One of the most popular works of the seventeenth century is Francis Bacon’s Sylva Sylvarum, or, a Natural Historie, first published the year after he died in 1627 and compiled by the philosopher-scientist’s chaplain William Rawley. English-language imprints from the 1630s, 1650s, 1660s, 1670s, and 1680s are still commonly found for sale today. Its loose organizational structure and relative incoherence set it apart from other Baconian publications, and it has vexed scholars for centuries. Rusu and Lüthy have argued that the text was compiled from manuscripts written by Bacon and never meant for publication, but that it nonetheless provides a window into his methods and demonstrates that he used these rough-hewn manuscripts in issuing other, more organized natural histories.
Despite being so dissimilar to his previously published works, Sylva Sylvarum was his most popular work in the seventeenth century. This third edition was owned some forty years after its publication by a Margaret and William Pratt, then later Sir George Strickland, 5th Baronet (1729– 1808) and his son Henry Eustatius Strickland (1777-1865). The Stricklands were of Yorkshire, though Henry eventually set up residence at Apperly Court in Gloucestershire.
The book is signed on the title page “Will: Pratt. A.M. 1670” and on the front flyleaf recto “The Booke of Mrs Margaret Pra[tt].” The A.M. after William’s name may signifies ‘Assembly Member,’ though of which governing body is unknown. An additional annotation in William’s hand above his ownership inscription is illegible due to trimming of the textblock, but may indicate when the book was procured and / or what price was paid for it.
Given the commonness of their names, it is difficult to say with certainty what the relationship William and Margaret had. The “Mrs” indicates a married name, though she could have been either his mother or wife.
It is also unknown how the book left the Pratts’ possession and entered the Stricklands’, though the Pratts may have been a Yorkshire family like the Stricklands. The book is bound in contemporary speckled calf.
Given the book’s popularity, it is not surprising that many surviving copies contain women’s inscriptions, even though generally it is less common to see women signing works of natural history and science than it is religious or devotional works. Another 1631 edition was offered for auction in July 2023 and is signed on A3r “Jane Eyton Jane Eyton / 1655 do[?] when / Jane Eyton.” This inscription gives the impression of someone sketching idly, maybe even considering the relationship between her signature and identity (the repeated lowercase Ys suggest an attempt to hone the inscription’s appearance).
There are no other clues in the book to suggest Jane’s identity. Hers seems to be the only legible ownership inscription, although the final text page has faded annotations at the foot, in what appears to be an earlier hand.
The divisional title page of another leaf has expunged annotations that say in part “A Table of The Experiments” and appear to be dated 1771, though whether there is an ownership inscription there is hard to determine.
Jane, like Margaret, is unidentified, but together the signatures indicate women’s interest in wide-ranging subjects.
[1] Doina-Cristina Rusu & Christoph Lüthy. “Extracts from a Paper Laboratory: The Nature of Francis Bacon’s Sylva Sylvarum,” Intellectual History Review, 27:2 (2017), 171-202, DOI: 10.1080/17496977.2017.1292020.
The sex of a book-owner is easy enough to determine with a full name. However, plenty of owners throughout Western book history have used initials or a first initial followed by a surname to sign their books. Oftentimes we assume these owners are men, but we sacrifice a more accurate and nuanced picture of book ownership and reading in the early modern period when we default to assumptions of maleness or whiteness.
There are several examples of early women book owners signing books and other documents using only initials. Discussing Elizabeth Puckering (1621/2–1689), David McKitterick says, “More often, and more consistently, she placed her initials ‘EP’ just above or to the side of the beginning of the first line of the text — either the main text or sometimes the preface.” Likewise, Anne Wolferstan, granddaughter of famous bibliophile Frances Wolfreston, initialed her copy of the Satires of Juvenal and Persius “A W” on the title page. Other initialers include Mary Astell, Mary Bankes, Frances Egerton, Sophia Hamilton, and Anne Hyde, Duchess of York (Book Owners Online). Mary Dormer, Countess of Carnarvon (1655–1709), utilized armorial bindings with her initials MC and also inscribed books “M Carnarvon” (BOO). Still other owners like Anne Fanshawe had armorial binding stamps, sans any initials. Elizabeth Talbot Grey’s bindings are distinguished by a Talbot hound with a lolling tongue and smartly curling tail.
