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.
As we have previously noted, the Book of Common Prayer is one of the books most likely to have been owned by a woman. As of the writing of this post, eight other examples have been featured here. A cornerstone of religious life, Books of Common Prayer were often sumptuously bound with hand-colored illustrations (see here and here) and gilt-tooled covers. Lucy Burman’s Book of Common Prayer is among them.
Her Book of Common Prayer is encased in gilt-stamped red morocco binding with black morocco inlay, silver clasps, and silver furniture. The center plate bears the initials “A B,” presumably another member of the Burnham family. Colorful Dutch gilt endpapers cap off the book’s visual appeal. The bookseller notes that style of the binding is similar to the so-called “cottage-roof binding” employed by the Restoration-era binder Samuel Mearne and may have been done by one of his apprentices.
As the bookseller observes, the binding was likely commissioned in or around 1703, that being the date of the Book of Psalms bound with the Book of Common Prayer. It is easy to find things to say about this striking binding, but less so A.B. and Lucy Burnham, who—like so many owners profiled on this blog—have been swallowed by the centuries.
Here again, the bookseller gives a lead, noting that A.B. and Lucy were likely members of the Stratford-upon-Avon Burman family, who lived in the village of Shottery, where Shakespeare’s wife Anne Hathaway resided as a child. In fact, Burman’s Farm is located directly behind the cottage and has since been renamed Hathaway Farm, the most popular tourist attraction in the area next to the cottage and Shakespeare’s Birthplace. As Katherine West Scheil notes, “connections between the Burmans and Hathaways stretch back to the fifteenth century.”
There are a few strong candidates for Lucy’s identity. The first is Lucy Walford Burnam (ca. 1660–1719) who married Stephen Burnam (1651–1709) in 1694. Their son Hugh Burnam (1696–1761) and his wife Hester Hurdis Burnam (1696–1766) of Shottery had seven children, only one of whom, Lucy (1732–1787), outlived her parents. The younger Lucy married the Reverend William Daniel of Stretton-on-Dunsmore in 1762 and “was a considerable heiress,” according to her descendant John Burman. Lucy and Stephen also had a daughter called Lucy, born in 1702 and married in 1728 to William Hurdis.
A.B. is harder to pin down. The A may stand for Ann(e) or Anna. An Anna Burman was born to a Thomas Burman in December 1639 and baptized at Stratford-Upon-Avon, while an Anne Burnam was born to Richard and Joice Burnam of Packwood sometime after 1665. Packwood was a civil parish about 15 miles north of Stratford. If she was the person whose initials are engraved on the silver furniture of the Book of Common Prayer, then she would have been in her late 30s at the time the book was bound.
Opposite Lucy Burman’s signature on the title is a religious poem, which can be viewed here. It bears similarities, though is not an identical match, to her signature, reading in full: “Faith in God that self denyes, / Wisdom with her self supplyes: / Filling the soul with th’ Eternal Good / When she wills not what she Would.” It is a poem about denying one’s own will and desires in order to obtain wisdom and Divine favor. Together, the book and the religious inscription provide interesting insight into the devotional life into a probable Stratford family in the early to mid-18th century.
Source: Book sold by WoodPaz Books Ltd on 25 February, 2024. Images used with permission.
Further Reading Burman, John. The Burman Chronicle: The Story of a Warwickshire Family (Birmingham: Cornish Brothers, 1940), p. 28-29. Libby Shade’s Page of Family Trees. “Burman: Sixth Generation” (https://www.shade.id.au/Burman/Burman6.htm) and “Burman: Seventh Generation” (https://www.shade.id.au/Burman/Burman7.htm). Updated May 2008.
“Mathematics” has yet to appear on this site as a subject tag. Admittedly, works of mathematics are uncommon presences in early modern libraries: at the time of writing, only 244 of 18,500 records in the Private Libraries in Renaissance England (PLRE) database are categorized as mathematics, including 12 of the 1950 records currently associated with woman owners. For women as well as men, the most popular forms of mathematical books that do appear in early modern libraries comprise geometry, arithmetic (a serious subject of study at the time, not just one for school textbooks), astronomy, and the applied subjects of mensuration and surveying (books of measurement appear often in the libraries of landowners). The most interesting mathematical work owned by a woman in PLRE to date appears in the library of Lady Anne (Stanhope) Holles (d.1651): Lady Anne owned a copy of the Abrégé recherché de Marie Crous pour tirer la solution de toutes les propositions d’arithmétique (Paris, 1641) (PLRE 298.9). Unacknowledged in her time as a woman of learning, Marie Crous is now credited as the mathematician who introduced the decimal system to France.
In England, publications devoted to algebra—in the period, essentially the theory of equations—started to be published in the second half of the seventeenth century. This 1709 edition of the Synopsis of Algebra by Johannes Alexander is the first and only edition of the English translation of a work first published in Latin in London in 1693 (Wing A913). The Latin and English versions were both published for use in the two “Mathematical Schools” in Christ’s Hospital, London. Founded in 1552 to serve the city’s poor and orphaned children, Christ’s Hospital remains one of the oldest boarding schools in England. Girls were admitted from the school’s founding onwards, so there is a possibility that the Elizabeth Gould who signed this book on both the title-page (“E. Gould”) and the recto of a front flyleaf (“Eliz:th Gould / Her Book”) was associated in some way with Christ’s Hospital. She would not have been affiliated with either of the two mathematical schools, the first of which was founded in 1673 to train boys (known as “mathemats”) as mathematicians and navigators to serve and strengthen British maritime power. The first school, strongly supported by figures such as Samuel Pepys, survives today as the Maths Department at Christ’s Hospital. The title-page also refers to a short-lived “new” school founded in 1706. Backed by Isaac Newton and led by Humphry Ditton (1675-1715), who supplied the appendix to this 1709 edition, this new school closed with the death of Ditton.
Elizabeth Gould’s signatures could be contemporary with the book: the ink and form both indicate an eighteenth-century provenance. As will be discussed below, the book in addition found its way into an institutional library by the early nineteenth century (and possibly was there even by the later eighteenth century). Her signature seems not to match the hand that added the notes and diagrams on “Parallelograms” to the front pastedown, though signatures often differ from other forms of inscription. It is also difficult to match either the signatures or the manuscript notes with confidence to the hand that inscribed “Allgebra” on the book’s tail edge, an uncommonly late appearance of this form of book labeling: the book potentially was stored with the tail edge facing outward. The binding is a contemporary paneled calf.
Elizabeth Gould eludes identification, but evidence of later provenance in this copy suggests some possible cultural context. The title-page is stamped “Homerton College Society.” Homerton College was a small (12-20 students at any one time) dissenting academy in the parish of Hackney, close to London. It was founded in the 1760s as King’s Head Academy and took the name Homerton College in the 1820s, though the book could have been in the school library before the name change: the stamp could have been added after the institutional name change rather than at the time of acquisition. In the 1850s, when admission to English universities was liberalized, Homerton College transferred its theological courses (and evidently some of its library) to New College London, whose bookplate inconveniently covers the pastedown notes on parallelograms. The continuity of institutional ownership from Homerton College to New College confirms that Elizabeth Gould owned the book at some point between its creation for use at Christ’s Hospital in the early eighteenth century and its acquisition by Homerton College in the early nineteenth century, or possibly even by its predecessor King’s Head Academy in the later eighteenth century. The link among these institutions is dissent: Humphry Ditton, the founder of the “new” mathematical school at Christ’s Hospital and contributor to this edition of Alexander’s Synopsis, was an ardent dissenting minister as well as a mathematician. With her record of ownership bookended by associations with dissenting schools—which promoted a “modern” curriculum of science, philosophy, and modern history—Elizabeth Gould seems likely to have pursued her interest in algebra while a member of the period’s dissenting community.
