When this book was first published in 1653, Dorothy Osborne wrote to her sweetheart William Temple: “a book of poems newly come out, made by my Lady Newcastle … they say ’tis ten times more Extravagant than her dress.”[1] This rather “catty” remark concerned Margaret Lucas Cavendish, wife of William Cavendish, marquess of Newcastle. Margaret had married her much older husband in Paris in 1645 where she was serving as a maid of honor at the court of exiled Queen Henrietta Maria, wife of Charles I. As part of the company of royalist exiles, the Cavendishes lived mainly in Antwerp where Margaret had time to write (and presumably to experiment with her wardrobe creations). In 1651 when she traveled back to London to try to recoup some of her husband’s estates, she took her poems with her and arranged to have them published. This was her first book in print.
For Margaret, poetry was a continuing process, and seeing her works in print often led to further corrections–some of which she made herself in copies of her own books before giving them as gifts and others made by herself or the printers in subsequent editions. This 1653 edition of Poems, and Fancies was the first of three, appearing in 1664 and 1668. But the 1653 edition itself occurs with variations, and the particular copy here belongs to the third variant, where her ‘royalist’ title on the title page has been reduced from “Countess” to simply “Lady,” a nod to the times under Cromwell’s Protectorate.[2]
The first owner of this copy to sign her name on the title page was Elizabeth Pain, inscribing the date as “13th January 16[?]3.” It’s tantalizing that an ink blot prevents us from knowing the exact year. We do know that the book was published early in 1653, but was Elizabeth one of its first owners, or did she acquire it ten or twenty years after the book was published? And who was Elizabeth Pain? There are many Pain, Pains, Paynes, etc. in seventeenth-century England and some in America. Was she the wife of William Payne of Essex, clergyman, ultimately prebendary of Westminster, who married Elisabeth Squire in 1675? There is no indication that they had any children, but the substantial library came up for auction in 1698 and 1699. More likely she was from a family that spelled their name “Pain” or “Paine,” since the subsequent owners, “Elias Harry Paine and Mary Paine, their book 1747” use that spelling. The family might have been in New England, since the proceeds of this sale are to benefit Historic Deerfield, and the book may just have stayed on this side of the Atlantic.
Whatever the case, Elizabeth Pain staked out her ownership right below “The Lady Newcastle” on the title page, a practice followed by other women book owners who sometimes seem to make a point of attaching their name to that of another woman associated with a book. For example, several copies of Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia have women’s inscriptions on the page dedicating the book to his sister, Lady Mary Sidney.
The later inscription by Harry and Mary Paine suggests that the book came down in the family, a frequent occurrence, making them more than books but objects that carry an accrued genealogy. Joint ownership marks by husband and wife are not uncommon in seventeenth-century books, and extend into the eighteenth century as well, but the particular inscription here “thair book” suggests, as Katharine Acheson has written about another book, “not only their shared investment in the content of the book, but a quality of their relationship which enables them to share possessions within the marriage.”[3] In other words, the inscription suggests a companionate marriage in which husband and wife might have enjoyed reading aloud to each other. Margaret herself had such a relationship with William who was also an author.
This particular copy of Cavendish’s Poems holds yet another layer of meaning, since it was sold by “a Lady”–a designation that sounds vaguely quaint since it was used frequently in bygone book auctions and is obviously still used to protect the privacy of an owner. (Sometimes, “property of a Gentleman” is also found.) Women have collected books for a very long time–recorded in Europe since at least the fourteenth century–but they often found it difficult to enter the predominantly white, male society of bibliophiles with the ambiance of a gentleman’s club. That began to change with major collectors such as Lisa Unger Baskin (books and ephemera by and about women and their work); Mary P. Massey (herbals); Caroline Schimmel (women in America), and many, many others, including young women who are now being encouraged to take up collecting by the Honey & Wax Book Collecting Prize.[4] No doubt Margaret would have been pleased to find another one of her books in the company of women.
The beautiful binding is a modern creation by skilled American binder Philip Dusel who specializes in re-creating seventeenth- and eighteenth-century styles.
Source: Book offered for sale by Christies on December 7, 2022. Images reproduced with permission.
[3] Katherine Acheson, “The Occupation of the Margins: Writing, Space, and Early Modern Women,” in Acheson, ed. Early Modern English Marginalia (New York and London: Routledge, 2019),
There is a tendency to treat books Seriously with a capital S, whether one is a scholar studying book history or is a book owner oneself, carefully inscribing one’s name on the inside cover or making serious notes in the margin. What we often miss is the playfulness that books can inspire. Rosalind Smith’s work has shown that early women’s books often abound with doodles, scribbles, and other marginal ‘trifles.’
This 1605 edition of Joshua Sylvester’s translation of Du Bartas’s Devine Weekes and Works is imperfect, lacking the title page and indeed the entire quire A, and beginning only on leaf B2. As we well know, most owners signed their names toward the front of their books on pastedowns, title pages, and flyleaves, so if this copy was once signed in this way, all of that provenance is long gone.
However, one reader made her lasting mark on page 528 in a circa eighteenth-century hand: “Ann Davis her hand and pen Shee Will bee good but god Knows When and[?].”
This kind of rhyming ownership inscription was not uncommon with eighteenth-century book owners, both male and female. What I love about this variation, which I’ve seen before, is its cheekiness. Like the title of Suzanne Hull’s bibliography of books marketed to women, women in this time period—and well beyond—were expected to be “chaste, silent, and obedient.” Davis’s jocular inscription seems to announce, ‘I’m capable of living up to the expectations for my sex, but you may be waiting awhile!’
Ann made another annotation on page 612: “I love thy pure lily hand / Soft and Smooth.” These are the first two lines of the end stanza to ‘An Ode of the Loue and Beauty of Astraea.’ Did these lines particularly strike her or was she simply echoing them out of boredom or a desire to practice her script?
