On December 28, 1702, the English gentlewoman Eleanor Glanville crafted a list of observations on insects. She referenced figures from a printed book to aid her descriptions: Johannes Goedaert’s Of Insects: done into English, and methodized, with the addition of notes, translated by Martin Lister (1682) (figure 1). Glanville was quite critical of the etchings, noting that the plates were “not wel figured” (British Library, Sloane MS 3324, f. 20).
Figure 1
Eleanor Glanville clearly owned a copy of Lister’s English translation. Her observations demonstrate how printed books could shape scientific practice and communication in real time. Yet, her very ownership of this book, a rare item with only 150 copies ever printed, raises questions about how this text circulated and what kinds of audiences ultimately had access to it.
While I have yet to locate Glanville’s copy—that is, if it even still exists—I have had some unexpected results while searching for it. When I ordered the text from Cambridge University Library (Syn.7.68.55), I was surprised to find an ownership inscription from Katherine Blount on the front flyleaf (figure 2). Underneath Blount’s signature, she recorded that she purchased the text in 1711 for 3 shillings. Written above, in a different, likely older hand, is the inscription “to his honoured friend Dr Frasier.”
Figure 2
I had never heard of Blount, but of course, finding a woman’s name inscribed in a scientific text piqued my interest. A quick Google search brought me to this blog, where several researchers have already compiled evidence on Blount’s book ownership. Sarah Lindenbaum first brought Blount to scholarly attention in 2020. Sophie Floate, William Poole, Mary-Ann O’Donnell, Victoria Burke, Martine van Elk, and Joseph Black have all added more titles to her library.
Most titles are literary, but the number of scientific texts known to be owned by Blount is steadily increasing. These titles include Francis Willughby’s The Ornithology (1678), acquired by Blount in 1730, Hales’s Vegetable Staticks, gifted to Blount by the author in 1727, and Francis Bacon’s Sylva Sylvarum (1685), bought by Blount in 1699. As Martine van Elk suggested in her recent post, these works suggest that Blount may have had an interest in natural history.
The addition of Goedaert’s Of Insects to Blount’s library adds weight to this theory. Furthermore, that Blount purchased (as opposed to being gifted) this copy demonstrates an active interest in natural history. Why might Blount have bought this work on insects?
The English Translation of Of Insects
The Dutch artist and naturalist Johannes Goedaert first published his Metamorphosis naturalis in the 1660s. This text would become a landmark in the history of entomology for its detailed descriptions of insect life cycles. In 1682, the English naturalist Martin Lister put out the earliest English translation of the text. Lister explained in his address to the reader that these copies were “intended only for the curious.”
Who belonged to this society of the curious? In 1682, most scientific texts were still printed in Latin. By printing in the vernacular, Lister may have intended to reach a wider audience. Intentional or not, the English translation opened the door for educated, although non-Latinate people, including women, to consult his work.
Katherine Blount’s Copy of Of Insects
In many ways, Katherine Blount’s copy of Of Insects closely resembles the other fifteen copies I have examined so far. It is a slim quarto volume numbering 140 pages with fourteen fold-out etchings. Despite having wildly different provenances, most copies (including Blount’s) have nearly identical bindings: mottled calf boards with double fillets, the edges gilt-rolled with the same foliated design (figure 3 and 4). Most of the spines have been replaced. The striking similarities between the bindings of multiple copies, held at different institutions, suggests that purchasers had the option to buy the volume as a pre-bound item.
Figure 3Figure 4
Unfortunately, Blount’s copy does not have any annotations. We don’t know from whom or how she came to purchase it. The inscription above hers, “for his honoured friend Dr Frasier,” suggests a previous owner, although I have not been able to definitively identify Dr. Frasier. Early Modern Letters Online has an entry for a James Frasier, an artist and friend of Martin Lister, John Ray, and Francis Willughby. I’ve also come across a Thomas Frazier who corresponded with John Woodward, a naturalist contemporaneous with Lister, although it is unclear if Thomas was a doctor.
Additional evidence on the front pastedown informs us of the book’s later provenance. It features the bookplate of Francis Jenkinson, the Cambridge University Librarian (essentially the head librarian) from 1889 to 1923 (figure 5). He trained as a classicist but held a wide variety of academic and personal interests, including a zeal for entomology. Martin Lister’s translation of Of Insects would have combined his passion for antiquarian books and insects. He donated this copy to the Cambridge University Library on August 20, 1917.
Figure 5
Women and the Culture of Collecting
Both Eleanor Glanville and Katherine Blount owned this scientific text. We know that Glanville and other naturalists used it as a model to write observations and organize their collections. Might Katherine Blount have done the same? The best source for biographical information about Blount, A History of Tyttenhanger (1895), first located by Sarah Lindenbaum, contains a clue, albeit an uncertain one. The author, Lady Jane Van Koughnet, writes of Blount that “she had a large collection of all sorts of curiosities” (66). Van Koughnet then lists a wide range of man-made curiosities that still survived at Tyttenhanger: a jewel box, ornamental arrows, a Chinese cabinet holding coins, an ivory crucifix, Chinese idols, and other objects.