Source: Kinney Center for Interdisciplinary Renaissance Studies, University of Massachusetts Amherst, shelfmark QA154.8 .A5413 1709. Images used with permission.
This is another installment in our series of blog posts Katherine Blount, who, as we have discovered, owned a formidable library. The more we look, the more we find. The search for Blount books started with a post by Sarah Lindenbaum, which was followed by posts by Sophie Floate, William Poole, and Mary Ann O’Donnell, who all added to the list compiled by Sarah. Then, most recently, Victoria Burke wrote for us on a manuscript miscellany that she could, with the help of evidence featured on the blog, identify definitively as written by Blount. The miscellany provides broad evidence of Blount’s reading, including many books not featured in our blog before, which were possibly part of the family library rather than Blount’s personal collection. Much work remains to be done in terms of identifying and locating the books from which she copied material in the miscellany manuscript.
Fortunately for us, Blount meticulously signed many of the books she owned, almost always including a date and often a price or a note about the person who gave her the book. I will not repeat the biographical facts of her life here since those can be found in any of the posts linked above. Her gift inscriptions show that she was frequently given books by her husband and other friends and relations, allowing us to begin to think about the networks of which she was a part. The particular book I concentrate on here is Vegetable Staticks by Stephen Hales. Vegetable Staticks was presented to Blount, her inscription shows, by Hales himself in 1727.
Who was Hales and why might Blount have been interested in this book? Stephen Hales (1677–1761), as the title page of the book tells us, was both a clergyman and a scientist. His main position, as Curate of Teddington, would have brought him in close proximity to Twickenham, the estate that was the primary residence of Blount and her husband, which is, according to Google Maps, a mere half an hour walk away.
Hales had become interested in science while at Cambridge and wrote a number of scientific works, making important discoveries and inventing various devices to benefit human health. Statick Vegetables is perhaps his most important work. The book collects Hales’s papers presented at the Royal Society on plant nutrition, considering the circulation of water and how plants acquire energy through air and possibly light. A section of the book is devoted to air chemistry, an important topic to Hales, who argued for the importance of air circulation to health and invented a kind of ventilator.
The entry on Hales in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography quotes contemporary Gilbert White’s impressions of Hales:
“Gilbert White noted that ‘His whole mind seemed replete with experiment which of course gave a tincture and turn to his conversation often somewhat peculiar, but always interesting’. He listed a series of anecdotes to support this view, among which were Hales’s concern with the incrustation of ladies’ tea-kettles, his advising the use of showers of water to test the salubrity of wells, his directing air-holes to be let in the outer walls of rooms, his imploring young people not to drink their tea scalding hot, his ad hoc advice to ferrymen on how to maintain the bottoms of their boats, and his teaching housewives to place inverted teacups in their pies to prevent the syrup from boiling over.”
The conversations Blount may have had with Hales may have ranged from science and botany to cooking and tea kettles. We can only speculate, but the fact that he presented her with his book means that he must have felt she would be interested in biology. Perhaps he was looking for patronage. The books in Blount’s collection we have uncovered so far are generally not directly scientific though one book in the list of works mentioned in her miscellany, Thomas Sprat’s The History of the Royal-Society, tells us that she may have had an investment in the history of scientific discovery.
Blount’s Vegetable Staticks’s later provenance history is visible in a book plate belonging to Henry Carrington Bolton (1843–1903), an American professor of chemistry and science historian, whose interest in the subject is obvious and whose ownership may explain how the book has ended up in the Library of Congress today.
Our other posts on Blount do not show the bindings for her books, but the images below can prove helpful in the future in establishing her ownership of other works.
Source: Library of Congress, shelfmark QK711 .H2 1727. Images by the Library of Congress, used with permission.
Further Reading
Allan, D. G. C. “Hales, Stephen (1677–1761), natural philosopher.” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford University Press, 2023.
One of Senate House Library’s copies of Charles I’s ghost-written memoir, Eikon Basilike. The Pourtraicture of His Sacred Majestie in his Solitudes and Sufferings, which was printed by “W[illiam]. D[ugard].” for Francis Eglesfield in 1649, contains a manuscript inscription on the verso side of its front endpaper. This undated inscription looks to the future of the book’s ownership, but it also imagines possible futures for that book’s female owner:
this Book at my Decease to Mr Morgan Mrs Morgans only son by her Husband Mr Thomas Morgan Drapier at Bromsg[rove] in ye county of Worcester now a Dowager till God is pleased to send Her a second mate.
Presumably, the ‘Mrs Morgan’ identified here is also the inscriber. She stipulates that upon her death, her copy of the Eikon was to pass into the possession of her “only son,” securing not only that book’s survival but also helping to reinforce maternal bonds. Mrs Morgan’s husband, Thomas, was already dead, which left her as a dowager, but Mrs Morgan clearly did not understand her dowagerhood as a fixed or finalized state, but rather one that might be reformed by remarriage.
If Mrs Morgan recognized that there was life after death—after the death of her husband, that is—she must also have identified the book as a powerfully symbolic object into which those imaginings could be etched. And not just any book but Eikon Basilike, a “Sacred” text that royalist writers celebrated as a “Living Memoriall,” as a kind of holy relic, which, in the wake of the regicide, functioned as a textual vessel and substitute for Charles I’s decapitated, corporeal form.[1] The Eikon gave posthumous life to the dead king, but as the inscription above indicates, it also gave Mrs Morgan the opportunity to think about what might come next: to think about where her book might go when she, like Charles I, passed on from one world to the next and to think, too, about the possibility of a new life before that, a new life as the wife of a God-sent “second mate.”
None of this is unusual, especially where the Eikon is concerned since this book has particularly rich historical associations with female ownership. Not only did early modern mothers pass copies onto their sons, but also onto daughters, granddaughters, and beyond, either by way of inheritance or in the form of a gift.[2] Copies of the Eikon also moved between families and therefore into the hands of “different female owners.”[3] As such, a single copy of Eikon Basilike might bear the traces of multiple female owners who were at a genealogical, geographical, and temporal distance from one another, but whose inscriptions form a discreet archive of copy-specific female book ownership bridging considerable distances of time and space.
If we turn now to another copy of the Eikon held at Senate House Library, we can find confirmation of this. Printed by Roger Daniel in 1649, this Eikon Basilike features the ownership mark of one “Frances Vavasour,” accompanied by the familiar phrase “Her Booke” and the date, “1669.” Vavasour’s name and her claim to ownership has been signed on the verso side of the first leaf, directly facing the main title page, which has been ruled in red by hand. Indeed, the whole book is ruled in red, and other user-generated additions include manipulations of William Marshall’s (fl. 1617-1649) famous engraving, which depicts Charles I kneeling at a basilica and which in this particular copy has been lovingly painted by hand.
Frances Vavasour is not the only woman present in this copy of the Eikon. One “Mary Wray” has signed her name at the top-left corner of the title page, and two other names circle that paratextual surface: “P. Dalton” and “E. Carnarvon.” None of these signatures are dated, and the partial nature of the evidence is only exacerbated by the fact that a possible fourth name has been cut away at the top of the page, leaving a gap between Wray and Dalton. Yet even in the face of excised evidence, the close proximity of the names “Frances Vavasour” and “Mary Wray” in the same book does help us to identify who these figures might have been and how they were related to each other.