Due to the commonness of her name, Ann’s identity is a mystery. Something about the irregularity of her hand suggests a young girl to me, perhaps between the ages of eleven and fourteen, still perfecting her handwriting and fashioning an identity for herself. In any case, her rough, playful inscription is the antipode of the meticulous calligraphic ownership inscriptions we have previously featured on the website.
Source: Book offered for sale by Rare Tome in April 2022 and since sold. Images used with permission. UPDATE: Molly Yarn has confirmed that the book has now found a permanent home in the Rasmussen Hines Collection. Thank you, Molly!
Still in print today, Italian poet Ludovico Ariosto’s epic poem Orlando Furioso has remained one of the most popular works of literature since its first publication in 1516. The poem continued Matteo Maria Boiardo’s unfinished multi-part Orlando Innamorato, which was published in Western printing’s infancy between 1483 and 1495. Its earliest editions are either lost or survive in very few copies.
Orlando Furioso quickly eclipsed the popularity of Boiardo’s work. Ariosto revised the poem at least twice, with a second edition released in 1521 and a posthumous third edition with several additional cantos published in 1532. The work—a chivalric romance that follows the journey of the hero, Roland, after the loss of a love and his sanity—was published in dozens of Italian and Latin editions in the sixteenth century. However, English readers not fluent in either language (a good number of women among them) would have to wait 75 years to read the work in the vernacular.
Courtier John Harington’s translation first appeared in 1591, with a second edition and third edition in 1607 and 1634, respectively. A notoriously lengthy poem, it was published in folio and accompanied by 46 engraved illustrations, which would have initially restricted its readership to those who could afford a copy. Women therefore might not have been able to read the work very widely until secondhand copies began to circulate.
One of these readers was Elizabeth Tyringham. She inscribed a front flyleaf “Elizabeth Tyringham, Her Book {Aprill ye 5[th] 1668;},” which suggests she acquired the book some thirty years after it was originally published.
Genealogical resources reference a number of Elizabeth Tyringhams, but their dates are either too early or too late to be this copy of Orlando Furioso‘s owner. It is possible, if not likely, that Elizabeth was the “only daughter and heiress of the grandson [Sir William Tyringham (d. 1685)] of Sir Anthony [Tyringham]” who “married to John Backwell, Esq.” (d. 1708) in 1678, her new husband succeeding to the Tyringham estate through his marriage to her [1], [2], [3]. The Tyringhams were of Buckinghamshire, but the usual nineteenth-century male-centric genealogies are interested in Elizabeth insofar only as she advanced the family line. She was said to have died “twenty years before” her husband, so in the year 1688 [4].
If she is the same Elizabeth, these scant biographical details tell us nothing about her reading life. Could this have been a volume from the Tyringham family library that she claimed for herself in 1668? Or was it a secondhand acquisition for her personal collection?
The volume is bound in contemporary double-ruled calf, with the gilt lettering and leather at the foot of the spine a later restoration. A remnant of what appears to be a shelf label survives at the head of the spine, although whether this is contemporaneous to Tyringham’s inscription or a later addition is debatable.
What can be said is that Tyringham (if she is the heiress Tyringham) owned the book a decade before she married and was probably young, perhaps in her late teens or early twenties, when she inscribed it. The flourishes in her signature denote care in making the inscription; the date is enclosed by curly brackets and underlined. Though the seller indicates that the copy is clean, an examination of the book’s over 450 pages may yet reveal traces of reading.
Even without a firm identification, it is an interesting example of women’s ownership of canon literature in the late seventeenth century.
Source: Book offered for sale by D&D Galleries in April 2022. Images used with permission.
Bibliography
[1] Sir Bernard Burke. A Genealogical and Heraldic History of the Landed Gentry of Great Britain & Ireland, vol. 1 (London: Harrison & Sons, Pall Mall, 1886), 1873.
[2] James Joseph Sheahan. History and Topography of Buckinghamshire Comprising a General Survey of the County (London: Longman, Green, Longman, and Roberts, 1862), 625.
While most of our posts involve single books or evidence of book ownership in the form of marginalia and signatures, another key area of provenance research is in the form of inventories and book lists. The fascinating database and journal series Private Libraries of Renaissance England have showcased a number of key women for whom the content of larger libraries are known. These lists, whether they are based on inventories or wills, help us determine not only what women read, but also, as Edith Snook notes, how they wanted to present themselves. Indeed, in her essay on the private library of Elizabeth Isham, Snook calls the booklist a form of life writing or “ego document,” a source that can tell us something about women’s senses of identity, particularly for noble women whose profile was of necessity at least to some degree public.
In his chapter in the collection Women’s Bookscapes, Joseph Black predicted that “Unpublished early modern booklists will … continue to turn up” (219). A few months ago, I was delighted to receive a message from Tim Couzens, who offered to share with us and our readers two lists of books that he has found in the papers of Lady Dorothy Long housed at the Wiltshire and Swindon History Centre. Though he will be editing and publishing these lists more fully soon, we get here an advance look at the contents. The lists were evidently drawn up to facilitate their placement in the household, as they are books to be put on “the high shelf,” some of them grouped among the “little books to be put on the high shelf.” Whether the “high shelf” indicates that they needed to be placed out of reach or were stored where they were not readily accessible is unclear.
Lady Dorothy Long, née Leche (c. 1620-1710) was married in around 1640 to Sir James Long, second Baronet (1617-1692), a politician. The couple lived in their estate at Draycot, Wiltshire. Sir James had fought on the side of the royalists in the Civil Wars, but nonetheless, according to biographer John Aubrey, befriended Oliver Cromwell through his interests in hawking, a lifelong passion. Aubrey lists James Long under “amici” (friends) in his Brief Lives.
