Women's Bookscapes in Early Modern Britain: Reading, Ownership, Circulation

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The Bookscape Leah Knight and Micheline White

I This volume showcases a wide range of new evidence and interpretations of early modern British women reading, owning, and circulating books and libraries between 1500 and 1700, a period that saw increased literacy and a revolution in book production and distribution. Scholars have long reconstructed and assessed the books and libraries of Renaissance men, including Henry VIII, Gabriel Harvey, John Dee, Ben Jonson, and Francis Drake; but as David McKitterick observed in his study of Elizabeth Puckering’s library, women’s book ownership has been a particularly elusive and largely uninvestigated subject that “awaits its historian.”1 Since then, Heidi Brayman Page 2 →Hackel and Catherine E. Kelly have called for scholars to be more creative in their search for and treatment of evidence of women’s books and reading, and a number of recent studies have offered more detailed and nuanced descriptions of the field.2 The authors in this volume further cultivate this burgeoning field with projects that advance knowledge of early modern women as readers and owners of books, and that diversify the methods that may be brought to bear upon the subject. In the past thirty years, the study of early modern women’s book ownership and reading has been bifurcated. As book historians and literary critics turned to examine women’s writing in the 1980s, they naturally focused considerable attention on the connections between women’s writing and women’s reading, since reading and literacy were preconditions for writing. Scholars undertook examinations of female-authored literary works, diaries, and commonplace books in light of male-authored directives regarding female literacy and education, and then analyzed how individual women responded to such patriarchal attitudes and deployed their reading in their own literary productions.3 At the same time, a somewhat separate strand of scholarshipPage 3 → probed the material traces of women’s reading, such as marginalia, ownership inscriptions, library inventories, and postmortem inventories.4 These investigations were largely by scholars in the broader field of material book history, a field centered on the reading practices of elite male scholars, poets, courtiers, and clergymen. This groundbreaking research brought to light important instances of individual women who amassed large collections of books or left records of their reading in their books. Yet much of this scholarship concentrated on the difficulties of assembling evidence of female reading, and it often concluded that women’s reading differed from men’s because women had been conditioned to read passively and privately for relaxation, pleasure, or inward self-reflection. More recently, scholars have unearthed new information regarding both Protestant and Catholic women’s reading. Monographs or collections by Valerie Schutte, Femke Molekamp, Kate Narveson, Andrew Cambers, Helen Smith, Heidi Brayman Hackel, and Catherine E. Kelly uncovered a valuable corpus of yet-unstudied evidence pertaining to female readers and underscored the fact that women read for a much wider range of personal, political, religious, and familial reasons than previously imagined.5 Essays Page 4 →by Caroline Bowden, Heather Woolf, Julie Crawford, Andrew Cambers, and Rosalind Smith have examined the libraries of elite women and of monastic communities to demonstrate that women’s reading was often as active and goaloriented as men’s.6 The essays in this volume extend our understanding of women’s book history by bringing to light new kinds of evidence (lists of confiscated books, convent rules, handmade books); by discussing new instances and revised readings of familiar kinds of evidence (marginalia, postmortem inventories, ownership signatures, portraits, and intertextual allusions); by focusing more attention on Catholic readers and reading communities; and by examining how digital tools offer new possibilities for the recovery and theorizing of early modern women readers. The essays ask that we attend to the material foundations of reading as they shed light on the myriad ways in which women bought, borrowed, accessed, wrote in, made, recorded, cited, and circulated books. The essays also draw attention to the distinct but sometimes overlapping reading protocols and practices within different socioeconomic and religious communities,Page 5 → protocols that determined how books were read and how reading itself was understood as an activity. Further, the essays ask us to think carefully about what

exactly constitutes “evidence” for reading and how new evidence of women’s book usage challenges received ideas about the history of gender in relation to knowledge, education, confessional affiliations, family ties, and sociability. This book is thus designed to reimagine the foundations of early modern women’s literary history, as Margaret Ezell observes in the afterword, by reconceptualizing and remapping literary landscapes.

II Women’s Bookscapes in Early Modern Britain takes its titular trope from recent developments in book history and related fields. Robert Darnton brought this metaphor to the fore in the related analogy of “The Information Landscape” in a 2010 monograph; two years later, David Pearson called for a richer understanding of “the landscape of book ownership” in seventeenth-century England.7 Women’s Bookscapes is our resounding response. James Raven recently adopted his own usage of the term in Bookscape: Geographies of Printing and Publishing in London Before 1800, a study that envisions afresh the networks of people, places, and practices at work in the city’s book trade.8 In his use of “bookscape,” Raven restricts its ambit to reconstructive mappings based on illustrative and topographical evidence about Page 6 →sites of production but concedes that the term “is suggestive of the broader historical perception of the вЂworld of books,’” in a sense inclusive of the “uses, travels and representations of books,” which coheres with our more expansive treatment of the reading materials and mentalities of early modern British women.9 Raven reflects further on the term in a manner pertinent to our study: To reconstruct a “bookscape” is, of course, to introduce a pointed artificiality—no one, to my knowledge, spoke or wrote of such a thing in the eighteenth century—but it is offered here as a deliberate parallel with what I see as the tensions between three essentials of the concept of landscape: the imagined, the remembered, and the actual. The “bookscape” I propose is not just real terrain, but the envisaging of spatial form, value and temporality. In adopting the term, we modify Raven’s list by focusing not only or predominantly on spatial but on cultural forms, values, and temporalities. We also respond to Raven’s earlier discussion of the way in which his use of bookscape relates to the idea of the “prospect,” that prominent eighteenth-century construct: Prospects can offer both expectations as well as views, and they each do so from a fixed perspective which is by definition one of many possible views offered by individual commentators and viewers. What I have in mind, therefore, is a configurationВ .В .В . of differently constructed mental mappings—a cultural topography.10 Likewise, each essay in this collection offers a distinct prospect on the multivalent concept of women’s bookscapes in early modern Britain. The sum of the analyses is a similar configuration of mental mappings, a cultural topography of female reading, ownership, and circulation of books in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. While tropes of natural and cultural “scapes” have been deployed for centuries, the value of regarding books as part of a panorama of spatial and social Page 7 →factors has only lately gained scholarly traction. After a century of largely topographical variants,11 Gerard Manley Hopkins put the term at the center of his metaphysics, with “inscape” arising in his journals as “the individual or essential quality of a thing” based on his sense of “scape” as a kind of mental artifact, “a reflection or impression of the individual quality of a thing or action.”12 Hopkins’s “inscape,” “outscape,” and “lovescape” suggested the term’s introspective possibilities, although outward-facing, nature-based variations continued with “starscape,” “treescape,” and “snow-scape” in the 1880s. The end of the Victorian era saw a surge in terms for the cultural landscape (itself a phrase from 1919) in the emergent urban “roof-scape” and “roadscape” and the facetious “cow-scape” and “mudscape.” Inspired by new technology, the early twentieth century contemplated “moon-scape,” “nightscape,” “earthscape,” “airscape,” and even “manscape,” until idealistic marine and mountain scapes imagined in the Great

Depression were displaced, after the war, by the fallen “slumscape” and “wirescape” of the broader “urbanscape.” But the inward and abstract turn begun by Hopkins persisted in coinings from “mindscape” to “moodscape.” Notable for this volume is the recent rise in uses accounting for artistic and other mediating phenomena, with “poemscape” (1958) and “soundscape” (1968) already less familiar now, however, than the “mediascape” (1987) and corporate “Netscape” (1994). In the same vein, Matthew G. Kirschenbaum recently transferred “bookscape” to the digital realm, while a 2015 blogger used it for fictional (not factual, pace Raven) geographies.13 The flexible modern suffix “-scape,” however, finds its origins in “landscape”: a term that entered the lexicon in the thick of the English literary Renaissance, the period at the heart of this volume. One connotation pertinent to our titular term is aptly evoked by an early usage: “in a curious Lant-schape, oft we see Nature, so follow’d, as wee thinke it’s shee.”14 The term’s merger of the forms of art and nature (and, here, the feminine) renders it a valuable analytic in our study, since we interest ourselves at once in the natural and cultural habitat of women readers in early modern Britain and Page 8 →in the artfulness with which they—and we, in turn, as scholars—represent that habitat and their reading in the evidence consulted here. With this double-edged characterization in mind, the contributors to this volume are alert to the extent to which our recoveries, reconstructions, and representations of early modern women’s books and libraries are artful acts that can never provide unmediated access to the things themselves. While retaining appropriate rigor with respect to evidence, we also seize the opportunities offered by it to craft narratives and stage scenes of reading in chapters that envision the text lives of early modern women and their books. The artful aspect of scholarship, after all, is not to be regarded solely with skepticism, since it offers a salutary corrective to past approaches that have limited the apparent scope and significance of early modern women’s book collections and book use. In some past studies, an absence of evidence has been taken for an evidence of absence; lacking proof positive of women’s historical presence, some scholars have posited a dearth of women readers, libraries, and literacy. But recent work has amended the tendency to ignore or misread the patchwork of proof that remains to be curated and cultivated, while the expansion of online compendia of primary sources has been a boon to the field.15 As part of this collective effort, the contributors to this volume take up the challenge of Brayman Hackel and Kelly to probe that evidence more innovatively and inclusively. Both authors and readers of this book and others would do well to remember our craftsmanship in the evocation of historical representations of times, spaces, people, and thoughts that survive only in fragments—until we pull them together in our field of vision to create what we call a bookscape. So much must stand in synecdochically for what is likely the far greater preponderance of books and readers lost to the depredations of time and the peculiarities of a patriarchal past. The accounts of women’s book use and ownership in this volume aim, without hope of perfect success, to make up for lacunae in the histories of libraries in the English-speaking world, which Page 9 →are disproportionately likely to represent works owned and read by men, for reasons almost too well known to bear repeating: from unequal access to education and the materials of reading and writing by girls and boys; to property laws that subsumed a woman’s goods before marriage to her father and after marriage to her husband; to entrenched attitudes toward females as intellectual and spiritual inferiors who could neither benefit from nor avoid being corrupted by their exposure to and participation in literary culture. To say so much, however, is to take a very big step back from our particular topic—which is, in itself, a vista. “Landscape,” in early modernity as today, often suggests a prospect that may be wide but can nonetheless be absorbed at once from a single vantage point.16 “Streit mine eye hath caught new pleasures / Whilst the Lantskip round it measures”: in his felicitous phrasing, Milton neatly captured this sense of landscape as survey.17 “Survey” as map, appraisal, and overview was another key early modern term for the capacious apprehension of a discourse or subject, and one that aptly characterizes this volume’s wide-ranging encapsulation of early modern women’s books, reading, and the related state of scholarly play.

III Women’s bookscapes in early modernity are, we contend, sufficiently complex and understudied to demand

that more than one lens be applied to them. The need for more than one angle on this material accounts for this book’s tripartite structure, which breaks down the topic of early modern women’s books into individual case studies (Part I), analyses of women readers who are best understood as members of specific interpretive communities (Part II), and questions of evidence and the methods and electronic tools for interpreting it (Part III). i Part One, “(Book)case Studies,” provides a slate of close readings of individual women as reader-writers, owners, annotators, and circulators of books. The essays bring to light new evidence of women’s book ownership and reading as they examine marginalia, poetic and dramatic citations, library inventories, a list on the back of a letter, and association volumes. This sectionPage 10 → takes its inspiration from the images of Margaret More Roper and Lady Anne Clifford in book-lined spaces: the essays explore how five other women from different families, classes, and geographical locations acquired books, collected and recorded them, wrote in them, and used them as sources for their own projects. In doing so, these essays emphasize that book ownership was a material phenomenon that took place in specific sociopolitical spaces, and that individual women used their access to and reading of books to achieve a wide range of sociopolitical, religious, and literary objectives. In chapter 1, Micheline White extends our understanding of Queen Katherine Parr by examining the material traces of her reading. Her essay, “Katherine Parr’s Marginalia: Putting the Wisdom of Chrysostom and Solomon into Practice,” examines Parr’s reading practices by focusing on the material evidence found in a sermon on display at Sudeley Castle in Gloucestershire. Parr wrote her signature on the title page of A Sermon of Saint Chrysostom (1542) and used the verso of the volume’s flyleaf to copy eight verses from Solomon’s Ecclesiasticus. White argues that Parr’s signature and handwritten biblical excerpts are best read in light of the circulation of Chrysostom’s volumes at the Tudor court and in light of Henry VIII’s marginalia in his copy of The Books of Solomon (c. 1545); she concludes that Parr used the blank spaces of the material book to signal her commitment to the humanist recovery of Greek wisdom and to engage in spiritual self-improvement, preparation for ethical monarchical action, and courtly self-representation. This essay concurs with recent arguments that women’s reading and note-taking was not only personal and inward-looking but performative, outward-looking, and action-oriented. In “Isabella Whitney and Reading Humanism,” Mary Ellen Lamb examines a woman who read and wrote in a very different socioeconomic environment. As Lamb notes, by the late sixteenth century, humanist reading material once available only to the very well-educated and wealthy became newly available for mass consumption. This fact made humanist modes of subjectivity and self-definition available for sale. In this commercial environment, the choice of what to read became a choice of who to be, and Lamb argues that the interrelationship between the commercial domain and the interior self underlies Whitney’s boldest cultural innovations in The Copy of a Letter (1567) and Sweet Nosegay (1573). These two verse collections reveal her emulation of humanism in the prominence and frequency of her references to figures of classical myth and history; in her choice of Senecan commonplaces to versify; and in the social network she creates through the publication of personal letters she wrote and received. Lamb invites us to judge to what extent Whitney’s own commodification of humanist knowledge is Page 11 →implicated in the commerce she details so vividly in her poetic compositions, and to what extent Whitney exemplifies the opportunities and limitations of humanist reading for a non-elite woman of the late sixteenth century. Chapter 3, “Book Passages and the Reconstruction of the Bradstreets’ New England Library,” sees Elizabeth Sauer draw attention to the movement of books across the Atlantic and offer a partial reconstruction of the libraries used by Anne Bradstreet, the Anglo-American poet whose The Tenth Muse (London, 1650; Boston, 1678) was the first transatlantic collection of verse by a New World resident. Bradstreet—whose father Thomas Dudley had served as steward of the Earl of Lincoln’s estate, with its exceptionally rich library—had at her disposal a wealth of books even after her family immigrated to America in 1630. Dudley kept up an impressive collection in the New World, as did John Winthrop, whose major library was also a lending library. But when the Bradstreets’ Andover home was consumed by fire, their massive book collection (eight hundred items in all) went up in flames. What might their library have contained? Sauer’s central question matters because holdings from this library nourished Anne’s literary life in the 1630s and 1640s as she composed the poems

later published in The Tenth Muse. In answering this question, this chapter considers the ways in which a review of Old and New World library catalogues, letters, inventories, and methodologies—material, textual, bibliographic, and historical—might enable a partial reconstruction of the Bradstreet library, which Sauer argues represented a lifeline to Old England comparable to the “English blood[lines]” to which the poet refers in her elegy on Philip Sidney. Anne Bradstreet’s consultation and use of this library in the New World illuminates the migration of books across oceans and the emergence of a new transatlantic dynamic in early women’s reading and literary culture. In chapter 4, Edith Snook examines an intriguing list entitled “My own Bookes” found on the back and margins of a letter sent to Elizabeth Isham and in her hand; the list inventories over seventy items that Isham saw fit to claim for herself in 1648. Snook extends current scholarly discussions of Isham’s autobiographical practices by reading this book list as a form of life-writing and by exploring how she linked the property claimed in this library to her sense of self, familial property, and personal propriety. Through the particular nature of the books on the list, which the essay explores in conjunction with her other writings, Isham created a record of ownership and exchange, independence and interdependence, that linked her sense of self to a library with books about faith and knowledge that would be useful in the caring work to which she devoted so much of her life. As a representation of the self, the book list demonstrates Isham’s seriousness, industry, Protestant Page 12 →godliness, acceptance of royal authority, and national and local attachments. Her list thus writes the self within the spiritually significant context of her family, not least through annotations and other evidence that suggest familial sources for certain books. These annotations matter all the more owing to Isham’s discussion, in a memoir, of the personal significance she found in reading books that once belonged to her relations. Constructing the family as an institution of learning, Isham connects her family’s legacy as Christian readers to her own identity. Snook argues that, as a piece of autobiographical writing, the list of Isham’s “own Bookes” amounts to a defense of her property as well as an act of devotion: an inventory that organizes her devout self and recalls the teaching provided to her by God and kin. In “Margaret Cavendish’s Books,” Julie Crawford turns to a well-known reader and writer to look at how she used her books politically—both those she read and those she wrote. Drawing our attention to an extant inventory of the Cavendish library as well as Cavendish’s plays, Crawford argues that Cavendish’s rather obvious camouflaging of her perfectly typical practices of “politically active” humanist reading simultaneously signaled her consiliary rights and denied her complicity with the forms of “reading for action” that had contributed to the fall of the previous monarchy. For example, while Cavendish often explicitly denies any formal learning, a close reading of her plays and other works reveals that she repeatedly draws on Plutarch, Livy, Tacitus, Thucydides, Ovid, and other authors associated with humanist learning and counsel. Moreover, the sales inventory of the Cavendish library (1719) includes the books cited above as well as other classical texts associated with political dissent and critique. As Crawford argues, the contradiction between Cavendish’s claims about reading and her documented reading practices serves two purposes: it reveals her learning—a necessary skill for the politically ambitious—and denies any relationship that learning might have with dissent. Finally, if Cavendish considered her own writing a form of rightful baronial counsel, then her circulation of her folio volumes to specific libraries was an attempt to institutionalize rightful counsel as a cornerstone of English political order. ii The volume’s second section, “Reading Communities,” expands our understanding of women’s bookscapes by examining women whose reading and book ownership can be fruitfully discussed in light of the specific reading Page 13 →practices embraced by distinct communities. As much recent scholarship has emphasized, while books were read and collected by individuals, they were also read aloud in groups and circulated and interpreted within large households, extended kinship networks, and religious communities; it is therefore critical to explore how women from different social formations engaged in different reading and interpretive practices. The four essays in this section examine female readers in recusant, Anglican, and exiled monastic communities and offer discussions of sources such as lists of confiscated books, biographies, handmade books, monastic regulations, and book inscriptions by nuns. They focus attention on the community-specific

values and needs that shaped how, when, and why women acquired, read, and used their books, and together demonstrate the importance of integrating women from religious orders and networks into our understanding of female book culture in early modern England.18 In chapter 6, “Women, Books, and the Lay Apostolate: A Catholic Literary Network in Late SixteenthCentury England,” Elizabeth Patton examines lay women involved in the surreptitious distribution of illegal Catholic books who used devotional books to sustain and nourish their communities. She begins with a recently uncovered inventory of confiscated books from 1587 that reveals that a female distributor received the greatest share of six hundred devotional texts smuggled into England; most intended recipients were also women expecting delivery of Luis de Granada’s Memorial of a Christian Life. Drawing on contemporary accounts of women with access to the Memorial, this essay highlights resonances between their religious practices and that text, while exploring the sometimes uneven boundary between priestly practice and the female lay apostolate. Sources include the biography of Anne Howard, Countess of Arundel, patron of Jesuit Robert Southwell; the biography of her maternal aunt, Magdalen Browne, Viscountess Montague; and the biography of the Jesuit John Cornelius by Dorothy Arundell, “cousin german” to both Lady Montague and the Countess of Arundel. As Patton demonstrates, it is by tracing the connections between the language Page 14 →of the Memorial and descriptions of female piety that we glimpse how Catholic women used the books smuggled from the continent at such great risk in order to contribute to their spiritual communities. In “The Discovery of Pattern at Little Gidding,” Paul Dyck explores the extraordinary conjunction of reading, cutting, gluing, and the making of books in the community project established by Mary Ferrar and her son Nicholas, members of a wealthy London family who intentionally retreated to an estate near Cambridge to pursue a life of holiness. While Nicholas provided the form of the community’s central activities, in practice the community was largely directed by Mary Senior and her daughter, Susanna Collet, and most of the inhabitants were Mary’s granddaughters. Dyck examines two of the community’s activities that most strikingly speak to the idea of reading communities and women’s libraries: the dialogues of the “Little Academy” (captured in books called “Conversations”) and the production of Gospel “Concordances, ” handmade books blending the four gospels that were used in communal worship. Both activities demonstrate a disciplined, personal, and relational use of books by women, young and old, in the context of a community and its web of friendships. This chapter shows how the community practiced a form of Christian knowing through the opening of questions in a life of devotion, in contrast to emerging ideas of Christian certainty. Where we might expect the drive for pattern would produce habits of simplification, the “Conversations” and “Concordances” not only admit difference but at times delight in it. This chapter takes into account tensions within the community and the paradoxically demanding and hierarchical way that conversation and concord were practiced. The failures of the community are themselves rich opportunities for consideration: Little Gidding was at once conservative and radical, producing stories that reward sustained attention. The next two essays focus on reading and book circulation in continental English convents, spaces that had normative reading practices that differed quite significantly from those in Tudor and Stuart courts, Protestant households, and recusant communities. Prior to the closure of the monasteries, nuns taught recusant girls in convent schools, but thereafter English monastic communities on the Continent promoted and provided spaces for literacy and authorship.19 In “Common Libraries: Book Circulation in English Benedictine Convents, 1600–1700,” Jaime Goodrich reminds Page 15 →us that Benedictine monasticism shaped the circulation and use of books in convents, and that convent libraries were explicitly designed to serve a corporate population rather than individual readers. Goodrich draws our attention to monastic regulations, catalogues, and book inscriptions from five seventeenth-century English Benedictine convents (Brussels, Cambrai, Dunkirk, Ghent, and Paris) and illuminates the complex ways in which cloistered libraries offered nuns a space for negotiating the interplay between their collective and individual identities. The chapter reviews prescriptions on book usage at the convents, then explores the material evidence of communal and individual book “ownership” and circulation both within and outside the convent. This section ends with a consideration of censorship at the Paris house, analyzing how the prioress’s “secret books” served a broader communal need to protect the convent against potential spiritual controversies. The chapter discusses the methodological issues posed by

monastic libraries and reminds us that scholars must be careful not to obscure the protocols of the convent library by confusing cloistered with secular readers. The following essay complements Goodrich’s by offering an in-depth analysis of the reading experience of exiled English nuns at one stage of their formation: the novitiate. In “English Reading Communities in Exile: Introducing Cloistered Nuns to Their Books,” Caroline Bowden notes that reading was central to the religious life in convents and written into the rule from the foundation of every convent. Choir nuns, in particular, spent much time with books carefully chosen by senior members of the convent communities, and the introductory formation period led by Novice Mistresses set the pattern for their subsequent religious life. By the end of the novitiate, candidates had to understand the foundational texts of their order and the purpose of the religious life in order to be accepted into the convent by the community in a Chapter Meeting. However, the formation of novices for the choir gave them the literary skills needed to develop much of their own specialized reading matter, matter that would help them throughout their careers as they sought to achieve the ultimate goals of their religious lives. iii In the final section, “Collecting Women’s Collections: Evidence, Methods, Projects,” we examine how scholars are turning up fresh evidence of women’s distinctive encounters with books and casting that evidence in new light through innovative approaches. These essays review the methods behind and discoveries afforded by both major collaborative initiatives and intensivePage 16 → case studies and offer accounts of novel ways to mine the data hidden in catalogues and materials housed in digitized and traditional archives. In chapter 10, Sarah Lindenbaum turns to the relatively well-known example of Frances Wolfreston in order to illuminate how novel kinds of research—and institutional support for it—can yield fresh evidence in old cases. In “Hiding in Plain Sight: How Electronic Records Can Lead Us to Early Modern Women Readers,” Lindenbaum explores why early modern female readers have been historically absent from bibliographic records and argues that their books survive in much greater numbers than once believed: extant but undiscovered in institutional collections. She also suggests that many more early modern women’s books should emerge as librarians and scholars collaborate in extending electronic records to make more provenance and ownership information available. On the basis of her own recent findings of books Wolfreston once owned, and drawing on her expertise as a rare books cataloger, Lindenbaum demonstrates how to use Online Public Access Catalogs to trace the remains of women readers across multiple libraries. Electronic records, Lindenbaum argues, supply vivid details of Wolfreston as a reader that enhance our existing knowledge of her life and collecting habits, including what she paid for books, where she obtained them, and what she thought of them. After outlining search strategies for locating early modern women readers in electronic catalogues, and problems of search and retrieval, the chapter concludes with an exhortation for libraries to make early modern women readers more visible in their catalogues, and a vision of how collaboration between librarians and faculty can enhance online bibliographic data. The essay is followed by an appendix of the newly identified Wolfreston books located by Lindenbaum. The volume’s next two chapters explore two ways in which such evidence as is outlined in earlier essays can be aggregated for analysis. In “Women’s Libraries in the Private Libraries in Renaissance England Project,” Joseph Black considers the recent increase in the representation of early women’s libraries in the major ongoing editorial and research project devoted to the history of private book ownership in early modern Britain. In conjunction with the related open-access database hosted by the Folger Shakespeare Library, about 17,000 records of book ownership in England have been tracked by PLRE so far. While the first seven volumes of the project focused on scholarly inventories, starting in 2014 the PLRE project began to expand the social and geographical range of its represented owners, balancing the learned libraries found in the university environment with libraries compiled by rural vicars; members of underground religious communities; provincial Page 17 →merchants and tradesmen; diplomats and lawyers; and noble, gentry, and middle-class women. This chapter interrogates what these collections reveal about women book owners in the period. PLRE’s growing archive enables us to trace patterns among books owned by women, to generalize about their cultural, religious, or political interests, and to see similarities or differences with libraries collected by men in the period. Examples surveyed here range from the politically edgy theological books owned by Lady Mary Grey, to learned works of natural history and medicine in several other libraries, to the single book bequeathed by Ester Woodfeild of New

England’s Plymouth Colony to her servant Hannah Ewell. Black demonstrates how PLRE offers an important resource not only for histories of women’s reading and book circulation but for broader work on the social and intellectual culture of early modern women. In chapter 12, “Women’s Book Ownership and the Reception of Early Modern Women’s Texts, 1545–1700,” Marie-Louise Coolahan and Mark Empey present results from a major international research project on the reception and circulation of early modern women’s writings as these pertain to women book owners. While the research project, titled “RECIRC: The Reception and Circulation of Early Modern Women’s Writing, 1545–1700,” aims to map the transmission of texts written by women within the English-speaking world, Coolahan and Empey’s essay focuses on collections whose ownership is associated with early modern women. RECIRC’s extensive source material enables statistical analysis of the proportions of female- to male-authored books owned by female collectors, the size of women’s collections, and the proportions of manuscript and print texts women owned. The authors argue that English women’s book collections in this period challenge more modern ideas about gender-based solidarity: the evidence to date suggests that early modern women writers were not concerned with identifying female role models. The statistical analysis arising from RECIRC’s research offers new approaches to examining women’s relationships, as both writers and readers, with the printed and manuscript book. In the final essay, “Reading Proof: Or, Problems and Possibilities in the Text Life of Anne Clifford,” Leah Knight profiles the woman who has, over the past quarter century, perhaps become the “textbook” case in the history of early modern British women’s reading. The pivotal role played by reading in Anne Clifford’s tumultuous life story has become a matter of broad scholarly interest, and the extraordinary range and variety of evidence of Clifford’s reading experiences helps to make her a valuable case study in the history of reading. The full inventory of Clifford’s known reading materials includes not Page 18 →just books but also a portrait, letters, wills, newspapers, genealogical records, monumental inscriptions, and even—rather recursively—the very diaries, account books, and portrait from which we now draw our understanding of her text life. With this trove of probative material and considerable scholarship already in play, Clifford provides an unusually rich site for a survey of the methodological and evidentiary problems posed and possibilities afforded by the history of book use by early modern women. In this chapter, the literature on Clifford’s reading is reviewed and challenges associated with her legacy as a reader are identified along with newly imagined opportunities for extending our understanding of her long lifetime in books. In the afterword, “Mapping Early Modern Women’s Literary History,” Margaret J. M. Ezell, a pioneer in women’s literary history,20 surveys the essays comprising Women’s Bookscapes to show how they triangulate to establish the groundwork for an enriched appreciation but also reconception of the spectrum of early modern women’s literacy. In this volume, literacy is understood in terms of book and manuscript ownership, collection, circulation, consultation, reading, and of course usage and composition, all representative of widespread literary practices. Excavating and formulating women’s engagements with the book are the goals of Women’s Bookscapes at large. This collection also seeks to exhibit new types of evidence, such as lists of confiscated books and convent rules, in order to assess how they work alongside more familiar kinds of evidence, such as postmortem inventories, ownership signatures, and intertextual allusions. We not only supply an array of methods for gauging the evidence, but we also offer introductions to and analyses of key resources and technologies for ongoing investigations into women’s libraries. By advancing, in these varied ways, the understudied history of women’s book ownership and library compilation, we help dismantle binaries of private and public, reading and writing, female and male literary engagement and production, and ownership and authorship. Most adventurously and ambitiously, we propose through Women’s Bookscapes to expand the landscape of women’s book engagements and to generate new approaches for surveying the intersections of early modern material culture, book history, print culture, library studies, and women’s literary and cultural history.

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Part One (Book)case Studies

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One Katherine Parr’s Marginalia Putting the Wisdom of Chrysostom and Solomon into Practice Micheline White Katherine Parr has long been celebrated as a patron and a writer. In the nineteenth century and first half of the twentieth century, she was best known as the patron and dedicatee of the English translation of Erasmus’s Paraphrases on the New Testament (1548). With the advent of feminism, scholars turned their attention to Parr’s writing, and there is now a significant corpus of scholarship devoted to her three published works.21 But Parr was also an avid reader. Moreover, her reading was heavily scrutinized and was the topic of considerable interest to her friends and foes: while her allies (Nicholas Udall, Thomas Caius, Anthony Cope, and Princess Elizabeth) praised her for reading the Bible and other religious texts, her enemies accused her of reading dangerous, forbidden books and hiding them in her closet.22 Although these Page 22 →different assessments of Parr’s reading emerge from warring religious factions, they have one thing in common: they view the queen’s reading as a serious matter that had consequences for herself, for the king, for the court, and for the whole country. The broad impact of Parr’s reading is particularly stressed by Udall, who claims that Parr’s passion for reading religious materials had so inspired other noble women of the court that it “is now no news in England to see young damsels in noble houses and in the courts of princes, instead of cards and other instruments of idle trifling, to have continually in their hands either Psalms, homilies, and other devout meditations, or else Paul’s epistles, or some book of Holy Scripture matters.”23 In another dedication, Udall claimed that Parr’s commitment to reading the Bible reverberated throughout the nation: all Parr’s “delight,” “study,” and “endeavor” was “employed to the public commodity of all good English people, the King’s most loving and obedient subjects, to be nuzzled and trained in the reading of God’s Word and in the meditation of his most holy Gospel.”24 These celebrations of Parr-as-reader prompt the modern scholar to wonder about her engagement with the bookscapes of the Tudor court. What kinds of books did Parr acquire, collect, and read? Where did she store and read her books? With whom did she discuss her reading? What kind of reading practices did she employ? James P. Carley can help us begin to answer these questions, for he has noted that postmortem inventories following the deaths of Henry VIII (January 1547) and Thomas Seymour (March 1549) show that Parr had many small books in several traveling coffers. One coffer in particular (number seven) contained sixty books, “presumably the bulk of her collection.”25 Carley explains that the king and queen carried their personal books in coffers as they traveled from palace to palace, and these are the kinds of books that they read, shared, discussed, and annotated in their closets, privy chambers, and other court settings.26 Unfortunately, the extant Page 23 →inventories focus on the valuable coverings of Parr’s books and rarely give specific titles, although there are some details, such as a “Psalter,” a “book of Psalms,” a “book of parchment written in Italian,” New Testaments in French and English, a New Testament belonging to her second husband, and a “Primer in English.”27 Fortunately, other sources provide more specific evidence about what Parr was reading in her closet. From Parr’s own publications, we know that she worked with Bishop John Fisher’s Psalmi seu Precationes (London, 1544); Georg Witzel’s Formulae Precationum aliquot Evangelicarum (Mainz, 1541), Erasmus’s Precationes aliquot NovГ¦ (Basil, 1535), Richard Whitford’s translation of Thomas Г Kempis’s The Imitation of Christ (1531), and perhaps Luther’s Preface to the Romans (1524).28 In June 1547, Parr was presented with a bill for A Book of the Ten Commandments and a copy of Erasmus’s Enchiridion and The Preparation to Death, as well as for copies of her own books.29 Princess Elizabeth offered Parr manuscript translations of Marguerite de Navarre’s Miroir de l’Ame PГ©cheresse in 1544 (Bodleian Library, Cherry MS 36) and of one chapter of John Calvin’s Institution de la Religion ChrГ©stienne in 1545 (National Archives of Scotland, MS RH 13/78). In addition, six extant books have material

traces of Parr’s reading. Two of these are secular works. A copy of Il Petrarcha, con L’Expositione D’Alessandro Vellutello (Venice, 1544; BL C.27.e.19) covered with purple velvet has elaborate embroidery with Parr’s coat of arms, and Parr wrote a Latin inscription in a French-Latin dictionary for teaching children, Les mots franГ§ois selon l’ordre des lettres (Paris, 1544; BL C.28.f.3). The other four books are religious: around 1520, she wrote two short inscriptions in a family prayer book (CUL, Inc. 4.J.1.2 [3570]); she signed her name in Lady Jane Wriothesley’s manuscript prayer book (Bodleian, MS Laud Misc. 1, fol. 8b); she signed her name in a prayer book apparently owned by Anne Carew (Elton Hall); and she signed her name and wrote verses in a translation of a sermon by the Greek church Page 24 →father John Chrysostom (Sudeley Castle).30 The number of books that can be compiled from these various sources is admittedly smaller than the number of books that can be associated with Anne Bradstreet, Elizabeth Isham, Margaret Cavendish, Frances Wolfreston, or Anne Clifford (see chapters 3, 4, 5, 10, 13); nevertheless, the fortuitous survival of these volumes allows us to begin the project of studying Parr as a reader and of reconstructing what her books may have signified to her and to those (like Udall) who observed her reading. This chapter begins this undertaking through a detailed consideration of a single volume. Sudeley Castle in Gloucestershire currently houses a Sammelband of six octavo volumes bound in crimson velvet.31 Parr wrote her signature on the title page of the first book, A Sermon of Saint Chrysostom, wherein beside that it is furnished with heavenly wisdom & teaching, he wonderfully proveth, that No man is hurted but of himself: translated into English by the Flower of learned men in his time, Thomas Lupset Londoner (see fig. 1.1). This book is a translation of Chrysostom’s Quod nemo laeditur nisi a semet ipso, a sermon based on a well-known saying of the Greek cynic philosopher Diogenes of Sinope. In 1542, Lupset’s translation was printed by Thomas Berthelet, the king’s printer, in an edition that features his well-known title page compartment.32 Parr somehow acquired a copy of this book (and the five others), and she wrote her name on the bottom of the title page using the same formulation she used in official and personal correspondence from the time of her marriage to Henry on July 12, 1543, until the time of her death on September 7, 1548: “Kateryn the Quene KP.” But the signature is Page 25 →not all: the verso of the volume’s flyleaf has eight verses written in a secretary hand that has long been identified as Parr’s (see Appendix).33 As Mueller clarified in 2011, the eight verses are drawn from Ecclesiasticus, a biblical book attributed to King Solomon in the early modern period.34 Today Parr’s Page 26 →signature and annotations are on display in a glass case at Sudeley Castle and are examined by roughly one hundred thousand visitors a year. This display of her handwriting invites the viewer to lean forward and promises to reveal something about “Kateryn the Quene.” But what exactly? Fig. 1.1. Katherine Parr’s signature and annotations in Thomas Lupset, trans., A Sermon of Saint Chrysostom (London: Thomas Berthelet, 1542; RSTC 14639). Reproduced by permission of Sudeley Castle, Winchcombe. In what follows, I will argue that the Sudeley Castle book reveals how Parr used the blank spaces of the material book to engage in spiritual self-improvement, preparation for ethical monarchical action, and courtly selfrepresentation. In so doing, this chapter contributes to a growing body of scholarship that is focusing on the material traces of women’s reading (in margins and on title pages) and that views women’s marginalia as performative, outward-looking, and action-oriented as well as personal and inward-looking.35 I will begin by observing that the Greek church father John Chrysostom was newly visible at court in the early to late 1540s, as aspiring figures like John Cheke and Thomas Chaloner dedicated novel translations of Chrysostom to Henry and his advisors and as clerics like Archbishop Thomas Cranmer used Chrysostom to reform the English church.36 In such a context, Parr’s signature can be read as a visible marker that announces her commitment to humanist ideals and that identifies her as part of a community of cutting-edge, forward-thinking, reformist readers. Parr’s signature and annotations also draw our attention toward the Chrysostom sermon itself and raise questions about the relations between the handwritten notes and the printed text.37 In this sermon, Chrysostom exhorts his readers to disregard earthly power and riches and to focus on spiritual fortitude and virtuous action. Parr’s signature, I argue, declares that she is committed to those ascetic ideals, in spite of her position as a rich and powerful queen. Parr’s handwritten biblical verses elaborate on her signature by providing a list of maxims that will enable her to act in ways that fulfill Chrysostom’s directives and that might enable her to Page 27 →transform the court into a more godly place. Finally, I will demonstrate that Parr’s extractions

from Solomon’s Ecclesiasticus resonate closely with the annotations that Henry made in his copy of Solomon’s Book of Proverbs (c. 1545). Although it is unclear exactly when these annotations were entered, the markings in Parr’s and Henry’s books reveal similar patterns of religious reading and writing and a shared view that the margins of material books were important sites for monarchical self-reflection and selfrepresentation.38