A Frances Vavasour (1654–1731) of Copmanthorpe, Yorkshire, married Sir Thomas Norcliffe (1641–1684) of Langdon, Yorkshire, in 1671, becoming Lady Frances Norcliffe.[4] They had two sons: Fairfax Norcliffe (1674–1721) and Richard Norcliffe (1676–1697). Fairfax’s daughter (and Lady Frances’s granddaughter), Frances Norcliffe, married one John Wray (1689–1752), and their daughter (and Lady Frances’s great-granddaughter) was called Mary Wray (c. 1745–1807).[5] So, one scenario is that this copy of the Eikon passed from great-grandmother to great-granddaughter (perhaps by way of Frances’s daughter, who also inherited her mother’s first name). Additionally, since the evidence seems to point to Frances Vavasour being Lady Frances Norcliffe, she must have signed her copy of the Eikon not too long before her first marriage to Thomas—following his death in 1684, Frances married her “second mate,” to quote Mrs Morgan again, this time an Aleppo merchant—and right around the time that Sir Peter Lely (1618–1680) painted her bust-length portrait.[6]
Given the historical remits of this blog, this should mark the logical limits of where the story of this book’s ownership should end; however, over the course of the following century, Frances’s “Booke” fell into the hands of another female owner. On the recto side of the leaf bearing Vavasour’s ownership inscription, and just above an engraving featuring the Stuart coat of arms, we find the name “E. M. A. Austen,” which is dated “1909.” Towards the bottom of the same page, there’s a further note related to the Austens, this time memorializing the fact that the book was passed down from one generation to the next as a birthday gift: “Elizabeth J. Hampden Austen with loving good wishes for her 21st birthday from aunt Edith”—who might be the “E. M. A. Austen” who signed and dated the book in 1909—“and aunt Lily. December 3rd 1942.”
Fortuitously, Elizabeth J. Hampden Austen’s life is fairly well documented. According to her obituary,[7] Elizabeth J. Hampden Austen (or rather Sister Martin Dominic Austen) was born in Oxfordshire in 1921, the daughter of an Anglican clergyman. She joined the Women’s Royal Naval Service during the Second World War, and after the war she converted to the Roman Catholic faith. Sister Martin subsequently joined the Dominican Sisters of Bethany in France, and for the remainder of her life and career, she moved between Europe and the US, living with religious communities in Italy and Switzerland and helping to form communities in Massachusetts and elsewhere in the US. Sister Martin was also well known for her pastoral work with female prisoners in a variety of penitentiaries in Maine, Connecticut, and New York. She died in Portland, Maine, in February 2018.
By now we are really at quite some distance from the early modern, but as Whitney Trettien has argued, “the history of reading,” and of the period’s “used books,” “is also a history of mediating the material world, a narrative that, by its nature, pleats the past, present, and future.”[8] The two copies of Eikon Basilike discussed here perform this temporal pleating in all kinds of ways, and both copies have clearly played an important role in the life cycles of early/modern women. Mrs Morgan’s inscription looks to the past in that it commemorates “her Husband Mr Thomas Morgan Drapier at Bromsg[rove] in ye county of Worcester”; it meets us in the “now” of her writing, when Mrs Morgan found herself “a Dowager,” although she’s looking to the future, too, the future of her “Book,” her “only son,” and her own marital status. Frances Vavasour’s inscription firmly places us in 1669, but knowing what comes next—her marriage to Sir Thomas Norcliffe and her sitting for Lely’s portrait were just around the corner—conjures a sense of the transitional, even liminal contexts in which her claim to book ownership was made. In the inscription from 1942, Eikon Basilike again becomes a material space in which to mark out another kind of turning point, this time a woman’s twenty-first birthday, and it’s one that’s set against a global war, a future confessional turn, as well as a much deeper history of female ownership, which might well take us back to “E. M. A. Austen” in 1909 and almost certainly to Mary Wray in the eighteenth century and Frances Vavasour in the 1600s.
When aunts Edith and Lily gave Eikon Basilike to Elizabeth as a birthday gift in 1942, did the book’s long history of female ownership play a special part in their estimations of that gift’s symbolic significance? What did Elizabeth make of her gift and of Frances and Mary’s presence within it? Did she—and might we—treat their temporally-distant inscriptions as “marginal beside-text[s],” to quote Trettien again, each framing the “future readers’ encounters with the other”?[9] I don’t have the answers, but both copies do invite us to think, like Mrs Morgan, about the future—the future shapes, say, of our histories of early modern female book ownership, particularly as they pertain to where those histories might begin and, given the present discussion, where they might end.
Source: copies held at Senate House Library, 1) shelf mark ([Rare] (VIII) [Charles I] 5); and 2) shelf mark ([Rare] (VII) Cc [Charles I] 7). Photos by Michael Durrant, reproduced with permission.
[1] Anon, The Princely Pellican. Royall Resolves Presented in Sundry Choice Observations, Extracted from His Majesties Divine Meditations (London: [s.n.] 1649), p. 1.
[4] Carrying on the Yorkshire theme, this copy of the Eikon eventually passed into the ownership of Sir Mark Masterman-Sykes (1771-1823), a landowner, politician, and well-known bibliophile based in Sledmere near Leeds. His vast library was sold off in 1824, and so this book, which features Masterman-Sykes’s bookplate affixed to front board, must have been dispersed as part of the 3700 lots that made up that auction (and which fetched nearly £18,000). See Alan Bell, “Sykes, Mark Masterman, third baronet (1771-1823), book collector,” ODNB (2004), https://0-www-oxforddnb-com.catalogue.libraries.london.ac.uk/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-26869.
[5] I have drawn this biographical outline from the description provided in John Burke, A Genealogical and Heraldic History of the Commoners of Great Britain and Ireland, Vol. 2 (London: Henry Colburn, 1835), p. 631.
[8] Whitney Trettien, “Media, Materiality, and Time in the History of Reading: The Case of the Little Gidding Harmonies,” PMLA 133:5 (2018), pp. 1135-51 (p. 1138).
As scholars have noted for more than a half century now, the eponymous Bowdler of “bowdlerization” and its derivatives is rightfully Henrietta Maria Bowdler (1750-1830), not her brother Dr Thomas Bowdler (1754-1825). The unrevised entry in the OED continues to credit Thomas as the etymological source for “bowdlerize”—“To expurgate (a book or writing), by omitting or modifying words or passages considered indelicate or offensive; to castrate”—by citing his 1818 edition of a collection of Shakespeare’s works, marketed for its omission of words and expressions that could not be read aloud with propriety in a family setting. But the first edition of the Bowdler Family Shakespeare, published anonymously in four volumes in Bath in 1807 and containing twenty plays, was the work of his sister Henrietta Maria.[1] Anonymous publication was not unusual at the time, especially for women, and the omission of Henrietta Maria’s name from the 1818 and subsequent editions likely reflects her own sense of public propriety rather than brotherly suppression. In recent years, scholars have also started to recuperate Henrietta Maria and Thomas as editors and popularizers, pointing out that Shakespeare’s plays had long been subject to varying degrees of “bowdlerization” avant la lettre, and that the Bowdlers were not alone in revising texts to create new readerships for Shakespeare in the nineteenth century: Charles and Mary Lamb’s immensely popular Tales from Shakespeare also first appeared in 1807.[2]
This copy of Select Plays of Beaumont and Fletcher (Glasgow, 1768) features Henrietta Maria Bowdler’s beautifully hand-painted book label, dated 1786. The label appears on the verso of the second front flyleaf, facing the title-page of volume 1. The chain surround and lettering are painted in watercolor with a dark green shading a lighter green, overlaid with delicate black highlighting and every detail meticulously bordered with gilt. Whatever her attitude to the texts of these plays, Henrietta Maria Bowdler treasured her books. The two-volume set remains in its original half-leather binding with marbled paper and decorated spine, and features no markings in the text itself.
