It is perhaps unsurprising that copies of the works of Katherine Philips continue to emerge inscribed with the ownership inscriptions of women. As Martine van Elk has noted, Philips was an incredibly popular poet, who achieved wide acclaim during her tragically short life. Her full-length portrait at the front of the first official edition of her poems in 1667, engraved by William Faithorne, portrays a woman who was elevated to the ranks of literary luminaries such as Shakespeare and Dryden.
In addition to the three copies of her Poems already featured in this blog (see here, here, and here), a quick survey of library records turns up handfuls more that are associated with women: a 1710 edition inscribed by “Her Grace the Duchess of Argyll and Greenwich” at the University of Reading (RESERVE–821.49-PHI); other 17th and early 18th-century editions with the ownership marks of Susanna Titus (NLW North PRINT Wing P2035), Elizabeth Triman (NLW North PRINT Col. 16639), and Mary Edwards (NLW North PRINT OC 444) at the National Library of Wales; a copy at Columbia University tantalizingly inscribed “Loving Annarilla” and Mary Levett (B823 P53 L Q Folio); and more. Copies at other institutions are inscribed simply with first initials and surnames, inviting researchers deeper down a variety of rabbit holes. Given the underfunded nature of library cataloguing combined with the comparatively recent interest in women’s ownership, it is certain that many further copies of Katherine Philips’ work (and other books) that belonged to women await description and research.
This copy, one of the 1667 edition published by Henry Herringman, was formerly in poor condition but has been repaired and rebacked in 2012. The repair maintained parts of what must have been a near-contemporary binding, stamped with the gilt arms of William Sancroft (1617-1693), Archbishop of Canterbury. Pasted inside the front cover is the 18th-century book plate of the Honorable Frederick Cavendish.
On the title page, a woman named Maria Waller has made her ownership inscription, identifying the book as his gift to her: “Maria Waller / From the Hon[oura]ble Frederick Cavendish.” Although neither Waller nor Cavendish annotated the text throughout, at the very end, a note in the same hand as Waller’s inscription comments that “the remainder of this scene, and the 5th Act is wanting” (Philips neglected to finish her translation of Pierre Corneille’s Horace, which was completed in the 1669 edition by Sir John Denham).
As V. M. Braganza writes in her entry on Mary Gough’s copy of Philips’s Poems, “men’s lives, including those that are not particularly of note, are often well-documented.” The life of the Honourable Frederick Cavendish (circa 1733-1812), the second son of Lord Charles Cavendish and brother of renowned physicist Henry Cavendish, has been very well documented. On his death in 1812, he received a four-page, double-column obituary in the Gentleman’s Magazine. Descended from nobility and ultimately the inheritor of a reasonable fortune, he was sadly “thought to be unfitted for public life” due to a rather serious tumble out of a high window onto a courtyard while at Cambridge as a young man, which left him with life-threatening injuries and “a deep indentation in his forehead.” This forced him to withdraw from polite society and spend “his succeeding years…in retirement.” This retirement took place in the village of Studham in Bedfordshire, which is possibly where he befriended Maria Waller and her family. He was known for his exceptional charity, generosity, and taking long walks around the countryside. He was devoted to natural illustration and literature and made the charmingly eccentric insistence that friends and acquaintances always refer to him using the honorific “The Honourable,” which appears on his bookplate and in Waller’s inscription.
Maria Waller, who possibly died in 1805, received no such lengthy memorialization. Her family life and kin networks are opaque to us. Records show that multiple Maria (or Mary) Wallers were born, baptised, married, and died in Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire in the eighteenth century; she could have been any one of them. Yet, we still know more about her than many women of her time. Two letters at the Bedfordshire Archives bear her name, written and signed in the same hand as the inscription in the book—a careful, somewhat spidery italic script including some elegant swashes and loops, and with distinctive right angles on the penultimate “r” of “Waller.” Contextual clues in the letter such as references to a school in St. Albans, and the fact that Waller is writing to the mother of a young girl clearly in her care, indicate that Maria Waller likely worked as a schoolmistress, governess, or otherwise in some sort of educational role. These two letters, a brief snapshot in March and April of 1776, are filled with details about the girl, Miss Williamson’s, health and well-being (apparently the girl was recovering from an injury to her foot) but reveal little about Waller herself. Some further information may be found again based on her connection with Cavendish.
When the Honourable Frederick Cavendish wrote his will, he included a legacy of one thousand pounds to “my dear friend Miss Mary Waller, at present resident in the town of St. Albans in the County of Hertford … as a testimony of my regard and affection for her.” He left the same to another Miss Waller, possibly Mary’s sister. The will was likely written some time before his death, as Mary Waller likely pre-deceased her friend by some seven years. A will in 1805 of a Maria Waller, spinster, of St. Albans, makes no mention of the Honourable Frederick Cavendish and refers only obliquely to a sister near whom she wishes to be buried. This Maria Waller does mention other relations, including a nephew named Frederick, though the name was not uncommon. Most interestingly, Maria Waller, spinster, left most of her worldly goods to her niece Elizabeth. In addition to wearing apparel, rings, and gilt boxes, this included “whatever books she may make choice of.”
Although there is no way to definitively link these two Mary/Maria Wallers, their geographic and temporal proximity make it tempting to build a bridge between the definitive and the possible. The Maria who was given a book of Katherine Phillips’ poetry, who befriended a likely lonely young man who loved drawing and literature, who likely brought this appreciation to and enjoyment to teaching other young women, and who wrote letters to their parents in her careful italic hand, matches neatly with the spinster who left a variety of bequests to a beloved niece, including whatever books she might choose. It is unclear how a book belonging to a Hertfordshire schoolteacher found its way to the climate-controlled vault at Stationers’ Hall and even more unclear how we can accurately interpret the lives of (some) of its owners. Either way, this book and its inscription is a testament to the friendship between two people at a moment in time; something which Katherine Phillips, who famously wrote on friendship, would doubtless appreciate.
My thanks to Dr Ruth Frendo, Stationers’ Company Archivist, and Robert Harding at Maggs Bros for pointing this volume out to me, and to the staff at Bedfordshire Archives Service for their assistance with the Waller letters.
Will of Frederick Cavendish, commonly called The Honourable Frederick Cavendish, proved 06 April 1812. PROB 11/1532/86, The National Archives. Will of Maria Waller, proved 05 April 1805. PROB 11/1424/59, TNA.
On December 28, 1702, the English gentlewoman Eleanor Glanville crafted a list of observations on insects. She referenced figures from a printed book to aid her descriptions: Johannes Goedaert’s Of Insects: done into English, and methodized, with the addition of notes, translated by Martin Lister (1682) (figure 1). Glanville was quite critical of the etchings, noting that the plates were “not wel figured” (British Library, Sloane MS 3324, f. 20).
Figure 1
Eleanor Glanville clearly owned a copy of Lister’s English translation. Her observations demonstrate how printed books could shape scientific practice and communication in real time. Yet, her very ownership of this book, a rare item with only 150 copies ever printed, raises questions about how this text circulated and what kinds of audiences ultimately had access to it.
While I have yet to locate Glanville’s copy—that is, if it even still exists—I have had some unexpected results while searching for it. When I ordered the text from Cambridge University Library (Syn.7.68.55), I was surprised to find an ownership inscription from Katherine Blount on the front flyleaf (figure 2). Underneath Blount’s signature, she recorded that she purchased the text in 1711 for 3 shillings. Written above, in a different, likely older hand, is the inscription “to his honoured friend Dr Frasier.”
Figure 2
I had never heard of Blount, but of course, finding a woman’s name inscribed in a scientific text piqued my interest. A quick Google search brought me to this blog, where several researchers have already compiled evidence on Blount’s book ownership. Sarah Lindenbaum first brought Blount to scholarly attention in 2020. Sophie Floate, William Poole, Mary-Ann O’Donnell, Victoria Burke, Martine van Elk, and Joseph Black have all added more titles to her library.
Most titles are literary, but the number of scientific texts known to be owned by Blount is steadily increasing. These titles include Francis Willughby’s The Ornithology (1678), acquired by Blount in 1730, Hales’s Vegetable Staticks, gifted to Blount by the author in 1727, and Francis Bacon’s Sylva Sylvarum (1685), bought by Blount in 1699. As Martine van Elk suggested in her recent post, these works suggest that Blount may have had an interest in natural history.
The addition of Goedaert’s Of Insects to Blount’s library adds weight to this theory. Furthermore, that Blount purchased (as opposed to being gifted) this copy demonstrates an active interest in natural history. Why might Blount have bought this work on insects?
