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.
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.
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).
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.
The title page of the 1673 self-help manual, The Gentlewomans Companion; or, A Guide to the Female Sex (ESTC, R204109), discreetly tucks “By Hannah Woolley” at the foot of the text’s long title, sandwiching “Woolley” between two rules and just above the imprint, where we find another female agent being marked out as a key player in this text’s making: “LONDON, Printed by A[nne] Maxwell [fl. 1660-1680] for Dorman Newman at the Kings-Arms in the Poultry, 1673.”
As Martine van Elk has written elsewhere on this blog, Anne Maxwell’s involvement as the Companion’s printer seems fairly well assured, but Hannah Woolley’s involvement as the Companion’s author is rather less clear cut. For sure, Woolley was a likely candidate to be the author of a text that, to quote from the title page again, purports to contain “Directions of [female] Behaviour, in all Places, | Companies, Relations, and Conditions, from | their Childhood down to Old Age.” She had made a name for herself as an expert writer of recipes and matters to do with household management, and so there’s scope to imagine that Woolley really did branch out to pen the Companion, in which tips on cooking, cleaning, human hygiene and health jostle alongside prescriptions on proper female speech, conversation, gait and posture, and guidelines for the writing of letters. But really The Gentlewomans Companion seems to have been spurious, an attempt by its publisher, Newman, working alongside its printer, Maxwell, to cash in on the Woolley brand
Whilst it has been suggested that the Companion may have been based on an authentic Woolley manuscript,[1] Woolley would publicly disown the text soon after its publication in 1673, complaining in a dedicatory poem that accompanied A Supplement to the Queen-like Closet (1674) that her “Name” had been “much abus’d” by the Companion; Woolley had in fact been “far distant” when the Companion was printed; and since her authorial identity (her “Name”) had been appropriated without her consent, Woolley concludes by asserting “that Book to own I think not fit.”
The whole issue of appropriation—and with this, the idea of where early modern books come from—is addressed in the Companion’s epistle, “To all Young Ladies, Gentlewomen, and all Maidens whatever,” which is allegedly Woolley-authored. There, “Woolley” tells us that, given the commercial success of her other print products (“the first called, The Ladies Directory; the other, The Cooks Guide”), she had been encouraged by both her “Book-seller” and her “worthy Friends” (sig. A3r) to write a more fulsome “Companion and Guide to the Female Sex” (sig. A3v). Over the course of seven years, “Woolley” read and researched her way through several contemporary manuals on female instruction, including “that Excellent Book, The Queens Closet; May’s Cookery; The Ladies Companion,” her own “Directory and Guide,” as well as fashionable books “lately writ in the French and Italian Languages” (sig. A4r-v). “Woolley” then settles on imagery associated with the painting of portraits to account for the way in which she actively folded words and ideas from these books into her own writing:
I hope the Reader will not think it much, that as the famous Lymner when he drew the Picture of an exact Beauty, made use of an Eye from one, of a Mouth from another, and so cull’d what was rare in all others, that he might present them all in one entire piece of Workmanship and Frame: So I, when I was to write of Physick and Chyrurgery, have consulted all Books I could meet with in that kind, to compleat my own Experiences (sig. A4v–A5r).
Quoting the same passage, Leah Orr suggests that “[s]uch “culling” is very generally practiced [in the period] but rarely stated so forthrightly.”[2] Given Woolley’s own complaint that the Companion had actually “abus’d” (or we might say “cull’d) her “Name” and therefore her brand identity, there appears to be something cheekily self-referential at work here. Indeed, the “Lymner” imagery—and with this, the idea of an individual’s portrait being made of bits and pieces drawn from the bodies of other subjects—seems particularly pointed given the fact that the Companion was published alongside a paratextual portrait, which was supposed to be in the likeness of Woolley herself, but that was really a retouched image of someone else.
Turning now to the British Library’s (BL) copy of The Gentlewomans Companion (C.194.a.1455), we can see that the issues of appropriation I’ve been discussing find expression in evidence related to book use and competing claims to book ownership.
This copy lacks the suspect Woolley portrait, although on its title page we do find a seventeenth-century inscription, written in brownish ink, which designates female ownership: “Elizabeth Polwheile her booke.”
