Johannes Goedaert, Of Insects, Translated into English by Martin Lister

By Michele D. Pflug

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 3

Figure 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.

Van Koughnet, Jane C. E. A History of Tyttenhanger. London : M. Ward, 1895. http://archive.org/details/historyoftyttenh00vank.

Thomas Pope Blount, Essays on Several Subjects (1697); Francis Bacon, Sylva Sylvarum, or, A Naturall Historie, comp. William Rawley (1685)

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 13^th. 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 8^s. / 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.

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[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.

Stephen Hales, Vegetable Staticks (1727)

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.

Stephen Hales, studio of Thomas Hudson; oil on canvas, feigned oval, circa 1759. NPG 1861© National Portrait Gallery, London

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.

Bacon and Rawley, Sylva Sylvarum, or, A Naturall Historie (1631)

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.

Sources: Books offered for sale by Stanley Louis Remarkable Books and eBay seller booker17 in July 2023. Images used with permission.

[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.