Reading John Chrysostom at the Late Henrician Court John Chrysostom (d. 407) was the famously eloquent Archbishop of Constantinople. His works were in manuscript circulation in the West in Latin translations during the Middle Ages (some by Annianus of Celeda), but with the advent of humanism and sophisticated Greek scholarship, scholars like George of Trebizond (1395–1473), Desiderius Erasmus (1466–1536), Wolfgang Musculus (1497–1563), and Sigismund Gelenius (1497–1554) produced folio multivolume and small single-volume Latin-Greek editions of his works.39 Other scholars produced vernacular translations to make Chrysostom’s works more accessible, and his works were attractive to both Protestant and Catholic Reformers. Chrysostom became highly visible in England in the mid- to late 1540s, especially at court. Parr’s signature and annotations are intriguing in this context because they gesture outward and signal to others that she was part of a reading community of courtiers, scholars, and clerics who were interested in the recovery and active use of previously lost Greek texts.40 The first English translations of Chrysostom appeared in London in 1542. Thomas Berthelet, the king’s printer, issued the translation by Lupset that Page 28 →Parr owned, and John Mayler and Thomas Gough printed another translation by Charles Chavalary.41 Lupset (d. 1530) was a highly regarded second-generation humanist who had been friends with Erasmus, More, Colet, Lily, Leland, and Pole. As J. Christopher Warner has argued, Berthelet’s printing (and reprinting) of works by Lupset and other humanists in the 1530s and 1540s served to advertise Henry’s interest in the “new learning” and in progressive humanist projects.42 In the mid1540s, Henry VIII was presented with several new volumes of Chrysostom’s works by men who thought (or hoped) that they would be useful or interesting to him. A book bill from April 2, 1542, shows that Berthelet delivered to “the king’s highness” two large volumes of Latin translations: Chrysostom’s sermons on Matthew and his sermons on John, Mark, and Luke.43 According to Carley, Henry did not necessarily choose books himself and these volumes may have been acquired for him by an advisor who thought they would be useful.44 In addition, between 1543 and 1545 Henry VIII and his close advisor, Anthony Denny, were presented with three printed translations by John Cheke. Cheke was the first Regius Professor of Greek at Cambridge (1540), and he offered Henry translations of Chrysostom both before and after his appointment in July 1544 to serve as a tutor to Edward VI. It has often been thought that Parr was involved (along with Denny and William Butts) in Cheke’s appointment, but whether she was or not, she had a close relationship with Cheke and would have been interested in his noteworthy gifts to Henry.45 Cheke’s first gift was presented at Christmas 1543 as he offered Henry an impressive quarto edition of two Greek sermons with new Latin translations.46 As Winthrop Hudson observes, Cheke’s Greek-Latin book was remarkable as a material object for being “the first piece of sustained Greek printing in Page 29 →England,” and indeed the book must have been visually arresting to all who saw it at court.47 The novelty of this book was reinforced only three months later as the aspiring courtier Thomas Chaloner dedicated an English translation of the second of Cheke’s homilies to “Master Anthony Denny, one of the chief gentleman of the king majesty’s privy chamber.”48 Parr may well have seen this book because Denny’s wife, Joan Champernowne Denny, was one of Parr’s ladiesin-waiting. Chrysostom’s homilies were in the royal view once again in 1545, as Cheke offered Henry an octavo book as a New Year’s gift, this time a translation of six homilies on providence and fate.49 In 1546, Berthelet issued an edition of Lupset’s works that included a reprinting of the translation of Chrysostom from 1542 (RSTC 16932). In the context of all these translations, Cheke’s volumes are particularly helpful because they have dedications that offer an account of the cultural value of Chrysostom at court and thus shed light on how Parr (and Henry) may have viewed the copy that she read and signed. For example, Cheke underscores the novelty of his Chrysostom translations and claims that they enhance the prestige of Henry’s court. In offering his first exotic-looking gift, he trumpets the fact that he is offering Henry Greek texts that have not yet been translated and

have not come forth “into the sight of men.”50 He also posits that Henry’s court is the ideal location for the reappearance of Chrysostom’s wisdom and eloquence, since Henry is himself the epitome of wisdom and has created a “flourishing” state by using his “counsel and wisdom” to bring together “all virtue and humanity.”51 The printer Reyner Wolfe elaborates on this flattery through the use of a large (45 mm) historiated “Q” that opens the book and which appears twice in the 1543 volume and once in the 1545 volume (see fig. 1.2).52 This woodcut depicts Henry as Solomon using his wisdom to identify the true mother of a child (1 Kings Page 31 →3:16–28); but in this context Henry’s wisdom is constituted by his interest in Chrysostom and by his decision to support scholars like Cheke. Although Cheke does not discuss the actual content of the sermons in his dedications, he does assert that they are excellent reading material for Henry because they treat “holy and wholesome” topics and because they focus the mind on the important things to be looked for in this life and in the life to come.53 While Cheke tactfully or strategically leaves the question of how Henry might read and apply these “holy” topics up in the air, he clearly asserts that the recovery and use of Greek wisdom is a vital monarchical activity.54 Page 30 → Fig. 1.2. Henry VIII as Solomon in John Cheke, trans., О¤ОџОҐ О•Оќ О‘О“О™ОџО™ОЈ О™О©О‘ОќОќОџОҐ О¤ОџОҐ О§ОЎОҐОЈОџОЈО¤ОџОњОџОҐ бЅ‰ОњО™О›О™О‘О™ О”ОҐОџ.В .В .В . D. Joannis Chrysostomi, homilГ¦ duГ¦, nunc primum in lucem Г¦ditГ¦ (London: Reyner Wolfe, 1543; RSTC 14634), A2r. Me35 C461 F543. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. Parr also surely discussed Chrysostom in the context of her relationship with the reformist Archbishop Thomas Cranmer. Cranmer was an active reader, annotator, and translator of works by Chrysostom during the years that Parr was queen, including the period when Henry instructed Cranmer to attend on Parr daily during her regency (July–October 1544). As David G. Selwyn has shown, at least four different copies of Chrysostom’s works published before 1547 have Cranmer’s inscriptions or annotations, and these annotations cover topics such as sacrifice, the Eucharist, and the liturgy.55 Cranmer was so taken with parts of Chrysostom’s liturgy (in the Missa grГ¦colatina prepared by Erasmus) that he translated one of Chrysostom’s liturgical prayers, inserted it into his vernacular Litany (May 1544), and provided a marginal note explaining to the reader that it was “A Prayer of Chrysostom.”56 This marginal note is unique in the volume, as Cranmer did not identify his other sources. Cranmer’s Litany was printed to garner spiritual support for Henry’s war against the French and Scottish, and it was “reformed” in the sense that he had translated the Latin rite into Page 32 →English and had removed all the invocations to the saints; his marginal note announces that he had also reformed the rite by recuperating and including a prayer from Chrysostom’s ancient and “uncorrupted” Greek liturgy. Parr was also working on a reformed religious wartime project at the same time that Cranmer was translating Chrysostom’s prayer (her translation of the Psalms or Prayers), and it is very likely that she and Cranmer discussed the value of Chrysostom’s works for those who were seeking to reform elements of the English church.57 At one level, then, Parr’s decision to sign her copy of Chrysostom’s sermon serves to place her among a group of scholars, clerics, and courtiers who were reading Chrysostom and who valued his works for their novelty, their wisdom, and their religious purity.

Parr’s Reading and Writing: Applying the Wisdom of Chrysostom and Solomon In addition to gesturing outward toward a community of elite humanists and reformers, Parr’s signature and handwritten biblical verses gesture inward to the content of Chrysostom’s sermon. William Sherman has rightly noted that handwritten notes on flyleaves, title pages, and margins are often unrelated to the texts they accompany.58 But in this case, Parr’s excerpts from Ecclesiasticus are intimately related to Chrysostom’s sermon, and I argue that they function as a kind of lengthy “marginal” response. Parr’s annotations display the new protocols of Bible-reading and sermon-reading explored in depth by Kate Narveson and Eugene Kintgen.59 Specifically, they record a moment of “intertextual reading” as Parr’s perusal of a patristic homily (Chrysostom) led her to turn to the Old Testament (Solomon) and to cull and write out related passages in the blank spaces of her book.60 Yet Parr used these new protocols of reading and note-taking for particular ends. The passages that Parr wrote out from Ecclesiasticus are all in the imperative: they show that she was “applying” the Bible and the sermon to herself and Page 33 →that her reading was intended to lead to ethical action. More specifically, though, I submit that Parr’s excerpts offer a complex response to

Chrysostom’s sermon: they certainly record a desire to follow Chrysostom’s directions for godly behavior, but they also express a desire to act in ways that might reform the abuses of political and economic power that Chrysostom describes. If Chrysostom exhorts his readers to endure suffering, Parr takes his ideas one step further and exhorts herself to transform the court into a place where suffering is eliminated or minimized. Unlike Cheke’s 1543 book, the book that Parr wrote in is not an eye-catching quarto volume with exotic font. It is a small, short sermon of only sixty-two pages. Chrysostom makes it clear that his sermon is not a sophisticated work designed for an elite readership; on the contrary, he presents it as a simple “tale” for poor men, and he addresses “feeble and weak persons” who are “overthrown” by the “mighty” and the “rich.”61 Its main argument is that readers must undergo a spiritual transformation, rethink what it is “to be hurted,” and act in new ways (A4r). Thus, although men think that they are hurt by the powerful in the present life—through poverty, injustice, slander, exile, persecution, robbery, and so on—they cannot, in fact, be hurt by any of these things. Moreover, he argues that they must not be misled into blaming God because they suffer while evil men are bestowed with riches, honor, and power. Contrasting “this life” with everlasting life, Chrysostom argues that our true essence lies in the “virtue of the mind” and that true virtue is “to think right of God, and to do right amongst men” (A5r–6r). A person’s faith and “constant will toward God” (A6r) cannot be harmed by another person, but only by him/herself. In fact, we can be strengthened in faith by earthly suffering; those who harm others injure themselves (B1v). At its core, the sermon is an impassioned exhortation to readers to disregard earthly values (riches, honor, sexual pleasure, power) to endure the injustices of the world, and to live by God’s rules. Along the way, Chrysostom draws on examples such as Job, St. Paul, Lazarus, Salome, and the Jews to prove the truth of Diogenes’s maxim: “No man is hurted but of himself.” Parr’s signature on the title page can be read as an endorsement of Chrysostom’s views, and many of her excerpts correspond to his directives (see Appendix). Chrysostom opens his sermon by criticizing “men of gross judgment” who are “given to the pleasures of this present life, drowned in worldliness,” and who “regard not the spiritual sense” of life (A2r). Parr’s first excerpt exhorts her to resist precisely these sorts of people: “Delight not thou Page 34 →in the multitude of ungodly men, and have no pleasure in them for they fear not God.” Similarly, Chrysostom argues that the love of riches leads to spiritual disaster: “riches doth not only nothing prevail for virtue, but also when they once come into the mind, if they find anything towards goodness, and meet for virtue, they utterly destroy and corrupt the same, and in the stead and place of virtue, they bring in vice and sin” (B5v). Parr’s second excerpt speaks directly to this concern: “Trust not in wicked riches, for they shall not help in the day of punishment and wrath.” Chrysostom warns against those who “waste their whole life in the course of sin” and “embrace nothing but shadows and winds” (B3v), while Parr reminds herself, “Be not carried away with every wind and walk not in every path: for so doth the sinner that hath a double tongue.” Chrysostom warns against speaking any “impatient sentence” and argues that speaking rashly in the face of suffering hurts only the self (B2r). Parr instructs herself: “Be swift to hear and slow in giving answer.” But Parr’s signature and maxims go beyond endorsing the text’s basic message, because they recast the rhetorical framework of the sermon and express a desire to transform the corrupt world that the text describes. Because Parr is “the queen,” her signature performs a creative rewriting of the sermon’s imagined reader/hearer. Chrysostom directs his words toward the poor, and he excoriates the “fury” of “kings and princes” (C5r) and the brutality of the politically powerful. Parr’s annotations serve to insert her into this imagined exchange between Chrysostom and his humble congregation, and they position her (a queen) as an able “hearer” of Chrysostom’s wisdom and as one willing to put his values into practice. This creative, interventionist dimension becomes clearer when we consider some of Parr’s maxims more closely. Chrysostom is particularly critical of those who delight in “the power of this world” and who use their power to cause suffering (B3v; A3r). Although Chrysostom remains focused on consoling the oppressed, some of Parr’s excerpts address the exercise of power and wealth and they exhort her (and those around her) to alleviate the injustices bewailed by Chrysostom. For example, Chrysostom attacks “judges” who have been given the authority to “amend” wrongs but who cause “more” grief (A3r), and he argues that those

who come into “high promotion, high dignities, great honor” often become “fearful” to others and find “innumerable ways” to “vexeth, troubleth, renteth, teareth, .В .В .В and stampeth under foot” the “honest” and “innocent” people (A3v). Parr appears to respond to this assessment of the world, and uses Solomon’s wisdom to assert that she will use her power and wealth as “queen” to help, rather than harm, those in trouble: Page 35 → See that thou justify small and great alike. Refuse not the prayer of one that is in trouble, and turn not away thy face from the needy. Other maxims also take on a different tenor when understood from the perspective of “the queen.” In several places Chrysostom discusses how people use slander to destroy each other’s worldly “renown and fame” (A5v), and he argues that since earthly renown is ultimately meaningless, simple men should not fear “an evil tongue” (A5v). As queen, however, Parr understands the vital power of reputation at court, and so she takes Chrysostom’s point in a different direction, exhorting herself to use her power in a fair and honorable way: “Be not a privy accuser as long as thou livest, and use no slander with thy tongue.” In sum, Parr’s annotations reveal her to be a creative, responsive, and action-oriented reader. Susan James has ably demonstrated the degree to which Parr thoroughly enjoyed the material pleasures that came with her position (jewels, beautiful fabrics, paintings, etc.), but what Parr’s signature and biblical verses claim, for those who track her reading, is that she understands that her true essence lies in her virtuous mind, and that she will use her power to help, rather than oppress, the people of England.

Parr’s Marginalia, Henry’s Marginalia, and the Wisdom of Solomon If Parr’s excerpts from Solomon can be read in productive dialogue with Chrysostom’s sermon, they can also be read in relation to Henry’s marginal annotations in his personal copy of The Books of Solomon (c. 1545). As we shall see, the annotations in the two books have much in common, as both Parr and Henry cull or mark up imperative verses that exhort them to embrace the same virtues and shun the same vices. Although it is impossible to determine who annotated their book first or whether they explicitly discussed them together, these handwritten markings demonstrate that Solomon’s works were an important resource for both Henry and Parr, and that active physical engagement with the biblical text (with a pencil or pen in hand) was part of their ethical self-reflection and self-representation as godly monarchs. Scholars have long noted that Solomon provided an important model for Christian kings, and that he was deployed by Henry and by those who sought to influence or flatter him. Solomon was renowned for several things: he was wise and prudent, he built the Temple, he amassed a fortune, he was Page 36 →visited by the queen of Sheba, he fortified cities, and he expanded Israel’s military (1 Kings 1–11; 2 Chronicles 2–8). As John N. King and others have noted, Henry drew on King Solomon as a way of representing himself in a variety of media, especially in the years immediately following the Act of Supremacy (1534).62 Henry continued to be identified (and to self-identify) with Solomon after his marriage to Parr. Cheke’s gift-books from 1543 and 1545 contain woodcuts that celebrate Henry as a later-day Solomon, and Anthony Cope, a member of Parr’s household, aligned Henry with Solomon after his capture of the French town of Boulogne in September 1544. Cope (the Master of Parr’s hawks) dedicated his translation of Livy’s account of the military exploits of Hannibal and Scipio to Henry, and he turned to Solomon twice in praising Henry’s decision to go to war with France. Cope argued that Henry was forced to “revenge” the wrongs inflicted on his subjects, and that in waging war he was following the advice of Solomon, who said, “There is time to love, and time to hate, time of peace, and time of war: which sentence the said wise man, endued by God with sapience, would never have left unto us, if war had not in some case been both lawful and expedient.”63 Henry surely enjoyed these depictions of himself as a Solomonic king. He also actively engaged with Solomon’s works in 1544 or 1545 and, like Parr, he “applied” Solomon’s precepts to himself.

Henry’s personal copy of The Books of Solomon is currently in the British Library [BL C.25.b.4 (1)], and it has a Westminster Royal Library inventory number (No1183) in the top right-hand corner.64 This edition was translated by Miles Coverdale and was printed by Edward Whitchurch, probably in 1544 or 1545.65 Henry read the Page 37 →opening of this book with care and made more than a dozen marginal annotations in pencil on the first five chapters of Proverbs. Scholars have noted that Henry made several kinds of marks in his books, and we find examples of all of them in his Books of Solomon: he bracketed verses, he marked verses with dots and a squiggle (a stylized trefoil that, as Carley notes, resembles a “tadpole”), he placed manicules (a hand with a pointing finger) in the margins, and he made marginal comments. Surveying Henry’s annotations, Carley suggests that they reveal a concern with obedience to God’s commandments, with wisdom and riches, and with the contrast between the harlot and the loving wife.66 They also, like Parr’s extractions from Ecclesiasticus, focus on maxims for monarchical action. Both Henry and Parr, then, read Solomon in identical ways. In the first three excerpts in Parr’s book, Solomon exhorts the godly to reject the company of the “ungodly,” to fear God, to ignore the false security of “wicked riches,” and to avoid “walk[ing] in every path.” Henry marked up many similar verses in his book. For example, he placed a trefoil and a bracket around a passage that explains that God will ultimately destroy the ungodly who do not fear him: “Then shall they [the wicked] call upon me, but I will not hear.В .В .В . And that because they hated knowledge, and received not the fear of the Lord, but abhorred my counsel, and despised my correction” (A3r; see fig. 1.3). Henry also placed a trefoil beside verses celebrating wisdom over riches: “well is him that findeth wisdom, and obtaineth understanding, for the getting of it is better than any merchandise of silver, and the profit of it is better than gold” (A4v). Like Parr, Henry was interested in the metaphor of “walking” in God’s “paths,” placing a trefoil beside Proverbs 2:20: “That thou mayest walk in the good way, and keep the paths of the righteous” (A4r; see fig. 1.4).67 Parr’s fourth excerpt is a self-reflexive one that stresses the importance of hearing “the word of God” and receiving it with understanding and wisdom. Henry made similar annotations that showcase his commitment to following God’s word and pursuing wisdom. For example, he placed trefoils beside “let thine heart receive my words, keep my commandments, and thou shalt live” (A5v) and “well is him that Page 40 →findeth wisdom, and obtaineth understanding” (A4v). Both Parr and Henry also excerpted or annotated passages about slander: Parr wrote, “Be not a privy accuser as long as thou livest, and use no slander with thy tongue,” while Henry placed a trefoil beside “Put away from thee a froward mouth, and let the lips of slander be far from thee. Let thine eyes behold the thing that is right, and let thine eyelids look straight before thee” (A6r). Parr’s final excerpt explains that the rich should not “refuse” to extend charity and mercy to those “in trouble” or in need; Henry displayed a similar concern as he placed a trefoil beside the end of this long passage: “Refuse not to do good unto him that should have it, so long as thine hand is able to do it. Say not unto thy neighbor: go thy way and come again, tomorrow will I give thee: where as thou hast now to give him. Intend no hurt unto thy neighbour, seeing he hopeth to dwell in rest by thee” (A5r).68 As is the case with Parr’s book, these markings might be seen as conventional responses to traditional Christian values; yet it is surely striking that both Parr and Henry turned to small, modest religious volumes, that they took time to mark passages and add handwritten notes, and that they identified the same biblical passages as ones they desired to translate into lived, daily monarchical practice. Page 38 → Fig. 1.3. Henry VIII’s marginalia in Miles Coverdale, trans., The Books of Solomon, namely: Proverbia, Ecclesiastes, Sapientia, and Ecclesiasticus, or Jesus the son of Sirach (London: Edward Whitchurch, ca.1545?; RSTC 2754), A3r. British Library C.25.b.4. (1). Reproduced by permission of the British Library Board. Page 39 → Fig. 1.4. Henry VIII’s marginalia in Miles Coverdale, trans., The Books of Solomon, namely: Proverbia, Ecclesiastes, Sapientia, and Ecclesiasticus, or Jesus the son of Sirach (London: Edward Whitchurch, ca.1545?; RSTC 2754), A4r. British Library C.25.b.4. (1). Reproduced by permission of the British Library Board. The remarkable affinity between Parr’s and Henry’s annotations is particularly interesting in light of Henry’s most famous annotations, those on the distinction between the “harlot” and the “wife”

found in Proverbs 5. Henry made four different annotations beside a long passage excoriating the “harlot”: “For the lips of an harlot are a dropping honeycomb, and her throat is softer than oil. But at the last, she is as bitter as wormwood, & as sharp as a two-edged sword” (A6v; Prov. 5:3–12). He also annotated a passage celebrating the good wife: “Let thy well be blessed, & be glad with the wife of thy youth. Loving is the hind, and friendly is the Roo: let her breasts always satisfy thee, and hold thee ever content with her love” (A6v–7r; Prov. 5:18–19). Henry not only wrote “n[ota]” (for himself), but he also wrote “for wives,” suggesting that Solomon was not only instructing him to “be glad” with his wife, but was also instructing his wives to be “loving,” “friendly” and sexually satisfying. In 1965, Michael Hattaway argued that these annotations were made in 1542, in the wake of Henry’s discovery of Katherine Howard’s adultery, but Carley has pointed out that the book was not printed until 1544 or 1545 and that Henry was probably thinking about his new wife, Parr, and his escape from the “harlot.”69 While there is no concrete evidence that Parr ever saw these particular annotations, the fact that her book provides Page 41 →an almost perfect “response” to the concerns about virtue and vice and good and bad wives found in Henry’s annotations suggests that Henry’s reading had a powerful influence on the “bookscapes” of the Tudor court and that Parr was attuned to that influence. Parr’s book emphatically declares her rejection of earthly pleasures, sexual promiscuity, riches, and ambition; it proclaims that her queenship is grounded in godly precepts derived from Solomon; and it explains that she aspires to shun the “ungodly,” to avoid slander, to be gentle, wise, and generous, and to transform the court into a more virtuous place. Whether she had Henry specifically in mind or not, such a declaration of values could only have served her well in projecting an image at court and distinguishing herself from her ill-fated predecessor. The Sudeley Castle book is an unassuming volume, yet it sheds considerable light on Udall’s enthusiastic, but vague, description of Parr and other court women engaged in dynamic discussions about “Psalms, homilies, and other devout meditations.”70 As we have seen, Parr’s book and its marginalia reveal a great deal about her reading practices: she was a forward-thinking reader interested in the newest material; she engaged with new techniques of Bible-reading and note-taking; she was an intertextual reader who synthesized parts of the Old Testament with the works of the Greek Church fathers; and she used the pages of her book to reflect upon herself, to inspire herself to act virtuously, and to present herself to Henry and to others as a pious queen. As we will recall, Udall’s praise of Parr’s religious reading extended beyond her own edification, as he claimed that she served as a model for her peers (“noblewomen”) and for younger women (“young damsels”) at court. Indeed, it is not difficult to imagine some of the women he may have had in mind, for many elite women in the late 1540s were already, or would become, serious readers, patrons, or annotators of homilies, Patristic works, meditations, the Bible, and liturgical texts. These women include Katherine Brandon, the Duchess of Suffolk; Anne Seymour, the Duchess of Somerset; Lady Joan Denny; Lady Elizabeth Tyrwhit; Mary Tudor; Elizabeth Tudor; Mary Roper Bassett Clarke; Mildred Cooke Cecil; and Lady Anne Cooke. While Udall’s suggestion that Parr had inspired women to exchange their playing “cards” for godly “homilies” was perhaps an exaggeration, the Sudeley Castle book reveals that Parr engaged in intensive, dynamic, and action-oriented reading of a sermon, and it prompts us to track down and take a closer look at the books of other Tudor women who may have engaged in similar reading practices. Page 42 →

Appendix Transcribed from Sudeley Castle. The spelling has been modernized. I have added the biblical chapter and verse numbers. These are also provided in Mueller, Katherine Parr, 47–48. Delight not thou in the multitude of ungodly men and have no pleasure in them for they fear not God. [Ecclesiasticus 16:1] Trust not in wicked riches, for they shall not help in the day of punishment and wrath. [Ecclesiasticus 5:10]

Be not carried away with every wind and walk not in every path: for so doth the sinner that hath a double tongue. [Ecclesiasticus 5:11] Be gentle to hear the word of God, that thou mayest understand it, and make a true answer with wisdom. [Ecclesiasticus 5:13] Be swift to hear and slow in giving answer. [Ecclesiasticus 5:13] Be not a privy accuser as long as thou livest, and use no slander with thy tongue. [Ecclesiasticus 5:16] See that thou justify small and great alike. [Ecclesiasticus 5:18] Refuse not the prayer of one that is in trouble, and turn not away thy face from the needy. [Ecclesiasticus 4:4]

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Two Isabella Whitney and Reading Humanism Mary Ellen Lamb In her collection A Sweet Nosgay (1573), Isabella Whitney wanders a bookscape produced by a rapidly emerging consumer economy in which books, like other goods, present new opportunities for self-definition. In what Craig Muldrew has identified as “the most intensely concentrated period of growth before the late eighteenth century,”71 the period from 1550 to 1580 offered even non-elite consumers choices to purchase goods—clothing and baked goods, jewelry, and printed books— to an extent unknown to their forebears. This material landscape represented more than a physical terrain. It circulated the cultural forms and the values of an advancing proto-capitalist consumer economy that opened up opportunities to create (or to lose) an identity in terms of goods and their cost. With the increased accessibility of printed books by the 1570s, modes of subjectivity became newly available for sale; the choice of what to read was, in a sense, a choice of whom to be.72 This chapter, like the other essays in this section, connects reading to a range of women’s ways of being: Katherine Parr as a virtuous and learned queen advocating reform according to St. Chrysostom’s ascetic exhortations, Anne Bradstreet as a reader identified with an English bloodline in the New Page 44 →World, Elizabeth Isham as Protestant and Royalist through books her family owned or had read, Margaret Cavendish as a purveyor of wise counsel much like the women of classical Rome at a time when the English Civil War had rendered humanist knowledge of such classical authors as Tacitus as politically dangerous. With the opportunities to read, to consider, to reread, and to consider again, the increasing ownership of books fostered newly empowered modes of reading able to wrest even high-culture texts to address the material circumstances of nonelite readers of print. In the first of three sections of A Sweet Nosgay, Whitney’s versification of classical sententiae translated by Hugh Plat participates in the democratization of humanist discourse, when modes of self-definition through reading material once available only to the well-educated and wealthy became a saleable commodity newly available for purchase by those, including women readers, who could not translate Latin for themselves. Whitney’s commodification of humanist knowledges and, more importantly, of the profoundly reasonable self produced through humanist reading practices contributed to the increasingly complex cultural language offered to ordinary citizens searching for their own modes of selfdefinition. The second section, composed of familiar epistles, demonstrates—or perhaps advertises—the value of this reasonable self in Whitney’s attainment of stoic wisdom in the face of a loss of employment; her demonstration of calm sanity and good sense establishes her credentials as a suitable attendant, as a viable credit risk, and as an author conveying insights of value to readers. In her third section, her poem “The Maner of Her Wyll” levels a searing economic critique that details the excesses of a consumer economy and its cost to the poor, ultimately rendering the value of this bookscape, which includes her own book for sale at St. Paul’s, as less than certain. A consideration of Isabella Whitney as a reader best begins with the unusually detailed scene of reading described in her prefatory verse letter to A Sweet Nosgay (A5v–8v), in which she adopts “Plat his Plot” (A6) as the sole book able to protect her against the infection of the streets. With the longer title The Floures of Philosophie, with the Pleasures of Poetry annexed to them, aswel plesant to be read as profitable to be followed of all men, this text by Hugh Plat was hot off the press in 1572.73 Whitney’s remarkable enthusiasm Page 45 →for this text induces her to versify 110 of his sententiae and to title her entire volume a Sweet Nosgay, as a gathering of flowers from Plat’s work. Representing herself as dejected by her personal circumstances—“Haruestlesse, / and servicelesse also / And subiect vnto sicknesse”—she initially turned to other books for consolation. None of them sufficed—not scriptures, histories, or classical works by Virgil, Ovid, Mantuan, “and many other more” (A5v). This failure to find solace in books sets off by contrast the intensity of her appreciation of Plat’s Floures. Taking a walk to seek relief, she meets a friend fleeing London who warns her of infections dangerous to her health. On her return home, Fortune leads her to Plat’s Floures. Enjoying the smell of the

“fragrant Flowers” of his sententiae which “preuents ech harme,” she reposes for an hour in “those Beds so brauely deckt, / with euery goodly Flower” (A6v). When necessary business forces her to put the book down, she brings with her a single slip—a page or proverb—to smell for protection “in stynking streetes, or loathsome Lanes / which els might mee infect” (A6v). Since then, she has read Plat every day, gathering from his work a nosegay, which she now offers to readers in the hopes that her work may similarly guard them from infection. If her collection meets with their approval, she recommends that they read further wise sayings in Plat’s work. She cautions them to let in no unworthy readers (dog or swine), and also not to curse her as a sorceress. She concludes with a warning, “yf thou to Plat his Plot / Repayre: take heede it is a Maze / to warne thee I forgot” (A8v). This scene of reading raises a number of questions that have not gone unnoticed by critics.74 What are these infections that cause her to turn to Plat’s sayings for protection? Especially compelling is Danielle Clarke’s description of Whitney’s nosegay as a response to “social and moral contagion” in a London “in the process of radical and rapid change” from the “alteration from the older feudal hierarchy to a capitalist individualism.”75 In the juxtaposition of the abundance of goods—bread, woolen and linen, Page 46 →jewels and plate, swords, and wine—available on specific streets, and the prisons and workhouses—the Counter, Newgate, Fleet, Ludgate—where the impoverished suffer and sometimes die, as described in “The Maner of Her Wyll,” Whitney identifies the most visceral signs of an emergent capitalism in the city streets, all the more distressing for the rapidity of their relatively recent appearance.76 An interpretation of infections as related to the rise of a culture of commodity exchange helps to explain the strikingly provocative aspect of Whitney’s representation: her rejection of virtually all canonical literature—classical works, histories, and scripture—in favor of Plat’s Floures.77 An economic factor is suggested by her reprimand of Dido (“Good DIDO stint thy teares” [D3]) for a grief due to her own “fickle fancie” as opposed to Whitney’s own undeserved financial misfortune. Whitney’s simultaneous exploitation and rejection of classical narratives in her two letters published in another collection, The Copy of a LetterВ .В .В . with an Admonition to al yong Gentilwomen (1567), provide further insights.78 Capitalizing on the popularity of George Turberville’s recently published translation of Ovid’s Heroides, Whitney’s letters reinterpret classical culture as a succession of narratives of male betrayals not unlike that of her own beloved, who (according to her narrative) married another. Rather than uttering the florid complaints of Ovid’s female protagonists, Whitney assumes a persona that is fully self-possessed, utterly rational, and solid as a rock in her calm and continued concern for her ex-lover’s welfare. While Whitney does not explicitly conflate eros with economic terms, a concern with credit surfaces in her letter. Her beloved’s breach of contract is as serious as the Page 47 →treachery of Sinon, who betrayed Troy. If continued, his dishonesty will destroy his credit and, like Sinon’s, all his “kindred stayne” (A2v). Her sense of her own value as a commodity appears in her claim to possess the chastity of Penelope, the constancy of Lucrece, and the fidelity of Thisbe (A4v). Her beloved has surely made an unwise exchange. Finally, however, the weeping and pathetic betrayed women of Ovid’s Heroides provide no satisfactory subject position for Whitney or for the maids of London to whom she addresses her second letter in Copy. Paradoxically, rejecting this Ovidian model enables Whitney to adopt the equanimity and reasonable self-control marking a mature humanist. There is less background information available in Whitney’s rejection of history and scripture. She sets aside historical texts because the follies they record from the past remain undiminished in her present time, “more pittie it is we follow them, in euery wicked crime” (A5v). In this rejection, Whitney practices the pragmatic reading technique commonly used by humanists, turning it against itself.79 If there is no observable benefit in mining the past for lessons applicable for the present, then what is the point of studying history? The implications of Whitney’s rejection of the solace of scripture because she lacks a divine to resolve her doubts are less clear. Does she entertain doubts placing her in danger of heresy? Or maybe she is following the Pauline dictum that women should “learne in silence with all subiection”: that is, not on their own but with the aid of a male advisor.80 During the Reformation, concerns on the part of religious as well as political establishments to limit the control of individual interpretation were not limited to female readers alone.81 The scattered references to God in Sweet Nosgay suggest that Whitney’s religious convictions were conventional for her time. She advises her sisters, employed in service, to pray to God upon rising (C7v). In a letter Page 48 →to G.W., she

affirms that “God can, and wyl, exalt the humble minde” (E2). At the end of “The Maner of Her Wyll, ” she asks onlookers to “Rejoyce in God that I am gon, / out of this vale so vile” (E7v). The most concentrated mention of God appears in her letter to C.B. (D5v–7v), in which she prays to God for the patience of Job and for an end to her sufferings either in death or in improved fortunes. Whitney’s more devout terminology may be influenced by C.B.’s convictions, for C.B.’s eloquent response assesses Whitney according to a religious, rather than a humanist, paradigm: “those fretting fyts, that thou are in, / Offends the Lord, augmenteth sin” (D6v). While Whitney does not reject traditional Christian piety, it does not seem to offer her the answers she seeks in addressing the inequities of a commodity culture. If Whitney finds so little satisfaction in reading classical works, histories, and scripture, what pleasure, one might ask, does she find in reading Hugh Plat’s Floures of Philosophie, which consists of 883 translated commonplaces to Seneca (“once most carefully planted in Rome by Seneca” [A2v])82 followed by miscellaneous poems entitled “The Pleasures of Poetry”? These commonplaces are entirely unexceptional, from his first (“The long absence of friends maketh their friendshippe more ioyfull at the nexte meeting”) or second (“It is better to be absente, then present at perils”), down to the last, #883 (“He that doth consider the ende of murther, woulde neuer goe about to kill any”). Baffled modern critics look for underlying explanations for Whitney’s pleasure in this work.83 Understandably, anthologized selections omit these proverbs. Yet this omission obscures the crucial act of authorial self-fashioning that accounts for the collection’s title Sweet Nosgay, which, following out the description in her Page 49 →preface of the impact of Whitney’s reading of “Plat his Plot,” represents the work as inspired by Hugh Plat’s The Floures of Philosophie. This representation is further confirmed by the collection’s running title: “A sweete Nosegay, gathered in a Philosophicall Garden.”84 Whitney’s acknowledgment of “Plat his Plot” as the stimulus for Sweet Nosgay complicates (but does not negate) the gendered implications of Whitney’s nosegay, which Kim Walker has ably described as “a form of housewifely physic” drawing her readers “into this neighborly set of relations.”85 But the term “nosegay” did not evoke a solely female domain. Writing under the name Theodore Basil, the Protestant reformer Thomas Becon gathered the “flowers” of his A pleasaunt newe nosegay: full of many godly and swete floures (1542) from scripture, and a few years after Whitney’s collection was published, one Thomas Crewe gathered “flowers” from Italian authors into The Nosegay of morall Philosophie (1580) to elucidate “the parte of a true Christian” (A1) and the nature of virtuous living. As a gathering of Plat’s “Floures,” Whitney’s title Sweet Nosgay also draws on the common word for flowers, “posies,” frequently used as a term for “poesy” and “a collection of pleasant poetry or rhetoric.”86 Locating his work of translation within the elite male milieu of the Inns of Court in his self-description to the Countess of Warwick as “[y]our most humble orator HVGH PLAT of Lincolnes Inne” (A3v), Plat identifies his collection of “flowers” as a commonplace book, the product of a humanist mode of education in which students copied sayings in notebooks as a form of moral discipline as well as usable cultural capital. It is this technology that Plat offers the Countess of Warwick as he presents her these flowers “once most carefully planted in Rome by Seneca,” that he “with some paines have remoued them here to Englande” (A2v). Plat expands the metaphor of his commonplaces as flowers for moral edification: their “sweete slips being deeply set in the frutefull soile of your noble harte, will soone take roote and bring foorth frute” (A3). The flower metaphor similarly dominates his letter to the general reader, which details the flowers—carnations, pinks, marigolds, daisies, and so on—in his “pleasaunte plotte of fragrant flours” (A4), well worth the cost of “a little coine” (A5). The source of the collection’s monetary value is implicit in Plat’s usefulPage 50 → index, designed for a reader mining his collection for specific fragments relating to a specific rhetorical or moral need, with entries ranging from A (“absence”) to W (“wrong”) with longer lists of commonplaces under “benefits, ” “death,” “euill,” “life,” “pouvertie,” and “women.” This index reflects a fragmented form of reading for sententiae, described by Mary Crane as “a material commodity produced by a transferable educational technology.”87 Rather than exclusively to humanist-trained residents of the Inns such as himself, Plat offers a courtly status to female as well as male members of his imagined readers (“A maze