Writing for the BL’s “Untold Lives” blog, Beth Cortese suggests that this “Elizabeth Polwheile” is likely the Restoration playwright, Elizabeth Polwhele (c. 1651–1691), who was the author of at least two unpublished plays, The Faythfull Virgins (c. 1670) and The Frolicks, or The Lawyer Cheated (c. 1671). It’s an exciting possibility, because as Cortese points out, it would offer us a little glimpse into the library of a woman about whom we still know little, and her ownership of “Woolley’s” Gentlewomans Companion might suggest that this text was being used not only for educational purposes but perhaps also as one of Polwhele’s “literary influences”.
This scenario—that Polwhele read the BL’s copy of the Companion for the bits that could be “cull’d” to form the basis of her own writing—might explain the presence of two hand-drawn crosses (+) that are positioned in the margins of this book. Written in what appears to be the same brownish ink used to write the “Elizabeth Polwheile her booke” inscription, these marginal notations materialise in the concluding section of the book, where “Woolley” offers a suite of imaginary/stock “Letters upon all Occasions” (sig. Q3v–S3v). The first cross appears in the left-hand margin of “The Answer of an ingenious Lady” (sig. Q8v). This letter serves as a reply to the preceding “Letter from one Lady to another, condemning Artificial-beauty” (sig. Q7r–Q8r), and it finds the “ingenious Lady” arguing for a woman’s right to wear cosmetics, and she fights back at prevailing stereotypes that linked the “Art in the imbellishing” with female “sin”, “pride” and “vanity” (sig. Q8v). The second cross appears in the right-hand margin of “A Lady to her Daughter, perswading her from wearing Spots and Black-patches in her face” (sig. R2r), in which another “Lady” adopts an entirely antithetical line, neurotically linking cosmetics and female fashions with libertine excess and therefore with “the vices of this present age.”
I don’t know for sure whether these two crosses were put there by Polwhele, but if she is responsible for these markings, perhaps it’s evidence of her reaching into “Woolley’s” Companion to mark-up moments that might be usefully appropriated within the contexts of her own dramaturgy—serving, say, as a source for ready-made dialogues between female characters who could represent competing forms of femininity.
So, a book that seems to have appropriated the Woolley brand, and a book that, at the same time, draws attention to rather than obscures its own literary appropriations and borrowings, may have become a site of creative appropriation for at least one female Restoration playwright. But then returning to the title page of the BL’s copy of The Gentlewomans Companion, we find another, later hand reaching into the text to mark out another identity, another form of ownership, and with this, another layer of appropriation.
Just under the “Elizabeth Polwheile her booke” statement, a male hand has inserted the word “formerly”; just below that, the same hand then adds that Polwhele’s book “is now the property of Edmund Hopkinson”—that is, Edmund Hopkinson (1787–1869) of Edgeworth Manor House near Cirencester, who was the High Sheriff in Gloucestershire. An avid collector of antiquities—including, by all accounts, an Egyptian mummy, which he unwrapped during a dinner party before donating to the Gloucester Museum in the 1850s—Hopkinson steps in to appropriate the title page of The Gentlewomans Companion as a space to enact his own masculinist (self-)possession. Nudging Polwhele to the side, the book seems to become Hopkinson’s “property,” but in the case of The Gentlewomans Companion, where issues of possession and attribution and appropriation seem to be constantly shifting and recalibrating, such an assertion is really more complex than it might first appear.
Source: copy held at the British Library, shelf mark C.194.a.1455. Photos by Michael Durrant, reproduced with permission.
[1] See Margaret J.M. Ezell, “Cooking the Books; or, The Three Faces of Hannah Woolley,” in Reading and Writing Recipe Books, 1550–1800, ed. by Michelle DiMeo and Sara Pennell (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), pp. 159–78.
[2] Leah Orr, Publishing the Woman Writer in England, 1670-1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023), p. 61.
Katherine Philips, also known by her famous coterie name Orinda, was one of the most popular female authors of the late seventeenth century; her early death and renowned modesty as well as her compelling poetic persona meant that she was frequently contrasted with more notorious and subversive women writers like Aphra Behn and Margaret Cavendish. The posthumously published collection Poems, the authorized edition put out after an unauthorized edition had appeared in 1663, much to Philips’s own apparently dismay. Both versions had been published in Folio format, signalling an ambition to be seen as a monumental author, an impression that is confirmed in the posthumous edition by the many dedicatory poems, the preface to the reader, and especially by the monumentalizing frontispiece.