The English Translation of Of Insects
The Dutch artist and naturalist Johannes Goedaert first published his Metamorphosis naturalis in the 1660s. This text would become a landmark in the history of entomology for its detailed descriptions of insect life cycles. In 1682, the English naturalist Martin Lister put out the earliest English translation of the text. Lister explained in his address to the reader that these copies were “intended only for the curious.”
Who belonged to this society of the curious? In 1682, most scientific texts were still printed in Latin. By printing in the vernacular, Lister may have intended to reach a wider audience. Intentional or not, the English translation opened the door for educated, although non-Latinate people, including women, to consult his work.
Katherine Blount’s Copy of Of Insects
In many ways, Katherine Blount’s copy of Of Insects closely resembles the other fifteen copies I have examined so far. It is a slim quarto volume numbering 140 pages with fourteen fold-out etchings. Despite having wildly different provenances, most copies (including Blount’s) have nearly identical bindings: mottled calf boards with double fillets, the edges gilt-rolled with the same foliated design (figure 3 and 4). Most of the spines have been replaced. The striking similarities between the bindings of multiple copies, held at different institutions, suggests that purchasers had the option to buy the volume as a pre-bound item.
Figure 3Figure 4
Unfortunately, Blount’s copy does not have any annotations. We don’t know from whom or how she came to purchase it. The inscription above hers, “for his honoured friend Dr Frasier,” suggests a previous owner, although I have not been able to definitively identify Dr. Frasier. Early Modern Letters Online has an entry for a James Frasier, an artist and friend of Martin Lister, John Ray, and Francis Willughby. I’ve also come across a Thomas Frazier who corresponded with John Woodward, a naturalist contemporaneous with Lister, although it is unclear if Thomas was a doctor.
Additional evidence on the front pastedown informs us of the book’s later provenance. It features the bookplate of Francis Jenkinson, the Cambridge University Librarian (essentially the head librarian) from 1889 to 1923 (figure 5). He trained as a classicist but held a wide variety of academic and personal interests, including a zeal for entomology. Martin Lister’s translation of Of Insects would have combined his passion for antiquarian books and insects. He donated this copy to the Cambridge University Library on August 20, 1917.
Figure 5
Women and the Culture of Collecting
Both Eleanor Glanville and Katherine Blount owned this scientific text. We know that Glanville and other naturalists used it as a model to write observations and organize their collections. Might Katherine Blount have done the same? The best source for biographical information about Blount, A History of Tyttenhanger (1895), first located by Sarah Lindenbaum, contains a clue, albeit an uncertain one. The author, Lady Jane Van Koughnet, writes of Blount that “she had a large collection of all sorts of curiosities” (66). Van Koughnet then lists a wide range of man-made curiosities that still survived at Tyttenhanger: a jewel box, ornamental arrows, a Chinese cabinet holding coins, an ivory crucifix, Chinese idols, and other objects.
Katherine Blount would have collected these objects in an age when the boundaries between natural and artificial curiosities were porous. A single collector might as easily hold ancient coins and dried plants, antiquarian manuscripts and beetles, or elephant tusks and paintings in the same collection. These cabinets of curiosities were often heterogeneous, some bordering on encyclopedic.
Given this historical context and Katherine Blount’s predilection for collecting, it is possible that she collected natural curiosities too. Such biological specimens, unlike the durable man-made objects listed in A History of Tyttenhanger, would not have survived the intervening centuries, at least not without an intensive amount of preservation.
Without further evidence, though, the idea of Katherine Blount as a collector of naturalia remains pure speculation. Together, her scientific texts cover birds, butterflies, and plants. These would have been fashionable curiosities for a woman, described as “gifted with a mind full of energy,” to collect (Van Koughnet, 65).
Source
Cambridge University Library, shelfmark Syn.7.68.55. Photographs by Michele D. Pflug, used with permission.
Further reading
H. F. Stewart. Francis Jenkinson, Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, and University Librarian: A Memoir. Cambridge: University Press, 1926.
As we have previously noted, the Book of Common Prayer is one of the books most likely to have been owned by a woman. As of the writing of this post, eight other examples have been featured here. A cornerstone of religious life, Books of Common Prayer were often sumptuously bound with hand-colored illustrations (see here and here) and gilt-tooled covers. Lucy Burman’s Book of Common Prayer is among them.
Her Book of Common Prayer is encased in gilt-stamped red morocco binding with black morocco inlay, silver clasps, and silver furniture. The center plate bears the initials “A B,” presumably another member of the Burnham family. Colorful Dutch gilt endpapers cap off the book’s visual appeal. The bookseller notes that style of the binding is similar to the so-called “cottage-roof binding” employed by the Restoration-era binder Samuel Mearne and may have been done by one of his apprentices.
As the bookseller observes, the binding was likely commissioned in or around 1703, that being the date of the Book of Psalms bound with the Book of Common Prayer. It is easy to find things to say about this striking binding, but less so A.B. and Lucy Burnham, who—like so many owners profiled on this blog—have been swallowed by the centuries.
Here again, the bookseller gives a lead, noting that A.B. and Lucy were likely members of the Stratford-upon-Avon Burman family, who lived in the village of Shottery, where Shakespeare’s wife Anne Hathaway resided as a child. In fact, Burman’s Farm is located directly behind the cottage and has since been renamed Hathaway Farm, the most popular tourist attraction in the area next to the cottage and Shakespeare’s Birthplace. As Katherine West Scheil notes, “connections between the Burmans and Hathaways stretch back to the fifteenth century.”
There are a few strong candidates for Lucy’s identity. The first is Lucy Walford Burnam (ca. 1660–1719) who married Stephen Burnam (1651–1709) in 1694. Their son Hugh Burnam (1696–1761) and his wife Hester Hurdis Burnam (1696–1766) of Shottery had seven children, only one of whom, Lucy (1732–1787), outlived her parents. The younger Lucy married the Reverend William Daniel of Stretton-on-Dunsmore in 1762 and “was a considerable heiress,” according to her descendant John Burman. Lucy and Stephen also had a daughter called Lucy, born in 1702 and married in 1728 to William Hurdis.
A.B. is harder to pin down. The A may stand for Ann(e) or Anna. An Anna Burman was born to a Thomas Burman in December 1639 and baptized at Stratford-Upon-Avon, while an Anne Burnam was born to Richard and Joice Burnam of Packwood sometime after 1665. Packwood was a civil parish about 15 miles north of Stratford. If she was the person whose initials are engraved on the silver furniture of the Book of Common Prayer, then she would have been in her late 30s at the time the book was bound.
Opposite Lucy Burman’s signature on the title is a religious poem, which can be viewed here. It bears similarities, though is not an identical match, to her signature, reading in full: “Faith in God that self denyes, / Wisdom with her self supplyes: / Filling the soul with th’ Eternal Good / When she wills not what she Would.” It is a poem about denying one’s own will and desires in order to obtain wisdom and Divine favor. Together, the book and the religious inscription provide interesting insight into the devotional life into a probable Stratford family in the early to mid-18th century.
Source: Book sold by WoodPaz Books Ltd on 25 February, 2024. Images used with permission.
Further Reading Burman, John. The Burman Chronicle: The Story of a Warwickshire Family (Birmingham: Cornish Brothers, 1940), p. 28-29. Libby Shade’s Page of Family Trees. “Burman: Sixth Generation” (https://www.shade.id.au/Burman/Burman6.htm) and “Burman: Seventh Generation” (https://www.shade.id.au/Burman/Burman7.htm). Updated May 2008.
This post offers another instalment in the continuing and collaboratively written story of the growing library of Katherine (Butler) Blount: for earlier posts, see Sarah Lindenbaum, Sophie Floate, William Poole, Mary Ann O’Donnell, Victoria Burke, and Martine van Elk. The number of known books with Katherine Blount’s provenance stands currently at 42, and her library seems likely to have been considerably larger still. The date and circumstances of its dispersal have yet to be traced.
The first of the two books discussed here is Sir Thomas Pope Blount’s presentation copy to his daughter-in-law Katherine of the third edition of his Essays on Several Subjects (1697). Researchers interested in Katherine Blount knew this book existed because of its appearance in a 1905 auction catalogue, but not where it was currently located. It appears as lot 733 in Sotheby, Wilkinson & Hodge, Catalogue of books and manuscripts including a selection from the libraries of J.H. Reddan … and other properties… which will be sold by auction … February 16th, 1905. Blount’s copy of her father-in-law’s Essays appears in the catalogue among “other properties,” in a group aptly headed “The Property of a Lady.”
