This is another installment in our series of blog posts Katherine Blount, who, as we have discovered, owned a formidable library. The more we look, the more we find. The search for Blount books started with a post by Sarah Lindenbaum, which was followed by posts by Sophie Floate, William Poole, and Mary Ann O’Donnell, who all added to the list compiled by Sarah. Then, most recently, Victoria Burke wrote for us on a manuscript miscellany that she could, with the help of evidence featured on the blog, identify definitively as written by Blount. The miscellany provides broad evidence of Blount’s reading, including many books not featured in our blog before, which were possibly part of the family library rather than Blount’s personal collection. Much work remains to be done in terms of identifying and locating the books from which she copied material in the miscellany manuscript.
Fortunately for us, Blount meticulously signed many of the books she owned, almost always including a date and often a price or a note about the person who gave her the book. I will not repeat the biographical facts of her life here since those can be found in any of the posts linked above. Her gift inscriptions show that she was frequently given books by her husband and other friends and relations, allowing us to begin to think about the networks of which she was a part. The particular book I concentrate on here is Vegetable Staticks by Stephen Hales. Vegetable Staticks was presented to Blount, her inscription shows, by Hales himself in 1727.
Who was Hales and why might Blount have been interested in this book? Stephen Hales (1677–1761), as the title page of the book tells us, was both a clergyman and a scientist. His main position, as Curate of Teddington, would have brought him in close proximity to Twickenham, the estate that was the primary residence of Blount and her husband, which is, according to Google Maps, a mere half an hour walk away.
Hales had become interested in science while at Cambridge and wrote a number of scientific works, making important discoveries and inventing various devices to benefit human health. Statick Vegetables is perhaps his most important work. The book collects Hales’s papers presented at the Royal Society on plant nutrition, considering the circulation of water and how plants acquire energy through air and possibly light. A section of the book is devoted to air chemistry, an important topic to Hales, who argued for the importance of air circulation to health and invented a kind of ventilator.
The entry on Hales in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography quotes contemporary Gilbert White’s impressions of Hales:
“Gilbert White noted that ‘His whole mind seemed replete with experiment which of course gave a tincture and turn to his conversation often somewhat peculiar, but always interesting’. He listed a series of anecdotes to support this view, among which were Hales’s concern with the incrustation of ladies’ tea-kettles, his advising the use of showers of water to test the salubrity of wells, his directing air-holes to be let in the outer walls of rooms, his imploring young people not to drink their tea scalding hot, his ad hoc advice to ferrymen on how to maintain the bottoms of their boats, and his teaching housewives to place inverted teacups in their pies to prevent the syrup from boiling over.”
The conversations Blount may have had with Hales may have ranged from science and botany to cooking and tea kettles. We can only speculate, but the fact that he presented her with his book means that he must have felt she would be interested in biology. Perhaps he was looking for patronage. The books in Blount’s collection we have uncovered so far are generally not directly scientific though one book in the list of works mentioned in her miscellany, Thomas Sprat’s The History of the Royal-Society, tells us that she may have had an investment in the history of scientific discovery.
Blount’s Vegetable Staticks’s later provenance history is visible in a book plate belonging to Henry Carrington Bolton (1843–1903), an American professor of chemistry and science historian, whose interest in the subject is obvious and whose ownership may explain how the book has ended up in the Library of Congress today.
Our other posts on Blount do not show the bindings for her books, but the images below can prove helpful in the future in establishing her ownership of other works.
Source: Library of Congress, shelfmark QK711 .H2 1727. Images by the Library of Congress, used with permission.
Further Reading
Allan, D. G. C. “Hales, Stephen (1677–1761), natural philosopher.” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford University Press, 2023.
One of Senate House Library’s copies of Charles I’s ghost-written memoir, Eikon Basilike. The Pourtraicture of His Sacred Majestie in his Solitudes and Sufferings, which was printed by “W[illiam]. D[ugard].” for Francis Eglesfield in 1649, contains a manuscript inscription on the verso side of its front endpaper. This undated inscription looks to the future of the book’s ownership, but it also imagines possible futures for that book’s female owner:
this Book at my Decease to Mr Morgan Mrs Morgans only son by her Husband Mr Thomas Morgan Drapier at Bromsg[rove] in ye county of Worcester now a Dowager till God is pleased to send Her a second mate.
Presumably, the ‘Mrs Morgan’ identified here is also the inscriber. She stipulates that upon her death, her copy of the Eikon was to pass into the possession of her “only son,” securing not only that book’s survival but also helping to reinforce maternal bonds. Mrs Morgan’s husband, Thomas, was already dead, which left her as a dowager, but Mrs Morgan clearly did not understand her dowagerhood as a fixed or finalized state, but rather one that might be reformed by remarriage.
If Mrs Morgan recognized that there was life after death—after the death of her husband, that is—she must also have identified the book as a powerfully symbolic object into which those imaginings could be etched. And not just any book but Eikon Basilike, a “Sacred” text that royalist writers celebrated as a “Living Memoriall,” as a kind of holy relic, which, in the wake of the regicide, functioned as a textual vessel and substitute for Charles I’s decapitated, corporeal form.[1] The Eikon gave posthumous life to the dead king, but as the inscription above indicates, it also gave Mrs Morgan the opportunity to think about what might come next: to think about where her book might go when she, like Charles I, passed on from one world to the next and to think, too, about the possibility of a new life before that, a new life as the wife of a God-sent “second mate.”
None of this is unusual, especially where the Eikon is concerned since this book has particularly rich historical associations with female ownership. Not only did early modern mothers pass copies onto their sons, but also onto daughters, granddaughters, and beyond, either by way of inheritance or in the form of a gift.[2] Copies of the Eikon also moved between families and therefore into the hands of “different female owners.”[3] As such, a single copy of Eikon Basilike might bear the traces of multiple female owners who were at a genealogical, geographical, and temporal distance from one another, but whose inscriptions form a discreet archive of copy-specific female book ownership bridging considerable distances of time and space.
If we turn now to another copy of the Eikon held at Senate House Library, we can find confirmation of this. Printed by Roger Daniel in 1649, this Eikon Basilike features the ownership mark of one “Frances Vavasour,” accompanied by the familiar phrase “Her Booke” and the date, “1669.” Vavasour’s name and her claim to ownership has been signed on the verso side of the first leaf, directly facing the main title page, which has been ruled in red by hand. Indeed, the whole book is ruled in red, and other user-generated additions include manipulations of William Marshall’s (fl. 1617-1649) famous engraving, which depicts Charles I kneeling at a basilica and which in this particular copy has been lovingly painted by hand.