The existing copies of the book sometimes features female signatures. We have shown some of these on our blog (see here and here). Lady Dorothy Long had a copy in her library, and the RECIRC project has found 11 receptions of her collections of poems. And as Mark Empey has shown, Bridget Bennet owned a copy of the book.
Recently yet another instance of a female-owned copy of Philips’s poems has come to light. In this copy, two owners have placed their signatures on the title page.
On the left Charles Cope has written a strong signature, his capital C for his first name moving decisively onto the title of the collection itself. Next to him, Mary Delamowaye or Delamotraye has written her name more modestly, with only slight decoration. Delamowaye is an unusual name, not found at all in FamilySearch, for instance, though I have found a Mary Mowaye, married to a Joseph Moway, whose son Joseph Mowaye was born in 1786. There are some instances of records for people with the family name Motray. Of course, it is possible that other variant spellings (like Morway or Matray) take us in another direction, but for now the owner remains unidentified.
On the website for the book, the seller notes the traces of another owner’s inscription that has been erased, beginning with “Clemen-.”
Whoever owned it when it was bound showed some investment in maintaining it, as it has been nicely bound, including some floral decorations.
Source: book offered for sale by Peter Harrington, May 2023. Images reproduced with permission.
By Ynys Convents, Ellen Gommers, Sebastiaan Peeters, Emma Ten Doesschate, and Patricia Stoop (University of Antwerp)
Women’s contribution to the literary culture of the early modern Low Countries is still very much underexposed. Fascinating research done in recent years has not yet reached the general public. Many other sources have not been studied thus far. Therefore, students of Dutch at the University of Antwerp studied seven early printed books from the seventeenth century that are preserved in the library of the Ruusbroec Institute of the University of Antwerp (https://www.uantwerpen.be/en/research-groups/ruusbroec-institute/library/). Each of these religious books can be linked to women in at least two ways. They dealt with women’s exemplary lives, were written or printed by or dedicated to them, and, at a later stage, found their way to female owners. In this blogpost we present the students’ findings.
Theresa of Ávila as a Source of Inspiration
The works of the influential Spanish mystic, saint, and Doctor of the Church Theresa of Ávila (1515–1582) became widespread across Europe soon after her death, partly under the influence of the Counter-Reformation. Her reformed ideas that led to the foundation of the Order of Discalced Carmelites in 1562 also reached the Catholic part of the Netherlands. Several of her texts were translated — sometimes indirectly via French — into Dutch. The Bibliography of the Hand Press Book in Flanders (STCV: Short Title Catalogue Vlaanderen; https://vlaamse-erfgoedbibliotheken.be/en/dossier/short-title-catalogue-flanders-stcv/stcv) lists seventeen different Dutch-language books, some of which were printed multiple times. In addition, several of her texts in Spanish, French, and Latin were also distributed in the Southern Netherlands.
Figure 1: Theresa of Ávila inspired by the Holy Spirit. Hand-colored engraving by M[aria?] Volders (active in Antwerp between 1669 and 1688) (Antwerp, Library of the Ruusbroec Institute, RG–PC H1: Theresa of Jesus (unnumbered)).
The Bruydegoms vrede-kus oft Bemerckingen vande liefde Godts (Bridegroom’s Peace-Kiss or Reflections on the Love of God), in which Theresa described various sorts of prayer, was printed in 1647 by the widow of the Antwerp printer Jan Cnobbaert (1590–1637). The work was annotated by the Spanish Carmelite Jerónimo Gracián (1545–1614), Theresa’s spiritual mentor. The Discalced Carmelite Antonius of Jesus produced the Dutch translation at St Joseph’s Convent in Antwerp (as he did for many of her other works). He dedicated the translation to Françoise de Bette (1593–1666), who was the abbess of the Benedictine convent in Vorst near Brussels from 1637 until her death.