The only additional provenance information in the set is an inscription on the verso of the final rear flyleaf in volume 1: “Charles Brecknell Bought Miss Waseys sale October 17 / 1877.” Charles Brecknell eludes identification, but “Miss Wasey” likely refers to Mary Wasey (d.1880) of Priors Court, Chieveley, Berkshire: in the 1850s, Miss Wasey founded a school, “Miss Wasey’s Chapel School” or “Miss Wasey’s Voluntary,” in Curridge, in the parish of Chievely. The school remains in operation, as Curridge County Primary. The inscription could refer to a sale held at the school, or to a sale of books owned by Miss Wasey.
The edition itself represents an effort to popularize select plays of Beaumont and Fletcher for a later eighteenth-century readership: it was preceded in the century only by a seven-volume Works (1711) and a scholarly ten-volume Works (1750). Charles Lamb would include selections from three plays by Beaumont and Fletcher in his influential follow-up to Tales from Shakespeare: Specimens of English Dramatic Poets: who lived about the time of Shakespeare (1808). Henrietta Maria Bowdler’s edition of Shakespeare reveals a shrewd understanding of the language and idiom of early modern drama, and this volume likely represents one of the means by which she gained that knowledge.
Source: Private collection. Photos reproduced with permission.
[1] Evidence includes acknowledgements of her responsibility in letters circulated among family and family friends: see Noel Perrin, Dr. Bowdler’s Legacy: A History of Expurgated Books in England and America (New York: Atheneum 1969), 60-86. Many online library catalogues also continue to credit Thomas as the editor of the 1807 Family Shakespeare. Thomas added sixteen plays in his 1818 edition and revised the twenty plays Henrietta Maria had edited in 1807; this complete edition became a best-seller. See also the ODNB entries for Henrietta Maria Bowdler and Thomas Bowdler, both by M. Clare Loughlin-Chow.
[2] See e.g. Colin Franklin, “The Bowdlers and Their Family Shakespeare,” The Book Collector 49.2 (2000), 227-43; Adam H. Kitzes, “The Hazards of Expurgation: Adapting Measure for Measure to the Bowdler Family Shakespeare,” JEMCS 13.2 (2013), 43-68; Molly G. Yarn, Shakespeare’s ‘Lady Editors’: A New History of the Shakespearean Text (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2022), esp. 22-23, 29, 228.
Today we feature a 1682 Bible printed in Oxford and jointly owned by husband and wife Thomas and Mary Buswell in the 18th century.
The reversed calf binding is intricately blind-tooled, with an ownership statement in the center “Tho:s & Mary Buswell. 1758.” The blank front endpaper is signed “Mary Buswell 1772.”
Mary and Thomas remain unidentified, though they may be the Buswells/Boswells who resided in colonial Maryland. If they are, then Thomas was born in 1711, married a Mary Chaney/Cheney/Chanley around 1752, and died in 1797.
The date on the binding may signify an acquisition date of what would have been an important centerpiece of the family’s life or it may represent the couple’s marriage date. If it was an acquisition date, why would Mary have signed the book some 14 years later rather at the time of purchase? Or is it possible that Mary—who may not have been Mary Chaney mentioned above—signed the book the year it was acquired and had the binder date the book with the year she and Thomas were married? Why is there such a wide gulf between the printing date of the book and the approximate date the couple acquired it, and what can it tell us about the import of books from England to the colonies?
Regardless, like most Bibles, it was clearly a cherished and significant book to Thomas and Mary.
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).
When we uncover a long-forgotten woman’s inscription in an old book, our tendency is to celebrate. After all, each new name has the potential to enrich our understanding of women’s reading and their intellectual, devotional, political, and recreational lives in the early modern period. The beautifully wrought signature of Dulcibella Kent, dated 1734, on the title page of a 1616 edition of Ben Jonson’s Workes is a perfect example. Our attention is drawn by the unusual first name (derived from dulce, Latin for sweet) and the florid handwriting, which is offset by the stately engraved title page.
Yet this “sweet” reader conceals a dark reality.
Dulcibella Kent was born in 1711 to Susanna Chafe and prosperous London merchant Charles Kent. Three daughters would outlive the Kents, Dulcibella and her older sisters Susanna (b. 1705) and Charlotte (b. 1707). Dulcibella was baptized on 17 April and her father died at forty-nine on 14 April, 1716, so on or around her fifth birthday, followed by her mother on 16 February, 1718. It is not clear who took charge of the not-quite-seven-year-old Dulcibella and her sisters, the eldest of whom was only thirteen at the time. It must have been a sad and frightening period in the girls’ lives.
Although it could not have made up for the loss of their parents, the girls were handsomely provided for in Kent’s will and his estate was placed in trust for them. Emily J. Climenson’s The History of Shiplake, Oxon. (1894) describes Kent as a “rich merchant who owned property in several counties, also important estates in Jamaica.” The anodyne phrase “also important estates in Jamaica” disguises the sinister truth: these estates were built upon the backs of enslaved Africans. Says Professor Trevor Burnard for The Guardian:
Jamaica in the 18th century was described by Charles Leslie as a “constant mine, whence Britain draws prodigious riches”. It contributed greatly to the wealth of individuals thousands of miles away, such as William Beckford, Lord Mayor of London and the owner of well over 1,000 enslaved people, whose statue still graces Guildhall in London. But more significantly, it enriched Britain by filling the coffers of the Treasury with money from taxes levied on sugar and rum. Britain was the greatest slave trader in the Atlantic world during the 18th century, sending nearly 1 million captive Africans to Jamaica between 1655 and 1807, resulting in a population of enslaved people barely over 300,000, due to horrific mortality rates. Black people suffered greatly for white people’s enjoyment of sweet things.
The Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery is unequivocal, calling Charles Kent a “slave-trader, shown as deceased co-owner with Col. Richard Thompson (q.v.) of Morant estate from 1740 until 1832.” The Morant estate, located in St Thomas-in-the-East, Surrey, Jamaica, now Saint Thomas Parish, produced rum, molasses, corn—and sugar. Dulce indeed.
While she may have been ignorant of how her father’s fortune was made when she was a young orphan, by the time she inscribed her copy of Ben Jonson’s Workes in 1734 as a woman in her early twenties, she could not have been in doubt. She was listed as a joint owner of the estate from her father’s death in 1716 to 1793, the year of her own death. In her will, she bequeathed the Jamaica estates to her son Edward Dodwell.
Dulcibella did not marry until 1744 when she was in her early thirties, older than the average marrying age of 25 or 26 for women at the time. Although she was by no means an old maid then, her disquietingly acquired wealth would have enabled her to delay marriage if she wished. She lived with her husband Henry Dodwell in Golden Square, a well-to-do area of Soho boasting several foreign diplomats as residents.