This early twentieth-century female owner is unfortunately unidentifiable, and none of the other 50+ books from her library (lots 732-85) appears to be associated with Blount. The book was acquired soon after the auction by Harvard University (Houghton Library, shelfmark *EC65 B6239 691EC), as it bears a Harvard accession stamp dated Dec. 1906.
Katherine Blount has inscribed the book on the recto of the front flyleaf in her distinctively clear hand, “Katherine Blount / Given me by the / Author / May the 13th. 1697.”
As the 1905 auction catalogue promises, the book retains its original personalized binding, stamped with Katherine Blount’s “K B” monogram in gilt on both the front and back boards. This is the only book known so far to feature Blount’s monogrammed binding, though it is possible that similar bindings survive on some of the other books identified as hers but which have not yet been examined. This binding is rebacked, so any spine decoration is lost. An illegible inscription or signature (****ising?) appears on the title-page, in an early hand but evidently post-dating Blount.
Sir Thomas Pope Blount, first baronet (1649–97), politician and writer, was the father of Katherine Blount’s husband, Sir Thomas Pope Blount, second baronet (1670–1731). Blount’s father-in-law was best known for his encyclopedic compilations, Censura celebriorum authorum (1690), A Natural History (1693), and De re poetica (1694); his Essays, first published in 1691 and his only original work, were also well regarded in their time. As described in the article on Pope Blount in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, “In seven short pieces, he treats of self-interest; the mischiefs of learning; education and custom; a tempered respect for antiquity; the virtues of modern men; passion; and the uncertainty of human knowledge. An eighth essay, added to a third, expanded edition (1697), concerns religion. In domestic metaphors and plain prose, Blount reveals himself to be sceptical, cynical, cheerfully optimistic, possessed of a dry wit, and warmly anti-Catholic.”[1] From what is known so far of her library, Katherine Blount shared her father-in-law’s wide-ranging interests, though this book offers no evidence of her engagement with his Essays: other than a couple of pencilled marginal markings that post-date Blount’s ownership, the text itself is clean. But Pope Blount’s compilations and essays do offer a window onto Katherine Blount’s intellectual milieu.
The second book featured today speaks to Katherine Blount’s interest in natural science, the subject of her father-in-law’s compilation A Natural History. The book is a copy of the 1685 edition of Sir Francis Bacon’s Sylva Sylvarum, a folio gathering of heterogenous observations, experiments, and theories compiled by Bacon’s former chaplain William Rawley from manuscripts soon after Bacon’s death. Enormously popular in the seventeenth century (the 1685 edition is the eleventh), the collection is now best known for its inclusion of Bacon’s New Atlantis and, in editions starting from the 1670s, an epitome in English translation of his Novum Organum. For other copies of Sylva Sylvarum owned by women in the seventeenth century, see this post by Sarah Lindenbaum.
Sylva Sylvarum was not the only work Blount owned by Francis Bacon: her copy of the 1673 edition of Bacon’s Essays is mentioned in a 1902 work on book collecting but remains untraced (see this post by Sarah Lindenbaum). Perhaps like her copy of Pope Blount’s Essays it sits in a major research library, waiting for a researcher to run a search for “Katherine Blount.” Blount purchased this copy of Sylva Sylvarum herself: it was not an inheritance, gift, or presentation copy, like her copy of her father-in-law’s Essays. Her inscription on the recto of the front flyleaf reads: “Katherine Blount / Price 8s. / 1699.”
That Blount bought the book fourteen years after it was published does not necessarily mean that she bought a used copy: 1685 remained the most recent edition (and the work would not in fact be published again until the nineteenth century), and the price Blount paid suggests she purchased the book new. The 1673 Term Catalogue e.g. lists Sylva Sylvarum at “Price bound 8 s. sold by several Booksellers.”[2] The binding is a simply decorated calf with a gilt decorated spine and probably represents the original “trade binding” in which the book was sold. The text is clean other than a few marginal markings in pencil: the use of pencil again indicates that these markings post-date Blount.
This copy features the bookplate of Brentford Public Library (stamped “Withdrawn from stock”), in the West London borough of Hounslow; additional stamps indicate that the book entered the library as part of the “Layton collection.” The antiquarian Thomas Layton (1819-1911) collected books, coins, and antiquities for seventy years, accumulating what has been described as “probably the largest collection of London antiquities ever amassed by a single individual”: for information about Layton and his collections, see here. He bequeathed his collection of over 20,000 objects—evidently including this book—to the people of Brentford, though since his death the collection has been divided among several locations. A collection of over 8,000 of Layton’s books is currently stored at Feltham Library, also in the West London borough of Hounslow. This particular book may have become separated from that main collection, remaining at the Brentwood Public Library until it was withdrawn. The 8000 Layton books at Feltham are catalogued but insufficient copy-specific information appears in these records to determine if Layton acquired other books with a Blount provenance over the many decades in which he built his collections.
Source: Thomas Pope Blount, Essays on Several Subjects (1697): Houghton Library, Harvard University, shelfmark *EC65 B6239 691EC. Francis Bacon, Sylva Sylvarum (1685): book in private ownership. All images of both books reproduced with permission.
[1] Jonathan Pritchard, “Blount, Sir Thomas Pope, first baronet (1649–1697),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004).
[2] Robert Clavell, comp., A catalogue of all the books printed in England since the dreadful fire of London in 1666, to the end of Michaelmas term, 1672 (1673), H1v.
“Mathematics” has yet to appear on this site as a subject tag. Admittedly, works of mathematics are uncommon presences in early modern libraries: at the time of writing, only 244 of 18,500 records in the Private Libraries in Renaissance England (PLRE) database are categorized as mathematics, including 12 of the 1950 records currently associated with woman owners. For women as well as men, the most popular forms of mathematical books that do appear in early modern libraries comprise geometry, arithmetic (a serious subject of study at the time, not just one for school textbooks), astronomy, and the applied subjects of mensuration and surveying (books of measurement appear often in the libraries of landowners). The most interesting mathematical work owned by a woman in PLRE to date appears in the library of Lady Anne (Stanhope) Holles (d.1651): Lady Anne owned a copy of the Abrégé recherché de Marie Crous pour tirer la solution de toutes les propositions d’arithmétique (Paris, 1641) (PLRE 298.9). Unacknowledged in her time as a woman of learning, Marie Crous is now credited as the mathematician who introduced the decimal system to France.
In England, publications devoted to algebra—in the period, essentially the theory of equations—started to be published in the second half of the seventeenth century. This 1709 edition of the Synopsis of Algebra by Johannes Alexander is the first and only edition of the English translation of a work first published in Latin in London in 1693 (Wing A913). The Latin and English versions were both published for use in the two “Mathematical Schools” in Christ’s Hospital, London. Founded in 1552 to serve the city’s poor and orphaned children, Christ’s Hospital remains one of the oldest boarding schools in England. Girls were admitted from the school’s founding onwards, so there is a possibility that the Elizabeth Gould who signed this book on both the title-page (“E. Gould”) and the recto of a front flyleaf (“Eliz:th Gould / Her Book”) was associated in some way with Christ’s Hospital. She would not have been affiliated with either of the two mathematical schools, the first of which was founded in 1673 to train boys (known as “mathemats”) as mathematicians and navigators to serve and strengthen British maritime power. The first school, strongly supported by figures such as Samuel Pepys, survives today as the Maths Department at Christ’s Hospital. The title-page also refers to a short-lived “new” school founded in 1706. Backed by Isaac Newton and led by Humphry Ditton (1675-1715), who supplied the appendix to this 1709 edition, this new school closed with the death of Ditton.
Elizabeth Gould’s signatures could be contemporary with the book: the ink and form both indicate an eighteenth-century provenance. As will be discussed below, the book in addition found its way into an institutional library by the early nineteenth century (and possibly was there even by the later eighteenth century). Her signature seems not to match the hand that added the notes and diagrams on “Parallelograms” to the front pastedown, though signatures often differ from other forms of inscription. It is also difficult to match either the signatures or the manuscript notes with confidence to the hand that inscribed “Allgebra” on the book’s tail edge, an uncommonly late appearance of this form of book labeling: the book potentially was stored with the tail edge facing outward. The binding is a contemporary paneled calf.