there is for Ladies all, / with Lords to walk their fill” [A4v]). Presented in an inexpensive octavo in black letter print, Whitney’s versifications are designed to extend the appeal of Plat’s translation to a wider group including less elite readers for whom a maze induces dangerous confusion rather than the pleasant wandering. Her exasperation with the organization of Plat’s sententiae (“yf thou to Plat his Plot / Repayre: take heede it is a Maze / to warne thee I forgot” [A8v]) reflects an implicit expectation that his 883 sentences should accommodate a sequential reading, with thematic associations between and among sentences, rather than a selective choice aided by an index. The scene she describes in her preface, when she takes with her a single slip from Plat’s garden to protect her from infection, however, represents a selective reading as well; and her versifications are designed not only to increase a reader’s pleasure but also to make Plat’s individual commonplaces easier to memorize. Whitney’s versifications are not slavish imitations, and critics have provided a few insights into the pressure of gender on her reading.88 Richard Panofsky’s thorough comparison of Whitney’s collection with Plat’s identifies one notably gendered comment. Plat’s #63 (“The louers teares wil soone appease his Ladies anger”) becomes in Whitney’s #65 (“The louers teres, wil soone appease / his Ladyes angry moode: / But men will not be pacified, / if wemen weepe a flood”).89 The presence of a gendered perspective in Whitney’s expansions is, however, relatively unusual. As Panofsky observes, Whitney follows Plat’s Page 51 →first ninety-seven commonplaces closely; she chooses only her last twelve sentences from disparate parts of Plat’s collection, grouping them under such topics as “law, ” “speech,” or “wicked.”90 In a modern privileging of authorship in terms of originality, it is easy to miss the significance of the extent to which Whitney models her verse in terms of Plat’s translations, rather than against them. Whitney’s versifications typically conform to Plat’s. Her primary adaptations lie in her additions, which sometimes only fill in the verse form to make a rhyme, and at other times suggest strategies for applying Plat’s proverbs to the readers’ own lives. For example, Whitney #6 echoes Plat’s #6 (“To abounde in all things, and not to knowe the use of them is playne penurie”), to instruct readers to generosity in the application “Wherfore, thy goods, bestow.” In her search for practical applications of these proverbs as guides for her own life and for the lives of her readers, Whitney demonstrates her reading of them as equipment for living, and as a source of ancient authority guiding contemporary moral choices. In her labor of versifying, Whitney also demonstrates her successful internalization of these pseudo-Senecan sententiae to present herself, as in Copy, as fully possessing the qualities of a mature humanist: rationality, discipline, and calm self-possession. Whitney’s versifications emphasize an integral relationship between friendship, slander, and economic security that become topics of particular relevance to the other sections of Sweet Nosgay. Represented as a friendly gift of this nosegay to her readers, Whitney’s authorship is itself ennobled by the number of proverbs advancing the moral advantages of friendship.91 The financial consequences of a friendless state are dire (Wh#60P#59 and Wh#30-P#29). These commonplaces frequently portray friendship in terms of economics. As Craig Muldrew has explained, before the establishment of a dependable banking system, borrowing and lending established networks of economic dependency at all levels of society, and the capacity to extend and to receive credit became a crucial factor in a consumer society.92 Echoing Plat’s observation (“He hath helpes for adversitie, that sought them in prosperitie” [#27]), Whitney’s #28 then contributes her own advice to purchasePage 52 → friends (“None in adversitie hath help, except they prospered have / And by that menes have purchast frends / of whom they ayde may crave”). Whitney also adds the word “purchase” to Plat’s #4: “For new acquaintance purchase place / and old doo lose their share.” The high degree of trust that is the essence of friendship evokes its opposite, as well. Only a few friends are worthy of high trust. To Plat’s #31 (“Be liberall unto all men, flatter and be familiar with fewe”), Whitney #32 qualifies the word “fewe” with a bitter twist suggesting a personal disappointment: “which nomber make but one.” When friends do not fulfill this ideal, the consequences are potentially devastating. To Plat’s #40 (“What shall enimies do, when brethren be at variaunce?”), Whitney #41 adds “When frends fall out among themselves / who shal their dais men be”?93 Financial and moral issues converge in the “dangers deepe” confronting the friendless—those who lack credit—in a commonplace that poignantly evokes the

wandering Whitney will enact in her “Maner of Her Wyll”: “He that is voyd of any friend, / him company to keepe: / Walkes in a world of wyldernesse, / full fraught with dangers deepe” (Wh#52-P#51). In this social context, slander represented a serious threat to finances as well as to reputation. As Muldrew has noted, a reputation for honesty was necessary to attract credit, in order to prosper or even to maintain solvency in this expanding economy. Householders competed with each other to pull in more credit by promoting their own reputations for solid trustworthiness that then, in fact, enhanced their prosperity.94 In this competitive culture, a friendship that exposed one’s vulnerabilities became a risky venture. Destructive in any century, the shameful exposure of entrusted secrets posed a special threat in a culture of credit, in which not only honor but even financial well-being rested on one’s reputation. Marked as especially relevant to Whitney by the marginal print of a pointing hand, one particularly disturbing commonplace warns the reader to treat today’s friend as a potential future enemy (Whitney #56-Plat #55). But how can one follow this advice, if as in Whitney #59-Plat #58, all things—pleasures, griefs, and woes—are to be shared between friends? Several proverbs warn readers to safeguard their reputations from slander (#12, #32, #56, #59, #78, #105-7). Don’t believe unfounded accusations (Wh#12-P#11). Faults reflect more on accusers than on a defendant (Wh#13-P#13). Associate only with those who tell the truth (Wh#41-P#40). Whitney urges the reader to “No credit geue, Page 53 →or not to much, / to that which thou doest heare” if it is said by a “troubled minde” (Wh#78-P#77). Most notably, three proverbs concerning slander or injudicious speech number among Whitney’s final thirteen, gathered widely rather than sequentially from Plat’s collection. To Plat #374 (“A hastie tong makes the minde to repente at leisure”), Whitney #105 adds that we have only one tongue, so that we should see and hear more than “shuld with tong be named” (Wh#106-P#375). To Plat #379 (“Keepe thy tongue, and keepe thy friende”), Whitney #108 adds “In uttryng things, commit to thee / thou faithfull friends dost lose.” The importance of friendship and the dangers of slander to financial security are foregrounded in the second part of Sweet Nosgay, titled “Certain familier Epistles and friendly Letters by the Author: with Replies” (C6), which develops Whitney’s pragmatic reading of commonplaces to a narrative she represents as her own.95 Panofsky notes that Whitney’s allusions to her own troubles provide a “strong narrative occasion” for her versified proverbs, describing this framing device as Whitney’s distinctive contribution to collections of commonplaces popular around midcentury.96 As in Copy, Whitney asserts her value in the face of rejection, in this case in her discharge from service, earlier indicated in her preface (“harvestlesse, / and servicelesse also: / And subject unto sicknesse” [A5v]). The verse epistles of Sweet Nosgay elaborate on this situation. To her brother, G.W., she describes “a vertuous Ladye, which / tyll death I honour wyll: / The losse I had of seruice here, / I languish for it styll” [C6v]. Her advice to her sisters in service includes heavy hints that her dismissal was due to groundless slander and perhaps to “flyting” (“For fleetyng is a foe, / experience hath me taught” [C8v]), an ambiguous term referring to a range of contentious speech acts, from disputing to scolding or reproaching.97 A letter from C.B. comforts her with the assurance that “Thy Friends that haue thee knowne of long, / Will not regard Page 54 →thy enemies tong” (C7); her long-standing virtue persuades C.B. that “thy enemies lye, / And in that quarell would I dye” (C7). These epistles extend outward to implicate concentric circles of readers.98 On perhaps the most basic level, if Whitney’s narrative reflects her personal experience, they appeal to Whitney’s former mistress to present “an indirect plea for restoration to her post,”99 as Louise Schleiner claims—or if not that mistress herself, then another mistress-reader who, recognizing Whitney’s virtue, responds to her need. In particular, the exemplary advice Whitney offers in “An order prescribed, by Is.W, to two of her yonger sisters seruinge in London,” with the running title “A modest meane for Maides,” demonstrates her own suitability for employment: after morning devotions, “Maides” should “iustly do such deedes, / as are to you assynde, ” work hard to please employers, take care of their plate, and be sure the house is secure from intruders (C8D1).100 This appeal discovers a practical use of the versified proverbs of Plat’s Floures to advertise implicitly her unassailable virtue, stoic wisdom, and sensible conversation as valuable credentials for a position as a gentlewoman attendant, whose high level of literacy also particularly qualifies her in the common duty of reading to a mistress. She offers a potential employer (or general reader) not merely service but also an ennobling contact with a profoundly reasonable moral teacher, who is tranquil in the face of personal catastrophes and eminently

suited to advise and console those around her. In this invitation, as Lorna Hutson has ably observed, Whitney’s use of publication to initiate credit relations, in the form of employment in service, derives from humanist example, and she was perhaps the first to adapt this social use of the printed book to a woman’s circumstances.101 The terms of this bid for employment transform the nature of the service Page 55 →relationship according to a humanist agenda, to become, in Hutson’s terms, a form of “knowledge-transaction” rather than merely a retainership.102 Like the disciplined self she expresses, this implicit overture adapts humanist practice to the interests of the middling sort. The wise counsel offered by a humanist to a monarch at court becomes, instead, sensible advice offered by a gentlewoman attendant to her lady in her retiring room. The letters in this second part present Whitney’s value not only as a potential employee but as a viable credit risk for a loan. Reading a letter addressed “To her Brother. G.W.” offers general readers of either gender the pleasure of assuming the role, for the moment, of Whitney’s dependable older brother; especially responsive readers—perhaps forgotten acquaintances or anonymous altruists—might, just perhaps, actively alleviate her alleged financial distress with some material compensation. To such an audience, her expansion of Plat’s pseudo-Senecan proverbs will have demonstrated her internalization of the classical wisdom forming the basis of a disciplined self. Her sobriety, her discretion, and her virtuous labor in versifying Plat all represent credentials for a loan in a culture of credit in which learning reflects upon a social reputation for the honesty—or solvency—necessary for sound financial exchanges.103 To such an audience, her brother’s solid standing, suggested by his supervision of “fertyl feelds,” suggests a ready backer for a loan (C6). As she offers a smell of her nosegay to her brother, Whitney provides a personal and relational context for the self constructed through her versified commonplaces. She not only claims an older brother; the epistles as a group also represent Whitney as the center of a social network composed of close family members and concerned friends whose evident respect attests to her credibility not only as a person but as a credit risk. Paradoxically, however, the writing of letters also establishes her physical distance from this network. For the moment, she is vulnerable and on her own, receptive and deserving of financial relief from a source more handily close by than her distant network.104 Finally, even readers whose pleasures in Whitney’s letters to family and friends remain determinedly and solely textual become, in a sense, her anonymous benefactors, as their purchases confirm the commercial value Page 56 →of her works to her printer and enable the further circulation of credit.105 To sympathetic members of this group, her vulnerability as a younger sister encountering hard times humanizes Whitney as a reader and versifier of commonplaces. From this perspective, Whitney’s narrative of personal distress may have increased the commercial appeal of her versified commonplaces by rendering herself as a writer and her work more emotionally accessible. Creating an emotional connection with readers through her own vulnerability advertises the benefits of reading commonplaces even to ordinary readers who also experience mundane personal difficulties. As a woman writer, she models the benefits of Plat’s commonplaces particularly to women readers of the middling sort, who, like her, value hard work, common sense, and the wisdom achieved through reading classical texts even in translation. More radically, her narrative of personal distress provides a human face to the plight of those unfortunates, including hardworking and literate women, who are, as she represents herself, out of work, in ill health, and quickly running out of time. The searing economic critique leveled in Whitney’s masterful poem “Maner of Her Wyll” suggests another, quite different, reason for her extraordinary enthusiasm for Plat’s volume. Subtitled “The Pleasures of Poetry,” the miscellaneous poems following Plat’s translated adages share much in common with Whitney’s collection. One of Plat’s poems provided a gendered model for a collection of proverbs by a woman.106 A young woman wishing to buy a gift for her beloved is disappointed with the trivial goods sold at fair stalls, until she enters Dame Virtue’s tent, where she finds “a knot of peerelesse points / Besette with posies neate”; these posies consist of twelve proverbs offering good advice (K4–K5v). Written in the versified fourteeners adopted by Whitney, these proverbs were, like Whitney’s, offered for sale at a market. More important, however, Whitney shares with Plat an outrage over the excesses of a consumer economy and the cost of that economy to the poor. Like Whitney’s “Maner of Her Wyll,” Mendax’s tale of a marvelous house made of food (G8v–H4) suddenly shifts perspective from abundant goods to the costs of

unlimited consumption to its victims. Humanized by “fetters on their feete,” flies became trapped in a paper prison, lured there by sweets. Begging for food and on the verge of starvation, these flies serve as “a good example to the rest, / howe they the like deserve” (H2v). Ostensibly referring to flies, the “rest” also implicates Mendax, the other guests, Page 57 →and readers themselves in their similar attraction to the sweets of a custard house. More disturbing are the two pigs who “came in their peticotes, / with long knives at their wast, / With shrieking voyce they cride aloude / come eate us both in hast” (H3), rather than be doomed to a more painful death by fire. Providing these pigs with a human-like subjectivity capable of deep distress transforms this scene of abundant consumption into a scene of inhumanly cruel exploitation. Plat’s social criticism moves to outrage in his poem “Of two Gentlemen which by racking of their rents had destroyed a whole Town” (I2–4). Two gentlemen have “pinchte the poore with racking rents / to heave their wals on hie, ” while they now spend this ill-gotten gain in “excesse in meate and drinke” (I3v). As the town has fallen, so will the realm. The poem concludes with the prayer: “God mende or ende such Gentlemen, / which seeke to make the poore their pray” (I4). Plat’s emphasis on the common ground shared with the poor strikes a common chord with Whitney’s “Maner of Her Wyll,” which generalizes from her situation to that of others who have similarly suffered in this consumer economy. As in her epistles, Whitney personalizes these unfortunate effects as her own. While the first half of the poem represents Whitney as a knowledgeable consumer of goods heaped on the city streets, the second half represents her as equally knowledgeable in the penal institutions of London. Whitney specifically identifies herself with the debtors of Ludgate, where she would herself be placed if she had received enough credit to accrue debt. Whitney expresses her awareness of a growing early modern contempt for the poor in the ridicule she projects from her readers as “standers by” who “smile, / and laugh so in your sleeve” at her economic misfortune. Near the end of the poem, she imagines for herself a pauper’s funeral, requesting only a “shrowding Sheete” as she is buried “in oblivion” (E7v). Whitney’s claim to this degree of abject poverty is only a partial truth, or perhaps true only in London, for the headnote to her poem mentions friends who constrain her to depart. Rather than dying as a pauper, she is probably (if her narrative is autobiographical) about to rejoin members of her family to lead a life appropriate to an unmarried sister of the rural lower gentry. This discrepancy reveals Whitney’s identification with the poor as a conscious ideological choice central to a social agenda of her poem, as she refuses the social shame, on her own behalf and also for others, imposed on those no longer able to maintain themselves as consumers. Rather than dissolute, violent, and idle, the poor in her poem suffer as would any normal person in the same distressed circumstances. Such a perspective presents a radical intervention in the contemporary redefinition of poverty described by A. L. Beier as a Page 58 →“de-sanctification of the poor” circulated, as Linda Woodbridge observes, by humanists themselves, who blamed the poor for their condition.107 Refusing cultural stereotypes of the able-bodied poor as dissolute and improvident, Whitney deflects blame to the obsessive desire for goods and the metaphorical “infections” they circulated on the streets of London. Whitney’s reading of Plat offered her the benefits and also exposed the limits of a commodified humanism. Whitney’s self-fashioning as a humanist was not simply a pose, put on and taken off like a theatrical costume, but one of several selves available to her to choose to become. Most remarkably, in “The Maner of Her Wyll, ” Whitney uses her freedom to choose an identity as an ailing bankrupt to turn the process against itself by exposing the inequities at the core of the very economy that had provided her, through her reading of Plat, an opportunity to assume a humanist self. Whitney would have found this paradoxical countermove within Plat’s Floures, which also followed its commonplaces, advertised as Senecan and translated for non-Latin readers, with a radical critique of economic inequities that cast doubt on the efficacy of the wisdom of those very commonplaces. In this way, Whitney’s “Maner of Her Wyll” and Plat’s miscellaneous poems expose serious limits to the allegedly stabilizing humanist guidance that underlay the collecting and reading of their commodified commonplaces. As Whitney advertises her own books for sale by St. Paul’s, willing her “Friends these Bookes to byeВ .В .В . with other ware,” to what extent has her own commodification of humanist knowledges nevertheless become inextricably implicated in the infections of the commerce she details so vividly?

Whitney’s clear-eyed demonstration of the contradictions confronted by humanist reading to a woman of the late sixteenth century raises an issue, perhaps all the more visible to her with the relatively recent rise of a consumer culture, that still lies at the core of a capitalist economy in the relationship between our sense of interiority and the goods we consume, including not only the books we choose to read but also the films, television programs, Facebook, and other forms of media technology with which we daily interact.

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Three Book Passages and the Reconstruction of the Bradstreets’ New England Library Elizabeth Sauer In his Ornaments for the Daughters of Zion, Cotton Mather takes exception to Massachusetts Governor John Winthrop’s judgment about Ann Yale Hopkins, wife of the governor of Connecticut, who devoted herself wholeheartedly to her books. She should have “attended her household affairs and such things as belong to women, and not gone out of her way and calling to meddle in such things as are proper for men, whose minds are stronger,” insists Winthrop.108 Mather begs to differ: he imagines female-authored contributions to the libraries of Old and New England: even the Books Published by that Sex, were enough to make a Library far from Contemptible; nor has even the New-English part of the American Strand, been without Authoresses that would Challenge a Room in such a Library: They to whom the common use of Swords is neither Decent nor Lawful, have made a most Laudable use of Pens; and they that might not without Sin, lead the Life which old Stories ascribe to Amazons, have with much Praise done the part of Scholars Page 60 →in the World.109 Anglo-American poet Anne Bradstreet would have agreed. In fact, Mather had her in mind as he composed his apology for the pen-wielding women of New England. As an English “Gentlewoman in those parts”—an epithet penned for the poetess on the title page of the first edition of her book—Bradstreet’s experience of the world, including the New World, was mediated by letters, books, and an information network spanning the Atlantic.110 The collection of poems she composed would in turn find its way as a published volume in bookstalls and libraries of Old and New England, as discussed in the last section of this essay. Indeed a book on “Women’s Bookscapes in Early Modern Britain: Ownership, Circulation, Reading” ought to make room for the reception history of female-authored books. As observed in “The Bookscape,” the introduction to this volume, the reading habits and libraries of Renaissance Englishmen, like Gabriel Harvey, John Dee, Ben Jonson, and Sir William Drake, have been extensively perused, but libraries and book collections used by women of this era, considerably less so, thus the rationale for this book and this chapter. In the case of Anne, the Dudley-Bradstreet book collections historically and materially connect Old and New England—a correspondence comparable to the English bloodlines, or English “blood [that] yet runs within my veins,” to which she refers in an elegy for Sir Philip Sidney (comp. 1637–38).111 Bradstreet’s consultation of library holdings in England and New England forged a new transatlantic dynamic. The result of that exchange was The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung up in America, the first volume of verse by a New World resident. The second part of this chapter examines that book and a poem therein, “A Dialogue between Old England and New,” which is named on the title page of The Tenth Muse. Conceived in the New World and published in the Old, “A Dialogue” is especially worth studying for its reliance on classical and topical books transported across the Atlantic throughout Anne’s lifetime. It also warrants special attention for its formal and thematic exchanges on Old World and New Page 61 →World history and topical events, and for the number of editorial changes to which it was subject—arguably with Bradstreet’s interventions—in its 1678 printing in (New) Boston.

I The history of the transportation and trafficking of ideologies and ideas (not to mention people and goods) across the Atlantic in the colonial era was overwhelmingly and predictably unidirectional. Still the story of books—sermons, correspondence, poetry, newsbooks, broadsides, satires, and polemics—in the British

Atlantic world involves material, intellectual, and cultural negotiations between the Old and New Worlds.112 New England attracted many educated Г©migrГ©s, who influenced the direction of the colony in their capacity as governors, clerics, and writers. Boston, Massachusetts, itself would emerge in the Long Restoration as the center of the book trade in British North America.113 While controversialist writer Roger Williams, who lobbied for freedom of speech on grounds of conscience in New England, sought recourse to the London print trade, other New England Г©migrГ©s such as John Smith, John Winthrop, Anne Bradstreet, Nathaniel Ward, the “Eliot Tracts” authors, and John Cotton—characterized by Cotton Mather as “a Living System of the Liberal Arts, and a Walking Library”114—forged transatlantic bonds through letters and publications on both sides of the ocean. Granted those textual associations were sometimes made unintentionally. Predictably, sermons often numbered among the surreptitious publications of New Englanders’ writings in Britain. John Winthrop reported, for example, that printed copies of John Cotton’s sermon on Revelation, Chapter 16, were transported on board English ships that otherwise carried Г©migrГ©s and supplies to the New World. A former member of Cotton’s congregation in Boston, United Kingdom, John Humphrey, who heard Cotton preach the sermon, had acquired a transcription thereof “from some who had took Page 62 →them by characters [shorthand], and printed them in London, which was a great wrong to Mr. Cotton, and he was much grieved at it.”115 The printed version did not have his blessing or imprimatur, Cotton complained. Similarly, Thomas Shepard expressed outrage about the defacement of his sermon script, The Sincere Convert, printed without his license, “will or privity,” and with errors.116 The alleged unauthorized printing of Anne Bradstreet’s works in the same decade brought to light a different genre of New England composition: poetry whose subject matter reflected the author’s classical and distinctly English interests, training, and access to books. Like Cotton and Shepard, Bradstreet would register her distress over the publication of her work, as evidenced in the now oft-anthologized poem, “The Author to her Book, ” added to the second edition of her volume, printed in (New) Boston. Still, any attempt to distinguish her (poeticized) profession of consternation from the rhetoric of modesty required of a woman, especially a woman writer, would prove to be a tricky, if not impossible, undertaking. In the case of the aforementioned “Author to her Book,” Bradstreet appropriates the classical form of envoy, or the formula of “go little book,” possibly modeled on envoys by Chaucer or Lydgate, or on one of Bradstreet’s favorite poets, Edmund Spenser’s “To His Booke” in The Shepheardes Calender (1579). The formula is accompanied conventionally by the topos of the critical public. Its use by Bradstreet as a confession of her shame about her “ill-formed offspring” being “exposed to public view” abroad might suggest her reading of the 1650 volume and thus a rereading of her own newly published poems.117 While New England works made their way back to Old England, with or without the consent of their authors, readers in New England eagerly awaited shipments of news and books to the colony. It is possible to adumbrate a New England bookscape. Books were regularly sent across the Atlantic at the behest of individual colonists and could reach Massachusetts within a few months. The Massachusetts Bay Company had originally arranged for the exportation of a significant collection of books to the New World. Colonists themselves brought books with them and actively supplemented their collections;Page 63 → they also borrowed from and exchanged books with others. That many of the books contained in New England libraries had post-1630 publication dates confirms the ongoing acquisition of books by the New England colonists following their emigration. Many of the personal libraries formed from importation and collecting practices grew to considerable size and import, not least upon their bequest to institutions. Some of the contents of Dr. William Ames’s library of 570 books, for instance, made it to the New World, though Ames himself did not.118 When he died in 1638, John Harvard willed his entire library of 400 books to Harvard College. As the primary recipient of books and correspondence from Britain at the time, John Winthrop established the colony’s largest library (containing in 1640 about 1,000 volumes), whose holdings also circulated among the colonists.119 Anne Bradstreet’s father, Thomas Dudley, who alternated with John Winthrop in serving as governor and deputy governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, had amassed an impressive collection of books, most brought

from Old England. Dudley himself was a storehouse or “a magazine of history,” as Anne affirms in an epitaph appended to her 1653 elegy for him.120 When the Bradstreets’ New England home was consumed by fire, their collection of more than eight hundred books went up in flames. “Whilst I was at N. London” (New London, Connecticut), writes Anne’s son, Simon Bradstreet, in a July 12, 1666, journal entry, “my father’s house at Andover was burnt, where I lost my BooksВ .В .В . [though] my own losse of books (and papers espec.) was great and my fathers far more being about 800.”121 Anne Bradstreet similarly reported, “My papers fell a prey to th’ raging fire.”122 What might the Bradstreet library have contained? And how—if at all—might the contents of the library in the Andover house be recovered? Page 64 →Although Kevin J. Hayes claims that references in Bradstreet’s writings offer “the only clues” about the books’ titles, there is also a 1653 inventory of some of the books in the Dudley estate. Based on this inventory, we know that the Dudley’s New England library was enriched by the hundreds of volumes brought over from the Lincolnshire estate of Theophilus Clinton, the Puritan Earl of Lincoln. Dudley served as his estate administrator, and Simon Bradstreet was the Earl’s protГ©gГ©. The estate’s library holdings in the classics and literature of the early modern era had nourished—and represented—Anne’s literary life and pursuits in the Old World, but also in the New. The estate’s collection itself contained many rare editions and papers, including some of Anne Bradstreet’s own. At the same time, quite a few items on the 1653 inventory post-date 1630, when the family immigrated to America. Certainly, the identification of the books Bradstreet could have consulted would represent a valuable contribution to scholarship on early women’s literary culture in both worlds. While there is no complete catalogue of Dudley’s library in Roxbury (Boston), his nineteenth-century biographer Augustine Jones attempts a reconstruction on the basis of the 1653 inventory. She curates a book exhibit, indeed a bookscape, and then leads an imaginary tour of the library, the individual holdings of which she selects, annotates, and authorizes.123 Each book becomes an extension and expression of Dudley’s identity and personality; each is a “silent associate.” Jones romanticizes the tour, transforming the library into a vignette, or even a Dudley commonplace book. “We are admitted into the interior of this Roxbury home,” directs Jones, creating a room of Dudley’s own: The library attracts us in the study. Here, more than in any other room, we seem to feel the presence and the personality of “the sturdiest support and ornament of New England,” the pillar of church and state.В .В .В . The first book on his list but one is the General History of the Netherlands. The Netherlands, more than any other country except their native land, and Geneva, had contributed to the Puritan ideas of liberty, education, and religion. This book, next to the Bible, the laws of Moses and dealings of the Almighty with ancient Israel, may have been his constant study, his morning and evening text-book and guide. The Page 65 →Turkish History indicated breadth and liberality in reading and investigation. His copy of the “reserved and thoughtful” Tacitus denotes his vigorous and classical taste, respecting which Cotton Mather has informed us. Camden’s Annals of Queen Elizabeth would be of personal interest to him because he was an Englishman; because, also, he had been a subject during her reign, and had gone as a soldier to France, bearing her commission; besides, the book itself reflects credit on its owner, even if it was unreliable as to Queen Mary of Scotland, and too favorable to Elizabeth. Selden has declared that “Camden’s Annals of Elizabeth and Bacon’s History of Henry VII. are the only two Lives of the sovereigns of England which come up to the dignity of the subject, either in fullness of matter or beauty of composition.” The Commentaries of the Wars of France doubtless included the war in which his father died, and in which he himself had a part in the struggle of Henry IV. of France. Scotland also was dear to the Puritan heart, because Presbyterianism triumphed there, both over papacy and at last over prelacy. George Buchanan also was unfavorable to Mary, Queen of Scots, but his History of Scotland was a famous book.В .В .В .

As Dudley was himself a lawmaker, An Abstract of Penal Statutes must have been to him a useful book; besides, he was very much of a lawyer. But what was the significance of Piers Plowman in this library, a satire upon church and state? It was indeed very marked. For that book contains, in epitome and outline, the doctrines which produced the Reformation, and no man of his period was more strongly imbued with those teachings, extended even to the perfection of Puritanism, than he.В .В .В . We find in this room, also, the writings of Calvin, Cotton, Rogers, and Norton; books on history, law, theology, religion, and education. Every one of these books has an essential characteristic of himself in it, and is in the library because of his own exceeding need. His greatness and liberality are reflected in the quality of these silent friends and associates.124 Though she offers the impression of exhaustiveness, Jones’s cameo is very selective. Her source for these titles is the 1653 inventory of books not bequeathed before Dudley’s death. In other words, these were the leftovers. In his study of Elizabeth Puckering’s library, David McKitterick explained Page 66 →the lack of detailed information in postmortem book lists. Such inventories foregrounded saleable commodities, and only books with market value were considered worth detailing. “Larger books were obvious candidates,” reports McKitterick, but “lighter literature,” that is, common religious works, books on household management, conduct books, story books, and small used editions of poetry “frequently escaped enumeration even in the inventories of male property.”125 The titles listed in Dudley inventory are weightier than the examples of “lighter literature” named above, and yet they were apparently of minimal interest to the family. For later scholars, including Jones, they merit examination not only for the range of subject matter, genre, and publication information they present. For us today, their worth is tied in part to their probable availability and accessibility to Anne Bradstreet.126 As Jones is understandably not interested in noting in her biography of Dudley, the inventory additionally lists “8 French books”; “Several pamphlets”; “New books”; “Smalle writings.” These entries again indicate how imprecisely some kinds of early modern books were catalogued; Wright notes how profitable it would be to have access to complete records.127 The failure to identify the miscellaneous works is all the more regrettable, explains White, because Anne Bradstreet’s own manuscripts might have been among them.128 Sources and references cited in Anne Bradstreet’s works might be mined to enable a fuller reconstruction of the family library than the 1653 inventory permits.129 In fact, we discover that any inventory of the books that make up the holdings of the Bradstreet library is largely embedded in Bradstreet’s works. In comparison to other literate early modern European women at the time, who may have had access to housewifery manuals, devotional texts, a catechism, Bible, a French dictionary, some plays, and a book of geography,130 Bradstreet could avail herself in England and New England of a phenomenal and enviable collection of religious, classical, historical, humanist, judicial, educational, and scientific literatures. These would have consisted, first, of Page 67 →various translations of the Bible, devotional writings, religious tracts, controversial pamphlets, and sermons of all kinds, including those by Calvin, ThГ©odore de BГЁze, Bishop Lancelot Andrewes, William Ames, John Norton, Richard Sibbes, John Cotton, and Richard Rogers, to which might be added the meditations of Bishop Hall and Ecclesiastical Polity by Richard Hooker (published in the early 1630s). Hesiod, Thucydides, Xenophon, Aristotle, Virgil, Ovid, Pliny, Seneca, and Quintus Curtius’s The History of Alexander would number among the library’s classical holdings. She also would have had access to George Chapman’s Homer, which appealed to readers across political and religious divides; Philemon Holland’s translation of Titus Livius’s Romanae historiae; Sir Thomas North’s translation of Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans, familiar in Puritan circles; Josuah Sylvester’s translation of Du Bartas (1605); John Florio’s translation of Montaigne’s Essays; Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy; the poetry of William Langland, Edmund Spenser, Sir Philip Sidney, Michael Drayton, George Wither, and John Donne. Shakespeare may have appeared there as well, Bradstreet’s father having perhaps found the bard appealing.131 Among many others, Dudley’s inventory confirms that there would be works by antimonarchists like George Buchanan (Rerum Scoticarum Historia). History books contained in Dudley’s collection, including especially Walter Raleigh’s History of the World, informed Bradstreet’s unfinished

Four Monarchies, the manuscript of which was among the papers that burned at Andover. Raleigh also finds his way into the collection as the author of an elegy on Sidney, which provides the inspiration for Bradstreet’s aforementioned “Elegy UponВ .В .В . Sir Philip Sidney.” Furthermore, the library held books on natural philosophy, ranging from that of Lucretius and Francis Bacon to Helkiah Crooke’s Description of the Body of Man. The corpus of Bradstreet’s works reveals an indebtedness to James Ussher’s Annals of the World, William Pemble’s Period of the Persian Monarchie, John Speed’s Historie of Great Britaine, and William Camden’s Annales or The History of the Most Renowned and Victorious Princess Elizabeth, an original Latin version of which (Annales Rerum AnglicarumВ .В .В . Regnante Elizabetha, 1615), was in Thomas Dudley’s library. The result of the engagement with this bookscape is The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung up in America. Page 68 →

II That Bradstreet produced The Tenth Muse after 1630 confirms the availability of her source materials for the volume in the New World. The Tenth Muse contains, among other poems, four long four-part poems, or quaternions, on the Four Elements, Constitutions (humours), Ages of Man, and Seasons, as well as the unfinished “Exact Epitome of the Four Monarchies,” likely influenced by Raleigh’s History. Especially instrumental for Bradstreet was the poetry by French Huguenot poet Guillaume de Salluste Du Bartas. Translated into English in the seventeenth century, his 1578 La Semaine ou CrГ©ation du Monde influenced key English authors like Spenser, Torquato Tasso, Sidney—who was among the translators of Du Bartas—and, later, John Milton. As for Bradstreet, cleric and poet Nathaniel Ward characterizes her, partly in jest, as “a right Du Bartas Girle.”132 According to the anonymous author of “An Anagram,” addressed to “Deer Neat An Bartas,” Du Bartas’s name will be an “Epicene” (sharing characteristics of both sexes) once Bradstreet’s poems are compared with his (Tenth Muse, A8v). For his “Dialogue upon the Troubles past: Betweene Heraclitus and Democritus, the weeping and the laughing Philosophers,” Du Bartas adopted the humanist dialogue form, which conventionally presented opposing positions on a question (in utramque partem).133 This short piece appears in Du Bartas’s Divine Weekes and Workes, which Bradstreet imitates in composing her quaternions and in “Dialogue between Old England and New, concerning their present troubles.” In her intertextual exchange with Du Bartas’s poem, Bradstreet repeats with variation the title of “The Dialogue upon the Troubles past” while adopting the dialogue form and Du Bartas’s subject matter of a world turned upside down. While he leaves his impression on the form and content of Bradstreet’s “Dialogue,” Du Bartas is also the subject of Bradstreet’s epitaph “In honour of Du Bartas,” printed several pages after “A Dialogue.” The poem that follows this epitaph confirms Bradstreet’s debts to other volumes imported from Old England: Bradstreet’s tribute “In honour of that High and Mighty Princess, Queen Elizabeth, of most happy memory” mentions “Spencers Poetry” and the histories of Speed and Camden.134 At the same time, her work—especially “A Dialogue”—is indebted to contemporary Page 69 →reports not contained in the library transported overseas from the Dudley residence. Bradstreet includes multiple historically specific allusions and topical references to “present troubles.” Indeed, her poem was composed when New Englanders sought to interpret their exile in relation to the troubles and revolutions in the homeland.135 “A Dialogue” mentions the clashes between king and parliament, the execution of the Earl of Strafford and Archbishop Laud, the controversies over episcopacy and church-government, the print wars, and the suffering of innocent victims.136 During the civil war era, some newsbooks, letters, and gazettes about the crisis made their way to New England, where colonists apparently read “with fascination and horror as old England [still referred to as вЂhome’] tore itself apart.”137 Admittedly, the Atlantic world, which evidently was never a priority for the mother country, was largely disregarded when England became embroiled in what Bradstreet’s New England calls “intestine Wars” in “A Dialogue.”138 New World residents, however, hungered for transatlantic correspondence during the revolutionary era, the course of which they “cared deeply” about, and which led many to reconsider the objective of their colonial mission or errand into the wilderness.139