Katherine Blount would have collected these objects in an age when the boundaries between natural and artificial curiosities were porous. A single collector might as easily hold ancient coins and dried plants, antiquarian manuscripts and beetles, or elephant tusks and paintings in the same collection. These cabinets of curiosities were often heterogeneous, some bordering on encyclopedic.
Given this historical context and Katherine Blount’s predilection for collecting, it is possible that she collected natural curiosities too. Such biological specimens, unlike the durable man-made objects listed in A History of Tyttenhanger, would not have survived the intervening centuries, at least not without an intensive amount of preservation.
Without further evidence, though, the idea of Katherine Blount as a collector of naturalia remains pure speculation. Together, her scientific texts cover birds, butterflies, and plants. These would have been fashionable curiosities for a woman, described as “gifted with a mind full of energy,” to collect (Van Koughnet, 65).
Source
Cambridge University Library, shelfmark Syn.7.68.55. Photographs by Michele D. Pflug, used with permission.
Further reading
H. F. Stewart. Francis Jenkinson, Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, and University Librarian: A Memoir. Cambridge: University Press, 1926.
This post adds another physical book owned by Katherine Blount to her ever-expanding library list and also reveals a manuscript that demonstrates her reading practices in action. Previous posts by Sarah Lindenbaum, Sophie Floate, William Poole, and Mary Ann O’Donnell have brought the total number of books inscribed by Katherine Blount to twelve, but additional discoveries by Martine van Elk and Sarah Lindenbaum have expanded that list further to 40 titles. As research by Lindenbaum and O’Donnell outlines, Katherine Blount was the daughter of James Butler and Grace Caldecott of Amberley Castle in Sussex. Born in 1676, she married Sir Thomas Pope Blount, 2nd Baronet in 1695.[1] When I started researching the miscellany of Katherine Butler (St. Paul’s Cathedral Library MS 52 D.14) around 2010, I proposed a few branches of the Butler family to which she might have belonged, including the Butlers of Amberley Castle, but I wasn’t certain.[2] Now that I have compared Katherine Butler’s signature and handwriting to those of the printed books identified in the other posts, I can confidently say that the Katherine Butler who inscribed a manuscript collection of sermons by John Donne and Joseph Hall in 1693 and who used the blank pages in that same manuscript to compile a miscellany from 1696 onwards is the same person as Katherine Blount. I can also confirm that the marginal notes written in the book described by Floate (Cyrano de Bergerac’s The Comical History) and the identifications of characters in the manuscript key and the text of the book described by Poole (Samuel Garth’s The Dispensary) are indeed in Blount’s hand. But readers of this post can judge for themselves.
The manuscript collection of sermons by John Donne and Joseph Hall
A manuscript collection of five sermons (four by John Donne and one by Joseph Hall), now St. Paul’s Cathedral Library MS 52 D.14, is inscribed “Katherine Butler Given me by my Father May 1693” (fol. 1r). The donor of this manuscript was James Butler of Amberley Castle, who died on 11 July 1696.
Fig. 1. Katherine Butler’s inscription from 1693, fol. 1r.
The sermons were transcribed by Knightley Chetwode in 1625 and 1626 or shortly thereafter. [3]
Fig. 2. The title page of the sermons, fol. 2r.
Exactly how this early seventeenth-century sermon collection came into the hands of James Butler and what occasion prompted him to give it as a gift to his daughter, Katherine, in 1693 are unclear.
Katherine Blount’s manuscript miscellany in verse and prose
Butler signed her name only once in St. Paul’s Cathedral Library MS 52 D.14, two years before her marriage in 1695, after which she would have signed her married name of Blount. But she was already Katherine Blount in 1696 when she began using the blank pages of the sermon manuscript to create her own miscellany. On fol. 178r, after the sermons, she wrote the heading “1696” and began a collection of verse extracts, and sometimes complete poems, ending at fol. 195v.
Fig. 3. The first page of the verse section of the miscellany, fol. 178r.
Facing that first page of poetry is an inscription on fol. 177v in which she explains her motivations for her selections: “The reason why I wrote severall of these following Verses, was not that I thought them all good, but the subjects was – what, I had occasion to make vse of.”
Fig. 4. The inscription on fol. 177v.
Blount does indeed make use of her chosen poems and extracts, consistently identifying them by theme or title, and favoring topics like friendship, virtue, and the importance of moderation, among others. Her “subjects” were not narrowly moralistic, however. As we can see from fol. 181r, she transcribes all of Abraham Cowley’s poem “Drinking” (which ends with the rousing couplet, “Should every Creature drink but I / Why, Men of Morals, tell me why?”).
Fig. 5. A sample page from the verse section, fol. 181r.
At the bottom of this page she includes two passages from different plays by John Dryden that disparage the state of marriage; it is a “Curse of Life,” “Loves nauseous cure,” and “but ye Pleasure of a Day.”[4]
Blount also began writing a second section of her manuscript in the year 1696. She took the manuscript and turned it upside down, making a new first page from the end of the volume and beginning a section of prose, which runs from fols. 276v, reversed to 230v, reversed. In the image below, you can see that she has headed this section, “A Common Place Book 1696.” Though I have called her manuscript a miscellany (since it is primarily a collection of miscellaneous extracts in verse and prose), it could equally be called a commonplace book, as she has labeled the prose section, since it is largely organized thematically.