In February 2022, I was browsing antiquarian books on eBay when my eye was caught by an unassuming copy of Henry Hammond’s Annotations on the Psalms. As far as seventeenth-century books go, it is common. Dozens of 1659 copies are reported to the ESTC Online and at any given time a copy or two can usually be found for sale on eBay or AbeBooks.
What drew my eye was the inscription on the half-title page: “L Huntingdon. April 1st 1666.” It tickled my memory. For no reason that I could discern, I thought, This is a woman’s inscription. I bought the book, convinced I’d stumbled on something important and unwilling to let it disappear.
It wasn’t long before I recalled Rosalind Smith and Kathy Acheson’s “Women and Marginalia in English Printed Books” seminar at the 2021 virtual Shakespeare Association of America conference. Diana Barnes had presented a wonderful paper on Lucy Hastings, Countess of Huntingdon’s elegiac manuscript poem from her copy of Lachrymae Musarum, a volume of poetry which commemorates her son Henry Hastings, heir to the earldom.
Lucy Hastings was born to Eleanor (née Touchet) and John Davies in 1613. Davies was a politician and poet whose works won the attention of Queen Elizabeth I, while Eleanor was an ardent Protestant who became infamous for publishing pamphlet prophecies from 1625 to her death in 1652. One, From the Lady Eleanor, Her Blessing, to Her Beloved Daughter the Right Honorable Lucy, Countesse of Huntingdon (1622), was addressed to Lucy. With such parents, it is not surprising that Lucy was well-educated. The famed educator and writer Bathsua Makin was her tutor and instructed her in divinity and languages, which included “Latin, Greek, Hebrew, French, and Spanish” (Stevenson & Davidson 246).
In 1623, Lucy was married to fourteen-year-old Ferdinando Hastings when she was approximately eleven years old. The marriage was probably not consummated until she was around seventeen, as Henry, their first child, was not born until ca. 1630.
Lachrymae Musarum, consisting of 39 elegies by male poets minor and major, including Andrew Marvell and Charles Cotton, was published after Henry died of smallpox in 1649. Notably, John Dryden’s first published poem also appears in the volume. The Huntington Library’s copy of the book (RB102354) belonged to Lucy and once contained her manuscript poem on a front flyleaf, which is now detached and stored separately. The poem is in italic script and signed “L H.”
This manuscript’s significance as a poem by Lucy Hastings in her hand was first noted in 1952 by H.T. Swedenberg. In it, she laments her son’s death through imagery of bowels, clay, canker, and dust.
Other examples of Lucy’s writings survive in the Morgan Library, which holds her handwritten bond for £200 dated 3 September, 1667, and the University of Edinburgh Laing manuscript 444, which the Perdita Project describes as “Poems compiled by or for Lucy Davies (c. 1630).” Other manuscripts are held by the Huntington, which has over 50,000 items in its Hastings collection.
Lucy Hastings’ signature on the bond, Morgan Library MA 1475.16 [above]. This more formal version of her signature is similar to the one on her 1656 will at the Huntington Library [below].
The final page of MS Laing III. 444, which features two manuscript poems about a “Blackmoor” woman courting a white boy. The screenshot is from the manuscript digitized through the Perdita Project and is used only for educational purposes.
The University of Edinburgh’s manuscript, described in the Laing handlist as “The first Fifty Psalms in Verse, translated by Sir John Davies, 1624, with other Poems,” contains transcriptions of over fifty Psalms and dozens of poems by John Davies such as “A Maid’s Hymn in Praise of Virginity.” Only two poems in the volume break the Davies pattern. They are on the final page in an apparently different script, one much like Lucy’s, and indeed the initials “L H” appear in the right margin. The uppermost is Henry Rainolds’ “A Blackmoor Maid Wooing A Fair Boy” and the lowermost Henry King’s “The Boy’s Answer to the Blackmoor,” and the pair have been the subject of scholarship by Dr. Brandi K. Adams.