Frances Vavasour is not the only woman present in this copy of the Eikon. One “Mary Wray” has signed her name at the top-left corner of the title page, and two other names circle that paratextual surface: “P. Dalton” and “E. Carnarvon.” None of these signatures are dated, and the partial nature of the evidence is only exacerbated by the fact that a possible fourth name has been cut away at the top of the page, leaving a gap between Wray and Dalton. Yet even in the face of excised evidence, the close proximity of the names “Frances Vavasour” and “Mary Wray” in the same book does help us to identify who these figures might have been and how they were related to each other.
A Frances Vavasour (1654–1731) of Copmanthorpe, Yorkshire, married Sir Thomas Norcliffe (1641–1684) of Langdon, Yorkshire, in 1671, becoming Lady Frances Norcliffe.[4] They had two sons: Fairfax Norcliffe (1674–1721) and Richard Norcliffe (1676–1697). Fairfax’s daughter (and Lady Frances’s granddaughter), Frances Norcliffe, married one John Wray (1689–1752), and their daughter (and Lady Frances’s great-granddaughter) was called Mary Wray (c. 1745–1807).[5] So, one scenario is that this copy of the Eikon passed from great-grandmother to great-granddaughter (perhaps by way of Frances’s daughter, who also inherited her mother’s first name). Additionally, since the evidence seems to point to Frances Vavasour being Lady Frances Norcliffe, she must have signed her copy of the Eikon not too long before her first marriage to Thomas—following his death in 1684, Frances married her “second mate,” to quote Mrs Morgan again, this time an Aleppo merchant—and right around the time that Sir Peter Lely (1618–1680) painted her bust-length portrait.[6]
Given the historical remits of this blog, this should mark the logical limits of where the story of this book’s ownership should end; however, over the course of the following century, Frances’s “Booke” fell into the hands of another female owner. On the recto side of the leaf bearing Vavasour’s ownership inscription, and just above an engraving featuring the Stuart coat of arms, we find the name “E. M. A. Austen,” which is dated “1909.” Towards the bottom of the same page, there’s a further note related to the Austens, this time memorializing the fact that the book was passed down from one generation to the next as a birthday gift: “Elizabeth J. Hampden Austen with loving good wishes for her 21st birthday from aunt Edith”—who might be the “E. M. A. Austen” who signed and dated the book in 1909—“and aunt Lily. December 3rd 1942.”
Fortuitously, Elizabeth J. Hampden Austen’s life is fairly well documented. According to her obituary,[7] Elizabeth J. Hampden Austen (or rather Sister Martin Dominic Austen) was born in Oxfordshire in 1921, the daughter of an Anglican clergyman. She joined the Women’s Royal Naval Service during the Second World War, and after the war she converted to the Roman Catholic faith. Sister Martin subsequently joined the Dominican Sisters of Bethany in France, and for the remainder of her life and career, she moved between Europe and the US, living with religious communities in Italy and Switzerland and helping to form communities in Massachusetts and elsewhere in the US. Sister Martin was also well known for her pastoral work with female prisoners in a variety of penitentiaries in Maine, Connecticut, and New York. She died in Portland, Maine, in February 2018.
By now we are really at quite some distance from the early modern, but as Whitney Trettien has argued, “the history of reading,” and of the period’s “used books,” “is also a history of mediating the material world, a narrative that, by its nature, pleats the past, present, and future.”[8] The two copies of Eikon Basilike discussed here perform this temporal pleating in all kinds of ways, and both copies have clearly played an important role in the life cycles of early/modern women. Mrs Morgan’s inscription looks to the past in that it commemorates “her Husband Mr Thomas Morgan Drapier at Bromsg[rove] in ye county of Worcester”; it meets us in the “now” of her writing, when Mrs Morgan found herself “a Dowager,” although she’s looking to the future, too, the future of her “Book,” her “only son,” and her own marital status. Frances Vavasour’s inscription firmly places us in 1669, but knowing what comes next—her marriage to Sir Thomas Norcliffe and her sitting for Lely’s portrait were just around the corner—conjures a sense of the transitional, even liminal contexts in which her claim to book ownership was made. In the inscription from 1942, Eikon Basilike again becomes a material space in which to mark out another kind of turning point, this time a woman’s twenty-first birthday, and it’s one that’s set against a global war, a future confessional turn, as well as a much deeper history of female ownership, which might well take us back to “E. M. A. Austen” in 1909 and almost certainly to Mary Wray in the eighteenth century and Frances Vavasour in the 1600s.
When aunts Edith and Lily gave Eikon Basilike to Elizabeth as a birthday gift in 1942, did the book’s long history of female ownership play a special part in their estimations of that gift’s symbolic significance? What did Elizabeth make of her gift and of Frances and Mary’s presence within it? Did she—and might we—treat their temporally-distant inscriptions as “marginal beside-text[s],” to quote Trettien again, each framing the “future readers’ encounters with the other”?[9] I don’t have the answers, but both copies do invite us to think, like Mrs Morgan, about the future—the future shapes, say, of our histories of early modern female book ownership, particularly as they pertain to where those histories might begin and, given the present discussion, where they might end.
Source: copies held at Senate House Library, 1) shelf mark ([Rare] (VIII) [Charles I] 5); and 2) shelf mark ([Rare] (VII) Cc [Charles I] 7). Photos by Michael Durrant, reproduced with permission.
[1] Anon, The Princely Pellican. Royall Resolves Presented in Sundry Choice Observations, Extracted from His Majesties Divine Meditations (London: [s.n.] 1649), p. 1.
[4] Carrying on the Yorkshire theme, this copy of the Eikon eventually passed into the ownership of Sir Mark Masterman-Sykes (1771-1823), a landowner, politician, and well-known bibliophile based in Sledmere near Leeds. His vast library was sold off in 1824, and so this book, which features Masterman-Sykes’s bookplate affixed to front board, must have been dispersed as part of the 3700 lots that made up that auction (and which fetched nearly £18,000). See Alan Bell, “Sykes, Mark Masterman, third baronet (1771-1823), book collector,” ODNB (2004), https://0-www-oxforddnb-com.catalogue.libraries.london.ac.uk/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-26869.
[5] I have drawn this biographical outline from the description provided in John Burke, A Genealogical and Heraldic History of the Commoners of Great Britain and Ireland, Vol. 2 (London: Henry Colburn, 1835), p. 631.
[8] Whitney Trettien, “Media, Materiality, and Time in the History of Reading: The Case of the Little Gidding Harmonies,” PMLA 133:5 (2018), pp. 1135-51 (p. 1138).