In 1687 Hieronymus Verdussen V (1650–1717) printed Den catechismus van S.te Theresia (The Catechism of St Theresa) in Antwerp. According to the title page, Petrus Thomas a S. Maria (1611–1686), a Discalced Carmelite from Normandy, gathered the spiritual teachings “uyt de Schriften ende eygen Woorden vande selve Heylige” (“from the writings and own words of the same saint”). He published the result in French in Rouen in 1672. His French version was translated by a person who only left his initials M. AE. S. in the Antwerp edition and therefore cannot be identified.
Additionally, the library of the Ruusbroec Institute keeps a Dutch translation of Theresa’s biography by the Spanish Jesuit Francisco Ribera (1537–1591). The Spanish version (La vida de la madre Teresa de Iesus) was published in Salamanca in 1590. The anonymous Dutch translation, entitled Het leven der H. Moeder Terese van Iesus fundaterse vande barvoetsche carmeliten ende carmeliterssen (The Life of the Holy Mother Theresa of Jesus, Founder of the Discalced Carmelites), was printed in Antwerp thirty years later by Joachim Trognesius (between 1556 and 1559–1624). Whether the translation was made directly from Spanish or, as in the previous example, from French is not clear. It is certain, however, that a French version by the Carmelite Jean de Brétigny (1556–1634) and the Carthusian Guillaume de Chèvre circulated in the Netherlands: the 1607 edition of La vie de la mere Terese de Jesus was published in Antwerp by Gaspar Bellerus (fl. 1606–1617).
The Lives of Spiritual Virgins
Some inspirational women from the Low Countries also helped shape literary and devotional culture. We know a great deal about them because they documented their lives and religious experiences extensively in diaries and correspondences with their confessors. Based on this auto-biographical documentation, their Lives were written. The Jesuit Daniël Huysmans (1643–1704), for example, wrote biographies of Agnes van Heilsbagh (1597–1640) and Joanna van Randenraedt (1610–1684), who were both spiritual daughters — unmarried women who wanted to lead a religious life, often under the spiritual guidance of Jesuits, without joining a convent. Both Agnes and Johanna lived in Roermond in Limburg (nowadays located in the Netherlands) and were involved in education and the promotion of Christian values. Their biographies in Huysmans’s versions were printed in Antwerp shortly after each other. Kort begryp des levens ende der deughden vande weerdighe Joanna van Randenraedt (Short Account of the Life and Virtues of the Honorable Joanna van Randenraedt) was published and printed in 1690 by Augustinus Great (fl. 1685–1691); Leven ende deughden vande weerdighe Agnes van Heilsbagh (Live and Virtues of the Honorable Agnes Heilsbagh) appeared a year later and was printed by Michiel Knobbaert (fl. 1652–1706). Huysmans integrated the letters of both spiritual daughters into his Lives, which allowed the voices of these women to resonate distinctly in his texts.
Figure 2: Title page of Daniël Huysmans, Leven ende deughden vande weerdighe Agnes van Heilsbagh with her Portrait (Antwerp: Michiel Knobbaert, 1691) (Antwerp, Library of the Ruusbroec Institute, 4050 A 12).
Finally, the Carmelite tertiary and mystic Maria Petyt (1623–1677) wrote an autobiography and corresponded with her spiritual counsellor Michael a Sancto Augustino (1621–1684). He published Maria’s texts posthumously in Het leven vande weerdighe moeder Maria a S.ta Teresia, (alias) Petyt, Vanden derden Reghel vande Orden der Broederen van Onse L. Vrouwe des berghs Carmeli (The life of the honorable mother Maria a Sancta Teresa, (alias) Petyt, from the Third Rule of the Order of the Brethren of Our Lady of the Mount Carmel), which came out in Ghent in 1683. Michael claims not to have modified any of Maria’s words in his four-volume publication of no fewer than 1,500 pages. He, however, added a short introduction to each chapter.
Books in Women’s Hands
These works by and about women were often destined for a female readership. This is evident from the many ownership inscriptions we discovered. Most of the books ended up in female communities. Theresa of Ávila’s Bruydegoms vrede-kus, for instance, belonged to Catrijn de Roos, who lived “opt groodt begijn hof” (“in the large beguinage”; fly leaf at the front) of an, unfortunately, unspecified town. Some of the books belonged to Alexian sisters (“zwartzusters”). The Life of Agnes van Heilsbagh was owned by her namesake Agnes Vandervloet, who lived in the Alexian community in Antwerp. Het leven der H. Moeder Terese van Iesus was kept in the convent of Alexian sisters in Ypres for no fewer than 175 years. It was donated to the community by Nicolais Reynier in 1624 (Figure 4). There, Sister Catalijn van der Bogaerde owned it. A note at the end of the book further shows that in 1788 it was still in the convent, now being kept by Sister Theresia Verbeke.