So what does this background tell us about Dulcibella’s ownership of the Jonson volume? The book was already old when she acquired it, almost 120 years old. A trimmed inscription about one-third of the way down on the engraved title page reads “Wm. An[…?]” or perhaps “Wm. Aw[…?].” We don’t know if it was given as a gift, taken from the family library, or if she acquired it secondhand. Either way, her ability to leisurely browse the book’s over 1000 pages was made possible by her station in life, which was directly supported by enslaved Africans.
The issue of Britain’s role in the Jamaican slave trade is not a thing of the past. In an essay for The Guardian in late March 2023, Jamaican journalist and activist Barbara Blake-Hannah tackled the question of how Britain—”a country whose role in the enslavement of millions of Africans over three centuries, and the subsequent monopoly of their ruling systems and economies, is the basis of its global strength and leadership”—should make amends to the country and the descendants of the people it so cruelly exploited. Ultimately, she finds the idea of cash reparations unrealistic. Instead, she proposes “the total relief of all Jamaica’s debt to the UK, plus the lifting of UK visa restrictions for Jamaican descendants of enslaved people, with unlimited access to the ’empire’s’ educational and economic opportunities, which were built on the labour of my enslaved ancestors.”
In the meantime, it would behoove white people to remember Trevor Burnard’s words:
Black people suffered greatly for white people’s enjoyment of sweet things.
Source: Dulcibella Kent’s copy of Ben Jonson’s Workes was sold at auction by Swann Galleries in 2023. Images are used with permission.
“Dulcibella Dodwell (née Kent): Profile & Legacies Summary.” Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery, UCL Department of History 2023. https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/person/view/2146650587
“Morant: Jamaica | St Thomas-in-the-East, Surrey.” Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery, UCL Department of History 2023. https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/estate/view/2224
Notes and Queries: A Medium of Intercommunication for Literary Men, General Readers, Etc. 12th series, vol. V: January–December, 1919 (London: The Times Publishing Company), p. 185. https://books.google.com/books?id=_nIEAAAAYAAJ
Another Bible is featured today, containing the wonderful calligraphic signature of Ann Lightfoot. This edition was printed by the shop of Robert Barker, who issued the so-called ‘Wicked Bible’ in 1631 in which the word “not” was omitted from the Commandment “Thou shalt not commit adultery.” Barker and his co-printer Martin Lucas were subsequently each fined the then enormous sum of £300 for the sacrilege and Barker died in a debtors’ prison four years later [1].
In this copy, the recto of the leaf before the title page is boldly signed “Ann Lightfoot. 1769” in elaborate calligraphic script.
Though Ann’s signature brims with personality, it is not possible to definitively identify her, absent any additional information. A candidate may be Ann Lightfoot (1745–1807), who is buried in Berks County, Pennsylvania. An inscription on the first flyleaf verso opposite her signature, “T.H. Judson”, is dated 1882. Judson’s bookplate is also affixed to the front pastedown. Cursory research shows that T.H. Judson was Physical Science Postmaster at Merton College, Oxford, elected in 1875.
The paneled binding may provide some clues to Ann’s status, as it appears to be contemporary and is carefully tooled, suggesting that some money was expended in its commission.
Source: Book offered for sale by Journobooks in April 2022. Images used with permission.
Today’s book is a 1653 edition of minister Joseph Caryl’s exposition on chapters of the book of Job and contains several inscriptions of colonial American owners from the late eighteenth to early nineteenth century.
Caryl was a Puritan minister later removed from his post by the Church of England during the Restoration. Before his ejection, he had several sermons published in the 1640s. His work on the Book of Job began in 1643. The multi-decade “exposition with practical observations” on the Old Testament book eventually came to encompass all forty-two of its chapters. This particular copy concentrates on the fifteenth through the seventeenth chapters.
Job is a prosperous, pious Biblical figure whose wealth, children, servants, and health are obliterated after Satan suggests to God that he would not be so devout in the face of extreme adversity. At first Job accepts his suffering and continues to praise God, but as he continues to suffer with no change in circumstance, he becomes angry and questions him. Eventually, he acknowledges that God is all-powerful and all-knowing and declares his repentance, whereupon his prosperity is restored.
The front flyleaf contains four inscriptions. The one that first draws the eye is Joseph Emerson’s acquisition note in the center of the page: “bought by J. Emerson of the Rev.d Mr. Chandler of Rowley Octo. 2. 1747.” The bookseller identifies Emerson (1724-1775) as a minister in the town of Groton, Massachusetts, later renamed Pepperell. He married Abigail Hay and had six children with her, and was Ralph Waldo Emerson’s great-uncle. The Community Church of Pepperell asserts that he “delivered the prayer on Cambridge Common before the combined militias marched to Breed’s Hill, now called Bunker Hill, in Charlestown” [1]. He contracted dysentery at the onset of the Revolutionary War and died in late October of 1775. His signature, dated 1747, also appears on the upper part of the flyleaf as well as the title page.
Reverend James Chandler (1706-1789), from whom Emerson purchased the book, was the minister of the first church in Georgetown, Massachusetts [2]. One wonders whether Chandler could have been a mentor to the young Emerson, in his early twenties when he purchased the book from Chandler. Additionally, there are two expunged inscriptions on the page. The uppermost one appears to read “Tho.s E. Christian & Jo[…?].” The one beneath Emerson’s signature is too obliterated to read. The inscriptions are circled with three numeral 5s and an apparent monogram on the lower portion of the page.
Another flyleaf contains three more inscriptions: “Sam.ll Chase Book . . .”; “Anna Chase Book Chase”; and “Samuel Chase / Boston / 1826.” The bookseller identifies these owners as Samuel Chase, Sr. (1768-1808), his wife Anna Longley Chase (1776-1866), and Samuel Chase, Jr. (1801-1876). The Chases were also from the Pepperell area and presumably acquired the book there.
Less knowable is how the book found its way to the colonies, whether Abigail Emerson and Mary Hale Chandler (who did not sign the book) used it alongside their husbands, and what significance the story of a Job—a man suffering for his faith—would have had in the lives of the Chandlers, Emersons, and Chases.
Source: Book offered for sale by eBay seller mantosilver in April 2022. Images used with permission.
[1] “Commemorating 100 Years: Historical Moment: Our First Pastor.” Community Church of Pepperell (April 14, 2019). https://tinyurl.com/2p9xt4na
In 1638 the French Jesuit Paul de Barry (1587–1661) published his third book, entitled La Solitude de Philagie ou l’adresse pour s’occuper avec profit aux Exercices spirituels une fois tous les ans durant huict ou dix jour.[1] It was printed in Lyon in the printing house of Claude I Rigaud (1583–1628), which at that time was operated by his widow and his son-in-law Philippe Borde (d. 1669). De Barry, who was rector of the Jesuit colleges of Aix and Nîmes and later provincial of Lyon, was an esteemed preacher, but first and foremost a prolific author. Carlos Sommervogel, who composed the Bibliothèque de la Compagnie de Jésus, attributes no fewer than twenty-five works to him. La Solitude de Philagie, which was first printed in 1638, must have been quite popular as it was reprinted no fewer than fourteen times until 1692 and new editions appeared half-way through the nineteenth century (in 1854 and 1859).[2]
Eight years after its publication, the text was translated into Dutch by Guilliam van Aelst, who, as is mentioned on the title page, was “gheboortigh van Antwerpen” (“born in Antwerp”). Van Aelst, who passed away before 1646, was an active translator with a strong connection to the Jesuits.[3] Before he translated De Barry’s La Solitude de Philagie into De eensaemheydt van Philagia, Dienende tot Gheestelijcke Oeffeninghe in eensaemheydt. Van acht ofte thien gheduerighe daghen ’s Iaers, Van Aelst published De Thien eerste Boecken Der Nederlandtsche Oorloge in 1645, which was a translation of De bello Belgico decades duae, 1555–1590 (Antwerp, 1635) by the Roman Jesuit Faminio Strada (1572–1649). In 1651 he translated the Traité de l’Amour de Dieu (De Liefde Godts), which was colloquially known as Theotimus (Lyon, 1616), by St Francis de Sales (1567–1622), who was educated by the Jesuits, later bishop of Geneva and a renowned mystic and reformer, as well as an inspiration for many members of the Society of Jesus, including De Barry.