Fig. 6. The first page of the prose section of the miscellany, fol. 276v, rev.
It is this heading that convinced me that Katherine Butler was Katherine Blount since, though the main hand of the miscellany is messier than any of the inscriptions in her printed books, the upper case “B” looks very similar to all of the “B”s each time she signs “Blount.” The upper case “P” looks similar to that in the word “Pope” in the inscription in O’Donnell’s post. And the date “1696” on both pages in the St. Paul’s manuscript replicates the number forms in all of her dates on her printed books. Blount died in 1753, and so she may have continued writing in this manuscript well into the eighteenth century. The final item in the verse section can be dated to 1719, though a later edition is possible, while one of the final items in the prose section in Blount’s hand appears to have been taken from a book published in 1736.[5]
More books from Katherine Blount’s library?
Not only does Blount identify many of her chosen passages by topic, but at several points in her manuscript she has written authors’ names, works, and page numbers beside passages, and many of those transcribed passages match specific editions.[6] Here is a list of works in which her transcriptions and page numbers match known editions; these are volumes she is likely to have consulted—and perhaps owned—from the verse section of the manuscript, rearranged into alphabetical order:
Boyle, Roger, Earl of Orrery. Tryphon,in Four New Plays (1670) or Six Plays (1694)[7]
Brome, Alexander. Songs and Other Poems (1668)
Charron, Pierre. Of Wisdome, Three Books, translated by George Stanhope (1697)
Cowley, Abraham. Works (any edition between 1668 and 1693)[8]
Denham, John. Poems and Translations (1668, 1671, or 1684)
Dryden, John. An Evening’s Love, or, The Mock-Astrologer (1691)[9]
Dryden, John. Aureng-zebe, A Tragedy (1685)
Dryden, John. The Conquest of Granada by the Spaniards (1687)[10]
Dryden, John. The Hind and the Panther. A Poem (1687)[11]
Dryden, John. The Indian Emperor, or, The Conquest of Mexico by the Spaniards (1686 or 1692)
Montaigne, Michel de. Essays, three volumes, translated by Charles Cotton (1685-86)[12]
Norris, John. A Collection of Miscellanies (1687 or 1692)
Philips, Katherine. Poems (1667, 1669, or 1678)
Plutarch’s Morals Translated from the Greek by Several Hands, vols. 1 and 2 (1691 or 1694)[13]
Reynolds, Edward. A Treatise of the Passions and Faculties of the Soul of Man (1656)
Suckling, John. Works (1676)
Tuke, Samuel. The Adventures of Five Houres: A Tragi-Comedy (1671)
Waller, Edmund. Poems (1694)
Wilmot, John, Earl of Rochester. Poems on Several Occasions (1680 or 1685)
In the prose section, Blount lists two page references tied to works that match the following printed texts:
Marana, Giovanni Paolo. The First Volume of Letters Writ by a Turkish Spy (1691, 1692, 1693, or 1694) or the eight-volume edition (1694)
Sprat, Thomas. The History of the Royal-Society (1667, 1702, 1722, or 1734)
Interestingly, one of the books described in Lindenbaum’s post, Reynolds’ A Treatise of the Passions (1656), is in the above list. It was the first book that Blount used in the verse portion of the miscellany. She inscribed the Reynolds book on July 10, 1696, and I wonder if then or shortly thereafter she wrote the heading “1696” in the St. Paul’s manuscript and began transcribing. Visible in the marginal notes beside the second entry in figure 3, above, you can see the note “Reynolds saith in his Tre: of ye Pa: & Faulties of ye Soul Page ye 228.” This short passage on grief (the only passage in prose in the verse section of the manuscript) is indeed from p. 228 in Reynolds’ book. But Reynolds’ treatise is also the source for the rest of the passages on this first page, those she has attributed to Ovid, Lucretius, and Euripides; of three on the following page (fol. 178v), which she has attributed to The Iliad, Ovid, and Homer; and of one on fol. 186v, which she has attributed to “A Greek Poet,” which Reynolds identifies as Euripides. In these seven passages (which appear in Reynolds, pp. 228, 179, 122, 89, 284, 297-98, and 265), Blount obscures Reynolds as the source and instead highlights his own marginal references to classical authors and their works, no doubt capitalizing on the cultural cachet of these ancient sources.[14]
As Lindenbaum and Van Elk have discovered, Blount owned books written by Ben Jonson (The Works, 1692, which she purchased in 1699), Edmund Waller (The Works, 1729, which was given to her by the editor in 1730), and Francis Bacon (The Essays or Counsels, 1673, which she inscribed in 1697). Though extracts or complete works by each writer appear in Blount’s miscellany, those precise editions were not her source. A marginal note indicates that the eight-line passage from Jonson’s translation of Horace’s De Arte Poetica appeared “In a Translation of Hor:” (fol. 187v). This suggests that Blount’s source was The Poems of Horace, Consisting of Odes, Satyres, and Epistles Rendered in English Verse by Several Persons, which included Jonson’s translation in the editions of 1666 and 1671. There are four extracts from Waller, from The Maid’s Tragedy Altered (fol. 178v), “Of Divine Love. Six Cantos” (fol. 179r), “A Panegyrick to my Lord Protector” (fol. 179r), and “Upon the Earl of Roscommon’s Translation of Horace” (fol. 180v). Two of the four extracts have page numbers beside them, and these line up with Waller’s Poems of 1694 but do not match the 1729 edition.[15] Since Blount began compiling her manuscript in 1696, and since the Waller extracts appear near the beginning (fols. 178v, 179r, and 180v), the Waller edition she received in 1730 is not her source. Finally, the Bacon item she includes in full, “The Character of Queen Elizabeth” (fols. 257v, rev.-247v, rev.), is the English translation that was first printed in the 1696 edition of The Essays or Counsels; the 1673 edition she owned does not include that work.[16] Blount might have used editions from 1696, 1701, 1706, or 1718, all of which included the version she transcribed.