Correspondents addressed letters about the build-up to and outbreak of the civil war to John Davenport, Roger Williams, and John Winthrop, who reported that information about the ill news arrived in the colony on fishing vessels.140 Letters served as alternative source materials for topical references in Bradstreet’s poems. News was sometimes read aloud and otherwise shared in what Matt Cohen calls a “networked wilderness” that stretched across the colonies from Page 70 →Massachusetts west, and from Plymouth to Connecticut.141 For example, Herbert Pelham sent communications to Thomas Dudley at Boston for further transmission.142 Winthrop received letters from his nephew James Downing and from Winthrop’s friend, the antiquary Robert Reyce of Preston, about the bishops’ campaign for religious conformity and the literary exchanges and controversial pamphlets that fueled the anti-episcopal movement.143 From Winthrop, colonists learned about the beheading of the aforementioned Earl of Strafford and the arraignment or imprisonment of figures like Archbishop Laud (“our great enemy”), as well as of various officers, judges, and bishops. Such revolutionary events left Puritans expecting the dawning of a new world in the native country. Many New Englanders felt summoned to aid the cause of ecclesiastical reform or the war against the monarchy. Seven to 11 percent of the New England population did take up arms for the motherland, where former Puritan colonists served as soldiers, ministers, and members of Parliament in an effort to establish a “Puritan state in England.”144 Bradstreet’s contribution to that endeavor would take place on the other side of the Atlantic. Indeed, though they did not participate directly in the revolution, New England women defended the motherland by other means. As Mather pointed out in the quotation with which this chapter began, “They to whom the common use of Swords is neither Decent nor Lawful, have made a most Laudable use of Pens.” Bradstreet herself poeticizes sympathy for the plight of Parliament in the care of a daughter (figured as New England) offering feminized pathos and advice, as well as parliamentary support, to her mother, Old England. Taking as its subject England’s tragic fall into civil war, “A Dialogue” is a specifically gendered account of Old England’s troubles, which plague her daughter New England. Thomas Dudley had used a similar figure of “four sisters” to represent the four continents of Europe, America, Asia, and Africa in his “On the Four Parts of the World,” of which Bradstreet had Page 71 →read a description.145 Elsewhere, Dudley similarly deploys the trope of the feminized land or nation in comparing “little mothers [who] bring forth little children” to “small commonwealths [that generate] matters of small moment, the reading whereof yet is not to be despised by the judicious.В .В .В .”146 Captain John Smith used terms of endearment to characterize the American colonies as “my children; for they have been my wife, my hawks, hounds, my cards, my dice, and, in total, my best content, as indifferent to my heart as my left hand to my right.”147 Bradstreet specifically adopts verse as a medium for the creation of an exchange between two female figures, a diseased “Old England” and a supportive, if underdeveloped, “New England.” The poet was perhaps influenced by her father’s portrayal of the geographical and political units, though contemporary Bradstreet editor Elizabeth Wade White offers a different explanation for Bradstreet’s use of female speakers in her “Dialogue.” She cites correspondence the sea captain Benjamin Gostlin addressed to John Winthrop just before the outbreak of civil war: “If ever mother had neede of Dawghters helps[,] now it hath,” he wrote. White maintains that Bradstreet herself must have had access to this letter while it circulated among the colony’s officials.148 Whatever her source or inspiration for the poem’s feminized and personified figures, Bradstreet was clearly interested in animating their relationship in ways not evidenced in Du Bartas, Dudley, or Gostlin. Bradstreet’s New England, the daughter colony, succeeds in discerning, historicizing, diagnosing, and poeticizing the ills that cripple Old England, and thus she forges alternative connections between Old and New England, past and present. Bradstreet’s poem exhibits what Kate Chedgzoy describes as “the continuing transatlantic entanglement of the fates of the two Englands,”149 an entanglement, as I attempt to show, that extended to the poem’s and the volume’s Page 72 →textual and material history. The book in which “A Dialogue” appeared was published, complete with multiple commendatory poems, in London, having been transported there in 1647 by Bradstreet’s brother-in-law and Church of England opponent—the Reverend John Woodbridge. The English publisher Stephen Bowtell of The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung up in America printed anti-prelatical and Presbyterian tracts as well as The Simple Cobler of Aggawam by Nathaniel Ward, who may have persuaded

Bowtell to publish Bradstreet’s volume.150 The Tenth Muse was included in George Thomason’s collection of books amassed during the civil war and interregnum periods,151 and it was listed in the end matter of contemporaneous works like Obadiah Sedgwick’s 1657 Humbled sinner resolved and alongside sermons, catechetical works, and biblical commentaries.152 Among these it certainly stands out as a volume more secular than religious, though the company it shares with religious books arguably invests it with new value as a testimonial. Two decades later, The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung up in America returned home, and, in a renaissance for Bradstreet, who had died six years earlier, appeared as Several Poems Compiled with great variety of Wit and Learning. John Foster, the first American-born printer, who acquired a press in Boston in the mid-1670s, printed the volume. In the meantime, “My papers fell a prey to th’ raging fire,” reported Anne Bradstreet in an apology found among her papers that explained the incomplete status of her poem on the Roman monarchy in the Four Monarchies.153 The 1678 posthumous edition would print “An Apology” immediately following the selections of the Four Monarchies. “To finish what’s begun, was my intent,” she explains, but her work remained disabled: “my monarchies their legs do lack.”154 The 1678 edition contains numerous additional changes to the poems originally printed in the Tenth Muse. Most of the emendations signal support of the Restoration of the monarchy. Included in the second edition of “The Four Elements,” for example, is a reference to the 1666 fire of London and Page 73 →another to the restored city: “And stately London (our great Britain’s glory) / My raging flame did make a mournful story, / But maugre all, that I, or foes could do / That Phoenix from her bed is risen New.”155 Appearing in both editions of Bradstreet’s poems, “Old Age,” the final quarter of the quaternion the “Ages of Man,” vividly connects the corruption of the body and the troubled nation in a manner complementing Old England’s lamentations in “A Dialogue between Old England and New.” In the 1650 edition of the Tenth Muse, Old Age declares “The desolation of a goodly State, / Plotted and acted so that none can tell. / Who gave the counsel, but the Prince of hell.”156 In the 1678 edition of Bradstreet’s volume, explanations for the diseased state include newly added accounts in “Old Age” of the 1641 Irish “Rebellion,” the deposition of Charles I, and Cromwellian tyranny: “Three hundred thousand slaughtered innocents, / By bloody Popish, hellish miscreants /В .В .В . /В .В .В . I’ve seen a king [Charles I] by force thrust from his throne. / And an usurper subtly mount thereon.”157 Awareness of topical politico-historical developments in England likely dictated Bradstreet’s and her printer’s rereading of the earlier work, most notably “A Dialogue between Old England and New.” Retained in the second edition, this poem saw more changes than any other printed in the Tenth Muse. In its second edition, “A Dialogue” registers the western reorientation of the 1678 volume. New England becomes the model for a revived Old England whose healing and restoration is brought about through narration. In the 1678 edition of Bradstreet’s volume,158 Having exhorted New England to help spare her mother from punishment (l. 86, 1650 edn.), Old England joins her tears not only with those of her daughter (“our tears” l. 93, 1678 edn.) but also with the victims of war, including “my weeping Virgins,” “[t]he poor [who] want their pay,” and “wofull mothers [weeping] tears unpitied” (ll. 203, 207, 208, 1678 edn.).159 Again, the sutures of the nation here are not so much bloodlines as tears and sympathy, which, while exposing wounds, also serve as a balm. In the original version of the poem, the distinctions between cause and effect and sins and punishment are elided in Old England’s account of her Page 74 →troubles, and it becomes clear that the mother country herself is internally exiled: These Prophets mouthes (alas the while) was [sic] stopt, Unworthily, some backs whipt, and ears cropt; Their reverent cheeks, did beare the glorious markes

Of stinking, stigmatizing, Romish Clerkes; Some lost their livings, some in prison pent, Some grossely fin’d, from friends to exile went. (ll. 126–32, 1650 edn.) The 1678 edition omits this graphic description of the persecution of Bastwick, Prynne, and Burton, retaining only the lines “Some lost their livings, some in prison pent, / Some fined, from house and friends to exile went” (ll. 136–37, 1678 edn.). The alteration in the later edition corresponds with the more moderate and measured tone and the politically conservative position of the 1678 version. The “exiles” in the aforementioned passage are now described as estranged from their “home,” a newly inserted word in the second edition. Further, in the expanded version of Bradstreet’s volume that constitutes the Several Poems Compiled with great variety of Wit and Learning, the additional poems point the book in a new direction: the new poems concentrate on the home as a domestic space, one now situated in the New World. Epitaphs and elegies for Bradstreet’s parents and extended family members including grandchildren, love poems to her husband, the meta-poetic “Author to her Book,” and poems about Bradstreet’s various illnesses represent the new works of the 1678 homespun posthumous volume produced “By a Gentlewoman in New-England.” The final significant revision—at whose hands we cannot be sure—of the 1650 edition of Bradstreet’s 1643 “Dialogue” saw the penultimate verse changed from “FarewellВ .В .В . Parliament, prevail” (l. 293, 1650 edn.) to “rightest cause prevail” in the 1678 edition (l. 298). It was an emendation dictated by postcivil war politico-historical conditions that saw the restoration of monarchy across the Atlantic in the interim. The degree of seventeenth-century editorial intervention in the production of the second edition of Bradstreet’s volume remains undetermined. Jeannine Hensley maintains that the corrections in the second edition are likely Bradstreet’s. So again, the emendations, deletions, and additions that distinguish the 1650 and 1678 editions may offer as much or more evidence of Bradstreet’s rereading her own work as of the printer, John Foster’s, redactions. The title page of the 1678 edition states that the volume was “Corrected Page 75 →by the Author,” and many of the revisions in that edition resemble those in the 1650 Andover holograph manuscript (in Harvard University’s Houghton Library). The textual history of the volume generates an afterlife for Bradstreet in terms of The Tenth Muse and Several Poems in the New World.160 A number of the collections and libraries of her contemporaries listed or printed her poems. Entries in booksellers’ catalogues show some of the company that books keep and with which books Bradstreet’s Tenth Muse or Several Poems kept company. Under “Poems” in “Romances, Poems, and Playes,” which is among the categories in William London’s “Catalogue of the most Vendible Books in England, ” works by such playwrights and poets as Beaumont, Donne, Du Bartas, Fanshawe, Fletcher, Quarles, Herbert, Herrick, Milton, Cavendish, Suckling, Shakespeare, Vaughan, Shirley, and Wither appear alongside Bradstreet’s, which is entered by the poet’s surname and again by the volume’s title.161 The Tenth Muse also appeared in the catalogues and bookstalls of Boston booksellers John Usher and Elkanah Pembroke; in the library collections of Edward Phillips, Edward Taylor, and Thomas Prince; and in the intertextual communications of female author Bathsua Makin162 and of Daniel Russell and Cotton Mather. Edward Phillips, Milton’s nephew and pupil, produced a catalogue of ancient and modern poets, Theatrum Poetarum, in which he testified to the endurance of The Tenth Muse two and a half decades after its printing.163 Indeed, the volume would experience a new life in New England, where it was printed in 1678. Colonial American poet, pastor, and physician Edward Taylor, the inventory of whose library contained 192 items, had one book of verse: Bradstreet’s.164 In a dedication to Cotton Mather for the production of the Magnalia Christi Americana, John Higginson announces “the little daughter of New-England in AmericaВ .В .В . bow[s] down herself to her mother England, in Page 76 →Europe, presenting this memorial unto herВ .В .В . and finally promising all that reverence and obedience which is due to her good mother.”165 As Higginson celebrates the monument that is the Magnalia Christi Americana (1702), Mather himself makes a plea for the inclusion of Bradstreet in the catalogues of English libraries: “Reader, America justly admires the Learned Women of the other Hemisphere.” These include women ancient and contemporary, from “Hippatia, who formerly taught the Liberal Arts” to

“the most Renowned Anna Maria Schurman,” with whom Edward Phillips had also juxtaposed his catalogue entry of Anne Bradstreet. “But she [America] now prays,” continues Mather, “that into such Catalogues of Authoresses, as Beverovicius, Hottinger, and Voetius, have given unto the world, there may be a room given unto Madam Ann Bradstreet, the daughter of our Governour Dudley, and the Consort of our Governour Bradstreet, whose Poems, divers times Printed, have afforded a grateful Entertainment unto the Ingenious, and a Monument for her Memory beyond the Stateliest Marbles.”166 “There may be a room given unto Madam Ann Bradstreet,” Mather judges, pointing to The Tenth Muse, which would, as he declared a decade earlier in Ornaments for the Daughters of Zion, serve as a monument and “Challenge a Room in . . . a Library.” Such evidence confirms that the frontiers of literary production were already moving beyond the borders of England, as the transatlantic female author’s work—a product of Bradstreet’s musings, memory, and book passages—occupies rooms in the Old World and the New.

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Four Elizabeth Isham’s “own Bookes” Property, Propriety, and the Self as Library Edith Snook Among the surviving papers of the seventeenth-century gentlewoman Elizabeth Isham (1608–54)—the nevermarried daughter of Sir John Isham (1582–1651) and Judith Lewyn Isham (1590–1625) of Lamport Hall in Northamptonshire—is a list she entitled “My own Bookes.” This book list survives alongside her will, notes, letters, a memoir (Book of Rememberance, written in 1638 and 1639), and a unique, one-page calendar-like diary that chronicles with brief notes her life between the ages of eight and forty.167 Isham recorded the book list on the back of a letter, dated May 27, from her father’s sister, Susannah (Isham) Stuteville. Dated May 29, the book list first consists of fifty-seven numbered entries for print and manuscript books, to which Isham adds, in the top left margin of the page, the titles of two more books.168 The list continues in the left and top margins of the letter itself, where Isham recorded thirteen more titles, the first ten numbered, with three more titles recorded in a page corner. Isham inscribed what may be further book titles between the lines of the letter, and although these are illegible, the date 1648 Page 78 →appears there, suggesting the list was compiled in that year.169 The book list’s style is characteristic of Isham’s writing practice, which frequently uses shorthand abbreviations and marginal annotations and presses itself into small spaces to make use of every bit of paper. Almost all of these approximately seventy-two books are identifiable. They are mainly domestic and religious texts, but within these bounds, include recipes, poetry, foreign-language materials, Bibles, catechisms, sermons, prayers, and other devotional works. This essay will read Elizabeth Isham’s list of “My own Bookes” through the lens of her other writing. To think about Isham’s bookscape, the essay will argue that in her book list—an inventory that defines her book ownership and the parameters of her library—Elizabeth Isham writes her life, in part, through the discourse of property, that is, through forms of writing that are deployed around property ownership and exchange. The Ishams were a family of means who rose to wealth through the efforts of her great-grandfather John Isham, a mercer and merchant adventurer who purchased Lamport in 1560, in a county where Ishams had held land for centuries. He made further profits from Lamport’s lands through sheep farming and rents, and the estate was settled on his son Thomas and then on Elizabeth’s father, who, when he was knighted in 1608, cemented their status as gentry; in 1627, he was created first Baronet of Lamport by Charles I. Their social position, argues Mary E. Finch, was created by the exclusion of the junior branches of the family, by profitable business decisions, and by “stringent economy.”170 Like many early modern women, however, Elizabeth Isham did not participate in property exchanges through the possession of land; that role went to her brother Justinian (1611–75), although after her father’s marriage negotiations on her behalf foundered, Elizabeth would receive an annuity of ВЈ300 from Lamport.171 Unsurprisingly then, her writing documents her possession of money and moveable property; in her will, for instance, she gave money to John Goodman and to the daughters of Edmund Vaughn, clerk.172 Page 79 →Isham’s book lists are another form of property writing. The inventory could be, Amy Louise Erickson reminds us, a legal document of the ecclesiastical court when undertaken by appraisers (who were to be at least two local men) and was often used to articulate a claim to moveable property.173 Although Isham’s book list is not in this legal category—it was not undertaken by an appraiser but written by Isham herself, and it was not filed with a court—it remains a statement of her property ownership. Also surviving in her hand are an unattributed, undated list of twenty-two more books, recorded on the front of a folded sheet of paper also containing numbered notes on governance.174 Isham recorded on another small bit of paper a list of the books that had belonged to her sister, Judith Isham (1610–36), and, on the reverse, another posthumously created list, dated 1649, of the books that had belonged to her mother.175 These lists distinguish women’s books from

others within the household at Lamport Hall.176 With the inventory entitled “My own Bookes,” Elizabeth Isham not only defines the contents of her library, but she also forges a record of who she was. While the book list is not recognized today as a form of life-writing in the way that diaries and memoirs are, Adam Smyth argues that “before the diary or autobiography began to dominate attempts to arrange a written life—that is, before the later seventeenth century—individuals seeking to produce textual records of their lives experimented and improvised with other available forms,” such as annotated almanacs, financial accounts, commonplace books, and parish registers.177 Modeled on the household inventory, a book list, particularly one entitled “My own Bookes,” is a form of Page 80 →life-writing that—like the will, already discussed as life-writing—arranges a life through documenting the possession and exchange of property.178 For Elizabeth Isham, the self can be understood through book ownership. Isham draws a link between the self and the library in her Book of Rememberance: “O my God to be amazed at having in us astwere an everlasting libreary.”179 Her language recalls (imperfectly, as if from memory) the praise of memory in Augustine’s Confessions: “Great is this force of memory, excessive great, O my God: a large and infinite room.”180 Shifting Augustine’s “room” (and the “field” he mentions elsewhere) to her eternal “libreary,” another commonplace for memory, Isham forges an intimate connection among the library, the self, and apprehension of the divine.181 In her list of “My own Bookes,” Isham presents the library as a more material statement of the self, one that nevertheless continues to articulate her knowledge and her relationship to others and to God. What books, then, did Elizabeth Isham claim as her own? The rest of this essay will answer this question and, contributing to current research on Isham’s life-writing, examine how Isham uses her book list to present herself as a woman of property, attached to her family, community, and the Ishams’ Royalist political stance, and of propriety, a woman committed to her faith and her work.182

Page 81 →Books as Family Property For Elizabeth Isham, books are, among other things, material objects that can be purchased, given, and bestowed through bequest. In the list of her own books and in her memoir, Isham repeatedly records where her books come from. She writes in her memoir, for instance, that for two years she kept a hen and sold the eggs to get money to buy two books.183 Here books mark her economic and intellectual independence. But just as often, her books come from members of her family. She records in her memoir that when she was still a child, “my mother let me keepe some bookes of hers,” and that her sister indicated at some point before her death that “I should have her best treasure her bookes.”184 The book list itself asserts her books’ origins through the markings beside a number of titles: the letters F, M, S, B, Mr H, and C, as well as the names Mr Goodman and “gran” and a symbol, roughly \.. These marks, also used in the diary and in letters between Justinian and Elizabeth, appear to designate the sources of the adjacent book titles, with F, M, S, B standing for Father, Mother, Sister, and Brother and the \. for “my.”185 For instance, Pensive Man’s Practise and Quarles’s Emblems are marked with the \. symbol, and Isham records in her memoir, “I bought Mr Quarlsses Emblems, ” and in the diary in 1621 that she bought Pensive Man’s Practise “in this or the next year.” That the F stands for father is suggested by the F beside “2 Bibles,” which matches the diary’s record that in 1634 her father gave her an embroidered Bible and the memoir’s record that her father “had boug[ht] us his Children Bibles a pies.”186 On the list of her own books, M marks, amongst other titles, The Godly Garden, and Isham reports in her memoir that “my mother gave me and my sister the Godly Garden a prayer Page 82 →booke a piece.”187 B marks the title Cure of Cares, and the memoir states: “that I confesse theses [sic] thoughts did me much harm I received comfort out of a Booke my Brother gave me when he went beiond sea called the cure of cares.”188 Gerard’s Meditations is marked with S, an abbrevation Isham uses repeatedly in her diary for Judith’s name, and the Book of Rememberance indicates that her sister, “having a new booke of Gerards Meditations: sat up in the night to read it. coming to me when she tho-ught [sic] I was waken and telling me what great joy she had being filled with devine love.”189 While this incident does not prove that her sister gave her the book, that it also appears on Judith’s list at least confirms Judith’s ownership of it.190 While the diary and memoir do not afford definitive clues to the identities of C or Mr. H, the “Mr. Goodman” named beside a book called “Privat devotions” may be the “Mr John Goodman, Minister

of Lamport” named in her will. Beside the entry for The Treasure of Health is the annotation “gran,” possibly her grandmother, whose name is similarly abbreviated in the diary (The Treasurie of Health was printed in 1570, well before her paternal grandmother’s death in 1621). With these notations beside titles on the book list, Elizabeth Isham creates a record of where the books that are her own have come from. For her it is important to remember that her own property has been bestowed on her by her family. Elizabeth Isham further draws out the significance of books’ origins in her memoir when she chronicles reading the books of her ancestors. Her mother’s brother, for instance, showed to her mother a psalm book that had belonged to Elizabeth’s grandfather: “Granfather Leowens underlineing in divers places, wherein he [Isham’s uncle] delighted saying that it did him more good that his father was religious then all the land which he left him.”191 Elizabeth writes, too, of reading a book her mother had read: “I received comfort and instruction in the book of the [soules] conj[un]tion with God which my mother had used. and which Mrs Alce read to me.”192 With her grandmother, Elizabeth read a copy of her great-grandfather’s Christian Prayers and Meditations, Page 83 → which he marked in many places that he liked. she shewing it mee and withall comending what a kind father inlaw he was to her: since I have bine very glad to meete with these places and somthing else of his owne writing yea it doth much rejoyce mee to aplie theses places for my owne use and to tred in the selfe same stepes towards heaven wherein my forefathers have walked. \for/ thou art my God and the God of my fathers.193 Elizabeth’s mother gave her a copy of Christian Prayers and Meditations when she was a child to have as her own, which, Isham says, “pleased me so well that I used almost every day to writ somthing out of it.”194 In all of these instances, the processes of receiving the book, reading both the text and others’ notes, knowing where the book came from, and copying are all integral parts of possessing a book. She receives comfort from reading the books that belonged to others, for they allow her to remember her kin as readers and to forge a material connection to them through books. To walk where one’s forefathers have walked is to shape a Christian identity through the family line; this is an inheritance, as her uncle says, that can be valued more even than land. Some of the titles on Elizabeth Isham’s book list also document the self through owning books written by her family and by members of her community. This sociability is of a piece with her more general reading habits; as Isaac Stephens demonstrates more fully, her reading was sociable, and she often read with others.195 The sociability of her book ownership extended to kinship relations. The list refers to what appear to be handwritten sermon notes: “4 or 5 sermons of my cosen Nokes/writ=/1 of Mr Elbrowes” and “Som of Mr Bolt Sr writ.” Cousin Nokes is likely the cousin mentioned in her diary in 1646, 1647, and 1648 (which includes no mention of Mr Elbrowes or Mr Bolt, however). An uncle and cousin, both ministers, are the authors of the books indicated on the list by “Pagits Catichisme,” “Christianografy by Ephraim Pagit,” “another book of his of ye Woolfs,” and “The History of [the] Bible by way of Quest & Answehr pagit.” Eusebius Pagit (1546/47–1617) was the vicar of Lamport in 1572 under the patronage of John Isham and the author of The History of the Bible Briefly Collected by way of Page 84 →Question and Answere (1602).196 When Pagit was deprived of that position for nonconformity, he developed a catechism for the household at Lamport Hall, Short Questions and Answeares, Conteyning the Summe of Christian Religion (1572), published anonymously and addressed to Christian parents.197 This text may be what Isham refers to as “Pagits Catichism.”198 In her Book of Rememberance, Isham discusses reading such a work: my father called upon me to learn a Catechisme (of Mr pagitts a minister \which was much in/ request) I had learnt a litle at the begining in mine Infancy. and I could say most of that in the servis book by hearing her that tended us, now my mother bought me one with pruftes. Which I liked well to redd, as I did, in those bookes which were bought for mee. espeshally at the first, but my father would have us learne that without proufts I suppose because it was easyer for memory.199

Suggesting that she follows her mother in preferring the text with evidence, she adds in the margin, “of Mr Pagitts which proufts were set footh by another.”200 The books from Eusebius Pagit trace both her family lineage and the instruction she received in her youth from her parents. Her cousin, Ephraim Pagit (1574–1646), born in Northamptonshire, was Eusebius Pagit’s son and the author of Christianographie, or the Description of the Multitude and Sundry Sorts of Christians in the World not Subiect to the Pope (1635). Complete with maps, it examines the non-Catholic Christians in Europe, Asia, Africa, and America, sets out how they all agree with “us,” and establishes the antiquity of these churches and the illegitimacy of the pope.201 Also by Ephraim Pagit, The Mysticall Wolfe. Set forth in a Sermon Preached in the Church of Edmond the King, in Lombard-street (1645) is a sermonPage 85 → on the text of Matthew 7:15 warning against false prophets, including Catholics as well as Protestant nonconformists, such as Anabaptists, Brownists, Independents, and others. In her diary, Isham recorded that in 1645 she “r[ead] my cosen pagets book. of woolves in sheeps clo[thing],” which specifically situates her reading in terms of her kinship with the author. Interestingly, The Mysticall Wolfe is one of the few controversial books in her possession. Her ownership of it should not, however, be seen as a sure indication of her religio-political attachments. Isham also owned, on the one hand, Ancilla Pietatis by Daniel Featley, chaplain to Charles I and a supporter of episcopacy, and Institutiones Piae or Directions to Pray (1630) by Lancelot Andrewes, Bishop of Winchester and Dean of the Chapel Royal under James I, and, on the other, The True Watch, and Rule of Life (1607) by John Brinsley, a Puritan schoolmaster, and Crumms of Comfort, a prayer book by Michael Sparke, the publisher of the notorious William Prynne.202 Elizabeth Isham was a Puritan according to both Erica Longfellow and Isaac Stephens (he calls her a “prayer book Puritan”), but her book ownership included both conformist and nonconformist religious books.203 The point here is that while a narrow religious position did not seem to drive her book collecting, it is her identification with her family that pervades the books she claims as her own. Elizabeth Isham’s book list also positions her within her Northamptonshire community, for she owns sermons by local ministers. The entry for “Mr ffosbroks Sermons at Ketring” refers to Six Sermons Delivered in the Lecture at Kettering (1633) by John Fosbroke. Kettering, in Northamptonshire, is about nine miles from Lamport on today’s roads.204 The entry for “Mr Caudrius Sermons” seems likely to refer to Three Sermons by Daniel Cawdry, printed first in 1641 when he was the rector of Great Billing in Page 86 →the same county (about eleven miles away).205 Probably the most important clerical figure in Elizabeth’s life was John Dod, the rector of Fawsley, also in Northamptonshire. Isham’s book list includes “Mr Dod on the Sacrament” and “Mr Dod o[n] the Com[mandments],” the first being either Ten Sermons Tending chiefely to the Sitting of Men for the Worthy Receiving of the Lords Supper (1609) or A Briefe Dialogue, Concerning Preparation for the Lords Supper (1614), and the second, A Treatise or Exposition upon the Ten Commandements (1603).206 Dod was a frequent visitor to Lamport Hall, where he ministered to Elizabeth’s ailing mother.207 Dod became a guide for Elizabeth herself when she was young, appointing her and her siblings to read two chapters of the Bible a day and then asking them to “account what wee coud remember” to him or to their parents.208 Although Elizabeth Isham does not always agree with Dod—she disputes his view that it is unlawful to play cards, for instance—the books on her list memorialize his influence. With this book list, Elizabeth Isham establishes her ownership of books by kinsmen and of sermons by other local ministers, and, by signaling her books’ origins, she testifies to her place within a family that for decades supported churches and ministers in the community.209

Books as Proper Property The difference between Isham’s account of her reading in her memoir and diary and the books she claims as her own property highlights the emphasis the list of her books places on propriety, as it was defined by early modern notions of good womanhood. In his exploration of Elizabeth Isham’s reading, Isaac Stephens argues that it was diverse (at times, aural and oral; at others, private and silent), active, and empowering to her as an autodidact, writer, and unmarried woman.210 The book list, however, specifically emphasizes Elizabeth Isham’s identity as a woman whose interests are defined by Page 87 →her faith and her work. In some ways, her claim to the property of her books stands on the foundation of this identity. David Lemmings argues that “[f]or women in early modern England, their property and material interests were closely connected with

establishing what anthropologists generally term вЂhonour,’ meaning moral вЂcharacter.’”211 Property and propriety were thus tied together not only because the two words were occasional synonyms but also because women’s claim to property often depended on their propriety. In Isham’s list, ownership of proper books offers a more long-lasting construction of the self, a more “everlasting libreary,” than the books that she read which did not remain in her possession. The underpinnings of early modern notions of good womanhood are evident in the book list’s notable emphasis on the Bible, religious texts, and books about work, and by its exclusion of forms of reading that she evidently undertook but were more contentious for women, such as recreational reading and reading in natural philosophy and learned medicine.212 For instance, Isham’s diary indicates that in 1647 she “made an end of the L[or]d Ba[con].”213 Although it is not clear which of Bacon’s works she means, her wording suggests something substantial that took some time. She also read natural philosophy, specifically John Swan’s Speculum MundiВ· Or a Glasse Representing the Face of the World, as well as medical books, including Hygiasticon: or the Right Course of Preserving Life and Health and a “book of surgery.”214 Notes in the margins and blank spaces of her letters show that she read Giovanni da Vigo’s The Most Excellent Workes of Chirurgerye, Made and Set Forth by Maister John Vigon and Thomas Gale’s Certaine Workes of Chirurgerie.215 None of these books, however, are listed as Isham’s own. Instead, the book list records her ownership of works more conventionally domestic and directed to female readers, including an untitled herbal, a preserving book, and a book of gardening, with notations that make these titles impossible to identify in the English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC) but Page 88 →certainly define them through their household purpose in providing gardening and cookery knowledge.216 The list includes, as well, Thomas Tusser’s frequently republished husbandry manual, Hundreth Good Pointes of Husbandrie (1557), as well as four medical and cookery recipe books: “ye Closit or treasure of Hiden Secrets,” “The Widdowes Treasure,” and on the verso of the list in the margins of the letter are “Wid= treasure,” “Goodhousew Treasure,” and “Treasure of Health.” These titles refer to John Partridge’s popular The Treasurie of Commodious Conceits, & Hidden Secrets (1573) and his The Widowes Treasure, Plentifully Furnished with Secretes in Phisicke: & Chirurgery (1582); The Good Hous-wives Treasurie (1588); and The Treasury of Healthe Contaynyng Many Profitable Medycines (1550[?]). While the first three of these titles are for female readers, the last is not, and it explicitly evokes learned medicine in specifying that its contents were “gathered out of Hypocrates, Galen and Avycen.”217 Like the others, it is, however, a practical recipe book rather than medical theory. Another entry on the list for “Two work books” is also obliquely suggestive of Isham’s work within the household. Joseph Black argues that “work” here may refer specifically to needlework and that the books are pattern books; Giovanni Battista Ciotti’s A Booke of Curious and Strange Inventions, called the First Part of Needleworkes (1596) was in the Lamport Hall library.218 Whatever kind of work is supported by Isham’s work books, this entry and the others for domestic books present Elizabeth Isham as a woman who eschewed idleness and cared for her household through medical care and the provision of food, as good women in the early modern period were expected to do (and as her diary shows she did). A similar concern with propriety is evident in the literary books on Isham’s book list. She claims as her own Francis Quarles’s Emblems (1635), George Wither’s “Satyrs & Moto,”219 and John Donne’s Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions (1624)—works that are deeply moral in their approach. The only narrative on her list, the clergyman Richard Bernard’s Isle of Man, is an allegory about sin that has been said to have influenced Bunyan; it, Page 89 →Isham says, “helped me to \clens my soul as some \sermon \did.”220 However, Isham’s Book of Rememberance shows that she read many more literary texts than these, including a work by Du Bartas, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Spenser (including, specifically, The Shepheardes Calender), and George Herbert’s “Affliction” from The Temple; the diary records that she also read Chaucer, Sidney, and Juvenal. Isham, however, claims none of these books as her “own.” One explanation for these differences between the books she read and those she claimed as her own may be found in the way that Isham attaches her book ownership to the reading culture of her family, with the book list emerging in alignment with her father’s sense of feminine propriety, as well as her family’s preferences.

She records that her sister Judith was pleased when Elizabeth bought Quarles’s Emblems and that Judith was “much pleased” with Wither’s Motto.221 Her father, Isham says, refused to lend her plays, and so although she wrote in her diary in 1625, “I read some part of Withers and play Bookes, which our nurs sent, ” she listed no plays as her “own.” Her reading may have included books not sanctioned by her father, but her book list does not. It is the moralistic and devotional literature of Wither and Donne, and not the potentially contentious poetry or romance of Sidney, Ovid, or Chaucer, that appears on the list as her own. Aligned with proscriptions against female recreational reading propounded within a culture anxious about female idleness and women’s supposed wandering minds, the book list, then, represents Isham as a woman of faith and diligence. Despite the notable exclusions, the list is not marked only by constraint. Rather, it more positively derives from how Elizabeth Isham came to think about knowledge as best defined by what is useful in caring for her family and in her faith. Thus, while the book list provides evidence of her study of languages, the memoir explicitly frames these as part of her domestic labor and her identity as a Christian. The foreign language books on the book list are “A laten Grammer,” a French grammar, “2 other french Bookes,” and a “French Testament.” In her memoir, Isham details the progress and then the cessation of her language learning, with her interest in Latin emerging first as a form of resistance to typical feminine accomplishment and then being marked as an inaccessible discipline. Isham records in her memoir that her Aunt Denton Page 90 → put me in mind of learning frinch. but I had a more mind to latten thinking it more profitable which my Cosen Thomas pagitt taught me. I doe not remember that I learnt further then the declensions of pronounes: for I had not time (to be excellent or) to learne much of one thing having many: yet I thought it made me read or understand English the better.222 She adds later that while she “had a mind to learn latin,” she determined that “Knowledge puffeth up. but love edifieth. I therefore purposed to read of the vertue of those hearbs and flowres which I had wrought.”223 With the Latin grammar that she identifies as her own, Elizabeth Isham remembers her cousin’s teaching, thwarted by a culture that did not expect women to set aside the time to learn Latin as boys of her class would in attending grammar school and university. But she also redefines Latin learning as less useful and meritorious than reading the herbal, which affords more edifying and loving knowledge, since it can be useful in the care of others. Of French, Isham emphasizes how it enhanced her reading of the Bible. She writes, “My Brother learneth me some french which I tooke the more delight in because thy [God’s] word seemed the more fresh to me in another language taking the more heed in it and thereby I might be perfect in it. though I had not so well learned the frinch as to well speak.”224 By not recording in her book list the titles of two of her French books, or even their subject areas (as she did with her gardening book and herbal), Isham renders them as significant only in that they are French. The named volumes are her French testament and the grammar, which highlight her faith and her study. The largest category of books Elizabeth Isham identifies as her own are religious books, including Bibles, catechisms, prayer books, meditational and devotional works, religious histories, and sermons. Her book list begins with three Bibles—“2 Bibles a greater, & lesser” and the French testament—and it pays special attention to the Psalms. One entry for three psalm books further identifies two of them more particularly: “King James Tran[slation] of them” and another “with reading & singing.” Another psalm book for singing, “7 Sobs of a Sorowfull Soule,” also on Isham’s list, is Seven Sobs of a Sorrowfull Soule for Sinne Comprehending those Seven Psalmes of the Princelie Prophet David, Commonlie called Poenitentiall (1583) by William Hunnis,Page 91 → a volume which provides a musical staff and notes for singing these psalms. Hannibal Hamlin argues that psalm translation was a crucial part the Renaissance culture of translation and fundamental to the spread of the Reformation; regarded by some as educational and praised for their literary merits, the Psalms were sung communally and translated many times.225 With the psalm books on her list, Isham recalls her childhood delight in the Psalms; how her grandmother thought “it to be good” for her to learn them; how her mother reproved her for her poor singing; how her poor singing led her to have “no mind to

learn,” despite her father’s insistence on it for health reasons; and finally how she later came “to a fuller understanding” and “condemne[d] my neclygence herein,” knowing as an adult that “the cheefest matter which is required is the intencion of the hart uttering words of devine knowledge.”226 Also on the list, A True Christians Daily Delight: Being the Summe of Every Chapter of the Old and New Testaments, set downe Alphabetically, in English Verse (1623) versifies the entire Bible. Together, Elizabeth Isham’s Bibles and Psalters are part of her family’s culture of reading. She remembers her family’s wishes for her, and, more broadly, with the versifications and translations, she presents herself as a woman with a literary life that revolves around the Bible and one for whom the Psalms justify self-expression: by their “singing and Eloquence[e?] is the heart inflamed with the more alacrity and vigour and our spirits set a worke to give the more atention to thy Glory.”227 Catechisms and devotional texts are similarly part of her family life and household work. The list records “3 or 4 catechisms together” and two catechisms attributed to “Pagit.” The remnants of childhood instruction, the catechisms also aid her efforts as an adult to teach maids in her household who were unable to read, with the “old catechisme” being best, she says, for this purpose.228 Prayer books are well represented, too, including the popular A Pensive Mans Practise (1584) by John Norden, Supplications of Saints. A Booke of Prayers (1612) by Thomas Sorocold, and Crumms of Comfort (1627) by Michael Sparke.229 Such books, like the psalm books, again show her to be Page 92 →following her father’s advice: he wished his daughter to read prayers in morning, which, Elizabeth professes, “since I have done.”230 Their variety also speaks to her preference for “not tieing my selfe alwaies to one PraireBooke for I found that viriaty quickened my Spirites. being not so much driven away as when I used alwaies one form of praier.”231 These religious books highlight her position as a Christian, as her father’s daughter, as a religious guide within her household, and as a woman who autonomously has and fulfills preferences of her own with respect to her choice and use of prayer books. Finally, Elizabeth Isham’s religious books engage with her family’s political identity as Royalists, a position with which she actively identified. Her papers include a draft of an undated letter to Charles I, in which she expresses the desire that “yor Maty may have joy againe of your servants” and signs herself, “your Majesties Loyall subject to serve you.”232 Several of the psalm books Isham claims as her own align faith and Royalist politics. The entry identifying one of the psalm books as “King James Tran[slation] of them” suggests that Isham owned The Psalms of King David, Translated by King James (1631), a versification of the Psalms printed under the authority of Charles I, with a title page that represents James I and King David. Similarly, another entry in her list for “The Ld Haton on ye Psalms” refers to The Psalter of David: with Titles and Collects According to the Matter of each Psalme (1644) by Sir Christopher Hatton, a work that indexes each psalm according to its type, designates daily psalm reading to ensure they can all be read within thirty days, supplements each psalm with a prayer, and concludes with other devotions. Like the translation attributed to King James, this volume has a title page that pictures a king. Here he kneels to pray in a church, with the words, “Gloria Miserere Confiteor”; referencing the English Civil War, the preface draws a connection between Charles I and King David, also vexed by a civil war. Hatton was “one of Northamptonshire’s principal gentlemen” and a Royalist who was, in 1646, negotiating for the king at Uxbridge.233 These two psalm books are not just religious texts but political ones, aligning the psalmist with the Royalist identity, an identity Isham also manifests through the property that she claims as her own. Page 93 →

Conclusion Jennifer Summit argues that “libraries bear a privileged relation to our past, safe-guarding our collective identity as communities, peoples, and nations by documenting our history.”234 For Elizabeth Isham, too, the library of her “own Bookes” safeguarded her identity. This is evident in the way she records her memory of a closet that her mother permitted her to have: “I remember the Bookes which I had in my closet reading and pra\y/ing to thee [God] in secret thinking my selfe safe in so dooing.”235 Similarly, with the book list, Elizabeth Isham is able to set her books apart. She distinguishes her books—like those of her mother and sister—from the other books within the household at Lamport Hall. With her book list, she establishes her claim

to her books at a moment when the English Civil War threatened her family’s property. Although Sir John Isham received a protecting order in May 1643 commanding all soldiers in the county to “not offer any molestation of force to the person, house goods, chattels, or estate” at Lamport, a letter from Justinian Isham to Elizabeth in March 1644 reports that he had heard that parliamentary forces had broken into the house in the night and frightened Elizabeth and his children. Elizabeth replies with assurances they have been well “since that afright,” although she acknowledges that the forces had searched the house of his bailiff for plate and money and taken a horse.236 Sir John Isham and Justianian Isham both had their estates sequestered in 1648; in 1649, Justinian was forced to compound for his Shangton estate in Leicestershire for over £1100.237 In this perilous context, Elizabeth Isham’s book list asserts what is her own, what should be returned to her if it were to be taken away, and what books should be remembered as hers. The list, then, documents her cultural landscape. It shows how having one’s “own Bookes” can mark a self and how books established Isham’s connections with family, with kin and community in Northamptonshire, and with a Protestant reading culture and Royalist politics.