Cheaply printed and often read to pieces by their young users, early modern schoolbooks are scarce survivals. Early modern schoolbooks with evidence of female provenance are even more scarce, especially early modern schoolbooks designed for Latin instruction: young women were seldom afforded opportunities to learn Latin. This copy of William Lily’s Short introduction of grammar … for the bringing up of all those that intend to attain to the knowledge of the Latin tongue (1696) is the first schoolbook to appear on this site.
William Lily’s Short introduction was the standard textbook used to teach the basics of Latin to grammar school pupils from the 1540s through to the second half of the eighteenth century. Hundreds of editions survive, but individual editions are all rare in themselves, usually surviving in a handful of copies at most. This 1696 edition, held by Smith College (shelfmark 876.5 L62 1696), is one of many editions of Lily that survives in one unique copy. The edition is unlisted in both Wing and ESTC, though ESTC lists editions with the identical imprint from 1695 and 1697, each also surviving in a single copy.
This copy of Lily features several claims of ownership, probably by two different women named Hannah Johnson. The opening flyleaf recto is inscribed “Hannah Johnson [decorations] Johnson her Booke”; “Hannah Johnson Her Book To Learn Grammar” is inscribed on the flyleaf verso, facing the title-page, in the same hand. A different hand writes “Hannah Joh[n]son her book by the gift of har father William Johnson” on the title-page verso. Below that inscription, in the same hand as that on the opening flyleaf, appears this gloss: “Mr Grandfathar Johnson Dyed in the year 1712.”
The most likely explanation for these inscriptions is that the “Grandfather Johnson” who died in 1712 is the same “William Johnson” who gave this copy of Lily to his daughter Hannah Johnson. The placement of the reference to “Grandfather Johnson” suggests that it both follows and responds to the inscription that invokes William Johnson. If father and grandfather William are indeed the same man, then the inscriptions indicate two different Hannah Johnsons: the daughter who was the book’s first owner, followed by a young woman with the same name in the next generation (a niece?), who added her name in or at some point after 1712. If so, then the older Hannah Johnson passed on to another young woman in the family the gifts her father had given her: the gifts of both the book and the encouragement to learn Latin. The younger Hannah Johnson comments on the older Hannah’s note, memorializing her grandfather in turn as she proudly lays claim to the book that has been passed on to her and notes its purpose: “To Learn Grammar.”
The Hannah Johnson who received this book as a gift from her father likely received it soon after it was published in 1696: the book remains in its original binding, and contains no additional evidence of provenance.
Source: Smith College 876.5 L62 1696. Photos reproduced with permission.
The title page of the 1673 self-help manual, The Gentlewomans Companion; or, A Guide to the Female Sex (ESTC, R204109), discreetly tucks “By Hannah Woolley” at the foot of the text’s long title, sandwiching “Woolley” between two rules and just above the imprint, where we find another female agent being marked out as a key player in this text’s making: “LONDON, Printed by A[nne] Maxwell [fl. 1660-1680] for Dorman Newman at the Kings-Arms in the Poultry, 1673.”
As Martine van Elk has written elsewhere on this blog, Anne Maxwell’s involvement as the Companion’s printer seems fairly well assured, but Hannah Woolley’s involvement as the Companion’s author is rather less clear cut. For sure, Woolley was a likely candidate to be the author of a text that, to quote from the title page again, purports to contain “Directions of [female] Behaviour, in all Places, | Companies, Relations, and Conditions, from | their Childhood down to Old Age.” She had made a name for herself as an expert writer of recipes and matters to do with household management, and so there’s scope to imagine that Woolley really did branch out to pen the Companion, in which tips on cooking, cleaning, human hygiene and health jostle alongside prescriptions on proper female speech, conversation, gait and posture, and guidelines for the writing of letters. But really The Gentlewomans Companion seems to have been spurious, an attempt by its publisher, Newman, working alongside its printer, Maxwell, to cash in on the Woolley brand
Whilst it has been suggested that the Companion may have been based on an authentic Woolley manuscript,[1] Woolley would publicly disown the text soon after its publication in 1673, complaining in a dedicatory poem that accompanied A Supplement to the Queen-like Closet (1674) that her “Name” had been “much abus’d” by the Companion; Woolley had in fact been “far distant” when the Companion was printed; and since her authorial identity (her “Name”) had been appropriated without her consent, Woolley concludes by asserting “that Book to own I think not fit.”
The whole issue of appropriation—and with this, the idea of where early modern books come from—is addressed in the Companion’s epistle, “To all Young Ladies, Gentlewomen, and all Maidens whatever,” which is allegedly Woolley-authored. There, “Woolley” tells us that, given the commercial success of her other print products (“the first called, The Ladies Directory; the other, The Cooks Guide”), she had been encouraged by both her “Book-seller” and her “worthy Friends” (sig. A3r) to write a more fulsome “Companion and Guide to the Female Sex” (sig. A3v). Over the course of seven years, “Woolley” read and researched her way through several contemporary manuals on female instruction, including “that Excellent Book, The Queens Closet; May’s Cookery; The Ladies Companion,” her own “Directory and Guide,” as well as fashionable books “lately writ in the French and Italian Languages” (sig. A4r-v). “Woolley” then settles on imagery associated with the painting of portraits to account for the way in which she actively folded words and ideas from these books into her own writing:
I hope the Reader will not think it much, that as the famous Lymner when he drew the Picture of an exact Beauty, made use of an Eye from one, of a Mouth from another, and so cull’d what was rare in all others, that he might present them all in one entire piece of Workmanship and Frame: So I, when I was to write of Physick and Chyrurgery, have consulted all Books I could meet with in that kind, to compleat my own Experiences (sig. A4v–A5r).
Quoting the same passage, Leah Orr suggests that “[s]uch “culling” is very generally practiced [in the period] but rarely stated so forthrightly.”[2] Given Woolley’s own complaint that the Companion had actually “abus’d” (or we might say “cull’d) her “Name” and therefore her brand identity, there appears to be something cheekily self-referential at work here. Indeed, the “Lymner” imagery—and with this, the idea of an individual’s portrait being made of bits and pieces drawn from the bodies of other subjects—seems particularly pointed given the fact that the Companion was published alongside a paratextual portrait, which was supposed to be in the likeness of Woolley herself, but that was really a retouched image of someone else.
Turning now to the British Library’s (BL) copy of The Gentlewomans Companion (C.194.a.1455), we can see that the issues of appropriation I’ve been discussing find expression in evidence related to book use and competing claims to book ownership.
This copy lacks the suspect Woolley portrait, although on its title page we do find a seventeenth-century inscription, written in brownish ink, which designates female ownership: “Elizabeth Polwheile her booke.”