Elizabeth Gould eludes identification, but evidence of later provenance in this copy suggests some possible cultural context. The title-page is stamped “Homerton College Society.” Homerton College was a small (12-20 students at any one time) dissenting academy in the parish of Hackney, close to London. It was founded in the 1760s as King’s Head Academy and took the name Homerton College in the 1820s, though the book could have been in the school library before the name change: the stamp could have been added after the institutional name change rather than at the time of acquisition. In the 1850s, when admission to English universities was liberalized, Homerton College transferred its theological courses (and evidently some of its library) to New College London, whose bookplate inconveniently covers the pastedown notes on parallelograms. The continuity of institutional ownership from Homerton College to New College confirms that Elizabeth Gould owned the book at some point between its creation for use at Christ’s Hospital in the early eighteenth century and its acquisition by Homerton College in the early nineteenth century, or possibly even by its predecessor King’s Head Academy in the later eighteenth century. The link among these institutions is dissent: Humphry Ditton, the founder of the “new” mathematical school at Christ’s Hospital and contributor to this edition of Alexander’s Synopsis, was an ardent dissenting minister as well as a mathematician. With her record of ownership bookended by associations with dissenting schools—which promoted a “modern” curriculum of science, philosophy, and modern history—Elizabeth Gould seems likely to have pursued her interest in algebra while a member of the period’s dissenting community.
Source: Kinney Center for Interdisciplinary Renaissance Studies, University of Massachusetts Amherst, shelfmark QA154.8 .A5413 1709. Images used with permission.
This is another installment in our series of blog posts Katherine Blount, who, as we have discovered, owned a formidable library. The more we look, the more we find. The search for Blount books started with a post by Sarah Lindenbaum, which was followed by posts by Sophie Floate, William Poole, and Mary Ann O’Donnell, who all added to the list compiled by Sarah. Then, most recently, Victoria Burke wrote for us on a manuscript miscellany that she could, with the help of evidence featured on the blog, identify definitively as written by Blount. The miscellany provides broad evidence of Blount’s reading, including many books not featured in our blog before, which were possibly part of the family library rather than Blount’s personal collection. Much work remains to be done in terms of identifying and locating the books from which she copied material in the miscellany manuscript.
Fortunately for us, Blount meticulously signed many of the books she owned, almost always including a date and often a price or a note about the person who gave her the book. I will not repeat the biographical facts of her life here since those can be found in any of the posts linked above. Her gift inscriptions show that she was frequently given books by her husband and other friends and relations, allowing us to begin to think about the networks of which she was a part. The particular book I concentrate on here is Vegetable Staticks by Stephen Hales. Vegetable Staticks was presented to Blount, her inscription shows, by Hales himself in 1727.
Who was Hales and why might Blount have been interested in this book? Stephen Hales (1677–1761), as the title page of the book tells us, was both a clergyman and a scientist. His main position, as Curate of Teddington, would have brought him in close proximity to Twickenham, the estate that was the primary residence of Blount and her husband, which is, according to Google Maps, a mere half an hour walk away.
Hales had become interested in science while at Cambridge and wrote a number of scientific works, making important discoveries and inventing various devices to benefit human health. Statick Vegetables is perhaps his most important work. The book collects Hales’s papers presented at the Royal Society on plant nutrition, considering the circulation of water and how plants acquire energy through air and possibly light. A section of the book is devoted to air chemistry, an important topic to Hales, who argued for the importance of air circulation to health and invented a kind of ventilator.
The entry on Hales in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography quotes contemporary Gilbert White’s impressions of Hales:
“Gilbert White noted that ‘His whole mind seemed replete with experiment which of course gave a tincture and turn to his conversation often somewhat peculiar, but always interesting’. He listed a series of anecdotes to support this view, among which were Hales’s concern with the incrustation of ladies’ tea-kettles, his advising the use of showers of water to test the salubrity of wells, his directing air-holes to be let in the outer walls of rooms, his imploring young people not to drink their tea scalding hot, his ad hoc advice to ferrymen on how to maintain the bottoms of their boats, and his teaching housewives to place inverted teacups in their pies to prevent the syrup from boiling over.”
The conversations Blount may have had with Hales may have ranged from science and botany to cooking and tea kettles. We can only speculate, but the fact that he presented her with his book means that he must have felt she would be interested in biology. Perhaps he was looking for patronage. The books in Blount’s collection we have uncovered so far are generally not directly scientific though one book in the list of works mentioned in her miscellany, Thomas Sprat’s The History of the Royal-Society, tells us that she may have had an investment in the history of scientific discovery.
Blount’s Vegetable Staticks’s later provenance history is visible in a book plate belonging to Henry Carrington Bolton (1843–1903), an American professor of chemistry and science historian, whose interest in the subject is obvious and whose ownership may explain how the book has ended up in the Library of Congress today.
Our other posts on Blount do not show the bindings for her books, but the images below can prove helpful in the future in establishing her ownership of other works.
Source: Library of Congress, shelfmark QK711 .H2 1727. Images by the Library of Congress, used with permission.
Further Reading
Allan, D. G. C. “Hales, Stephen (1677–1761), natural philosopher.” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford University Press, 2023.
One of Senate House Library’s copies of Charles I’s ghost-written memoir, Eikon Basilike. The Pourtraicture of His Sacred Majestie in his Solitudes and Sufferings, which was printed by “W[illiam]. D[ugard].” for Francis Eglesfield in 1649, contains a manuscript inscription on the verso side of its front endpaper. This undated inscription looks to the future of the book’s ownership, but it also imagines possible futures for that book’s female owner:
this Book at my Decease to Mr Morgan Mrs Morgans only son by her Husband Mr Thomas Morgan Drapier at Bromsg[rove] in ye county of Worcester now a Dowager till God is pleased to send Her a second mate.
Presumably, the ‘Mrs Morgan’ identified here is also the inscriber. She stipulates that upon her death, her copy of the Eikon was to pass into the possession of her “only son,” securing not only that book’s survival but also helping to reinforce maternal bonds. Mrs Morgan’s husband, Thomas, was already dead, which left her as a dowager, but Mrs Morgan clearly did not understand her dowagerhood as a fixed or finalized state, but rather one that might be reformed by remarriage.
If Mrs Morgan recognized that there was life after death—after the death of her husband, that is—she must also have identified the book as a powerfully symbolic object into which those imaginings could be etched. And not just any book but Eikon Basilike, a “Sacred” text that royalist writers celebrated as a “Living Memoriall,” as a kind of holy relic, which, in the wake of the regicide, functioned as a textual vessel and substitute for Charles I’s decapitated, corporeal form.[1] The Eikon gave posthumous life to the dead king, but as the inscription above indicates, it also gave Mrs Morgan the opportunity to think about what might come next: to think about where her book might go when she, like Charles I, passed on from one world to the next and to think, too, about the possibility of a new life before that, a new life as the wife of a God-sent “second mate.”
None of this is unusual, especially where the Eikon is concerned since this book has particularly rich historical associations with female ownership. Not only did early modern mothers pass copies onto their sons, but also onto daughters, granddaughters, and beyond, either by way of inheritance or in the form of a gift.[2] Copies of the Eikon also moved between families and therefore into the hands of “different female owners.”[3] As such, a single copy of Eikon Basilike might bear the traces of multiple female owners who were at a genealogical, geographical, and temporal distance from one another, but whose inscriptions form a discreet archive of copy-specific female book ownership bridging considerable distances of time and space.
If we turn now to another copy of the Eikon held at Senate House Library, we can find confirmation of this. Printed by Roger Daniel in 1649, this Eikon Basilike features the ownership mark of one “Frances Vavasour,” accompanied by the familiar phrase “Her Booke” and the date, “1669.” Vavasour’s name and her claim to ownership has been signed on the verso side of the first leaf, directly facing the main title page, which has been ruled in red by hand. Indeed, the whole book is ruled in red, and other user-generated additions include manipulations of William Marshall’s (fl. 1617-1649) famous engraving, which depicts Charles I kneeling at a basilica and which in this particular copy has been lovingly painted by hand.
Frances Vavasour is not the only woman present in this copy of the Eikon. One “Mary Wray” has signed her name at the top-left corner of the title page, and two other names circle that paratextual surface: “P. Dalton” and “E. Carnarvon.” None of these signatures are dated, and the partial nature of the evidence is only exacerbated by the fact that a possible fourth name has been cut away at the top of the page, leaving a gap between Wray and Dalton. Yet even in the face of excised evidence, the close proximity of the names “Frances Vavasour” and “Mary Wray” in the same book does help us to identify who these figures might have been and how they were related to each other.