Figure 3: Ownership inscriptions on the title page of Francisco Ribera, Het leven der H. Moeder Terese van Iesus (Antwerp: Joachim Trognesius, 1620) (Antwerp, Library of the Ruusbroec Institute, 3053 C 20 gamma).
Besloten hof, het innigh ghebedt betuynt met de doornen-haghe der verstervinghe (Enclosed Garden, the Inner Prayer Bordered with the Thorny Hedge of Mortification) (Antwerp: Arnout van Brakel, 1665) is associated with two female communities. It is dedicated to Maria van Praet (d. 1668), who at the time of publication was “hooftmeestesse” (“grand mistress”) of the beguinage of Antwerp. Later, the book ended up in a women’s convent (possibly of Discalced Carmelite nuns) in Willebroek, a little town south of Antwerp. The ownership inscriptions at the fly leaf at the front show how the book was passed from person to person within the convent, presumably after the previous owner died. Under Sister Theresia Helman’s name the inscription “Requiescat in Pace” was added, and Sister Joanna van Luijtelaer’s name was followed by the abbreviation “R.I.P.”. Presumably Sister Anna t’Kint, who wrote her name at the top of the page, was the book’s new owner.
Figure 4: Title page of Besloten hof, het innigh ghebedt betuynt met de doornen-hage der verstervinghe and ownership inscriptions of three sisters (Antwerp: Arnout van Brakel, 1665) (Antwerp, Library of the Ruusbroec Institute, 3079 D 14).
Some books were more likely owned by secular women. Den catechismus van S.te Theresia, for instance, is said to have been in the possession of “Joanna Chaterina Roovers woonende in de Copper straet inden wieten engel” (“Joanna Chaterina Roovers living in the Copperstraet in the White Angel”; fly leaf at the front). Unfortunately, it is not clear where the Copperstraet was. The third volume of Het leven vande weerdighe moeder Maria a s.ta Teresia, (alias) Petyt can be located more precisely. It was owned by Joanna Francisca van der Eijnde who lived “op den tribunael tot Mechelen” (“at the tribunal in Mechelen”; fly leaf at the front). She probably belonged to a family of painters whose members lived and worked as porters in that same tribunal (the court of justice). Remarkably, Arnold Frans Van den Eynde (1793–1885), a possible family member of Joanna Francisca, painted the Carmelite convent in Mechelen where Maria Petyt lived as an anchorite in the last phase of her life.
Towards an Inclusive Literary History
Our exploratory research in the library of the Ruusbroec Institute shows the importance of research into handwritten inscriptions in printed books. It shows that there is still a world to discover when it comes to the relationship between women and (religious) book culture in the early modern period. Both religious and secular women participated in the production, reception, and circulation of seventeenth-century printed books in many different ways. In several books, women’s spiritual ideas were passed on by men who wanted to make their voices heard. Books were dedicated to women or put out to print by them. Many copies reached female audiences. In some cases, we find that books were passed down from woman to woman for generations.
Our work also underlines again the importance of enhancing access to heritage collections and making material evidence in individual copies available. A systematic exploration of early printed book collections will bring visibility to large numbers of women. Provenance data in early printed books can teach us which women read and wrote or were otherwise involved in the book culture of their time. Such data can also be used to discover what women read, for what reason, and in what context. It is this type of research into women’s books that will help us eventually to construct an inclusive history of early modern Dutch literature.
Note: This blogpost was developed within the module “Women and early modern literature” of the BA-course “Dutch Studies in Practice” (“Neerlandistiek in de praktijk”) of the Language and Literature program of the University of Antwerp. The research was carried out by Noah Claassen, Ynys Convents, Kevin De Laet, Ellen Gommers, Ingeborg de Heer, Eline Heyvaert, Joran Jacobs, Anouck Kuypers, Sebastiaan Peeters, Jade Simoens, Emma Ten Doesschate, Cynthia Thielen, Lotte Van Grimberge, and Jens Van Reet, under the supervision of Tine De Koninck and Patricia Stoop. The text was written by Ynys Convents, Ellen Gommers, Sebastiaan Peeters, Emma Ten Doesschate, and Patricia Stoop.