In their edition of Elizabeth Isham’s autobiographical writings, Elizabeth Clarke and Erica Longfellow mention Lady Long (“Dolly”)’s correspondence with Isham’s brother and contrast her style with that of the more sober Isham: “[Long’s] letters employ the banter of a royalist coterie, complete with nicknames and a (mocking) reference to their ‘Academy’, in a style reminiscent of the more familiar and accomplished works of Margaret Cavendish and Katherine Philips. Lady Long does display an interest in literature, particularly the salacious Ovid, but she mocks the Countess of Dysart’s serious study of Donne.” Long donated to the Ashmolean, and their Book of Benefactors describes her in much different terms, as “the pride and joy of her family and her sex … [She] showed a deep interest in primitive religions and antiquities. Her piety and great good will to this University led her to give a carved ivory crosier [head] which had belonged to Saint Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, to this museum to be placed with the other treasures.”
Given these contrasting descriptions, it is fascinating to think, with Snook, of the two lists of books that belonged to Long as a form of life writing to counter the narratives of royalist eccentricity and piety.
Here is Tim Couzen’s transcription, along with his preliminary identifications of the books in brackets:
Little books to put ith highe Shelf. [15 July 1704, from content]
Narrative oth Fire at London [An Historical narrative of the Great and Terrible Fire of London, Sept 2nd1666. Gideon Harvey. This may be an original of the book published more generally by W. Nicoll in 1769.]
Epitome of Husbandry [The Epitome of the Art of Husbandry: comprising all necessary directions for the Improvement of it. Etc, by J.B. Gent (Joseph Blagrave), 1675.]
Flatmans Poems [Dr. Thomas Flatman (1635–1688) Fellow of the Royal Society, Poet and miniature painter. Probably Poems and Songs (1674).]
Counr Manners Legacy tos Son. [Counsellor Manners, His Last legacy to His Son: etc. Probably the first edition, published in 1673, by Josiah Dare.]
Dr Gouge Domestick dutys [Of Domesticall Duties, eight treatises etc. by William Gouge, 1622.]
Pasquin risen from ye Dead [London, 1674.]
Nat: Culverwel on ye Light of Nature [Nathaniel Culverwell (1619–1651), An elegant and learned discourse of the Light of Nature, 1652.]
The History of Joseph &c: [Josephus’s Antiquities of the Jews. Probably the 1700 edition.]
Theopanila Broms Poems [William Sales’s Theophania (London, 1655) and Alexander Brome’s Poems.]
G [Gaius] Velleius Paterculus [Roman Historian (c 19BC – c AD31). There are several early editions.]
Evagoros. [Evagoros. [Two possible identifications: Paul Salzman has suggested this is Evagoras, a Romance by L.L. Gent (London, 1677). A second possibility is the Greek oration by Isocrates on the King of Salamis (Unknown edition). Given the mixture of romances, for Dorothy Long’s own use, and text books from her grandson, James, it is not possible to be certain, but the former seems much more likely.]
Bookes to put into ye High Shelfe ye 15o July 1704.
The Countise Montgomerys Urania [romance by Mary Wroth (1587–1653), dedicated to Countess of Montgomery; the book was first published in 1621.]
Orlando Furiosa: Abraham Cowleys workes [Two separate books. The first is Orlando Furioso, an Italian epic poem of Ludovico Ariosto (1516–1532), presumably in an early, but un-named translation. Abraham Cowley (1618–1667), was an English poet, with 14 printings of his works published between 1668 and 1721.]
Mrs Phillipes’s Verses. orinda. [Katherine Philips (1631/32–1664), known as “The Matchless Orinda,” was an Anglo-Welsh royalist poet, translator, and woman of letters. After her death, in 1667, an authorized edition of her poetry was printed entitled Poems by the Most Deservedly admired Mrs Katherine Philips, the Matchless Orinda, which included her translations of Pompee and Horace.]
Scarrons Comicall Romance [Paul Scarron (1610–1660) was a French dramatist and novelist. The Roman Comique was reworked by a number of English authors.]
The Lusiad. or Portingales His: a Poem [The Lusiads is a Portuguese epic poem written by Luis vaz de Camoes (c1524/5–1580) and first published in 1572. The date and author of the early translation is not stated.]
The warres of Justinian [The history of the warres of the Emperour Justinian in eight books: etc. Written in Greek by Procopius etc. Englished by Sir Henry Holcroft (1586–1650). Published in 1653.]
Micrographia. By Rob: Hooke [Likely to be a first edition (1665) directly from the author. The book is listed in the 1846 Draycot House contents catalogue.]
The Civell warrs of Spain [Joseph Black has identified this as Prudencio de Sandoval, The Civil Wars of Spain (published in multiple editions from 1652 to 1662) This book is also listed in the 1795 Draycot House Inventory.]
Phillipe De Comines. [An early translation from French of the Memoirs of Philippe de Commines. The usual publication date for Volume 2 is 1712.]
Cornelius Tacitus Tacitus Arriana. [The Annales of Cornelius Tacitus: The description of Germanie. Translated by Richard Greenway and Sir Henry Savile (1549–1622). Published London, 1640; Ariana is a romance by Jean Desmarets, Sieur de Saint Sorlin, originally translated in 1636.]
Of Goverment of obeydiense by Jo: Hall. [Of Government and obedience as the stand directed and determined in Scripture and reason, four books by John Hall of Richmond. London, 1654.]
Cass[andra?] Sanders on Memory &c. [The title is obscured by the fold; the first book is Cassandra the fam’d romance: the whole work: in five parts / written originally in French: now elegantly rendred into English by a person of quality. Cassandra is a translation of a romance novel by Gaultier de Coste La Calprenède, translated in 1652. Possible second work is unidentified.]
Pasquil risen from ye Dead to put higher [see above.]
Standly’s 7: wise Men &c. [Thomas Stanley (1625–1678) was an English Author and translator. The History of Philosophy, 3 volumes published in 1655, 1656, and 1660, includes the seven wise men (sages) of Greece.]