A Frances Vavasour (1654–1731) of Copmanthorpe, Yorkshire, married Sir Thomas Norcliffe (1641–1684) of Langdon, Yorkshire, in 1671, becoming Lady Frances Norcliffe.[4] They had two sons: Fairfax Norcliffe (1674–1721) and Richard Norcliffe (1676–1697). Fairfax’s daughter (and Lady Frances’s granddaughter), Frances Norcliffe, married one John Wray (1689–1752), and their daughter (and Lady Frances’s great-granddaughter) was called Mary Wray (c. 1745–1807).[5] So, one scenario is that this copy of the Eikon passed from great-grandmother to great-granddaughter (perhaps by way of Frances’s daughter, who also inherited her mother’s first name). Additionally, since the evidence seems to point to Frances Vavasour being Lady Frances Norcliffe, she must have signed her copy of the Eikon not too long before her first marriage to Thomas—following his death in 1684, Frances married her “second mate,” to quote Mrs Morgan again, this time an Aleppo merchant—and right around the time that Sir Peter Lely (1618–1680) painted her bust-length portrait.[6]
Given the historical remits of this blog, this should mark the logical limits of where the story of this book’s ownership should end; however, over the course of the following century, Frances’s “Booke” fell into the hands of another female owner. On the recto side of the leaf bearing Vavasour’s ownership inscription, and just above an engraving featuring the Stuart coat of arms, we find the name “E. M. A. Austen,” which is dated “1909.” Towards the bottom of the same page, there’s a further note related to the Austens, this time memorializing the fact that the book was passed down from one generation to the next as a birthday gift: “Elizabeth J. Hampden Austen with loving good wishes for her 21st birthday from aunt Edith”—who might be the “E. M. A. Austen” who signed and dated the book in 1909—“and aunt Lily. December 3rd 1942.”
Fortuitously, Elizabeth J. Hampden Austen’s life is fairly well documented. According to her obituary,[7] Elizabeth J. Hampden Austen (or rather Sister Martin Dominic Austen) was born in Oxfordshire in 1921, the daughter of an Anglican clergyman. She joined the Women’s Royal Naval Service during the Second World War, and after the war she converted to the Roman Catholic faith. Sister Martin subsequently joined the Dominican Sisters of Bethany in France, and for the remainder of her life and career, she moved between Europe and the US, living with religious communities in Italy and Switzerland and helping to form communities in Massachusetts and elsewhere in the US. Sister Martin was also well known for her pastoral work with female prisoners in a variety of penitentiaries in Maine, Connecticut, and New York. She died in Portland, Maine, in February 2018.
By now we are really at quite some distance from the early modern, but as Whitney Trettien has argued, “the history of reading,” and of the period’s “used books,” “is also a history of mediating the material world, a narrative that, by its nature, pleats the past, present, and future.”[8] The two copies of Eikon Basilike discussed here perform this temporal pleating in all kinds of ways, and both copies have clearly played an important role in the life cycles of early/modern women. Mrs Morgan’s inscription looks to the past in that it commemorates “her Husband Mr Thomas Morgan Drapier at Bromsg[rove] in ye county of Worcester”; it meets us in the “now” of her writing, when Mrs Morgan found herself “a Dowager,” although she’s looking to the future, too, the future of her “Book,” her “only son,” and her own marital status. Frances Vavasour’s inscription firmly places us in 1669, but knowing what comes next—her marriage to Sir Thomas Norcliffe and her sitting for Lely’s portrait were just around the corner—conjures a sense of the transitional, even liminal contexts in which her claim to book ownership was made. In the inscription from 1942, Eikon Basilike again becomes a material space in which to mark out another kind of turning point, this time a woman’s twenty-first birthday, and it’s one that’s set against a global war, a future confessional turn, as well as a much deeper history of female ownership, which might well take us back to “E. M. A. Austen” in 1909 and almost certainly to Mary Wray in the eighteenth century and Frances Vavasour in the 1600s.
When aunts Edith and Lily gave Eikon Basilike to Elizabeth as a birthday gift in 1942, did the book’s long history of female ownership play a special part in their estimations of that gift’s symbolic significance? What did Elizabeth make of her gift and of Frances and Mary’s presence within it? Did she—and might we—treat their temporally-distant inscriptions as “marginal beside-text[s],” to quote Trettien again, each framing the “future readers’ encounters with the other”?[9] I don’t have the answers, but both copies do invite us to think, like Mrs Morgan, about the future—the future shapes, say, of our histories of early modern female book ownership, particularly as they pertain to where those histories might begin and, given the present discussion, where they might end.
Source: copies held at Senate House Library, 1) shelf mark ([Rare] (VIII) [Charles I] 5); and 2) shelf mark ([Rare] (VII) Cc [Charles I] 7). Photos by Michael Durrant, reproduced with permission.
[1] Anon, The Princely Pellican. Royall Resolves Presented in Sundry Choice Observations, Extracted from His Majesties Divine Meditations (London: [s.n.] 1649), p. 1.
[4] Carrying on the Yorkshire theme, this copy of the Eikon eventually passed into the ownership of Sir Mark Masterman-Sykes (1771-1823), a landowner, politician, and well-known bibliophile based in Sledmere near Leeds. His vast library was sold off in 1824, and so this book, which features Masterman-Sykes’s bookplate affixed to front board, must have been dispersed as part of the 3700 lots that made up that auction (and which fetched nearly £18,000). See Alan Bell, “Sykes, Mark Masterman, third baronet (1771-1823), book collector,” ODNB (2004), https://0-www-oxforddnb-com.catalogue.libraries.london.ac.uk/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-26869.
[5] I have drawn this biographical outline from the description provided in John Burke, A Genealogical and Heraldic History of the Commoners of Great Britain and Ireland, Vol. 2 (London: Henry Colburn, 1835), p. 631.
[8] Whitney Trettien, “Media, Materiality, and Time in the History of Reading: The Case of the Little Gidding Harmonies,” PMLA 133:5 (2018), pp. 1135-51 (p. 1138).
As scholars have noted for more than a half century now, the eponymous Bowdler of “bowdlerization” and its derivatives is rightfully Henrietta Maria Bowdler (1750-1830), not her brother Dr Thomas Bowdler (1754-1825). The unrevised entry in the OED continues to credit Thomas as the etymological source for “bowdlerize”—“To expurgate (a book or writing), by omitting or modifying words or passages considered indelicate or offensive; to castrate”—by citing his 1818 edition of a collection of Shakespeare’s works, marketed for its omission of words and expressions that could not be read aloud with propriety in a family setting. But the first edition of the Bowdler Family Shakespeare, published anonymously in four volumes in Bath in 1807 and containing twenty plays, was the work of his sister Henrietta Maria.[1] Anonymous publication was not unusual at the time, especially for women, and the omission of Henrietta Maria’s name from the 1818 and subsequent editions likely reflects her own sense of public propriety rather than brotherly suppression. In recent years, scholars have also started to recuperate Henrietta Maria and Thomas as editors and popularizers, pointing out that Shakespeare’s plays had long been subject to varying degrees of “bowdlerization” avant la lettre, and that the Bowdlers were not alone in revising texts to create new readerships for Shakespeare in the nineteenth century: Charles and Mary Lamb’s immensely popular Tales from Shakespeare also first appeared in 1807.[2]
This copy of Select Plays of Beaumont and Fletcher (Glasgow, 1768) features Henrietta Maria Bowdler’s beautifully hand-painted book label, dated 1786. The label appears on the verso of the second front flyleaf, facing the title-page of volume 1. The chain surround and lettering are painted in watercolor with a dark green shading a lighter green, overlaid with delicate black highlighting and every detail meticulously bordered with gilt. Whatever her attitude to the texts of these plays, Henrietta Maria Bowdler treasured her books. The two-volume set remains in its original half-leather binding with marbled paper and decorated spine, and features no markings in the text itself.
The only additional provenance information in the set is an inscription on the verso of the final rear flyleaf in volume 1: “Charles Brecknell Bought Miss Waseys sale October 17 / 1877.” Charles Brecknell eludes identification, but “Miss Wasey” likely refers to Mary Wasey (d.1880) of Priors Court, Chieveley, Berkshire: in the 1850s, Miss Wasey founded a school, “Miss Wasey’s Chapel School” or “Miss Wasey’s Voluntary,” in Curridge, in the parish of Chievely. The school remains in operation, as Curridge County Primary. The inscription could refer to a sale held at the school, or to a sale of books owned by Miss Wasey.
The edition itself represents an effort to popularize select plays of Beaumont and Fletcher for a later eighteenth-century readership: it was preceded in the century only by a seven-volume Works (1711) and a scholarly ten-volume Works (1750). Charles Lamb would include selections from three plays by Beaumont and Fletcher in his influential follow-up to Tales from Shakespeare: Specimens of English Dramatic Poets: who lived about the time of Shakespeare (1808). Henrietta Maria Bowdler’s edition of Shakespeare reveals a shrewd understanding of the language and idiom of early modern drama, and this volume likely represents one of the means by which she gained that knowledge.