Blount’s sources are even more plentiful than the above list since many more rhyming couplets, prose and verse extracts, and complete poems and prose works appear in her miscellany, only sometimes identified by author. Though the exact works and editions are not always clear, in addition to those already mentioned she includes passages or complete works from the following authors in her compilation: Edward Baynard, Thomas Browne, Colley Cibber, John Cleveland, Jeremy Collier, Thomas Creech, William Davenant, John Donne, Richard Fanshawe, Charles Gildon, Matthew Morgan, John Oldham, John Philips, Samuel Pufendorf, Charles Sedley, Jeremy Taylor, William Walsh, and John Webster.[17]
Katherine Blount’s miscellany gives us a rich opportunity to see one woman from the late-seventeenth and early-eighteenth century engaging with her reading material. It is likely that more books owned by Blount from the above lists will surface, so let’s all keep our antennae out.
Source: St. Paul’s Cathedral Library MS 52 D.14. Photos by Graham Lacdao, St. Paul’s Cathedral, reproduced with permission.
Works Cited
Booker, John M. L., ed. The Clough and Butler Archives: A Catalogue. West Sussex County Council, 1965.
Burke, John. A Genealogical and Heraldic History of the Commoners of Great Britain and Ireland. 4 vols, London, 1836-38.
Burke, Victoria E. “The Couplet and the Poem: Late Seventeenth-Century Women Reading Katherine Philips.” Women’s Writing, vol. 24, no. 3, 2017, pp. 280-97. Special issue: Katherine Philips: Form and Reception, edited by Marie-Louise Coolahan and Gillian Wright. Reprinted in Katherine Philips: Form, Reception, and Literary Contexts, edited by Coolahan and Wright, Routledge, 2018, pp. 151-68.
Burke, Victoria E. “‘The disagreeable Figure of a Common-Place’ in Katherine Butler’s Late Seventeenth-Century Verse Miscellany.” Manuscript Miscellanies in Early Modern England, edited by Joshua Eckhardt and Daniel Starza Smith, Ashgate, 2014, pp. 183-99.
Potter, George R., and Evelyn M. Simpson. “General Introductions: II. On the Manuscripts.” The Sermons of John Donne, 10 vols., edited by Potter and Simpson, University of California Press, 1962, vol. 1, pp. 33-45.
Van Koughnet, Jane C. E. A History of Tyttenhanger. London, 1895.
[1] See sources by Van Koughnet, Crook and Henning, and others in the posts by Lindenbaum and O’Donnell.
[2] This research culminated in an article on Butler’s manuscript miscellany, “The disagreeable Figure of a Common-Place” (2014). See note 6, in which I used John Burke’s Commoners, vol. 3, p. 517, to suggest her possible link with the Butlers of Amberley Castle; I used the birth and death dates from Booker, The Clough and Butler Archives, pedigree facing p. x.
[3] For a description of St. Paul’s Cathedral Library MS 52 D.14, see Potter and Simpson, vol. 1, pp. 41-42. For editions of the four Donne sermons in this manuscript, see The Oxford Edition of the Sermons of John Donne Project website: https://donnesermons.web.ox.ac.uk/st-pauls-cathedral-library-ms-52d14
[4] The first passage is from Dryden’s play The Conquest of Granada by the Spaniards; the 1687 edition matches Blount’s marginal reference of p. 88 (the reason for the cross-reference to p. 67 on the right of the passage is unclear). The second passage is from Dryden’s Aureng-zebe, a Tragedy, and Blount’s page reference of 46 matches the 1685 edition of that play.
[5] The final item in the verse section, the first 13 lines from the verse prologue of Dr Edward Baynard’s Health: A Poem, must be from the 1719 edition (the first to include the verse prologue) or later editions. An item from the later pages of the prose section in Blount’s hand (fol. 259r, rev.) appears to have been extracted from The Counsels of Wisdom, Or a Collection of Such Maxims of Solomon as are Most Necessary for the Prudent Conduct of Life … by Monseigneur Fouquet …, vol. 1 (1736), p. 28. While two seventeenth-century volumes with similar titles from 1680 and 1683 contain the passage, Blount’s wording matches the 1736 edition.
[6] My thanks to Shane Hawkins, who matched many of the references to digitized copies of books in Early English Books Online (EEBO), which catalogues books printed from 1475-1700, and Eighteenth-Century Collections Online (ECCO).