Source: Books held by the Library of the Ruusbroec Institute, Antwerp. All images reproduced with permission.
Printed books studied
Besloten hof, het innigh ghebedt betuynt met de doornen-hage der verstervinghe (Antwerp: Arnout van Brakel, 1665) (Antwerp, Library of the Ruusbroec Institute, RG 3079 D 14).
[Daniël Huysmans], Kort begryp des levens ende der deughden vande weerdighe Joanna van Randenraedt (Antwerp: Augustinus Graet, 1690) (Antwerp, Library of the Ruusbroec Institute, 3054 H 3 gamma).
[Daniël Huysmans], Leven ende deughden vande weerdighe Agnes van Heilsbagh (Antwerp: Michiel Knobbaert, 1691) (Antwerp, Library of the Ruusbroec Institute, 4050 A 12).
Den catechismus van S.te Theresia (Antwerp: Hieronymus Verdussen V, [1687]) (Antwerp, Library of the Ruusbroec Institute, 3018 I 23bis).
Francisco Ribera, La vida de la madre Teresa de Iesus, fundadora de las Descalças, y Descalços Carmelitas (Salamanca: Pedro Lasso, 1590).
Francisco Ribera, La vie de la mere Terese de Jesus, Fondatrice des Carmes dechaussez (Antwerp: Gaspar Bellerus, 1607).
Francisco Ribera, Het leven der H. Moeder Terese van Iesusfundaterse vande barvoetsche carmeliten ende carmeliterssen (Antwerp: Joachim Trognesius, 1620) (Antwerp, Library of the Ruusbroec Institute, 3053 C 20 gamma).
Michael a Sancto Augustino, Derde deel van het leven vande weerdighe moeder Maria a S.ta Teresia, (alias) Petyt, Vanden derden Reghel vande Orden der Broederen van Onse L. Vrouwe des berghs Carmeli (Ghent: heirs of Jan vanden Kerchove, 1683) (Antwerp, Library of the Ruusbroec Institute, 3017 C 1 2/1).
Theresa van Ávila, Bruydegoms vrede-kus oft Bemerckinghen vande liefde Godts (Antwerp: Weduwe van Jan Cnobbaert, 1647) (Antwerp, Library of the Ruusbroec Institute, RG 3018 C 18, 1e ex).
This copy of the best-selling sermons of the “silver-tongued” Henry Smith (c.1560-1591) joins the copies of his Twelve Sermons (1629) and Foure Sermons (1617) with early modern female provenances posted on this site on April 23, 2020 and February 8, 2022 respectively. As the February 8, 2022 post suggested, Smith’s frequently published and repackaged works are notorious for their bibliographical complexities, complexities often reflected in individual copies. In this case, the signatures of “Mary Hockmore” on sig. T5v and “Rich. Norris” on sig. C8v both appear in a copy of Smith’s collected Sermons (1604), STC 22725. This copy of that publication, however, is missing its title-page and all leaves preceding C8, the leaf that contains the signature of Rich[ard] Norris. This missing section has been replaced in this volume with a copy, complete in itself, of Smith’s Foure Sermons (1605), STC 22750, a collection not usually found as a separate publication but instead issued with Smith’s Two Sermons (1605), STC 22753.
It is impossible to tell when these two Smith sermon collections were conjoined in this volume—and the joining is quite literal, as the verso of the final leaf of Foure Sermons (1605) is glued to the recto of what is now the opening leaf of Sermons (1604). The two collections were published by different stationers and the book is in a modern binding, so the pairing could be a recent attempt to salvage a damaged copy of the substantial Sermons (1604). But the appearance of the “Rich[ard] Norris” signature around the title of the sermon that begins on sig. C8v could indicate that the book was already missing its initial section when Norris signed: his signature mimics one common way of positioning signatures on title-pages, framing the title. The opening section missing from Sermons (1604) is not a sermon but Smith’s “Preparative to Marriage”: possibly the book was customized early on, removing this initial “Preparative” and adding a group of sermons not in the larger volume to “complete” it as a collection of Smith’s sermons.