Writing for the BL’s “Untold Lives” blog, Beth Cortese suggests that this “Elizabeth Polwheile” is likely the Restoration playwright, Elizabeth Polwhele (c. 1651–1691), who was the author of at least two unpublished plays, The Faythfull Virgins (c. 1670) and The Frolicks, or The Lawyer Cheated (c. 1671). It’s an exciting possibility, because as Cortese points out, it would offer us a little glimpse into the library of a woman about whom we still know little, and her ownership of “Woolley’s” Gentlewomans Companion might suggest that this text was being used not only for educational purposes but perhaps also as one of Polwhele’s “literary influences”.
This scenario—that Polwhele read the BL’s copy of the Companion for the bits that could be “cull’d” to form the basis of her own writing—might explain the presence of two hand-drawn crosses (+) that are positioned in the margins of this book. Written in what appears to be the same brownish ink used to write the “Elizabeth Polwheile her booke” inscription, these marginal notations materialise in the concluding section of the book, where “Woolley” offers a suite of imaginary/stock “Letters upon all Occasions” (sig. Q3v–S3v). The first cross appears in the left-hand margin of “The Answer of an ingenious Lady” (sig. Q8v). This letter serves as a reply to the preceding “Letter from one Lady to another, condemning Artificial-beauty” (sig. Q7r–Q8r), and it finds the “ingenious Lady” arguing for a woman’s right to wear cosmetics, and she fights back at prevailing stereotypes that linked the “Art in the imbellishing” with female “sin”, “pride” and “vanity” (sig. Q8v). The second cross appears in the right-hand margin of “A Lady to her Daughter, perswading her from wearing Spots and Black-patches in her face” (sig. R2r), in which another “Lady” adopts an entirely antithetical line, neurotically linking cosmetics and female fashions with libertine excess and therefore with “the vices of this present age.”
I don’t know for sure whether these two crosses were put there by Polwhele, but if she is responsible for these markings, perhaps it’s evidence of her reaching into “Woolley’s” Companion to mark-up moments that might be usefully appropriated within the contexts of her own dramaturgy—serving, say, as a source for ready-made dialogues between female characters who could represent competing forms of femininity.
So, a book that seems to have appropriated the Woolley brand, and a book that, at the same time, draws attention to rather than obscures its own literary appropriations and borrowings, may have become a site of creative appropriation for at least one female Restoration playwright. But then returning to the title page of the BL’s copy of The Gentlewomans Companion, we find another, later hand reaching into the text to mark out another identity, another form of ownership, and with this, another layer of appropriation.
Just under the “Elizabeth Polwheile her booke” statement, a male hand has inserted the word “formerly”; just below that, the same hand then adds that Polwhele’s book “is now the property of Edmund Hopkinson”—that is, Edmund Hopkinson (1787–1869) of Edgeworth Manor House near Cirencester, who was the High Sheriff in Gloucestershire. An avid collector of antiquities—including, by all accounts, an Egyptian mummy, which he unwrapped during a dinner party before donating to the Gloucester Museum in the 1850s—Hopkinson steps in to appropriate the title page of The Gentlewomans Companion as a space to enact his own masculinist (self-)possession. Nudging Polwhele to the side, the book seems to become Hopkinson’s “property,” but in the case of The Gentlewomans Companion, where issues of possession and attribution and appropriation seem to be constantly shifting and recalibrating, such an assertion is really more complex than it might first appear.
Source: copy held at the British Library, shelf mark C.194.a.1455. Photos by Michael Durrant, reproduced with permission.
[1] See Margaret J.M. Ezell, “Cooking the Books; or, The Three Faces of Hannah Woolley,” in Reading and Writing Recipe Books, 1550–1800, ed. by Michelle DiMeo and Sara Pennell (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), pp. 159–78.
[2] Leah Orr, Publishing the Woman Writer in England, 1670-1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023), p. 61.
Title page from the 1651 edition at the Huntington LibraryFrontispiece from the 1651 edition at the Huntington Library
Appearing in eight editions (plus additional issues) between 1621 and 1676, seven of them in folio, Robert Burton’s expansive and erudite Anatomy of Melancholy was a seventeenth-century publishing phenomenon. A copy of the 1651 edition of Burton’s Anatomy, held by the Redwood Library & Athenaeum in Newport, Rhode Island (shelfmark PR 2223.A1 1651), is the first to appear on the EMFBO site.[1] Furthermore, the evidence here of early modern female book ownership is but one of this book’s several interesting features—including the only known manuscript copy of Katherine Philips’ song “Pompey’s Ghost” in a seventeenth-century printed book or made by a seventeenth-century woman.
The Redwood copy is in a modern binding and lacks the frontispiece and title-page, but it retains two original flyleaves and the half-title that precedes the now missing frontispiece.[2] The earliest provenance appears on the recto of the second of the two flyleaves, where Pleasant Rawlins has enthusiastically inscribed her full name four times: “Pleasant Rawlins / Her Book”; “Pleasant Rawlins / Her Book Aprill the 1 day 16**” [second line of inscription obliterated and date trimmed]; “Pleasant Rawlins her book / Aprill ye 1 day 1672” [entire inscription obliterated]; and, at the bottom of the page, “Pleasant Rawlins her book.”
Second flyleaf recto (top)Second flyleaf recto (middle)
She subsequently re-inscribed her name in an accomplished calligraphic hand on the recto of the first flyleaf, the inscription oriented vertically on the page: “Mrs Pleasant Biker / her booke / Aprill Idus Mensis pridie [the day before the Ides of April, i.e. April 12] Anno Domine 1676.”
First flyleaf recto
The obliterations of the two dated “Rawlins” entries look likely to be by Rawlins herself, possibly prompted by her addition of the re-dated inscription under her married name. The same hand has obliterated two instances of the name “John” on the “Rawlins” inscription page, in the same ink and probably at the same time as the other obliterations. On the top left of the “Biker” page, also oriented vertically, is another inscription, probably not by Rawlins/Biker but still early and possibly missing some text due to paper repairs. Difficult to decipher, it reads like a quotation but remains untraced: “[?Jan*** pa**] / I shall Endeavour for the future / To have \no/ constant indareance between us / by Letter.”
