (at least for the family), Nicholas Oldisworth’s manuscript sermons, mentioned above, were bound up and appear to have been preserved by the Chamberlayns, as the names of a Thomas and a John Chamberlayn are written on the last leaf. 12 J. Gouws, ‘Nicholas Oldisworth and MS Don. c. 24’, Bodleian Library Record 15 (1995), 158–65 (p. 160). Gouws briefly describes the history of the manuscript and the literary connections of Oldisworth’s poems.

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C. B. Hardman Q128 (fols. 93–100), p. 175. [No further page numbers. Fol. 93 is headed ‘The first Booke’ as previous rectos and then blank. Recipes begin on fol. 94.] Q138–Q158 (fols. 101–24). [Recipes end fol. 117v and remaining folios are blank.] Q16–208 (fols. 125–62). Q218, lacks 1, 2 (fols. 163–8). Q22–248 (fols. 169–92). Q256, lacks 1–4 (fols. 193–3*). [Modern foliation has missed fol. 193*; stubs remain for missing folios .] Blank (fols. 194–5).

The 114 poems thus occupy pages 5–144, the prose romance pages 145–74, and the recipes (not paginated) folios 94–117. The remaining folios 118–95 are blank. The pages of the manuscript measure 32.5 x 21.5 cm., and the paper has a ‘bunch of grapes’ watermark. The front end papers (two sheets) measure approximately 32 x 28 cm. and have the chain lines running parallel to the shorter side of the manuscript. Stubs of about 6.5 cm. remain beyond the stitching next to the boards. The final blanks, each measuring approximately 32 x 21 cm., also have chain lines running parallel with the shorter side of the manuscript. All these sheets have the same ‘cornet’ watermarks. They have all been folded in half at some stage and the folds are also parallel to the shorter side of the manuscript. On the inner of the two front sheets in the top half is written ‘Margaret Man Her Book Given Me By My Dear Mother’, crossed out and rewritten, and then in the bottom half ‘Mr Nicholas Oldisworth’. On the final blank in the bottom half upside down is written ‘These are fore Ms Margery’. The fold lines are very hard and it looks as if these were folded sheets intended perhaps for making into another booklet. The shape suggests perhaps an account book. Were these sheets used to accompany the manuscript before it was bound, and is the note on the final blank an indication of who was to get the manuscript either before or after the mother’s death? The binding is plain with ruled lines, a five-panel spine and two ties, and is probably late seventeenth or early eighteenth century. This binding postdates the writing of the recipes because the recipes, unlike the poems and the prose romance, have not been kept within the uniformly ruled inner and outer margins but were written right up to the edge of the page and there has been some loss of text when the pages were trimmed in binding. The ‘appearance and arrangement’ of the manuscript have been described as imitating the ‘appearance of a printed book’,13 and from the layout one can see why. (See Plate 6.) However, the intimate dedication on the title page and the 13

Gouws, ‘Nicholas Oldisworth’, p. 161.



The book as domestic gift

Disclaimer: Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. To view the image on this page please refer to the printed version of this book.

Plate 6.  Nicholas Oldisworth’s manuscript title page. Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Don. c. 24, fol. 7r.

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epistle suggest not the wider readership of the printed book but a readership even more restricted than manuscripts intended for coterie circulation. This is a presentation manuscript for one reader. The title page contains more information than manuscripts (compared with contemporary printed books) usually do about its composition and production, and is more personal than is usual for a manuscript collection where, as author and audience are intimately connected, one might normally expect there to be a need for less to be said rather than more.14 A RECOLLECTION OF CERTAINE SCATTERED POEMS Written long since by an Vndergraduate, being one of the students of Christchurch in Oxford. And now in the yeare 1644 transscribed by the author and dedicated to his wife. When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I putt away childish / things. 1. Cor. XIII. II.

There is a studied formality here balancing the intimacy when he writes impersonally of an ‘undergraduate’, the ‘author’ and his ‘wife’. The epistle that follows, beginning ‘Sweet Mall’, is completely intimate. Here one can understand Walter Ong’s assertion that handwritten, rather than printed, texts transmit the voice and presence of the author.15 To his deare Wife Marie Oldisworth. Sweet Mall Wee two have now beene marryed five yeares: and hitherto (praised bee God) wee have wanted nothing, but Peace. For my part, I thanke God for those good dayes, which I have seene in my youth: wherein I had Leisure to please my owne fancie, and to write such Toyes as here doe follow. And I doubt not but Thou also, in those very dayes, hadst and didst enjoy thy faire virginlike contentments; though I then was not so happy, as to know either Them or Thee. Time was (Mall) when tabrets and pipes were more respected, then drummes and trumpets: which drummes and trumpets were seldome heard in England, but at a Masque, or at a Play. Time was, when I could ride from Borton to London, both without Companie, and without Danger, and carry my Pockets full of monie. But now where is that monie? My gold-scales (thou knowest) lie useless and unemployed: nor doe I see my Soveraigne’s face in silver at home much oftener, then I see his face in flesh and blood at Oxford. Yet have I spent as much, in Contributions and Free-quarters, as would not onely have sett mee out of debt, but have begunne competent Portions for thy two little daughters. I pray god send us Patience: for, although wee are likely to stand in Need of many things, yet are

14 See P. Beal, In Praise of Scribes: Manuscripts and Their Makers in Seventeenth Century England (Oxford, 1998), p. 18. 15 W. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London, 1982), quoted by Beal, In Praise of Scribes, p. 15.



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wee likely to stand most in Neede of Patience. So entreating thee to bee of good Cheare, and not to trouble or disquiet thy minde with the Fear and expectation of those Evils, which per chance may never come; I rest Thy true Friend Nicolas Oldisworth From Willington. 1644. Febr: 17

The personal, intimate tone of the letter beginning with the affectionate shortening of his wife’s name, ‘Sweet Mall’, is so obvious that it needs no comment: we do indeed seem to hear the tone of the poet’s voice. Oldisworth does, of course, speak of the afflictions of the time. The king had set up his capital in Oxford, where one might see his face more readily than on a coin in those straightened times (‘now where is that monie?’). After initial military success, 1644 was a turning point for the king, and the parliamentary alliance with the Scots led to defeat at Marston Moor in the summer. The New Model Army was formed early in 1645, so the patience to which Oldisworth refers was certainly required of his family, though he himself soon succumbed to the plague. The brief but telling reference to the cost of ‘Contributions and Free-quarters’ provides an insight into the afflictions suffered in Gloucestershire and the surrounding counties in the war. There were two manors in Bourton-on-the-Hill and William Bateson, the lessee of the manor not held by the Overbury family, was to complain a few years later when his property was sequestered that he had suffered a great loss when both armies had been quartered in the village at different times.16 A year or so later one John Chamberlayne Esquire of Maugersbury, which is not far from Bourton-on-the-Hill and very near to Oddington, who was presumably a kinsman of Oldisworth’s wife (so the account is particularly pertinent), was accused of having taken the royalist side. He confessed that he had done so and was consequently liable to a very substantial fine, though he had also been forced to give succour to parliamentary troops. His plea before the Committee of Sequestration was so detailed that the case was not resolved for nearly four years. The details give a

16

He claimed, though he was being fined as a royalist, he had ‘advanced Horse and Armes with other things to Major Puryfoy for the parliament’s service to the value of £20; that Captain Sambuck had from mee Two horses and more for parliament service – £20; that Captain Michelborne had of mee Two horses more for the parliament service, worth £20; that Major Carr, being Major to Sir William Waller, had one gelding for the Parliament service, worth £13; that he quartered the Parliament soldiers, to the value of £167.11.6 at 12d a day and a night for a man and a horse and 6d a day for a footman and niver received a penny for it’; quoted from Westminster Abbey Muniments 8221, in E. G. C. Beckwith, A History of Bourton-on-the-Hill, Gloucestershire (Bourton-on-the-Hill, 1970), p. 40.

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further compelling account of the financial sufferings of the populace.17 There are numerous references to the cost of providing quarters and contributions for both sides, for example on one occasion he says that he quartered a royal force and the following day a parliamentary one.18 Chamberlayne was clearly a gentleman of some substance, with a number of manors and income from fairs and markets at Stow-on-the-Wold, but even men of more modest income and property were affected. In Blockley, the neighbouring parish to Bourton-on-the-Hill, the parson George Durant was sent a requisition for a horse and money from Sir Henry Bard, whom even Clarendon the royalist historian of the war described as ‘licentious’ and exercising ‘an illimited tyranny over the whole country’ when in charge of the king’s troops quartered at Chipping Campden.19 When the parson refused he was threatened with abduction from his house in the night and imprisonment.20 Though a royalist, he took refuge with the other side, provided them with a horse, twenty-one pounds, intelligence and protection for parliamentary soldiers. Thomas Wyat, rector of Ducklington and vicar of Nuneham Courtenay in Oxfordshire, complained: When the King went from Oxford [in 1642] above 60 soldiers at one time were lodged at Newnham. Above 20 men & horses entertained at the parsonage. Spent in victals & fodder & corne worth 5L at least. One sargeant major Daniel & Mr Kingsmol lodged in my chamber with great charge of money & pretious thinges. They did no hurt but some or other took away my glasse & comb.21

Plundering, exactions and demands for free quarter were commonplace and gave rise to groups called clubmen in different counties of England who attempted to provide a defence against the depredations of undisciplined soldiery. The declaration of the Worcester Clubmen in the neighbouring county to Glouces17 See H. P. R. Finberg, ‘A Second Sheaf of Documents’, in Gloucestershire Studies, ed. H. P. R. Finberg (Leicester, 1957), pp. 184–94 (documents on John Chamberlayne and the Civil War, pp. 184–9). 18 ‘When Sir Wm. Waller chased the kings armye towards Worcester I quartered of the Kings men 43 men & Horses one night wch comes to 02li 17s 04d The next daye I quartered of Sir Wm. Wallers armye Colonel Birch & 30ty officers and 40ty Horses and 120ty foote soldiers 5 days which comes to 27 10s 00’ (Finberg, ‘Second Sheaf ’, p. 185). He also lists a number of ‘contributions’, the most substantial being: ‘Item Pd. to Colonell Gerards Regimt. and my Ld. Percyes regimt. 14teene months Contribucion att 03li 03s 04d the month’ (ibid., p. 184). In total he claimed to have lost some £446.10s. 4d. (ibid., p. 188). 19 Edward, Earl of Clarendon, The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England, ed. W. D. Macray, 6 vols. (Oxford, 1888), IV, 37–8. 20 See the petition by Durant to the Committee for Compounding at Westminster, August 16, PRO SP 23/G81. 21 Diary of Thomas Wyatt, Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Top. Oxon. c. 378, p. 331.



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tershire states that they have ‘long groaned under many illegal taxations and unjust pressures’ and ‘we, our wives and children, have been exposed to utter ruin by the outrages and violence of the soldier; threatening to fire our houses; endeavouring to ravish our wives and daughters, and menacing our persons’.22 Early in 1645 the County Committee of Gloucestershire reported that as a consequence of the same treatment, ‘our countrey was soe extreamely exhausted and miserably destroyed that it was quite ready to give up the ghost’.23 The collection of poems that follows Oldisworth’s tender letter to his wife in MS Don. c. 24 contains a few poems celebrating public events, which he notes had already been printed, for example: ‘On the birth of James duke of Yorke’ (p. 72), ‘On his majesty’s going to Scotland 1633’, ‘On his majesty’s being in Scotland’ and ‘On his majestie’s comming from Scotland’ (pp. 129–31). There is a variety of forms and of kinds: occasional verse, epigrams, odes, epitaphs, an eclogue, a journey poem, poems about friendship, wooing, true and false compliments and so on, frequently characterized by wit and humour. One recognizes the fashionable topics in poems addressed to acquaintances and public figures, and finally those familiar literary gestures: ‘His Farewell to Poetrie’, ‘Poetry’s Answer’ and ‘His Reply to Poetrie’ (pp. 143–4). The first poem, dated 1629, is a quite witty verse letter to Ben Jonson (p. 1), which is no doubt intended to set the context for the collection, establishing a literary connexion with Jonson who, like Oldisworth, was from Westminster School, and suggesting that this recollection of scattered verses is in the tradition of Jonson’s collections of poems in The Forest and Underwoods. Jonson had died in 1638 and Underwoods was published for the first time as recently as 1640–1, as part of the third volume of the folio, with this description of The Forest in ‘To the Reader’: ‘The ancients call’d that kind of body Sylva … in which there were works of divers nature and matter congested; as the multitude call Timber-trees, promiscuously growing, a Wood, or Forest.’ The variety of poems listed above in Oldisworth’s collection follows the pattern established by Jonson in The Forest and Underwoods. In particular, there are poems addressed to persons of rank in both, and, in Oldisworth’s case, sometimes to family connexions. In this respect the volume is evidence of the same family pride demonstrated in the memorials to Mary and her father at Tewkesbury and at Oddington. The third poem, ‘On his Seeing the study of mr Michael Oldisworth’ (pp. 4–5), names an influential relative to whom other poems are addressed later in the collection. The marginal note makes clear his status: ‘Mic. Oldisworth Esquire was once a fellow of Magdalen coll. in Ox. afterward secretary to William 22 C. D. Gilbert, ‘The Worcestershire Clubmen of 1645’, in Transactions of the Worcestershire Archaeological Society 3rd s. 15 (1996), 211–18 (p. 212). 23 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Tanner 60, fol. 75, quoted in A. R. Warmington, Civil War, Interregnum and Restoration in Gloucestershire 1640–1672 (London, 1997), p. 74.

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earle of Pembroke, and last of all secretary to Philip earle of Pembroke and Montgomerie’. There is an indirect Jonson connexion here too, for Jonson’s Epigrams, published in 1616 and again in 1640, were dedicated to William, Earl of Pembroke. The poem is also a witty praise of the importance of learning: Never, till now, I thought that unreadd Bookes Could teach men Knowledge: but the onley Lookes Of this place dart such Learning through mine eies That on a sodaine I am growne more wise. Here dwells true Beauty; I had rather see The lovely face of this faire Librarie, Than all the White-hall ladies at a Play, By their bright aspects turning Night to day. Lett handsome women hate mee, if I finde Ought in them, but what (in an higher kinde) Adornes these paper’d shelves.

And he also compares history and poetry to the advantage of the latter in a manner which reminds one of Sidney’s Apology: On this side stand Historians, and on that Stand poets; both are liars, that is flatt, Yet poets are the better: for they wrappe Truth under tales; wheras Historians lappe Tales under truth.

He concludes with an observation on the important interdependence of the knowledge contained in the volumes. A marginal note makes the point, for example, that ‘Rhetorick and moral Philosophie are servants to divinity’. He compares college libraries, where men ‘bind each writer with a severall chaine’, playing on the chaining of individual volumes in libraries as unacceptably compartmentalizing knowledge. Between these two texts is a poem addressed ‘To his friend beyond the sea’ (p. 7), also written in 1629 when Oldisworth and Richard Bacon, the friend in question, were eighteen. Both Oldisworth and Bacon had been at school together at Westminster. Oldisworth matriculated at Christ Church, Oxford and Bacon at Trinity College, Cambridge but within the year the latter had moved to Douai. This friendship provides the material for the familiar friendship topic in several poems in the collection, concluding with the blank page headed ‘On the death of his deare friend Mr Richard Bacon’ (p. 138). Since the page ends with the pen flourish which usually indicates the completion of a poem, one wonders if the blank page was intended as a formal indication of inexpressible grief and loss. Oldisworth’s journey poem, ‘ITER AVSTRALE, 1632 Or, A journey Southwards’ (pp. 77–82), combines many of the features to



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be found elsewhere in the collection. It is a journey poem following in the footsteps of Richard Corbett’s ‘Iter Boreale’24 which Corbett had written celebrating a journey in the Midlands shortly before he became Dean of Christ Church in 1620. This was a very popular Oxford fashion that began with Richard Eedes’ Latin poem of the same title and continued for many years.25 Oldisworth begins with a reference to Ben Jonson, then to his family the Overburies and Michael Oldisworth, and then, when his journey takes him to ‘Arborvill neare Reding’, he describes the splendid paradisal gardens of Sir John Backhous at Swallowfield and his management of his estate, in terms reminiscent of what have come to be called country house poems. They more usually speak of hospitality and of the support and gratitude of retainers, whereas in Oldisworth’s poem, Sir John makes an attempt to remedy the decline in hospitality and almsgiving. Sir John was hee, who with his quickening bounty Rais’d the dead limbes of poore folks through ye County And gave them Leggs and Armes of fleshe and bone, Which had before or earthen ones, or none. O yee hard Masters, who doe rogue & knave them Whom yee beat from your gates; what would yee have ym Doe with themselves?  (p. 78)

As Alastair Fowler observes, this decline was often regretted at the beginning of the century, with reports of ‘hospitality gone to wrack and husbandry almost quite fallen’ and of gentlemen who no longer ‘give alms and cherish the needy’.26 Sir John rescues ‘from the grave these ghosts’, just as at Saxham ‘The cold and frozen air had sterved / Much poor, if not by thee preserved’.27 This is not just charity but employment, as they ‘with their after-industrie repay’ him. When Oldisworth finally arrives at Portsmouth, he praises the sisters of his friend Richard Bacon, who has gone overseas, and writes about their house Chillings, overlooking the Isle of Wight, and their hospitality.