[7] Though Orrery’s Two New Tragedies (1669) also contains this extract on the page listed by Blount (p. 45), she later quotes (without a page reference) from Orrery’s Mustapha, a play which appears in the 1670 and 1694 volumes but not the 1669. It is thus more likely that she used the 1670 or 1694 edition for the extracts from both plays.
[8] Blount’s page numbers line up with the editions of 1668, 1669, 1672, 1674, 1678, 1680, 1681, 1684, 1688, and 1693. Though the page numbers also match Cowley’s Poems (1656), she later quotes (without a page reference) from a work that does not appear in the 1656 edition, making it more likely that all of her Cowley quotations come from an edition of his Works.
[9] Blount’s page number matches the 1691 edition of An Evening’s Love, or, The Mock-Astrologer, but also the version of the play found in the three-volume 1695 collection of Dryden’s works. Only one other Dryden work in this list fits the pagination in the three-volume 1695 edition (The Hind and Panther); since none of Blount’s page numbers for Aureng-zebe, The Conquest of Granada, or The Indian Emperor match the three-volume edition, it is not likely the source for her Dryden extracts. A final play by Dryden, All for Love, or, The World Well Lost a Tragedy, is quoted by Blount, but her edition is uncertain since the Prologue from which she quotes is unpaginated in all editions (1678, 1692, 1696, and the three-volume 1695 edition of Dryden’s works).
[10] The quotation appears on pp. 87-88 in the 1678 edition, but the only edition in which it appears on p. 88 (Blount’s reference) is the 1687 edition.
[11] Blount must have extracted from one of the three editions Jacob Tonson printed in 1687, since her reference of p. 14 lines up with those editions only (not with the other two editions printed in 1687, by James Watson and by Andrew Crook and Samuel Helsham, whose pagination is different).
[12] Though Blount gives a page reference for only one of her eleven quotations from this source (p. 327 from vol. 1), the quotations come from all three volumes.
[13] Blount quotes nine times from volume 1 or 2 of this work, but only gives a page number once (p. 37), which matches volume 1 of the 1691 and 1694 editions.
[14] For a discussion of Blount’s use of classical sources in her miscellany see Burke, “The disagreeable Figure of a Common-Place,” pp. 193-94. Blount also obscures Samuel Pufendorf’s Of the Law of Nature and Nations (1703) as the source of thirty classical quotations.
[15] The page reference given by Blount for the extract from “Of Divine Love. Six Cantos” (p. 281) matches both the 1694 and 1705 editions, but the page reference for The Maid’s Tragedy Altered (p. 10) matches the edition of the play first printed in 1690, and then in the Poems of 1694, but not the 1705 edition, suggesting that Blount likely used the 1694 edition for her Waller extracts.
[16] Two different English translations were printed earlier in the century: one in 1651 in The Felicity of Queen Elizabeth: and Her Times (pp. 1-42) and one in 1657 in the collection Resuscitatio (pp. 181-93). This latter translation by William Rawley was praised as superior in Baconiana, or, Certain Genuine Remains of Sr. Francis Bacon (1679), pp. 52-53, by “T. T.” The Latin text seems first to have been printed, also by Rawley, in the Latin collection entitled Opuscula varia posthuma (1658), pp. 175-94.
[17] Later material that may be in a different hand includes a sermon by John Scott, letters by John Tillotson and James Radcliffe, and “Mrs Cowlings Thoughts upon Time.” (The last may be the Mrs. Couling referred to by Van Koughnet as a friend of Blount’s sister, Grace: p. 68). For additional work on Blount’s reading material and strategies see the two articles (and forthcoming work) by Burke.
Previous posts on this blog (see here and here) have revealed to us the book ownership of Katherine Blount (d. 1753), wife of Sir Thomas Pope Blount (1670–1731), the second baronet. The blog has so far traced eleven of her books—or rather evidence for ownership of eleven books, for four are known only through report. (All her inscriptions traced to date follow her marriage in 1695, as they employ her married name of Blount, rather than her maiden name of Butler.) I would like to add one more to this list, a copy of Samuel Garth’s celebrated mock-epic, The Dispensary (London, 1699), on the feud among London’s physicians and apothecaries concerning dispensing medicines gratis to the poor.
I acquired this book myself in June 2011 via the internet from a Los Angeles bookdealer. I have several early editions of this poem, because they are fairly commonly, even typically, annotated, the chief and pleasurably conspiratorial task of the reader being—as it had been with John Dryden’s Absalom and Achitophel—to identify which historical personages lie hidden under poetical ciphers (e.g. ‘Querpo’ for the physician Dr George Howe), as well as those sporting the customary libel-dodging fig-leaf dash (e.g. ‘Lord De——re’ for Lord Devonshire). Katherine Blount’s copy does not disappoint.
Katherine acquired this book, a copy of the second edition, very soon after its first appearance, as her inscription records that she received it from her cousin by marriage, Henry Blount, on 27 May 1699.