Source: Private collection. Photos reproduced with permission.
[1] Evidence includes acknowledgements of her responsibility in letters circulated among family and family friends: see Noel Perrin, Dr. Bowdler’s Legacy: A History of Expurgated Books in England and America (New York: Atheneum 1969), 60-86. Many online library catalogues also continue to credit Thomas as the editor of the 1807 Family Shakespeare. Thomas added sixteen plays in his 1818 edition and revised the twenty plays Henrietta Maria had edited in 1807; this complete edition became a best-seller. See also the ODNB entries for Henrietta Maria Bowdler and Thomas Bowdler, both by M. Clare Loughlin-Chow.
[2] See e.g. Colin Franklin, “The Bowdlers and Their Family Shakespeare,” The Book Collector 49.2 (2000), 227-43; Adam H. Kitzes, “The Hazards of Expurgation: Adapting Measure for Measure to the Bowdler Family Shakespeare,” JEMCS 13.2 (2013), 43-68; Molly G. Yarn, Shakespeare’s ‘Lady Editors’: A New History of the Shakespearean Text (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2022), esp. 22-23, 29, 228.
Today we feature a 1682 Bible printed in Oxford and jointly owned by husband and wife Thomas and Mary Buswell in the 18th century.
The reversed calf binding is intricately blind-tooled, with an ownership statement in the center “Tho:s & Mary Buswell. 1758.” The blank front endpaper is signed “Mary Buswell 1772.”
Mary and Thomas remain unidentified, though they may be the Buswells/Boswells who resided in colonial Maryland. If they are, then Thomas was born in 1711, married a Mary Chaney/Cheney/Chanley around 1752, and died in 1797.
The date on the binding may signify an acquisition date of what would have been an important centerpiece of the family’s life or it may represent the couple’s marriage date. If it was an acquisition date, why would Mary have signed the book some 14 years later rather at the time of purchase? Or is it possible that Mary—who may not have been Mary Chaney mentioned above—signed the book the year it was acquired and had the binder date the book with the year she and Thomas were married? Why is there such a wide gulf between the printing date of the book and the approximate date the couple acquired it, and what can it tell us about the import of books from England to the colonies?
Regardless, like most Bibles, it was clearly a cherished and significant book to Thomas and Mary.
Cheaply printed and often read to pieces by their young users, early modern schoolbooks are scarce survivals. Early modern schoolbooks with evidence of female provenance are even more scarce, especially early modern schoolbooks designed for Latin instruction: young women were seldom afforded opportunities to learn Latin. This copy of William Lily’s Short introduction of grammar … for the bringing up of all those that intend to attain to the knowledge of the Latin tongue (1696) is the first schoolbook to appear on this site.
William Lily’s Short introduction was the standard textbook used to teach the basics of Latin to grammar school pupils from the 1540s through to the second half of the eighteenth century. Hundreds of editions survive, but individual editions are all rare in themselves, usually surviving in a handful of copies at most. This 1696 edition, held by Smith College (shelfmark 876.5 L62 1696), is one of many editions of Lily that survives in one unique copy. The edition is unlisted in both Wing and ESTC, though ESTC lists editions with the identical imprint from 1695 and 1697, each also surviving in a single copy.
This copy of Lily features several claims of ownership, probably by two different women named Hannah Johnson. The opening flyleaf recto is inscribed “Hannah Johnson [decorations] Johnson her Booke”; “Hannah Johnson Her Book To Learn Grammar” is inscribed on the flyleaf verso, facing the title-page, in the same hand. A different hand writes “Hannah Joh[n]son her book by the gift of har father William Johnson” on the title-page verso. Below that inscription, in the same hand as that on the opening flyleaf, appears this gloss: “Mr Grandfathar Johnson Dyed in the year 1712.”
The most likely explanation for these inscriptions is that the “Grandfather Johnson” who died in 1712 is the same “William Johnson” who gave this copy of Lily to his daughter Hannah Johnson. The placement of the reference to “Grandfather Johnson” suggests that it both follows and responds to the inscription that invokes William Johnson. If father and grandfather William are indeed the same man, then the inscriptions indicate two different Hannah Johnsons: the daughter who was the book’s first owner, followed by a young woman with the same name in the next generation (a niece?), who added her name in or at some point after 1712. If so, then the older Hannah Johnson passed on to another young woman in the family the gifts her father had given her: the gifts of both the book and the encouragement to learn Latin. The younger Hannah Johnson comments on the older Hannah’s note, memorializing her grandfather in turn as she proudly lays claim to the book that has been passed on to her and notes its purpose: “To Learn Grammar.”
The Hannah Johnson who received this book as a gift from her father likely received it soon after it was published in 1696: the book remains in its original binding, and contains no additional evidence of provenance.
Source: Smith College 876.5 L62 1696. Photos reproduced with permission.
One of the most popular works of the seventeenth century is Francis Bacon’s Sylva Sylvarum, or, a Natural Historie, first published the year after he died in 1627 and compiled by the philosopher-scientist’s chaplain William Rawley. English-language imprints from the 1630s, 1650s, 1660s, 1670s, and 1680s are still commonly found for sale today. Its loose organizational structure and relative incoherence set it apart from other Baconian publications, and it has vexed scholars for centuries. Rusu and Lüthy have argued that the text was compiled from manuscripts written by Bacon and never meant for publication, but that it nonetheless provides a window into his methods and demonstrates that he used these rough-hewn manuscripts in issuing other, more organized natural histories.
Despite being so dissimilar to his previously published works, Sylva Sylvarum was his most popular work in the seventeenth century. This third edition was owned some forty years after its publication by a Margaret and William Pratt, then later Sir George Strickland, 5th Baronet (1729– 1808) and his son Henry Eustatius Strickland (1777-1865). The Stricklands were of Yorkshire, though Henry eventually set up residence at Apperly Court in Gloucestershire.
The book is signed on the title page “Will: Pratt. A.M. 1670” and on the front flyleaf recto “The Booke of Mrs Margaret Pra[tt].” The A.M. after William’s name may signifies ‘Assembly Member,’ though of which governing body is unknown. An additional annotation in William’s hand above his ownership inscription is illegible due to trimming of the textblock, but may indicate when the book was procured and / or what price was paid for it.
Given the commonness of their names, it is difficult to say with certainty what the relationship William and Margaret had. The “Mrs” indicates a married name, though she could have been either his mother or wife.
It is also unknown how the book left the Pratts’ possession and entered the Stricklands’, though the Pratts may have been a Yorkshire family like the Stricklands. The book is bound in contemporary speckled calf.
Given the book’s popularity, it is not surprising that many surviving copies contain women’s inscriptions, even though generally it is less common to see women signing works of natural history and science than it is religious or devotional works. Another 1631 edition was offered for auction in July 2023 and is signed on A3r “Jane Eyton Jane Eyton / 1655 do[?] when / Jane Eyton.” This inscription gives the impression of someone sketching idly, maybe even considering the relationship between her signature and identity (the repeated lowercase Ys suggest an attempt to hone the inscription’s appearance).
There are no other clues in the book to suggest Jane’s identity. Hers seems to be the only legible ownership inscription, although the final text page has faded annotations at the foot, in what appears to be an earlier hand.
The divisional title page of another leaf has expunged annotations that say in part “A Table of The Experiments” and appear to be dated 1771, though whether there is an ownership inscription there is hard to determine.
Jane, like Margaret, is unidentified, but together the signatures indicate women’s interest in wide-ranging subjects.
[1] Doina-Cristina Rusu & Christoph Lüthy. “Extracts from a Paper Laboratory: The Nature of Francis Bacon’s Sylva Sylvarum,” Intellectual History Review, 27:2 (2017), 171-202, DOI: 10.1080/17496977.2017.1292020.
This post adds another physical book owned by Katherine Blount to her ever-expanding library list and also reveals a manuscript that demonstrates her reading practices in action. Previous posts by Sarah Lindenbaum, Sophie Floate, William Poole, and Mary Ann O’Donnell have brought the total number of books inscribed by Katherine Blount to twelve, but additional discoveries by Martine van Elk and Sarah Lindenbaum have expanded that list further to 40 titles. As research by Lindenbaum and O’Donnell outlines, Katherine Blount was the daughter of James Butler and Grace Caldecott of Amberley Castle in Sussex. Born in 1676, she married Sir Thomas Pope Blount, 2nd Baronet in 1695.[1] When I started researching the miscellany of Katherine Butler (St. Paul’s Cathedral Library MS 52 D.14) around 2010, I proposed a few branches of the Butler family to which she might have belonged, including the Butlers of Amberley Castle, but I wasn’t certain.[2] Now that I have compared Katherine Butler’s signature and handwriting to those of the printed books identified in the other posts, I can confidently say that the Katherine Butler who inscribed a manuscript collection of sermons by John Donne and Joseph Hall in 1693 and who used the blank pages in that same manuscript to compile a miscellany from 1696 onwards is the same person as Katherine Blount. I can also confirm that the marginal notes written in the book described by Floate (Cyrano de Bergerac’s The Comical History) and the identifications of characters in the manuscript key and the text of the book described by Poole (Samuel Garth’s The Dispensary) are indeed in Blount’s hand. But readers of this post can judge for themselves.
