Richard Barckley, A Discourse of the Felicitie of Man (1598)

Sir Richard Barckley, a knight about whom no biographical information exists, first published the commonplace book A Discourse of the Felicitie of Man, or, His Summun Bonum in 1598. The text was dedicated to Queen Elizabeth I and was popular enough to see a “newly corrected and augmented” second edition in 1603 and a reissue by playwright Thomas Heywood in 1631. It serves as a philosophical and metaphysical meditation and advice book on the subject of happiness.

The copy featured here is in a contemporary triple-ruled binding with a blind-tooled centerpiece with scrollwork. The earliest known owner is a “John Mablon in Huggin Lane,” whose inscription appears on a front endpaper. The later name of “Elizabeth Dirdo” is written on the title page verso in a ca. seventeenth-century hand.

Like the author of the book she owned, Elizabeth Dirdo eludes identification. At least one other book with the inscription “Elizabeth Dirdo” survives, a 1640 edition of Sir Richard Baker’s Meditations and Disquisitions upon the Seven Penitentiall Psalmes, now Folger Shakespeare Library STC 1228. Dirdo, also spelled Dirdoe or Durdo, is an uncommon surname. Though limited, these two examples of her book ownership suggest an interest in religious texts.