24

The Poems of Richard Corbett, ed. J. A. W. Bennett and H. R. Trevor-Roper (Oxford, 1955), pp. 31–49. 25 See Oxford Poetry by Richard Eedes and George Peele, ed. D. F. Sutton (New York, 1995), pp. 1–139. 26 A. Fowler, The Country House Poem (Edinburgh, 1994), p. 9, quoting from William Vaughan’s ‘very influential’ Golden Grove Moralized (London, 1600). John Evelyn records a visit to Swallowfield on 22 October 1685 and describes the house as ‘after the antient building of honourable gent: houses, when they kept up the antient hospitality’; Diary of John Evelyn now first printed from the manuscripts belonging to Mr John Evelyn, ed. E. S. de Beer, 6 vols. (Oxford, 1955), IV, 481. 27 Thomas Carew, ‘To Saxham’, ll. 11–12.

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This last poem is especially characteristic of the work of Christ Church writers appearing in contemporary anthologies.28 The genesis of Oldisworth’s poems was in the Oxford of the 1630s, but what we have in this manuscript is not an attempt to offer these poems to his male Oxford contemporaries but, some years after he has left Oxford, to produce something rather different: an organized collection for his wife. Throughout the manuscript there are side notes. Those in the margins of The Chronicle of Europe seem to function like the pointing finger of the moralizing parson – for whatever this narrative was intended to be about, it was seen as providing exemplary passages: ‘A wise man’, ‘A devoute man’, ‘A prudent and virtuous matron’, ‘Against drunkennesse’ (there is a long exhortation in the text against drunkenness). However, some of the marginal annotations in the poems, such as the note above on the books in the library of Michael Oldisworth, would be necessary to provide information for his wife about poems written before their marriage and perhaps to identify relatives and even public events of which she might have been unaware. He makes clear, for example, that a poem headed ‘The wordes of a Lover speaking to the reflection of his mistresse face in a Looking-glasse’ (p. 15) was verses ‘made for Mr Chandler of Colnrogers when he was a suitor to her, who is now his wife’. He avoids any ambiguity in a poem ‘To his mistress’ by heading it ‘For an Innes of courts man’ (p. 115). A number of the poems are clearly fashionable exercises: ‘The nobleman’s wooing’ and ‘The country-gentleman’s wooing’ (pp. 28–9). There is obviously some pride in those verses about public events which were in print, and his poem ‘On his majesty’s Recovery from the Small poxe Decemb 1632’ (p. 9) is annotated with a note praising the queen’s attending to the king throughout his infectious illness but also recording that ‘the verses were presented to the King by Mr Osbolston schoolmaster and prebend of Westminster’. Lambert Osbadeston was Master of Westminster in succession to Lancelot Andrews from 1622 and is credited with ‘guiding “the generation of writers who appear so prominently in the Oxford collections” of panegyric verse’.29 Modern critics tend to consider that turning this poetical manuscript into a recipe book, probably by the daughter when she inherited it, was to considerably reduce its status. However, perhaps the diminution of status, especially for contemporary women, was not quite as marked as it now seems. The will of Nicholas’s brother William Oldisworth of Fairford, who died in 1680, indicates something of the importance placed on recipes, which of course included not just culinary recipes but household recipes and medical remedies. William Oldisworth asked his eldest son James, his executor, to catalogue his books so 28

p. 32. 29

See A. F. Marotti, Manuscript, Print and the English Renaissance Lyric (Ithaca NY, 1995), Ibid., p. 32.



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that his library might be disposed appropriately amongst the members of his family: his sons, his wife and others, or kept to serve the needs of his descendants. He was specific about books on the law, his books in Italian, French and Spanish and on heraldry, and instructed that ‘Gerards Herball and my books and Notes of Phisick and Chirurgerie’ might be given to ‘the first of my posterity … to studdy physick’, and he was just as concerned about what should happen to his ‘notes of sweetemeates, sweet drinkes, cookery, husbandry, housewifery and gardening’, which he bequeathed to his ‘daughter Hickes when her Mother hath done with them’.30 The recipes in MS Don. c. 24 are similar to those found in many contemporary printed books, though the methods of making ‘cheescake’ with or without curd, or making a ‘marrow pudding’ or a lemon pudding, or stewing, boiling, roasting or making an ‘afriggasee’ of various kinds of meat never seem to be exactly the same. There are instructions for making mead and various wines: cowslip, cherry, quince and honey wine, for example and, as one would expect, for preserving all kinds of fruit: oranges, lemons, grapes, cherries, gooseberries, ‘apricocks’, and for pickling too: mushrooms, walnuts, ‘cawcombers’ and even pigeons. Not surprisingly for a town on a river, there are a number of recipes for preserving and stewing lampreys and for roasting pike, making oyster pie and frying oysters, and making ‘sawse for a Salmon’. There is even a recipe for making a ‘pickle for starrgin’. The latter is inserted at the bottom of a page in a different hand and ink (fol. 96v). Perhaps this relates to the right enjoyed by the town corporation as lords of the royalty to sturgeon caught in the Severn. It is recorded that sturgeon were caught in 1701 and 1725, and in 1725 the sturgeon was ‘delivered up to the bailiffs’.31 Amidst these recipes for preparing food one finds instructions for making blue, black, yellow and crimson dye. There are also descriptions of how to make powder for the teeth, ‘surfit water’, ‘Aqua mirabilis’ and various kinds of plasters, including a ‘strain plaster for the worms’. It is clear from the nature of corrections and the deletion of repetitions that the recipes are copied from exemplars. There is also a feature found in printed anthologies – the naming of authorities for the recipes. So one finds ‘Mrs Hales Cowslip wine’, ‘To make white pudding Mrs Simpsons way’, ‘an excellent led plaster of Mrs Doswell’, ‘To preserve lampry my Lady Russells way’, ‘To preserve Goosberries ye Lady R: way’. Lady Russell is frequently cited. As in printed books, the names of real people, especially people of rank, are clearly a matter of importance in giving authority to recipes. The most prominent published collection of recipes was The Queen’s Closet Opened, which first 30 Will of William Oldisworth of Fairford, Gloucestershire, Kew, TNA, Prob 11/364. I am grateful to Chris Hobson, author of The Oldisworths of Fairford (Fairford, 2008), for information about the Oldisworth family in Fairford. 31 J. Bennett, History of Tewkesbury (London, 1830), p. 300.

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appeared in 1655. This duodecimo volume was reprinted many times before the end of the century and early editions are sometimes given more authority by a portrait frontispiece of Queen Henrietta Maria. Initially in two volumes (the first ‘The Pearl of Practice: Accurate, Physical, and Chirurgical Receipts’ and the second ‘A Queens delight: Or, The art of preserving, conserving and candying’), a third book was added later: ‘The Compleat Cook’, which contained recipes for preparing meat and fish, making sauces, and so on. The claim was that these recipes were collected for and by the queen and were even used by her. Whatever the truth of this, the recipes are ‘typical of those found in the manuscript receipt books compiled by elite women’.32 This volume and others gave an authority to the recipe book which makes the use of the remaining pages of Nicholas Oldisworth’s collection seem anything but demeaning. Bodleian MS. Don. c. 24 is then an interesting family manuscript. There are of course a number of family compilations of poetry in noble and gentry families, some of which were passed down from one generation to the next, but this is not the same.33 Here we can see inscribed the tender relationship of a husband and father for his wife and daughters at a dangerous time. It begins as a single author autograph collection of poems dedicated to a woman, and they are poems of some quality, if not of the first rank. It is a rarity because it was always intended to remain a manuscript and not to be turned into a printed volume. It occupies the space between manuscript and print, though of course, as the marginal notes indicate, some of the poems had already crossed the line and were in print. Finally, in the collection of recipes, the women of the family to whom it was first dedicated and then left, operate also in the space between manuscript and print. By this time the tradition of compiling and passing down recipes in manuscript for the family had become validated and elevated as the activity not just of early modern women of rank but of queens, and had received the authority of print in numerous volumes.

32 J. Archer, ‘The Queens’ Arcanum: Authority and Authorship in The Queens Closet Opened (1655)’, Renaissance Journal 1 (2002), [http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/ren/projects/publications/journal/six/archer.doc]. This article deals with these issues in detail. It has been suggested that this collection also had a political agenda in propagating an image of the queen as a domestic icon, the nation’s housewife rather than the alien Roman Catholic who led the king astray, as discovered when Parliament opened the king’s Cabinet for public scrutiny in The Kings Cabinet Opened (1645). 33 See Marotti, Manuscript, pp. 40–8.

Alice Eardley

‘like hewen stone’: Augustine, Audience and Revision in Elizabeth Isham’s ‘Booke of Rememberance’ (c. 1639)

E

arly in her autobiographical ‘Booke of Rememberance’, Elizabeth Isham writes: ‘I would not offer that to the Lord my God which doth cost me nothing but like hewen stone I have prepared this in all points as true as I could.’1 She presents her narrative as a ‘true’ account of her own life and emphasizes the effort expended in revealing that truth, later adding that the ‘cost’ of the labour that went into her task was summoned from both ‘soule’ and ‘body’. Like ‘hewen stone’ that has been carved and polished, her text has been crafted from the raw material of her life, a feat requiring both physical and spiritual effort and stamina. Isham’s description is made particularly striking because in the Bible ‘hewn stone’ is cited as a negative thing; for example, Exodus 20. 25: ‘And if thou wilt make me an altar of stone, thou shalt not build it of hewn stone: for if thou lift up thy tool upon it, thou hast polluted it.’ In this context, stone that is hewn is engraved, beautified and defaced by a process of human craft that obscures its natural God-given form. But for Isham, the act of hewing her text is a means not of adorning it but of purifying it. It allows her to pare away the dross to achieve a more rarefied form of truth. Her volume as a whole suggests that for her much of the value of the text resides not solely in its completed form but in the work, both spiritual and physical, expended 1

Princeton University Library, Robert H. Taylor Collection RTC01 no. 62, fol. 7v. I am grateful to Elizabeth Clarke and Erica Longfellow, co-directors of the British Academy-funded project ‘Elizabeth Isham’s Lives’, for introducing me to this manuscript. For further information and a full transcription of Isham’s autobiographical text see: www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/ren/ projects/isham. Transcription conventions are as follows: u/v and i/j have been regularized and ‘Ye’ silently replaced by ‘the’. \ / indicates a superlinear insertion in the original. / \ indicates a sublinear insertion in the original. [ ] indicates my own insertions, especially in places where the manuscript is particularly difficult to read. [?] indicates that the text is virtually illegible. Strikethrough indicates that words have been excised from the original.

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in its creation. Some indication of the work Isham put into the production of her autobiographical narrative is provided by a comparison of the fair-copy text now in Princeton with a series of draft sections fortuitously preserved in Northamptonshire Record Office. Such a comparison sheds light both on the careful way in which Isham constructed her narrative and on the spiritual significance invested in the process of composition. In her own words, Elizabeth Isham was ‘borne immediatly afore day the 28 of January … in the yere of our lord 16[0]9’.2 She was born at the family residence Lamport Hall in Northamptonshire and was the daughter of Sir John Isham, first baronet and his wife Judith.3 One of the most prominent members of her family was her brother Justinian, who would eventually become one of the founding members of the Royal Society.4 Details of Isham’s life are preserved in her ‘Booke of Rememberance’, a neatly penned and lengthy presentation copy of her spiritual autobiography, now housed in Princeton University Library. Composed around 1639, when Isham was thirty years of age, it comprises a chronological narrative of her life interspersed with devotional meditations and prayers. She provides a rich account of daily life within the household of a Northamptonshire gentry family, detailing her relationships and interactions with those around her, her spiritual practices, her domestic duties, both her own illnesses and those of family members (together with their treatment), her reading and study habits, marriage negotiations and many, many more details, both substantial and incidental. Draft versions of several small portions of the Princeton text remain in the Northamptonshire Record Office.5 The passages are squeezed into the blank spaces of a letter sent to Isham by her sister-in-law Jane, wife of Justinian. The letter is not dated but Jane Isham refers to one of her own young children and to her wet-nurse. The first of Jane and Justinian’s children, also called Jane, was born in 1635, suggesting the passages were composed no earlier than this and possibly just prior to Isham’s beginning work on the Princeton volume. Isham herself notes that she began work on the Princeton manuscript in 1638, stating ‘I began my confessions which was my Chiefest worke for this yere \and almost the next/’.6 A later note states that she completed her work in November 1639, suggesting that she apparently spent at least a year labouring over the project.7 2

RTC01, no. 62, fol. 18r, marginal note. K. Aughterson, ‘Isham, Elizabeth (bap. 1608, d. 1654)’, Oxford DNB (Oxford, 2004), [http://ezproxy.ouls.ox.ac.uk:2117/view/article/68093, accessed 28 October 2008]. 4 R. Priestley, ‘Isham, Sir Justinian, second baronet (1611–1675)’, Oxford DNB (Oxford, 2004), [http://ezproxy.ouls.ox.ac.uk:2117/view/article/14489, accessed 28 October 2008]. 5 Northamptonshire Record Office, IC 4344. 6 Ibid., IL 3365, section 26. 7 ‘I ended my confessions this Novemb- the 25’, IL 3365, section 27. 3



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Some sense of the painstaking care that went into the final volume is provided by the consistent neatness of the hand throughout, the relative lack of errors, and the presence of hundreds of marginal annotations in a hand so small that many sections can only be read with the aid of a magnifying glass.8 Although Isham makes great claims to be presenting the ultimate ‘truth’ of her life, the presence of draft versions of her text, together with the obvious care that has been taken in the composition of the final volume, draw attention to the lengthy and deliberate process of self-presentation that went into the creation of the final volume. A comparison of these two versions of Isham’s autobiographical text not only sheds light on Isham’s own composition practices, but also contributes new evidence to recent arguments put forward by scholars working within the field of early modern women’s life-writing. Michelle Dowd, Julie Eckerle and Sharon Seelig have emphasized the constructed nature of women’s autobiographical narratives.9 Rather than reading these texts as unmediated representations of ‘real’ women, they draw attention to the generic and formal factors that affected the way in which women both conceptualized their own lives and preserved them for posterity. With specific reference to manuscript autobiography, Margaret Ezell has highlighted the importance of the ‘situation of the creation of the text … and how this information might affect its being read’.10 Some sense of the influences that had a bearing on Isham’s self-presentation is provided by the differences between the two versions of her text. On a formal level, the Princeton volume bears witness to the influence of Saint Augustine’s Confessions on the way she chose to present her life. His work also sheds some light on Isham’s aims in engaging in the spiritual and mental process of recording her life for posterity. On a material level, Isham’s text was written with a very specific family audience in mind and on occasion it is possible to detect how this had an effect on the way she presented her material. A close examination of the draft portions of Isham’s text and a comparison of these sections with the final volume allow for an at least partial reconstruction of the process by which Isham set about composing her narrative. The Princeton manuscript presents a continuous, chronological account of her life from when she was a baby through to the year during which she was writing. In contrast, the Northamptonshire draft version comprises a series of discrete, 8 It is difficult to imagine how Isham managed to produce such tiny notes. One possibility is that she was extremely shortsighted, meaning that for her the text appeared larger. 9 Genre and Women’s Life Writing in Early Modern England, ed. M. M. Dowd and J. A. Eckerle (Aldershot, 2007), esp. pp. 1–14; S. Seelig, Autobiography and Gender in Early Modern Literature: Reading Women’s Lives, 1600–1680 (Cambridge, 2006), esp. pp. 1–14, 154–9; Early Modern English Lives: Autobiography and Self-Representation 1500–1660, ed. R. Bedford and P. Kelly (Aldershot, 2007), esp. pp. 163–202. 10 Dowd and Eckerle, Genre and Women’s Life Writing, p. 34.