The manuscript collection of sermons by John Donne and Joseph Hall
A manuscript collection of five sermons (four by John Donne and one by Joseph Hall), now St. Paul’s Cathedral Library MS 52 D.14, is inscribed “Katherine Butler Given me by my Father May 1693” (fol. 1r). The donor of this manuscript was James Butler of Amberley Castle, who died on 11 July 1696.
Fig. 1. Katherine Butler’s inscription from 1693, fol. 1r.
The sermons were transcribed by Knightley Chetwode in 1625 and 1626 or shortly thereafter. [3]
Fig. 2. The title page of the sermons, fol. 2r.
Exactly how this early seventeenth-century sermon collection came into the hands of James Butler and what occasion prompted him to give it as a gift to his daughter, Katherine, in 1693 are unclear.
Katherine Blount’s manuscript miscellany in verse and prose
Butler signed her name only once in St. Paul’s Cathedral Library MS 52 D.14, two years before her marriage in 1695, after which she would have signed her married name of Blount. But she was already Katherine Blount in 1696 when she began using the blank pages of the sermon manuscript to create her own miscellany. On fol. 178r, after the sermons, she wrote the heading “1696” and began a collection of verse extracts, and sometimes complete poems, ending at fol. 195v.
Fig. 3. The first page of the verse section of the miscellany, fol. 178r.
Facing that first page of poetry is an inscription on fol. 177v in which she explains her motivations for her selections: “The reason why I wrote severall of these following Verses, was not that I thought them all good, but the subjects was – what, I had occasion to make vse of.”
Fig. 4. The inscription on fol. 177v.
Blount does indeed make use of her chosen poems and extracts, consistently identifying them by theme or title, and favoring topics like friendship, virtue, and the importance of moderation, among others. Her “subjects” were not narrowly moralistic, however. As we can see from fol. 181r, she transcribes all of Abraham Cowley’s poem “Drinking” (which ends with the rousing couplet, “Should every Creature drink but I / Why, Men of Morals, tell me why?”).
Fig. 5. A sample page from the verse section, fol. 181r.
At the bottom of this page she includes two passages from different plays by John Dryden that disparage the state of marriage; it is a “Curse of Life,” “Loves nauseous cure,” and “but ye Pleasure of a Day.”[4]
Blount also began writing a second section of her manuscript in the year 1696. She took the manuscript and turned it upside down, making a new first page from the end of the volume and beginning a section of prose, which runs from fols. 276v, reversed to 230v, reversed. In the image below, you can see that she has headed this section, “A Common Place Book 1696.” Though I have called her manuscript a miscellany (since it is primarily a collection of miscellaneous extracts in verse and prose), it could equally be called a commonplace book, as she has labeled the prose section, since it is largely organized thematically.
Fig. 6. The first page of the prose section of the miscellany, fol. 276v, rev.
It is this heading that convinced me that Katherine Butler was Katherine Blount since, though the main hand of the miscellany is messier than any of the inscriptions in her printed books, the upper case “B” looks very similar to all of the “B”s each time she signs “Blount.” The upper case “P” looks similar to that in the word “Pope” in the inscription in O’Donnell’s post. And the date “1696” on both pages in the St. Paul’s manuscript replicates the number forms in all of her dates on her printed books. Blount died in 1753, and so she may have continued writing in this manuscript well into the eighteenth century. The final item in the verse section can be dated to 1719, though a later edition is possible, while one of the final items in the prose section in Blount’s hand appears to have been taken from a book published in 1736.[5]
More books from Katherine Blount’s library?
Not only does Blount identify many of her chosen passages by topic, but at several points in her manuscript she has written authors’ names, works, and page numbers beside passages, and many of those transcribed passages match specific editions.[6] Here is a list of works in which her transcriptions and page numbers match known editions; these are volumes she is likely to have consulted—and perhaps owned—from the verse section of the manuscript, rearranged into alphabetical order:
Boyle, Roger, Earl of Orrery. Tryphon,in Four New Plays (1670) or Six Plays (1694)[7]
Brome, Alexander. Songs and Other Poems (1668)
Charron, Pierre. Of Wisdome, Three Books, translated by George Stanhope (1697)
Cowley, Abraham. Works (any edition between 1668 and 1693)[8]
Denham, John. Poems and Translations (1668, 1671, or 1684)
Dryden, John. An Evening’s Love, or, The Mock-Astrologer (1691)[9]
Dryden, John. Aureng-zebe, A Tragedy (1685)
Dryden, John. The Conquest of Granada by the Spaniards (1687)[10]
Dryden, John. The Hind and the Panther. A Poem (1687)[11]
Dryden, John. The Indian Emperor, or, The Conquest of Mexico by the Spaniards (1686 or 1692)
Montaigne, Michel de. Essays, three volumes, translated by Charles Cotton (1685-86)[12]
Norris, John. A Collection of Miscellanies (1687 or 1692)
Philips, Katherine. Poems (1667, 1669, or 1678)
Plutarch’s Morals Translated from the Greek by Several Hands, vols. 1 and 2 (1691 or 1694)[13]
Reynolds, Edward. A Treatise of the Passions and Faculties of the Soul of Man (1656)
Suckling, John. Works (1676)
Tuke, Samuel. The Adventures of Five Houres: A Tragi-Comedy (1671)
Waller, Edmund. Poems (1694)
Wilmot, John, Earl of Rochester. Poems on Several Occasions (1680 or 1685)
In the prose section, Blount lists two page references tied to works that match the following printed texts:
Marana, Giovanni Paolo. The First Volume of Letters Writ by a Turkish Spy (1691, 1692, 1693, or 1694) or the eight-volume edition (1694)
Sprat, Thomas. The History of the Royal-Society (1667, 1702, 1722, or 1734)
Interestingly, one of the books described in Lindenbaum’s post, Reynolds’ A Treatise of the Passions (1656), is in the above list. It was the first book that Blount used in the verse portion of the miscellany. She inscribed the Reynolds book on July 10, 1696, and I wonder if then or shortly thereafter she wrote the heading “1696” in the St. Paul’s manuscript and began transcribing. Visible in the marginal notes beside the second entry in figure 3, above, you can see the note “Reynolds saith in his Tre: of ye Pa: & Faulties of ye Soul Page ye 228.” This short passage on grief (the only passage in prose in the verse section of the manuscript) is indeed from p. 228 in Reynolds’ book. But Reynolds’ treatise is also the source for the rest of the passages on this first page, those she has attributed to Ovid, Lucretius, and Euripides; of three on the following page (fol. 178v), which she has attributed to The Iliad, Ovid, and Homer; and of one on fol. 186v, which she has attributed to “A Greek Poet,” which Reynolds identifies as Euripides. In these seven passages (which appear in Reynolds, pp. 228, 179, 122, 89, 284, 297-98, and 265), Blount obscures Reynolds as the source and instead highlights his own marginal references to classical authors and their works, no doubt capitalizing on the cultural cachet of these ancient sources.[14]
As Lindenbaum and Van Elk have discovered, Blount owned books written by Ben Jonson (The Works, 1692, which she purchased in 1699), Edmund Waller (The Works, 1729, which was given to her by the editor in 1730), and Francis Bacon (The Essays or Counsels, 1673, which she inscribed in 1697). Though extracts or complete works by each writer appear in Blount’s miscellany, those precise editions were not her source. A marginal note indicates that the eight-line passage from Jonson’s translation of Horace’s De Arte Poetica appeared “In a Translation of Hor:” (fol. 187v). This suggests that Blount’s source was The Poems of Horace, Consisting of Odes, Satyres, and Epistles Rendered in English Verse by Several Persons, which included Jonson’s translation in the editions of 1666 and 1671. There are four extracts from Waller, from The Maid’s Tragedy Altered (fol. 178v), “Of Divine Love. Six Cantos” (fol. 179r), “A Panegyrick to my Lord Protector” (fol. 179r), and “Upon the Earl of Roscommon’s Translation of Horace” (fol. 180v). Two of the four extracts have page numbers beside them, and these line up with Waller’s Poems of 1694 but do not match the 1729 edition.[15] Since Blount began compiling her manuscript in 1696, and since the Waller extracts appear near the beginning (fols. 178v, 179r, and 180v), the Waller edition she received in 1730 is not her source. Finally, the Bacon item she includes in full, “The Character of Queen Elizabeth” (fols. 257v, rev.-247v, rev.), is the English translation that was first printed in the 1696 edition of The Essays or Counsels; the 1673 edition she owned does not include that work.[16] Blount might have used editions from 1696, 1701, 1706, or 1718, all of which included the version she transcribed.
