This post offers another instalment in the continuing and collaboratively written story of the growing library of Katherine (Butler) Blount: for earlier posts, see Sarah Lindenbaum, Sophie Floate, William Poole, Mary Ann O’Donnell, Victoria Burke, and Martine van Elk. The number of known books with Katherine Blount’s provenance stands currently at 42, and her library seems likely to have been considerably larger still. The date and circumstances of its dispersal have yet to be traced.
The first of the two books discussed here is Sir Thomas Pope Blount’s presentation copy to his daughter-in-law Katherine of the third edition of his Essays on Several Subjects (1697). Researchers interested in Katherine Blount knew this book existed because of its appearance in a 1905 auction catalogue, but not where it was currently located. It appears as lot 733 in Sotheby, Wilkinson & Hodge, Catalogue of books and manuscripts including a selection from the libraries of J.H. Reddan … and other properties… which will be sold by auction … February 16th, 1905. Blount’s copy of her father-in-law’s Essays appears in the catalogue among “other properties,” in a group aptly headed “The Property of a Lady.”
This early twentieth-century female owner is unfortunately unidentifiable, and none of the other 50+ books from her library (lots 732-85) appears to be associated with Blount. The book was acquired soon after the auction by Harvard University (Houghton Library, shelfmark *EC65 B6239 691EC), as it bears a Harvard accession stamp dated Dec. 1906.
Katherine Blount has inscribed the book on the recto of the front flyleaf in her distinctively clear hand, “Katherine Blount / Given me by the / Author / May the 13th. 1697.”
As the 1905 auction catalogue promises, the book retains its original personalized binding, stamped with Katherine Blount’s “K B” monogram in gilt on both the front and back boards. This is the only book known so far to feature Blount’s monogrammed binding, though it is possible that similar bindings survive on some of the other books identified as hers but which have not yet been examined. This binding is rebacked, so any spine decoration is lost. An illegible inscription or signature (****ising?) appears on the title-page, in an early hand but evidently post-dating Blount.
Sir Thomas Pope Blount, first baronet (1649–97), politician and writer, was the father of Katherine Blount’s husband, Sir Thomas Pope Blount, second baronet (1670–1731). Blount’s father-in-law was best known for his encyclopedic compilations, Censura celebriorum authorum (1690), A Natural History (1693), and De re poetica (1694); his Essays, first published in 1691 and his only original work, were also well regarded in their time. As described in the article on Pope Blount in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, “In seven short pieces, he treats of self-interest; the mischiefs of learning; education and custom; a tempered respect for antiquity; the virtues of modern men; passion; and the uncertainty of human knowledge. An eighth essay, added to a third, expanded edition (1697), concerns religion. In domestic metaphors and plain prose, Blount reveals himself to be sceptical, cynical, cheerfully optimistic, possessed of a dry wit, and warmly anti-Catholic.”[1] From what is known so far of her library, Katherine Blount shared her father-in-law’s wide-ranging interests, though this book offers no evidence of her engagement with his Essays: other than a couple of pencilled marginal markings that post-date Blount’s ownership, the text itself is clean. But Pope Blount’s compilations and essays do offer a window onto Katherine Blount’s intellectual milieu.
The second book featured today speaks to Katherine Blount’s interest in natural science, the subject of her father-in-law’s compilation A Natural History. The book is a copy of the 1685 edition of Sir Francis Bacon’s Sylva Sylvarum, a folio gathering of heterogenous observations, experiments, and theories compiled by Bacon’s former chaplain William Rawley from manuscripts soon after Bacon’s death. Enormously popular in the seventeenth century (the 1685 edition is the eleventh), the collection is now best known for its inclusion of Bacon’s New Atlantis and, in editions starting from the 1670s, an epitome in English translation of his Novum Organum. For other copies of Sylva Sylvarum owned by women in the seventeenth century, see this post by Sarah Lindenbaum.