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disjointed paragraphs corresponding with disparate paragraphs from the Princeton volume. The draft sections appear on a single sheet of paper folded in half in the form of a bifolium. Sections appear on the internal pages (fols. 1v–2r) and the back page (fol. 2v) of the bifolium. On that single sheet of paper are drafts of sections (in roughly this order) from fol. 14v, fol. 31r, fol. 33r, fol. 13r, fol. 13v, fol. 16v, fol. 30v, fol. 14r, fol. 14v and fol. 15r of the Princeton manuscript. As the folio numbers suggest, these sections are not chronological and instead relate to events from when Isham was aged nine, ten or eleven, and twenty-six or twenty-seven. The apparent connection between the different sections of Isham’s narrative that are preserved in the Northamptonshire manuscript is that they pertain to specific categories of event, or memory.11 The episodes recounted on the internal two pages (fols. 1v–2r) relate to episodes of sickness within her family and to God’s intentions and interventions in those instances. Isham describes for example a period when her ‘father was so ill with the swelling of the almons in his thro[tt] that my m[other] feared he would [have] died’.12 The distress caused by this episode is generated as much by fear for the fate of family, should the head of the household have died, as it is by the incident of grave illness in a family member. Isham, who would have been eleven years old at the time, was clearly struck by her grandmother’s concerns. She describes how her elderly relative ‘wished she might not see him not to see us in that wreched stat wherein he \wee/ should have left us if he \had/ then died’. Isham provides a reminder of the precarious position of a predominantly female household faced with the death of their only adult male relative. She goes on to recall her grandmother’s concerns that: my m[other] being a weake sickly women and unable to deale in affares of the world and nether m[other] f[ather] nor she having any brother, or neare kinsman to helpe us besides my b[rother] being under age reddy to be taken ward.

But Isham’s father survives and the family are saved from having to cope with the circumstances in which his death would have left them. Considering this episode in retrospect, Isham uses her text as an opportunity to address God directly, saying ‘considering thy great mercie my God in \still/ prefer\serve[ing]/ and blessing us I cannot suffis\c/hiontly give thee thankes’. In this episode God intervenes to preserve the family and long life, for Isham’s father, herself and her other relatives, is a means by which they may ‘fruityfie /and increase\ in all 11 E. Longfellow, ‘“Take unto you words”: Gender, Family Writing Culture and Elizabeth Isham’s Life-Writing’, a paper presented at the ‘Elizabeth Isham at Princeton’ symposium, 7–8 September 2007. 12 IC 4344, fol. 1v.



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good workes and waies’. Illness and its consequences are framed as a means by which God ensures human duty towards him is observed. In a second account, in which Isham recalls an episode of her own illness, God’s intervention serves as a reprimand and a reminder that his laws are not being observed. She begins by making two apparently unrelated observations about her own thoughts at a time when she would have been twenty-eight years old. First she says, ‘yet I found [the] too strict band of human society (espectially with naturall affection) to be prededitiall to the soule’, before going on to recount how ‘a consete came into my mind … which fed my malancoly humer, that I might die when [it?] the same time of the [yere?] [cam?] wherein she did’.13 The ‘she’ to whom Isham refers is her sister Judith, who died in 1636 ‘on the day which is kept in memorie of all Saints’, or 1 November. Having had these thoughts, Isham recalls how: the /very\ same day or night ensuing I was so ill that I could not rest but walked to ease my selfe in the night, the next day I was better but shortly after a paine in my side tooke me that I was hardly able to stand or goe being faint to goe to bed where I had more ease.

Isham interprets this episode as a reminder of her sins, describing how ‘I receved instruction my flesh being fearfull’. The pain she experiences is a reprimand for fearing and anticipating her own death. It is also a reminder that in ‘prefering father or mother brother or sister’ the individual makes him- or herself ‘not worthy’ of God. Isham connects her fear of death with her attachment to her family and reads her illness as a warning from God that she must not become too attached to earthly objects. In both of the episodes examined here, Isham is not simply recalling episodes of illness from her past but framing them within a consideration of God’s interventions in her life. In contrast, those episodes recalled on the final page of the draft manuscript are markedly different from those on earlier pages, and instead of detailing episodes of illness they pertain to issues of conscience. In one example Isham relates how ‘in this winter e[venings]’ she and her family played at cards.14 But on one occasion ‘mr D came who seeing us at play speak as if it were unlawfull’. As the Princeton manuscript reveals, ‘mr D’ is John Dod (1550–1645), the radical puritan minister who would later act as an intermediary between Sir Erasmus Dryden and Sir John Isham during negotiations concerning the potential marriage between Elizabeth Isham and Sir Erasmus grandson John

13 14

Ibid. Ibid., fol. 2v.

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(not the poet).15 In this episode, Isham describes how her father responded by pointing out that they were playing ‘but for pindes’ (i.e. for very little) but that Dod was adamant that ‘that we coveted t[hough] it was but for letle which in t[ime] might grow to more’. Having presented the dispute enacted before her between two authoritative men, Isham concludes with her own thoughts on the matter. Referring to Mr Dod she says that ‘I am not of his opinion for suppose it may be lawfull with some company who onely desireth i[t] for [mirth]’. Playing cards for innocent recreation is acceptable so long as it does not become ‘a [trad] [ie. ‘trade’] of life’ or ‘false play’ is involved. Another issue not so easily resolved by Isham is the question ‘whether wee were Jewes or not’. She turns to her grandmother for advice who, Isham says, ‘mentioned to mee the 11 chap to the Rom where it is shewen that we being Gentiles /of the wild olive tree\ were grafted into the right olive tree whereof /of nature\ they were and so /wee\ are the Israel’. This does not bring about the required result and Isham admits to ‘much wavering and douting’. Finally, however, she describes how her mind was ‘con[firmed] strengthen and stablished’ after reading a series of biblical passages, including ‘gal 3. 28 of G[od] pro to abraham Gen 22. 18 in thy seed shall all the nations of the east be blessed’. Each of these episodes reveals Isham wrestling with a question which she resolves in her own mind after listening to the opinions of others and, where necessary, turning to scripture for advice. Taken together, the episodes recounted as discrete passages within the draft manuscript provide some indication that Isham set about recalling episodes from her life not as a continuous narrative but as a series of events linked by some association within her own mind, whether it was through the association of the illnesses affecting members of her family or the recollection of the theological issues that troubled her in the past. These episodes suggest a systematic process of recollection that resulted in a series of accounts that then had to be shaped into a continuous narrative within the final volume. They also point to the presence of significant themes within the narrative as a whole. Rather than recount events in a chronological narrative or as they occurred to her, Isham recalls episodes apparently according to a set of predetermined categories. Events pertaining to these categories were recalled and noted down, regardless of when they occurred during her life, and were then rearranged into a chronological order when the final volume was composed. This provides some explanation for the consistency of themes and concerns that are evident 15

J. Fielding, ‘Dod, John (1550–1645)’, Oxford DNB (Oxford, 2004), [http://ezproxy. ouls. ox.ac.uk:2117/view/article/7729, accessed 28 October 2008]. For a discussion of the marriage negotiations between the Ishams and the Drydens, and for a consideration of Elizabeth Isham’s general attitudes towards marriage, see I. Stephens, ‘The Courtship and Singlehood of Elizabeth Isham, 1630–1634’, Historical Journal 51 (2008), 1–25.



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throughout the text and helps to explain the presence of an over-arching set of narratives, such as illness and courtship, within Isham’s presentation of her life. Some evidence confirming the transcription scenario outlined above is provided by a manuscript with a puzzling relationship both to the final version of Isham’s autobiographical text and to the draft sections. In Northamptonshire Record Office is preserved a vademecum, or single sheet of paper (roughly A3 in size), that has been folded into eighteen squares.16 Isham used these squares to note down the events of her life, a square per year. She used both sides of the sheet of paper and, writing retrospectively, she provides a detailed list of events for the first thirty-six years of her life. It is possible to compare this sequential list of notes with the more descriptive passages preserved in the Northamptonshire rough drafts. The reference within the vademecum to Isham’s father’s illness presents difficulties which I will address shortly, but the other two examples provided above give some indication of the way in which the vademecum may have functioned as a chronological ordering structure for the more detailed Princeton narrative. In the square devoted to 1636 Isham provides the simple note that ‘of all Saints /day\, my S Judith died’.17 In the section for 1637, however, there is no mention of the spiritual crisis occasioned by her sister’s death and her own anxiety about dying.18 Similarly, in the ­Princeton manuscript Isham notes that the conflict with John Dod concerning gambling takes place in the ’11 yeere’, or 1619.19 In the corresponding square of the vademecum she notes, ‘I have t[ime] by my selfe /in these\ times when Mr Dod has come’.20 She registers his presence in their lives but her recollection, as it is noted here, is very different. She does not refer to the specific incident that occasioned her enquiry into the legitimacy of gambling and instead makes a general statement about the extra freedom afforded her on the occasions that Dod visited the household. In both of these examples Isham provides references to significant events and people but her lengthier, more detailed accounts of spiritual investigation and crisis are not recorded. These were apparently recalled on a separate occasion but fitted into the chronological narrative that the vademecum provides. For the account of her father’s illness, the relationship between the vademecum and the Princeton manuscript is not so straightforward. In the section 16

IL 3365. I am grateful to Jill Seal-Millman for allowing me to use her transcription of this manuscript. I have slightly altered the transcription so that it accords with the conventions outlined above. References to ‘sections’ pertain to the attributions of Seal-Millman. For the full text, see [www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/ren/projects/ isham]. 17 IL 3365, section 24. 18 Ibid., section 25. 19 RTC01 no. 62, fol. 13v. 20 IL 3365, section 7.

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headed ’1622’ Isham notes that ‘my father was ill’.21 This is apparently three years later than the account provided in the Princeton narrative but she adds in the margin of the Princeton text that he ‘hath bin ill for 2 or 3 yeeres foll[ow]ing’.22 This may point to a mistake in the placing of the account, later to some extent corrected using the marginalia, or to an omission from the vademecum which Isham was able to silently emend in the ordering of her Princeton narrative. The illness that Isham records in the section of the vademecum devoted to 1622 is not mentioned in the Princeton manuscript, the account of that year instead being given over to Isham’s account of her mother’s illness, alluded to in the vademecum with the statement that ‘my m was let blood’, and to a consideration of her own melancholy character.23 Events that become important within the context of the Princeton narrative are not necessarily those that had prominence when Isham was constructing a narrative sequence of the events that occurred in her life. Conversely, the vademecum provides tantalizing hints of other stories that Isham might have told. In the section for 1626, for example, she briefly notes, ‘here was an earthquake’, an event to which she does not even allude in the Princeton narrative.24 Similarly, in the entry for 1629 she recalls that ‘New England was now began to be spoken on’.25 References such as this provide a sense of engagement with the wider world that is largely absent from the Princeton manuscript. This suggests that these things are not a feature of the Princeton text, not because Isham was not aware of or interested in them, but because they did not suit the aims, agenda and guiding model on which she premised her composition. Taken together, the two documents provide evidence of the different ways in which a person might recall events in their life, depending on the set of criteria they set out to fulfil. In the Princeton manuscript Isham is very clear that it is her intention to: leave my mind to my friends when I die. to give them satisfaction. which I thought I ought to \doe/ especially to my father. \writ somwhat to/ which otherwise I could not so well expresse.26

Isham makes this statement while addressing one of the main themes of her text: her decision never to marry.27 Much of her narrative is devoted to recounting 21

Ibid., section 10. RTC01 no. 62, fol. 14v. 23 IL 3365, section 10. 24 Ibid., section 14. 25 Ibid., section 17. 26 RTC01 no. 62, fol. 30r. 27 For a detailed account of this theme in Isham’s narrative, see Stephens, ‘Courtship and Singlehood’. 22



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the various marriage negotiations and the treatment she received at the hands of her father, who attempted to coerce her with the threat of financial hardship. In recounting this information, she is careful not to criticize her father’s actions but she also clearly sets out her own thoughts and feelings about the issue, while explaining the role she considered God to have had in her decision. The narrative as a whole, with its attention to God’s direct intervention in her life and the demonstration it provides of her own careful theological enquiries, lends support to Isham’s attempt to clarify and justify her thoughts and actions. In the quotation above she expresses concern about her own ability to communicate these issues and the carefully crafted manuscript enables her to construct and present her views in as persuasive a manner as possible. Designed to be read after her death, it becomes an incontrovertible statement of her position. In order to reinforce the validity of her position with regards to marriage, Isham takes great care to present her argument as accurately and persuasively as possible. In the Princeton, or presentation, manuscript of her life, in addition to transcribing the draft sections in chronological order, Isham makes a series of additions and improvements. The spelling has been improved; ‘kieping’ becomes ‘keeping’, for example, and Isham has used one corner of the draft manuscript to practise alternative spellings.28 Words and phrases added in the margins are incorporated into their correct places within the main text. In her discussion of her grandmother’s distress at her father’s illness, for example, the statement that ‘I suppose she desired die afore him’ is transplanted from the margin; so that instead of Isham’s grandmother saying that she ‘wished she might not see him not to see us in that wreched stat wherein he \wee/ should have left us if he \had/ then died’, Isham says that she ‘wished that she might die afore him, I suppose she desired not to see us in that wreched stat wherein wee might have bine if he had then died’.29 Not all of the marginalia is transplanted and instead it is reproduced in the marginalia of the final text. Isham clearly had a concept of the information she intended her marginal notes to convey and it is generally domestic details. We are told, for example, that during one of her illnesses the doctor supplied her mother with ‘oyles to anoint her head but she neded them not’.30 That she went to the trouble of drafting her marginal notes contributes to the sense of the care and attention that Isham expended in compiling her autobiography. They also contribute a sense of completeness through generating the impression that no detail has been omitted. Isham has carefully filled every piece of available space in the margins to her text, reinforcing through the visual appearance of the volume the impression that her narrative is complete.

28 29 30

IC 4344, fol. 2r. RTC01 no. 62, fol. 14v. Ibid., fol. 14r.

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Isham provides a direct indication of the physical labour expended in copying out, correcting and compiling her text, a not inconsiderable labour in a time of ink pens and no electric light. Early in the volume she breaks off her own narrative with the statement: ‘I desire to refresh my selfe a little that I may runne with the greater speed.’31 She then embarks on a lengthy passage of praise and prayer, opening with the statement: ‘Happy are those that in the time of there health and prosperity thinke of thee my God.’ Prior to this statement she had recounted events from her childhood and had just begun to examine herself and to confess the sins evident in her childhood behaviour. The measured tones of her confessions are replaced with a more free-flowing and repetitive passage in which there are more frequent statements in parentheses, as though her thoughts were tumbling out in quick succession, and more mistakes and crossings-out. Throughout her text, Isham indulges in these passages of prayer, for which we have no rough drafts. It is possible that, in keeping with the organization of the extant draft sections, the passages were rehearsed thematically on a sheet of paper now lost. Alternatively, these sections, in which Isham ‘refreshes herself ’, represent a different, more spontaneous and less-labour intensive part of the composition process. Having broken off for refreshment, Isham returns to the task in hand by saying, ‘I returne from whence I di[ss]gressed.’32 Isham’s passage of prayer and celebration provides some indication of the spiritual, in addition to the physical labour expended in the composition of her narrative. Not only does it represent a break from the physical labour of copying out and correcting her drafts: she also makes an explicit statement of what it has cost her to expose her spiritual flaws in writing. She says that ‘though it irketh me to find my selfe a sinner, yet I withdraw not to confesse my owne unworthines’, a statement echoing an earlier resolution to ‘call to mind my overpassed impurities, and the fleshly corruptions of my soule; the burden there of doth make me feare to come before thee’.33 But she reminds herself that God ‘hath called unto him all that are wearey and heavy laden promissing to ease them’.34 Ashamed and oppressed by her own failings, Isham is motivated to confess them, specifically in textual form, so that she might be forgiven and so that she might ‘receive the reward promissed to thine elect’ (fol. 8r). The sins that Isham chooses to recount range from those connected to delightfully mischievous, familiar and everyday events to those that evidently caused her considerable distress. One particularly entertaining example is provided by an anecdote recounted from when she was approximately eight or nine years old. She says: 31 32 33 34

Ibid., fol. 7r. Ibid., fol. 8r. Ibid., fols. 7v, 2v. Ibid., fol. 2v.