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Five Margaret Cavendish’s Books Julie Crawford We know that Margaret Cavendish wrote a great deal. But what, exactly, did she read? In most of her own books, she explicitly denies any formal learning, or indeed reading of any kind. In Natures Pictures (1653), for example, she claims to have never read a romance through to the end in her life; after a few lines, she would “straight throw it from [her] as an unprofitable study.”238 In Philosophical Fancies (1653), she asks her readers not to despise her thoughts “because they came not from the Ancient, Wise” Greeks, and in Philosophical Letters (1664) she claims not to have read any natural philosophers: “my Opinions did meerly issue from the Fountain of my own Brain, without any other help.”239 In the General Prologue to her 1662 Playes, moreover, she claims that “All my Playes Plots, my own poor brain did make: / From Plutarchs story I ne’r took a Plot.”240 Page 95 →Yet in each of the works prefaced by the above claims, Cavendish both explicitly and silently cites the genres she denies reading: romance in Natures Pictures; ancient and contemporary political and natural philosophy in her Philosophical Fancies and Letters; and, as I will argue here, Greek and Roman history in her Playes. Along with Thucydides, Livy, Tacitus, and a wide range of other Greek and Roman authors, Plutarch does in fact appear in Cavendish’s work, particularly in the 1662 Playes she claims to be free of his “Plot.” This contradiction serves two purposes: it reveals Cavendish’s learning—a necessary skill for the politically ambitious—and denies any relationship that learning or reading might have with political dissent. This essay demonstrates that Cavendish’s rather obvious camouflaging of her perfectly typical practices of “practically active” humanist reading simultaneously signaled her consiliary capacities and rights, and denied her complicity with the forms of “reading for action” that contributed to the fall of the previous monarchy.241 While her bookscape was a familiar one, then, her pointed occlusion of its role in her own field of operations paradoxically highlights her keen sense of its political implications. Despite its failure to name Margaret Cavendish as one of its collectors, the library inventoried in Bibliotheca Nobilissimi Principis Johannis Ducis de Novo-Castro, &c. Being a large collection of books Contain’d in the Libraries of the most Noble William and Henry Cavendish, and John Hollis, Late Dukes of Newcastle (London, 1719) provides an as-yet untapped treasure trove of information about Margaret Cavendish’s reading. Her husband, William, and stepson Henry are the first two of the named collectors; the collection was housed at Welbeck Abbey, where Margaret herself lived until her death in 1673; and her own books are included in its inventory: “Newcastle (Dutchess of) Her Philosophical, Oratorical, and Poetical Works, in 9 vols.”242 The collection also includes works by all the great ancient philosophers and historians—including Plutarch—in English, the only language Cavendish (claimed she) could read. The collection includes precisely the kinds of books one would expect a family of committed Royalists to own, including a red-letter version of Page 96 →Eikon Basilike, the much-reprinted Royalist martyrology of the executed king, and what the inventory lists as “speeches and Prayers of some of the Pretended Judges of Charles I” (52).243 Yet it also includes an impressive number of books one might be unlikely to associate with Royalists. These include the work of FranГ§ois Hotman, a monarchomach and outspoken critic of absolute monarchy; William Hakewill’s The Libertie of the Subject Against the Pretended Power of Impositions (London, 1641); the Parliamentarian John Sadler’s Rights of the Kingdom; or, Customs of our Ancestours (London, 1649); John Selden’s Privileges of the Baronage of England, When they Sit in Parliament Together (London, 1642); and James Harrington’s The Prerogative of Popular Government (London, 1657), an “idiosyncratic” take on classical republicanism.244 Not all of these texts are directly critical of the monarchy; indeed, most explicitly support it as the best form of government. Each is, however, centrally concerned with the political rights of the nobility, particularly with the crucial bulwark they provided against

monarchical absolutism. Harrington, for example, points out that “the Prince himself is no otherwise tall, then by being set upon the shoulders of the Nobility,” and Sadler argues that Earls are “consanguineous” to the king: “he might style them his Peers, or Companions.”245 As Sadler points out, the premier treatise of advice to princes, The Mirror for Magistrates, is equally clear on this point: “Although the king hath No Equals, yet it was provided by Law, that he should have Companions.”246 The Newcastle collection, in other words, is not a storehouse of absolutist thinking, but rather one richly stocked with defenses of a mixed or limited monarchy.247 Page 97 →The collection also includes many histories of the reigns of kings, which were popularly understood as cautionary tales. Its histories include Thomas May’s Life of Edward III (1635) and John Hayward’s myriad Lives of English kings, all of which were associated with criticism of standing English rulers.248 As Edward Coke described Hayward’s history of Henry IV during Hayward’s 1599 trial: “he selecteth a storie 200 yere olde, and publisheth it this last yere; intendinge the application of it to this tyme.”249 In the story, a “kinge is taxed for misgovernm[en]t, his councell for corrupt and covetous for there private [ends,] the king censured for conferring benefits of hatefull parasites and favorites, the nobles discontented, [and] the commons groning under continuall taxation.” In the end, the king is deposed “by an erle” and murdered.250 Despite defending himself against charges of antimonarchism and analogical reading (“intendinge the application of it to this tyme”) during his trial, Hayward nonetheless highlighted the cautionary purposes of his history in the work itself: “And thus doe these and the like accidents dayly happen to such Princes as will be absolute in power, resolute in will, and dissolute in life.”251 In addition to cautioning princes against absolutism, histories also offered wisdom and exempla for those who would advise them. In his dedication of his translation of Thucydides’s History of the Peloponnesian Wars (1629) to (another) William Cavendish, Thomas Hobbes points out that Thucydides includes “profitable instruction for Noble men, and such as may come to have the managing of great and weighty actions.”252 Thomas North’s translation of Antonio Guevara’s The Diall of Princes, a (fanciful) history of the Stoic Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius, was similarly concerned with the crucial role of good counselors.253 The title page of the first edition, which Page 98 →North hoped would “serve to hygh estates for counsell, to curious serchers of antiquityes, for knowledge, and to all other vertuous gentlemen for an honest, pleasaunte, and profitable recreation” (sig. A1r–v), features a monarch taking advice from his counselors (see fig. 5.1). While critical of rulers like Catiline and Tarquin “that played the Tyrant,” The Diall also insists that a central problem in many royal courts is that “there is no difference whether [the courtiers] bee fooles or wise, ” but only “whether they be acceptable to princes” (286). The Diall is sententious (“if thou followest thine owne opinion, and not the counsell of an other, thou embracest flatterers, and repulsest vertuous men” [98]) and presents opinions geared toward both advising and limiting the power of the monarch. “We do not denye a Prince, but that hee [В .В .В .В ] is Lord of sea and land,” it suggests at one point, but then states, “we will not grante him that he is Lord of Justice. For there is none other true Lord of Justice but God” (360). Perhaps the most surprising Roman history in the Newcastle library, however, is that of Cornelius Tacitus. In addition to copies in the original Latin, Tacitus’s work is well represented in English, including in Henry Savile’s 1604 translation of the Annals; William Jones’s translation of Justus Lipsius’s Politics (1594), a compendium of Tacitean wisdom supplemented by other historians; an English translation of Lorenzo Ducci’s Ars Aulica (The Courtiers Art), which advises (and provides the material for) would-be courtiers to study “the supreme master of courtiers” in order to learn the necessary (dissimulative) skills of court life; and Jean Hotman’s A Casket Full of Rich Jewels (1609), which takes most of its “pithie” examples from Tacitus.254 Tacitus’s work enlivened a great deal of Renaissance political thought. His Annals recount the power games that created and sustained the Julio-Claudian Empire, particularly the reigns of tyrants like Tiberius and Nero and the “favorites” who enabled them.255 Deemed eminently useful by Page 100 →those who saw parallels between the reigns of the Roman emperors and contemporary European monarchs, Tacitus enjoyed what Alan T. Bradford calls “a posthumous career as a councilor of state to the princes of Renaissance Europe.”256

Lipsius considered the Annals “a seminary of morall, and a magazine of pollitique discourses, for the provision and ornament of those, that possess some place in the managing of the world.”257 As William Jones wrote in the preface to his translation, Lipsius’s Politics “sheweth what the Prince should be, what vertues he is especially to be endued with all, [and] how he should make choise of Good Counsellers and Officers” (Aiiiv). The English edition of Ducci’s Ars Aulica was dedicated to the consummate Jacobean “Counsellers and Officers” William and Philip Herbert. Page 99 → Fig. 5.1. Antonio de Guevara, The Diall of Princes, trans. Thomas North (1557), title page. RB47821, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California. Tacitus did not originally enter English political discourse in an oppositionist capacity.258 The Stuart kings buttressed their ideas about (autocratic) rule with Caesar as their exemplary case study, and some scholars offered monarchist commentaries on Tacitus. The Royalist Edmund Bolton, for example, interpreted Tacitus’s account of Nero’s tyranny as proof that “No Prince is so bad as not to make monarckie seeme the best forme of government.”259 Yet by the time the Cavendishes were reading Tacitus, his work was indissolubly linked not only with the criticism of princes but also with outright resistance. Tacitus played a key role in Essex’s rebellion against Elizabeth I, and James I condemned his admirers for “accus[ing] our present princes of tyranny.”260 John Milton—also, rather surprisingly, well represented in the Newcastle library—identified Tacitus as “the greatest possible enemy to tyrants,” and Charles I imprisoned at least two men for reading his work in public. (As he said when John Eliot quoted Tacitus in Parliament in 1626, “he must intend me for Tiberius.”)261 Most damningly, parliament’s deposition of Charles I in Page 101 →1649 took Tacitus’s account of the Roman Senate’s condemnation of Nero as its precedent.262 Hobbes’s claim in Leviathan that Greek and Roman histories teach men that it is “lawful and laudable” to kill their princes as long as they “call him a tyrant [first],” is likely a reference to Tacitus.263 Tacitus reinforced what Malcolm Smuts called “a particularly dangerous aristocratic mindset” in early modern England, especially about “the proper role of aristocratic warriors”—peers, for some, parliamentarians for others—in national affairs.264 While the widespread dissemination of Tacitus’s work threatened to turn “even Shop-keepers,” as one contemporary put it, into “cunning” critics of “State policy,” he was nonetheless primarily associated with those who had some claim to a share in their nation’s governance.265 In order to keep Tacitus out of the hands of “turbulent or factious spirits,” for example, The New-found Politicke advised limiting the circulation of his work “unto choice and excellent men, unto Secretaries, and unto Privy Counsellers of State to Princes.”266 Handling Tacitus, in other words, was a dangerous game, and limiting its dissemination was serious business. The presence of Tacitus in the Newcastle library thus raises some interesting questions. One might insist that the Tacitean books in the collection were the sole property of William Cavendish. As an “excellent m[a]n” and (sometime) “Privy Counseller of State” to the king, William Cavendish would have been entitled to read Tacitus. Like most ambitious men of his class, William Cavendish was well read in classical and Renaissance discourses of political counsel. In 1659, he wrote what critics have called a “Machiavellian” book of advice for Charles II, which was replete with Tacitean sententiae about governance.267 His claim that “when Moste was Unlettered, it was a much better world” was directly concerned with limiting the tools available to “fractious and turbulent spirits,” including the work of Tacitus. In his view, which Margaret Cavendish reiterates in her own work, book controversy “is a Civill war with the Pen, which Pulls out the Page 102 →sworde soone afterwards.”268 Yet Margaret Cavendish’s work reveals that she read Tacitus as well. She refers to him by name in her Playes (1662) and Observations Upon Experimental Philosophy (1666), and she cites familiar Tacitean sententiae in her own “notes,” which she appended to her husband’s “sayings” in her Life of William Cavendish. Indeed, as I have argued elsewhere, Cavendish understood her Life—her own history of great (and less-thangreat) men—not only as a vindication of her husband but as a form of advice for princes.269 Tacitean history plays an even more central role in Cavendish’s plays. In particular, the women leaders and

counselors featured in the Annals and elsewhere appear, in various forms, throughout the 1662 Playes. Like other English writers of her time, Cavendish’s “use of the Roman historians” signaled her desire to “possess some place in the managing of the world,” and she did so via an ingenious use of the “heroic” women of the early empire. While Hero Chalmers and others have argued that the martial heroines in plays like Bell in Campo were modeled on Queen Henrietta Maria, herself a “heroickess” who led troops into battle, and the French “femme forte” celebrated in works like The Gallery of Heroick Women, Cavendish’s plays offer abundant evidence that Roman history was also a crucial resource.270 Cavendish’s use of Roman history shows her awareness of its advisory and admonitory history even as she, like other writers, sidesteps explicit “application” of its lessons “to the present tyme.” While Roman histories certainly include accounts of the perfidy and weakness of women, they also feature many examples of what The Diall calls “excellent women” from the ancient world (277). Another Roman history in the Newcastle library, Philemon Holland’s translation of Suetonius’s The Historie of Twelve Caesars, which was dedicated to Lady Anne Harington, former governess to Elizabeth of Bohemia, spends a considerable amount Page 103 →of time on the Briton warrior Queen Boadicea.271 In the Politics, Lipsius similarly notes that “the ancient Brittons, did not only make [women] their rulers in peace, but their leaders in warre,” and Tacitus himself provides accounts of women like the Roman emperors’ wives Livia and Agrippina who exceeded their contemporaries in “fame, and name.”272 I argue here that these women show up in Cavendish’s plays both in explicit references and in the figurative forms that the “analogical reading” of Roman history enabled and invited.273 Critics have long pointed out that characters like Lady Victoria in Bell in Campo, Lady Sanspareille in Youths Glory and Deaths Banquet, and Madam Ambition in Wits Cabal are barely concealed figures for Margaret Cavendish herself.274 Rather than mere vanity, however, Cavendish’s characterization deploys wellestablished practices of analogical reading—creating (deniable) parallels between fictional or historical figures and contemporary ones—in order to highlight her own claims for political redress and representation. In Cavendish’s plays, the allusions to and figures based on exemplary Roman women work to uphold a monarchism in which the chief nobility—including women—are crucial to its workings, and she does so through multilayered referents: Augustus Caesar’s wife Livia, for example, informs the character of Madam Ambition in Wits Cabal, and Madam Ambition, in turn, serves as a figure for Margaret Cavendish. The learnedness and consiliary wisdom of these exemplary women, at once based on Roman heroines and ciphers for Cavendish herself, attest to Cavendish’s explicitly political value as a counselor and author of advice to princes. Roman women’s status as counselors to great generals and empires also resonates with Cavendish’s own presentation of herself as the heroic wife to William Cavendish, a great general in his own right. As Cavendish wrote in The Worlds Olio (1655), Caesar “shewed himself a Fool in nothing but in quittingPage 104 → his gard, and not hearkening to his wife” (83). “If he had condescended to his Wives Perswasion,” she continues, “he had not gone to the Senate that day; and who knows but the next might have discovered the conspiracy.” Wives, for Cavendish, are the rightful counselors to male leaders; listening to women is one of the things that differentiates good rulers from bad ones. Cavendish’s claim in a prefatory epistle that her and her husband’s “Wits join as in Matrimony,” and his frequent contributions to the plays themselves, advertise their paired skills and political ecumen. As is the case with Livia, many of the idealized women in Roman history were counselors to their husbands, their wisdom a necessary political balance to the men’s martial skills. The Diall, for example, argues that the “Auncients gave as much glorie to women learned in letters as unto the valiant and stout men expert in Armes” (285). The book offers examples of women learned “in Rhetoricke and Poetrie” and “true in [В .В .В .В ] counsel,” including a female student of Plato and the daughter of a Roman consul whose wisdom ensured his reputation in the senate (290–91, 280). Guevara also recounts a disputation between ten Greek and ten Roman women at Rhodes, which seems to have had an impact on Cavendish. In Guevara’s account, the learned women “in their chairs read certain lessons, everyone one after other, and afterwards the one disputed again the other of sundry and diverse matters.” When they returned home “they were received with such

triumph and glory as if they had won a battle,” and the Senate of Rhodes set up a series of pillars, “in every one of which were the names of the women” (278). (The pillars were eventually removed by the tyrant Heliogabalus.) Cavendish presents similar scenes her plays; in The Female Academy the women disputants actually assume “Chairs” to make their arguments, and in Bell in Campo the great leader and rhetorician Lady Victoria has her figure inscribed in brass, and her deeds “recorded in story, and put in the chief Library of the Kingdome” (633). Cavendish shared in the Roman predilection for heroic monumentalizing of exceptional women, including herself. As scholars have long noted, Cavendish presented herself in Roman heroic mode in the Abraham van Diepenbeke engraving that prefaces her Playes (1662) (and the Worlds Olio [1655]). The frontispiece portrays her wearing a toga and standing in a niche supported by Apollo and Minerva (see fig. 5.2). Her contemporaries picked up on this mode of representation as well. The Fellows of Trinity College called her “both a Minerva and an Athens,” arguing that “Antient Rome it self would have resolved all [her] Praises into Statues and Monuments of Page 106 →[her] name, by which there might arise continually Cornelias.”275 Much like the library established for Lady Victoria in Bell in Campo, moreover, the Fellows “set apart a place in [the Cambridge] Library, that faithful Depository of Wits,” for the work of Margaret Cavendish (27). Page 105 → Fig. 5.2. Margaret Cavendish, Playes (1662). RB120157, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California. Cavendish’s plays are replete with heroines who allude both directly and indirectly to Roman history as they establish their authority. In Love’s Adventure, Lady Orphant cross-dresses as Affectionata to serve Lord Singularity (a cipher for William Cavendish). Affectionata proves a brilliant military tactician and politician, routing the Turks on behalf of “the Venetian-States” and becoming the Lieutenant General of the Army and a member “of the Council of War” (50). When the Duke of Venice offers to adopt Affectionata for his son, “he” refuses out of loyalty to Lord Singularity. Even if the Duke would adopt him, Affectionata tells Lord Singularity, “as Augustus Caesar did Tiberius, and make me master of the whole World; by Heaven I would refuse it, and rather chose to live in a poor Cottage, with my most Noble Lord” (57). In Tacitus’s account of the Roman emperors, Tiberius begins his career as Caesar’s adoptive heir consulting “the Consuls, as the manner was in a free commen wealth,” but he becomes increasingly tyrannical, eventually rending the Commonwealth in “peeces” and finding his undoing at the hands of his dissembling favorite, Sejanus (3). By his own account, Tacitus wanted to illustrate the exploits of the early Roman emperors, until they were “overswarm[ed]” by flatterers (1). Cavendish offers a similar lesson in her play; Affectionata and Singularity even have a series of conversations about the dangers of flatterers. Singularity claims that he “had rather fight a battel, than be bound to [the] flattery, which must be practised if one live at Court,” and Affectionata bemoans the fact that “a Favourite is more sought [В .В .В .В ] than the King himself” (66). Refusing to adopt the mantle of imperium—and, ultimately, Tiberian tyranny—“Affectionata” instead vows constant service to his “Lord.” The play presents the pair’s fidelity to one another as a model of loyalty and an exempla of balanced government. Cavendish, moreover, aligns the politically resonant relationship between Orphant/Affectionata and Singularity with her own. When Singularity and (the now uncross-dressed) Lady Orphant are to be married, the wedding musicians present the happy couple “with a Song written by my Lord Marquiss of New-Castle” (76) (see fig. 5.3). Sung by Lord Singularity, the epithalamion celebrates Affectionata/Orphant for her political skills: “Then Love it was thy fate / To advise in State” (77, emphasis added). Both within the analogous drama of the play and in his epistolary dedications—where, among other forms of praise, William Cavendish celebrates his wife for having “the style of States-men”—Cavendish enscripts her husband’s support for her work and presents Page 107 →their union as a model of noble political consiliarity.276 Fig. 5.3. Detail. Margaret Cavendish, Playes (1662), 76. RB120157, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California. The heroine in Youths Glory, and Deaths Banquet makes similar references to Roman history. Claiming that her ambitions are greater than those of “Alexander and Caesar joyned into one mind,” the unmarried Lady

Sanspareille worries that a husband would “not approve of my works, were they never so worthy, and by no perswasion, or reason allow of there publishing; Page 108 →as if it were unlawfull, or against nature, for Women to have wit” (130, 131). As if to present a counterexample, the “Lord Marquess of Newcastle” contributes to this play as well, this time as the author of a series of scenes in which male philosophers discuss their new competition: “’Tis a prodigious thing,” one exclaims, “a girle to read Philosophy; O divine Plato! how thy Soul will now be troubled” (134). At the end of William’s final contribution, the philosophers decide to “go home and make a funerall pile of [their] bookes” after hearing Lady Sanspareille speak (139). Indeed, publication is Sanspareille’s explicit goal: unlike oratory, which can be manipulated and misconstrued, she argues, “writeing, or printing, fixes [one’s ideas] to everlasting time, to the publick view of the World” (132). “My Lord Marquess” also contributes a celebratory speech in response to this claim, this time in the voice a soldier who claims that Sanspareille’s work makes “Caesars Comentaries blush for shame” (152). By having her husband help to elevate her work “to everlasting time” on the model of Roman history, Margaret Cavendish stakes her claim for posterity. In the second part of the play, the “Queen of Attention” comes to hear Sanspareille talk about statecraft. The wisdom Sanspareille dispenses in this scene directly cites the advice William Cavendish offered to (the future) Charles II in his 1659 letter: “where Ceremonie is not used,” she states, “the Gods are neglected, and Princes dispised; for Ceremonie is the Throne which Gods and Princes sits on” (156). When the queen tells her that she is “fit to be a Governesse [В .В .В .В ] that can speak so well of Government,” Sanspareille responds that she would be happier “to be a Subject to so gracious a Sovereign, than [to] govern a people my self” (156). As in Love’s Adventure, where Affectionata chooses loyal service over becoming, like the overweening Tiberius, “master of the whole World,” Sanspareille chooses a consiliary over a sovereign role, at once asserting her political rights and denying any rebellious intent. At her death, Sanspareille, much like Bell in Campo’s Lady Victoria, gets a “Statue for her self, as well as a Library for her Works” (163). In Wits Cabal, the heroine Madam Ambition expresses similar reservations about marriage as Lady Sanspareille. She rejects Monsieur Vain-glorious’s offer of marriage, claiming that if she ever does marry, “I will have a Husband that is able to govern Kingdoms, to Marshal Armies, to Fight Battels, and Conquer Nations; and not a self-conceited Fool, or fantastical Gallant, such as speaks ranting Words” (274). She also tells Vain-glorious that wisdom lies not in “cit[ing] dead Authors” and “repeat[ing] their Learned Opinions” but rather in having—much like William Cavendish—“appeased a mutinous and half-starv’d Army,” “fought a Battel with Prudence,” or “made a safe Page 109 →and honourable Retreat” (280). (William’s retreat after the Royalist army’s defeat at Marston Moor was a sore point.) Other paths to wisdom include delivering “judicious Counsel” and “suitable Admonitions,” both of which Ambition considers forms of “Action” (280). (And, in yet another illustration of the Cavendishes’ exemplary marriage, “The Marquiss of Newcastle” “writ [the] Epilogue” to Wits Cabal as well [289].) The second part of the play alludes even more frequently to Roman history. “It is said that Women are the greatest Conquerors,” Madam Ambition avers, “because they conquer conquering men,” including “the power-fullest men, as Alexander and Caesar” (295). “Livia,” another woman continues, “Conquer’d Augustus Caesar, and Ruled his Power; and he was as absolute a Master of the Worlds Power” (296). Livia does in fact play a starring role in Tacitus’s Annals, helping Augustus in war and in peace and accompanying him on military expeditions “to the East and West” (5, 75). Tacitus also offers an account of her oppression under her son Tiberius, who determined that she “was an intollerable and burdensome mother to the common wealth” (6). Indeed, Tiberius’s treatment of Livia highlights the intimate relationship between misogyny and tyranny in Roman history.277 Constantly finding “fault with such as went about to win womens fauor & good will,” Tiberius grows increasingly “tyrannous” after Livia’s death, “for whilest his mother lived, there was some refuge left, because he had a long time accustomed to shew himselfe dutifull into her” (117). (Even Sejanus, the paradigm of the ambitious flatterer, “dared not [В .В .В .В ] cross” Livia.) While Caesar listens to his wife, Tiberius, by erasing women from the scene of political governance altogether, secures his downfall. For Tacitus, and for Margaret Cavendish after

him, women’s counsel is a bulwark against tyranny and a necessary cornerstone of effective governance. The other Tacitean texts in the Cavendish collection present Livia in a similar way. In Lipsius’s Politics, for example, Livia’s advice to Augustus is presented in sententious italics: she advises him to exercise clemency to “advaunce [his] renowne,” for “there is nothing more glorious, then when a Prince is harmed, without inflicting punishment” [90]. Lipsius (backhandedly) praises her wisdom: “Heare from a woman, no womans counsel” (see fig. 5.4). Suetonius argues that Livia’s wisdom is the basis of Caesar’s good governance, claiming that all of Augustus’s conversations with Livia “about any grave and serious matters” were “put downe in writing” in order to providePage 110 → the emperor with a resource “out of which hee would rehearse the same, that hee might not speake otherwise extempore or lesse than was meete” (84). This was done, moreover, so that Caesar “might not be thought ruled and directed by her counsails; which otherwhiles notwithstanding he was wont both to stand in neede of, and also to use” (84). Cavendish’s claim that “Women are the greatest Conquerors because they conquer conquering men,” thus seems less fanciful when we see it as a close reading of the Roman historians, particularly of the crucial—indeed constitutive—role of women’s counsel in the idealized—that is, nontyrannical—Augustan principate. Fig. 5.4. Detail. Justus Lipsius, Six Books of Politics, trans. William Jones (1594), 90. Cs609, The Folger Shakespeare Library. In The Unnatural Tragedie (with a Prologue, as we have now come to expect, “by my Lord Marquiss of Newcastle”), a group of “sociable virgins” gathers “to discourse and talk, to examine, censure, and judge of every body, and of every thing,” including, once again, “Affairs of State” (328, 332). Rejecting the claim that women are not “fit to be States-men,” the women claim that if they had the right education, “we should govern the world better than it is,” a claim they exemplify through a sustained analysis of Roman history (332). Eventually they hone in on a discussion of the value of “Speeches and Orations” recorded by historians, particularly of the strangeness of claiming an apt record of ex tempore speeches given in extremis. “For Example,” claims one virgin, “when Tacitus set down the Speeches of some persons at such times,” there was “not any one person that could have the leisure, time, rest, or silence, to get those Speeches by heart.” Nor, she continues, “had they Place, Time, Ink, Pen, or Paper, to write them down” (335–36).278 Cavendish explicitly engages contemporary debates about history in this scene, particularly about the role of (invented) speeches, which, like literature,Page 111 → present things not as they were but rather as they might have been.279 The women’s debate is extensive: they declare that Tacitus strains credibility by pretending to “know the particulars and private speeches betwixt man and man,” and by even claiming access to the “thoughts of some Commanders” (336). The Matron, however, tells the young women not to be “so strict in History, as to have every word true: for it is a good History, if the sense, matter, manner, form, and actions be true.” Thus, she announces, “Tacitus’s Speeches may be true, as to the sense, although he should express them after his manner, fancy, wit, or judgment” (336). Poetic imagination, in other words, plays a valid role in the representation of historical truth. Thus Margaret Cavendish makes an implicit case for the value of the fictional work she herself is writing. In the course of their argument, the sociable virgins also discuss authorial bias. “For have not some Writers spoke well of Nero,” one argues, “and striv’d to have glorify’d him, who was the wickedst of all the Emperours?” (338). Ultimately, however, truth will out, for even though some writers “have indeavour’d to blot and blur the Renowns of Julius Caesar, and Augustus Caesar,” these men are “never the worse esteem’d in the House of Fame” (338). Cavendish herself unfailingly praises the rule of the Caesars in her work, saving her criticism, as we have seen, for the likes of Tiberius and Nero. (She even seems to be taking a shot at the Jacobean Royalist Edmund Bolton who tried to “glorify” Nero in 1623.) Perhaps the most interesting debate in The Unnatural Tragedie centers on the question of whether or not pens can “force swords” in the same way that “Heroick Actions, and wise Governors, force pens” (338). The young woman who responds, claiming that “books of Controversies” “make Enemies, and such Enemies, as to pursue with fire and sword to death,” silently cites William Cavendish’s advice to Charles

II, where, as we have seen, he warns him against allowing “books of controversy, writ butt in Latin [В .В .В .В ] for controversy is a Civill war with the Pen, which Pulls out the sword soon afterwards” (emphasis added).280 Yet rather than merely parroting her husband, Cavendish has her characters debate controversial matters in English rather than Latin, considering not only the challenges of using Roman history but also its considerable promises as well. The “sociable virgins” praise the fact that the “Heroick Actions” of Alexander and Caesar “were seconded with their generous deeds, distributing Page 112 →their good fortune to the most deserving and meritorious persons in their Parties,” and they lament the fact that there have not been any princes since who are “as Heroical and Generous as they were” (338). “Princes since their days,” one woman claims, “have been rul’d, check’d and aw’d by their petty Favourites; witness many of the Roman Emperors.” Such princes’ refusal to reward the “most deserving and meritorious persons in their Parties” was one of Cavendish’s primary critiques of Charles II’s restoration government. As Cavendish would write a few years later in her Life, “Meritorious persons, for their noble actions, most commonly get Envy and Reproach, instead of Praise and Reward.”281 Through her use of the Roman historians, Cavendish presents an analogy, and subtle rebuke, of her own prince. Cavendish’s most-written-about play, Bell in Campo, makes the most extensive use of Tacitus. Early in the play, a gentleman argues that it is “no crime [В .В .В .В ] for a man to let his wife go along with him when he goeth to the Wars, for there hath been examples; for Pompey had a wife with him, and so had Germanicus, and so had many great and worthy Heroicks” (583). In many nations, he continues, “men are not only desired, but commanded by the Chiefs to let their wives go with them,” “to encourage their fights, and so give fire to their Spirits.” Who, he asks rather rhetorically, “is fitter” to do so “than a wife? what other woman will be so lovingly careful, and industriously helpful as a wife?” (583). The Annals includes an entire chapter on the subject, “VII. Whether Captaines and Governors of provinces should have their wives with them” (73), and Cavendish seems to have had this chapter open on her book wheel when writing her play. Tacitus’s claim that when armed men “return after their labours, what more honester solace then a mans wife?” (74) seems to be the direct source for Cavendish’s similarly rhetorical question in Bell in Campo, “what other woman will be so lovingly careful, and industriously helpful as a wife?” Among the wives that Cavendish mentions, Germanicus’s wife, Agrippina, plays a crucial role in Tacitus. In one scene he describes her as being “of greater credit with the armie, than the Lieutenants and Captains,” and credits her with suppressing a sedition “which Caesars name and power could not” (28). After Germanicus’s death, moreover, she preserves his “lamentable relickes” (58) and becomes an exemplary figure for the principate. Indeed, Page 113 →the “ardent affection men bare Agrippina: calling her the honour of their country,” enrages the increasingly tyrannical Tiberius, and Sejanus attempts to kill her (64). Yet while Agrippina helped to uphold the Roman principate, the other wife Cavendish invokes, the Roman senator Pompey’s wife, Cornelia, was a servant of the Roman republic. Plutarch, whom James I criticized for being too hard on Augustus Caesar, celebrates Cornelia’s “excellent gifts,” including her skills in “philosophie,” and commends her for keeping her husband’s ashes after his death.282 Lucan, however, whose account of the fall of the Roman republic was translated by Thomas May, goes even further, characterizing Cornelia as a republican hero.283 During the trying period leading up to his death, Cornelia clasps Pompey’s “care-wounded breast” to her own and refuses to leave his side (77). She is so virtuous that “her life was seen / While her lord stood, as he had conquer’d bin” (111, emphasis added). This claim seems to be the most direct source for Cavendish’s reference (by way of Madam Ambition) to wives conquering the conquerors. Threats against Cornelia in the Pharsalia take a familiar form: a “wicked king” and “tyrant” plans to “all wedlocks rites exile, / And with wives numberless[, including Cornelia,] all laws defile” (117). She, however, remains loyal, even after her husband’s death. “Doth not thy breast contain / Thy Pompey,” she asks herself in a climactic scene, “and his image still remain / Within thee?” (126–27). In the end, Cornelia becomes the keeper of the republican cause, vowing not to let “Caesar’s race in quiet reign, / Whilest any of our stock on earth remain.” Cavendish’s idealized Roman women thus range from the antityrannical to the republican, illustrating, as Lady Victoria puts it later in the play, that women

are “fit to be Copartners” in men’s “Governments” (588, emphasis added). Victoria’s claim that “Pompey had a wife with him, and so had Germanicus, and so had many great and worthy Heroicks” serves to remind princes of the crucial role of counselors—“copartners” to good governance. But it also highlights Cavendish’s own role as William Cavendish’s wife: “lovingly careful, and industriously helpful.” At both the beginning and the end of her Playes, Cavendish reminds readers that she too is her husband’s keeper. “I Said in the beginning of this Page 114 →Book of Playes,” she writes in her final epistle, “that I should not trouble you with any more of my Works, unless one, which was a History of the Life of my Noble Lord” (681). In the Life itself she claims that her “Lordship was [her] onely Tutor,” drawing an analogy between her “Contemplating and Writing” and his “Heroick Actions” (A2r). While he performed his “publickly in the Field,” she argues that hers were done “privately in [her] Closet” (b1r-b1v). The Cavendishes’ contributions to the country are assured by their perfect marriage, and their perfect marriage serves as an emblem for a balanced government—one as informed by wisdom as by war. Cavendish considered her writing a form of rightful baronial counsel, and her circulation of her “privately” produced folio volumes to Oxford and Cambridge libraries was an attempt to institutionalize that counsel—by the titled nobility, in carefully curated and managed forms—as a cornerstone of English governance. Her own Roman figure on some of her books’ title pages, moreover, reminded readers of the example of ancient Rome, inviting them into the bookscape of Roman history that she surveyed so acutely when peopling the stages of her plays.