A larg print of Cardinall Richeleis House [Probably the Chateau de Richelieu, south of Chinon, Touraine, rather than the Palais Royal in Paris.]
Nero Ceazar. & ye warr of Jugurth &c: [Two separate books. The first title is possibly Nero Caesar, or Monarchy Depraved. An Historical Work, by Edmund Bolton (published 1627). The second is an early English translation of Sallust (Gaius Sallustius Crispus). The Warre of Jugurth is by Thomas Heywood, 1608.]
The collection of books is, as Tim Couzens notes in his email to me, largely associated with her schooling of her grandsons, Sir Giles and Sir James Long (later 5th Baronet), before they went on to tutors and governors and to Oxford. But many women’s collections included works of history and politics, whether or not they used them to educate their children.
Poems by the Most Deservedly Admired Mrs Katherine Philips, Folger Shakespeare Library, P2035.
Readers of this blog will be particularly interested to see both Mary Wroth’s Urania and Katherine Philips’s Poems in the listing, and, compared with other such inventories, there are surprisingly few devotional books. Though Margaret Cavendish is missing, the presence of Philips certainly shows, much like the romance texts, an affiliation with royalist culture. Links between different books are evident: Thomas Flatman, author of a book of poems listed here, had written a dedicatory poem for Philip’s collection, and as it happens, another copy of Philips’s poems we have featured on this site (housed by the Folger Shakespeare library) was owned by Hannah Flatman, Thomas Flatman’s wife.
Generally, Long’s inventories reveal her political affiliations, her investment in learning (or teaching the boys in her family), and a wide range of interests in romance, history, philosophy, and poetry, with only minor concerns with household management and domestic advice so commonly found in women’s inventories and little in books of devotion that normally dominate such libraries. Perhaps those books were placed on the lower shelves.
We want to thank Tim for providing us with transcriptions and pictures of the two lists of books owned by Lady Dorothy Long and Sara Morrison and Anabel Loyd for permission to reproduce both the transcription and images.
Source: Wiltshire and Swindon History Center 2943B/1/35. Draft letters and notes by Lady Dorothy Long [No description] (1686-1704). 35 documents.
Further Reading
Joseph L. Black, “Women’s Libraries in the Private Libraries in Renaissance England Project.” Bookscapes in Early Modern Britain: Reading, Ownership, Circulation. Edited by Leah Knight, Micheline White, and Elizabeth Saur. University of Michigan Press, 2018. 214–229.
Elizabeth Clarke and Erica Longfellow, “Introduction to the Online Edition.” Elizabeth Isham’s Autobiographical Writings. Center for the Study of the Renaissance, University of Warwick, 2015. https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/ren/researchcurrent/isham/texts/.
Tim Couzens, Hand of Fate: The History of the Longs, Wellesleys and the Draycot Estate in Wiltshire. ELSP, 2001.
PLRE.Folger: Private Libraries in Renaissance England. Ed. Joseph L. Black et al. Folger Shakespeare Library. https://plre.folger.edu/
Private Libraries in Renaissance England vols. 8-9 (2014–16).
Edith Snook, “Elizabeth Isham’s ‘own Bookes’: Property, Propriety, and the Self as Library.” Women.’’ Bookscapes in Early Modern Britain: Reading, Ownership, Circulation. Edited by Leah Knight, Micheline White, and Elizabeth Saur. University of Michigan Press, 2018. 77–93.
The Rasmussen Hines Collection holds a copy of the third edition of Sir John Suckling’s works, Fragmenta Aurea (1658), with a complex and interesting #herbook provenance.
The first dated inscription in this copy is that of “Anne Boyle,” 1673. Although not a terribly unusual name, several other inscriptions in the volume, including the names “Coote” and a cut-off “Blesinton,” allow us to identify Anne confidently as Lady Anne Coote Boyle (1658–1725), Viscountess Blessington. Anne was the daughter of Charles Coote, the second Earl of Mountrath (1628–1672) and Alyce Meredith. Anne’s grandfather Charles, first Earl of Mountrath (a brutal soldier and rapacious acquirer of Irish land, and by all accounts a ruthless oppressor of Irish Catholics), led Parliamentary forces in Ireland and served in the protectorate parliaments but managed, with his ally Roger Boyle (Lord Broghill and the future Earl of Orrery), to switch sides, offering his support to Charles II prior to the Restoration and becoming Earl of Mountrath for his efforts. Coote’s son Charles, the second Earl and Anne’s father, outlived his father by only ten years and seems not to have been a significant political player; however, the Cootes were major Protestant landowners with several large ironworks and strongly positioned for success after the Stuarts returned.[1] In 1672, the same year as her father’s death, Anne Coote married Murrough Boyle (c. 1645–1718), a member of the powerful Boyle clan and cousin to Mountrath’s ally Roger Boyle, Earl of Orrery. The following year, Murrough Boyle became the first Viscount Blessington (originally spelled “Blesinton”). In addition to Anne’s 1673 signature, this ornate signature several pages later, which appears to read “A Blesint—,” is likely also hers.