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I removed into the chamber within my granmothers where my \littel/ cosin Thomas Ards lay. who though he was antoward in the day to my granmothers greffe; yet he was very fearefull in the night crying out in his sleepe and saying his prayers; and I called upon my Brother to rore as I did, to scare him.35

Isham provides a vivid account of her cousin who was naughty by day but terrified at night, possibly scared by the dark or by bad dreams. Rather than sympathize with her cousin, the young Isham conscripts her brother into making a noise to scare him, most probably so they could take amusement in his fright. Reflecting on her youthful actions, the older Isham turns to God, asking him to ‘pardon my faults and let not my unworthyness hinder my prairs’. Growing into her teens, Isham recounts several episodes that seem strikingly modern. She describes how, for example, her ‘father provided me a winter garment which I disliked because it was not so hansome as I would’ and goes on to recall how ‘I said it was like a sheapards cote. he answered if it were a tarbox it were good innough.’36 Again, on recognizing her sins, Isham turns to God, resolving ‘not to follow the extremity of fashions to set foorth my selfe. because thou Lord hadest given me enough to be content and not to be proud’. In these extracts, and there are many, many more like this in the text as a whole, Isham records details not usually found in autobiographical texts from the period, drawing attention to her particular attempt to expose a whole lifetime of sin. Apparently more trivial episodes are set side by side with more troubling events. Throughout her life Isham appears to have been afflicted by what she describes as: the sin of Atheisme which coolled my affections in thy [i.e. God’s] service tho I still followed it for I found my selfe happy in the custome of those good waies which I was loth at any time to violate.37

In providing accounts of her sinful actions from the minor to the more heinous, Isham generates the impression that she is being entirely candid and that the reader is being exposed to the full truth of her life. But she does herself add the qualifier to her protestations of truth that she is recalling the events of her life ‘as true as I could’, alerting her reader to the potential ways in which her text fails to meet this ideal. As we have already seen, there is much information that Isham has chosen to exclude from her narrative and it is useful to consider the factors that shaped her decisions about the material to include. In her account of ‘the 29 yeare’ of her life Isham provides a short list of texts that inspired her to begin writing the narrative of her life and it is possible to 35 36 37

Ibid., fol. 4r. Ibid., fol. 21r. Ibid., fol. 32v.

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see how their contents informed the process by which she composed her own volume, together with its final content. She describes how she: now of late \at last/ was imboldened by the sight of S Austi con and afore by Mr King lectur remember the lord and give him thankes. [lect] 28 and by the cure of cares to [ex][amine?] my life.38

In his twenty-eighth lecture upon the book of Jonah, which takes as its text 2. 7: ‘When my soule fainted within me, I remembered the Lorde, and my prair came unto thee into thine holy temple’, John King emphazises the role of memory in restoring hope to the afflicted soul.39 He sets out a process by which the fainting soul may be revived by the application of memory, asserting that: And for your better encouragemente to make use of memory, understand that it is a principall meanes to avoide desperation, onely to call to mind the goodnes of the Lord forepassed, either to our selves or others.40

In the extracts cited above, it is possible to see Isham engaging in this process of recalling God’s intervention in both her own life and those of her family members, specifically her father. As she emphasizes throughout the volume, the effort after memory plays a significant role in the production of her confessions. Similar advice is provided by Henry Mason in The Cure of Cares (1627) who, among the four principal rules for the alleviation of spiritual and worldly cares – ‘distraction’, ‘taking away of the cause’, ‘meditation’ and ‘turning to God for comfort’ – emphasizes the significance of meditating on ‘the sweet providence of our good God’.41 Also significant is his emphasis on ‘honest work’ as a means of distraction from worldly cares and on the value of turning to God and ‘in all our pensive thoughts wee goe to God for comfort, and still unloade our cares into his bosome by prair and supplication’.42 Isham’s autobiographical text therefore performs several functions; in her emphasis on the labour expended in its creation she reveals her reliance on the text as a form of work, one which allows her to meditate on God’s goodness and to relinquish her concerns about her own spiritual failings. But it is St Augustine and his Confessions, an English translation of which had been published in 1631, just a few years before she began composing her own 38

Ibid., fol. 33v note. J. King, Lectures Upon Jonas (Oxford, 1597), p. 369. There are several other editions but the 1597 version is preserved in the Lamport Hall library. I am grateful to Erica Longfellow for supplying this information. 40 Ibid., p. 382. 41 H. Mason, The Cure of Cares (London, 1627), p. 30. 42 Ibid., p. 26. 39



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confessional text, that feature most prominently in Isham’s text.43 Throughout her volume, she makes numerous references to this text in ways that provide evidence of the role Augustine’s words had in her daily life. Isham turns to Augustine, for example, when seeking to resolve certain, often theological, issues in her own mind. In one example she writes: ‘whereby I understood the blessed Trinity (by reading) also since I receved much comfort consern this in S Aust’.44 In other examples, Isham remembers her reading of Augustine at moments when she requires guidance. In one account, aware that she has been desiring too much from God on behalf of her friends, she notes that ‘the desire of S Austin hath often run in my head who saith. teach me to aske those things thou mayest grant’.45 Elsewhere, Isham uses Augustine to verbalize the thoughts and feelings she wants to express. In one extract, giving thanks for her brother’s children, she writes: ‘herein I conclud with the words of S Aust Good Lord such blessings hast thou given us in this life. which being well spent. may be profitable to us in time to come’.46 Augustine’s text has a very practical role in Isham’s life and her comments suggest that in addition to turning to the volume in times of need she assimilated much of its contents into her own mind and used his comments as a means of understanding and living through events she encountered. The ways in which Augustine’s Confessions shaped Isham’s conception of her own life can be seen in the way many of the events and themes of his text are replicated in Isham’s own. One of the most striking examples is provided by an episode in which Isham recounts the theft of some pears from her mother’s cupboard, an event that echoes a similar occurrence in Augustine’s text. Augustine describes how: A Peare-tree there was in the Orchyard next our Vineyard, well laden with fruit, not much tempting either for colour or taste. To the shaking and robbing of this, a company of lewd yong fellowes of us went, late one night, (having, according to our idle custome in the Game-places, continued our sports even till that season) thence carryed we huge loadings, not for our lickerishnesse, but even to fling to the Hogs, having bitten off one piece.47

Isham records two similar events. First she describes how:

43 W. Watts, Saint Augustine’s Confessions Translated (London, 1631). This translation is cited throughout. 44 RTC01 no. 62, fol. 28v. 45 Ibid., fol. 33v. 46 Ibid., fol. 43r. 47 Watts, Confessions, p. 79.

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a lickorishnesse stole upon me to open my mothers cobord, she letting me have a nether roome of it to myselfe, I longed to trie whether I could open it with my key, which when I had found the way of it I tooke fruite from thence, my mother having charged me with it I flatly denied it.48

She then provides an account of a time when, she says: my mother let me keepe a closet to my selfe, wherein I kept pares to dish out for the table, my father injoining me that I should eate no pares but they tempting me every time I saw them. I should take one having som regard to my fathers command; thinking that if I offended not in the number I did well enough.

The similarities between these accounts are apparent even at the level of vocabulary, with Isham picking up on the use of the word ‘lickerishnesse’ to describe her appetite for the pears, an appetite Augustine claims was absent from his own actions. But it is also possible to see how Isham adapted her reading to suit her own situation and circumstances. While Augustine’s actions take place in an open and public world of orchards and ‘lewd yong fellowes’, Isham’s theft is a covert affair that first of all takes place in her mother’s cupboard and later in her own closet. Similar differences can also be detected in the way each writer responds to his or her youthful misdemeanours. Augustine’s account suggests he gave little thought to his actions until much later in life. After this account he boldly and openly declares to God ‘Now (behold) let my heart tell thee’ and confesses that his actions signalled a ‘shrinking backe thus from my holdfast upon thee, even to utter destruction’. In contrast Isham was immediately tormented by her own internal conscience and she reminds God that he ‘gavest me feare of thee in these times’. Her means of recourse from this guilt and fear was to retire to her closet to read and to pray, and she concludes her account with the statement: ‘I praise thee my God, for the good things I learnt in my testament and for writing nots [notes] out of it.’ For Augustine the act of textual confession was a retrospective and definitive event but for Isham reading and writing were an ongoing and central part of her spiritual life. While the pear-stealing incidents provide a very definite point of comparison between Augstine’s Confessions and Isham’s ‘Rememberances’, other similarities are apparent on a much more general level. Most obviously, Isham’s proposed attempt to reveal all of the sins of her life has its origins in Augustine’s own project to confess his shortcomings. There are also significant stylistic similarities between the two texts. These are most apparent in the decision made by each author to address their narratives directly to God while also seeking to appeal to and to educate an earthly readership. Significant differences between the Northamptonshire draft manuscript and the fair Princeton volume reveal 48

RTC01 no. 62, fol. 10r.



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the ways in which Isham altered her text in order to accommodate the demands placed on it by her awareness of these different audiences. While the Northampton manuscript is written about God, the Princeton version, as the quotation above indicates, is addressed to God. In the Northamptonshire draft manuscript Isham includes the statement: ‘if wee should see any part of that immortall glory it might make our flesh weary /impatient\ of this pilgramage which G hath aloted for us.’49 But in the Princeton manuscript this same sentence is altered to: ‘if wee shoud see any part of that immortall glory it might make our flesh impatient of this pilgrimage which thou Lord hast aloted for us.’50 The rigour and consistency with which she applied this decision to her presentation volume can be seen in the occasional slip she makes in the mode of address. She writes, for example, ‘I praise my God, for the good things I learnt in my testament’, and has to correct herself by inserting the word ‘thee’ above the line so that the sentence reads: ‘I praise thee my God, for the good things I learnt in my testament.’51 This suggests that throughout her rough notes, Isham referred to God in the third person and that in the act of composing the final text she emended the draft as she went along. Occasionally, a lapse in concentration may have led to these mistakes. All of this indicates that at some point during the composition of her text, possibly between the writing of the draft sections and the compilation of the final version, Isham made a very conscious decision to address her text directly to God. Isham’s decision to address God directly has significant implications for the text as a whole, and a clear example of this can be seen in the way she becomes more hesitant in her assertions, adding clauses such as ‘I suppose’ to previously more assertive statements. Discussing her father’s illness, in the Northamptonshire manuscript she notes treatment ‘whereby he was somewhat eased and me\n/ded by degrees’.52 In the Princeton manuscript, this is altered to: ‘whereby (as I suppose) he was somwhat eased and mended by degrees’.53 Another example of such hesitancy can be found in a passage already explored. Discussing her grandmother’s distress at her father’s illness, in the Northamptonshire manuscript Isham writes: ‘my G wished she might not see him not to see us in that wreched stat wherein he \wee/ should have left us if he \had/ then died’.54 In the Princeton manuscript this is expanded to: ‘my Granmother wished that she might die afore him, I suppose she desired not to see us in

49 50 51 52 53 54

IC 4344, fol. 1v. RTC01 no. 62, fol. 31r. Ibid., fol. 10r. IC 4344, fol. 1v. RTC01 no. 62, fol. 12r. IC 4344, fol. 1v.

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that wreched stat wherein wee might have bine if he had then died’.55 Isham’s rewriting suggests that her grandmother did not express direct concern of the consequences of her son’s death but instead expressed her wish to die before such an event should occur; the rest of her statement is rewritten as Isham’s speculation. The moderations made by Isham draw attention to the difficulty of her attempt to reveal the truth about her life. Like Isham, Augustine is wary of making inappropriate statements about the truth and he states that he hopes the ‘impertinency be somewhat moderated, by the addition of this word, perhaps’.56 Through the act of addressing their texts to God, both writers are made aware that theirs is a subjective form of truth. Referring to her ‘Booke of Rememberance’, Isham writes: ‘nither doe I this as if thou knewest not \all/ my God’.57 Similarly, Augustine notes that to God ‘the bottome of mans Conscience is layd bare’ and he asks ‘what can bee hidden in mee though I would not confesse it’.58 Aware that God knows everything, both writers express their lack of confidence in the versions they present of their own lives. When recalling, in note form, episodes from her own life, Isham is apparently not so cautious as she is when framing her narrative as a direct address to God. In adding qualifications to her writing, Isham draws attention to her desire for truth but also to the many ways in which her text may fail to meet that ideal; there are some things she cannot know and about which she is only able to speculate. At the start of his text, Augustine is keen to highlight the fact that his confessions are addressed directly to God, a point he makes explicit in his introduction with the statement that: ‘This worke beginneth thus: “Great art thou, O Lord”.’59 He goes on to remark that his confessions ‘both of my sinnes, and good deedes, do prayse God’.60 In similarly presenting her own life to God, Isham is performing an equivalent act of devotion, for her made more significant by the labour she expends in the act of composition. Augustine points to the further significance of this act when he writes of the power of his confessions to excite his own mind and affection towards God. He states that ‘they wrought this effect when I wrote them, and so they yet do, when now I read them’.61 This points to the significance of the process of composition, not simply as a means to an end (in the form of a polished text) but as a significant act of devotion. We can speculate that for Isham, each draft of her text, drawing on 55 56 57 58 59 60 61

RTC01 no. 62, fol. 14v. Watts, Confessions, sig. A6v. RTC01 no. 62, fol. 7v. Watts, Confessions, p. 568. Ibid., sig. A6v. Ibid. Ibid.



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the combined practices of writing and reading, was a means of exciting her own mind and affection towards God. For Isham therefore, this creative process, one we associate with the composition and craft of a literary work, is not prior to the existence of the final text but is integral to it. The final volume draws attention to the long work of labour that went into its composition and as readers we are required to acknowledge this process. The issue of audience, both for Augustine and Isham, is not however straightforward. Augustine notes that in addition to voicing his praise of God his text is designed to ‘excite both affections, and understanding of man towards him’.62 More specifically he states that his confessions ‘do much please many of my brethren’. He has a dual audience in mind: God and his earthly readers. Similarly, Isham’s text is designed both as her own spiritual examination before God and to provide edification for those family members reading her text after her death. She states for example that ‘this and other workes of my calling’ have been prepared ‘both for my owne wellbeing and others’.63 She then tailors the content of her text to accommodate her earthly audience. Several sentences in the Northamptonshire manuscript have been excluded from the Princeton text, and many of these contain less than complimentary references to several members of her family, including her sister Judith Isham and her own father. She writes, for example, ‘my S [Iudith??] [seemed] to blame my mother for malancoly yet she tasted of the same cup her selfe’ and later adds that ‘my father seem[ed] to love or make more of my sister Judith than of my selfe’.64 It is therefore possible to see that Isham’s dual audience begins to diverge: that which is acknowledged before God in the rough notes is not included in the text officially designated for the eyes of her surviving family. The caution expressed with statements such as ‘I suppose’ points not only to her awareness of a transcendent divine truth but also to the competing subjective truths of those family members comprising potential future readers of her text. A similar act of self-censorship can be seen in a surviving letter that Isham addressed to an anonymous suitor.65 In what appears to be a final draft of the letter she tells the unfortunate gentleman that if he forgets his love for her then ‘The Sun of Devine truth will apeare more Cleare not being interposed by any earthly Object’. In contrast to the spiritual, almost poetic nature of these lines a rough note on the back of the letter states: ‘if their remain in you any tho[ughts] of carnall affectio[n] I wish you may suppress them’. In these examples it is possible to catch a glimpse of a different aspect of Isham’s character. She expresses thoughts and opinions later excised from those texts designed to 62 63 64 65

Ibid. RTC01 no. 62, fol. 8r. IC 4344, fol. 2r. Northamptonshire Record Office, IC 4336.