HAF, Box 20, Folder 8, the second of two religious “memoranda books” by Lucy Hastings at the Huntington Library. Her daughter’s ownership inscription “Eliza: Hastings” is in the center of the blank front wrapper, while Lucy’s effaced inscription “Lucy Huntingdon” is beneath. The books contain detailed notes on Bible verses from Proverbs, Ephesians, John, etc. and are in keeping with someone who would be interested in deep reading on the Psalms.
So was the L. Huntingdon who inscribed Hammond’s Annotations Lucy Hastings, Countess of Huntingdon? Huntingdon is often a peerage title, though some individuals from the early modern period like preacher John Huntingdon make clear it was surname, as well. It is also possible that Huntingdon is an alternative spelling of Huntington, a commoner surname, which could make the owner of the book L. Huntington, not Huntingdon.
However, if the Huntingdon is a peerage title rather than a last name, then it is harder to see who besides Lucy could have signed the Hammond. The Huntingdon title attaches only to the earl, his spouse, and his direct male heir (note in the image above how Lucy’s daughter signs her name Eliz: Hastings, not Eliz: Huntingdon). The book was published in 1659 and the inscription dated 1666. The only peerage-linked L. Huntingdon in 1666 would appear to be Lucy. Her husband Ferdinando Hastings, 6th Earl of Huntingdon, died in 1656 and was succeeded by their son Theophilus, born 1650, who did not begin having children himself until the 1670s. His direct heir, also named Theophilus, was not born until 1696.
If the Hammond did belong to Lucy, it is a rare example of a book owned by her; I know of no surviving specimens in institutions besides the Lachrymae Musarum. What understanding does the book bring to her life and work? Was she interested in the Psalms because of her father’s translation, piety’s sake, or both? Her memoranda books, after all, consist of detailed notes on Bible verses. Could her reading of them be connected to her son Henry’s untimely death 17 years earlier?
While the book is not heavily annotated, there are a few marginal references and corrections toward the front of the book, suggesting a close reading. What might such marginalia suggest? Is it in Lucy’s hand or one of her children’s?
The contemporary calf binding of the Hammond is worn, but close inspection reveals a blind rule with stamped corner-pieces on each board, as well as blind-tooled spine compartments. While not a fine binding by any stretch, it would have suited a woman of Lucy’s station.
I welcome readers’ thoughts on whether they believe the book was owned by Lucy Hastings and, if so, how they might contextualize it.
UPDATE: Since this blog went live, I have received some interesting feedback. Dr. Beatrice Groves, who has published on Biblical marginalia in the early modern period, notes that the M2 and E2 marginalia “mean that the reader is marking up the psalms that were used in the BCP readings – a psalm read at morning prayer on the second day of the month and at evening prayer on the 1st day of the month. So s/he is either using this as a psalter (interesting!) or, if it doesn’t have texts, using it to compare across – also interesting!” Thank you for the great note, Beatrice!
Source: Book in ownership of blog author. Other images featured with permission. My thanks to Martine Van Elk, Philip Palmer, and Danielle Clarke for assisting in my research for this blog.
Further reading
Brink, Jean R. “Royalist Correspondent: Lucy Davies Hastings, Countess of Huntingdon.” ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes and Reviews 5 (2–3: Renaissance Studies), 1992: 61–63.
“Lucy Hastings, née Davies, Countess of Huntingdon (b. 1613).” In Early Modern Women Poets: An Anthology, edited by Jane Stevenson and Peter Davidson, 246–247. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.
O’Donnell, Mary Ann. “Hastings Family Tree, 1381-1874” in “A Survey of the Poetry Collection in Manuscript of the Noble Family of Huntingdon.” Harvard Library Bulletin 28 (3), Fall 2017: v–vi.
The 1589 Geneva Bible featured today is bound in contemporary leather with a 1591 edition of The Whole Booke of Psalms and signed five different times by female reader Jane Horsley. Like many 16th-century books, it contains layers of ownership inscriptions from various eras.