Murrough Boyle, Viscount Blessington, was a man with literary ambitions – he was the author of a tragic play entitled The Lost Princess, which a critic described as “truly contemptible” (Doyle, “Boyle, Murrough”). As a member of the Boyle family, he also had numerous literary connections that make this copy of Fragmenta Aurea’s provenance particularly interesting. Roger Boyle, first Earl of Orrery, was himself an accomplished author and friend to many writers, including John Suckling himself. One of Suckling’s poems in Fragmenta Aurea, “Ballade upon a Wedding,” may have been written to commemorate Roger Boyle’s marriage to Margaret Howard. Orrery and his siblings – Richard Boyle, second Earl of Cork, and his wife, Elizabeth Clifford, Katherine Boyle Jones, Lady Ranelagh, Mary Boyle Rich, Countess of Warwick, Robert Boyle, the chemist, and Francis Boyle, first Viscount Shannon, and his wife Elizabeth Killigrew, sister of writers William and Thomas Killigrew – were all, in their own rights, major figures in the English literary and intellectual circles of the mid to late seventeenth century.[2]
In her discussion of the Boyle women’s life writing, Ann-Maria Walsh emphasizes the significance of dynastic marriages to the Protestant “New English” families of landowners in Ireland, and Murrough and Anne’s marriage sits within a complex and shifting network of alliances. Anne’s grandfather, Charles Coote, was allied with Roger Boyle, the first Earl of Orrery; they served together as two of the three lord justices of Ireland in 1660. In this context, a marriage between the two families makes sense. Murrough Boyle, however, came with his own set of baggage. He was the son of Michael Boyle, archbishop of Dublin and the lord chancellor of Ireland. Although Michael Boyle and his father had benefited from the influence of their more powerful cousins, particularly the earls of Cork, Michael Boyle married the Hon. Mary O’Brien in the 1640s. Mary was the sister of Murrough O’Brien, the first Earl of Inchiquin and a long-time enemy of Orrery. Michael Boyle aligned himself with the O’Briens, even serving as Inchiquin’s emissary during delicate negotiations. The Inchiquin-Orrery feud is too complex to detail here; however, the two men decided to make peace during the late 1660s, cementing their friendship with a marriage between Orrery’s daughter Margaret and Inchiquin’s son William in 1665. Orrery’s son Henry would also marry Inchiquin’s daughter Mary in 1679. The 1672 marriage between Anne Coote, daughter of a close Orrery ally, and Murrough Boyle, cousin of Orrery and nephew of Inchiquin, whose branch of the Boyles had recently been reconciled with the Cork/Orrery branch, fits into this pattern of dynastic and political alliances.[3] The personal connection between Orrery and Suckling, particularly the link between Orrery’s own wedding and one of the volume’s poems, make this book a remarkably evocative item for Anne to have acquired, or at least inscribed, the year of her own marriage into the Boyle family.
The Coote connection links Anne to another interesting woman-owned book, which has been described by Kate Lilley. Anne Tighe Coote was the wife of Anne Coote Boyle’s second cousin Thomas and the owner of a 1669 edition of Katharine Phillips’ Poems. Her copy, now held at the National Art Library at the V&A, includes a transcription of a poem entitled “The Teares of the Consort for Mr Tighe Writt by My Lord Blessington 1679,” signed by “Ann: Tighe: August ye 26th 1680.” “Mr Tighe” was Anne Tighe’s first husband, William, who died in 1679; “My Lord Blessington” was, of course, Murrough Boyle, Anne Coote Boyle’s husband. Anne Tighe owned the book before her marriage into the Coote-Boyle family in 1680 (the monogram on the binding, “ANTIGHE,” indicates that it was likely bound, or at least stamped, during her marriage to William Tighe, 1675–1679), but the choice to inscribe it with Murrough Boyle’s poem seems deliberate, a nod to her future husband’s family connections and, likely, an indication that Anne Tighe developed a personal relationship with Anne and Murrough Boyle. Katharine Phillips was closely involved with the Boyle circles – she dedicated various poems to Elizabeth Boyle, Countess of Cork, and her daughters, and the Earl of Orrery wrote one of the volume’s commendatory poems. Clearly, Anne Tighe was aware of the Boyle family’s patronage of Phillips, and this inscription reflects, in Lilley’s words, “a complex web of associations” similar, and related to, the one found in the Coote-Boyle copy of Suckling (121).
Anne Boyle may have only kept Fragmenta Aurea for about a year of her married life. By 1673, some time after she and Murrough became Viscountess and Viscount Blessington (as indicated by the “ABlesint” signature) she had passed it along to a new owner, at least temporarily – “Coote” is written on the dedication page and, although it has been scratched out, “Charles Coote His Booke 1673” appears opposite the title page of The Last Remains of John Suckling.
Taking the date into account, this Charles Coote was most likely Anne’s brother, the third Earl of Mountrath. Like his brother-in-law Blessington, Coote supported Hugh Capel and experienced a brief rise in his political fortunes during the mid 1690s, then a fall into irrelevance.
The signature below Charles’s throws an additional curve ball: “Elizabeth Adshead her booke 169-.” Unfortunately, the binding hides the final digit of Elizabeth’s date, but, if accurate, this suggests that Charles Coote had passed the book along by 1699 at the latest. Based on this, and the loss at the edges, the copy was trimmed and bound sometime after c. 1700.
The matching lower-case “th” in “Elizabeth,” “tho,” and “that” suggests that Elizabeth herself wrote something like “the man is bleest that” below her signature. I have been unable to identify Elizabeth Adshead. A large Adshead family is associated with Cheshire, but I see no links between them and the Coote-Boyles. The line below offers another clue:
It appears to read “alizabeth kinder her,” but there is certainly room for interpretation in that transcription. The similarity between the “d” in Adshead and in “kinder” inclines me to think that Elizabeth Adshead wrote all three lines. If it is a name, perhaps it is her maiden name? It could also be a continuation of the quotation (if such it is) on the line above: “______ hath hinder her,” maybe?