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be read by an external audience. In her spiritual autobiography, this dual focus on, and careful consideration of, audience complicates Isham’s presentation of the ‘truth’ of her life to God. While reworking and rewriting her ‘hewen’ text may have been a means by which Isham sought to attain a form of truth for her narrative, it was also a means by which she was able to revise and censor it. The labour of drafting and rewriting that Isham expends in her text can in itself be linked to the writings of Augustine. Within her narrative a significant number of the quotations that Isham reproduces from her predecessor’s text pertain to the value of hard work. Referring specifically to the production of her confessional text she notes that: I thought to have don it afore [Ester] but I [saved? it fore otherwise] being about a yere and a half since I begun [it] but S Aust [says?] the vertue of good worke is perseveren[ce] and my God thou hast [quitt]ed me for this.66

Isham references a statement made by Augustine in his Prayers, a text which, in addition to the Confessions, she regularly cites. In a passage headed ‘A Devout praier for grace and praise and to thanke the Lord dulie for his benefits’, Augustine notes that ‘the virtue of a good work is perseverance’.67 This comment appears in the midst of Augustine’s consideration of the actions of godly women, specifically of those women, depicted in Matthew 28. 1 and Mark 16. 1, who persevered in their visits to Christ’s tomb despite opposition from those around them. Isham’s subtle modification of this statement so that it pertains to ‘good worke’ rather than ‘a good work’ provides a reminder that she considers the construction of her own confessions to be a work of ongoing labour, rather than a single notable action, or set of actions. Evidence of the ongoing nature of Isham’s spiritual labours is provided by the extent to which she returned to both versions of her text, even after the completion of the fair-copy volume. In the fair-copy volume, Isham provides, for example, various alternative words; in many places a synonym has been inserted above the original word without the original word being crossed out. Examples of this practice are numerous and they include the statements: I call to mind the evill enclinations of my Childhod being to subject to covet \or desire/ after vane things.68

66 67

168. 68

RTC01 no. 62, fol. 34r note. T. Rogers, A Right Christian Treatise, entitled Saint Augustine’s Praiers (London, 1581), p. RTC01 no. 62, fol. 4v.



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I praise thee my God, which hath put into my heart \mind/ to meditate of these things.69 I suppose that want of love \or charity/ is the cause that many forbare to confesse there faults one to another.70

In each of these examples the word (or words) in slashes have been written in superscript above the word immediately preceding it (or them). In each instance, the different words, appearing in the neat hand Isham uses throughout the fair-copy manuscript, are left to stand as two subtly different alternative readings. Traditionally, this was conventional practice used as a means by which a scribe, who was not the original author, could include revisions, reflect his or her uncertainty about a reading, or provide an alternative reading derived from a different source text.71 But for Isham it is a way of more tightly honing her own language and of attempting to express the truth of her life ever more clearly. The presence of two, subtly different readings draws attention to the inadequacy of words to convey the truth of what she wants to write but it means we are left with a clearer sense of the meaning towards which she strived. An equally interesting issue is raised by notes that appear in a very small version of Isham’s usual hand and in ink that is considerably darker than that used in the main text. Notes in this form appear in the marginalia of both the Northamptonshire and the Princeton manuscripts. This script appears in Isham’s hand but it is distinctively different from the main body of both texts. It would seem that Isham returned to both of her texts after she had completed the composition of the Princeton manuscript. This is possibly a means by which she continued her confessional project to reveal everything before God: things later recalled were incorporated where there was space. Within his own Confessions, Augustine quotes John 3. 21, addressing God with the statement that ‘thou hast loved truth, and he that does so, commeth to the light.’72 For him, the revelation of the truth is a means of coming closer to the ultimate truth of salvation through God. Augustine says that he will achieve this through ‘the confession of my heart; and in my writing, before many witnesses’. Similarly, while Isham may not be able to supply a completely accurate rendition of her life, she is able to invest spiritual and physical effort in the ongoing attempt to perfect her narrative and to present the truth of her life in her writing.

69

Ibid., fol. 8r. Ibid., fol. 9r. 71 For a description of this practice, see the entry on ‘Scribal Errors’ in P. Beal, A Dictionary of English Manuscript Terminology 1450–2000 (Oxford, 2008), p. 360. 72 Watts, Confessions, p. 568. 70

Anna Bayman

Female Voices in Early Seventeenth Century Pamphlet Literature

T

he querelle des femmes, a literary debate between detractors and defenders of women, had a long pedigree. Formalized classical and medieval debates fed the artful exchanges of humanists, in which the nature of women became a subject for displays of rhetorical skill. Biblical and early Christian exempla were deployed by early modern contributors to the querelle alongside material drawn from romance literature, popular traditions of misogyny and the ‘battle of the sexes’ (in which the ‘shrew-taming’ material ranks as some of the most ­notorious), and from the related debate over the respective benefits of married and single life.1 The querelle attracted contributions that ranged from the learned, aimed at an audience well versed in humanist scholarship, to the unashamedly popular, which sought a far wider and less well educated readership. That readership was increasingly, over the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, courted by printed pamphlets; and the starting point for this essay is a pamphlet that sits squarely towards the populist end of the querelle’s spectrum: Joseph Swetnam’s The Araignment of lewde, idle, froward, and unconstant women of 1615. Swetnam’s text is notorious for its scurrilous and titillating style, admitting its own incontinence and choler in a bid to attract a readership excited by provocative misogyny. His use of a style and form intended to engage

1 See Women Defamed and Women Defended: An Anthology of Medieval Texts, ed. A.  Blamires, with K. Pratt and C. W. Marx (Oxford, 1992); L. Woodbridge, Women and the English Renaissance: Literature and the Nature of Womankind, 1540–1620 (Brighton, 1984); B. F. Henderson and K. U. McManus, Half Humankind: Contexts and Texts of the Controversy about Women in England, 1540–1640 (Urbana IL, 1985), esp. pp. 3–20; D. Purkiss, ‘Material Girls: The Seventeenth-Century Woman Debate’, in Women, Texts and Histories 1575–1760, ed. C. Brant and D. Purkiss (London, 1992), pp. 69–101; J. Raymond, Pamphlets and Pamphleteering in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge, 2003), pp. 279–81. On the long tradition of ‘shrew-taming’ (and with some very interesting comment on the gendering of the shrew) see H. Crocker, ‘Engendering Shrews, Mediaeval to Early Modern’, in Gender and Power in Shrew-Taming Narratives, 1500–1700, ed. D. Wootton and G. Holderness (Basingstoke, 2010).

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a wide vernacular readership raised particular challenges for the defenders of women, and in particular for defences authored by women. Swetnam’s work opened a new chapter in the English querelle: three further pamphlets were printed in 1617 in direct response to his attack on women. While Swetnam’s work owed a great deal to the conventions of the debate, there was something quite unusual about the printed responses: all three appeared under women’s names. Women, among whom the prolific fifteenthcentury author Christine de Pisan is the best known, had written before in their own defence, especially in manuscript publication. The respondents to Swetnam – Rachel Speght, Ester Sowernam and Constantia Munda – were, however, among the very first female voices to use the printed pamphlet form to this end. There was probably only one English precedent, an Elizabethan pamphleteer known as Jane Anger.2 These pamphlets have received a great deal of critical attention as a result. Of their authors, we know little in the cases of Ester Sowernam and Constantia Munda. The names are obviously pseudonyms, and there is no compelling reason to think either that they were, or were not, actually written by women. Elizabeth Clarke has proposed Anne Southwell as a possible Munda, but we cannot securely identify any further works by the same writers.3 In the case of Jane Anger, it is not even certain whether her name was pseudonymous, but its structure certainly fits with the conventions taken up by later female pseudonyms (including John Taylor’s creations Mary Tattle-well and Joan Hit-him-home).4 Rachel Speght stands out among female pamphlet writers of the period in asserting her own identity, and she is the only one of those who responded to Swetnam to whom we can attribute further publication. Of Swetnam we also know more: two years after the Araignment he published a fencing manual, The schoole of the noble and worthy science of defence, which has been taken to provide some clues as to his identity (although we should perhaps take his claim that he tutored Prince Henry with a pinch of salt). A play, Swetnam the Woman-Hater, apparently accepts (and mocks) Swetnam’s claims that he ran a fencing school on the Continent. A daughter has been identified, and it seems that Swetnam died abroad in 1621.5

2 Raymond, Pamphlets and Pamphleteering, pp. 277–8; on the rarity of female print publication in the early seventeenth century, see also P. Crawford, ‘Women’s Published Writings, 1600–1700’, in Women in English Society 1500–1800, ed. M. Prior (London, 1985), pp. 211–31. 3 E. Clarke, ‘Anne Southwell and the Pamphlet Debate: The Politics of Gender, Class and Manuscript’, in Debating Gender in Early Modern England, ed. C. Malcolmson and M. Suzuki (New York, 2002), pp. 37–53. 4 Her DNB biographer argues the case for female authorship; Joad Raymond for male (Pamphlets and Pamphleteering, p. 283). 5 F. W. Van Heertum, A Critical Edition of Joseph Swetnam’s The araignment of lewd, idle, froward and unconstant women (1615) (Nijmegen, 1989).

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This I alleage as a paradigmatical patterne for all women, noble & ignoble to follow, that they be not enflamed with choler against this our enraged adversarie, but patiently consider of him according to the portraiture which he hath drawne of himselfe.6

In the dedicatory epistle to her pamphlet A mouzell for Melastomus, Rachel Speght thus urged patience, not anger, as the appropriate response to Swetnam’s Araignment. She also demonstrates the strong use of the first person as the dominant authorial style in pamphlet literature, which was predicated upon the convention that each pamphlet was written to express a personal viewpoint. However, both the name adopted by the author and the ‘voice’ construed by the writing were often fictional constructs, intended to make their own contribution to the pamphlet’s impact. Speght’s rarity, in writing under her own name in early seventeenth century print, makes the manner of her response to Swetnam especially significant. This essay will set Speght’s work in the context of other ‘female’ voices in the pamphlet querelle des femmes, looking at the ways in which female-voiced print could be constructed. Did pamphlet literature provide a space for women to assert some form of power or were female voices simply contained within a dominant misogynist discourse? Did ‘female’ writers seek to display their difference from male ones or did they appropriate male modes? It will be argued that we should contextualize this gender debate within the rise of pamphleteering more generally in order to understand its effects. If we address the querelle as a subset of broader developments in pamphlet literature, we find that the opportunities offered by print for female voices were the product of a more general trend, and that particular types of female voice found especially strong expression in pamphlets. Jane Anger’s extraordinary earlier contribution to the querelle might explain why Speght recommended patience rather than ‘enflamed choler’ in her introduction (quoted above). Jane Anger her protection for women was published in 1589 apparently in response to another pamphlet, now lost, that attacked women using the conceit of a complaint about a surfeit of their kindness.7 Anger constantly plays with her readers’ awareness that women were not encouraged to express forceful opinions or ‘masculine’ emotions. Defending her intervention in the debate, she describes her book as ‘that which my cholloricke vaine 6

R. Speght, A mouzell for Melastomus (London, 1617), sig. A4. The most likely candidate for the work of the ‘Surfeiter’ is a lost text called Boke his surfeyt in love, which title was entered in the Stationers’ Register in 1588. See H. A. Kahin, ‘Jane Anger and John Lyly’, Modern Language Quarterly 8 (1947), 1–35. Kahin thinks that Anger may be responding to Lyly, perhaps transmitted via the Surfeiter, although the literary connections she suggests are not all that strong. See also Woodbridge, Women and the English Renaissance, p. 63. Woodbridge does not accept Kahin’s argument. 7



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hath rashly set downe … it was ANGER that did write it’.8 Anger’s first ‘epistle’ is dedicated to Gentlewomen, and makes some apology for choleric outspokenness by a female. But her second goes on to place the blame on ‘railing’ male speech: Fie on the falshoode of men, whose minds goe off a madding, & whose tongues can not so soone be wagging, but straight they fal a railing … shall not Anger stretch the vaines of her braines, the stringes of her fingers, and the listes of her modestie, to answere theire Surfeitings: Yes truely.9

Anger is, then, answering the Surfeiter in his own vein, rather than taking the ‘patient’ road preferred by Speght. This allows her to play him at his own game, exploiting the comic potential in the discourse, but it also enables her readers to laugh at her, as well as at the Surfeiter; and it confirms the misogynist reading of women who speak out as shrewish. Her ‘female’ speech is both comically baffling and knowing in its echoes of logical, scholastic discourse: give me leave like a scoller to prove our wisdome more excellent then theirs, though I never knew what sophistry ment. Ther is no wisdome but it comes by grace, this is a principle, & Contra principium non est disputandum: but grace was first given to a woman, because to our lady: which premises conclude that women are wise. Now Primus est optimum, & therefore women are wiser then men. That we are more witty which comes by nature, it cannot better be proved, then that by our answers, men are often droven to Non plus.10

Anger thus allows her readers to respond to her voice in varied and competing ways: her speech is disorderly, but therein lies its efficacy (and its humour). She encourages her readers to react in the same complex way to the Surfeiter. They are asked to ‘beare with the olde Lover his surfeit, because hee was diseased when he did write it, and peradventure hereafter, when he shal be well amended, he will repent himselfe of his slanderous speeches … and make a publique recantation’. The reader is then, however, instructed to disbelieve his putative recantation, ‘for although a jade may be still in a stable when his gall backe is healed, yet he will showe himselfe in his kind when he is traveiling: and mans flattery bites secretly.’11 If Jane Anger was written by a woman, she deliberately played with normal expectations of a ‘feminine’ mode of expression. Many other defence texts that

8

Jane Anger, sig. A2. Ibid., sig. A2v. 10 Ibid., sig. C2. 11 Ibid., sig. D1. The horse galled and angered by the saddle is a common trope in the pamphlets. 9

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adopted female speaking positions and pseudonyms were written by men. Jane drops hints that she has connections to the author of the lost text, telling her readers that she will supply further advice from him: ‘if you listen, the Surfeiter his pen with my hande shall foorthwith shew you.’12 The ‘Jo. A.’ whose name is appended to the poem that concludes the work might be a deliberate slip to point to male authorship.13 Jane Anger offered a model for a female voice in a printed ‘defence’ pamphlet, but it was not a straightforward one. Rachel Speght sought a quite different form of female speech. Speght was unusually well educated and had connections to the burgeoning world of print publication. Her father, a London Calvinist minister, wrote religious works and was involved in book-licensing, and she may have been a relative of the Thomas Speght who edited Chaucer.14 Her tone is careful and controlled; as we have seen, she prefers reasoned engagement with the text of her ‘adversarie’ to choleric rebuttal. Biblical exegesis and extensive use of many of the formal conventions of the debate – both of which demonstrate her learning – counter the idle wastefulness of Swetnam’s text.15 Speght’s refusal to adopt the scurrilous tone of her ‘adversarie’ had precedent. Some defences of women written from the more conventional male perspective also adopted a sober tone, rejecting the trivializing wit that typified many contributions. Examples of such works are Asylum veneris (1616), by one ‘D.T.’ (sometimes identified as Daniel Turvil), and Christopher Newstead’s Apology for women (1620). There was, however, more at stake here for Speght than for Newstead and D.T., since she was vulnerable to the attacks on uncontrolled female loquacity that were a mainstay of the misogynist discourse. Anger had

12 Ibid., sig. C4v. A number of pamphleteers wrote both attacks and defences, including: [E. Gosynhyll?], The schole house of women [1541] (Kahin, ‘Jane Anger and John Lyly’, p. 31, suggests that Gosynhyll may have written this); E. Gosynhyll, The prayse of all women [1542]; C. Pyrrye, The praise and dispraise of women (1569); [ J. Taylor], A juniper lecture (1639); [ J. Taylor], Divers crabtree lectures [1639]; [ J. Taylor?] The womens sharpe revenge (1640). Simon Shepherd, among others, has put together a case for Taylor’s authorship of the last in The Womens Sharpe Revenge: Five Women’s Pamphlets from the Renaissance, ed. S. Shepherd (London, 1985), pp. 160–1. John Lyly also wrote on both sides of the question: see Kahin, ‘Jane Anger and John Lyly’, p. 31. 13 Jane Anger, sigs. D1v–D2. Anger’s biographer for the DNB suggests that ‘Jo. A.’ might be a relative or spouse (A. Lake Prescott, ‘Anger, Jane (fl. 1588)’, Oxford DNB (Oxford, 2004), [http:// www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/39675]). 14 The Polemics and Poems of Rachel Speght, ed. B. K. Lewalski (Oxford, 1996), pp. xi–xiv, xxviii–xxix. 15 Lewalski comments that Speght ‘breaks the mold’ of the ‘rhetorical gamesmanship’ that characterized the querelle, in turning to the much more serious task of biblical exegesis to make her case (Polemics and Poems, p. xxi); Woodbridge remarks on Speght’s use of exhortatory discourse as an effective rhetorical strategy against Swetnam’s flippancy, and also notes her retention of aspects of the educated debate (Women and the English Renaissance, esp. pp. 87–92).