Figure 1: Title page of the first edition of Paul de Barry, De eensaemheydt van Philagia (Antwerpen: Jacob van Ghelen, 1646). Copy owned by Marijken de Raedt, an Alexian sister in Aalst. University of Antwerp, Ruusbroecgenootschap, 3060 E 13. Reproduced with permission.
Like its French counterpart, De eensaemheydt van Philagia was quite successful. After the first edition was published in 1646 by Jacob van Ghelen, whose printing house was located at the Eiermarkt in Antwerp, three more editions (in four versions) were printed.[4] The second edition (“Den II Druck”) was printed again by Van Ghelen in 1649. In 1655 his colleague Arnout I van Brakel (1606–75) reissued this print, in identical form—even Van Ghelen’s 1649 colophon is present—but with a modified title page. That is to say, the printer’s name was altered and the date of publication was changed to 1655. In 1664, Van Brakel, whose shop was located at the other end of the Antwerp cathedral at the Wijngaardbrug, produced the third edition in a new lay-out. In 1711, the text was reprinted once more by Joannes Paulus Robyns, again in Antwerp.
Solitude as the Road to Holiness and Spiritual Perfection
With his Solitude de Philagie De Barry wanted to provide a tool for people who strive to make progress towards spiritual perfection and serve God, both within monasteries and in the world. In order to help these lovers of holiness—hence the word Philagia, a combination of φίλη (philè) and ἅγία (hagia) in, in the title—go through the three stages of the contemplative process (the purgative, illuminative, and unitive ways), the Jesuit wrote spiritual exercises that should be done in eight or ten days. During this period the readers should act as if they were living in a large desert and personify solitude to talk to only with God and their own soul. In this way, they can overcome their evil inclinations and arrive at great purity of conscience and peace of mind.
After a short introduction containing the intentions of the author, a long list of general notes to be read in preparation for the eight- or ten-day exercises follows. Before starting, one must, for example, complete or suspend all one’s work, provide oneself with appropriate literature (apart from Thomas a Kempis’s Imitatio Christi, De Barry recommends works by fellow Jesuits), and contemplate on past sins in preparation for confession. Once these eight pages of instructions are mastered, the devotee can start the eight or ten days of meditations, the maintaining (‘onderhoudinghe’) of inner attitudes and devotional acts (e.g. the intimacy of the heart, the preparation for the yearly confession and the examination of conscience in preparation), and investigations (of the virtues for example).
On the first day, one should contemplate the reason why one is created. The second day is dedicated to repentance for the sins of the previous life. On the third day, faint-heartedness and sluggishness in the service of God take center stage. Next, one must consider what happens to one at the end of life. On day five to seven one should imitate Christ in the three stages of his life: in his youth, during his apostolate, and during his passion and death. The last three days of the process revolve around love owed to God, the unity with God, and the love for the Holy Sacrament. Once that whole process has been completed and readers have worked their way through nearly seven hundred pages of text, they are prepared for the New Year.
The Dedication by Catharina van Aelst
De Barry dedicated his original French La Solitude de Philagie “au glorieux S. Joseph, le plus aimable et le plus ayme de tous les Saincts, apres Jesus, & Marie’ (“to the glorious St Joseph, the most lovable and most loving of all the Saints, after Jesus and Mary”). The German translation by Martinus Sibenius also dedicated the text to Joseph, “der Mutter GOTtes allerwürdigstem Bräutigam, und allerweisesten Regierer des Worts, das Fleisch worden ist” (“the Mother of GOD’s most worthy Bridegroom, and most wise Ruler of the Word that became flesh”). With a general dedication like this, the book was aimed at all readers, men and women alike. In the Dutch version, however, the original dedication was replaced by a text by Catharina van Aelst, the daughter of the translator. Her father had passed away at the time that she wrote the dedication, “op den Voor-avont van’t Jaer 1646” (“on the Eve of the Year 1646”; fol. a6v):
Desen soo kostelijcken Lust-hof, van mijnen goeden Vader saeligher tot alghemeyn gherief van ons Nederlandt uyt de Fransche sprake overgeset, ende met meer andere sijne Boecken aen my als erfenisse ter handt ghekomen zijnde, alsoo hy aen een eighelijck van ons even nutbaer ende dienelijck is. (fol. A5v)[5]
(This so precious Garden of Delight has been translated from French by my good late Father for the general benefit of our Netherlands, and has come to me as an inheritance, together with more of his other Books, so that it is as useful as it is serviceable to all of us).
In her signature to the dedication, Catharina added the letters G.D. to her name. They can also be found after her initials on the title page of the 1646 edition: “[De eensaemheydt van Philagia] Wordt aen alle Gheestelijcke Dochters voor een Gheluck-saeligh Nieuw Jaer ghegunt Door C.V.A.G.D.” (“[The eensaemheydt of Philagia] is presented in kindness to all Spiritual Daughters for a Happy New Year by C.V.A.G.D.”). The abbreviation means that Catharina identified herself as a “Geestelijke Dochter” (“Spiritual Daughter”) or filia devota. She was one of the many single, Catholic women in the early modern Low Countries—often called “kloppen” or “kwezels”—who chose a chaste life dedicated to God outside monasteries and in secular contexts, often under the spiritual guidance of and in obedience to secular priests or, as in this case, Jesuits.
Catharina dedicated her father’s translation of De Eensaemheydt of Philagia to “alle gheesteliicke dochters. Beminde mede-Susters” (“all spiritual daughters, Beloved fellow Sisters”; fol. a2r). She encourages them to follow the example of Solomon in the Song of Songs 4. 16, who took his bride to the garden of delight. This can be done, she states referring to the eensaemheydt of De Barry’s title, by seeking the pleasure garden of solitude. It is there “dat onsen aldersoetsten Bruydegom Jesus noch alle daghen onse Zielen trouwt” (“that our most sweet Groom Jesus marries our Souls every day”; fol. A2v), in order to pull them “uyt de slavernije des duyvels, te weten, uyt het wereldts leven” (“out of the slavery of the devil, namely, of worldly life”). Subsequently, she explains that the “aldermeest gheachten Lust-hof van onsen Hemelschen Bruydegom, inden welcken hy sijnen aldermeesten lust heeft” (“most esteemed Pleasure-ground of our Heavenly Bridegroom in which he takes the most pleasure”; fol. a3v) is the bonus hortus virginitatis (delightful garden of virginity). In order to see to what exalted holiness and spiritual perfection of the soul solitude could lead, Catharina encourages people to look especially at
de heylighe en Lofweerdighe Societeyt Jesu, de welcke inden selven Lust-hof uyt Godt ontfanghen ende voort-gebraght, met het selve sogh onderhouden ende op-ghevoedt zijnde, tot alsulcke overvloedighe Heyligheydt ende volmaecktheydt ghekomen is, dat sy de heele wijde wereldt, ende onder andere oock ons haere Gheestelijcke Kinderen soo rijckelijck, als wy tot ons groot voordeel ende gheluck daghelijcks bevinden, vande selve is mededeelende. (fol. A5r–v)
(the holy and Praiseworthy Society of Jesus, which, received and brought forth from God in the same Garden of Delight, being nurtured and educated with the same milk, has come to such abundant Holiness and perfection, that it lets the whole wide world and also, among others, us its Spiritual Children, share the same so richly, as we experience to our great benefit and happiness every day).