Sylva Sylvarum was not the only work Blount owned by Francis Bacon: her copy of the 1673 edition of Bacon’s Essays is mentioned in a 1902 work on book collecting but remains untraced (see this post by Sarah Lindenbaum). Perhaps like her copy of Pope Blount’s Essays it sits in a major research library, waiting for a researcher to run a search for “Katherine Blount.” Blount purchased this copy of Sylva Sylvarum herself: it was not an inheritance, gift, or presentation copy, like her copy of her father-in-law’s Essays. Her inscription on the recto of the front flyleaf reads: “Katherine Blount / Price 8s. / 1699.”
That Blount bought the book fourteen years after it was published does not necessarily mean that she bought a used copy: 1685 remained the most recent edition (and the work would not in fact be published again until the nineteenth century), and the price Blount paid suggests she purchased the book new. The 1673 Term Catalogue e.g. lists Sylva Sylvarum at “Price bound 8 s. sold by several Booksellers.”[2] The binding is a simply decorated calf with a gilt decorated spine and probably represents the original “trade binding” in which the book was sold. The text is clean other than a few marginal markings in pencil: the use of pencil again indicates that these markings post-date Blount.
This copy features the bookplate of Brentford Public Library (stamped “Withdrawn from stock”), in the West London borough of Hounslow; additional stamps indicate that the book entered the library as part of the “Layton collection.” The antiquarian Thomas Layton (1819-1911) collected books, coins, and antiquities for seventy years, accumulating what has been described as “probably the largest collection of London antiquities ever amassed by a single individual”: for information about Layton and his collections, see here. He bequeathed his collection of over 20,000 objects—evidently including this book—to the people of Brentford, though since his death the collection has been divided among several locations. A collection of over 8,000 of Layton’s books is currently stored at Feltham Library, also in the West London borough of Hounslow. This particular book may have become separated from that main collection, remaining at the Brentwood Public Library until it was withdrawn. The 8000 Layton books at Feltham are catalogued but insufficient copy-specific information appears in these records to determine if Layton acquired other books with a Blount provenance over the many decades in which he built his collections.
Source: Thomas Pope Blount, Essays on Several Subjects (1697): Houghton Library, Harvard University, shelfmark *EC65 B6239 691EC. Francis Bacon, Sylva Sylvarum (1685): book in private ownership. All images of both books reproduced with permission.
[1] Jonathan Pritchard, “Blount, Sir Thomas Pope, first baronet (1649–1697),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004).
[2] Robert Clavell, comp., A catalogue of all the books printed in England since the dreadful fire of London in 1666, to the end of Michaelmas term, 1672 (1673), H1v.
This post adds another physical book owned by Katherine Blount to her ever-expanding library list and also reveals a manuscript that demonstrates her reading practices in action. Previous posts by Sarah Lindenbaum, Sophie Floate, William Poole, and Mary Ann O’Donnell have brought the total number of books inscribed by Katherine Blount to twelve, but additional discoveries by Martine van Elk and Sarah Lindenbaum have expanded that list further to 40 titles. As research by Lindenbaum and O’Donnell outlines, Katherine Blount was the daughter of James Butler and Grace Caldecott of Amberley Castle in Sussex. Born in 1676, she married Sir Thomas Pope Blount, 2nd Baronet in 1695.[1] When I started researching the miscellany of Katherine Butler (St. Paul’s Cathedral Library MS 52 D.14) around 2010, I proposed a few branches of the Butler family to which she might have belonged, including the Butlers of Amberley Castle, but I wasn’t certain.[2] Now that I have compared Katherine Butler’s signature and handwriting to those of the printed books identified in the other posts, I can confidently say that the Katherine Butler who inscribed a manuscript collection of sermons by John Donne and Joseph Hall in 1693 and who used the blank pages in that same manuscript to compile a miscellany from 1696 onwards is the same person as Katherine Blount. I can also confirm that the marginal notes written in the book described by Floate (Cyrano de Bergerac’s The Comical History) and the identifications of characters in the manuscript key and the text of the book described by Poole (Samuel Garth’s The Dispensary) are indeed in Blount’s hand. But readers of this post can judge for themselves.
The manuscript collection of sermons by John Donne and Joseph Hall
A manuscript collection of five sermons (four by John Donne and one by Joseph Hall), now St. Paul’s Cathedral Library MS 52 D.14, is inscribed “Katherine Butler Given me by my Father May 1693” (fol. 1r). The donor of this manuscript was James Butler of Amberley Castle, who died on 11 July 1696.