Pleasant Rawlins and Mrs Pleasant Biker are the same person: Pleasant Rawlins, daughter of William and Katherine Rawlins, was baptised in the parish of St Botolph Without Aldgate in London on February 1, 1652. She married Samuel Biker (d.1685) at some point between April 1672 (the date of her “Rawlins” inscription) and 1674, the year her daughter Pleasant Biker (d.1696) was baptised, also in St Botolph Without Aldgate, on August 30. Pleasant (Rawlins) Biker died in early 1685, the same year as her husband, and was buried in St Botolph Without Aldgate on January 12 of that year, at the age of thirty-two.[3]
Pleasant Rawlins was a young woman of twenty when she first inscribed her copy of Burton’s Anatomy. The Latin in her 1676 inscription as well as her practised use of Italic and calligraphic hands, not to mention her ownership of a work like Burton’s Anatomy, suggests a certain level of education. In addition, the thirty-line poem she has copied in the book, beginning on the “Rawlins” inscription page (in the same hand and ink as her signature at the bottom of the page) and continuing onto the facing verso of the preceding flyleaf, suggests a fashionably current literary sensibility. Beginning “From lasting and unclouded Day,” the poem is an extract, often known as “Pompey’s Ghost,” from Katherine Philips’s play Pompey, her translation of Pierre Corneille’s tragedy La mort de Pompeé. “Pompey’s Ghost” is one of the newly written songs Philips innovatively added to the translated play.
From lasting and unclouded Day, From joys refin’d above allay And from a Spring without decay. I come by Cynthia’s borrow’d bems To visit my Cornelia’s Drems, And give them yet sublimer Thems.
Second flyleaf recto
[first flyleaf verso, oriented vertically]
Behold the Man thou love’dst before Pure streams have wash’d away his Gore And Pompey now shall bleed no more. By Death my Glory I resume, For ’twould have been a harsher doom T’ outlive the Liberty of Rome. By me her doubtfull fortune try’d Falling, bequeaths my Fame this Pride I for it lived and with it Dy’d. Nor shall my Vengeance bee withstood Nor unattempted, with a Flood off Roman and Egitptian blood. Cesar himselfe it shall pursue his days shall troubled bee & few And hee shall dye by treason too. hee by severity Divine shallbee an offring att my shrine As I was his hee must bee mine Thy stormy life Ile regrett noe more For Fate shall waft the soone ashore [And to thy Pompey the restore] There none a Guilty Crowne shall weare nor Cesar bee Dictator there nor shall Cornelia shed one teare
First flyleaf verso
Rawlins has omitted from Philips’ original the penultimate three-line stanza, probably for reasons of space: working around some pen trials already on the page, she changed hands halfway through the first line of the sixth stanza from her elegant italic to a more cramped secretary, squeezing stanzas six and seven onto the lower half of the left side, then squeezing stanzas eight and nine onto the lower half of the right side (in stanza nine, the final line has been trimmed in rebinding and the final words of the first two lines are covered by a paper repair), then adding the final stanza in an empty space above, breaking up lines to make it fit. The omitted stanza reads, in Philips’ original, “Where past the fears of sad removes / We’l entertain our spotless Loves, / In beauteous, and Immortal Groves.” Rawlins has bracketed stanzas eight and nine, adding an unfortunately illegible (and possibly trimmed) word in the margin (?*eib*).
Pleasant (Rawlins) Biker and her husband Samuel both died in 1685, in London: Samuel was buried in St Botolph Without Aldgate on February 21, about six weeks after his wife. At some point that same year, the next owner of this copy of Burton’s Anatomy bought it in a location a world away: an inscription across the top of the book’s half-title reads, “Benjamin Newberry Ejus Liber Bought att / Port Royall In Jamaica 1685.” This is probably Benjamin Newberry (c.1653-1711), of Newport, Rhode Island.
Half-title
The Newberrys were a prominent merchant family in Newport and would likely have had trade dealings in Jamaica; the Newport connection could also explain the current presence of the book in the Redwood Library & Athenaeum. The same page features one additional later signature, the (untraced) “Robert Morton / 1828.” If this copy of Burton remained in the possession of the Rawlins/Biker family until the deaths of Pleasant and then Samuel in early 1685, it soon made its way into the hands of somebody with an entrepreneurial sense of the potential transatlantic market for used books. While other copies of Burton’s Anatomy are documented in America in the seventeenth century, including at least one owned by a woman,[8] this book may represent the earliest text by Katherine Philips to make its way across the Atlantic.
Source: Redwood Library & Athenaeum, call number PR 2223.A1 1651. Photos reproduced with permission.
[1] I would like to thank Michelle Farias, Archivist & Special Collections Librarian at the Redwood Library and Athenaeum, for drawing this book to my attention during a visit there in January 2022, and Victoria Burke and Elizabeth Hageman for their comments on early versions of this note.
[2] Because the title-page is missing, the holding library has catalogued the copy on the basis of its colophon, dated 1651 (sig. 4A4r). The same colophon appears in the 1652 re-issue, which differs only in its re-dated title-page: the copy may therefore represent the 1652 re-issue (Wing B6182) rather than the 1651 edition (Wing B6181).
[3] The genealogical data presented here all derives from records found in ancestrylibrary.com. This Pleasant Rawlins is not to be confused with her niece, also Pleasant Rawlins (b.1684), who was the teenaged victim of a notorious 1702 case of heiress abduction and forced marriage regarded as a source for Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa: see Beth Swan, “Clarissa Harlowe, Pleasant Rawlins, and Eighteenth-Century Discourses of Law,” Eighteenth-Century Novel 1 (2001), 71-93.
[4] Long ‘s’ and initial ‘ff’ regularized, abbreviations silently expanded, and a false start on one stanza omitted.
[5] Paul Salzman, Reading Early Modern Women’s Writing (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006), 182.
[6] Salzman, 187-90; Catalogue of English Literary Manuscripts 1450-1700 (CELM), PsK 575-77; John Cunningham, “Songs Lost and Found: Katherine Philips’s ‘Pompey’s Ghost’,” Music and Letters, advance article 20 May 2022.
[7] The Folger Union First Line Index of English Verse lists five manuscript copies; CELM adds two, one now lost (PsK 578-80); Cunningham, incorporating ongoing research by Nathan Tinker, adds seven more, all copied in the USA in the eighteenth century (20-23). For a study of manuscript copying of other work by Philips by early modern women, see Victoria E. Burke, “The Couplet and the Poem: Late Seventeenth-Century Women Reading Katherine Philips,” Women’s Writing 24.3 (2017), 280-97.
[8] Charles Heventhal Jr., “Robert Burton’s ‘Anatomy of Melancholy’ in Early America,” PBSA 63.3 (1969), 157-75. Heventhal notes that a copy of the 1632 edition is described in the 1870 catalogue of the Thomas Prince library as signed “Sarah Standish” (159-60). Prince bequeathed his library to Boston’s Old South Church in 1758, and this could be any one of several Sarah Standishes who lived in the New England settlements between the mid-seventeenth century and the date of Prince’s death. The Prince library is currently held by the Boston Public Library, but this copy of Burton’s Anatomy seems no longer to be present in the collection.