Catharina’s dedication, which encourages the mystical wedding and the virginal matrimony of the soul with Christ, is written as a New Year’s wish. The fact that it is composed by a spiritual daughter of the Jesuit order and addressed to other spiritual daughters shifts the intended audience of De Barry’s devotional treatise. Rather than at a general audience, the text is now aimed at female addressees, and more specifically, female religious addressees. But which readers did the text actually reach?
For the Love of Holiness: The Readers of De eensaemheydt van Philagia
Not all the extant copies I have seen contain ownership inscriptions.[6] A good number of the ones that do, however, indeed belonged to women. In many cases the ownership inscriptions point out that the books were owned by individuals, albeit all members of religious communities. One copy of the 1646 edition, for example, was owned by Marijken de Raedt, who was a zwartzuster (Alexian sister) in the community in Aalst in East Flanders, which had been founded there in 1475 in order to take care of the sick (especially the plague victims) and continued to exist until 2020, when the remaining sisters moved to a neighbouring residential care center (Ruusbroecgenootschap, 3060 E 13; see Figure 1). A second copy (Kontich: Museum voor Heem- en Oudheidkunde, no shelfmark) made its way to Maria Theresia Peeters, who was a “beggijntien op het vermaert beggijn hof tot Lier” (“beguine in the renowned beguinage of Lier”), located some twenty kilometers southeast of Antwerp. When Marijken and Maria Theresia lived is not clear.
When Sister Josephine Vanherberghen, who was a hospital sister in the Sint-Janshospitaal in the Brabantine city of Tienen (near Louvain), lived is not clear either. She owned a copy of the 1649 edition and left the mark of her ownership on the flyleaf of her book (Ruusbroecgenootschap, 3060 E 14 bis): “Gasthuis Thienen Suster Josephine Vanherberghen.” Another copy of the same, second edition, however, was owned in the nineteenth century by a grey sister (grauwzuster), likely of the Third Order of St Francis. On the flyleaf at the front she wrote that she owned the book during the time of Sister Ida: “Van zuster MariAnna Spillebijkx grouw zuster geproffest den 7 october 1834 als zuster Ida overste was ende die is gestorven den 13 Mert 1839” (“Of Sister MariAnna Spillebijkx grey sister professed on 7 Oct 1834 as sister Ida was superior, who died on 13 March 1839”; Museum Plantin-Moretus, A 3446). Unfortunately, the book does not mention in which community the women lived. Interestingly, at another (later?) point in time the book was owned by a man. In the lower margin of the title page, a certain Frederic Verachter wrote his name.
A copy of the 1655 edition (i.e. the second edition as it was published by Arnout I van Brakel) also switched hands, but this time from woman to woman (Ruusbroecgenootschap, 3060 E 15). Judging from the location of the ownership inscription on the flyleaf as well as the handwriting, which is considerably older than the other signature, the book was initially owned by Maria Barbara Melijn and later transferred to Maria Bal who owned it in 1796. Both women indicate that they kept the book with the permission of their superior (“met orlof van haer oversten”). This indicates of course that these women were also members of a religious community. Possibly they lived in the female Dominican convent of Antwerp. The State Archives in that city own a donation deed that states that after the death of Peter Melijn (a building contractor who supervised fortification works in and around Antwerp between 1660 and 1680) six hundred gulden should be transferred to the Dominican convent where his daughter Maria Barbara Melijn was professed in 1670.[7]
Figure 2: Title page of Paul de Barry, De eensaemheydt van Philagia, in the second edition issued by Arnout I van Brakel(Antwerpen, 1655). Copy owned by Maria Barbara Melijn and Maria Bal. University of Antwerp, Ruusbroecgenootschap, 3060 E 15. Reproduced with permission.
A second copy of the same 1655 edition also contains two ownership inscriptions (Erfgoedbibliotheek Hendrik Conscience, F 88500, flyleaf at the front). Initially, the book was owned by someone who noted down two little verses: “Het is een vremdt gemoedt / Dat noch mint, noch minnen doet” (“It is a strange disposition / That neither loves nor enables to love”) and “En houdt voor geenen vriendt / Die verandert als den windt” (“And regard as no friend / Who alters like the wind”). In between likely the same person added an emblem with the initials A.M.V. and the date 1730. Subsequently Sister Coleta Bouckaert added her name under the verse lines. Again, she is difficult to identify. A beguine with this name passed away in the Groot Begijnhof in Ghent on 27 or 28 February 1832 at the age of sixty-two.[8] However, around the same date a Sister Coleta Bouckaert was prioress of the convent of St Trudo in Odegem near Bruges (canonesses regular of the order of St Augustine).[9] This makes it impossible at this stage to establish whether the book was located in Ghent or in Bruges in the first half of the nineteenth century.
The last edition that was published by Van Brakel in 1664 also found its way into women’s hands. The copy that is currently kept in the Erfgoedbibliotheek Hendrik Conscience in Antwerp (shelfmark F 126879) belonged, according to a note on the front flyleaf, to Sister Francoise Schrijnmaeckers in 1704. Whether she owned it earlier or later than Sister Tresa Boon, who left her ownership inscription at the back of the title page, is impossible to say. In any case Tresa was very concerned about her soul’s post-mortem well-being. She explicitly asked the readers of her inscription to pray for her after her death: “Tot behoef van suster Tresa Boon. Bidt voor mijn siel naer mijn doot op dat ick sondaers mach bevrijdt woorden van de eeuieghe doot” (“For the sake of Sister Tresa Boon. Pray for my soul after my death that I, sinner, may be freed from the eternal death”).
All the aforementioned copies of the Eensaemheydt of Philagia were owned by individual women who were members of religious communities. Two other books also circulated in women’s convents but were destined for common use. The 1655 edition that is nowadays at the Museum Plantin-Moretus in Antwerp (A 2221) explicitly mentions on the front flyleaf that the book is meant “Voor het gemeyn van Blyenberch” (“for common use of Bleyenberg”), a community of Victorines in Mechelen. The Norbertine sisters in Antwerp kept their copy (of the first edition of 1646) according to a note on the title page in their church: “Ecclesia Norbertinarum Antw[erpiensis]” (Museum Plantin-Moretus, A 3443). The third book (1649 edition) did not belong to a female community, but rather to the professed house of the Jesuits in Antwerp: “Dom[us] Prof[essa] Soc[ietatis] Jesu Antverpiae” (Ruusbroecgenootschap, 3060 E 14, 1e ex).