Fig. 1. Katherine Butler’s inscription from 1693, fol. 1r.
The sermons were transcribed by Knightley Chetwode in 1625 and 1626 or shortly thereafter. [3]
Fig. 2. The title page of the sermons, fol. 2r.
Exactly how this early seventeenth-century sermon collection came into the hands of James Butler and what occasion prompted him to give it as a gift to his daughter, Katherine, in 1693 are unclear.
Katherine Blount’s manuscript miscellany in verse and prose
Butler signed her name only once in St. Paul’s Cathedral Library MS 52 D.14, two years before her marriage in 1695, after which she would have signed her married name of Blount. But she was already Katherine Blount in 1696 when she began using the blank pages of the sermon manuscript to create her own miscellany. On fol. 178r, after the sermons, she wrote the heading “1696” and began a collection of verse extracts, and sometimes complete poems, ending at fol. 195v.
Fig. 3. The first page of the verse section of the miscellany, fol. 178r.
Facing that first page of poetry is an inscription on fol. 177v in which she explains her motivations for her selections: “The reason why I wrote severall of these following Verses, was not that I thought them all good, but the subjects was – what, I had occasion to make vse of.”
Fig. 4. The inscription on fol. 177v.
Blount does indeed make use of her chosen poems and extracts, consistently identifying them by theme or title, and favoring topics like friendship, virtue, and the importance of moderation, among others. Her “subjects” were not narrowly moralistic, however. As we can see from fol. 181r, she transcribes all of Abraham Cowley’s poem “Drinking” (which ends with the rousing couplet, “Should every Creature drink but I / Why, Men of Morals, tell me why?”).
Fig. 5. A sample page from the verse section, fol. 181r.
At the bottom of this page she includes two passages from different plays by John Dryden that disparage the state of marriage; it is a “Curse of Life,” “Loves nauseous cure,” and “but ye Pleasure of a Day.”[4]
Blount also began writing a second section of her manuscript in the year 1696. She took the manuscript and turned it upside down, making a new first page from the end of the volume and beginning a section of prose, which runs from fols. 276v, reversed to 230v, reversed. In the image below, you can see that she has headed this section, “A Common Place Book 1696.” Though I have called her manuscript a miscellany (since it is primarily a collection of miscellaneous extracts in verse and prose), it could equally be called a commonplace book, as she has labeled the prose section, since it is largely organized thematically.
Fig. 6. The first page of the prose section of the miscellany, fol. 276v, rev.
It is this heading that convinced me that Katherine Butler was Katherine Blount since, though the main hand of the miscellany is messier than any of the inscriptions in her printed books, the upper case “B” looks very similar to all of the “B”s each time she signs “Blount.” The upper case “P” looks similar to that in the word “Pope” in the inscription in O’Donnell’s post. And the date “1696” on both pages in the St. Paul’s manuscript replicates the number forms in all of her dates on her printed books. Blount died in 1753, and so she may have continued writing in this manuscript well into the eighteenth century. The final item in the verse section can be dated to 1719, though a later edition is possible, while one of the final items in the prose section in Blount’s hand appears to have been taken from a book published in 1736.[5]
More books from Katherine Blount’s library?