If Charles Coote was the book’s owner until the 1690s, his family’s fortunes could explain how the book ended up with a new owner. As a Protestant supporter of William and Mary, Charles Coote’s estates were forfeited during the Jacobite-Williamite War (1688–1691), although they were restored and enlarged after William’s victory. Many large houses belonging to Williamites were looted. The Coote family supposedly experienced “considerable deprivation” during the War, with Coote’s wife, Isabella, dying “out of grief, pawning her last ring” (Doyle, “Coote, Charles”). The book, along with many of his other belongings, could have left his possession during that period. One more inscription in the book, however, may hint at another owner before 1689-1691:
Although partially scratched out, image manipulation reveals more details:
The date under “1672” appears to be “1679,” although it could also be “169_,” with the last digit cut off during rebinding. I am inclined toward “1679,” however, with the “7” set slightly above the “9” and connected to the “6.” Although it’s difficult to be sure, the handwriting appears to slightly resemble Anne’s above (see the similarity of the “6”); if this is the case, Charles Coote may have returned the book to his sister, who added the additional date and crossed out Charles’s inscription on the later page to reassert her ownership. In that case, a different narrative would be required to explain why the book passed out of the Coote-Boyle family’s hands. Murrough’s father, Michael Boyle, built an enormous mansion at Blessington, in County Wicklow, around the time of Anne and Murrough’s marriage, which was “plundered” in 1689 (Breffny). Perhaps it ended up in the library there? As Walsh explains, however, the Boyle women were extremely mobile, traveling to family properties across Ireland and England. The Cootes either owned or let a London house in Soho Square, where Murrough is known to have stayed with them (Barnard, 331). Either Anne, Charles, or an unknown person could have left, lost, or given away the book in any number of places around England and Ireland, making the timeline of its ownership quite murky.
Speaking of an unknown person, however, if 1679/169_ does not belong with Anne’s inscription, it may be associated with the partially lost text beneath it. That handwriting, in combination with the forceful erasure, is challenging, but I’m currently inclined to read it as “Lord” and something like “Peiret”; if this rings a bell with anyone, I’d be very happy to hear from you!
Source: Rasmussen Hines Collection. Photos by Molly G. Yarn, reproduced with permission.
Further Reading
Toby Christopher Barnard, Making the Grand Figure: Lives and Possessions in Ireland, 1641-1770 (Yale University Press, 2004).
Brian de Breffny, “The Building of the Mansion at Blessington, 1672,” The GPA Irish Arts Review Yearbook, 1988, 73–77.
Kate Lilley, “Katherine Philips, ‘Philo-Philippa’ and the Poetics of Association.” Material Cultures of Early Modern Women’s Writing, ed. by Patricia Pender and Rosalind Smith (Palgrave MacMillan, 2014), pp. 118–39.
Jane H. Ohlmeyer, Making Ireland English: The Irish Aristocracy in the Seventeenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012).
Ana-Maria Walsh, “The Boyle Women and Familial Life Writing.” Women’s Life Writing and Early Modern Ireland, ed. by Julie A. Eckerle and Naomi McAreavey, Women and Gender in the Early Modern World (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2019), pp. 79–98.
[1] For the Coote-Boyle clan’s involvement in 17th century politics, see (among many others) Ohlmeyer.
[2] See individual entries in the ODNB and the Dictionary of Irish Biography.
[3] There are documents related to the negotiation of their marriage and to Murrough Boyle’s financial affairs in the De Vesci papers at the National Library of Ireland [MS 38,748/4; MS 38,831/1-2; MS 38,837].
This copy of a second edition of George Herbert’s The Temple has a fascinating provenance, beyond what is usually our upper date limit of 1800, so I felt it was worth a post even though this is not strictly speaking an instance of early modern female book ownership.
Herbert’s book is signed on the title page by Rufus Greene, who helpfully added the date and place of acquisition, London, July 23, 1728. Greene (1707-1777) was a Boston silversmith whose works can be found today in museums, such as the Fitchburg Art Museum.
Image of a tankard in the Fitchburg Art Museum on Wikimedia.
1728, the date in the inscription, is both the year of his marriage and the year he started his business. A portrait of Greene’s wife, Katherine Stanbridge, by John Singleton Copley sold at auction in 2017 and is currently in the Young Museum. Their daughter, Katherine Greene Amory (1731-1777), is today well known for the journal she kept during the American Revolution. She and her husband, John Amory, were loyalists who departed for England, leaving their children in America.
Katherine’s son John Amory Jr married Catherine Willard and their daughter, Catherine Willard Amory (1794-1831) wrote her own signature in Herbert’s book.
Her inscription shows her desire to give us both her family history and the history of the book’s ownership: “Catherine W. Amory formerly belonging to her Great Grandfather Rufus Greene.”
One of her portraits, by Alvan Clarke, was painted in the year of her death and is currently at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
Portrait at the Museum of Fine Arts; reproduced from Wikimedia.
While we do not know when Catherine W. Amory made the inscription, it skips over the generations between herself and her great-grandfather, creating a direct link between nineteenth- and eighteenth-century ownership of Herbert’s famous collection of poems and between the two of them as readers.
Source: Book offered for sale by Manhattan Rare Books, July 2021. Images reproduced with permission.
Also known as the Heroides, Ovid’s epistles saw their first print translation by George Turberville in 1567. The Heroides are made up of fifteen epistolary poems between famous lovers: Penelope to Odysseus, Medea to Jason, Sappho to Phaon, and so on. This 1680 edition is noteworthy for its preface by John Dryden. “[Y]et this may be said in behalf of Ovid, that no man has ever treated the Passion of Love with so much Delicacy of Thought, and of Expression, or search’d into the nature of it more Philosophically than he,” he writes (A3v).
This copy contains two early owner’s inscriptions. The first, John Sibthorpe, wrote his name on the title page. There were a couple John Sibthorpes of note, including the MP (1669–1718) and botanist (1758–1796), and either could have plausibly owned this book. The inscription that draws the most attention though, if only for its considerably larger size, is on the title page verso.
It reads in a neat italice hand: “Mrs Anne Ayssoghe / her Booke / Jan ye 26 / 1684.” Anne’s unique spelling of her surname has made it difficult to determine what the modern spelling may be (Assow? Eishow?) and thus her identity remains a mystery for now. What does seem to be clear is that she signed (if not acquired) the book on January 26th, 1684 and that she was married at the time she owned this text of romance, passion, and love spurned.
Source: Book offered for sale by Julian Roberts Fine Books in October 2020 and since sold. Images used with permission.