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played with these, but Speght did as much as she could to resist the characterization of her voice as shrewish. Rather than respond in kind to Swetnam and risk Anger’s choleric stridency, Speght seeks to hoist him with his own petard, inviting her readers to ‘patiently consider of him according to the portraiture which he hath drawne of himselfe, his Writings being the very embleme of a monster’. Swetnam, in her account, can be proved wrong – is wrong – not just because his arguments are fallacious but also because his technique and manner are at fault.16 Swetnam had in fact anticipated this strategy. His first introductory epistle, echoing Jane Anger, depicts his work as both an idle pastime and the product of a temper: Musing with my selfe being idle … and I being in a great chollor against some women … in the ruffe of my fury, taking my pen in hand to begild the time withal, indeed I might have imployed my selfe to better use then in such an idle business.

Swetnam then goes further and (in a brazen attempt to have his cake and eat it) suggests that he is already beginning to repent: when I first began to write this booke, my witts were gone a wooll-gathering … when my fury was a little past, I began to consider the blasphemy of this infamous booke against your sectes; I then tooke my pen and cut him in twenty peeces, and had it not beene for hurting my selfe, I would have cut my owne fingers which held my pen.17

Swetnam, a caricature of the misogynistic railer, is marked by his excessive speech. In the remainder of his introductory material, we find further substantial parallels with Jane Anger. Like her, Swetnam did not rest content with an acknowledgement of his choleric excesses, but supplemented his contrite introductory epistle with a considerably less diffident introduction to a new group of readers. This was in line with the convention of including an epistle to the dedicatee(s) and another to a more general reader, each taking the appropriate tone.18 Swetnam’s first apologetic epistle addresses the ‘common sort of women’; his second, to men, invites them to a ‘Bear-bayting of women’, and suggests that

16 Raymond comments that the ‘crux of the confrontation’ between Swetnam and the three responses was ‘decorous speaking’ (Pamphlets and Pamphleteering, pp. 286, 289–90). 17 Swetnam, Araignment, first epistle, sigs. A2–A3. 18 Raymond notes that all the contributions to this exchange have separate prefaces to male and female groups of readers (Pamphlets and Pamphleteering, pp. 285–6).

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it may be wise ‘to drive all women out of my hearing’, although it also declares him unafraid of the inevitable sharp response from them.19 Two further responses to Swetnam were published in the same year as Speght’s work, and both of these reject the measured tone recommended by Speght. They prefer a livelier and at times strident engagement with the Araignment, reminiscent of Jane Anger’s style. The first of these responses was Ester Sowernam’s Ester hath hang’d Haman. The ambivalent authorial identity signified by the pseudonym, which is clearly calculated as a reproach to the sourness of Swetnam’s text, belying the ‘sweet’ in his name, is further unsettled by the title page’s riddle: Sowernam is ‘neither Maide, Wife nor Widdowe, yet really all’. The first part of the pamphlet is sober enough, although there is some internal contradiction. The text and the persona are then complicated by the introduction of strikingly different voices. The second part starts with a new epistle, in which Sowernam declares she will give up the restraint of the first section: ‘Now I am determined to solace my selfe with a little libertie.’20 It consists principally of a description of Swetnam’s imagined trial, in which Swetnam is indicted ‘For that thou the twentieth day of December, in the yeare &c. diddest most wickedly, blasphemously, falsly and scandalously publish a lewd Pamphlet’.21 Swetnam refuses to engage with the trial; it turns out that he is in fact impotent as a public speaker. Ester is reclaiming vocal dexterity for the defenders of women, and the fluent, rapid movement from one register to another in the remainder of the pamphlet asserts female vocal superiority. The ‘Enditement’ of Swetnam is light and witty; the next section, Ester’s speech to the court, rants and resorts to the attack methods of the shrew – personal insult, especially – and then shifts again to present a tightly structured and earnest answer to Swetnam’s arguments. The pamphlet ends with a poem signed ‘Ioane Sharpe’, who echoes the sentiments of the body of the work but is stylistically quite different from the prosy Ester. The effect is unnerving, as volatile, unstable female voices both counteract and confirm the misogynistic stereotypes. The third response to Swetnam published in 1617 was The worming of a mad dogge: Or, a soppe for Cerberus the jaylor of hell by Constantia Munda. Munda acknowledges, in her first epistle (dedicated to her mother, Prudentia Munda) that her work, like Swetnam’s, is imperfect: she is waiting for ‘the second birth 19

Swetnam, Araignment, second epistle, sig. A3v; Constantia Munda picks up on the contradiction of a ‘bear-baiting’ of women who have already been driven away. Swetnam’s analogy for writing was used by Thomas Dekker in A strange horse-race (1613), where he tells us that ‘hee is tyed to a stake like a Beare to be baited that comes into Paules Church-yard to bee read’ (sig. A3). 20 Ester Sowernam, Ester hath hang’d Haman (London, 1617), p. 16. 21 Ibid., p. 29.



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of education [to] perfect me’. Using the same terms as Swetnam, she offers the book as ‘Some trifling minutes I vainely did bestow’. There is some shame at stooping to Swetnam’s level: ‘This is the worst disgrace that can be had / A Ladies daughter worm’d a dog that’s mad.’ But for the most part Munda writes with assurance and confidence; she is relentlessly verbose but elegant and witty. She vigorously asserts her right to speak out in response to Swetnam in the second epistle, which is addressed to him. She remarks that ‘female modesty hath confin’d our rarest and ripest wits to silence’, which ‘wee acknowledge … our greatest ornament’, but when ‘too much provoked’ the ‘opportunity of speaking slipt by silence, is as bad as importunity upheld by babling’.22 Her text is more uniform than those of Sowernam, Swetnam and Anger, but it is not the sober defence of Speght, either. Her strategy is to pile up a dazzling array of comic images in the attack on Swetnam and his ilk.23 A climactic passage exemplifies her rapid-fire approach, as Swetnam’s own metaphors are turned against him: Sometimes you make me burst out with laughter, when I see your contradictions of your selfe … you beginne as if you were wont to runne up and downe the Countrey with Beares at your taile … Now you suppose to your selfe the giddy-headed young men are flockt together … In sted of bringing your Beares out to the stake, you say, I thinke it were not amisse to drive all women out of my hearing … You promise your spectators the Beare-baiting of women, and yet you thinke it not amisse to drive all women out of your hearing; so that none but your self the ill-favoured Hunckes is left in the Beare-garden to make your invited guests merry: whereupon it may very likely be, the eager young men being not willing to be guld and cheated of their money they paid for their roome, set their dogges at you, amongst whom Cerberus that hell-hound appeared, and you bit off one of his heads.24

But even the accomplished Munda fails to sustain the consistency that marks the body of her work. The pamphlet ends with a male voice, ‘transcribing some verses that a Gentleman wrote to such a one as your selfe’, rather against the grain of her assertions that women are justified in publicly answering ­Swetnam.25 Swetnam uses one of the most perfidious of the commonplaces of misogynistic discourse, claiming that he has repented, but publishing none the less, 22

Constantia Munda, The worming of a mad dogge: Or, a soppe for Cerberus the jaylor of hell, (London, 1617), p. 5. 23 Clarke, ‘Anne Southwell and the Pamphlet Debate’, esp. p. 50, stresses Munda’s accomplishment and her capacity to turn the misogynist ‘discourse of the commonplace’ to the defence of women. 24 Munda, Worming of a mad dogge, pp. 24–5. Swetnam had referred to Cerberus as ‘twoheaded’; in later editions (from 1622) this was amended. 25 Munda, Worming of a mad dogge, p. 34.

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while insisting that it was all just a joke. He reassures those men who have already married that they should merely ‘take it merrily, and to esteeme this booke only as the toyes of an idle head’.26 Munda refuses to accept this: ‘words make worse wounds than swords … Your idoll muse, and musing being idle (as your learned Epistle beginneth) shall be no plea to make your viperous scandals seeme pleasing.’27 But she too faces the problem that she needs to hold the attention of her – and his – readers in order to answer him effectively. The popularity of misogyny (she remarks that it is ‘a pleasing theme to the vulgar’) must be countered in equally entertaining rebuttals.28 As in Swetnam’s, much of the attraction of her work lies in playful riffing on other contributions to the debate (as for example in her punning on Swetnam’s choler and ruff, that picks up on his own version of this joke).29 Speght cannot (and does not want to) achieve the same kind of appeal that Anger, Swetnam, Sowernam and Munda all sought, because she insists on maintaining her intellectual integrity and the agency she allocates to the female voice by refusing to stoop to the level of the comic detractors. But was she right to imply that choleric, partial reaction compromised the female-voiced defence of women? Could there have been more to this element of the defence than entertainment? The timing of Anger’s pamphlet is very suggestive: her response to the ‘Surfeiter’ utilizes a strategy that was forced, and legitimated, by the ongoing Martin Marprelate controversy. Pamphlets attacking the episcopal hierarchy, written under the pseudonym of Martin Marprelate and published from an illegal press, had been circulating since 1588.30 Alarmingly, from the perspective of the government, they targeted a popular audience, reportedly becoming a remarkable sensation, through their use of scurrilous and comical personal attack and their presentation in short pamphlet form. Marprelate deliberately sought to open up the debate over Church government to include a much wider constituency than had traditionally been addressed by presbyterian print polemicists. One aspect of the government’s response was to sponsor equally popular pamphleteers to rebut Martin in kind. This strategy is usually credited

26 Swetnam, Araignment, p. 64. Swetnam’s Dutch translator presented the work (in 1641) as a piece of entertainment, not to be taken seriously (Van Heertum, Critical Edition, p. 59). 27 Munda, Worming of a mad dogge, pp. 5, 6. 28 Ibid., p. 3. 29 Purkiss, ‘Material Girls’, notes that Swetnam parodies earnest literature on the subjects he covers, such as marriage conduct literature. 30 Seven Marprelate pamphlets were published between 1588 and 1589, before the press was seized. See J. Black, ‘The Rhetoric of Reaction: The Martin Marprelate Tracts (1588–89), AntiMartinism, and the Uses of Print in Early Modern England’, Sixteenth Century Journal 28 (1997), 707–25; Raymond, Pamphlets and Pamphleteering, esp. pp. 46–9.



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to Richard Bancroft, and can be set in the wider context of increasingly sophisticated, and sometimes covert, use of cheap print as a vehicle for propaganda by the Elizabethan government.31 Pamphleteers including John Lyly, Robert Greene and Thomas Nashe were engaged to confront Martin in his own scurrilous, populist terms, to the horror of commentators such as Gabriel and Richard Harvey, and Francis Bacon, who saw this as simply legitimating a form of debate that should rather have been suppressed.The Marprelate episode has persuasively been constructed as a watershed in the history of pamphleteering; by authorizing responses in kind, Martin’s polemical strategy and clever use of the press was itself validated by the Elizabethan hierarchy. The responses to Martin were overtly and self-consciously complicit in a Martinesque exploitation of printing technology.32 At the same time, other genres of pamphlet were beginning to explore the possibilities offered by disavowing respectability in favour of edgier, more dangerous speaking positions. The ‘rogue’ or ‘conycatching’ pamphlets, once written from the perspective of magistrates and reformers, began to combine conventional arguments for moral reform with celebration of their subjects. Robert Greene, who claimed that his knowledge of the underworld came from his own youthful misadventures there, suggested in a series of pamphlets published in the 1590s that the best way to counteract rogues was to serve them with their own medicine.33 Jane Anger was, then, employing a technique that came to embody much of what was both admired and feared about the pamphlet press – that it could deliberately seek proliferation among an indiscriminate audience, and that countering pamphlet polemic necessitated the kind of populism which made it dangerous in the first place. It suited the purposes of the writers engaged in the ‘woman debate’ particularly well, because the terms of the debate – female scolding, misogynist railing – conflated, to a significant degree, with those of the debate about print. Proliferation, and the kind of dangerously popular polemic purveyed by Marprelate, meant that the press was often represented as a danger to learning, a corrupting (because commercially driven) influence on literature and public speech. Many printed texts went to great pains to resist

31 Around this time, Robert Cecil sponsored the publication of news from France in order to promote a particular foreign policy agenda: see L. F. Parmelee, Good Newes from Fraunce: French Anti-League Propaganda in Late Elizabethan England (Rochester NY, 1996); P. J. Voss, Elizabethan News Pamphlets: Shakespeare, Spenser, Marlowe and the Birth of Journalism (Pittsburgh PA, 2001). 32 This point is particularly well argued by Black, ‘Rhetoric of Reaction’ and Raymond, Pamphlets and Pamphleteering; see also J. Lander, Inventing Polemic: Religion, Print, and Literary Culture in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2006). 33 A. Bayman, ‘Rogues, Conycatching and the Scribbling Crew’, History Workshop Journal 63 (2007), 1–17.

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conception as vulgar, scurrilous or irresponsible – qualities that were thought to lie at the heart of ‘popularity’ – urging the highest motives for publication, or (in an introductory commonplace) denying the author any agency in bringing the work to press. Others, such as Greene’s rogue texts and many of Thomas Dekker’s works, embraced the new readership opened up by the market for print, developing a space in which ambiguity and even subversion were possible as writers left their work in the hands of their audience. In these works, readers did not expect to find containment but polyvocality; the contrasting epistles of Jane Anger and the Araignment, and the unstable voice of Sowernam, are typical of the slipperiness of pamphlet writing, while Munda’s readers may not have thought that her assertion of female vocal agency was closed down by the use of a male voice to end her text. The terms in which pamphleteering was criticized themselves carried gendered meanings corresponding most closely with the attacks on male ‘railers’ against women.34 Raymond has commented on the ‘ambivalent masculinity’ of pamphleteering, of which the Swetnam exchange was ‘symptomatic’; all of the responses, he notes, ‘derogate the status of Swetnam’s works, linking pamphleteering to male vices’.35 Swetnam’s attempt to evade earnest censure (‘esteeme this booke only as the toyes of an idle head’) evokes the language of idleness, wastefulness and playfulness that was typically applied to pamphlets. Speght distanced her work from that kind of writing, giving no space to the scurrilous and entertaining elements typical of the popular pamphlet. Lisa Schnell observes that ‘if Swetnam … seems particularly aware of the entertainment value of the controversy, Speght … seems thoroughly ignorant of her participation in a market-driven economy’.36 Speght’s refusal to recognize the commercial imperatives of pamphleteering amounts to an implicit devaluation of the

34 M. Ingram, ‘“Scolding women cucked or washed”: A Crisis in Gender Relations in Early Modern England?’, in Women, Crime and the Courts in Early Modern England, ed. J. Kermode and G. Walker (London, 1994), pp. 48–80, draws important links between male railing, or ‘barratry’, and female scolding, both prosecuted in the courts as a breach of the peace. 35 Raymond, Pamphlets and Pamphleteering, pp. 284, 286; see also Purkiss, ‘Material Girls’. Tim Reinke-Williams (drawing on Alex Shepard’s work) has argued that Swetnam constructed himself in problematically gendered terms, exemplifying a transgressive kind of masculinity: ‘Will the Real Joseph Swetnam Please Stand Up? Rethinking Male Subjectivity in SeventeenthCentury England’, unpublished paper; and see A. Shepard, Meanings of Manhood in Early Modern England (Oxford, 2003). I am grateful to Dr Reinke-Williams for allowing me to read his paper. 36 L. J. Schnell, ‘Muzzling the Competition: Rachel Speght and the Economics of Print’, in Debating Gender in Early Modern England, ed. Malcolmson and Suzuki, pp. 57–77 (pp. 62–3), although this is probably a deliberate ploy rather than genuine naivety (cf. Woodbridge and Raymond). The involvement of two publishers – Thomas Archer (publisher of Swetnam and Speght) and Nicholas Bourne (publisher of Sowernam) – with a keen eye for market opportunities and the value of a controversy is telling.