Not only does Blount identify many of her chosen passages by topic, but at several points in her manuscript she has written authors’ names, works, and page numbers beside passages, and many of those transcribed passages match specific editions.[6] Here is a list of works in which her transcriptions and page numbers match known editions; these are volumes she is likely to have consulted—and perhaps owned—from the verse section of the manuscript, rearranged into alphabetical order:
Boyle, Roger, Earl of Orrery. Tryphon,in Four New Plays (1670) or Six Plays (1694)[7]
Brome, Alexander. Songs and Other Poems (1668)
Charron, Pierre. Of Wisdome, Three Books, translated by George Stanhope (1697)
Cowley, Abraham. Works (any edition between 1668 and 1693)[8]
Denham, John. Poems and Translations (1668, 1671, or 1684)
Dryden, John. An Evening’s Love, or, The Mock-Astrologer (1691)[9]
Dryden, John. Aureng-zebe, A Tragedy (1685)
Dryden, John. The Conquest of Granada by the Spaniards (1687)[10]
Dryden, John. The Hind and the Panther. A Poem (1687)[11]
Dryden, John. The Indian Emperor, or, The Conquest of Mexico by the Spaniards (1686 or 1692)
Montaigne, Michel de. Essays, three volumes, translated by Charles Cotton (1685-86)[12]
Norris, John. A Collection of Miscellanies (1687 or 1692)
Philips, Katherine. Poems (1667, 1669, or 1678)
Plutarch’s Morals Translated from the Greek by Several Hands, vols. 1 and 2 (1691 or 1694)[13]
Reynolds, Edward. A Treatise of the Passions and Faculties of the Soul of Man (1656)
Suckling, John. Works (1676)
Tuke, Samuel. The Adventures of Five Houres: A Tragi-Comedy (1671)
Waller, Edmund. Poems (1694)
Wilmot, John, Earl of Rochester. Poems on Several Occasions (1680 or 1685)
In the prose section, Blount lists two page references tied to works that match the following printed texts:
Marana, Giovanni Paolo. The First Volume of Letters Writ by a Turkish Spy (1691, 1692, 1693, or 1694) or the eight-volume edition (1694)
Sprat, Thomas. The History of the Royal-Society (1667, 1702, 1722, or 1734)
Interestingly, one of the books described in Lindenbaum’s post, Reynolds’ A Treatise of the Passions (1656), is in the above list. It was the first book that Blount used in the verse portion of the miscellany. She inscribed the Reynolds book on July 10, 1696, and I wonder if then or shortly thereafter she wrote the heading “1696” in the St. Paul’s manuscript and began transcribing. Visible in the marginal notes beside the second entry in figure 3, above, you can see the note “Reynolds saith in his Tre: of ye Pa: & Faulties of ye Soul Page ye 228.” This short passage on grief (the only passage in prose in the verse section of the manuscript) is indeed from p. 228 in Reynolds’ book. But Reynolds’ treatise is also the source for the rest of the passages on this first page, those she has attributed to Ovid, Lucretius, and Euripides; of three on the following page (fol. 178v), which she has attributed to The Iliad, Ovid, and Homer; and of one on fol. 186v, which she has attributed to “A Greek Poet,” which Reynolds identifies as Euripides. In these seven passages (which appear in Reynolds, pp. 228, 179, 122, 89, 284, 297-98, and 265), Blount obscures Reynolds as the source and instead highlights his own marginal references to classical authors and their works, no doubt capitalizing on the cultural cachet of these ancient sources.[14]
As Lindenbaum and Van Elk have discovered, Blount owned books written by Ben Jonson (The Works, 1692, which she purchased in 1699), Edmund Waller (The Works, 1729, which was given to her by the editor in 1730), and Francis Bacon (The Essays or Counsels, 1673, which she inscribed in 1697). Though extracts or complete works by each writer appear in Blount’s miscellany, those precise editions were not her source. A marginal note indicates that the eight-line passage from Jonson’s translation of Horace’s De Arte Poetica appeared “In a Translation of Hor:” (fol. 187v). This suggests that Blount’s source was The Poems of Horace, Consisting of Odes, Satyres, and Epistles Rendered in English Verse by Several Persons, which included Jonson’s translation in the editions of 1666 and 1671. There are four extracts from Waller, from The Maid’s Tragedy Altered (fol. 178v), “Of Divine Love. Six Cantos” (fol. 179r), “A Panegyrick to my Lord Protector” (fol. 179r), and “Upon the Earl of Roscommon’s Translation of Horace” (fol. 180v). Two of the four extracts have page numbers beside them, and these line up with Waller’s Poems of 1694 but do not match the 1729 edition.[15] Since Blount began compiling her manuscript in 1696, and since the Waller extracts appear near the beginning (fols. 178v, 179r, and 180v), the Waller edition she received in 1730 is not her source. Finally, the Bacon item she includes in full, “The Character of Queen Elizabeth” (fols. 257v, rev.-247v, rev.), is the English translation that was first printed in the 1696 edition of The Essays or Counsels; the 1673 edition she owned does not include that work.[16] Blount might have used editions from 1696, 1701, 1706, or 1718, all of which included the version she transcribed.