“Mary Hockmore” (sig. T5v)
“Rich. Norris” (sig. C8v)
The combination of signatures (Norris and Hockmore) strongly suggests that the “Mary Hockmore” who signed her name at the bottom of the leaf on which Smith’s sermon “The Arte of Hearing” begins is the Mary Hockmore who married a Richard Norris in Combeinteignhead, Devon in 1658; she is probably also the Mary Hockmore who subsequently died and was buried in Combeinteignhead in 1671. Richard Norris is more difficult to identify with confidence, other than this 1658 marriage record. Mary Hockmore evidently owned the book before her marriage, and her inscription indicates that the book had been a bequest: “Mary Hockmore, her booke, Wich was bestowed uppon her at the Deth of the vertuos and …”. The final words are unfortunately trimmed, but her use of the frequently gendered term of praise “vertuos” makes it likely that she inherited the book from another female owner, probably her mother or another relation. The presence of her husband’s signature at what is now the beginning of the book might suggest that he laid some degree of claim to Mary’s books upon their marriage (or after her death); on the other hand, it might simply indicate a shared interest with Mary in the sermons of Master Smith.
A photograph of the title-page of Foure Sermons (1605) with which this book now opens is included above; Sermons (1604), the text in which these two signatures actually appear, lacks its title-page in this copy and is a scarce edition: few copies are complete and accessible, and the quality of the image on EEBO is too poor to reproduce.
Source: book in private ownership. Photos by Joseph L. Black, reproduced with permission.
Previous posts on this blog (see here and here) have revealed to us the book ownership of Katherine Blount (d. 1753), wife of Sir Thomas Pope Blount (1670–1731), the second baronet. The blog has so far traced eleven of her books—or rather evidence for ownership of eleven books, for four are known only through report. (All her inscriptions traced to date follow her marriage in 1695, as they employ her married name of Blount, rather than her maiden name of Butler.) I would like to add one more to this list, a copy of Samuel Garth’s celebrated mock-epic, The Dispensary (London, 1699), on the feud among London’s physicians and apothecaries concerning dispensing medicines gratis to the poor.
I acquired this book myself in June 2011 via the internet from a Los Angeles bookdealer. I have several early editions of this poem, because they are fairly commonly, even typically, annotated, the chief and pleasurably conspiratorial task of the reader being—as it had been with John Dryden’s Absalom and Achitophel—to identify which historical personages lie hidden under poetical ciphers (e.g. ‘Querpo’ for the physician Dr George Howe), as well as those sporting the customary libel-dodging fig-leaf dash (e.g. ‘Lord De——re’ for Lord Devonshire). Katherine Blount’s copy does not disappoint.
Katherine acquired this book, a copy of the second edition, very soon after its first appearance, as her inscription records that she received it from her cousin by marriage, Henry Blount, on 27 May 1699.
This is Henry of Blount’s Hall, born in the Strand in 1675. He was educated at Christ Church, went into the military, served as a Lieutenant-Colonel in the Foot Guards, but was killed young in 1704 in the Battle of Schellenburg, one of the engagements of the War of the Spanish Succession. Henry was the son of Charles, the famous Deist writer and younger brother of Thomas Pope Blount Sr, the first baronet, an equally famous if less notorious writer than brother Charles, who had preferred the genres of the essay and the biobibliography, and who had presented to Katherine a copy of the 1697, third edition of his Essays. So the Henry who gave Katherine this book was properly her husband’s first cousin, and she had already received at least one book from his father.[1]
The Dispensary was a publishing sensation: it went through three editions in 1699 alone, distinguished as such on their title-pages; by 1768 it had reached its eleventh. The first printed merely Garth’s poem, but the second and third sported various prefatory materials, including four commendatory poems, of which the final is by one ‘H. Blount’, almost certainly ‘our’ Henry Blount. Now Henry gave his cousin’s wife a copy of this second edition, presumably hot off the press, and so in effect he was presenting her with a modern classic in which he himself now proudly featured.[2]
Katherine’s copy is further distinguished by the amount of annotation it bears. Garth’s poem, as mock-epic, had allegorised its main protagonists by giving them entirely new names, a common tactic. The reader was invited to ‘crack the code’ of the poem, and to facilitate this manuscript ‘keys’ to the poem were circulated, eventually making it into print, and indeed thereafter often accompanying later editions of the poem. Garth himself probably initiated this process: a letter of his, of 1699 or just perhaps 1700, to Arthur Charlett of University College, Oxford, includes a key in his own hand.[3] Now there is a key in Katherine’s copy in the front end-papers, albeit the page was at some subsequent point too closely courted by candle, and is now rather damaged at the edges. Then, throughout the text, like many other readers, identifications of characters have been added where needed. Garth’s poem of course invited this sort of engagement; but this is still an impressively engaged copy.[4] What I would say is that the key does not seem to me to be in the hand of Katherine’s signature, but the annotations are probably in the hand of the key. Let the reader judge!