The digital search for early modern women’s reading leaves one black and blue: the blue of an unclicked hyperlink, a potential lead that tantalizes with symbolic hope; more often, the black of unclickable plaintext—a definitive, de-legitimizing dead end. As an archival historian in the digital age, I find myself charting these errant paths like a manic cross between a Spenserian knight and one of Pavlov’s dogs. Armor dented but valor intact, salivating over every crumb of evidence that offers a clue to the burning question: Who was she?
I recently emerged, bruised if technically victorious, from another such adventure. The volume is a copy of the 1667 posthumous edition of Katherine Philips’ poetry in the Special Collections at Carnegie Mellon. It bears two competing ownership inscriptions on the opening flyleaf: the first, browned and bleeding with age, proclaims the book “Ex Libris | Henrici: Goughe”; a second, just below, rejoins, in a darker, sharper italic, that it is “Mrs Mary Gough. | Her Book. | 1700.” The binding is unremarkable, unadorned contemporary calf.
These squabbling signatures are reconciled by a marital union about which little information survives. While a variety of internet searches for “Mary Gough” prove fruitless on their own, a single search for “Henry Gough” produces a hit immediately. It details not only the arc of Gough’s political career from Staffordshire High Sheriff to a Tory Member of the House of Commons, but that he “married Mary Littleton, the daughter of Sir Edward Littleton, 2nd Bt. [likewise hyperlinked], of Pillaton Hall, Staffordshire in 1668” (Wikipedia). Gough must have bought the book sometime between 1667, when it was published, and 1700, when he either gave it to his wife or she claimed it for her own.
Here, the archival impulse bruises itself by repeatedly bumping up against the digital dead end of Lady Mary Littleton Gough (1651-1722). A renewed search for leads, revised to include the maiden name obtained via her husband’s Wikipedia page, yields nothing but a portrait and an incomplete genealogy.
Lady Mary, like so many early modern women, is unlinked. Meanwhile, her husband, a minor figure in Parliament, and her father, recipient of a title ranked below the peerage, are amply documented. What does this disparity mean? The experience of informational paucity in relation to early modern women in the context of today’s technologies makes a staggering impression upon the historian: it reduces so many women’s lives to unmoored names and biographical dates adrift in a sea of information, sometimes towed along by the reputational freight of a male relative, often a husband or father.
Although the world wide web is neither all-inclusive nor infallible, the slippage of many women’s histories through its titanic net conveys the vestiges and consequences of a social infrastructure which yokes women primarily to domestic roles and men. This infrastructure, of course, prevails across periods. The historic devaluation of women’s lives echoes loudest in the information age—a silence in the midst of a cacophony of data. Men’s lives, including those that are not particularly of note, are often well-documented by contrast—and, more fundamentally, presumed to be worthy of documentation. While we can recover Henry’s Parliamentary career in considerable detail, we know only that Mary bore sixteen children (Mimardière).
A counter-narrative to this digital pattern emanates from the object itself. This book’s unfinished dedication offers the most promising link between Mary Gough’s name and untold history, but it is a broken one. The dangling preposition “To,” evidently in her hand and smudged diagonally downward to the left (perhaps she was left-handed?) invites speculations that she may have stopped in the act of gifting the book to someone else. (One might alternatively entertain the idea that “To” is the first word of an unfinished epigraph or quotation, but the neatness of the entire inscription and the lack of stray marks elsewhere in the book advocate against it being an idle doodle.) The fragmentary inscription is evidently contemporaneous with Mary Gough’s ownership mark above, and the question of why she would mark the book as hers and simultaneously inscribe it to another recipient is answered by the need to identify herself explicitly as the giver, given her husband’s foregoing ownership mark. The lack of an ex dono formulation might be explained by supposing that she was not Latin-literate, consistent with her use of an English ownership inscription in contrast to her husband’s ex libris.
This speculative fantasy of gift-giving is catalyzed by the book itself. Katherine Philips’ poetry focuses heavily on bonds of friendship generally, and female friendship in particular—might the intended recipient have been a woman? Why did Gough leave the inscription incomplete? Was she interrupted, or did she change her mind? This volume is not only evidence of a woman reading a woman writer, but an emblem of women’s links to the wider world: their creation, loss, preservation, and attempted recovery.
It has been over a decade since William H. Sherman optatively coined the term “matriarchive” (53-67). Since then, passionate and innovative projects like the Early Modern Female Book Ownership Blog, the Perdita Project, RECIRC, and, for later periods, the Women in Book History Bibliography and Alison Booth’s tremendous Collective Biographies of Women, have gotten underway the project of uncovering and curating an impressive breadth of material. Also noteworthy is the Twitter hashtag #fembib, which has provided a means to link researchers studying women in the archive. This wave of groundbreaking work puts us in a position to re-evaluate the contours and meanings of such an archive. It circumscribes, as Sherman anticipates, presence and absence. The matriarchive today is a space where empty spaces are eloquent. It is defined by—and encodes—a view of the consequences of social choices regarding women’s lives: that is, how centuries of these choices and attitudes shape not only what we see of the past, but how we see it. This is true of how we imagine not only women, but non-white subjects, in British history.
On the one hand, there is enormous scope to “liberate … [many women] from their long period of textual house arrest” (Sherman 67). On the other, British societies from the early modern to the modern periods have colluded in creating an equally formidable graveyard, an elusive space which presides over the metamorphosis of women from participating (albeit second-class) members and potential archival subjects, into evacuated names appended to men’s histories. This haunted space now curates the present’s link with the past.
I owe a debt of gratitude to curator and colleague Samuel Lemley for his generosity in drawing my attention to this volume.
Source: Special Collections, Carnegie Mellon University Libraries, PR3619.P4 O637. Images reproduced with permission.