Blount’s sources are even more plentiful than the above list since many more rhyming couplets, prose and verse extracts, and complete poems and prose works appear in her miscellany, only sometimes identified by author. Though the exact works and editions are not always clear, in addition to those already mentioned she includes passages or complete works from the following authors in her compilation: Edward Baynard, Thomas Browne, Colley Cibber, John Cleveland, Jeremy Collier, Thomas Creech, William Davenant, John Donne, Richard Fanshawe, Charles Gildon, Matthew Morgan, John Oldham, John Philips, Samuel Pufendorf, Charles Sedley, Jeremy Taylor, William Walsh, and John Webster.[17]
Katherine Blount’s miscellany gives us a rich opportunity to see one woman from the late-seventeenth and early-eighteenth century engaging with her reading material. It is likely that more books owned by Blount from the above lists will surface, so let’s all keep our antennae out.
Source: St. Paul’s Cathedral Library MS 52 D.14. Photos by Graham Lacdao, St. Paul’s Cathedral, reproduced with permission.
Works Cited
Booker, John M. L., ed. The Clough and Butler Archives: A Catalogue. West Sussex County Council, 1965.
Burke, John. A Genealogical and Heraldic History of the Commoners of Great Britain and Ireland. 4 vols, London, 1836-38.
Burke, Victoria E. “The Couplet and the Poem: Late Seventeenth-Century Women Reading Katherine Philips.” Women’s Writing, vol. 24, no. 3, 2017, pp. 280-97. Special issue: Katherine Philips: Form and Reception, edited by Marie-Louise Coolahan and Gillian Wright. Reprinted in Katherine Philips: Form, Reception, and Literary Contexts, edited by Coolahan and Wright, Routledge, 2018, pp. 151-68.
Burke, Victoria E. “‘The disagreeable Figure of a Common-Place’ in Katherine Butler’s Late Seventeenth-Century Verse Miscellany.” Manuscript Miscellanies in Early Modern England, edited by Joshua Eckhardt and Daniel Starza Smith, Ashgate, 2014, pp. 183-99.
Potter, George R., and Evelyn M. Simpson. “General Introductions: II. On the Manuscripts.” The Sermons of John Donne, 10 vols., edited by Potter and Simpson, University of California Press, 1962, vol. 1, pp. 33-45.
Van Koughnet, Jane C. E. A History of Tyttenhanger. London, 1895.
[1] See sources by Van Koughnet, Crook and Henning, and others in the posts by Lindenbaum and O’Donnell.
[2] This research culminated in an article on Butler’s manuscript miscellany, “The disagreeable Figure of a Common-Place” (2014). See note 6, in which I used John Burke’s Commoners, vol. 3, p. 517, to suggest her possible link with the Butlers of Amberley Castle; I used the birth and death dates from Booker, The Clough and Butler Archives, pedigree facing p. x.
[3] For a description of St. Paul’s Cathedral Library MS 52 D.14, see Potter and Simpson, vol. 1, pp. 41-42. For editions of the four Donne sermons in this manuscript, see The Oxford Edition of the Sermons of John Donne Project website: https://donnesermons.web.ox.ac.uk/st-pauls-cathedral-library-ms-52d14
[4] The first passage is from Dryden’s play The Conquest of Granada by the Spaniards; the 1687 edition matches Blount’s marginal reference of p. 88 (the reason for the cross-reference to p. 67 on the right of the passage is unclear). The second passage is from Dryden’s Aureng-zebe, a Tragedy, and Blount’s page reference of 46 matches the 1685 edition of that play.
[5] The final item in the verse section, the first 13 lines from the verse prologue of Dr Edward Baynard’s Health: A Poem, must be from the 1719 edition (the first to include the verse prologue) or later editions. An item from the later pages of the prose section in Blount’s hand (fol. 259r, rev.) appears to have been extracted from The Counsels of Wisdom, Or a Collection of Such Maxims of Solomon as are Most Necessary for the Prudent Conduct of Life … by Monseigneur Fouquet …, vol. 1 (1736), p. 28. While two seventeenth-century volumes with similar titles from 1680 and 1683 contain the passage, Blount’s wording matches the 1736 edition.