Jane, who has repeated her inscription (“Jane Horsley Booke 168[1 or 4] / Jane Horsley booke 1679”) twice above one of the woodcut ornaments, was the earliest owner to date the book. Absent any earlier inscriptions, it is difficult to say whether she acquired the then 90-year-old Bible as a secondhand purchase or inherited it from a family member.
As with most of the female book owners featured within this blog, her identity is ambiguous. We know she cannot be the Jane Reay of Newcastle who married John Horsley of Milburne Grange in 1699, as our Jane used the surname Horsley as early as 1679.
Subsequent inscriptions can sometimes be a clue to an earlier female owner’s identity, but in Jane’s case the Hansons are almost certainly unrelated. One page covered in genealogical records, some faded and others clear, reads in part:
Grace Hanson Born July 3[d?] day 1724 and babtizd July 3[?]
Samuell Hanson born [M]arch 16 1726 and babtizd M[ar]ch 31
Rachel Hanson Born Febr.y 25 1727/8 and babtizd march 16
Fanny Hanson Born June 21 1731 died 6 Mar.
Jon Hanson Born about midle of February January 1733-4
Joshua Hanson Book Bought on ye year of our Lord 1729
On the verso of the divisional New Testament title page, yet another inscription reads “John Iles and for yor[?]. Beneath it is a line to indicate a separation and the inscription “John Iles Borne June y 25 and Baptized July 2nd 1714.” Further down the page is another inscription by Joshua Hanson, “If any one upon me loke I am Joshua Hanson Book ~ ~ .” It is possible that Jane Horsley could have married an Iles, though probably likelier that the book had left her possession sometime in the roughly thirty-year period between the 1680s and 1714.
The book remained in the Hanson family early into the 20th century, when it was gifted to the Cheales family. From the bookseller’s description:
The bookplate of Samuel Hanson (1804-1882) bears the family crest and logo, Deo favente et sedulitate (By the favour of God and by assiduity). Samuel passed it onto his son Sir Reginald Hanson (1840-1905) on the 5th of December 1880. Sir Reginald Hanson was a conservative MP and elected Lord Mayor of London in 1886 during which time Queen Victoria celebrated her Jubilee year. Having previously been knighted, in 1887 he entertained Her Majesty and was created a Baronet. The Bible was gifted by Lady Hanson to the Cheales family on July 14, 1905, three months after Sir Reginald passed away. It has remained with the Cheales family until now.
Samuel, the second child recorded in the family genealogy, therefore inherited the book from his father Joshua and passed it onto his own son Reginald two years before his death.
While it is true that more recent book owners tend to be easier to identity, it also cannot be denied that male book owners are, as a whole, easier to identify than female. Even John Iles can be identified and is linked to the Hanson family. In 1723, the widow Grace Iles (née Mallory) married Joshua Hanson. She was married in 1713 to an Iles; hence the June 25th birth of John Iles in 1714. Remarkably, the Hanson family Bible is mentioned in the first volume of Yorkshire Notes and Queries (1888), page 156. It is likely that Sir Reginald Hanson made it available to the editor of the book.
It is splendid to have so much information about the Iles and Hanson families, but frustrating to be unable to easily find the same basic biographical data for Jane. Despite writing her name on the book’s title page, her identity disappears amid the other ownership markings.
Featured today is a 1648 King James Bible with the initialed binding of seventeenth-century owner Anne Sheather and signed by her on the verso of the divisional New Testament title page.
Many, though not all, Bible owners reserved their best handwriting for the sacred text. Here, Anne Sheather tries out two different styles, a form of blackletter for her uppermost signature and a stylized italic hand for the lower: “Anne sheather / her booke; i674.” The signatures are underlined and accented with calligraphic scrollwork.
What strikes me as even more remarkable is that the contemporary initialed binding suggest that the book was chiefly owned by Anne. The elaborate gilt-tooled boards feature a centerpiece flanked by the initials “AS.” There are holes in the boards where metal clasps once were, further confirming that this was not an inexpensive binding and suggesting that Anne may have been a woman of some financial means.