Here is the (damaged) manuscript key at the front of the book (the larger stains indicate that there was an original leather binding wrapped around; the copy is now elegantly rebound in modern quarter-calf), with a second picture with a tiny loose fragment restored:
And here are some characteristic annotated extracts:
What I would like to know is whether this hand can be identified with either the donor or with later figures associated with Katherine—or just possibly with Katherine herself when not writing ownership inscriptions. I doubt this book passed out of her hands within her lifetime. And I have fully collated neither key nor annotations against surviving keys and copies: so I would welcome further research into this matter.
Finally, of Katherine’s books traced so far, her ownership inscriptions are added to books often printed quite a long time ago: her 1656 Edward Reynolds was gifted to her in 1696; her 1662 Glanvill and 1673 Bacon were both acquired in 1697; her 1678 Willughby in 1738; her 1690 Pepys in 1701; her 1692 Ben Jonson was bought by her in 1699; her 1695 John Somers in 1705. A book by Basil Kennett published in 1721 was bequeathed to her in 1734. These are gaps of frequently decades. There have been two exceptions so far: we have seen that Blount Senior gave Katherine a book of his own presumably upon publication; and the final book noted by Sarah Lindenbaum in her post on this blog, a Xenophon of 1710, was a present from the Duchess of Marlborough in the year of publication. We know of so few of her books that it is rash to generalize, but on this evidence Katherine typically came into ownership of books that had already been in circulation for some time. Her copy of Garth is a further exception, and an interesting one, because we know that a very literary uncle by marriage had presented her with a book of his own writing; and now we have one from his son, containing a poem of his own composition.
New College, Oxford
Source: book in private ownership. All images reproduced with permission.
[1] For genealogical material I am indebted, like previous posters on this blog, to Lady Jane Van Koughnet’s A History of Tyttenhanger (London: Marcus Ward & Co., 1895).
[2] The poem has been edited in volume six of the Yale University Press series Poems on Affairs of State (1970, ed. by F. H. Ellis). Indispensable remain John F. Sena, ‘Samuel Garth’s The Dispensary’, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 15 (1974), 639–48, and C. C. Booth, ‘Sir Samuel Garth, FRS: the dispensary poet’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society, 40 (1985–6), 125–45; the bibliography of the poem was put on a proper footing by Pat Rogers, ‘The Publishing History of Garth’s Dispensary: Some ‘Lost’ and Pirated Editions’, Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society, 5 (1971), 167–77.
[3] Bodleian, MS Ballard 24, fols. 111r–112v (113r is another key, not in Garth’s hand); J. F. Sena, ‘The letters of Samuel Garth’, Bulletin of the New York Public Library, 78 (1974), 69–94, at 93–4.
[4] Just flipping through the Bodleian copies: the first edition in the library possibly once belonged to the great Greek scholar Humphrey Hody, as it is in a volume, 4o P 19 Jur, with some titles that certainly did, but it is unannotated. A copy of the second edition, G. Pamph. 1594(1), is heavily cropped but sports dozens of identifications placed in the margins, and is followed by printed key. A copy of the third edition, Godw. Pamph. 1570(4), is particularly full, with all blanks filled in, many interlinear identifications, some giving alternative possibilities, and even a couplet on Garth at the end. Another copy of the third edition, at Gough London 257, is comparably annotated, the annotator being Samuel Bishop, Fellow of St John’s, Oxford 1753, whom Gough identifies as the headmaster of Merchant Taylors’ School of that name; he was a poet too.
Early Modern Female Book Ownership 