William H. Sherman, “Reading the Matriarchive,” in Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 53-67
This edition of poetry by Robert Wild, a clergyman who was both a Presbyterian and a Royalist, was published in 1671. The poem “Iter Boreale” (March from the North) was dedicated to General George Monck to honor him for his march to London, which led to the Restoration of Charles II to the throne. This edition, which includes other political poetry, such as a tribute to Christopher Love, a Presbyterian who was executed in 1651 for plotting to restore Charles II to the throne, and eulogies on Presbyterian members of the Westminster Assembly and other key figures, must have been meaningful to Royalist readers, who could read the poems to look back on a turbulent era.
The modest inscription of a woman named Sarah Nicholas in a 1671 edition of a collection of Robert Wild’s poetry appears to date from the 18th century. If so, her reading of the collection suggests a possible religious and political affiliation, and, at the very least, an interest in the history of the Civil Wars and their aftermath.
Source: Book offered for sale by Stephen Rench, 4/4/19. Images used with permission.
While Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene was written for Queen Elizabeth I, the epic was meant for female readership beyond Elizabeth and offered early modern women “a remarkable degree of interpretive agency,” as Caroline McManus has demonstrated.[1] This copy of the second edition of the first part of The Faerie Queene (1596)—from the Rare & Special Books Collection of the University Libraries at the University at Buffalo—demonstrates how one late early modern woman asserted her intellectual agency and physical ownership of the text through a full-page bookplate.
Mrs. Elizabeth Percival’s tipped-in bookplate distinguishes her from the later male owners of this book, who left their (considerably smaller) bookplates adhered to its boards. The bookplate, bound in and trimmed to appear as though it is part of the book’s original signatures, faces the title page. Its placement ensures that future readers will acknowledge Percival’s intellectual and physical possession. In case they miss it, she also wrote her name in now much faded ink on the title page itself.
The design of Percival’s bookplate was popular in the early eighteenth century, and many of the earliest known bookplates of women readers follow a similar template. In the ornately decorated border, it announces, using majuscule, “The Noble Art and Mystery of PRINTING was first Invented / in the Year 1430. And Brought into ENGLAND in the year 1447.” The bookplate itself has a colophon; it was “Printed at the Theatre in Oxford, March 25, An. Dom. 1721.”
Despite appearances, however, bookplates such as Percival’s may not signify ownership: in her 1895 study of women’s bookplates, Norna Labourchere argues that it is “doubtful” that women’s full-page bookplates served the same purpose as ex-libris bookplates, noting that “the labels themselves often appear as if they have never had been placed within the covers of a volume” and “no libraries have been traced to any of these ladies.”[2] Instead, she theorizes, “printers kept a stock of blank plates, and filled in the name of the customer, with the date, address, etc.” filled out as appropriate, as souvenirs. Since this copy of The Faerie Queene was rebound by Riviere and Son in the early twentieth century, it would be difficult to say for certain that Percival had bound in the plate with the book. However, given that Percival inscribed her name on the title page, it seems reasonable to argue that this was indeed her book. Whether or not full-page labels like Percival’s served as ex-libris bookplates, they did have the function of putting women’s names into print and creating social currency around book ownership.
Uncovering who Elizabeth Percival was, and what volumes her library might once have held (if any), is a discovery for the future.
Source: Rare & Special Books Collection of the University Libraries at the University at Buffalo. Images reproduced courtesy the Rare & Special Books Collection of the University Libraries, University at Buffalo, The State University of New York.
[1] Caroline McManus, Spenser’s Faerie Queene and the Reading of Women. Cranbury, NJ: University of Delaware Press, 2002: 147.
The publication of Sara Maria van der Wilp’s volume of collected poems, Gedichten (1772), led to one of the juiciest controversies in Dutch literary history. The author portrait Van der Wilp initially included in the book (left) produced a torrent of criticism and resulted in a fierce argument in the public press between its painter and the poetess. After several contemporaries reached out to the Amsterdam poetess and told her she “looked like a shrew; a dragon of a wife, […] an impertinent Whore, with Breasts like the udders of a cow,” Van der Wilp decided to commission a new portrait from a competing artist (right) and urged her readers to destroy the first portrait.
Many of her readers, however, seem to have ignored the poetess’s explicit request. Most surviving copies of the edition contain both portraits. Interestingly several readers added handwritten notes, taking a position in the controversy. On the whole, their judgement did not favor Van der Wilp, and only a few seemed pleased with the volume. A noteworthy exception appeared to have been Wobbegien Smit (b. 1767). Born in Meppel, Wobbegien married the local merchant Egbert van Veen (1767-1815) in 1788. In 1818, a few years of her husband’s passing, Wobbegien wrote multiple inscriptions of her name in her copy of Van der Wilp’s Gedichten: ‘Wobbegien Smit haar boek in jaar achttien honderd en achttien’ (Wobbegien Smit her book in the year 1818) and ‘Wobbeggien Smit zijn Boek’ (Wobbegien Smit his Book). In addition, she included two inscriptions with the surname of her late husband (‘Wobbegien van Veen’). Apparently, Wobbegien used Van der Wilp’s controversial book to practice her writing and try to establish her own distinctive signature.
Figs. 4 and Fig. 6
Source: Atria, Institute on gender equality and women’s history (Amsterdam), NED 54 1772-B. Photographs by Lieke van Deinsen, reproduced with permission.
Further Reading
Lieke van Deinsen, “Visualising Female Authorship. Author Portraits and the Representation of Female Literary Authority in the Eighteenth Century,” Quærendo49:4 (2019), pp. 283-314.
Mary Harris’s inscription in a sammelband copy of Edmund Waller’s poems is a reminder that contemporary bindings and endleaves can be critical in preserving information about early women’s book ownership. Had the book been rebound over the centuries like countless others, the record of Mary Harris’s ownership would have been lost. The book is comprised of the sixth edition of Waller’s poems and a 1690 edition of The Second Part of Mr. Waller’s Poems.
Source: Book offered for sale by Centralantikvariatet, 1/7/19. Images used with permission.
Early Modern Female Book Ownership 