Her identity, however, is uncertain. An Ann Sheather seems to have been born around 1631 in Sussex to a Henry Sheather, although sources are conflicted about the surname of her mother. Variants of the name (Shether, Sheether) similarly lead to dead ends.
In any case, it is an interesting example of both female book ownership and binding, and sheds just a little more light on how women valued and interacted with their Bibles in the seventeenth century.
As many of the posts on this blog make clear, early modern books passed through generations of readers and accumulated ownership marks and marginalia that can tell us something about individual female owners as well as about the larger families and networks through which the books moved over time.
In an earlier post, Sarah Lindenbaum introduced a signature by Katherine Rous who wrote “Katherine Rouse / Her Booke” in a rare copy of the 1561 Forme of Prayers and Ministration of the Sacraments used in the English Church at Geneva printed in Geneva by Zacharie Durand (see blog post here ). The volume was based on Calvin’s liturgy and had been prepared by John Knox for the Protestants who went into exile in Geneva during the reign of Mary Tudor. The volume contains reformed liturgical rites, a catechism, and a metrical Psalter. Prepared quickly in a time of crisis, the book continued to be printed after Elizabeth’s accession, and it cast a long shadow in England and Scotland as it shaped liturgical life for generations. For example, following Knox’s return to Scotland, the form was adopted in Scotland in 1562 as the Book of Common Order.
Lindenbaum hypothesized that Katherine might be from the Rous family from the West Country. I agree, and I propose here that she was likely the Katherine Rous (d. 28 November, 1659) who was the granddaughter of Anthony Rous (d. 1620) and Elizabeth Southcott of Halton, Cornwall; the daughter of Ambrose Rous (d. 1620) and Magdalena Osborne; and the wife (as of 30 December 1617) of Francis Wills of Wivelscombe, Cornwall. Katherine and Francis appear to have lived in the Wivelscombe manor, only 8 miles from her family’s seat at Halton, and they had at least thirteen children (nine sons and four daughters) all baptized at St. Stephens just outside Saltash.[1] A map by John Nordon from 1604 shows both St. Stephens and Halton, the home of “Ant Rowse.” A sermon preached at Anthony Rous’s funeral celebrated the fact that he was a “great grand-father by his eldest” child, a likely reference to Katherine’s children.[2] It is impossible to determine whether Katherine signed the book before or after her marriage, although it was probably before.
Katherine’s ownership mark in the Forme of Prayers is intriguing for several reasons. First, it appears to shed light on her own religious experiences. Katherine signed the book in the volume’s Catechism, in the margins of a page in which the parent (or minister) instructs the child about the function of baptism. Mothers were frequently exhorted to catechize their children and servants in early modern Europe, and they often organized baptisms. Katherine may have chosen to write her name on this page because this was a section of the volume that her mother or grandmother used when catechizing her or because she thought that she would one day use (or was already using) this part of the book in teaching her own children.
Forme of Prayers and Ministration of the Sacraments used in the English Church at Geneva (Geneva: Zacharie Durand, 1561; not in the STC). Image re-used from Lindenbaum’s post. Privately owned.
The fact that Katherine Rous signed her name in such an old book, however, raises questions. Why would a young woman in the 1610s care about a fifty-year-old liturgical book designed for a community of exiles that no longer existed? And how did she acquire the book in the first place?
The short answer is that the Rouses were part of a community of Puritan non-conformists who complained loudly about the Book of Common Prayer and who envied and used more “reformed” liturgies from other countries. In other words, Katherine Rous was from precisely the kind of family that would own, use, treasure, and pass on a book like Forme of Prayers. In this regard, she might be aligned with earlier Puritan women, like Dorcas Martin (d. 1599), who specifically turned to the Genevan catechism because they were unhappy with the one in the Book of Common Prayer.