First published within days of the execution of its putative author, King Charles I, and appearing in about sixty editions within a year, Eikon Basilike. The Pourtraicture of His Sacred Majestie in his Solitudes and Sufferings (1649) was a seventeenth-century bestseller.[1] It is also a book with an increasingly well-documented history of ownership by early modern women. All six copies currently listed in the Private Libraries in Renaissance England project database (plre.folger.edu) are associated with women: three copies, including one in French, in the library of Lady Anne (Stanhope) Holles (d.1651), two in the library of Lady Elizabeth (Talbot) Grey, Countess of Kent (d.1651), and one in the library of Lady Dorothy (Percy) Sidney, Countess of Leicester (d.1659). Sarah Lindenbaum noted on this site (July 1, 2019) a copy signed by “Anna Vyvyan” in the early eighteenth century, and Scott Schofield has posted on this site (April 19, 2021) an account of three copies with female ownership held by the library of Western University in London, Ontario: one inscribed “Barbara Whyte” and dated 13 June 1649, another inscribed “Lettice Cuff” and dated 1688, and a third, passed down first “To my daughter Frances Bouchiry [?] 1700” then subsequently gifted “To My Dear Daughter Sarah Amy Hersent [?] 1725.” Laura Lunger Knoppers has addressed the widespread presence of early ownership marks and gift inscriptions in copies of Eikon Basilike, including the “relatively high number of female signatures,” a history of inscription that foregrounds the book’s cultural status as material legacy.[2]
The “Heneretta: Maria Pitches Juń” who inscribed “Her Book” on this copy of Eikon Basilike, currently in a private collection, claimed with her signature not only the book itself but also other forms of legacy. One legacy is familial: born in 1715 in Bildeston, Suffolk, Henrietta Maria Pitches was named after her mother, Henrietta Maria (Capel) Pitches (c.1695-1726): “Juń” is an abbreviation for “Junior.” The use of “Junior” for a daughter bearing the same name as her mother is unusual but not unknown, and that is clearly the reading here. The other legacy is cultural: Henrietta and her mother were both evidently named after Queen Henrietta Maria (1609-1669). The name announced the family’s political-cultural affiliations, and what book more appropriate for a namesake of the Queen to possess than the book that represented the textual and material legacy of the executed King? The status of the book as material legacy is in addition signalled by its fine binding. This copy is Wing E283 (Madan #21), an octavo edition dated 1648 but published in the second half of March 1649. The gold-tooled “lozenge or diamond”-style binding likely preceded the book’s acquisition by Henrietta Maria Pitches: the British Library holds two copies of Eikon Basilike decorated in a manner similar to this copy by the Restoration binder Thomas Dawson of Cambridge.[3] Henrietta Maria Pitches either acquired this finely decorated copy or was gifted or inherited a copy bound in a manner appropriate to the suggestive association with her royal namesake.
In August 1738, Henrietta Maria Pitches married the “eminent Jeweller” Robert Nelson, bringing with her a substantial dowry of £3000.[4] The wedding announcement notes that she was niece to the Bishop of Ely, the Reverend Robert Butts (1684–1748), who in 1712 had married her aunt, Elizabeth Pitches (1686–1734). Bishop Butts had been a chaplain to George II and before his translation to Ely in 1738 had been Bishop of Norwich, an appointment he won through a patron’s influence with Queen Caroline (ODNB). As befitting her name, Henrietta Maria Pitches enjoyed connections with church and court.
This copy of Eikon Basilike features one additional signature: the name “Charlotte Wentworth” (unidentified) is inscribed on the front pastedown in a hand later than Henrietta Maria Pitches’ but still early: the ink is brown and the signature likely dates from the later eighteenth or earlier nineteenth centuries. This inscription was covered up when new blank pastedowns were glued over the originals and new free endpapers added. These changes themselves probably date from before the twentieth century: the replacement endpapers are handmade and look eighteenth century. Additional evidence of early provenance or reader engagement may have been lost with the disappearance of the original free endpapers.
One additional piece of information helps round out the story of this inscription. A copy of Richard Allestree’s Ladies Calling (1675) sold in a 2005 auction at Christie’s is also signed “Henrietta Maria Pitches”: but this Henrietta Maria is the mother, as the book is also signed, in the same hand, “Heneretta Maria Capoll.”[5] Henrietta Maria (Capel) Pitches was the daughter of William Capel of Stow Hall, Suffolk and Mary Capel (1670-1724); her husband, Richard Pitches (1668-1727), father of Henrietta Maria Pitches “Juń,” served as rector in the parish of Hawstead, Suffolk.[6] The current location of this copy of Allestree is unknown. It had been collected by Lady Hilda Ingram (1891-1968), who concentrated on fine bindings: the Christie’s auction catalogue describes the Allestree as featuring “Contemporary black morocco elaborately tooled in gilt with wide border round sides composed of tulips, roses, fleurons, birds heads with infilled corner pieces surrounding a central diamond shaped decoration composed of the same tools, the whole within a narrow border of pointillé dots, semi-circles, etc., gilt spine and edges.” Mother and daughter evidently shared a taste for quality decorated bindings, and it is possible that Henrietta Maria Pitches “Juń” acquired her Eikon Basilike from her mother, but that her mother’s provenance markings were lost when the endpapers were replaced: the signatures in the Allestree appear on the front free endpaper, the original of which is no longer present on this copy of Eikon Basilike.
Source: Book in private ownership. Images posted with permission.
[1] The standard bibliography remains Francis F. Madan, A New Bibliography of the Eikon Basilike of King Charles the First (London: Bernard Quaritch, 1950). Madan offers an authoritative discussion of the book’s authorship, concluding that it was written by John Gauden but probably includes some authentic writings by Charles (126-63).
[2] Laura Lunger Knoppers, Politicizing Domesticity from Henrietta Maria to Milton’s Eve (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011), 86-93 (88).
[3] See shelfmarks Davis75 and c118d50 in the British Library “Database of Bookbindings”: https://www.bl.uk/catalogues/bookbindings/. Davis75 is strikingly similar, though the binding tools employed are not identifiably identical with those on with this copy. For overviews of the decorative characteristics of fine bindings in the second half of the seventeenth century, see Howard M. Nixon, English Restoration Bookbindings: Samuel Mearne and His Contemporaries (London: British Library, 1974), and David Pearson, English Bookbinding Styles 1450-1800: A Handbook (2005; rpt. New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press, 2014), 68-73, 133-38.
[4]Gentleman’s Magazine: and Historical Chronicle, vol. 8 (London, 1738), 435.