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Part Two Reading Communities

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Six Women, Books, and the Lay Apostolate A Catholic Literary Network in Late Sixteenth-Century England Elizabeth Patton Early in 1587, poised precariously between the threat of a Spanish invasion and internal Catholic conspiracies, English authorities proactively detained prominent men from the country’s leading Catholic families.284 During the same period, however, in an ironic inversion of the traditional gendering of public and private spaces, their wives and daughters remained free to travel about London, visiting priests in the city’s permeable prisons and participating in the reception and distribution of Catholic imprints, most of these smuggled into England from the Continent. The wives of the imprisoned Lords Vaux and Tresham, for example, along with a daughter and stepdaughter of the similarly imprisoned Sir John Arundell of Lanherne, Cornwall, were named on a secret Catholic book delivery inventory, “How and to whom his Popish Books were bestowed,” listing 614 illicit imprints from the Continent, primarily from recent presses established in Rouen by Robert Persons, SJ, and George L’Oyselet.285 In a coauthored essay, Earle Havens and I have contextualized both the manuscript—hereafter referred to as the “Marshalsea-Newgate” book inventory—and the prison-based Page 118 →book distribution network it delineates in terms of the goals of the Jesuit mission to England as well as “the larger, cosmopolitan and polyglot culture of the Catholic Reformation in later sixteenth-century France, the Spanish Netherlands and, more broadly, Spain and Rome.”286 In the present study, I narrow this focus and consider how one of the most popular books on the inventory would have been used by the women who received it: Richard Hopkins’s recent (1586) translation of the Memorial of a Christian Life by Luis de Granada.287 The Marshalsea-Newgate book inventory was clearly a working ledger, its meticulous entries tracking the progress of all 614 volumes from reception to delivery (or refusal, in some cases) and listing only one of these imprints—a copy of the Memorial—as lost: “how or why I know not,” writes the frustrated account keeper.288 Nine of the ten recipients named on the inventory were women of London’s upper citizenry, gentry, and aristocracy, and six of the nine, notably, were expecting specially “gilt” or custom-bound copies of the Memorial. Among them were Mary, Lady Vaux (nГ©e Tresham), her sister-in-law Muriel, Lady Tresham (nГ©e Throckmorton), and Mary Tregian (nГ©e Stourton)—the wives and stepdaughter, respectively, of the imprisoned Catholic leaders mentioned above.289 Forty additional and less expensively formatted copies of the Memorial were among the nearly two hundred books delivered to Agnes Alford, the single woman among seven distributors named on the inventory, most of whom spent time as prisoners in either the Marshalsea or Newgate prisons during this period.290 The socially well-connected but illusory Mistress Alford, however, acted with seeming impunity, accepting delivery of the largest allotment of books at her home in Salisbury Place near the French Embassy (as the meticulous record keeper notes, she also purchased “a little primer” for her private Page 119 →use).291 Soon after arriving at Salisbury Place, the Memorial—printed in an octavo format easily transferred from hand to hand, pocket to pocket—would have been circulating widely among London’s Catholics, particularly, it seems, among women.292 The Marshalsea-Newgate book inventory therefore testifies to the existence of a tightly organized distribution network—an underground Catholic bookscape—operating efficiently in the netherworld of London’s prisons as well as in the private drawing rooms of its more visible and presumably reformed cityscape; further, this remarkable document places women in the center of that largely hidden bookscape, both as recipients and dispersers of illicit Catholic imprints. As the inventory testifies, the Memorial was clearly regarded by the elite Catholic women who awaited its delivery as filling a pressing need (discussed further below) for spiritual guidance and doctrinal clarity.293 Given such evident access to this recent imprint, how would the women who obtained, shared, or copied the Memorial make use of it in attending to the educational and spiritual needs of their large families and households—or perhaps even to the needs of those further afield? In the next section, I lay the groundwork for answering this question by providing a

fine-grained description of the contents of this popular devotional text, which has as its central focus the tri-fold sacrament of Penance. In subsequent sections, I provide examples from contemporary accounts of the practice of three early modern women, each of whom would have had access to the Memorial and reason to study this newly available spiritual guide: Dorothy Arundell of Lanherne, Cornwall (1560–1613), Anne Dacre Howard, Countess of Arundel (1557–1630), and the Countess’s paternal aunt, Magdalen Dacre Browne, Viscountess Montague (1538–1608).294 Guided by their own reading of the text as well as by their confessors, these women disseminated the Memorial’s precepts among fellow Catholics, practicing a form of personal apostolate defined more by the urgency of circumstances among Catholics in England than by formal vows, although they had all taken vows of chastity and one of them, if not all, had also made a vow of simple obedience. Page 120 →

A Memorial of a Christian Life: Text and Context The printing or importation of Catholic texts, prohibited since the Henrician reformation, had been further criminalized under Queen Elizabeth I, who ordered her subjects “to forbeare utterly from the use or dealing with any such seditious bookes, made or translated by any person.”295 The covert importation of such books by the hundreds, however, indicates that Catholics continued to find ways around these restrictions, particularly for highly desirable books such as the Memorial, a very practical manual on how to become a “perfecte Christian.” Granada’s “Prologue to the Christian Reader” gives a humanist-inflected nod to wellknown models for creating a “perfit orator,” a perfect “prince,” and a perfect “courtier,” but it presents the Memorial to readers as something apart from these—a more “divine” undertaking.296 Written in 1565, on the cusp of the wave of reformed Catholic devotional literature following the Council of Trent, the Memorial differs from Granada’s earlier work, such as his 1554 Of Prayer and Meditation, which modeled interior spirituality to a degree that earned it a place on the Index of forbidden books in 1559.297 Possibly in reaction to this rebuke, Granada turned to the more external world of particulars (“estas particularidades”) in the later Memorial; these “particularidades,” especially those that constituted “deadlie sins,” would subsequently be considerably expanded by the work’s English translator, Richard Hopkins. Both Granada and Hopkins remain in strict conformity with the late medieval concept of Penance and its reaffirmation by the fourteenth session of the Council of Trent in 1551, which distinguished the sacrament of Penance from the nonsacramental “continuous process of repentant faith” described by Martin Luther in the first of his ninety-five theses.298 Granada’s formulation of the first part of Penance, “Contrition,” as “a repentance for the sinnes paste [and] a firme and determined purpose of Page 121 →ammendement in time to come,” is virtually the same as the conciliar description of contrition as “sorrow of the soul and the detestation for sin committed, together with the resolve not to sin anymore.”299 Similar conformity of language obtains in descriptions of the second part of the sacrament, confession and absolution by a priest.300 For the sacrament’s final element, “Satisfaction,” the Memorial emphasizes physical suffering as a means by which the sinner can “make Satisfaction to the honor of Almightie God for offences committed against his divine Maiestie.”301 After receiving absolution, the Memorial’s third treatise notes, penitents could participate in “The Sacrament of the Altar” and move forward in perfection guided by the book’s fourth treatise, “Two Rules of Good Life.” For Granada and Hopkins, however, the Memorial’s practical center was its second treatise, “On the Sacrament of Penance,” without which, Hopkins emphasizes, “no Christian committing any deadlie sinne after baptisme [can] atteine to salvation.”302 Hopkins’s substantial augmentations to his source are in fact limited to the Memorial’s second treatise on Penance, which more than doubles in length in his translation under the combined weight of biblical and patristic sources added to the margins and augmentations to the lists of “deadlie sinnes” within the text. The latter include not only personal infractions, such as attendance at “Heretical Assemblies,” but also “hinder[ing] the conversion of any others from Heresie, or Schisme,” or preventing others “from reconcilinge themselves to the due obedience of the Catholike Churche.”303 In sixteenth-century usage, the term “reconciliation” was often used interchangeably with “conversion” or, simply, “confession, ” and carried a religio-legal valence, as exemplified in a 1570 proclamation making it a crime “to absolve

or reconcile any person to the Catholic Church, or to be so absolved or reconciled.”304 The terms “heretic” and “schismatic” were used with greater specificity to distinguish adherents of the established church from Catholics who had attended its Page 122 →services (“Heretical Assemblies”) for a broad array of reasons.305 For those with scrupulous consciences, then, Hopkins’s extension of the definition of “deadlie sinne” to include “hinder[ing] the conversion of any others” might easily translate into a personal mandate to encourage such conversions or reconciliations, as it clearly did for the women to be discussed in this essay. The Countess of Arundel, the Viscountess Montague, and Dorothy Arundell did indeed have scrupulous consciences: as the following discussion of their practice will show, for each of these women failure to intervene to save others from “deadlie” or mortal sin constituted a personal failure in the eyes of God. Given the short supply of priests in England, however, and also given the frequency with which Catholics resorted to the diplomatic approach of occasional conformity by attending services of the established church, the challenge of connecting penitents with priests at such critical junctures was indeed daunting. Nevertheless, it was not impossible: because of the three-part structure of this sacrament, lay Catholics could—and did—intervene in the sacramental process of confession, acting in conjunction with priests (or in anticipation of a priest’s eventual presence) to guide penitents through the sacrament’s successive stages. The women discussed in this essay, for example, intervened initially by exhorting penitents towards true contrition and in many cases by encouraging them to sustain that contrition over time, until a priest could be found to administer confession and absolution. Afterwards, penitents could be exhorted and “animated” to make appropriate satisfaction and to continue in “good life.”306 Women in particular, it seems, worked tirelessly to bring priest and penitent together—schismatics and heretics alike—so that the sacrament’s crucial central component could be accomplished.307 While Catholic women’s sense of responsibility for the spiritual welfare of others was most immediately directed toward individuals in their large households, it also extended outwards:Page 123 → the second part of this essay offers three glimpses of such households and their environs, tracing the influence of the Memorial on women who appear to have used it as a very specific guide to practice. Although the seventeenth-century biographies of Anne Dacre Howard, Countess of Arundel and Magdalen Dacre Brown, Viscountess Montague were written by their personal confessors, this pattern is reversed in the case of Dorothy Arundell, with which I begin: unusually and perhaps uniquely in the early modern period, although John Cornelius was Arundell’s spiritual advisor, it was she who described his practice, and it was on that practice, as his “spiritual daughter,” that she modeled her own.308

Dorothy Arundell’s Life of Father John Cornelius and Female Apostolic Practice Dorothy Arundell’s two narratives of the life and martyrdom of her confessor, the Jesuit John Cornelius, provide at present the most detailed contextualization of the role played by an Elizabethan Englishwoman in the sacramental process described in the Memorial; although both of her English accounts remained in manuscript and are now considered lost, the narratives remain extant in four late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century translations.309 The earlier narrative, an anonymous third-person account only recently attributed to Dorothy Arundell, was completed within six weeks of the execution of Cornelius in July of 1594 and was sent secretly out of England to Jesuits on the Continent, who archived it as “A Letter from London” (hereafter, “Letter”).310 The second and longer narrative, the Life of Father John Cornelius, SJ (hereafter, Life), was written after Dorothy Arundell became a founding member of the first convent for English women on Page 124 →the Continent, the Benedictine Abbey of the Assumption, established in Brussels by her cousin, Lady Mary Percy, in 1598. This convent narrative is markedly more forthright and reflective: “I did not write all I have written about this glorious martyr in a rash moment,” Arundell asserts—now speaking openly as Dame Dorothea—“but after mature consideration.”311 Arundell’s accounts of her mentor’s life are framed by the history of a covert but intensively apostolic Catholic community that flourished at Chideock Castle, Dorset under the guidance of Cornelius from 1590 to the spring of 1594, when a raid by local officials led to his discovery. As Arundell recounts, immediately after her

extended family—“more than eighty in number”—arrived at the jointure property of her recently widowed mother, Cornelius identified “thirty recusant families” in neighboring areas who had kept their confessional ties hidden: “Father made it his job to seek out the names and titles of the nobility and other people round about and found various ways to acknowledge them.”312 Within the castle, she continues, Cornelius’s practice was to “teach Christian doctrine to all the familyВ .В .В . not only on FeastdaysВ .В .В . but every dayВ .В .В . for an entire hour in the afternoon”; in another daily session held “after vespers,” he read material intended for those members of the community “who were resolved to renounce the world and become religious.”313 As the community grew, Cornelius extended his range, going “out of the house, to instruct, preach and give the Holy Sacraments to these families, now to this one and now to that one.” Varying his locations to avoid suspicion, he began “to preach in the woods and in the streets” where local Catholics would seek him out: “everyone gathered where they thought he had gone, ” Arundell recalls, reflecting on these events from the perspective of her convent in Brussels.314 In the practice of Cornelius, both landscape and bookscape clearly became one as he expanded his teaching throughout the region. As I will discuss, the priest’s extensive outreach Page 125 →into the surrounding countryside mirrors Arundell’s own practice of drawing women from those neighboring areas into the physical center of the community. A raid on Chideock Castle in April of 1594 brought the rapid growth of this apostolic community to an abrupt end: searchers not only discovered and arrested Cornelius but also, importantly, confiscated a large cache of books. In the “Letter,” written in hiding in London not long after this event, Arundell gives an eyewitness account of raiders storming the castle: “They come armed,” she says, “enter the house, and, passing to one of the rooms, find there various Mass vestments, and a Priest, whom they seize and proceed to carry off.”315 In her later convent narrative, however, she also speaks of books discovered during the raid: “they searched all over for five or six hours without stopping,” recounts Dame Dorothea, “They found holy books in three different places—an entire library of books.”316 Although no list of these confiscated books appears to be extant, other surviving documents confirm that one of the people questioned at Chideock Castle after the raid was the London book smuggler William Bray.317 These same records confirm that a recently published polemical work, conventionally known as the Philopater, was seized in the room where Cornelius was discovered.318 A condemnation of Elizabethan policies, the Philopater had been published just two years earlier by Robert Persons, SJ, and figured largely during the trial of Cornelius as a “seditious” text.319 Taken together, then, the “entire library” of “holy books” found in “three different places” in the castle, the identification of a known Catholic book smuggler, and, finally, the presence in the castle of a very recent Catholic polemical imprint constitute fairly conclusive evidence that the community at Chideock Castle continued to be well supplied with contemporary Catholic publications, either imported from the Continent, published on secret presses in England, or copied by hand—all activities that were criminalized in the Elizabethan proclamation of July 1, 1570. At least one of the three libraries mentioned in the account of the raid surely contained books for Dorothy Arundell’s personal use; if she had remained at Chideock Castle, she might possibly have catalogued these, Page 126 →distinguishing books reserved for her own use much as Elizabeth Isham distinguished “My own Bookes” from the personal libraries of her mother and sister at their family home (see chapter 4 in this volume). Countering this, however, is the circumstance that Arundell, having already vowed to enter a convent, may have absorbed—perhaps during the “sessions after vespers”—a concept of the “collective nature of monastic life” (see chapters 8 and 9 in this volume).320 It is significant in this respect that a copy of the 1586 Memorial was present in the twentieth-century holdings of the Brussels Benedictines; in the rest of this section, I focus on how Arundell’s practice, as well as her writing, testify to her familiarity with its contents.321 Dorothy Arundell’s later convent narrative (the Life) has as its central focus the practice of Cornelius. Both her language and tone resonate with the Memorial, as exemplified in Granada’s portrayal of his own practice, exhorting a sinner toward virtue: “I set before him paradise, and hell, and the greate benefits which doe accompanie vertue,” he says, “that by this meanes he may be induced to make a firme determination with him selfe to forsake sin, and returne unto the service of his Lord.”322 Arundell portrays Cornelius as similarly relentless in presenting sinners with an implacable choice between heaven or hell, sin or virtue: “when it had

happened that he had warned someone who did not then correct his faults,” she says, “he would tell that person that he hated that fault in him like the Devil himself.”323 Although the practice of both the Spanish and English priests—self-described in the one instance and described by Dorothy Arundell in the Page 127 →other—is consistent with Tridentine canons and decretals, each exhibits a rhetorical fervor that far exceeds such conciliar discourse.324 We can reasonably assume that the very fervor that inflects Dorothy Arundell’s descriptions of her mentor also informed her own practice; further, because of a single extant passage in which she comments on her own responsibilities in the Chideock Castle community—a passage elided from all but one contemporary translation of her work—we can also see her modulate that fervor, bringing it into conformity with her own sex, age, and station.325 As the community at Chideock Castle grew, so did its ministry; the thirty newly reconciled families, along with their large households, needed guidance to persist in the “good life” prescribed by the Memorial, and for the women among them, Dorothy Arundell played a central role: I was given the task by father of instructing and teaching Christian doctrine to those older unmarried women in the parish whom Father had reconciled to the Holy Church. In this way we attracted others who were not yet Catholic but came to listen. 326 While Cornelius was extending his own practice outwards, then, Dorothy Arundell was bringing women into the Chideock community from surrounding areas, including women “who were not yet Catholic” but nevertheless accompanied their Catholic neighbors who came to Chideock Castle for instruction. Given the apostolic fervor evident in the community, at least some of these curious, non-Catholic women, attracted by Arundell’s teaching, would have experienced under her guidance the “true contrition” required by the first part of the sacrament of Penance. Working in concert with Cornelius, Arundell could connect these women with him for confession and absolution, then continue her guidance and encouragement to ensure that each woman successfully completed the third component of the sacrament by making appropriate reparation. Although Catholics traveled to Chideock Castle from as far as London and Cornwall to hear Mass, it was the sacrament of Penance, a necessary prerequisite for receiving the “The Sacrament of the Altar,” that constituted the nodal point around which the Chideock community’s apostolic agenda revolved.327 Even on the last night Page 128 →of his life, knowing he faced a traitor’s death in the morning, Cornelius was most concerned to “animate” his fellow prisoners to stay firm in their spiritual commitment: “He spent all that night hearing confessions,” the Life records: “twenty-two” of them, including some “by people who had not made their confession for several years.”328 Perhaps the most compelling image in the Life, however, is that of an early modern English woman “instructing and teaching Christian doctrine” to her peers; to that end, she would have found the Memorial to be an invaluable tool, speaking as it does not only to those who “beginne newly to serve God” but also to those who seek further guidance in order to “profit everie daie more and more in the waie of virtue.” 329 Despite confessional differences, the Chideock Castle community will reward further comparison with the later community at Little Gidding (see chapter 7 in this essay): Arundell’s brief autobiographical inclusion opens a wide perspective onto another reading/listening community of women.

Anne Dacre Howard, Countess of Arundel (1557–1630): Bringing Souls to the Point of Reconciliation In contrast to the preceding example of a woman’s description of her confessor’s practice, here and in the following section I draw on sources in which the activities of women are described by the priests who were also their confessors. Richard Blount, SJ, biographer of Anne Dacre Howard, Countess of Arundel, praises in vivid detail the intensity with which she approached the task of “saving souls.”330 Although the Countess is not named on the Marshalsea-Newgate book inventory, she not only had access to the publications it lists but was herself a significant patron of Catholicism in England.331 When the Memorial first entered Page 129 →circulation in London, she and her two young children were restricted to a small area of Howard House on the Strand. Although her finances and movements continued to be controlled by Queen Elizabeth through the 1590s, her life during that period was tightly interwoven with the needs of her fellow Catholics. With her compelling presence as the wife of England’s leading Catholic peer and as a formidable patron of English Jesuits in her own right, the

Countess had both the resources and opportunity to obtain a copy of the Memorial.332 She also had more direct access as well, however, through a member of her own household, Joan Aldred, who entered her service during this period and later married the Howard family associate, Thomas Lodge. Aldred is mentioned in the MarshalseaNewgate book inventory as having had access to twenty-two copies of the Memorial, four of them “gilt” and one “with clasps” (these latter five copies were “refused” by their intended recipients, who may well have learned that the distribution network had come under observation).333 Lodge himself produced a verse translation of the Memorial in 1601, and either he or his wife would likely have given the Countess a presentation copy.334 The Countess’s biographer links her life with that of her aunt, Lady Montague, by noting that both women had taken simple vows of chastity, promising not to remarry after the deaths of their husbands.335 The young Anne Dacre Howard’s personal reconciliation to Catholicism took place in 1582 or 1583, early in her marriage, when she was temporarily estranged from her husband and living at Arundel Castle in Suffolk. As Blount describes the incident (undoubtedly drawing on information provided by the Countess herself), she read “a book treating the great danger those are in that Page 130 →live in Schism” and was “efficatiously mov’dВ .В .В . to become a member of the Catholick and only true Church” (technically speaking, of course, she was a schismatic herself, having been baptized as a Catholic and instructed in that religion until at least the age of ten).336 The young Countess’s decision to receive confession and “become a member” of the Catholic Church was difficult to execute; after identifying “a grave and ancient man made Priest in the reign of Queen Mary,” she had to meet him secretly in the town of Arundel, on the outskirts of Arundel Castle, traveling “by certain darke obscure wayes and dangerouse passages to the Chamber where the Priest was lodg’d to make her Confession to him.” Moreover, she traveled alone—an action quite unsuitable to a woman of her station—“because she had not any Catholick woman about her at that time, nor any other whom she durst acquaint of that business.”337 Blount’s language is almost formulaic as he links the Countess’s actions in this instance to the three-part process of the sacrament of Penance: first, she became motivated to confess and “become a member” of the Catholic Church; second, she arranged to meet with a priest “to make her confession”; and third, now absolved after confirming her commitment to Catholicism, she “continued in the confession thereof well nigh 50 years.” 338 Having been without a guide herself in that first instance, forced to travel alone “by dark obscure ways,” she was later to act as a guide for others: “she animated moreover and encourag’d several by her words and example to the like [i.e., confession or “reconciliation”], who otherwise by fear were in great danger of fallingВ .В .В . some likewise who had in those tempests shewn weakness, were by her means strengthen’d and reduced again to their former state.”339 Here again, Granada’s tone and rhetorical intensity in the Memorial seem to inform Blount’s descriptions of the Countess’s apostolic efforts among her fellow Catholics, much as they also inform Dorothy Arundell’s descriptions of her mentor’s practice. Within her various households, the Countess routinely provided religious instruction to her servants, who “by her good counsel and example” were “animated to persevere and go on in the good way they had begun.”340 In the case of one servant “more obstinate than all the rest,” her efforts continued through his final illness, when “it pleased God so to move [him] by his good Lady’s means” that he asked “to speak with a Priest” and was reconciled,Page 131 → having first “received full satisfaction about the truth of the Catholic Religion.”341 But the Countess’s apostolic efforts also extended well beyond her own household and the needs of her coreligionists: whether she herself visited the sick or the sick came to her from far afield—at times as many as “threescore in one day”—she would attend to their spiritual as well as physical needs and “exhort them to that which was most for their eternal good.”342 In one such case, she “perceived” an inclination for Catholicism in a woman who “never had been a Catholick,” and in the end brought both the woman and her husband to the point of reconciliation.343 In this instance, her role in connecting the repentant couple with a priest for confession and absolution is implied (i.e., she “brought them to reconciliation”); in other examples, however, her role in the process of summoning a priest is made explicit. Not long after the 1595 death of the Jesuit Robert Southwell, who until then had lived in the Countess’s household as her confessor, the serving woman of a visitor became seriously ill and remained unmoved by all efforts to provide her with a priest to administer the sacraments, even though the Countess “alleadg’d

many forcible reasons unto her, used all kind of persuasions, yea and with teares kneeling by her bed side entreated her.”344 Finally, with death approaching, the patient relented and “entreated another GentlewomenВ .В .В . to find out some Catholick Priest by whom she might receive the benefit of absolution from her sins.”345 In Blount’s portrayal, during the interval required to locate a priest the patient also asked for “some Cordial to preserve her in life till his coming,” and then cried out, “O Blessed Father Southwel you shew’d much love to me and care of my soul whilst you liv’d hereВ .В .В . now pray for me.”346 The three-part process of the sacrament of Penance, reaffirmed by the Council of Trent and used as an organizing principle in the Memorial, is clearly evident in this series of examples from the practice of the Countess Page 132 →of Arundel, filtered through the observant eyes of a devout Jesuit. Attuned to the limits of lay interaction with priests, Blount nevertheless praises in the Countess the very behavior that could challenge those limits, portraying her as playing an essential role in guiding sinners through the sacrament of Penance and then further “animating” them to remain firm in their Catholic faith. The incident of the dying serving woman who testified to the recent presence of Robert Southwell in Anne Howard’s London household (and who survived until “the priest came”) also provides confirmation of the active presence of the Countess in London in the years following the Memorial’s first appearance in that city. Moreover, this incident shows that she was in touch with fellow committed Catholics, including at least one gentlewoman who could be “entreated” to go out and search for a priest to hear confession and administer absolution, while the Countess herself remained at the bedside of her dying patient.347 Despite this occasional blurring of the boundaries between lay and clerical responsibilities, both Blount and the biographer of the Countess’s paternal aunt, discussed in the next section, present their female subjects as dedicated to personal spirituality and obediently receptive to clerical guidance: in addition to their apostolic activities, both women are described as spending significant periods of the day in prayer, reading books of spiritual guidance, or participating in the sacraments.

Magdalen Dacre Browne, Viscountess Montague (1538–1608): “she spake to Heretikes of imbracing the Catholike fayth” Magdalen Dacre Browne, Viscountess Montague, offers a final example of a woman with a personally orchestrated lay apostolate. During the years of the Memorial’s first circulation, Lady Montague was an even more prominent presence in London and the English countryside than her niece, who possessed a higher status in the peerage but whose activities were significantly restricted by Queen Elizabeth. According to Lady Montague’s biographer and chaplain, Richard Smith, later Bishop of Chalcedon, Lady Montague had “twice offered [him] leave to set up a Press to print Catholike bookes” in one of her three major properties, which included Montague House in Southwark, “a common retire for priests going in and out of England,” where a printing press had been assembled in 1580 for the use of the Jesuit Page 133 →Robert Persons, and where Lady Montague would not only have had access to copies of the Memorial listed in bulk on the MarshalseaNewgate book inventory but also to Catholic vernacular imprints smuggled into England from Rouen in prior years.348 Two properties outside of London were Battle Abbey in Sussex, where she “kept three Priests” to administer sacraments “to all Catholikes repayring thither,” and Cowdray Castle.349 Although Smith’s English account of Lady Montague’s life was not published until 1627, he wrote an initial version in Latin after her death in 1608 and presented at least part of it as a funeral sermon.350 As a young woman, Lady Montague had established a prayer regimen based to some extent on pre-Reformation primers, breviaries, and litanies, and she seems to have maintained at least part of that regimen throughout her life.351 Although Smith’s descriptions of her practices are limited, he is clearly at pains to convey the insistency with which she urged her associates to remain faithful to the Catholic religion: she “maintayned a great family,” he says, “which consisted of eighty persons and sometimes more, almost all Catholikes.”352 Making great efforts to support this extended household “in the Catholike Religion,” she offered her dependents “the same benefit of the word of God, and the Sacraments, that she herselfe enjoyed”; she also moved beyond this limited pastoral sphere on more than one occasion and “spake to Heretikes of imbracing the Catholike fayth.”353 Never complacent, “she strictly commaunded her children, encouraged her servants, and importunatly exhorted all persons, to neglect the wealth of the world, constantly to retaine the Catholike fayth, and to repose

their hopes in God.”354 Even on her deathbed, Smith notes, although she was unable to utter the repetitive responses of her litanies, she exhorted those around her to do so and apparently orchestrated their efforts: “when in her infirmity she could not say [the responses] her selfe, she procured [them] to be sayd by others, distributing to every one a part.”355 Page 134 → Lady Montague’s practice, although described in brief by her biographer, nevertheless aligns with that of her niece the Countess and of her niece-by-marriage, Dorothy Arundell, to illustrate a pattern of shared behavior suggestive of common readership of the Memorial—or shared discussion of its contents—among a group of women connected by kinship, social station, and physical presence in London during the period in which books on the Lansdowne inventory, particularly the Memorial, were initially circulated. By decentering the physical book and its margins, this study of Catholic women as owners and readers of a common text focuses instead on the apostolic practices of three women readers of this book. The “readers’ marks” they have left cannot be gleaned from marginal comments in the 1586 Memorial, of which very few copies remain extant; instead, evidence of their readership exists in records of their apostolic practice, which show that all three women worked in close coordination with priests in reconciling their fellow Catholics, converting members of the established church, and facilitating the priestly administration of the sacrament of Penance.

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Seven The Discovery of Pattern at Little Gidding Paul Dyck Let us begin with an act of imagination. In 1634, at the manor house of Little Gidding, north of Cambridge, there is a large room in which half a dozen sisters between the ages of ten and thirty-four work on a common project. The walls are painted a pleasant green, and on them have been painted scriptural verses selected by the women themselves. There are large tables with plenty of workspace, and also neatly arranged materials: unbound quires of biblical texts in multiple editions and copies, in various states of fragmentation; engraved prints of biblical scenes, in various sizes; two copies of a recently printed Gospel Harmony, also unbound, with many pages already cut; and many pairs of scissors (not hinged, but spring) and pots of glue. The women are cutting this printed material and pasting the many pieces according to an intricate pattern. The women work alone or in pairs, ruling columns, snipping bits of scripture, and combining those textual bits with images, pasting them into place before pressing them, thus forming them together as a tightly knit, unified page. They are making a book—a Gospel Harmony—for King Charles I, at his special request; it is the most important thing that they have ever done.356 And at one table, a woman—perhaps Mary or Anna Collet, the “mayden sisters”—guides the blades of her scissors carefully around the figure of a prisoner, legs fettered, hands clasped, looking desperately over his Page 136 →left shoulder. She neatly separates the prisoner from the figure next to him and positions him on the page, in the space between two columns, in a configuration of misery. The anonymous figure of the prisoner has just become the figure of John the Baptist, imprisoned by Herod, a figure of prophesy and persecution, of faith and doubt. She has no way of anticipating that the king for whom this book will be a gift will himself someday be a prisoner, the very figure of abjection now beneath her fingers, and paradoxically also the figure of the martyr. The king does not only want this book because it is finely crafted; he wants it because of the holiness of its makers. And the women do not simply make the king a book; they extend to him a friendship that participates in the friendship of God, a demanding friendship, centered on the figure of the martyr and borne out in the handwork of scissors and located materially and metaphorically in the handmade book, a text that is also a place, a place that gestures toward other far-off places and people and makes them near. In this volume on women’s bookscapes, I want to think about “bookscape” in the sense I have just suggested, that is, a sense of the material book as imbued with the life of its makers and its readers, who in turn encounter the life of the Christian story through the recomposition of gathered materials. The books made in this room, the “Concordance Room,” bear witness to an acute sensibility regarding the material presence of the received story and the array of its forms, in text and image, and with great intention arrange these materials as the word of a living community and its network of friends, a shared place of habitation. This sensibility becomes visible through the scholarly turn to the material witnesses to women’s active engagement with books, and it strikingly bears out Helen Smith’s call to attend to the particularities of making and the sensuousness of books as the product of human hands. And, conversely, that bodies are a product of the books they handle, and further, that both bodies and books are produced by their environment even as they work upon it.357 Smith might be articulating the Little Gidding plan, for it is hard to imagine an arrangement of book, body, place, and social network that more intentionally takes up the very relationships she describes. In its methods, Little Gidding drew upon common practices but reconfigured them as a daring design of experimental Christianity. For them, the pattern of the book both followed and set a pattern of life, a pattern that required the very sort of communal discovery and composition modeled by the making of the Page 137 →book itself. In this chapter, I describe the Little Gidding project as a whole and then closely read (with scissors in hand, so to speak) one particularly telling example of the community’s finding and making: their use, and reuse, of Marten de Vos’s prints of the Seven Works of Corporal Mercy.

The community made its books using a pattern, but also bespoke, fitted for particular uses. The practices that produced the texts were also bespoke, designed to address cultural gaps, generally the gap in the practice of holiness, and particularly the gap in women’s education. The bespoke practices of Little Gidding come to a focus on the idea of pattern, the pattern of Christ. This pattern was both real in its shape and demands and also always waiting to be made real, both a way that can be followed and a way to be discovered. The simultaneous obedience to and search for pattern at Little Gidding can be seen in the books produced by the community, both the biblical harmonies or “concordances” described above and the “story books” of the “Little Academy,” philosophically driven group conversations. The concordances and the story books differ in purpose and content, but they share some striking similarities. They are both handmade, and that manual construction reflects and represents in both cases the labor of the community. They also both manifest a pattern of text and life, setting patterns even as they open a space for further pattern-making. In particular ways, they form the space the reading community, a community that was both female and catholic, specific and open. In contrast to the Roman Catholic lay networks and monastic communities described in the other chapters of this section, Little Gidding was reformed, understanding itself as faithful to the English church. However, because the family lived at a removed manor, the household also functioned as a parish, opening the possibility for experiments in Christian society.358 As a household, it was unusual in being under the authority of a widow, Mary Ferrar (nee Woodnoth), and one of her younger sons, the unmarried Nicholas, to whom the older men (John Ferrar and in-law John Collet) deferred. Page 138 →Mary’s only daughter and oldest child, Susanna Collet, had sixteen children, and while the sons went away to school and university, the daughters stayed in the household. The older ones learned to run it and took a central role in leading an experiment in communal holy living, one that involved the whole family, but in a particular way, the girls and women.359 While Nicholas, drawing on his firsthand knowledge of religious communities on the continent, developed the practices of Little Gidding, he (like the other men) was frequently away on family business.360 First Mary Ferrar and her daughter Susanna, and then four of her granddaughters in turn, ran the household, an activity that also manifested itself in books, the keeping of accounts in a notebook.361 At Little Gidding they sought a life expressive of the central concerns of the Christian Gospel: a community based on love of God and love of neighbor, enacted through the disciplines of prayer and praise, scripture reading and memorization, ministry to others, both medical and educational, and the learning of a range of crafts including bookbinding and, of course, the making of cut-and-paste harmonies. These books began as a shared, family project, for family use, and possibly also intended for print publication,362 became gifts (to family and friends, including George Herbert), before coming to the attention of the court and becoming gifts for king and archbishop, and for other patrons. The concordances took hold of the book as habitable space. The biblical book in early modern England was already conspicuously spatial, particularly in the way it laid out textual aids, building upon patristic and medieval orderings of the page by presenting a rich textual configuration. The biblical text itself was set in two columns per page or four per opening, presenting the reader with a textual array. The text was also ordered into marked chapters and verses, which worked as finding aids. Additionally, the text was marked with symbols keying the text to marginal helps, including cross-references, or references to related scriptures, enacting at a granular level the doctrine that scripture interprets scripture. As George Herbert, a close friend and collaborator of Nicholas Ferrar, wrote in his poem “H. Scriptures Page 139 →II”: “This verse marks that, and both do make a motion / Unto a third, that ten leaves off doth lie” (5-6).363 This laid out text, though, was not simply an array of information but rather both a space and a time to inhabit. The poem goes on to say that biblical readers find themselves in the text: “in ev’ry thing / Thy words do finde me out, & parallels bring” (10-11). In “The Bunch of Grapes,” he writes about the Jews of the Old Testament, “So now each Christian hath his journeys spann’d: / Their storie pennes and sets us down” (10-11). The scope of scripture includes or spans its readers and their time, particularly as the reader gains a sense of the whole story and its countless internal relationships: “The Bunch of Grapes,” for example, turns on the typological relationship between the story of the twelve spies (in Numbers 13) and the Lord’s supper. My point is not only that Reformation readers read this way but also that the material Bibles they read were laid out to invite this sort of reading.364 English Bibles, then, physically invited reading as habitation; the Little Gidding concordances intensified the effect. Much of this is owing to the use of images, which had not been included in printed English Bibles since the

previous century.365 The images evoke an immediate sensual response in a way that the text does not. However, the handmade quality of the books, their layout, and their size also contribute to the effect. To read these books is to witness the work that produced them, conspicuous in the hundreds of cuts composing each opening, and it is also to be invited into a consideration of the relationships of those disassembled and now reassembled bits of text and image. And finally, the large folio format scales to the reader’s body in such a way that one can most easily find oneself “in the book.” Broadening our view of the network of production, trade, reworking, Page 140 →gifting, and reception of materials, we can note that the engraved prints in the king’s book were primarily printed in Antwerp, in the shop of Gerard de Jode. Many of those prints were designed by Marten de Vos, who had studied with Jacopo Tintoretto in Venice, taking up his evangelical energy. The prints were brought to England and sold in London shops and at markets, and the family relied in part on their network of friends to buy these prints. The prints were cut and pasted into books, and those books were gifted to others. As for the biblical texts, they came from the printing house of the king’s printer, Robert Barker, and the printers with whom he (largely unhappily) shared his Bible-printing monopoly. One of the New Testaments used in the king’s book was printed by the widow of John Bill. All of the Bibles printed at the time were by type and paper purchased from the continent. To take Smith’s point, there were no freestanding objects involved, but rather a complex interplay of agents and materials; when the women of Little Gidding took these materials and reworked them, they did not so much add a woman’s touch to them as participate in a material circulation that transcended lines of gender. As little as we can say definitively when and where women acted in this circulation, their participation must have been ubiquitous. The difference at Little Gidding was, rather, the deliberation with which the community made an intentionally and specifically female productive action within this circulation. What is required here is, in Smith’s terms, an historical materialism that opens the book as subjective rather than objective thing, always already imbedded in, productive of and produced by human practices, and as Smith says, the sensuous human touch.366 Probably the most striking possibility in the story of Little Gidding books as the circulation of subjective things is the way that Charles himself participated in the production of his own book, as an intricate exchange of gifts. As has been often recounted, Charles had heard about the community and its concordances and was interested enough that, when he was nearby in 1633, he sent a courtier to borrow one. Embarrassed that a book made for home use was to be read by the king, the community hesitated but ultimately settled on the agreement that the king would take the book until the women made him one of his own. The first book, now at Harvard, has corrections in Charles’s hand—corrections that clearly influenced the layout of the same passage in the king’s book (implying of course that Charles returned it prior to the completion of his own). This movement of a family book back-and-forth with the king is remarkable enough, but it is also Page 141 →probable that the king and/or someone in his retinue provided one of the New Testament editions, in two copies, to the community for the purpose of including it in his book. The New Testament printed by Robert Young in 1633 features prominently in the king’s book and in no other Little Gidding book, the latter likely because Young was the king’s printer in Edinburgh. The 1633 testament in question was printed in honor of Charles’s Scottish coronation in 1633, raising the possibility that the traveling court and even Charles himself brought the copies back so that the women of Little Gidding could cut and paste them into his book.367 While the Young New Testament appears at first simply a mass-produced object, it instead suggests an intimate and intentional mediation as gift, in a complex exchange. Far from expressing an anxious hold on male authority and authorship, the bookmaking of the community became strikingly more female as its readers became more important, at least in one important way: the Gospel book made for King Charles employs images not only in greater quantity than in the other concordances but in far more intricate arrangements. To make a book fit for a king, the community produced intensive female work. In one way, this is not at all surprising, because there was already a place at court for female handwork, not only in the longstanding tradition of embroidery by courtiers but also in the work of specialists, most notably calligrapher Esther Inglis. We should also consider the particular ways in which devotion was gendered in the Caroline court: Charles was attracted by the faith of his queen, Henrietta Maria, and to the sensually rich practices and liturgical