[6] My thanks to Shane Hawkins, who matched many of the references to digitized copies of books in Early English Books Online (EEBO), which catalogues books printed from 1475-1700, and Eighteenth-Century Collections Online (ECCO).
[7] Though Orrery’s Two New Tragedies (1669) also contains this extract on the page listed by Blount (p. 45), she later quotes (without a page reference) from Orrery’s Mustapha, a play which appears in the 1670 and 1694 volumes but not the 1669. It is thus more likely that she used the 1670 or 1694 edition for the extracts from both plays.
[8] Blount’s page numbers line up with the editions of 1668, 1669, 1672, 1674, 1678, 1680, 1681, 1684, 1688, and 1693. Though the page numbers also match Cowley’s Poems (1656), she later quotes (without a page reference) from a work that does not appear in the 1656 edition, making it more likely that all of her Cowley quotations come from an edition of his Works.
[9] Blount’s page number matches the 1691 edition of An Evening’s Love, or, The Mock-Astrologer, but also the version of the play found in the three-volume 1695 collection of Dryden’s works. Only one other Dryden work in this list fits the pagination in the three-volume 1695 edition (The Hind and Panther); since none of Blount’s page numbers for Aureng-zebe, The Conquest of Granada, or The Indian Emperor match the three-volume edition, it is not likely the source for her Dryden extracts. A final play by Dryden, All for Love, or, The World Well Lost a Tragedy, is quoted by Blount, but her edition is uncertain since the Prologue from which she quotes is unpaginated in all editions (1678, 1692, 1696, and the three-volume 1695 edition of Dryden’s works).
[10] The quotation appears on pp. 87-88 in the 1678 edition, but the only edition in which it appears on p. 88 (Blount’s reference) is the 1687 edition.
[11] Blount must have extracted from one of the three editions Jacob Tonson printed in 1687, since her reference of p. 14 lines up with those editions only (not with the other two editions printed in 1687, by James Watson and by Andrew Crook and Samuel Helsham, whose pagination is different).
[12] Though Blount gives a page reference for only one of her eleven quotations from this source (p. 327 from vol. 1), the quotations come from all three volumes.
[13] Blount quotes nine times from volume 1 or 2 of this work, but only gives a page number once (p. 37), which matches volume 1 of the 1691 and 1694 editions.
[14] For a discussion of Blount’s use of classical sources in her miscellany see Burke, “The disagreeable Figure of a Common-Place,” pp. 193-94. Blount also obscures Samuel Pufendorf’s Of the Law of Nature and Nations (1703) as the source of thirty classical quotations.
[15] The page reference given by Blount for the extract from “Of Divine Love. Six Cantos” (p. 281) matches both the 1694 and 1705 editions, but the page reference for The Maid’s Tragedy Altered (p. 10) matches the edition of the play first printed in 1690, and then in the Poems of 1694, but not the 1705 edition, suggesting that Blount likely used the 1694 edition for her Waller extracts.
[16] Two different English translations were printed earlier in the century: one in 1651 in The Felicity of Queen Elizabeth: and Her Times (pp. 1-42) and one in 1657 in the collection Resuscitatio (pp. 181-93). This latter translation by William Rawley was praised as superior in Baconiana, or, Certain Genuine Remains of Sr. Francis Bacon (1679), pp. 52-53, by “T. T.” The Latin text seems first to have been printed, also by Rawley, in the Latin collection entitled Opuscula varia posthuma (1658), pp. 175-94.
[17] Later material that may be in a different hand includes a sermon by John Scott, letters by John Tillotson and James Radcliffe, and “Mrs Cowlings Thoughts upon Time.” (The last may be the Mrs. Couling referred to by Van Koughnet as a friend of Blount’s sister, Grace: p. 68). For additional work on Blount’s reading material and strategies see the two articles (and forthcoming work) by Burke.
Early Modern Female Book Ownership 