[5] Christie’s, Fine Printed Books & Manuscripts, 2 November 2005, lot 1.
[6] Sir John Cullum, The History and Antiquities of Hawsted, in the County of Suffolk (London, 1734), 37. Stow Hall is probably West Stow Hall, a still-surviving Tudor manor that features Elizabethan wall-paintings depicting the “Four Ages of Man”: https://weststowhall.com.
This 1612 edition of La perspective avec la raison des ombres et miroirs by Salomon de Caus (1576-1626) is a fascinating book. The work develops a theory of perspective in drawing by the French Huguenot De Caus, a hydraulic engineer, architect, and garden designer who designed gardens, fountains, grottoes, and aviaries for Queen Anna of Denmark, King James’s eldest son Prince Henry, and his sister Elizabeth Stuart, Queen of Bohemia.
La perspective develops a theory of perspective drawing, ranging in subjects from anamorphosis to shadows and mirrors. It also includes wonderful paper flaps and pop ups. Christies notes that it is “apparently only the second book printed in England to make use of folding or pop-up flaps in illustrations, after John Dee’s Euclid of 1570.”
This particular copy of the book is extremely significant in terms of its provenance since it is bound in vellum bearing the arms of Elizabeth Stuart and her husband Frederick I, King of Bohemia.
Their armorial stamp can also be seen on the binding of the British Library copy of Jean Baptiste Legrain’s Decade contenant la vie et gestes de Henry le Grand Roy de France et de Navarre (1614), shown in the British Library’s database of bookbindings, here.
In her excellent biography of Elizabeth, Nadine Akkerman notes that 1612, when the book came out, was when De Caus “allegedly taught her and her brother Henry art and music … the year after he had designed Anna’s French garden in Greenwich” (110), though she is careful to note that there is no clear source that helps us establish De Caus’s role as tutor (431, n. 11). De Caus dedicated La perspective to Henry, who would die later that year.
Bookseller Detlev Auvermann suggests the book may have been given to Elizabeth by De Caus on the occasion of her marriage in 1613, which certainly appears to be a possibility. It is not included in a list of eighty books sent to Elizabeth in 1622, while she lived in exile in the Netherlands. As Emily Rose’s article on the list shows, Elizabeth’s reading was broad and multilingual–the list itemizes books in four languages. Rose notes that a few books from her collection are extant but does not list La perspective among them.
In any case, Elizabeth was, as Rose explains, “an avid book collector” (156). Akkerman discusses her early representation as reader in a youthful portrait in which she holds her prayer book with an inscription by her mother. In a twist, she covers the last word of the inscription with her thumb, an indication of a type of agency, writes Akkerman, for a “young woman whose legacy was contested from the moment she was born” (45).
Robert Peake the Elder, portrait of Princess Elizabeth, ca. 1606. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gift of Kate T. Davison, in memory of her husband, Henry Pomeroy Davison, 1951 (51.194.1) http://www.metmuseum.org/Collections/search-the-collections/437263
Akkerman recounts how in 1614, two years after La perspective was published, De Caus was made “Master of the Gardens, Fountains and Grottoes of Heidelberg Castle.” Elizabeth would continue to be his patron and employer until 1619, as he worked with her not only as garden designer but also as designer of masques, another art form that requires a keen sense of perspective (see Akkerman, 110-112).
Source: book offered for sale 5/22/2022 by Detlev Auvermann Rare Books; images reproduced with permission.
Further Reading
Nadine Akkerman, Elizabeth Stuart, Queen of Hearts. Oxford University Press, 2021.
We have posted before on The Lady’s New Year’s Gift by George Savile on this blog, suggesting that the book had lasting appeal for women readers. We have recently encountered more evidence of the advice book’s popularity. A copy of the book has appeared at auction recently, bearing multiple traces of female ownership and passing down of the book from one generation to another.
The title page, as shown above, carries the signature “Mary Isham.” But front and end pages in the book show more signatures:
Jane and Mary have helpfully dated their signatures. Jane Isham’s 1706 signature is followed by Mary Brooke’s 1738 signature, which indicates that the book was a gift of her mother. This leaves us with the Mary Isham on the title page, which seems a different hand from Mary Brooke’s and possibly an earlier one.
While Isham is a relatively common name, some investigation has brought up an identification, beginning with a rector in Barby, Northamtonshire, named Thomas Isham (d. 1676), who was married to Mary, who died in 1684. Thomas and Mary had a son named Zacheus Isham (1651-1705), who became a clergyman and had a rather distinguished career at Oxford and beyond, including a position as chaplain to the Bishop of London and a prebendary in St. Paul’s Cathedral. He married Elizabeth Pittis, and they had eight children. Their third daughter was named Jane (c. 1699-1757), who is possibly be the person who signed her name twice in this book; if so, she signed the book when she was only seven years old. Her older sister and second daughter of Zacheus and Elizabeth was Mary Isham (c. 1696-1750), who possibly wrote the signature on the title page and who married Arthur Brooke (c. 1695-1754). Their eldest daughter was Mary Brooke (1723-1782), the likely writer of the note about receiving the book from her mama in 1738, when she would have been fifteen years old. This Mary married Richard Supple (1720-1797), and their son, Richard Brooke Supple (1758-1829) became a Baronet. The Ishams were related to another aristocratic Isham family as Zacheus Isham was a cousin of Sir Thomas Isham, third Baronet of Lamport, in turn a nephew of Elizabeth Isham, now best known for her diaries.
The book appears, then, to have been passed from sister to sister and then mother to daughter, as Mary Brooke’s inscription tells us. If Mary Brooke’s mother signed the title page, then all three women made note of their ownership. Alternatively, it is possible that the “Mary Isham” on the title page is the signature of Mary and Jane’s grandmother, also named Mary Isham, who died six years after the book was published. If that is the case, the object shows evidence of even more generations of female book ownership, as this particular family appears to have cherished the advice of Savile to his daughter.
Source: Book sold at auction February 10, 2022, by Forum Auctions. Images reproduced with permission.
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.
This work, falsely attributed to Aristotle, is one of the best known manuals on reproduction and sex published in the early modern period. This particular edition, the third, contained, like the ones before it, a compendium of beliefs on conception, pregnancy, and birth, along with detailed recommendations and descriptions of intercourse, including bawdy poems, which gave it a reputation as a sex manual.
Mary Fissell has written extensively on its tremendous popularity, which lasted all the way into the twentieth century. The book emphasizes the need for female pleasure in order for conception to occur and thus authorizes its frank and often deliberately erotic discussion of sex and illustrations of naked women, as seen on the title page and a separate front leaf. Alluding to a popular belief, the image features a black child, apparently conceived by white parents who looked at a black man during copulation, and a hairy woman, whose mother looked at an image of John the Baptist wearing animal skins at the point of conception.