The fact that Katherine acquired, signed, and safeguarded this old, un-authorized English liturgical book not only tells us something about her, but it enriches our understanding of the activities of two other generations of Rouses. Katherine’s grandfather, Anthony Rous, and his first wife, Elizabeth, were active Puritans: they attended radical “exercises,” and they sponsored Puritan preachers who criticized the Book of Common Prayer, used the Genevan liturgy, and preached illegally in private houses.[3] They harbored ministers from Scotland, Ireland, and the Netherlands, and between 1583 and 1585, they employed John Cowper, a Presbyterian preacher who had been banished from Scotland, as a chaplain. He “edified” the family by preaching and instructing them “in the points of … salvation.”[4] It is quite possible that the Rous family acquired their book through John Cowper or one of the other non-conformist ministers they sponsored.
Although little is known about Katherine’s parents (Ambrose and Magdalena), her uncle, Francis Rous (1580–1649), was a high-profile Puritan, speaker of the Barebones parliament, provost of Eton College, and a producer of liturgical texts. He too was highly critical of the Book of Common Prayer, claiming in 1621 that he “never yet saw such a common prayer book as was fit to subscribe to.”[5] He was a member of the Westminster Assembly, a group that produced the Westminster Directory for Public Worship (1644), which was, in part, inspired by the Scottish Book of Common Order and the Anglo-Genevan Forme of Prayers signed by Katherine. Francis Rous also produced a Book of Psalms in English Meter in 1638 (STC 2737) which was adopted for general use by parliament in 1643 (B2396) and was subsequently adopted in Scotland in 1650.
Anthony Rous and his nephew, Francis, left many traces of their lives in print and in the archives. The fortuitous survival of Katherine Rous’s signature and book reminds us that women also read and valued books, and the trace she left makes a small, but valuable, contribution to our understanding of English Puritanism.
[1] J. L. Vivian, ed., The Visitations of the County of Cornwall, Comprising the Herald’s Visitation of 1530, 1573, and 1620 with Additions (Exeter, 1887), 413, 560.
[2] Charles FitzGeffrey, Elisha his Lamentation, A Sermon Preached at the Funeralls of Sir Anthony Rous (London, 1622), 49.
[3] Micheline White, “Women Writers and Religious and Literary Circles in the Elizabethan West Country: Anne Dowriche, Anne Lock Prowse, Anne Lock Moyle, Elizabeth Rous, and Ursula Fulford.” Modern Philology 103.2 (2005): 187-214; 204. Patrick Collinson, Elizabethan Puritan Movement (Oxford: Clarendon Press, rpt. 1990), 276.
[5] Colin Burrow. “Rous, Francis (1580/81–1659), religious writer and politician.” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. 23 Sep. 2004; Accessed 5 Aug. 2022.
One publication which reliably contains the early ownership inscriptions of women is The Book of Psalms.
This edition of 1629 was once owned by Mary Crosse, who left an inscription on the verso of a rear flyleaf: “Mary Crosse / Mary Crosse / Her Booke / 1678.” Though the Bible and The Book of Psalms fell solidly within the confines of acceptable reading for women in a century where anxieties about the suitability of certain genres (e.g. literature) for the female sex still lingered, scholars like Femke Molekamp have shown that even prominent religious works encouraged women to come to their own interpretations and produce their own texts.
A surname (or possibly a place name) in an apparently later hand appears at the head of the title page. The book is bound in olive morocco and features a gilt medallion on each board, nestled within gilt-tooled borders. If this binding is contemporary to her signature, we might conclude that Mary had some measure of money at her disposal and that it was an important text to her. Otherwise, there are no clues about who Mary was.
Source: Book offered for sale by James Cummins Bookseller in February 2022. Images used with permission.
Further Reading
Femke Molekamp. “Early Modern Women and Affective Devotional Reading,” European Review of History: Revue européenne d’histoire 17:1 (2010), 53-74. DOI: 10.1080/13507480903511926
Femke Molekamp. Women and the Bible in Early Modern England: Religious Reading and Writing. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.
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.
Jesuit abbot Johannes Chrysostomus vander Sterre first published his biography of St. Norbert of Xanten in Latin in 1622, exactly 40 years after the saint’s canonization by Pope Gregory XIII. The book saw a Dutch translation the following year, a copy of which is featured in this post. St. Norbert of Xanten was ordained as a priest in 1115 and founded a monastery at Prémontré which became the seat of the Premonstratensian order of Canons regular. He was made archbishop of Magdeburg in 1126 and was instrumental in securing King Lothair III’s defense of Pope Innocent II, whose claim to the papacy was challenged by Anacletus II, the Antipope.