Blount’s sources are even more plentiful than the above list since many more rhyming couplets, prose and verse extracts, and complete poems and prose works appear in her miscellany, only sometimes identified by author. Though the exact works and editions are not always clear, in addition to those already mentioned she includes passages or complete works from the following authors in her compilation: Edward Baynard, Thomas Browne, Colley Cibber, John Cleveland, Jeremy Collier, Thomas Creech, William Davenant, John Donne, Richard Fanshawe, Charles Gildon, Matthew Morgan, John Oldham, John Philips, Samuel Pufendorf, Charles Sedley, Jeremy Taylor, William Walsh, and John Webster.[17]
Katherine Blount’s miscellany gives us a rich opportunity to see one woman from the late-seventeenth and early-eighteenth century engaging with her reading material. It is likely that more books owned by Blount from the above lists will surface, so let’s all keep our antennae out.
Source: St. Paul’s Cathedral Library MS 52 D.14. Photos by Graham Lacdao, St. Paul’s Cathedral, reproduced with permission.
Works Cited
Booker, John M. L., ed. The Clough and Butler Archives: A Catalogue. West Sussex County Council, 1965.
Burke, John. A Genealogical and Heraldic History of the Commoners of Great Britain and Ireland. 4 vols, London, 1836-38.
Burke, Victoria E. “The Couplet and the Poem: Late Seventeenth-Century Women Reading Katherine Philips.” Women’s Writing, vol. 24, no. 3, 2017, pp. 280-97. Special issue: Katherine Philips: Form and Reception, edited by Marie-Louise Coolahan and Gillian Wright. Reprinted in Katherine Philips: Form, Reception, and Literary Contexts, edited by Coolahan and Wright, Routledge, 2018, pp. 151-68.
Burke, Victoria E. “‘The disagreeable Figure of a Common-Place’ in Katherine Butler’s Late Seventeenth-Century Verse Miscellany.” Manuscript Miscellanies in Early Modern England, edited by Joshua Eckhardt and Daniel Starza Smith, Ashgate, 2014, pp. 183-99.
Potter, George R., and Evelyn M. Simpson. “General Introductions: II. On the Manuscripts.” The Sermons of John Donne, 10 vols., edited by Potter and Simpson, University of California Press, 1962, vol. 1, pp. 33-45.
Van Koughnet, Jane C. E. A History of Tyttenhanger. London, 1895.
[1] See sources by Van Koughnet, Crook and Henning, and others in the posts by Lindenbaum and O’Donnell.
[2] This research culminated in an article on Butler’s manuscript miscellany, “The disagreeable Figure of a Common-Place” (2014). See note 6, in which I used John Burke’s Commoners, vol. 3, p. 517, to suggest her possible link with the Butlers of Amberley Castle; I used the birth and death dates from Booker, The Clough and Butler Archives, pedigree facing p. x.
[3] For a description of St. Paul’s Cathedral Library MS 52 D.14, see Potter and Simpson, vol. 1, pp. 41-42. For editions of the four Donne sermons in this manuscript, see The Oxford Edition of the Sermons of John Donne Project website: https://donnesermons.web.ox.ac.uk/st-pauls-cathedral-library-ms-52d14
[4] The first passage is from Dryden’s play The Conquest of Granada by the Spaniards; the 1687 edition matches Blount’s marginal reference of p. 88 (the reason for the cross-reference to p. 67 on the right of the passage is unclear). The second passage is from Dryden’s Aureng-zebe, a Tragedy, and Blount’s page reference of 46 matches the 1685 edition of that play.
[5] The final item in the verse section, the first 13 lines from the verse prologue of Dr Edward Baynard’s Health: A Poem, must be from the 1719 edition (the first to include the verse prologue) or later editions. An item from the later pages of the prose section in Blount’s hand (fol. 259r, rev.) appears to have been extracted from The Counsels of Wisdom, Or a Collection of Such Maxims of Solomon as are Most Necessary for the Prudent Conduct of Life … by Monseigneur Fouquet …, vol. 1 (1736), p. 28. While two seventeenth-century volumes with similar titles from 1680 and 1683 contain the passage, Blount’s wording matches the 1736 edition.
[6] My thanks to Shane Hawkins, who matched many of the references to digitized copies of books in Early English Books Online (EEBO), which catalogues books printed from 1475-1700, and Eighteenth-Century Collections Online (ECCO).
[7] Though Orrery’s Two New Tragedies (1669) also contains this extract on the page listed by Blount (p. 45), she later quotes (without a page reference) from Orrery’s Mustapha, a play which appears in the 1670 and 1694 volumes but not the 1669. It is thus more likely that she used the 1670 or 1694 edition for the extracts from both plays.
[8] Blount’s page numbers line up with the editions of 1668, 1669, 1672, 1674, 1678, 1680, 1681, 1684, 1688, and 1693. Though the page numbers also match Cowley’s Poems (1656), she later quotes (without a page reference) from a work that does not appear in the 1656 edition, making it more likely that all of her Cowley quotations come from an edition of his Works.
[9] Blount’s page number matches the 1691 edition of An Evening’s Love, or, The Mock-Astrologer, but also the version of the play found in the three-volume 1695 collection of Dryden’s works. Only one other Dryden work in this list fits the pagination in the three-volume 1695 edition (The Hind and Panther); since none of Blount’s page numbers for Aureng-zebe, The Conquest of Granada, or The Indian Emperor match the three-volume edition, it is not likely the source for her Dryden extracts. A final play by Dryden, All for Love, or, The World Well Lost a Tragedy, is quoted by Blount, but her edition is uncertain since the Prologue from which she quotes is unpaginated in all editions (1678, 1692, 1696, and the three-volume 1695 edition of Dryden’s works).
[10] The quotation appears on pp. 87-88 in the 1678 edition, but the only edition in which it appears on p. 88 (Blount’s reference) is the 1687 edition.
[11] Blount must have extracted from one of the three editions Jacob Tonson printed in 1687, since her reference of p. 14 lines up with those editions only (not with the other two editions printed in 1687, by James Watson and by Andrew Crook and Samuel Helsham, whose pagination is different).
[12] Though Blount gives a page reference for only one of her eleven quotations from this source (p. 327 from vol. 1), the quotations come from all three volumes.
[13] Blount quotes nine times from volume 1 or 2 of this work, but only gives a page number once (p. 37), which matches volume 1 of the 1691 and 1694 editions.
[14] For a discussion of Blount’s use of classical sources in her miscellany see Burke, “The disagreeable Figure of a Common-Place,” pp. 193-94. Blount also obscures Samuel Pufendorf’s Of the Law of Nature and Nations (1703) as the source of thirty classical quotations.
[15] The page reference given by Blount for the extract from “Of Divine Love. Six Cantos” (p. 281) matches both the 1694 and 1705 editions, but the page reference for The Maid’s Tragedy Altered (p. 10) matches the edition of the play first printed in 1690, and then in the Poems of 1694, but not the 1705 edition, suggesting that Blount likely used the 1694 edition for her Waller extracts.
[16] Two different English translations were printed earlier in the century: one in 1651 in The Felicity of Queen Elizabeth: and Her Times (pp. 1-42) and one in 1657 in the collection Resuscitatio (pp. 181-93). This latter translation by William Rawley was praised as superior in Baconiana, or, Certain Genuine Remains of Sr. Francis Bacon (1679), pp. 52-53, by “T. T.” The Latin text seems first to have been printed, also by Rawley, in the Latin collection entitled Opuscula varia posthuma (1658), pp. 175-94.
[17] Later material that may be in a different hand includes a sermon by John Scott, letters by John Tillotson and James Radcliffe, and “Mrs Cowlings Thoughts upon Time.” (The last may be the Mrs. Couling referred to by Van Koughnet as a friend of Blount’s sister, Grace: p. 68). For additional work on Blount’s reading material and strategies see the two articles (and forthcoming work) by Burke.
Early Modern Female Book Ownership 