The last three books with ownership inscriptions I have found thus far probably belonged to lay people. On the flyleaf at the front of a copy held by the Museum Plantin-Moretus (A 3437), we read that “Dezen boek hoert toe aan Jozephina Lammens” (“This book belongs to Jozephina Lammens”). As Jozephina did not add “Sr” to indicate a religious profession to her name, we may assume that she was a lay woman or perhaps a spiritual daughter like Catharina van Aelst. The book with shelfmark BIB.ACC.012562 in the Universiteitsbibliotheek in Ghent (a copy of the 1649 edition) seems to have belonged to a couple: a note on the cover page expresses the hope that “Jehan en Marie wordt den besten trost” (“to Jehan and Marie the best consolation will come”), presumably in the hereafter. The 1664 version that is now in the Universiteitsbibliotheek at Ghent (BIB.158T008) has an ownership inscription on the front flyleaf that shows it belonged to a man: “Hic liber pertenet ad me Carolum Tileman anno 1762” (“This book belongs to me, Carolus Tileman, anno 1762”). He can be tentatively identified as the student who was mentioned in the Album studiosorum of the University of Leiden in 1756 and was born in The Hague in 1736.[10] If this identification is correct, this specimen is an outlier in many respects. It is not only the sole book thus far that has only been owned by a man and a student, but it is also the only copy that made its way to the Protestant north of the Low Countries.
Although De Barry does not seem to have had a distinct readership in mind, the dedication that Catherine added to her father’s Dutch translation clearly steered the reception of De eensaemheydt of Philagia. The majority of the books that have been studied thus far found their way to women who lived their lives as the Brides of Christ Catharina envisaged. Interestingly, however, most of the women who owned a copy lived such a life within (enclosed) convents of various orders, and not as the filiae devotae Catharina and the publisher seem to have had in mind when they addressed the book to “alle Gheestelijcke Dochters” (“All Spiritual Daughters”). Whether or not it was intended to, the book evidently reached a wide female audience and thereby played an important role in spreading Jesuit spirituality and mysticism to women’s religious communities in the Southern Low Countries.
Further reading
Album studiosorum academiae Lugduno Batavae xdlxxv–mdccclxxv: accedunt nomina curatorum et professorum per eadem secula. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1875.
“Barry, Paul de.” In Carlos Sommervogel and others, Bibliothèque de la compagnie de Jésus, 12 vols. Brussels: Schepens, 1890–1932. I (1890), cols 945–57.
“Barry, Paul de.” In Dictionnaire de spiritualité, ascétique et mystique, doctrine et histoire, ed. by Marcel Viller and others, 16 vols. Paris: Gabriel Beauchesne et ses fils, 1937–94. I (1937), cols 1252–55.
De Vlieger-De Wilde, Koen, ed. Adresboek van zeventiende-eeuwse drukkers, uitgevers en boekverkopers in Vlaanderen / Directory of Seventeenth-Century Printers, Publishers and Booksellers in Flanders. Antwerp: Vereniging van Antwerpse Bibliofielen, 2004.
De Vroede, Maurits. “Kwezels” en “Zusters”: De geestelijke dochters in de Zuidelijke Nederlanden, 17de en 18de eeuw. Brussels: Koninklijke Academie voor Wetenschappen, Letteren en Schone Kunsten van België, 1994.
Monteiro, Marit Edin. Geestelijke maagden: Leven tussen klooster en wereld in Noord-Nederland gedurende de zeventiende eeuw. Hilversum: Verloren, 1996.
Olthoff, Frans. De boekdrukkers, boekverkoopers en uitgevers in Antwerpen sedert de uitvinding der boekdrukkunst tot op onze dagen. Antwerp: J.-B. Buschmann, 1891.
“Sibenius, Martin.” In Carlos Sommervogel and others, Bibliothèque de la compagnie de Jésus, 12 vols. Brussels: Schepens, 1890–1932. VII (1896), cols 1181–84.
Stracke, D.A. “Guilliam van Aelst en Guillaume van Aelst S.J.” De Gulden Passer 6 (1928), 239–49
Van Honacker, K. Het archief van de families de Lannoy, Melijn, de Heuvel en Meyers met inbegrip van het archief van de heren van Zwijndrecht. Antwerp: Het Rijksarchief in België, 2002. Identification number BE–A0511/Y1/010)
Verheggen, Evelyne M.F. Beelden voor passie en hartstocht: Bid- en devotieprenten in de Noordelijke Nederlanden, 17de en 18de eeuw. Zutphen: Walburg, 2006.
[1] This blog was inspired by the module ‘Vrouwen en literatuur in de vroegmoderne tijd’ of the undergraduate course Neerlandistiek in de praktijk (University of Antwerp, academic year 2021–22). My gratitude goes to my students Robin Van Gestel and Mie Verschooten for their enthusiastic exploration of the copy of De Barry’s De eensaemheydt van Philagia in the Museum voor Heem- en Oudheidkunde in Kontich.
[3] It is not very clear who Guilliam van Aelst was, nor how many translations can be attributed to him. For an extensive discussion on both questions, see D.A. Stracke, “Guilliam van Aelst en Guillaume van Aelst S.J.,” in De Gulden Passer 6 (1928), 239–49.
[4] In the same year Paul De Barry’s text was also translated into German by Martinus Sibenius SJ (1604–68): Einöde Philagiae, Das ist Weiß unnd Manier, die Geistliche Exercitia einmal im Jahr, acht oder zehen Tag lang nützlich zu verrichten (Köln: Michael Dehmen [the Elder], 1646). This German translation was also reprinted eight times before 1738.
[5] The dedication of Van Aelst’s translation of De Sales’ De Liefde Godts (1651) is also written by Catharina van Aelst. This time the book is dedicated to Joanna van Lathem, abbess of the Cistercian abbey of Roosendael near Mechelen between 1639 and 1662, with whom she had a family connection. In the dedication, Catharina mentions “andere boecken” (“other books”) written by her “Vader saliger” (“late father”), as well as a female sibling and cousins, who seem to be nuns in the abbey of Roosendael.
[6] For this blog I consulted the Heritage Collections in Antwerp (Erfgoedbibliotheek Hendrik Conscience, Museum Plantin-Moretus, and Ruusbroecgenootschap), the Museum voor Heem- en Oudheidkunde in Kontich, the Koninklijke Bibliotheek in Brussels, and the digital copies that are available on Google Books.
[7] “Schenkingsakte ten belope van 600 fl., na het overlijden van Peter Melijn te overhandigen aan het klooster van de dominicanessen, waar zijn dochter Maria Barbara Melijn was geprofest. 1670.” See K. Van Honacker, Het archief van de families de Lannoy, Melijn, de Heuvel en Meyers met inbegrip van het archief van de heren van Zwijndrecht (Antwerpen: Het Rijksarchief in België, 2002; identification number: BE–A0511/Y1/010).
[8] Announcement of the deceased by the civil registry in Ghent in Den vaderlander, 26, Thursday 1 March 1832, p. 4.
[9] U. Berlière and others, eds, Monasticon Belge, 8 vols(Maredsous: Abbaye de Maredsous, 1890–1993), vii (1977–89): Province de Flandre Orientale, 1028 and 1061–62.
[10]Album studiosorum academiae Lugduno Batavae xdlxxv–mdccclxxv: accedunt nomina curatorum et professorum per eadem secula (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1875), col. 1055.
Early Modern Female Book Ownership 