This is Henry of Blount’s Hall, born in the Strand in 1675. He was educated at Christ Church, went into the military, served as a Lieutenant-Colonel in the Foot Guards, but was killed young in 1704 in the Battle of Schellenburg, one of the engagements of the War of the Spanish Succession. Henry was the son of Charles, the famous Deist writer and younger brother of Thomas Pope Blount Sr, the first baronet, an equally famous if less notorious writer than brother Charles, who had preferred the genres of the essay and the biobibliography, and who had presented to Katherine a copy of the 1697, third edition of his Essays. So the Henry who gave Katherine this book was properly her husband’s first cousin, and she had already received at least one book from his father.[1]
The Dispensary was a publishing sensation: it went through three editions in 1699 alone, distinguished as such on their title-pages; by 1768 it had reached its eleventh. The first printed merely Garth’s poem, but the second and third sported various prefatory materials, including four commendatory poems, of which the final is by one ‘H. Blount’, almost certainly ‘our’ Henry Blount. Now Henry gave his cousin’s wife a copy of this second edition, presumably hot off the press, and so in effect he was presenting her with a modern classic in which he himself now proudly featured.[2]
Katherine’s copy is further distinguished by the amount of annotation it bears. Garth’s poem, as mock-epic, had allegorised its main protagonists by giving them entirely new names, a common tactic. The reader was invited to ‘crack the code’ of the poem, and to facilitate this manuscript ‘keys’ to the poem were circulated, eventually making it into print, and indeed thereafter often accompanying later editions of the poem. Garth himself probably initiated this process: a letter of his, of 1699 or just perhaps 1700, to Arthur Charlett of University College, Oxford, includes a key in his own hand.[3] Now there is a key in Katherine’s copy in the front end-papers, albeit the page was at some subsequent point too closely courted by candle, and is now rather damaged at the edges. Then, throughout the text, like many other readers, identifications of characters have been added where needed. Garth’s poem of course invited this sort of engagement; but this is still an impressively engaged copy.[4] What I would say is that the key does not seem to me to be in the hand of Katherine’s signature, but the annotations are probably in the hand of the key. Let the reader judge!
Here is the (damaged) manuscript key at the front of the book (the larger stains indicate that there was an original leather binding wrapped around; the copy is now elegantly rebound in modern quarter-calf), with a second picture with a tiny loose fragment restored:
And here are some characteristic annotated extracts:
What I would like to know is whether this hand can be identified with either the donor or with later figures associated with Katherine—or just possibly with Katherine herself when not writing ownership inscriptions. I doubt this book passed out of her hands within her lifetime. And I have fully collated neither key nor annotations against surviving keys and copies: so I would welcome further research into this matter.
Finally, of Katherine’s books traced so far, her ownership inscriptions are added to books often printed quite a long time ago: her 1656 Edward Reynolds was gifted to her in 1696; her 1662 Glanvill and 1673 Bacon were both acquired in 1697; her 1678 Willughby in 1738; her 1690 Pepys in 1701; her 1692 Ben Jonson was bought by her in 1699; her 1695 John Somers in 1705. A book by Basil Kennett published in 1721 was bequeathed to her in 1734. These are gaps of frequently decades. There have been two exceptions so far: we have seen that Blount Senior gave Katherine a book of his own presumably upon publication; and the final book noted by Sarah Lindenbaum in her post on this blog, a Xenophon of 1710, was a present from the Duchess of Marlborough in the year of publication. We know of so few of her books that it is rash to generalize, but on this evidence Katherine typically came into ownership of books that had already been in circulation for some time. Her copy of Garth is a further exception, and an interesting one, because we know that a very literary uncle by marriage had presented her with a book of his own writing; and now we have one from his son, containing a poem of his own composition.
New College, Oxford
Source: book in private ownership. All images reproduced with permission.
[1] For genealogical material I am indebted, like previous posters on this blog, to Lady Jane Van Koughnet’s A History of Tyttenhanger (London: Marcus Ward & Co., 1895).
[2] The poem has been edited in volume six of the Yale University Press series Poems on Affairs of State (1970, ed. by F. H. Ellis). Indispensable remain John F. Sena, ‘Samuel Garth’s The Dispensary’, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 15 (1974), 639–48, and C. C. Booth, ‘Sir Samuel Garth, FRS: the dispensary poet’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society, 40 (1985–6), 125–45; the bibliography of the poem was put on a proper footing by Pat Rogers, ‘The Publishing History of Garth’s Dispensary: Some ‘Lost’ and Pirated Editions’, Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society, 5 (1971), 167–77.
[3] Bodleian, MS Ballard 24, fols. 111r–112v (113r is another key, not in Garth’s hand); J. F. Sena, ‘The letters of Samuel Garth’, Bulletin of the New York Public Library, 78 (1974), 69–94, at 93–4.
[4] Just flipping through the Bodleian copies: the first edition in the library possibly once belonged to the great Greek scholar Humphrey Hody, as it is in a volume, 4o P 19 Jur, with some titles that certainly did, but it is unannotated. A copy of the second edition, G. Pamph. 1594(1), is heavily cropped but sports dozens of identifications placed in the margins, and is followed by printed key. A copy of the third edition, Godw. Pamph. 1570(4), is particularly full, with all blanks filled in, many interlinear identifications, some giving alternative possibilities, and even a couplet on Garth at the end. Another copy of the third edition, at Gough London 257, is comparably annotated, the annotator being Samuel Bishop, Fellow of St John’s, Oxford 1753, whom Gough identifies as the headmaster of Merchant Taylors’ School of that name; he was a poet too.