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popular pamphlet mode as a vehicle for the debate, which is reinforced by her later work. Leaving the pamphlet form for the rather more elevated genres of poetic dream-vision and meditation on death, Mortalities Memorandum (1621) sought, in Schnell’s phrase, to ‘rise above the pettiness of the Swetnam controversy’.37 In ‘The Dreame’ (a poem that prefixes Mortalities Memorandum), Speght juxtaposed the whole Swetnam controversy and the ‘franticke dogge’ Swetnam with the ‘impartiall foe’ who is Death.38 The eagerness of the misogynists to publish in print was an easy target for the defenders of women. Sowernam remarked that ‘it hath ever beene a common custome amongst Idle, and humerous Poets, Pamphleters, and Rimers, out of passionate discontents, or having little other wise to imploy themselves about, to write some bitter Satire-Pamphlet, or Rime, against women’.39 This is powerfully reminiscent of the character literature that laughed at the ‘pot-poets’ desperate to see their work in print. Jane Anger observed that, ‘The desire that every man hath to shewe his true vaine in writing is unspeakable.’40 Munda also repeatedly uses the terms associated with the criticism of pamphleteering to attack Swetnam, accusing him of seeking              to fill the itching eares of silly swains, and rude Truth-not-discerning rusticke multitude With sottish lies, with bald and ribald lines, Patcht out of English writers that combines Their highest reach of emulation but to please The giddy-headed vulgar.41

Plagiarism and pandering to the ignorant multitude were common charges laid against cheap print. Swetnam’s work is an ‘invective pamphlet’, a ‘hotch-potcht work’ that draws on ‘mercenary Pasquils’.42 For Munda, as for Sowernam, the problem lies in the abuse of the press by such scurrilous writers as Swetnam:

37

Schnell, ‘Muzzling the Competition’, and see Purkiss, ‘Material Girls’, esp. pp. 90–1. Speght, ‘The Dreame’, in Polemics and Poems, ed. Lewalski, pp. 58–9. Speght’s literary aspirations may have been produced by her milieu and especially her family connections. Lewalski observes that she was highly educated for a seventeenth-century woman, an education which she passionately defends in Mortalities Memorandum. Speght’s possible connection to Chaucer’s editor Thomas Speght might provide a particularly acute context for her use of the romance tradition in Mortalities Memorandum (see Lewalski, pp. xiii–xiv, xxviii–xxix). 39 Sowernam, Ester hath hang’d Haman, p. 31. 40 Jane Anger, sig. B. 41 Munda, Worming of a mad dogge, sigs. A4r–v. 42 Ibid., sigs. A4v–B. 38

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The itching desire of oppressing the presse with many sottish and illiterate Libels, stuft with all manner of ribaldry, and sordid inventions, when every foulemouthed male-content may disgorge his Licambaean poison in the face of all the world, hath broken out into such a dismall contagion in these our days, that every scandalous tongue and opprobrious witte … will advance their peddling wares of detracting virulence in the publique Piatza of every Stationers shoppe. And Printing that was invented to be the store-house of famous wits … is become the receptacle of every dissolute Pamphlet.43

Munda, with the emphasis on commerciality (‘mercenary Pasquils’, ‘wares’, ‘shoppe’), explicitly links the proliferation of misogynist discourse with the growth of the book trade and the pamphlet in particular. She goes on, however, to assure Swetnam that there will be proliferation on the other side of the debate too: ‘if your scurrilous and depraving tongue breake prison, and falls to licking up your vomited poison, to the end you may squirt out the same with more pernicious hurt, assure your selfe that there shall not be wanting store of Hellebore to scoure the sinke of your tumultuous gorge’.44 We have seen that in the face of such provocation, for Munda, silence is as dangerous as the eagerness of the detractors to ‘let tongue and pen runne up and downe like a weaponed madde-man’.45 The only way for Munda – as for Anger and the antiMartinists – to fight poison is with poison: excessive use of the pamphlet press must be countered in kind. Its movement into pamphlet form had, then, put a distinctive stamp on to the querelle des femmes. Many of the conventions of the debate had been adapted to incorporate the contemporary commentaries on print, with which they had much in common. Constantia Munda explicitly conflated the querelle with the language used to describe printing: ‘Woman the second edition of the Epitome of the whole world, the second Tome of that goodly volume compiled by the great God of heaven and earth is most shamefully blurd, and derogatively rased by scribbling pens of savage & uncought monsters.’46 The querelle had long produced artfully constructed texts that paraded their literary wittiness; the self-awareness of these pamphlets, their consciousness about the act of printing, is both derived from the traditions of the querelle and typical of late Elizabethan and early Stuart pamphleteering (again, the pamphlets of Marprelate and the anti-Martinists make excellent examples). The tendencies to internal subversion had precedent in the earlier debate, and found affinity in the instability of meaning associated with cheap print. As pamphleteers discovered the benefits of fighting fire with fire, pamphlets became a vehicle in which 43 44 45 46

Ibid., p. 1. Ibid., pp. 15–16. Ibid., p. 5. Ibid., p. 2.



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we might expect to see the defences of women take on the scurrilous, entertaining and strident character of the attack; and this is particularly striking when they were written using the female voice. Raymond is right, then, that ‘decorous speaking’ was at the crux of the Swetnam exchange, but it was not always the preferred style. Some of the responses to Swetnam’s work disavowed decorum as much as he had done. It was easy for Swetnam’s misogynistic voice to employ the railing of the pamphlet form. He was able to make it a joke – to say appalling things but laugh because it was just the idle vitriol typical of cheap print. This, of course, is why all four of the defences considered here attack the abuse of print and the misogynists’ ‘itching desire of oppressing the presse’, and why, in both his own account and that of the later play Swetnam the Woman-Hater, Swetnam is constructed as one of the ‘Idle, and humerous Poets’ with an ‘unspeakable’ desire to publish. The matter was rather different for the female voices raised in women’s defence. While male railing was understood to be problematic, criticism of female vocality and outspokenness was more intense and culturally embedded.47 Since pamphleteering was already equated, especially since Marprelate, with male railing, the female voices become vulnerable to charges of both shrewishness/scolding (Munda calls it ‘waspishness’) and railing. Embracing male as well as female forms of disorderly public speech, as Anger, Sowernam and Munda all did, created a very ambiguously gendered voice. It was a voice that found its ideal home in the liminal, unrespectable form of the pamphlet. It may not have found the audience it sought there (and it is never entirely clear what audience Anger, Sowernam and Munda courted: perhaps they cast their nets too wide). Swetnam’s work seems to have been far more popular, achieving ten editions before the Civil War while his critics each enjoyed only a single print run. However, the voice created by these defenders of women did not disappear from the pamphlet literature. In 1620 it was taken up anew by the character Hic Mulier, the man-woman, in a series of pamphlets about cross-dressing.48 These strikingly fail to close down her vocal agency (unlike that of the corresponding male figure, Haec Vir). Hic Mulier’s crossdressing, like Anger, Sowernam and Munda’s use of the pamphlet, gives her access to masculine modes of speech, while her voice (like theirs) remains 47 L. Gowing, ‘Gender and the Language of Insult in Early Modern London’, History Workshop Journal 35 (1993), 1–21; L. Gowing, ‘Language, Power and the Law: Women’s Slander Litigation in Early Modern London’, in Women, Crime and the Courts in Early Modern England, ed. J. Kermode and G. Walker, pp. 26–47; and L. Gowing, Domestic Dangers: Women, Words and Sex in Early Modern London (Oxford, 1996); and see also Ingram, ‘“Scolding women cucked or washed”‘. 48 Hic Mulier, or, The Man-Woman (1620); Haec-Vir, or, The Womanish-Man (1620); Muld Sacke, or, The Apologie of Hic Mulier (1620).

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r­ esolutely female, turned to the defence of women and female freedoms. There was, then, a space for female speech in printed pamphlet debate. It may well have been written by men, and it was a far cry from the serious contribution envisaged by Speght. It might none the less have promoted female agency, and have done so to a wide audience.

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Index

Actes and Monuments (Foxe) 85 active reading 83, 84–5, 87, 94 Adams, Thomas 100, 102 Advent Sunday 44 agriculture 59 alliteration 74 Almanac and Prognostication 1590 (Buckminster) 60 An Almanack and Prognostication for the Year 1598 (Buckminster) 34, 57–61 Almanacke and Prognostication (Mounslowe) 49–50 almanacs 5–6, 7, 34–40, 43–61 Almanack and Prognostication (Low) 48 almsgiving 173 alphabetical headings 93, 98, 103 alphabets 16, 25–6, 28 anaphoric language, in authorial/scribal letters 138–42, 143 Anger, Jane 197, 198–9, 200n, 201, 204, 205, 207 Anglican Church 62–76 annotations 9, 32 in Chaucer 77–89 aphorisms 83, 91, 97, 103, 107, 109 apian metaphors 96–7, 96n Apologia Ecclesiae Anglicanae ( Jewel), Lady Anne Bacon’s translation 62–76 An Apologie of the Earle of Essex 111, 121, 123, 126 arabic numerals 49, 51 The araignment of lewde, idle, froward, and unconstant women (Swetnam) 12, 196 Arbuthnot, Alexander 157 Aristotle 92n arithmetical calculations, almanacs 51–2 Aske, Hawisia 42 astrology 7, 34, 35 astronomical calendars 55–7 astronomy 35, 55–7 Astrophil and Stella (Sidney) 114 atheism 187 Auchinleck manuscript 18, 19–21 audience, autobiographical narratives 193 Audley, Lucy 140–1

Augustine, St 12, 179, 188–95 authorial letters 133n, 134 autobiographies 11–12, 177–95 autographs 133n Backhous, Sir John 173 Bacon, Anthony 116, 125 Bacon, Francis 121n Bacon, Lady Anne 7, 62–76 Bacon, Nicholas 74 Bacon, Richard 172, 173 Baildon, Joseph 108 Bancroft, Richard 205 Bard, Sir Henry 170 Bateson, William 169 bathing 58 Battle Abbey Roll 19, 20 bawdy verse 99, 101–2 Becket, St Thomas à 24 Bede 47 bees 96–7, 96n Bellasys, Margaret 99, 100, 101, 102 Benson, John 97–8 Berkeley, Elizabeth 155 Bible-reading 182 biblical inscriptions 81–3 binding, books 166 blood-letting 46, 58 Bolton Hours 16 ‘Book of Remembrance’ (Isham) 177–95 influence of St Augustine’s Confessions 188–95 book-ownership 1, 36, 88–9, 162 commonplace books 101 primers 41, 42 books binding 166 book trade 207–8 for display 41 as domestic gifts 162–76 books of hours 1, 16, 38, 40–61 see also prayer books Bosanquet, Eustace 34–5 Bourton-on-the-Hill, Gloucestershire 169 Brackley, Lady Elizabeth 150

231

232 Broughton, Richard 134 Browne family 19–20 Buckhurst, Lord 122 Buckminster, Thomas 34, 57–61 Burghley, Lord 119, 125 Byrd, William 114 Cadiz expedition 116–17 calendars 34–61 Canterbury Tales (Chaucer) 15 card-playing 181, 182 Carew, Thomas 107 Carleton, Dudley 119 catchwords 26 Cato 15 Cavendish, Lady Jane 150 Cavendish, William, first duke of Newcastle 150 Cecil, Mildred Cooke 63, 66, 73 Cecil, Robert 115, 122, 123 Cecil, William 67 Cecile, St 84 ‘Challenge Sermon’ ( Jewel) 71 Chamberlayne, John 169–70 Charlemagne 22 Chaucer, Geoffrey 8, 15, 25 Cheke, John 73 children, education 15–16, 23, 27 Choice of Valentines (Nashe) 102 Christian teaching 20, 27, 69–70 Christ’s Wounds cult 24–5 The Chronicle of Europe 165, 174 chronological ordering, autobiographical narratives 183 Church calendars 37–40, 53 Church of England 62–76 Cicero 74, 92n civil defence 170–1 Clarke, Elizabeth 106 classical rhetoric 73–4 Clifford, Lady Anne 54 Clifton correspondence 125n clubmen 170–1 collective memory 33 colloquialisms 72 commonplace books 8–9, 17–33, 90–110 active reading 94 compilation process 106–8 compilers’ unease 109 creativity 99–102 editorial practices 99–102 evolution of 106–8 genres of writing 98–100 physical construction 108–9

Index self-reflexivity 108 themes in 98–9, 103 transcription of materials 94–7, 100, 103, 104–5 unease of compilers 109 computistical/astronomical calendars 55–7 Confessions (St Augustine) 12, 179, 188–95 ‘conjunction’, in almanacs 44 conscience 181, 190 Constance (Man of Law’s Tale) 84–5 ‘cony-catching’ pamphlets 205 Cooke, Sir Anthony 7, 70, 73 copying out see transcription of materials Corbett, Richard 173 court sittings 59 The courtyer 73 creativity, in commonplace books 99–102 creed, Anglicanism 70 Croke, Sir John 101–2 cross annotations 32 cross-dressing 209 Cuffe, Henry 116–17 Cyprian, St 73 Davies, Lucy 146, 149, 150, 158–61 Davies, Sir John 10–11, 158, 159–60, 161 De Copia Verborum (Erasmus) 8, 92, 93, 104 death 24–5, 181 decorations, in household miscellanies 32–3 ‘defence’ pamphlets, response to misogynistic writing 196–210 Dekker, Thomas 98 Denton, Anne 106 Dering, Edward 69–70 devotional treatises 5 Diallacticon (Ponet) 63, 66 diaries 54, 55 diet 59 Digges, Leonard 50, 51, 53, 57 dildos 102 discourse markers, authorial/scribal letters 138–42 Diseases of the Soule: A Discourse, Divine, Morall, and Physicall (Adams) 100 display books 41 Distichs (Cato) 15 Dod, John 181, 182, 183 domestic compendia 17–33 see also commonplace books dominical letters 51, 52 Douglas, Archibald 116 dowries 140 Durant, George 170



Index

Dyer, Sir Edward 117 dyes 175 Easter, timing of 39–40, 51 ecclesiastical calendars 37–40 eclipses 49, 58, 59 editing of material, commonplace books 99–102 education children 15–16, 23, 27 women 2, 82–3, 112–13, 148–9, 156 Edward VI primer 42, 52–3 Egerton, Dorothy see Vernon, Dorothy Egerton, Mary 79 elegies 160 elementary education 16 Elizabeth I 111, 122–3 Elizabethan court politics 9, 111, 117–21 English Civil War 169–71 English (language) in almanacs 49, 57 classical comparisons 71–2 ‘plain English’ 73 prayers 29–30 Epigrams ( Jonson) 172 Epistle of St James 81 epistolary culture 114–45 epitaphs 99 Erasmus 8, 92, 93, 104, 108, 109 erotic writing 102, 107, 157 Essex, Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of 9, 111, 115, 116–30 Ester hath hang’d Haman (Sowernam) 202 eulogies 174 exclusion of women 2, 4 Fairfax, Henry 104n families commonplace books 101, 106–8 family anthologies 17–33 verse collections 146–61 family anthologies 17–33 Fane, Sir Francis 107, 127–8 Farmer-Cheetham manuscript 125n, 127n, 128 feast days, timing of 39, 43, 44 Femina 16 Ferrers, Sir Humphrey 115 fish motifs 33 fish recipes 175 flower motifs 33 food and drink 175 for, usage in authorial/scribal letters 142, 143–4 Ford, Simon 160

233

The Forest and Underwoods ( Jonson) 171 Fowler, Constance Aston 95–6 Foxe, John 85, 104n friends, commonplace book compilation 106–8 friendship theme, poetry 172 fruit preserving 175 fruit-theft incidents 189–90 gambling 182, 183 gardening 59 gender issues 1, 198, 206, 209 genres of writing 98–100 Gloucestershire 164, 169 golden numbers 42–3, 50 grammar, authorial/scribal letters 138–42 Greene, Robert 205 Gregorian calendar 50 Grindal, Edmund, bishop of London 70 group beliefs, Anglicanism 69 group-compilation, commonplace books 106–8 hagiography 5 handwriting 133–4, 133n, 137–8, 143, 151, 154 Harding, Thomas 76 Harington, Ellina 146, 150–5 handwriting 154 Harington, Francis 146, 150–5 Harington, John, of Stepney 152 Harington, Sir John, of Kelston 150–1, 155, 155n harvests 59 Haslington Hall, Cheshire 77, 87 Hastings, Lord 158 Haward, Thomas 71–2 headings, in commonplace books 93, 98, 103 health in almanacs 54, 58, 59 in primers 52–3 recipes 175 and zodiac 47–8, 49 Heege manuscript 18, 28–31 ‘hewen stone’ simile 177 history of the book 6 Hoby, Lady Margaret 54, 55, 123 Hoby, Thomas 73 holographs 133n homoerotic writing 157 Hordinant, Katharin 106 hospitality 173 household miscellanies 6, 15–33 see also commonplace books humanistic annotations 87