The copy featured here has the ownership inscriptions of two early Dutch female readers. The first reads “Desen boek hoort Aen theresia ver achteren Anno 1721” (This book belongs To theresia ver achteren the year 1721) and is partly obscured in the image by a portion of old musical manuscript binding waste.
An earlier interior inscription on a blank divisional page reads: “DESEN BOECK HOORT TOE MARIA QVINION ANNO i647.” Beneath it, someone, perhaps a child, has copied DESEN in red pencil and made curlicues that almost appear to be in the shape of a bird. The same red pencil appears on the verso, echoing “boeck,” “desen,” and “hoort.”
Despite their distinctive names and bold inscriptions, the women remain unidentified so far. We might tentatively conclude that Maria Quinion was the book’s second owner given the 25-year gap between the original publication date and her inscription date. However, it is equally possible that Maria owned the book earlier and did not inscribe it until 1647. We might also assume that Theresia ver Achteren modeled her later inscription on Maria’s given the same phrase “Desen boeck hoort” and inclusion of a date for her ownership inscription.
Source: Book offered for sale by ElevenEleven Books, Inc. in October 2021. Images used with permission.
Sir Richard Barckley, a knight about whom no biographical information exists, first published the commonplace book A Discourse of the Felicitie of Man, or, His Summun Bonum in 1598. The text was dedicated to Queen Elizabeth I and was popular enough to see a “newly corrected and augmented” second edition in 1603 and a reissue by playwright Thomas Heywood in 1631. It serves as a philosophical and metaphysical meditation and advice book on the subject of happiness.
The copy featured here is in a contemporary triple-ruled binding with a blind-tooled centerpiece with scrollwork. The earliest known owner is a “John Mablon in Huggin Lane,” whose inscription appears on a front endpaper. The later name of “Elizabeth Dirdo” is written on the title page verso in a ca. seventeenth-century hand.
Like the author of the book she owned, Elizabeth Dirdo eludes identification. At least one other book with the inscription “Elizabeth Dirdo” survives, a 1640 edition of Sir Richard Baker’s Meditations and Disquisitions upon the Seven Penitentiall Psalmes, now Folger Shakespeare Library STC 1228. Dirdo, also spelled Dirdoe or Durdo, is an uncommon surname. Though limited, these two examples of her book ownership suggest an interest in religious texts.
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.
Known today more for its distinctive engraved title page by William Marshall (the illustrator responsible for the frontispiece in Eikon Basilike of a kneeling King Charles I) than its content, Saturni Ephemerides, sive, Tabula Historico-Chronologica was written by theologian Henry Isaacson (1581–1654) and published in 1633. It was never reprinted, but judging by the high number of surviving copies reported to the ESTC, the print run seems to have been sufficient to meet public demand.
Writes Joel Faber of the Centre for Renaissance and Reformation Studies:
The six pages of “authorities” Isaacson references range from Ovid and Boccaccio to Bede and Holinshed. The first section offers an abridged history of the “Four Monarchies” (Assyria, Persia, Greece, and Rome) before moving to the chronology table which comprises most of the book. Isaacson begins this section with the biblical patriarchs and proceeds through to the time of the book’s composition with various European locations each receiving their own columns. Alongside each year Isaacson also includes noteworthy events such as the founding of cities, universities, and the births and deaths of famous figures such as Sir Philip Sidney and John Harington with notes about their accomplishments. Appended to the work is a Christian history of Britain that lists the successions of bishops and archbishops. At the end of the book is an index which organizes the “famous men” that Isaacson includes into categories such as poets, musicians, philosophers, mathematicians, painters, grammarians, and others.
This copy is noteworthy for the inscription on A1v, The Frontispiece Explained. Beneath the tailpiece, the former owner made the inscription “Wm Thompson booke / bought of mrs Susanna Pelham.” Thompson also signed the book at the foot of the title page.