Although the bawdy verses and descriptions of genitals and sex have received much attention, Fissell notes that “the book also provided a solid framework of contemporary knowledge about the basics of pregnancy, childbirth, and infant health, detailing topics such as the signs of pregnancy, how to tell false labor from true, the various positions the baby might present in, etc. Not surprisingly, since it was plagiarized from another midwifery book, this information was largely unexceptional” (Birds). In addition, there were “dozens of recipes for household remedies and a guide to physiognomy.”
Along with practical recommendations for housewives and midwives, the book includes a section on monstrous births, featuring for instance a description of a boy born with one head, one body, four ears, four arms, two thighs, two legs, and four feet. There is also a description and image of a hairy child born in France in 1579.
There are many reasons why a woman might have wanted to own this book, aside from its instructions on sex and midwifery. It provides advice on how to conceive, what to do after conception, how to determine whether you are carrying a boy or a girl, and so on. In light of the medical content, it is not surprising that appended to it is A Treasure of Health, or The Family Physician, a short text filled with home remedies for a variety of conditions.
This particular copy of the book contains a female signature on the title verso, “elisabeth Scott her book” along with the date “1743.”
We are, unsurprisingly, not able to trace this particular owner and whether she was a midwife or just an interested reader. Fissell has found a variety of copies of Aristotle’s Masterpiece with female inscriptions. In a 2014 article, she discusses an inscription by a woman named Sarah in the library of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, and adds, “there’s Alice Burton in a copy at the New York Academy of Medicine, Elizabeth Vincent and Sarah Fackerall, two different women readers, separated by a century, in a first edition in the University of Pennsylvania’s Van Pelt Library, and at Johns Hopkins there is a first edition inscribed by Elizabeth Wright” (“Material,” 144). Elizabeth Scott, it seems, was one of many women who owned and likely used and enjoyed this book.
Many thanks to Patrick Olson for calling our attention to this book and for his meticulously researched description of it in his catalog, to which this post is much indebted.
Source: Book offered for sale by Patrick Olson Rare Books, September 2021; since sold. Images reproduced with permission.
Further Reading
Mary Fissell, “Material Texts and Medical Libraries in the Digital Age,” RBM: A Journal of Rare Books, Manuscripts, and Cultural Heritage 15.2 (2014): 135-145.
This copy of a second edition of Richard Allestree’s The Ladies Calling has an interesting set of marks showing a rich history of ownership. Allestree’s books have been featured repeatedly on this blog, showing the special interest of female readers in his conduct manual with its sections on modesty, meekness, compassion, piety, and other feminine virtues as well as, in the second part, explanations of expectations for virgins, wives, and widows.
This particular copy was clearly a treasured book, as its beautiful morocco binding and gold decorations suggest.
The foredge features additional decoration with angels’ faces and flowers.
The title pages, endpaper, and flyleaves of the book show both women and men read it and wanted to mark their ownership. The title page has been marked by a woman named Elice Christmas, whose hand suggest a later date.
Inside the book, there are two male bookplates, the first of which tells us the book belonged at some point to Harry Lawrence Bradfer Lawrence (1887-1965), an antiquarian and book collector.
The page preceding and the page featuring the frontispiece provide us with names of three previous owners. The bookplate tells us it belonged to Sir Edward Wilmot (1693-1786), a physician and later baronet from Derby. A woman named Mary Pooley wrote her inscription above the frontispiece.
Perhaps most interestingly, the third inscription shows evidence of female gift giving: “Mrs Chathrine Orson her book Given her by Mrs Cathrine Buttler anno Domini 1698.”
The use of “Mrs” for both owner and gift giver hints at a kind of formality, perhaps indicative of their relationship. But it also suggests that this inscription serves less as a personal moment in that relationship, and instead hints at an awareness of the fact that others will read it. As the reader records that one “Mrs” had given the book to another, she seems to be making a public self-representation of her own status and that of her friend that can be read alongside the book’s content. Both she and her friend, the inscription suggests, meet the expectations set by Allestree for proper, married womanhood.
Book offered for sale by Wisdompedlars, sold on 11/29/2020; now housed at Illinois State University. Images reproduced with permission.
This book is a translation and abbreviated version (“by way of Abstract”) of Seneca’s Epistulae morales, originally published in 1678 by Roger L’Estrange. The man now known as a fervent royalist and censor of the press after the Restoration published a number of translations, but this was the most popular (ODNB). Interestingly, this edition of the treatise, with its explanation of stoic morals presented as a beneficial and conducive to a happy life, came out in the middle of a strong Whig propaganda offensive against L’Estrange and shortly after he had survived accusations of being a Catholic and of involvement in the Popish plot. From 1681, he began to publish The Observator, a periodical which was to become, as Harold Love notes, “the most powerful organ of tory propaganda” (ODNB).
It is difficult to imagine that the first owners of this edition of the book L’Estrange translated were unaware of his politics. Ownership of the book, in other words, provides some potential indication of the owner’s stance in contemporary controversy, even if the bulk of the book itself does not directly address it.
This particular copy was a present from a mother to a daughter. It is inscribed, “Margrett Lowther geven me by my Mother 1692” and underneath, there is another inscription that reads “Margrett Lowther her book.”
I have been unable to locate the Margaret Lowther in question (FamilySearch comes up with several possibilities). The other signature, both on the flyleaf and on the title page and possibly by Margaret’s mother or another relative, is not easy to decipher (“H. Lowther”?).
It seems Margaret practiced writing in two different hands, and the capital letter M also shows that this is both signature and an instance of a pen trial.
By 1692, four years after the Glorious Revolution and fourteen years after the book’s original publication, L’Estrange was politically powerless, plagued by ill health and other personal tragedies, himself probably much in need of Seneca’s advice. Margaret Lowther may not have known much about L’Estrange if she was young when she received the book from her mother, but L’Estrange’s epistle “To the Reader” makes ample mention of seventeenth-century politics and accuses the Whigs of being impostors and hypocrites. Politics aside, women throughout the early modern period were attracted to stoicism, and this maternal gift shows a desire to convey Senecan philosophy to a daughter in an accessible form. What is interesting about the book is that it is ostensibly directed at male readers, and Seneca’s advice is, unlike other advice books presented to early modern young women, not specifically geared to the female experience.
Source: offered for sale by Wisdompedlars, 12/10/2019, and since sold. Images reproduced with permission.
Early Modern Female Book Ownership 