In my work cataloguing the rare books of several Oxford College libraries, I come across many interesting clues as to the provenance of the books. Though some books were bought directly from the booksellers by the colleges, others came from alumni, who in turn acquired their books from a variety of sources. I was cataloguing a copy of Cyrano de Bergerac’s A Comical History of the States and Empires of the Worlds of the Moon and Sun, printed in London in 1687, in the library of Hertford College, Oxford, when I noticed a distinctive signature on one of the endpapers.
Feeling sure I had seen this signature before, I searched these pages and found Sarah Lindenbaum’s blog post of March 30, 2020. The inscription in our book matches the others found by Sarah, this time with the date 1706 and the price 3s 6d. We can’t be sure how this book ended up in Hertford College Library, though it has certainly been here since the 19th century, as it has an ownership note of “Magdalen Hall Library” on the title page.
Magdalen Hall later became the second iteration of Hertford College (the first Hertford College was founded in 1740 but dissolved in 1805) when it was refounded in 1874–you can read more about its history here: https://archive-cat.hertford.ox.ac.uk/researchGuides/briefGuide. However, there is an earlier, as yet unidentified, provenance inscription on the first free endpaper, which pre-dates Katherine’s.
This edition of Cyrano de Bergerac’s work, first published posthumously in France in 1657, also has a correction, possibly by Katherine, on a torn page (leaf ²B8).
It is an interesting work to add to the others found by Sarah, continuing to show the breadth of Katherine’s interests. This early work of science fiction inspired the work of later writers such as Jonathan Swift and Voltaire and touches on philosophy, religion, and politics.
Hertford Library collection is open to researchers (https://www.hertford.ox.ac.uk/and-more/rarebooks-archives/rare-books) and partly catalogued on the university catalogue SOLO. There is still much to be discovered within the collections at Hertford College, and the ongoing cataloguing project will hopefully provide more interesting examples of early female owners.
One of the aims of Early Modern Female Book Ownership is to document women owners in the hope of discerning patterns of ownership, whether broader or localized to an individual. In Katherine Blount’s case, I had drafted a post in spring 2019 about a 1656 edition of Edward Reynolds’ A Treatise of the Passions and Faculties of the Soul of Man once in her possession and offered for sale by Blackwell’s Rare Books. She inscribed a front endpaper of the book “Katherine Blount Given me by Sr Thomas=Pope Blount, July ye 10th. 1696.”
To my frustration, I could find little information about Blount, apart from the fact that she was the wife of the 2nd Baronet, Sir Thomas Pope Blount (1670–1731), who married a Katherine Butler in 1695 and therefore must have given Reynolds’ book to her shortly after their marriage. An absence of information is an all-too-common problem in researching the lives of women, both in the early modern period and in more recent times. Many are unknown to the historical records except insofar as they are related to husbands, fathers, and other men.
A few months after I drafted my post about Blount, Jarndyce Antiquarian Booksellers offered for sale “an early Ben Jonson folio with contemporary female provenance.” Although the book was sold thereafter and now resides at the Beinecke Library under shelf-mark 2020 +1, Jarndyce was kind enough to allow me to share images of it on this website. It wasn’t until recently that I realized that the previous owner was none other than Katherine Blount.
The hoped-for patterns have emerged. To begin with, we can now link two books recently offered for sale to the same owner, somewhat of a rarity given that we are at the mercy of serendipity when it comes to booksellers’ wares. We can also guess that Blount may have regularly dated new acquisitions to her library and described her sources. The Reynolds book was a gift from her husband, but the 1692 edition of Jonson’s works appears to have been her own purchase, one for which she paid 18 shillings.
The best source of information about Blount’s life I have been able to find so far is an obscure text called A History of Tyttenhanger, written by Lady Jane Van Koughnet of Tyttenhanger House and published in 1895 [1]. Blount was the daughter of James Butler and Grace Caldecott of Amberley Castle, an edifice which is still standing today. She was born in 1676 and became the mistress of Tyttenhanger when she was nineteen, though she and her husband resided primarily at Twickenham. Just as Paul Morgan suggests that Frances Wolfreston was a “stronger character” than her husband, who was described as “meeke and virtuous” in his funeral epitaph, Van Koughnet makes clear that Katherine Blount was worth more notice than Thomas Pope Blount.
Sir Thomas was of a kind disposition, and greatly beloved . . . but there is nothing of his left that points to any talent or taste in particular. His wife, on the contrary, was a brilliant woman, full of cleverness and highly cultivated, fond of poetry, a lover of all that was refined and artistic, interesting herself in the passing world of her day, and gifted with a mind full of energy. Sir Godfrey Kneller’s portrait of her is handsome and determined-looking. She was a friend of Alexander Pope, with whom she corresponded. (65)
Van Koughnet goes on to describe Blount’s “large collection of all sorts of curiosities,” the remnants of which survived at Tyttenhanger at the time of writing. Blount owned, among other objets d’art, a “Chinese cabinet containing a collection of coins,” “Chinese idols, [a] boxwood Romululs and Remus with the wolf, . . . engravings, [and an] ivory crucifix.” Perhaps the most interesting of Blount’s surviving treasures is a “sheath with the ornamental arrows which she wore at a fancy ball, where she went dressed to represent Diana” (66–67).