objects of her chapel (as were many courtiers, some of whom converted to the Roman Church), and he saw a need for a similar devotion in the reformed English church. The production, as devotional handwork, of an English Bible, illustrated with richly evocative Flemish prints, by a community of holy, reformed, Church of England women, must have appeared to Charles as a highly desirable breaking of patterns and formation of a new pattern. Nicholas Ferrar modeled the community’s Gospel concordances on existing scholarly works, particularly the 150-chapter harmony of Cornelius Jansen, working from the Latin model to produce an English text out of the 1611 translation.368 This was, so to speak, the received pattern of the story. The Page 142 →pattern as received, though, requires a paradoxically obedient reinvention: there is no simple pattern to be simply enacted, nor a lack of pattern calling for innovation, but rather a profound and mysterious pattern, to be discovered and worked out moment-by-moment, with every breath, in countless small and interconnected actions. As much as the community thinks in terms of pattern, that pattern is an incarnate one, and there is no pattern apart from incarnation, down to the tiniest inclination, the most intimate gesture. If we seem to have entered a meditative mode, it is nonetheless the mode needed to understand how a group of women making innumerable cuts and ordering those innumerable fragments into new books—wholly unoriginal and also wholly original—understood themselves to be doing something extraordinary.369 It is also the mode we need to understand in order to get over the question that has marked studies of Little Gidding, that is, the question of intent and authority, as in, how much did the women of the community determine the content of the books they made? Deborah Shuger’s refutation of the long-held view that the dialogues of the Little Academy were composed by Nicholas and then memorized and performed by the women is entirely important.370 At the same time, when it comes to the concordances, we need no clear separation between the intentions of Nicholas and the intentions of the women. Rather, our lack of knowledge of who intended what is itself to the point, which is that the enacting of the pattern was of whole and irreducible importance at Little Gidding. This was the case, not simply because, in the words of James, faith without works is dead, but because the pattern cannot be known until it is enacted, or rather, until it is being enacted. The enactment of the Gospel comes alive in a particularly pointed way in the tradition of the seven Works of Corporal Mercy, based on Matthew 25. The rest of this essay will focus on the Flemish artist Marten de Vos’s prints of the Seven Works, printed by Gerard de Jode in Antwerp in 1581 and used in the king’s book.371 The de Vos images are mannerist in style, upsetting the classical balance of earlier renaissance forms and following Tintoretto in Page 143 →defying the stillness of the image by creating the effect of a swirl of bodies in motion. These images are not peaceful meditations, but rather are crowded with bodies, filling background, middle ground, and foreground with activity. The bodies themselves proclaim their fleshliness, not only in their muscularity but in their postures, which are almost never at rest. Rather, de Vos has set figures in bold contrapposto, with body moving in one direction, faces turned another. The images have the effect of a snapshot: every figure’s posture is the posture of a moment. A moment later, every body in the frame will have moved. The swirl of bodies in motion, though, moves in directions that together might be seen to form patterns—not stable patterns for fixed repetition but rather emerging patterns. Most of the designs (five of seven) feature both a male and a female figure of mercy, ministering to people in need, while two feature men only. All of the prints include the figure of Christ, who occupies the middle ground, unseen but seeing. Four of the images, though, make him central, while three locate him on the left. In some images, he appears fully visible and framed by the action, while in others, he stands behind other figures and must be searched out. The images establish a triangular pattern in which Christ stands central with male and female figures of mercy on either side, slightly to the foreground. The titles, directly quoted from scripture, name this triangulated relationship. Not “clothing the naked,” for example, but “I was naked and you clothed me” (“Nudus eram et operuitis me”). Jesus is both witness to and recipient of actions done by those who do not know that he is even there. The de Vos series captures in striking ways some of the central commitments of the Little Gidding community: their running of an infirmary, treating wounds with their own hands; their feeding of the poor (they prepared twenty gallons of gruel three times a week); and their taking into the household of four impoverished widows.372 The images undeniably present the biblical pattern that the community can be seen to have followed. At the same time, everything about the composition of the images also addresses the difficulty of discerning and following Christ’s pattern: each image newly reconfigures the pattern and suggests an ongoing action of

reconfiguration. Nothing is so characteristic of the pattern of Christ’s work as the turn of the head, the hand outreached. The difficulty of the pattern becomes sharper when considered in biblical context: the tradition of the works is based on Jesus’s story of the sheep and Page 144 →the goats regarding judgment (Matthew 25:31-46). Crucially, those under judgment find out about the works and their importance only after the fact, as it is revealed to them that they either have or have not done them, a division that makes all the difference. In this context it becomes clear that Jesus, in addition to receiving and witnessing these acts, also finally judges them, saying “inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me” (Matthew 25:40). The mystery of salvation turns on the most obvious of good deeds, yet not obvious enough, or better put, not obvious at all, even to the righteous, who (necessarily) saw no personal virtue in their acts of kindness. As much as the pattern seems straightforward, it cannot be reduced to a set of rules. The conversations of the Little Academy demonstrate the family’s interest in difficulty; while clear-cut saint’s stories had some appeal to them, their real engagement was with stories of wrestling with faith.373 And in thinking about their own practices, they felt the lack of real examples, and as Reid Barbour has argued, pushed themselves toward a heroic Christian life.374 As Mary Collet (”Mother”—the members of the Little Academy adopted aspirational names during sessions) said during a conversation in Advent 1632, We have a Talent, and a great one, committed to us if we be careful to employ it.В .В .В . We may tread out the way to heaven and we may lead on by good works, although we cannot teach by words. And perhaps that real kind of instruction hath in all ages been the most forcible, is in this the most necessary, where there are many Masters but few guides. A Dearth of Patterns in an exuberance of Rules.375 There is in the combined activities of Little Gidding a latent suggestion that the word “pattern” carries multiple, complementary meanings. It is both the pattern of life referred to in “His proceedings must be our pattern,” a meaning that is historical but also intangible, in that its repeatability in another historical moment requires abstraction, the drawing of a principle Page 145 →from the original moment and then the manifesting of that principle in another moment, the present.376 Another sense of “pattern,” the pattern of the patternbook, for handwork (for example, for embroidery or pen work) seems to bear only an accidental resemblance. Here the pattern is literal, a printed figure to be copied. Unlike the pattern of the Gospel, the pattern of handwork requires only a material copying of a material pattern, apparently not an act of interpretation. And yet, of course, the apparent difference gives way upon consideration: the arts of the hand demand much more than simple copying; they demand the full attention of the fully committed artist in such a way that interpretation, while not displayed, can also not be ruled out. The concordances of Little Gidding draw together the two meanings in a striking way: the Collet sisters traced the pattern of Christ through their handwork, feeling out the shape of the Gospel.377 The ways that the women of the community employed the de Vos prints reflect a deep engagement with them as a space in which to work out the problem of the pattern. They used these prints or details from them in three places in the king’s book, and I will begin with the last of those. Chapter 127 contains the story of the sheep and the goats, under the unambiguous heading “The Judgement.” The women pasted in the whole print series except one here, including the title plate showing the Last Judgment, trimming only the Latin titles at the bottom of the prints and putting the 1611 text in their place.378 Access to the continental image tradition gave the community access also to a rich iconography of female spirituality, an iconography that is celebrated in their books, and especially that made for the king. The women of the Gospel stories figure prominently, especially the Virgin Mary. The de Vos Acts of Mercy employ another kind of female figure, not historical, but as ideal example, suggesting (alongside the male) the embodiment of Mercy itself—the merciful are in this series both real and ideal. The community first used the de Vos prints (they had at least two copies of some of them) in chapter 13, on John

the Baptist and his preaching, selecting details to construct two images to illustrate Luke 3:10-11, “And the people asked him, saying, What shall we do then? He answereth and saith unto them, He that hath two coats, let him impart to him that hath none; Page 146 →and he that hath meat, let him do likewise.” The chapter spreads over a full opening: on the left page, they combined details from “I was naked,” showing both the male and female merciful; on the right, they chose the female merciful, giving bread to other women. Notably (and characteristically), they did nothing to mark the origin of the images, either by artist, or more to my point, by scriptural source. Rather, they added the text from Luke, writing it on the excerpted image. Arguably, this treatment might be seen as flattening scripture into one field, as it were, from which matter can be arbitrarily taken and used. I suggest, instead, that there is a profound play with the sense of pattern and its fulfillment going on here. The interchangeability of the Matthew 25 images with the Luke 3 text relies, not on categorical simplicity or arbitrary reassignment, but on the biblical sense that John’s teaching is fulfilled in Christ’s judgment. The right-hand page (fig. 7.1) demonstrates the possibility of female figuration in a text not explicitly female. The community’s recomposition of de Vos’s image presents not only a female figure of Mercy but also a community of women, joined by the extension of hands in the passing of bread in an act of tender intimacy. For both the book’s makers and its readers (especially Charles), it could not have been irrelevant that the hands that cut out this detail were also hands that actually gave food to the hungry.379 That the handwritten words “let him doe” appear in the gap between the figures—a space defined by the intensity of the women’s gazes at each other—suggests the powerful embodiment of the word: the placement of image does much more than illustrate Luke’s text: it situates it in the midst of a community living it out. The composition of the page makes a powerful implicit claim about female embodiment as constituting the Gospel itself, both living the word and making it possible. This effect is reinforced by a Pentecost image above and to the right (not visible in the figure here), there to illustrate Luke 3:16, “he shall baptize you with the Holy Ghost and with fire,” an image composed around the Blessed Virgin Mary. The image gives precedence to Mary at the coming of the Spirit, and the community’s use of it orients the story of John the Baptist within a female-centered sense of the whole story of salvation. Further, images of female agency take on particular qualities within the complex arrangement of image and text that constitutes the Little Gidding page. The association of de Vos’s “I was hungry” print with the preaching Page 147 →of John genders that preaching female, simultaneously moving the image from a conceptualized list of seven works to an immediate response to John’s preaching. The combination of text and image situates the female reader as first hearer (and consequently first disciple) instead of as the recipient of church teaching processed from scripture and codified. Again, the act of positioning this image within this network of textual relationships seems natural enough, but is a quietly radical reorientation producing not only an image of female discipleship but also an image of female devotion meant to inspire a king. The quiet gestures of Little Gidding were meant to reverberate along their networks and consequently to transform a kingdom. The “Affectionate’s” words from another context also fit well here: “Wee want an Example, let’s make one.”380 Fig. 7.1. Detail. The female figure of Mercy from Marten de Vos’s “Esurivi Enim et Dedistis Mihi Manducare,” as used in the King’s Concordance, chapter XIII. British Library C.23.e.4. Reproduced with the permission of the British Library Board. The most complex use by the community of the de Vos Works of Mercy Page 148 →prints, though, is the second of the three, in chapter 22 of the concordance, titled “John’s Imprisonment.” The text records the beginning of the end for John, a prelude to his infamous death as the perverse gift of Herod to his daughter, Salome, mediated by his wife, Herodias. The capture of God’s prophet within a network of female wickedness would have been of keen interest to the community; yet the other point in John’s story gestured toward here is not his death but his doubt. Notably, in the conversations, the community articulates a definite preference for stories of faithful struggle, of imperfect saints over perfect ones. They investigate, as it were, the fault lines of faith: the situations in which faith breaks down and fails. Within the book composed for Charles, the imprisonment of John becomes palpable as a terrible cut. But before we come to this terrible cut, we must understand what was cut. De Vos’s image “In Carcere eram et venistis ad me” (“I was in prison

and you visited me,” fig. 7.2) may well have been of particular interest to the community, in that its composition shows a special connection between Christ and the female figure of Mercy. While male figures dominate the image’s center and foreground, the middle ground and edges hold two defining figures: the female merciful on the far right and Christ and a prisoner on the far left. The lines of sight and gesture give the composition its power. The foreground features the male merciful handing money to a jailer, buying the release of a prisoner, who dons his cap in the doorway in front of a guard. This action has an obvious importance, but notably, Christ gestures across the middle ground, both pointing and making a sign of peace, a sign returned by the female merciful, who also carries food and water. Both prisoners on the far left foreground and middle ground look at the female merciful, who herself looks in the direction of Christ, at the prisoner beside him. Of all the images in the series, this figure comes closest, it seems, to recognizing or perhaps unconsciously registering Christ’s presence, both in her gaze and in her gesture, which though intended for the prisoner are also aimed at Christ. Chapter 22 tells the story of John’s imprisonment by Herod, drawing together the accounts of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, in which Herod, “being reproved” by John for all his evils, “added yet this above all, that hee had layd hold on John, and bound him, and put him in prison” (Luke 3:19-20, Matthew 14:3).381 Immediately below this, in the lower center of the page, the Page 149 →community has pasted images of prisoners, all bound, all except the most gruesomely tortured man who hangs above, looking to the right, toward nothing. A note below indicates that “these Pictures are to express the Torments in Prison” (3). “These pictures” have obviously been cut from the de Vos “In Carcere” print and rearranged to fit the column. But of course, this is only obvious because we have just looked at the whole print. Within a book of 289 pages, the source of these details comes as a mystery. Nothing suggests that the whole print will appear elsewhere in the book, as this would require the makers to have two copies of that print. And it is not until a reader has become familiar enough with the book as a whole that such a connection can be made. Fig. 7.2. Marten de Vos’s “In Carcere Eram et Venistis ad Me.” Arca Artium Art Collection, aap0442. Reproduced with the permission of The Hill Museum & Manuscript Library, Arca Artium Art Collection, Saint John’s University, Collegeville, Minnesota. When the Collet sister cut out the prisoner, she cut him apart from Christ (fig. 7.4). In the original composition, Christ leans back, behind but intimately close to the prisoner, so close that the two form a single block, marked by a diagonal line. In none of the seven prints does Christ himself Page 151 →participate in the action of mercy like he does here. In every print he blesses the mercy-givers, but here he physically aligns himself with the prisoner in a bodily gesture of compassion and comfort (while maintaining a lordly repose: he is simultaneously intimately involved in the situation and above it). Here, then, is the pattern of Christ: even as the merciful can be seen to follow Christ’s pattern, in this print, Christ’s comforting body gives as manifest an image of his pattern as the reader could want. It is all the more striking, then, that the sister cut exactly this figure of Christ out of the picture, or, cut the prisoner away from Christ. In tracing the lines of the prisoner with her scissors, the sister simultaneously traced the lines of the comforting Christ, thus producing indivisibly from the positive pattern of the prisoner, the negative pattern of Christ, or the pattern of Christ’s absence. The figure of the prisoner has been betrayed to isolation by a cut, figuratively participating in not only John’s isolation but his doubt, for in chapter 47 of the concordance, “John’s sending to Christ,” we are faced with John’s question, through his disciples, to Jesus: “Art thou hee that should come, or looke we for another?” (Luke 7:19-20). Page 150 → Fig. 7.3. Detail. Marten de Vos’s “In Carcere Eram et Venistis ad Me,” as used in the King’s Concordance, chapter XXII. British Library C.23.e.4. Reproduced with the permission of the British Library Board. Fig. 7.4. Detail. Reading with scissors. Photo credit: Kenji and Seika Dyck. Marten de Vos’s “In Carcere Eram et Venistis ad Me.” Arca Artium Art Collection, aap0442. Reproduced with the permission of The Hill Museum & Manuscript Library, Arca Artium Art Collection, Saint John’s University, Collegeville, Minnesota. Page 152 → Notably, even as the pattern of Christ’s absence is revealed/produced, so is the identity of the prisoner changed. He was just a prisoner, an anonymous recipient of mercy, but now he has become John the Baptist,

through women’s scissors and paste.382 This is also a strangely fitting transformation: the prophet-martyr has been produced by the removal of Christ, a removal that marks the martyr’s very shape. It is a removal both damning and saving, a removal felt as real abandonment and testifying to an unseen love. The martyr has been marked by Christ, through presence and absence, as friend.383 Does this cut then make the prisoner the expression of martyrdom? If the family is running ahead, setting the example, they are taking the martyr’s role as well as the prophetic one.384 In other words, once the prisoner is cut from the print, that prisoner is not only sundered from the figures of comfort, and thus a meditation on loneliness, but himself becomes the figure of the prophet and martyr, even (or especially) in his abjection. And thus the example of faithful living. The prisoner is now not the object of mercy but the figure of faithful suffering, even in his moment of anguished doubt. The transformation of the figure of the prisoner into the figure of John the Baptist demonstrates the richness of the Little Gidding books as living spaces, places in which the reader could enter the Gospel story with affective and sensory vividness. Before the books of Little Gidding ever came to the attention of the court, they were in the first place meant as everyday books, books that the whole family could work on together and that they could use to memorize scripture for recitation at family hours of prayer. In the everyday practices of the family, they developed a compositional technique that turned cultural limitations on women into a surprisingly powerful way of reading, interpreting, and (quietly but unforgettably) preaching the word.

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Eight Common Libraries Book Circulation in English Benedictine Convents, 1600–1700 Jaime Goodrich According to her obituary, Maria of the Blessed Sacrament Appleby (d. 1704), who professed in 1667 at the English Benedictine convent in Paris, showed a special devotion to pious reading: she got by her own industry to understand perfectly wel both French and Latin, taking great delight in reading spiritual Books, and was scarse ever without her Breverary or some good Book about her, haveing in a manner the whol Psalter by heart, on which she meditated day and night finding therein great comfort and consolation, as wel appear’d by what she said one day to a Sister in whom she had a great confidence, for she tould her that there was nothing in this world so deare to her as her Breverary.385 Appleby’s “great delight in reading” demonstrates the importance of bookscapes within the spiritual lives of the Englishwomen who joined ContinentalPage 154 → convents between 1600 and 1800. By perusing devotional texts in several languages, Appleby cultivated her own spiritual growth. Her special fondness for the breviary, which contained liturgical texts designed for private and communal reading during the Divine Office, reveals that books also framed Appleby’s participation in her convent’s shared spiritual life. The obituary notes that Appleby scrupulously acknowledged the house’s collective ownership of books: “she practis’d holy poverty to the letter, never appropriating any thing to herself, no not so much as a Book, but wou’d have al in common, and when she could, she wou’d get the poorest and oldest Brevaryes &c, which she wou’d make use of preferable to new ones.”386 While Appleby must have read books from the house library, she refused to borrow them indefinitely, instead preferring to “have al in common.” Every nun would have been expected to use a breviary during the Divine Office, but Appleby selected “the poorest and oldest” copies for herself rather than “new ones.” In maintaining this delicate balance between her love of reading and the virtue of monastic poverty, Appleby offers a striking example of cloistered attitudes toward libraries. Used by individuals as a means of cultivating monastic piety, convent libraries were a communal resource assembled for and owned by the entire house. Over the past decade, a growing body of research by literary scholars and historians has shown that books and manuscripts offered vital sources of spiritual direction and communal formation for English nuns in exile.387 Recently, J. T. Rhodes and Caroline Bowden have offered a new approach to this topic by using bibliographical methods to document and analyze cloistered book collections.388 This essay will build on Page 155 →their work by considering book circulation within five monastic libraries belonging to one order: the English Benedictine convents established at Brussels, Cambrai, Dunkirk, Ghent, and Paris.389 Founded in 1598, the Brussels convent was the first post-Reformation house established on the Continent specifically for Englishwomen. In 1623, three Brussels nuns helped start a new convent in Cambrai, which then established its own filiation in Paris in 1651. The Brussels house also founded a convent at Ghent in 1624, and Ghent in turn began a house at Dunkirk in 1662. Each of these cloisters assembled a library of books meant for common use, which allowed the nuns to perform the communal and individual reading stipulated by the Benedictine Rule. The nature of Benedictine monasticism shaped the mechanics of book circulation in these convents, offering a useful contrast to scholarship on secular women’s libraries.390 While lay women’s book collections reveal an individual’s participation in spiritual agendas grounded in familial and devotional networks (as discussed in chapters 6 and 7 of this collection), convent libraries existed to serve and shape a corporate population (as shown in chapter 9 of this collection).391 As a result, cloistered libraries offer an opportunity for

thinking about the circulation of books within a communal setting. This essay will begin by examining monastic regulations that envisioned a common library meant to serve as a spiritual resource for the entire community. It will then analyze traces of book circulation in extant books, manuscripts, and catalogs from the English Benedictine convents at Brussels, Cambrai, Page 156 →Dunkirk, Ghent, and Paris. These communal book collections offered nuns a space for negotiating the interplay between their collective and individual identities. The cloister itself may thus be viewed as a religious bookscape, a bibliographical terrain constituted by the collection, circulation, and readership of books that existed for the sole purpose of providing a shared foundation for the development of a communal monastic spirituality.

Monastic Book Circulation in Theory Monastic views of poverty and reading deeply informed the ways that book circulation functioned within English Benedictine convents during the seventeenth century. Each of the convents followed the Benedictine Rule as well as more specific guidelines developed within particular houses: the Brussels house wrote statutes that were approved by Archbishop Matthias Hovius in 1612 and adopted at Dunkirk and Ghent, while the Cambrai and Paris houses created their own constitutions in 1631 and 1656, respectively. All Benedictine nuns took a vow of poverty, and, theoretically speaking, monastic regulations forbade personal property of any kind, including books. The Benedictine Rule, for example, specifies that “none presume to give or Receave any thing what soever proper to themselves: not soe much as a booke or writting Tables or any Instrument to write withall.”392 The Brussels Statutes similarly prohibit personal possessions: “All such as make their profession of Religion in this Congregation, must understand that they can have nothing in propriety, even as the Rule hath enacted.”393 Indeed, the Brussels Statutes warn that any deceased nun found to have items “of notable value” in her cell would be “infallably deprived of Christian Buriall” (В§1.2.9). Any apparent individual ownership of communal books would therefore clash with the Benedictine ideal of monastic poverty. Yet both the Benedictine Rule and monastic regulations created an important loophole in this prohibition of personal ownership, as an individual nun could borrow and retain communal possessions with the leave of her superior. St. Benedict, for example, mandates that members of his order should not “receave or give letters bookes of devotion, or what other present Page 157 →how litle soever” to their friends or relatives without the superior’s express permission (Rule 77). The Brussels Statutes also allow nuns to accumulate items for individual use, mandating that each nun must make an annual declaration of her cell’s contents to the abbess, “leaving it to her [superior’s] Will, whether she will suffer them to retayne, restore, or otherwise dispose ther of” (В§1.2.8). The Cambrai Constitutions likewise forbid personal ownership without the superior’s leave, stating that it is “strictlie forbidden, to give, take, lend, send, beg, aske, receave, or chang directlie or indirectlie, in there persons or names; much or little; neither cloathes, monney, letters, tokens, gifts, for anie thing whatsoever [В .В .В .В ] without the Superiours leave expressed or reasonablie and conscionablie presupposed.”394 The Paris Constitutions contain a similar directive: “none of the Relligious of the Convent, without expresse leave of the Priouresse, shall keepe for her owne particular use by her, or by any other Person, any thing what-soever.”395 Going beyond the yearly examination stipulated by the Brussels Statutes, both the Cambrai and Paris Constitutions mandated that nuns must submit to their superiors “in writting a bill of all and everie thing they have for there use, in there cell or out of it” twice a year (Cambrai, 32).396 As Bowden has noted, such conditional possession of books “should perhaps be seen more as guardianship of a precious object rather than ownership.”397 Benedictine prescriptions on book ownership thus reflect a tension between individual and communal needs. While books remained the property of the entire convent, they could be borrowed indefinitely by the house’s members. References to reading in the Rule, Brussels Statutes, and Cambrai and Paris Constitutions suggest that it occurred throughout the house, particularly in the refectory, workhouse, infirmary, choir, parlor, and cells. As Bowden has noted, books were consequently found in a variety of locations for practical reasons.398 Yet Benedictine convents seem to have possessed a communal library as well, possibly located in a cupboard rather than a separate room.399 The Rule, for example, dictates that the nuns undertake a special course of reading during Lent (the period from Ash Wednesday to Page 158 →Maundy Thursday): “lett every one take her a booke out of the library, the which shee must reade through out, and these bookes must bee delivered to them at the beginning of lent” (74,

my emphasis). Benedict envisions the “library” as a common resource for the house’s spiritual development, in this case aiding the nuns’ preparation for Easter. Monastic guidelines from Brussels, Cambrai, and Paris offer more direct commentary on maintaining a communal library. Seeking to preserve spiritual orthodoxy, the Brussels Statutes mandate that the library must be examined by both the abbess and male authorities: “Lett the Abbesse have especiall care that noe bookes that savour not of a Religious Spirit, or which doe not helpe there unto, bee at any tyme brought into the Monastery; And lett the Catoloque of all the bookes of the Monastery bee examined of some learned discreete man, whoe may discerne whether they are profitable for Religious Spirits or noe” (В§1.1.13). Both Paris and Cambrai also include versions of this stipulation, transferring the responsibility solely to the house’s confessor, and Cambrai’s Constitutions extend this directive to manuscripts: “Let the Vicarius [i.e., confessor] have a special care that no bookes, written or printed (even papers of instruction or devotion) that savour not of a religious Monastical spirit, or that tend not unto it, be kept in the Monasterie: and therefore let the catalogue be examined at everie Visit” (5). Such scrutiny may have taken place on a regular basis within the Benedictine convents, but the best-known example occurred at Cambrai in 1632, when Rudesind Barlow and Leander Jones examined and approved the voluminous writings of Augustine Baker, the house’s unofficial spiritual director, after he was accused of heresy.400 Their approbations are extant in many Baker manuscripts from this period as well as later copies of these texts. Such careful monitoring of the nuns’ reading material suggests that libraries played a significant role in the corporate spiritual formation of English Benedictine houses. The communal nature of these libraries also necessitated the development of systems for tracking and controlling book circulation, in addition to the nuns’ yearly or semiannual declarations of their possessions to their superiors. The Brussels Statutes required that each nun only retain a few books: “lett her [the abbess] allow but some few for every one, commaunding the rest to bee kept by one of the Religious, to bee communicated unto others as neede shall require” (В§1.1.13). The nun in charge of the house’s library presumably acted as both librarian and gatekeeper, yet it is unclear whether Page 159 →she or the abbess was responsible for identifying a particular nun’s “neede” for reading material. The Cambrai Constitutions, meanwhile, are even more specific about the importance of limiting book circulation: “All the bookes must belong to the common librarie, and be keept undar-lock, and have written on them the name of the Monasterie; and be common to all indiffirentlie; and let none say this belongeth to me; I bought it or brought it, nor have any ones names on it. And whosoever doth appropriat anie thing to her selfe in this kind let her be punnished exemplarelie. Yet the lady Abbess may let anie one have what she will for her use in her celle as longe as she please” (32–33). Keeping books “undar-lock” would prevent free access to the library, reiterating the idea that its contents belonged to the monastery. This communal mindset is also conveyed by the requirement that all books carry the name of the house. The Paris Constitutions preserved Cambrai’s language, while introducing some important modifications: All the Bookes must bellong to the common Library (except such as the Priouresse shall judge fitt not to bee seene by all) & be carefully looked to, & have written on them the name of the Monastery; & none must have any Booke out from thence without leave of the Priouresse & leaving a Noate under their hand that they tooke such a Booke. And lett none presume to say this bellongs to mee, I bought it, or brought it, or have any Ones name on it. And whosoever doth appropriate any thing to her selfe in this kind, (except her owne Manuscripts, or what concerns her particular Conscience) lett her bee punished exemplarily; yet the Priouresse may lett any One have what shee thinkes good for her use in her Cell, as long as shee please.В .В .В . (В§4.6, my emphasis) In addition to the common library, the Paris Constitutions envision other discrete collections of reading material. The prioress maintained a library of censored books for her own use and possibly that of other senior office holders. Meanwhile, each nun kept her “owne Manuscripts” without any oversight from the superior, a stipulation that averted the need for the prioress to examine the loose papers that accumulated in each nun’s cell. The Paris Constitutions also establish a borrowing system based on notes, indicating that the library was not locked as at Cambrai. This arrangement may reflect the fact that the prioress had custody of suspect books. While Benedictine houses maintained common libraries that fostered individual and communal spiritual development, in

theory they also carefully limited book circulation to observe monastic poverty and maintain spiritual orthodoxy. Page 160 →

Monastic Book Circulation in Practice The remainder of this essay will trace how printed books circulated in English Benedictine convents by analyzing inscriptions and book lists from the seventeenth century. This evidence is necessarily partial because no Benedictine convent was able to bring a complete library to England in the aftermath of the French Revolution.401 By the late eighteenth century, for example, the Cambrai Benedictines had acquired nearly four thousand printed books and manuscripts, which were largely confiscated by French soldiers and subsequently destroyed or lost.402 Nonetheless, the remnants of these monastic libraries suggest that book circulation participated in the construction of a communal identity that spanned centuries. As a result, these common libraries offer an intriguing counterpoint to the book collections of lay women. Signatures and initials often provide the primary evidence that secular women possessed certain books, serving as an assertion of individual ownership.403 Within a convent setting, however, the inscription of names within books carried different connotations. As Bowden has observed, these signatures witnessed the nun’s temporary use of the book.404 Inscriptions in print and manuscript texts from Benedictine libraries therefore asserted the convent’s corporate ownership of books while allowing the individuals who read these volumes to identify themselves as part of a larger spiritual community. As previously mentioned, Brussels, Dunkirk, and Ghent all observed the Brussels Statutes, which regarded the library as common property but did not specifically prohibit individual inscriptions. Nuns from these convents did sign their names on the pastedowns and title pages of books, generally to indicate that they had borrowed the volumes with leave. Such signatures could also help to construct a broader sense of spiritual community, as books from Brussels and Dunkirk demonstrate. A 1619 Latin Psalter from Brussels bears the names of nuns from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries, including five women who professed before the house returned to England in 1794: Margaret Curson (pr. 1612, d. 1659), Martha Dallyson (pr. 1658, d. 1708), Marie Anne Bell (pr. 1712, d. 1754), Mary Catherine Eccles Page 161 →(pr. 1753, d. 1808), and Mary Anne Rayment (pr. 1774, d. 1839).405 Since the Psalter was used on a daily basis for the Divine Office, this book served a practical purpose even as it symbolized the nuns’ shared religious devotions. The dates of each nun’s profession and death suggest that the book saw nearly continual use between the early seventeenth century and the mid-nineteenth century. As a nun inscribed her name, she must have been conscious of her place within a spiritual and textual community that stretched across the decades. Inscriptions could also gesture toward spiritual communities beyond the cloister. On the pastedown of a 1659 missal owned by the Dunkirk house (Officium et Missa, in Festo et Per Octavam Corporis Christi), Alexius Caryll inscribed a line from Aquinas’s eucharistic hymn “Adoro te devote” followed by a request for prayer: “Peto quod petivit latro paenitens ora pro f. Alexio Caryll” (“I seek what the penitent thief sought, pray for brother Alexius Caryll”).406 A Benedictine monk, Caryll was also the sibling of Mary Caryll, who professed at Ghent in 1650 and then served as abbess at Dunkirk from 1663 to 1712. Xaveria Pordage (d. 1713), who professed at Ghent in 1661 and joined Mary Caryll in Dunkirk, wrote her initials just below Alexius Caryll’s inscription. The pastedown also includes the initials of Anastasia Vincent (d. 1748) and the name of Gertrude Wells (pr. 1746, d. 1807). Like the Brussels Psalter, this missal simultaneously served commemorative and functional purposes. Besides acting as a material witness of the Dunkirk house’s foundresses and its connections to the prominent Caryll family, it reflected the long-term vitality of the Dunkirk community.407 Inscriptions also held connotations of individuality that could be seen as at odds with a corporate identity. Some manuscripts and books from Ghent contain evidence of signatures that were later scratched out or scribbled over.408 It is impossible to tell when these erasures occurred, yet this practice reinforced the communal ownership of books by obliterating traces of individual readers. As a result, few books from Ghent contain datable Page 162 →evidence of use by nuns who lived in the community during the seventeenth century. One rare exception is The Lives of Holy Saints, Prophets, Patriarchs, Apostles, and Others (1685).409 Its front pastedown and title page both bear the signature of Abbess Mary Knatchbull II (pr. 1682, d. 1727 or 1730). Laurentia Ward, a later abbess, has noted in pencil on the front pastedown, “This book is not Catholic.” Just as the Paris prioress maintained a

library of censored books, Knatchbull may have kept this Protestant book for her personal use during her abbacy. Such a measure would have preserved the house’s doctrinal purity even as it allowed Knatchbull to become familiar with and possibly even to adapt unorthodox material for personal and communal purposes. Her signature may have escaped erasure due to the prestige of the Knatchbull family within the Ghent house. Six Knatchbulls joined the convent over the course of the seventeenth century, and three of them took on important leadership roles. Lucy Knatchbull (pr. Brussels 1611, d. 1629) founded the house in 1624 with the aid of her Jesuit brother, John Norton (alias Knatchbull). Four of Lucy Knatchbull’s nieces professed at Ghent, including Mary Knatchbull I (d. 1696), one of the house’s greatest abbesses. Her great-niece Mary Knatchbull II was the final Knatchbull to profess at Ghent. This anomalous inscription is therefore less an assertion of individual ownership than a reflection of communal priorities, in this case shared respect for an abbess and her family. As with Knatchbull’s inscriptions, most seventeenth-century nuns limited their marks within books to their names or initials. An unusual inscription from Dunkirk suggests that the brevity of these inscriptions reflected monastic humility. The pastedown to a volume containing three tracts appropriate for novices (A Short Treatise Touching the Confraternitie of the Scapular of St. Benedicts Order, 1639; The Second Booke of the Dialogues of S. Gregorie the Greate, 1639; and The Rule of Our Most Holie Father S. Benedict, 1639) bears this note: “when this you see Rember mee Elizabeth Caryll.”410 Below, a second hand has written “belonging to the Novitiat” in darker ink.411 While convent scribes occasionally signed their work with a request for the reader’s prayers, Caryll’s exhortation for readers to remember her is unusual within the context of extant book inscriptions by seventeenth-century Benedictine nuns. This assertion of individual identity may be explained by the timing of Page 163 →the inscription itself, which clearly predates Caryll’s profession and assumption of the monastic name Eugenia. It is tempting to speculate that Caryll (d. before 1700) brought the book with her to the convent and that it then was absorbed into the library of the novitiate due to its practical guidance on Benedictine life. Ironically, then, this signature commemorated Caryll’s secular identity, which ceased to exist as soon as she became Dame Eugenia. As noted, the Constitutions of Cambrai and Paris contained even more stringent rules about book circulation, suggesting that these houses may have emphasized communal ownership more strongly than the other English Benedictine convents. Books and manuscripts belonging to Cambrai and Paris were supposed to bear the name of the institution rather than the signatures of individual nuns. A copy of Johann Tauler’s Les Institutions divines, et salutaires enseignemens (1596) from Cambrai’s library bears a French inscription that conforms to this stipulation: “Ce livre appartient aux Religieuses Benedictines Angloyses de N. Dame de Consolation a Cambray” (“this book belongs to the English Benedictine nuns of Our Lady of Consolation at Cambrai”).412 Paris also followed this convention, and the uniformity of these inscriptions indicates that the house’s librarian was responsible for carrying out this task. It is possible to determine roughly when certain books arrived at the Paris house by comparing the hands of the librarians and the locations of their signatures. The house’s earliest librarian added a communal inscription to books and manuscripts that came to the convent from Cambrai as well as to those that they produced or acquired during the 1650s. She preferred to write on the pastedown of books, and her notes are followed by a cipher possibly representing Calvary: a cross on a hill. This librarian demonstrated a scrupulous desire to get the inscription right in a copy of Baker’s Sancta Sophia (1657). After writing and crossing out “This Booke belongs to the Benedictin Nunnes of our Blessed Lady of Good Hope in Paris,” she added a corrected version that specifies the house’s nationality: “This Booke belongs to the English Benedictin Nunnes of our Blessed Lady of Good Hope in Paris” (see fig. 8.1).413 Such meticulousness reveals the importance of this communal inscription, which identified the book—and, by implication, the reader(s)—as belonging to a community bound by physical location, religious profession, and national identity. This impulse toward communal ownership was so strong that Maura of St. Mary Magdalen Witham (pr. 1683, d. 1700) wrote the usual institutional inscriptionPage 165 → on the front pastedown of a manuscript collection that she had written for her own use, despite the fact that the Paris Constitutions allowed nuns to possess their own manuscripts.414 Some particularly important manuscripts bear the house’s communal inscription in multiple locations and hands, as with the Paris Constitutions, which contain inscriptions from the first librarian on the back of the front flyleaf, an early eighteenth-century librarian after the table of contents, and a third librarian on the back of the rear flyleaf. This insistence on marking the Constitutions as the