Thompson’s hand appears to date from the seventeenth century. The intriguing inscription raises more questions than it answers. Neither William Thompson or Susanna Pelham can be easily identified, Thompson because his name is so common, Susanna because there are many possible permutations and spellings of her name, from Susan to Suzanne. It seems likely that she was a private seller, though how she came to signal that her book was for sale and how she attracted Thompson as a buyer is unknown. Was she a former owner and reader of the book? Or was the book one of many wares she was offering for sale, not necessarily a personal possession? At any rate, it was a transaction and not a gift, as so many books exchanged between women and men were.
Source: Book offered for sale by Forest Books in May 2021. Images used with permission.
Citations
Joel Faber (20 November, 2018). “New Acquisition: Saturni Ephemerides Sive Tabula Historico-Chronologica (1633).” Centre for Renaissance and Reformation Studies. https://crrs.ca/news/saturni-ephemerides/
In early January 2021, rare-book librarian Jane Siegel discovered a previously untraced play owned by early woman reader Frances Wolfreston (1607–1677), Lewis Sharpe’s The Noble Stranger, at Columbia University’s Rare Book & Manuscript Library. Sharpe’s play was printed only once in 1640 and the ESTC records a little over two dozen surviving copies. The Folger Shakespeare Library’s Digital Anthology of Early Modern Drama indicates that the play was first performed in 1639 by Queen Henrietta Maria’s Men, who put on many of the plays that Frances Wolfreston owned in print: Richard Brome’s The Antipodes, Shackerley Marmion’s The Antiquary, Thomas Nabbes’ Covent Garden, Thomas Heywood’s The English Traveller, and John Ford’s Love’s Sacrifice, among others.
Little scholarship has been done on this relatively minor and obscure play and its even obscurer author, whom Matteo A. Pangallo calls a “nonaristocratic playwriting playgoer” (23). The Noble Stranger seems to have been Sharpe’s only printed play. The dramatis personae includes the King of Naples, the princess, and Honorio, the eponymous stranger.
In contrast to many of her playbooks, this is one that Wolfreston did not annotate. However, she did sign it in a favored location on the caption title page and in her customary way: “frances wolfreston her bouk.”
The book was first sold in 1856 as lot 361 of the now famous single-day Sotheby’s auction of the Wolferstan* family library. The lot contained two other minor plays, Henry Shirley’s The Martyr’d Souldier (1638), now at the Huntington, and an English translation of an Italian work by Guidubaldo Bonarelli, Filli di Sciro, or, Phillis of Scyros (1655), untraced. In contrast to the Shakespeare plays appearing a few lots before them, which sold for between £1 (two damaged copies of Richard the Third and Richard the Second) and £13 13s (the complete copy of Richard the Second now at the Harry Ransom Center), these three lesser known plays were purchased by bookseller Joseph Lilly for just a single shilling.
Siegel notes that Wolfreston’s copy of The Noble Stranger entered Columbia University’s collections as an anonymous gift some forty years after the Sotheby’s sale in October 1895. She goes on to say:
In the Report of the Librarian [George H. Baker] for the Academic Year ending June 30, 1895, on page 192, “There have been added to the library, through Prof. Geo. E. Woodberry [professor of Comparative Literature], from a sum of money put at his disposal by a gentleman, 1169 volumes. These books bear a bookplate with the words “Ex dono Amici Litterarum.” They are largely works in English drama, and in criticism and literary history.” [T]he accession register listings of other parts of this gift on the pages around The Noble Stranger include a number of other 17th century plays acquired at the same time.
At least one other signed book from Frances Wolfreston’s library now resides at Columbia University, Robert Mead’s play The Combat of Love and Friendship (1653), which Wolfreston deemed “a uery prity one, all of loue 3 copells of louers.”
*Wolferstan is the spelling adopted by Wolfreston’s eldest son Francis and used to this day by her descendants.
Source: Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University, B823 Sh25. Images taken by Jane Siegel and reproduced with permission.
Further Reading
Matteo A. Pangallo, Playwriting Playgoers in Shakespeare’s Theater. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017.
Early Modern Female Book Ownership 