Unfortunately, Van Koughnet does not say much about Blount’s book collection. Van Koughnet’s remaining pages about Blount mainly consist of letters that Blount received from her eldest surviving son Harry and his tutor. In spite of Blount’s “great pains with the education of her children,” Harry Pope Blount had difficulty managing money and appealed constantly to his mother, after she was widowed in 1731, to rescue him from his debts (68). He did briefly succeed her after she died on March 2nd, 1753, but the Tyttenhanger estate ultimately fell to his sister Catherine Blount Freman and to her daughter Catherine Freman Yorke in 1763. Upon her death, Katherine Blount left to her son “her books, prints, coins, medals, rarities, and curiosities” (91).
Katherine has been at least nominally recognized for her book collecting. Her name is listed in William Carew Hazlitt’s bibliography A Roll of Honour: A Calendar of the Names of over 17,000 Men and Women Who Throughout the British Isles and in Our Early Colonies Have Collected MSS and Printed Books from the XIVth to the XIXth Century, along with a Juliana Blount, relation unknown.
Blount also appears twice in a 1905 record of London book auctions as the recipient of a presentation copy of a third edition of Sir Thomas Pope Blount’s essays [2]. This Blount would have been her father-in-law, the 1st Baronet, who died the same year that the book was published.
I have since been able to link an additional seven books to her library:
Bacon, Sir Francis. The Essays or Counsels, Civil & Moral (London: Printed by T.N., [1673]) Inscribed “Katherine Blount, 1697.” Whereabouts unknown. Cf. Walter, Jerrold. The Autolycus of the Bookstalls (London: J.M. Dent, 1902), p. 189–90.
The Banquet of Xenophon (London: Printed for John Barnes, 1710) Inscribed “Kath: Blount. Given me by ye Dutchess of Marlborough. 1710.” The National Trust, shelf-mark WIM.
Glanvill, Joseph. Lux Orientalis, or, An Enquiry into the Opinion of the Eastern Sages, Concerning the Praeexistence of Souls (London, 1662) Inscribed by Sir Thomas Pope Blount and Katherine Blount; Katherine’s inscription is dated 1697. Whereabouts unknown. Cf. Catalogue of a Further Choice Portion of the Valuable Library of a Well-Known Collector (Sotheby & Wilkinson, [1858]), p. 33.
Kennett, Basil. Romae Antiquae Notitia, or, The Antiquities of Rome (London: Printed for R. Knaplock, 1721) Inscribed by Blount “Left by my Dear Brother the Revd Mr John Pope Blount (who decas’d Apr. 8. 1734) to the Library at Tittenhanger.” The National Trust, shelf-mark WIM.
Pepys, Samuel. Memoirs Relating to the State of the Royal Navy (London: Printed for B. Griffin, 1690) Inscribed “Katherine Blount price 6s., 1700/1.” Whereabouts unknown. Cf. Book-Prices Current, volume 27 (1913), p. 499.
Somers, John. A Discourse Concerning Generosity (London: Printed for J.A., 1695) Inscribed “Kath: Blount” and dated “1705.” British Library, shelf-mark 4403.bb.30. Cf. Rudolph, Judith. Common Law and Enlightenment in England, 1689-1750 (Boydell Press, 2013), p. 193.
Willughby, Francis. The Ornithology . . . In Three Books (London: Printed by Andrew Clarke, 1678) Inscribed “Katherine Blount Given me by Mrs. Pope 1730.” The National Trust, shelf-mark WIM.
These seven books demonstrate the breadth of Blount’s reading interests and also confirm that she did indeed systematically date new additions to her library as the inscriptions in her Reynolds and Jonson attest. The acquisition dates of the books described in this essay span a thirty-eight year period from 1696 to 1734. Katherine lived an additional nineteen years after 1734, and it will be interesting to see if any of her books emerge which are dated after this year. Her son Harry sent her a letter in October 1738 thanking her for “ye gift of Theophilus etc: wch I have once read, & design to read it often carefully Over,” so it seems clear that books continued to play an important role in her life and that of her family well into the 1730s, and probably beyond (79). It would be interesting, too, to delve into how the National Trust came to hold three of her books and whether there are any more besides. Another avenue worth taking would be Blount’s relationships with the women and men who gave her books, particularly Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough and “Mrs. Pope.”
Source: Edward Reynolds title offered for sale by Blackwell’s Rare Books. The Jonson was offered for sale in October 2019 and has since been acquired by the Beinecke Library at Yale. Images used with permission.
Additional Reading
[1] Van Koughnet, Lady Jane. A History of Tyttenhanger (London: Marcus Ward & Co., [1895])
[2] Karslake, Frank. Book-Auction Records: A Priced and Annotated Record of London Book Auctions: Vol. II: October 1, 1904–September 30, 1905 (London: Karslake & Co, 1905), p. 202, 348.
Early Modern Female Book Ownership 