234

Index

Hume, Alexander 148, 161 Humphrey, Laurence 65 hymns 24 ides 37 illness, in autobiographical narratives 180–1, 183–4, 191–2 illustrations, in household miscellanies 32–3 information-processing, commonplace books 104–6 ink recipes 105, 105n Inns of Court 126, 127 Interpretatio Linguarum (Humphrey) 65 Isham, Elizabeth 11–12 ‘Book of Remembrance’ 177–95 italic script 133, 134, 143, 151 ‘Iter Boreale’ (Corbett) 173 its, usage in authorial/scribal letters 139 James VI, King of Scotland 115, 116 Jewel, John 7, 66, 67, 68–71, 75, 76 Joad, Thomas 148–9 Joceline, Elizabeth 148–9 John Gaytryge’s Sermon 22–3 Jonson, Ben 171, 172 journals 5 judgement 24–5 Julian calendar 50 Juliana of Norwich 3 kalends 37, 45 Kempe, Margery 3 Kendall, Timothy 87–8 King Edward VI primer 42, 52–3 King, Henry 95 Lachrymae Musarum 160 ‘Lady Rich to the Queen’ letter see Rich, Lady Penelope The lamentacion of a synner (Parr) 66 Lanyer, Aemilia 147 Latin in almanacs 49, 57 in household miscellanies 28, 32 lemmata 28 mnemonics 23 translations from 62–76 The Lay Folks’ Catechism 22 layering of writing, in commonplace books 105 The Layfolks Mass Book 29 leap years 37, 52 legal terminology 138 lemmata 28 Leo III, Pope 22

letters 5, 9–10 authorial/scribal letters 131–45 Joan Thynne’s letters to her son 131–45 Lady Rich’s letter to Elizabeth I 111–30 linguistic style 10 manuscript circulation 124–30 Nicholas Oldisworth’s letter to his wife 168–9 print/scribal publication 121–30 lexico-grammatical variation, authorial/ scribal letters 138–45 libraries 77, 88 The Lie (Raleigh) 96 Life of Our Lady (Lydgate) 30, 31 life-writing see autobiographies literary culture 88–9, 99–102, 113–14, 146–61 literary patronage 5 Littleton, Adam 150 Locke, John 92n Lombardic script 27 Lord’s Prayer 21 Low, Henry 48 Ludlow, Henry 101 lunar calendar 39, 45–50, 51 lunar eclipses 59 lunations (lunar months) 46, 51, 52, 56 Lydgate, John 30, 31 Lyly, John 205 The Lyttyl Childrens Book 29 magical prayers 22 Maitland, Mary 11, 146, 156–8 Maitland Quarto manuscript 156–8 Maitland, Sir Richard 156, 158 Man of Law’s Tale (Canterbury Tales) 84–5 Mann, Margaret 11, 162, 164 manuscript autobiography 179 manuscripts Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales, MS Porkington 10 [now Brogyntyn II.1] 17n Cambridge, Magdalene College, Pepys Library, MS 1408, The Maitland Quarto 156–8 St John’s College, MS K.26 56 Sidney Sussex College, MS 37 16, 17n Trinity College, MS O.3.10 24n University Library MS Ee. 5. 23(c) 125n MS Ff. 2. 38 27–8 Chester, Cheshire Record Office, MS DLT B8 125n



Index

Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland MS Adv. 19.2.1, ‘Auchinlech manuscript’ 18, 19–21 MS Adv. 19.3.1, ‘Heege manuscript’ 18, 28–31 MS Adv. 34.2.10 125n University Library, MS Laing III.444 158–61 Gloucester, County Record Office MS 314 162n PFC 54 in 1/1 (Register) 163n Hatfield, Hatfield House, Cecil MSS: 115n, 116n, 119n, 120n, 121n, 123n Kew, TNA, MSS SP12/274/37 119n SP12/274/48 120n SP12/274/86 120n SP15/34/18 125n Lincoln Cathedral Library, MS 91, ‘Thornton manuscript’ 18, 21–6 London, British Library MS Add. 4130 125n MS Add. 6704 128n MS Add. 10309 99n, 100n, 101n MS Add. 25707 125n, 129 MS Add. 34218 125n, 128n MS Add. 36529 150–5 MS Add. 40838 125n MS Add. 44963 101n MS Add. 58219 94 MS Add. 64081 117 MS Egerton 2614, ‘Diary of Lady Margaret Hoby’ 54 MS Lansdowne 43 71n MS Lansdowne 57 115n MS Lansdowne 87 119, 125n MS Royal 17 B 50 125n, 126 MS Royal 17 B XVIII 66n, 73n MS Stowe 150 119, 124, 125n London Inner Temple, MS Peyt 538/36 125n, 127 London, Lambeth Palace Library MS Bacon 657 116n MS Bacon 658 116n Longleat Library MS Thynne Papers 5 137n MS Thynne Papers 7 141n MS Thynne Papers 8 132n, 133n, 135 Manchester, Chetham’s Library, MS Mun. A. 4.15, ‘Farmer-Cheetham manuscript’ 125n, 127n, 128

235

Northampton, Northamptonshire Record Office MS IC. 4336 193n MS IC. 4344 178n, 180n, 191n, 193n MS IL. 3365 183n, 184n Nottingham University Library, MS Cl C 596 (Clifton correspondence) 125n Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Ashmole 61, ‘Rate manuscript’ 18, 32–3 MS Ashmole 781 125, 127 MS Digby 86 17 MS Don. c. 24 11, 162–76 MS Don. c. 54 125, 127 MS Don. c. 188 117, 118n MS Eng. Hist. c. 272 125, 129 MS Eng. Th. f.20 163n MS Rawlinson C. 744 125, 126, 128n MS Rawlinson D. 924 125, 126 MS Tanner 60 171 MS Tanner 76 125n, 126 MS Top. Oxon. c. 378, ‘Diary of Thomas Wyatt’ 170n University College, MS 152 125n, 129 Philadelphia PA, University of Pennsylvania, Annenberg Rare Book Library MS Codex 726 103n, 108n MS Codex 823 90n Princeton NJ, University Library, Robert H. Taylor Collection, MS RTCO1 no. 62 177n, 178n, 183n, 184n, 185n, 189n, 190n, 191n, 192n, 193n, 194n Reading, University Library, MS 2087, (Reading-Eales Hours) 38 San Marino CA, Huntington Library, MS 1205i 125n Washington DC, Folger Shakespeare Library MSS 91n, 93n, 98n, 105n, 106n, 107n, 125n, 149n York Minster Library, MS Additional 2, ‘The Bolton Hours’ 16 marginalia 8, 78, 185 Marprelate, Martin 204–5 marriage 82, 84–6, 185 Mary, mother of Jesus 31 Mass 29 Medcalf, Thomas 98–9 medicine in almanacs 54, 59–60 recipes 175 and zodiac 47–8

236

Index

medieval calendars 50 Melville, Elizabeth 148 memory training 33 Middle English 72 miscellanies see commonplace books misogynistic writing 5, 12, 99, 101 and ‘defence’ pamphlets 196–210 mnemonics 23 mock epitaphs 99 mock sermons 30 Montaigne 96–7 moralizing texts 83, 108, 174 Morata, Olympia 156 morphosyntactic variation, in Paston letters 143, 144 Mortalities Memorandum (Speght) 147, 207 Morte Arthure 25 The Mothers Legacie, to her unborne childe ( Joceline) 148–9 mottos 81–2 Mounslowe, Alexander 49–50 A mouzell for Melastomus (Speght) 198 moveable feasts 39, 43, 44 Mulier, Hic 209 multiple-compilation, commonplace books 106–8 Munda, Constantia 197, 202–3, 204, 207–8 The Mysteries of Love and Eloquence (Phillips) 97 Nashe, Thomas 102, 205 newsletters 116 Newstead, Christopher 200 Nicholas of Lynn 55, 56 nones 37 Normans 19, 20 Norris, John 129 Northamptonshire 178 Nostradamus 57 nota bene phrases 31 Ochino, Bernardino 63 Old English 72 Oldisworth, Mary 162, 164 Oldisworth, Michael 171–2 Oldisworth, Nicholas 162–76 Oldisworth, William 174 ongoingness of manuscripts 104–6 ‘opposition’, in almanacs 44 Osbadeston, Lambert 174 over-layering of writing, in commonplace books 105 Oxinden, Henry 103, 107

page break markings 30–1 Paget, Lord 119 pagination 165–6 pamphlets 12–13, 196–210 panegyric verse 174 paper 32 Parker, Matthew, archbishop of Canterbury 7, 62, 65–6, 67, 70, 72, 75 Parkes, Christopher 105n The Parliament Fart 101–2 Parliamentarian army 169, 170 Parr, Katherine 66 participles, in authorial/scribal letters 141 Paston letters 143, 144 Pastorius, Francis Daniel 97 ‘Pater noster’ 21 patronage 5, 57 Peacham, Henry 74 pear-stealing incidents 189, 190 Penelope, Lady Rich see Rich, Penelope Perdita Project 5n ‘perpetual’ calendars 50 personal pronoun variation, in Paston letters 143 petitions 114 Petrarch 152–5 Petyt, William 127 phrase-initial participles, in authorial letters 141 Pisan, Christine de 5n plague 163 ‘plain English’ 73 poetry 10–11, 171–4 in commonplace books 96, 99, 101–2, 107 family albums 146–61 polemic writing 204–5 political verse 99, 101–2 Ponet, John 63, 66 populism, pamphlets 205–6 prayer books 5–6 see also books of hours prayers 20, 21, 22, 24, 25, 29–30 Prayers (St Augustine) 194 preaching 69–70 present participles, in authorial/scribal letters 141 presentation manuscripts 11, 167, 168 primers 16, 38, 40–61 primes 42–3, 46, 47, 48, 50, 51–2 printing 2, 40–1, 205–6, 207–8 private libraries 77, 88 private/public writing 66 Privy Council 120, 122 Prognostication everlasting (Digges) 50



Index

propaganda 205 The Prose Alexander 26 The Prose Life of St Katherine 30 Protestantism 68, 85 proverb-hunting 83 Proverbs 81 psalm paraphrases 159 Psalms 22, 24, 56, 159 psalters 56 pseudonyms 202 public/private writing 66 puns 99 Puttenham, George 74 Pynson, Richard 51 The Queen’s Closet Opened (recipe book) 175–6 querelle des femmes 12–13, 196–210 Quintilian 74, 92n Raleigh, Walter 96 Rate manuscript 18, 32–3 reading aloud 25, 26, 30, 31, 32, 71 reading habits, household miscellanies 28–9 Reading-Eales Hours 38 recipe books 11, 165, 166, 174, 175–6 record keeping, in commonplace books 103 reference markers, authorial/scribal letters 138–42 religious belief, in autobiographical narratives 177–95 religious teaching 20, 27, 69–70 religious translations 62–76 repetition (rhetoric) 74 request letters 114–15 rhetoric 73–4, 118 see also lexico-grammatical variation rhyme brackets 31 Rich, Lady Penelope 9, 111–30 education 112–13 letter to Elizabeth I 111–12, 118–30 Richard of Wallingford 56, 57 ‘rogue’ pamphlets 205 Rolle, Richard 33 Roman calendar 37 Roman Catholic Church 74, 75 roman numerals 49 royal patronage 57 Royalist army 169, 170 Russell, Elizabeth Cooke Hoby 63, 66 sacraments 69 St Augustine 12, 179, 188–95 St Cecile 84

237

St Cyprian 73 St James’ Epistle 81 St Thomas of Canterbury 24 saints’ days 45 see also moveable feasts Salter, Thomas 149 Salve Deus Rex Judeorum (Lanyer) 147 Sarum primer (Pynson) 51 satire 102 Scattergood, Elizabeth 101 scientific information, in almanacs 54–7 scribal letters 121–45 scribes 10 scripts (handwriting) 133–4, 133n, 137–8, 143, 151, 154 scrumping 189 The Second Nun’s Tale (Canterbury Tales) 84 secretary scripts 133–4, 143 self-censorship, in autobiographical narratives 193 self-presentation see autobiographies self-reflexivity, commonplace books 108 Septuagesima 44 sermons 22–3, 30, 163 Shakespeare, William 97–8 Sherburne, Edward 107 Sherwood, Mary 164 sickness, in autobiographical narratives 180–1, 183–4, 191–2 Sidney, Philip 113–14 signatures 133n sins, confession of 181, 186–7 Skerrington, Grace 54 solar calendar 46 Somer, John 55–6 sonnets 152–5, 159 Southwell, Anne 96, 98, 149 Southwell, Sir Robert 94 Sowernam, Ester 197, 202, 207 Speght, Rachel 12–13, 147–8, 197, 198, 200–1, 204, 206–7 spiritual autobiography 177–95 Stimulus conscientie minor 28, 32 subversive writing 204–5 ‘Sunday letters’ 51, 52 sunrise/sunset times, in almanacs 51, 52, 55 supernatural powers 35 Surrey, Henry Howard, Earl of 151, 152, 155 A Sweet Nosgay (Whitney) 148 Swetnam, Joseph 12, 196, 201–4, 206, 207, 209 symbols, in almanacs 48 teaching, household miscellanies 6 Tewkesbury, Gloucestershire 164

238

Index

therefore, usage in authorial/scribal letters 140, 143–4 thereof, usage in authorial/scribal letters 139, 140 Thirty-Nine Articles 70 Thoresby, Archbishop 23 Thornton manuscript see Lincoln Cathedral Library Thornton, Robert 21, 22–3, 24, 25 Thynne, Dorothy 135 Thynne, Joan 9–10, 131–45 Thynne, Maria (née Touchet) 135, 136, 137 Thynne, Thomas 131–45 Thynne, William 8, 77 tide-tables, in almanacs 45–6, 47, 53 title pages 167 transcription of materials in autobiographies 185, 186 in commonplace books 94–7, 100, 103, 104–5 translation 3, 7, 62–76, 152–5 Troilus and Criseyde (Chaucer) 25 Tudor England almanacs 34–40, 43–61 books of hours 40–61 underlining of text 83, 84–5, 87, 126 universities 2 Upon a Tablebook presented to a Lady (King) 95 Urbanitatis 29 vademecum 12, 183, 184 Vavasour, Anne 106 Vernon, Anne 79, 80, 81, 83, 86 Vernon, Dorothy (née Egerton) 79, 80, 81, 83, 86 Vernon, Sir Thomas 79 verse 10–11, 171–4 commonplace books 96, 99, 101–2, 107 family albums 146–61 virginity literature 5

watermarks 166 weather forecasts 49, 53, 57, 59 Wellden, Elizabeth 107 which, usage in Paston letters 143 Whitney, Isabella 10, 148 Whyte, Rowland 119, 121–2 Wilson, Thomas 72 wines 175 wives, conduct of 82 Wolfreston, Frances 8, 77, 88–9 Wolverstone, Henry 79 women annotation 77–89 autobiographies 177–95 book-ownership 88–9 education 82–3, 112–13, 148–9, 156 and literary culture 3–4, 88–9, 99–102, 113–14, 146–61 marriage 84–6 medical knowledge 54–5 poetry-writing 146–61 reading 4–6 translation 3, 7 Wood, Matthew 93 Worcester clubmen 170–1 Worde, Wynkyn de 34, 44 Wordsworth, Christopher 42, 51 work, value of 194 The workes of Geffray Chaucer (Folger STC 5074 Copy 2) 8, 77–89 The worming of a mad dogge (Munda) 202–3 Wroth, Mary 147 Wyat, Thomas 170, 170n Wyatt, Sir Thomas 151, 152, 153 York Horae (1536) 43 York primer (1520) (York Minster Library, XVI 0 36) 45–8, 51 zodiac 46–50

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Manuscript Culture in the British Isles 2

Women and Writing,

Eardley, C. b. Hardman, Phillipa Hardman, Elizabeth Heale, Anne

The Domestication of Print Culture

YORK MEDIEVAL PRESS BOYDELL & BREWER Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge IP12 3DF (GB) and 668 Mt Hope Ave, Rochester NY 14620-2731 (US) www.boydellandbrewer.com

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c.1340–c.1650

Dr Anne Lawrence-Mathers is Senior Lecturer in History, University of Reading; Phillipa Hardman is Reader in English, University of Reading. Contributors: Gemma Allen, Anna Bayman, James Daybell, Alice

LAWRENCE-MATHERS AND HARDMAN

The transition from medieval manuscript to early printed book is currently a major topic of academic interest, but has received very little attention in terms of women’s involvement, an issue which the essays in this volume address. They add female names to the list of authors who participated in the creation of English literature, and examine women’s responses to authoritative and traditional texts in revealing detail. Taking its cue from the advances made by recent work on manuscript culture and book history, this volume also includes studies of material evidence, looking at women’s participation in the making of books, and the traces they left when they encountered actual volumes. Finally, studies of women’s roles in relation to apparently ephemeral texts, such as letters, pamphlets and almanacs, challenge traditional divisions between public and private spheres as well as between manuscript and print.

Women and Writing

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Edited by Anne Lawrence-Mathers and Phillipa Hardman