Paris convent’s property reflects their essential role in providing guidance on the daily life of the house. Page 164 → Fig. 8.1. Inscription in Augustine Baker, Sancta Sophia (1652): Colwich, Staffordshire, St. Mary’s Abbey, N 25.2, sig. ДЃ1v. Reproduced by permission of St. Mary’s Abbey, Colwich. In addition to communal inscriptions, some Paris books included notes that mandated more specific purposes. The flyleaf of a copy of Gregory’s Dialogues (1639) bears a comment in the hand of the house’s first librarian: “This Booke belongs to Very Reverend Mother Priorisse for those that singes the martrilogie one Chapter days therfore no body is to take it a way or deprive her of it on noe accounte what so ever.”415 As with the librarian’s institutional inscriptions, this comment is followed by her usual cipher. This book contains both a life of St. Benedict written by St. Gregory the Great (d. 604) as well as the Benedictine Rule. The latter text would have been a vital resource when the nuns discussed disciplinary infractions and convent business during their chapter meetings. The librarian’s inscription suggests that the nun who chanted the day’s entry from the Roman Martyrology when the convent met in chapter was also responsible for consulting this book at that time. Since this office would have rotated, the prioress kept the book separate for this communal purpose. Yet eventually this book does seem to have made its way into the common library, and the early eighteenth-century librarian has added the usual communal inscription on the back of the title page. In this case, the book originally belonged to a monastic officeholder, who held it on behalf of the community until the house’s practices changed and the book entered common circulation. Many manuscripts and books from Paris contain no individual inscriptions dating from the seventeenth century, suggesting that the first generations of Paris nuns refrained from writing their names in books as mandated by the Constitutions. Yet during the late seventeenth century a few inscriptions in manuscripts and books reveal that the convent’s practices were changing. Mechtilda of the Holy Ghost Tempest (pr. 1669, d. 1722) Page 166 →wrote the following note on the final page of her manuscript compendium of works by Augustine Baker: “This Booke was ended on the 29th of march 1683 by Sister Mechtild of the holy Ghost, who with her superiors permission and leave desires to have it for her owne use.”416 Tempest was allowed to keep this manuscript by the terms of the Paris Constitutions, and the work never acquired the usual Paris inscription, perhaps because it entered the library of the Dunkirk Benedictines. More laconic inscriptions by Paris nuns who professed during the 1660s also show a growing trend of documenting permission to borrow printed books. A Manuall of Godly Prayers and Litanies (1640) contains the usual Paris note on the back of the title page, but the title page itself bears this inscription, “for the use of Sister Constantia of St Laurs,” or Constantia Clementia of St. Laurence Godfrey (pr. 1686, d. 1710).417 These two inscriptions make a distinction between communal possession and Godfrey’s use, balancing the collective nature of convent libraries with the needs of an individual reader. Some books offer more extensive evidence for the ways that cloistered imperatives influenced textual circulation. Inscriptions within a rare survivor from the Cambrai library reflect the book’s movement from an individual nun’s cell into the communal library. A copy of Walter Hilton’s The Scale (or Ladder) of Perfection (1659) bears an unusually assertive declaration of ownership on the front of a flyleaf: “Reverend Dame Margret Smith Her Booke 1671.”418 A more typical note appears on the obverse of this leaf, followed by a reference to the first chapter in Thomas Г Kempis’s Imitatio Christi: “Ad usum Sororis Margaritta de Nativitate Domini. Ama nescire, et pro nihilo reputari” (“For the use of Sister Margaret of the Nativity of the Lord. Love not to know, and to be esteemed for nothing”). A communal inscription below identifies Margaret Smith as the procurer of this book, perhaps explaining her bold claim to ownership: “This booke belongs to our Blessed Ladys of Comfort in Cambray. To the Library. procured by D. Marget Smith. Requiescat in Pace.” The same hand reoccurs at the top of signature A2r, reiterating the communal ascription of ownership: “This booke belongs to the Library of our Blessed Ladys of Comfort in Cambray.” It seems probable that Margaret of the Nativity of the Lord was the full monastic name of Margaret Smith (pr. 1654, d. 1680). The book’s inscriptions tell the story of its acquisition and incorporation into the common library, where Smith’s motto from Kempis memorializedPage 167 → her humble piety. Another interesting example of cloistered circulation occurs in a copy of A Poor Man’s Mite: A Letter of a Religious Man of the Order of St. Benedict, unto a Sister of His, Concerning the Rosarie (1674), by Anthony Batt OSB.419 The pastedown bears

two comments written in the same hand: “This Booke Belonges to the English Benedict [sic] Nunes of our Blessed Lady of Good hope in Paris,” followed by “for the Eus of Sister Teresa and Sister Elizabeth Cooke.” Biological sisters, Elizabeth of the Blessed Lady Cook (d. 1728) and Teresa of the Infant Jesus Cook (d. 1726) had both professed at Paris in 1663. This unusual joint inscription probably does not suggest that the Cook sisters read this book together, but rather that it passed back and forth between their cells. While their shared use of this volume testifies to a mutual interest in the rosary and Benedictine texts, the Cook sisters’ decision to borrow a book together also indicates their commitment to the collective nature of monastic life, as each forgoes the opportunity for sole access to the book. Monastic libraries consequently encouraged distinct patterns of book circulation that accommodated individual readers while still prioritizing communal ownership. Evidence from Cambrai also provides an important reminder that access to these common libraries did not depend upon a particular status within the convent. In a book list composed for the Cambrai house before 1631, Augustine Baker observes that Agnes More (pr. 1625, d. 1656) and Martha Martin (pr. 1625, d. 1631) had borrowed the house’s two copies of Six Spiritual Bookes Ful of Marvelous Pietie and Devotion (Douai, 1604). Martin had also checked out Antonio de Molina’s book “of M[ental] praier.”420 Like the other women discussed so far in this essay, More was a choir nun whose primary duty was to perform the Divine Office. Typically from well-to-do families, choir nuns were usually literate in English and some also knew Dutch, French, or Latin. In contrast, Martin had professed as a lay sister, the group of nuns who performed menial labor within the convents and who typically hailed from the lower rungs of society. While some lay sisters were literate and contributed to the Cambrai convent’s scriptorium, others were illiterate. Martin’s interest in reading contemplative spiritual treatises reveals that the common library truly was shared by all, regardless of rank within the house. Page 168 →Some controversial books, however, never entered the communal library or saw wider circulation. A seventeenth-century catalog of the Paris house’s manuscripts written by Clare of Our Blessed Lady and St. John Evangelist Newport (pr. 1665, d. 1696) provides an interesting case study of how such censorship operated. Several entries conclude with this note: “This book is in very reverend Mother Prioress’s custody.”421 As noted above, the prioress was expected to keep a copy of Gregory’s Dialogues for the house’s use when chapter meetings were held, and Newport’s comment might be read as further evidence of similar practices. Several of the books assigned to the prioress discussed matters of monastic governance and were therefore most relevant to superiors, such as Baker’s treatise on admitting novices (Admittance giving caveats for not admitting into enclosed houses of women spirits unfitting for the state, no. 4). Yet Rhodes argues that these notes indicate censorship at work, and several books reserved for the prioress do relate to the spiritual controversies associated with Baker. For example, Baker’s Treatise of the Modern Apostolic Mission into England of the Benedictine Order (no. 104) had caused such great scandal at the Benedictine college in Douai that the English Benedictines sent Baker to England. Since Baker had arrived in Douai after causing controversy at Cambrai over his views on confession, it is unsurprising that his tracts on confession were also reserved for the prioress (A Book Termed I. That Is Concerning the Office of a Confessarius in a Contemplative Order, no. 81). An insert at the end of Newport’s manuscript reveals even more direct evidence of censorship: “Catalogue of the secret books that our Rev Mother is to keep.”422 Most of these “secret books” were written by Augustine Baker, and the decision to withhold them once again reveals ongoing concerns about Baker’s influence and reputation. Some “secret books” could also be found within the house’s main library, such as Baker’s biography of Gertrude More. Perhaps the abbess held back copies with potentially controversial material, allowing the rest of the house to have access to censored versions. These books themselves were not “secret,” but the nuns’ access to the full text may have been controlled. Other works had much more delicate material that needed to be kept completely out of circulation. For example, Baker’s “book called Secretum” is an unvarnished autobiographical account of his life, which includes potentially embarrassing material such as his sinful preconversion fascination with masturbation. While it might seem more logical for the prioress to destroy such material, Page 169 →the Paris convent would have been aware that the Cambrai house had experienced serious controversies over Baker’s methods in the 1630s and 1650s. Perhaps believing that their convent could be subject to similar censure, the prioresses at Paris reserved these books for their own use and thus protected their house in two key ways: first, they prevented the Paris nuns from reading problematic material; second, they were fully informed about Baker’s most scandalous writings and armed

for any external controversy.

Conclusions A puzzling volume sits on the library shelves of Colwich Abbey, the current incarnation of the Paris house: Manuall of Devout Meditations and Exercises (1623), written by Thomas de Villacastin SJ and translated by Henry More SJ.423 One of five extant copies according to the English Short Title Catalogue, this volume offers guidance on Ignatian meditative techniques. Since Baker viewed Ignatian methods as inimical to contemplation, it would be surprising if the Paris convent owned a book on Ignatian prayer. In fact, this volume has no clear connection to the Paris convent, as shown by inscriptions on blank leaves inserted before Villacastin’s Manual. The recto of the first leaf bears the message “Mary Dynckon her Booke,” and Dynckon recorded the deaths of her family members and friends on the verso of this leaf and the recto of the following one, beginning with her father, who died on July 30, 1654, and ending with Marthy White, who died on September 28, 1703.424 Dynckon’s memoranda situate her within prominent Catholic networks of the period, most notably the Petre family.425 Yet convent records do not mention Dynckon, it is unclear whether she knew the Paris nuns, and her book does not contain the usual inscription of communal ownership. Dynckon’s book must have entered the Paris house’s library later, perhaps even after the community’s return to England. As evidence of the way that a secular reader interacted with a spiritual Page 170 →book, Dynckon’s Villacastin offers a useful point of comparison with cloistered book circulation. Both the Benedictine Rule and convent statutes identified books as the communal property of the entire cloister. While nuns were free to borrow books even indefinitely, they had to do so with permission of superiors and they could never claim ownership of these works. As a result, most seventeenth-century inscriptions in surviving books from the libraries of Brussels, Dunkirk, and Ghent consist of the borrower’s name or initials and possibly a date. The Cambrai and Paris convents emphasized communal ownership even more strongly by identifying each book and manuscript as the convent’s property, often several times over. Yet by the end of the seventeenth century, Cambrai and Paris nuns were also leaving their mark in the convent’s books. These practices allowed nuns to negotiate the inherent tension between the collective possession of books and their temporary use by individuals. In contrast, Dynckon indelibly asserted her ownership of Villacastin’s Manual by transforming it into a personalized memorial of her participation within a Catholic network of kith and kin. The Colwich copy of Villacastin also provides an opportunity for thinking about the bibliographical issues posed by convent libraries. These institutions may have acquired early modern books and manuscripts more recently than we might suspect, as another Colwich volume demonstrates. The front pastedown of Richard Lassels’s The Voyage of Italy (1670) bears this inscription: “A: Hippisly.”426 On the front flyleaf, a different hand has written, “Ann Hippisly’s of Shepton Mallet, Somerset R. I. P. amen.” This comment is followed by the date 1783 in a new hand and lighter ink. Another remark in the same hand as this date appears just below: “1829. & I give it to Cannington—begging to share their pious prayers.” It is followed by the typical convent inscription: “This Book belongs to the Eng: Bend: Nuns of Our Blessed Lady of Good Hope at Cannington Priory.” Since the descendants of the Paris community lived at Cannington Priory from 1807 to 1836, the inscription confirms that this seventeenth-century book became part of a convent library nearly 160 years after its publication. Scholars must therefore be careful in assessing the early modern books owned by convents today, as it is impossible to tell when books entered cloistered libraries without datable evidence such as contemporary catalogs or inscriptions by identifiable nuns. Otherwise, we may mistake the inscriptions of secular readers as evidence of monastic attitudes toward the circulation and ownership of books, obscuring the unusual operating protocols of the cloistered bookscape.

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Nine English Reading Communities in Exile Introducing Cloistered Nuns to Their Books Caroline Bowden “[A]s we speak to God by prayer, he speaks to us by his Holy Scriptures, and spiritual books, when we read them, with respectВ .В .В . & devotion; this makes our conversation, & communication with God, perfect and agreeable.”427 This guidance provided by an unknown nun-author to her choir sisters in Paris in the latter part of the seventeenth century situates reading at the heart of the religious life for women who at profession committed themselves to seek to perfect their relationship with God. The author, citing Thomas Г Kempis, argued that while Sacraments provided nourishment, reading spiritual books and Holy Scriptures provided a light to see their way and direct their steps: “Spiritual lectures are like laying up a provision for prayer, furnishing wood & fuel for that holy fire.”428 She went on to explain how to read Page 172 →the selected texts. Books should be read with simplicity and humility since they are the words of eternal life: they should be read slowly and attentively with “a great desire to practice what we learn.” Nuns must understand and remember their reading faithfully because there is a spiritual purpose to their task, and they must continue to read throughout their lives otherwise they will become ignorant and unable to deal with challenges they will inevitably face. The emphasis was on reading a restricted number of texts closely rather than reading an extensive wide-ranging syllabus. Such attention to reading is to be found in all the early modern English convents whose books survive to demonstrate the existence of significant reading communities in exile.429 This paper focuses on the reading to which candidates were introduced in the novitiate in preparation for joining the religious life as choir nuns. Here they learned how to fit into the community and how to approach the texts that would lead their aspirations toward the lofty goals expressed by the Augustinian writer quoted above. These reading practices would support them throughout their lives in the convent. Directed by Novice Mistresses, aspirants moved from a secular state to commitment to full enclosure and obedience to the monastic rule that they promised at their profession.430 Books and reading lay at the heart of the practice of the religious life in the English convents in exile. As such, convent communities fit the description adopted by Jaime Goodrich of convents as “religious bookscapes” with carefully chosen texts selected or created for a common purpose in order to develop a shared spirituality.431 Although they lacked printed books initially, convent leaders made full use of scribes in their communities to gather the texts they needed for every aspect of their life including the novitiate. The convents as reading communities were disciplined, strictly directed and focused on carefully chosen texts. The introductory formation led by Novice Page 173 →Mistresses set the tone and pattern for the religious life of a particular convent, varying according to the Order and the influence of the foundation texts. The aim of the training provided by the Novice Mistresses was uniformity, but it is clear that there were variations of interpretation and approach within convents over time. There were some disputes over meaning, and although these were mostly resolved by Superiors with understanding, the texts available in the community reflect a diversity of interpretations.432 Reading and associated activities such as listening, learning by heart, translating, editing, and copying were considered part of the work of the choir nuns moving toward achieving their spiritual goal of union with Christ. Reading was part of learning to pray, to meditate, and how to listen to God. In exile, the new English foundations set out to preserve Catholicism for English women by achieving a monastic life that established the highest standards and followed the spirit of the founders as exactly as possible. The work of the Novice Mistress was crucial to the survival of the exilic communities through her formation of aspirants whose reputation in turn would attract enquiries from future candidates. Convent leaders were acutely aware of

what made a successful community and set out key concerns in foundation documents. They all recognized that becoming a nun was hard and required commitment and effort.433 Leaving the world was marked physically by entering the enclosure at clothing when they took their habit and veil as a novice, and after profession by observing strict enclosure permanently. At the same time, the nun left the world spiritually and became “as one that is wholly dead to the world and to her selfe; having from that tyme forth no will any more, of choyse in any thinge.”434 Candidates could achieve this state through training, reading, and learning obedience led by the Novice Mistress. By understanding the purpose of the religious life, we can see just how important reading was to choir nuns and how the texts they read helped them fulfill their aims when they professed. This chapter argues that the time a candidate spent in the novitiate was crucial to the development of well-trained choir nuns who had to comprehend the new monastic life fully before taking their vows. In this year the novice was introduced to the full range of texts with which she had to familiarize herself. At the end of that Page 174 →time she had the opportunity to leave if she felt herself unsuited to the religious life, and the community voted on whether they considered her a worthy candidate for profession. The Statutes for the English Benedictines published at Ghent (1632) open with the statement that “the cheifest scope and end of Every Religious order is to advance the Professours there of to the Salvation and spirituall perfection of their Soules.”435 Choir nuns were to achieve that state through the exercise of piety and devotion following a strictly ordered daily pattern of activities consisting of three main elements: the recitation of the Divine Office, the reading of spiritual books, and a whole hour spent in mental prayer.436 At Cambrai, the Constitutions put the same points equally succinctly: “Religious persons are to know & ayme at two things. The first is the end of thier profession, the second is the meanes to attaine to this end. Thier end is to serve thier Creatour & save thier own Souls, with all Religious perfection possible.”437 The nuns attempted to achieve spiritual perfection through reading, meditating, and following the daily rituals of monastic office with full attention. Such were the daily demands of the religious life that in her vows at profession an individual signed up to a continuous permanent commitment to focus her whole being through every waking hour in her endeavor to become a worthy “Bride of Christ.” Senior members of the convents, confessors, and spiritual directors could instruct her and point her toward the right paths, but the individual had to obey with understanding and make her own contribution to the process. In this way all reading in the convents was directed toward the aims of the religious life. The term “reading” carried specific meanings in these communities: for instance in Benedictine convents lectio divina was practiced. Laurence Lux-Sterritt explains this practice as a four stage process: first the reader read a text from a collection authorized by the Abbess, then she pondered the meaning to allow it to penetrate (the meditatio). The third stage was a phase of oratio or prayer addressed to God, like a conversation asking for guidance. The fourth, most perfect phase, was the contemplatio when the reader allowed God to speak to her soul directly.438 Sister Scholastica of Page 175 →Stanbrook Abbey explained to me that reading practices at Cambrai led by Augustine Baker incorporated great flexibility for readers and encouraged them to follow their own call. She also emphasized the importance of noting readers’ responses to their reading, citing the example of Barbara Constable’s manuscript “Gemitus Peccatorum” [Complaints of Sinners] to illustrate the impact of the practice of lectio divina at Cambrai.439 Different elements of the reading process are highlighted in other conventual sources, which demonstrate both the involvement of senior nuns in formation and how well they understood the importance of reading in the cloister. The anonymous Augustinian from Paris already quoted was describing a process much like lectio when she wrote “we must take care to readВ .В .В . attentively & leisurely, ruminating & studying what we read, to understand it right, & remember it faithfully.”440 Each reading should be started and concluded by prayer. The Benedictine Justina Gascoigne, Prioress in Paris 1665–90, in a Lenten sermon to her nuns saw reading as an end in itself; to her it could provide inspiration, comfort, encouragement, and correction. She asked: “What a wonderfull variety may a soule find in holy and spirituall reading, for comfort and encouragement? .В .В .В It lays before us infinitt examples of the holy Fathers and Saints of former times.В .В .В . It comforts the sad and weak minded souls, and encourages and strengthens those that are ever ready to faint and fail under the heavie Burthens of their Infirmitys of body or mind, unto which we are all subject.”441

Reading for the Religious Life Beginners in the convents had to be introduced to these ways of reading and understanding. Aspirants arrived in many shapes and sizes and with very different experiences of religious teaching and schooling. They ranged from young children to mature women who had discussed the religious life with family confessors and read relevant books. Most cloisters provided schooling for the very young rather than preparing them directly for religious life. However, it seems that in the English convents girls from early teenage years upwards were more likely to begin experiencing religious life for themselves Page 176 →and reading texts related to the life of the community they had entered rather than joining the school. We find evidence regarding the role of the Novice Mistress in prescriptive texts and surviving books marked for use in the novitiate (or associated with the novitiate in other ways) that permits some preliminary conclusions regarding reading practices being taught to novices in the English convents in exile. On arriving at a convent, a candidate proceeded by measured stages toward vows she would take at her profession. After a short time for familiarization, she became a postulant while she tested her vocation and was introduced to texts fundamental to the identity and spirituality of the community, such as the rule and constitutions. If she was accepted, she left the secular world behind at her clothing, when she received her habit and veil and became a novice. For some, this initial experience was enough to show them that joining the community as a full member was too great a challenge. For instance, in October 1662 Dorothy Radcliffe wrote to her father admitting that her arrival at the Benedictine convent at Cambrai was the result more of the suggestion of others than a sense of her own vocation and asking his permission to return home.442 Her request was supported by her sister Clare, already a member of the community.443 The thoughtful, considered tone of the letters indicates both the care taken over the formation of novices at Cambrai and the fact that Dorothy indeed had a clear idea of what a vocation meant. Under Tridentine regulations, candidates had to sign a declaration that they entered of their own free will and that they understood the meaning of their vows on two occasions, once before clothing and the second before profession.444 They also had to convince a majority of the choir nuns that they had the qualities necessary to become useful members of the community. The Novice Mistress had a comparatively short time to effect what in some cases would have been the transformation of an individual.445 Most candidates appear to have entered before the age of twenty-one Page 177 →with some knowledge of what life in a convent meant.446 For instance, the two Coghlan sisters, Elizabeth and Anne, arrived at the Poor Clares in Aire having been educated by the Benedictines at Cambrai and thus had experience of life in another community.447 The collection of lives from the Antwerp Carmelites suggests that the majority of nuns experienced a vocation to religion from a young age, with a number of them remembering specific books crucial to their decisions.448 Among the Benedictines at Cambrai, Barbara Constable was one who said she grew up with a familiarity and love of religion. She later became a prolific editor, translator, author, and scribe, referring to her childhood and “the love I have always had even from my Infancie to reading.В .В .В . Which [God] hath used to keep me in the state of salvation.”449 Even with family experience of the religious life, becoming a nun was not always straightforward. The Benedictine Gertrude More was one entrant from a strong Catholic family who found becoming a nun more challenging than most, in spite of her familiarity with religious life from her early years. Gertrude More (pr. 1625, d. 1633) was one of the descendants of St. Thomas More with family access to a Benedictine confessor. In 1623 she was one of a group of eight young women gathered in England to found a new convent at Cambrai to be led by the English Benedictine Congregation. Her time as a novice was troubled in spite of reading as much as she could and taking the advice of the Novice Mistress, to the point where she had serious doubts about continuing. Her situation was transformed by reading a text with Father Augustine Baker that led her to finding a spiritual life based on internal prayer.450 Such was the impact of this experience that she became a prolific author recording her spiritual life. A selection of her writings was collected and published posthumously, finding its way into most of the book Page 178 →collections in the English convents in exile.451 Such incidents underline the complexities of the task of a Novice Mistress who had to develop her charges to the point where they were ready to pledge themselves to a lifelong commitment to religious life in about twelve months.

The Formation of Novices and Associated Texts In virtually every case, aspirants arrived at convents with an introduction from a person known to the convent, itself an indication they had already expressed a strong interest in trying out the religious life. Before profession, as I have already suggested, they needed to know a great deal more. Books served a number of purposes in the convent communities.452 This paper has already touched on two significant kinds of reading material: first, texts for individual spiritual development and second, normative texts such as constitutions to regulate daily life and create community identity. In addition candidates had to become familiar with books related to their community, such as saints’ lives and the lives of their founders. They needed to develop linguistic skills, particularly Latin and French, since living in exile made it more difficult to obtain specialist texts in English. As soon as printed versions of key texts became available, they were used to facilitate study and to learn by heart. Until then scribal copies were created and used in the community. In important ways, the distinctive charism of each convent was based on the rule and the constitutions that were drawn up to define how to live that rule in a particular house.453 We can see, for instance, how the Augustinian Canonesses set about building a spirit of unity among the community through reading and learning texts derived from the Rule of St. Augustine: “that they, living under one Rule and institute, and of one Profession and Order, should observe one and the selfe same manner in ther exteriour Dutyes, by which exteriour Conformity of manners, the interiour Unity and Conjunctione of harts might be manifestly declared.”454 We can see here that conformity was more than outward expression;Page 179 → it was dependent on inner conviction. In most houses the constitutions would be read once a year communally. In this way temporal continuity was assured by returning to founding texts such as the rule, and community solidarity was reinforced by listening together. The Constitutions drawn up for the Paris Augustinians specifically referred back to the documents originally created for the Canonesses of the Windesheim tradition in the Low Countries. The preliminaries stated that those who lived under the same rule should follow the same observances so that: “the interior unity of their hearts, may be known by the exterior uniformity of their manners.”455 In addition, guidance on interpreting the rule for a community could be found in works such as The Rule of the Great S. Augustin Expounded. One copy of this work was kept in the novice house in Bruges, others elsewhere in the house. The author recommended: “to the end that you may see your selves in this little book, as in a looking glass, and that nothing may be neglected out of forgetfulness; let it evermore once a week be read unto you.”456 Like the original rule, it provided texts for reading and meditating, thus deepening a novice’s understanding of the purpose of her life. In this way, texts such as constitutions contributed to the spiritual life of the convent by providing a focus for reflection and meditation for candidates.457 In addition to printed editions of rules, some manuscript versions and compilations for novices have survived. For instance, Jaime Goodrich’s study of a manuscript copy of Rules and Statutes written for scholars and novices at the Benedictine convent in Brussels noted the variations in text considered important by Dame Elizabeth Southcott, Novice Mistress in 1612, and the additions made by Ursula Hewick, Novice Mistress in 1625. The selections provided the reading material their mistresses considered essential before profession.458 Goodrich demonstrated the communal nature of this text with Page 180 →multiple contributors as in so many monastic manuscripts. Here the effect was to create a foundational document for use in the novitiate, simplifying the introduction of beginners to the complexities of the structure of convent life and behavior. After profession they would hear it read communally in the refectory regularly and would themselves refer to their own versions to refresh their knowledge. The Divine Office structured each day as one of the three key elements of the religious life for English contemplative nuns, and the Novice Mistress ensured those in her care learned to join in the daily liturgy in Latin. This required a range of books in addition to Breviaries in order to cover all the special services performed in the convents over the course of a year. It was essential for the choir nuns to be able to read and sing Latin (as well as learn passages by heart) in order to contribute meaningfully to the liturgy even if their formal knowledge of Latin grammar was limited. Divine Office was spoken or chanted, with listeners actively engaged with the reader or singer even when they weren’t participating directly themselves. Several texts have survived that show how young women were taught, initially in English, to understand the liturgy while they familiarized themselves with their Latin Breviaries. The Office of the Blessed Virgin Mary or Primer in English might serve to introduce beginners to the Office as well as provide texts for lay sisters who followed their own version of the daily

Office.459 Texts such as Lucy Herbert’s Severall Excellent Methods of hearing Mass and A Daily Exercise and Devotions for Young Ladies and Gentlewomen Pensioners provided additional support in understanding the liturgy. These books, found in several convent collections besides the Convent of Nazareth in Bruges for which they were originally created, provided food for meditation for novices as well as boarders in the convents and introduced them to devotions relevant to understanding what was happening in the Mass and other offices. The Novice Mistress, with additional input from senior members of the convent, confessors, and spiritual directors, introduced the candidates for profession to the texts that they would continue to read and study throughout their religious life. It was up to the Novice Mistress to arrange the program for those in her care and to call on experts when needed to teach singing or Latin. At the end of the year, candidates had to appear before the community in Chapter for approval and undergo a second examination Page 181 →by the representative of the Visitor to test their suitability. As novices they lived separately from the choir nuns within the enclosure. However, their day followed a similar pattern to that of the professed, in order to learn how to become fully part of the community, and they attended Divine Office and Chapter Meetings. They learned how to meditate on texts as part of their daily reflective reading and to prepare for longer retreats. They learned how to make their own collections of extracts from their reading to support their spiritual development. As we have seen, close reading of the rule and constitutions and learning passages by heart not only provided detailed instructions for daily living in the community but also material for further reflection.460 Reading exemplary lives, particularly those related to the Order, not only provided inspiration but helped to foster community spirit.461 Among texts that served to develop the novices’ comprehension of the purpose of religious life was one that seems to have been published specifically with the English convents in mind.462 Michel-Ange Marin’s La Parfaite religieuse was translated into English as The Perfect Religious (1762) by Brother FE (probably Felix Englefield) of the Order of St. Francis. He is acknowledged on the title page as the donor of the edition given to one of the Poor Clare convents and marked in a contemporary hand: “This belongs to the Noviship.” To emphasize the connection a further inscription reads, “By Rd Father Provincials order to be kept for that Place.”463 The inscriptions suggest external interest in and influence over the teaching taking place in the novitiate at the Poor Clares, an indication of the importance given to the process. The translation is dedicated to: “all the religious ladies of different orders in several English monasteries who are truly desirous of acquiring the perfection of their state.” The author claims nothing new for his book but writes that he has distilled material available at greater length elsewhere to Page 182 →facilitate learning and recall. His method is divided into three parts: first, the renunciation of the world; second, the exercise of piety and virtue; and third, the interior life and the love of God. The book provided a structure in print that replicated the teaching of the Novice Mistress. It was used in several convents: for instance, eight copies are listed at Cambrai and three at Ghent.464 Another work with a similar purpose widely found in the convents in many editions was St. Francis de Sales’s Introduction to a Devout life, first published in English in 1616. At the Benedictines in Cambrai one surviving book for young readers can be identified by an inscription by Mary Stanford. She is recorded as having arrived aged eleven in 1718 and left on January 18, 1721.465 She wrote her name and the date (1721) in S Scholastica’s Office of Devotion, printed for the convent in 1718. It consists of meditations written as verses for saying after every Office, thus aiding recall and reinforcing key aspects of each Office. There are few signs of wear on the paper, although there is evidence of use in some markings at the ends of lines and writing on the endpapers. Mary Stanford was too young to be a novice and the example here indicates reading material used for schoolgirls as well as novices. One novice who demonstrated an early contribution to convent life was Victoria Ayray at the Sepulchrines, LiГЁge. In 1683, the year before her profession at age eighteen, Victoria was able to contribute a section on St. Augustine in a volume containing several hands entitled “Considerations for the 10 Dayes [Spiritual] Exercise.”466 It may have related to the retreat that she, like all novices, carried out before their profession. The Psalter was another significant text in convent communities, read both in the daily Divine Office and as material for meditation, so it is not surprising to find copies specially marked for reading by novices. One Psalter of 1700 at the English Convent in Bruges was marked for use in the novitiate.467 The Old Testament in English and marked “Lent to the Novishous” at the Poor Clares in Rouen might serve to place the English text of

the psalms alongside the Latin Psalter to assist the novices in familiarizing themselves with the words. Also at Rouen was a French paraphrase of the Page 183 →psalms that possibly served a similar purpose.468 The group of seven penitential psalms was particularly significant to the nuns and survive in several convent collections.469 Surviving evidence suggests that most of the reading in the novitiate was in English, but since many in the communities had a working knowledge of French a number of devotional and other important printed works were in that language. Some candidates arrived at the convents with a knowledge of French, and in a number of places aspirants were sent to other convents for several weeks or months to learn the language before entering. One text that was of great importance to convent communities and found in novice houses over the whole period was Thomas Г Kempis’ Imitation of Christ, printed in several languages and numerous editions. At Nazareth in Bruges, for instance, a French copy of De l’Imitation de Jesus-Christ from 1690 was inscribed by “Mary Agnes Jerningham 1747,” recently professed at age eighteen and also marked for the novitiate.470 Skill and practice in French can be seen by the fact that several convents held their clothing and profession ceremonies for choir nuns in a combination of French and Latin: at Rouen they even had their own clothing ceremony printed in French.471 However, the primary emphasis on an English cultural identity represented in surviving manuscripts and printed books shows that the linguistic culture of the communities in France remained predominantly English during the entire exile period. English communities adopted their key texts in translation where they existed.

The Role of Novice Mistresses As we have already seen, Novice Mistresses had considerable responsibilities and were considered to be senior members of the convent.472 For instance, Page 184 →the Carmelites made clear that “The good Instruction of Novices is a thing of the highest consequence in Relligion. She, that has the care of them shou’d ever study upon the great obligations of her Office.”473 The advice urged her to emulate St. Teresa in her role and to set the highest example possible to the novices. The Benedictines listed the obligations of the Novice Mistress, stating that she must not only set a good example in her own behavior but must also know the constitutions in detail, how to teach songs and meditation, understand the practice of all elements of Divine Office, and possess key practical skills needed in the convent, such as keeping accounts.474 The Novice Mistresses at Bruges were advised that “It would be convenient for a Mistress to have a catalogue of the books proper for Novices,” although sadly it gives no titles in this manuscript.475 She must ensure that the candidates learn how to prepare themselves to perform in public and to prepare for reading or singing on their own. The emphasis in the advice books for Novice Mistresses tends to be on leading by example, and much was left to the responsibility of each Mistress to use her initiative in executing the program for her novices. I have not yet found notebooks or other evidence of writings by Novice Mistresses from the early modern period on teaching methodologies. At the Antwerp Carmel, three Novice Mistresses stand out as illustrating the multifaceted role assigned to them. Founding member Ann Worsley (pr. 1610, d. 1644), who in her career taught fifty novices, was said to have had a particular gift in identifying candidates who were having difficulties and needed help, but who would otherwise make sound members. Chrysogona Wakeman (pr. 1635, d. 1652), who had spent some years with the Mary Ward Sisters before entering at Antwerp, was described as knowing well how to withdraw her novices from attachment to the world, teaching them how to follow the religious life in all its particulars and training several who became significant members of the community. Mary Wigmore (pr. 1646, d. 1692) was described as an excellent Novice Mistress who “had a Singular gift in Page 185 →facilitating their difficulties, so that many of her novices attribute their persevereance to her discreet and charitable assistance.”476 These three Novice Mistresses not only ensured that candidates learned the rule and how to participate in the Office but also demonstrated how they should fit into the community and understand the meaning of religious life. They were able to show empathy and kindness as well as firmness while training candidates who needed to learn to submit themselves to the direction of others.477 As we can see here, Novice Mistresses had a complex and responsible job that combined teaching, training, and displaying leadership qualities that would enable them to understand when their novices were overwhelmed by their tasks or questioning their vocation and future in the convent. Such qualities were noted in convent records sufficiently often to suggest that the English convent communities did indeed aspire to reach the high standards

outlined in the prescriptive foundational texts that all novices had to read and absorb. Throughout the convent communities there was a realistic understanding that unsuitable and unsettled candidates, like Dorothy Radcliffe (seen earlier), caused problems in enclosed cloisters and that it was better for themselves and the community if they withdrew. It was up to the Novice Mistress to initiate discussion about a candidate’s future: “If a Novice be not proper for Relligion, the Mistress must not press her to remain; but deal with her equally and charitably, as with the rest till her going out.”478 Mother Superiors openly talked to novices about the challenges they faced if they wanted to sign up to the religious life. At the Augustinian convent in Paris a formal procedure took place in the Chapter House before clothing that began with questions and answers about the candidate’s intentions. There followed a homily, emphasizing how closely a candidate must follow the rule, constitutions, and customs of the place and the punishments to expect when she failed. The superior then underlined the challenges of monastic discipline: “You must watch when you would sleep: you must fast when you could wish to eate; you must work when you would be at rest: you must keep silence when you would wish to spend it in intertaining your selfe by discourse with others: .В .В .В you must with patience, silence & humility submit to all that shall be commanded you, how difficult & hard Page 186 →however.”479 If the candidate accepted the conditions and the community voted for her admission, she could join. Although the questions and answers were prepared as in Catechism, they were based on thorough grounding and teaching. Candidates were warned against deceiving themselves and God: they must “consider if you be rightly disposed to doe, & suffer all the sayd things for almighty Gods sake & the salvation of your owne soule, & express your resolution befor all this Community.”480 Formation did not stop at profession. Advised throughout her religious life by her seniors, each choir nun was continually striving to live for God alone. The superior herself provided spiritual leadership through sermons or homilies at Chapter Meetings. Spiritual Directors counselled individuals with annual retreats and spiritual exercises to continue the process. By these means, the religious were introduced to additional reading to assist their development. As they became more experienced, they took more responsibility for their own spiritual life in the gaps between meetings with their directors, through reading recommended books and responding to them. In all the convents nuns recorded their reading in “Collections” or compilations often written initially for themselves rather than for other readers, but at death often distributed to the community and kept in the archives.481 The connection between nuns’ reading and these collections remains to be studied and will enable us to understand more about convents as “bookscapes.” Although training and formation aimed for uniformity, inevitably some individuals with experience reached alternative conclusions from their reading. Superiors able to exercise skill and judgment in their leadership were able to maintain good order and avoid controversy. The qualities of good leadership were recognized in the convents. As Novice Mistresses were encouraged to demonstrate kindness but firmness, so superiors had to act wisely to maintain stability in their communities while allowing for a moderatePage 187 → range of expression.

Conclusion Predominantly English in identity, focused on their long-term goal of preserving English Catholicism for women, and drawn mainly from landed families whose daughters, for the most part, had access to teaching before they professed, these reading communities were well-educated and able to comment on and edit the kinds of texts spiritual directors and confessors recommended to support their spiritual life. Novices were inducted into the monastic life and their formation started by Novice Mistresses, who introduced them to the key texts that would develop their spiritual life and imprint on them the mores of the community they had chosen to join. The term “reading communities” applied to convents refers to highly structured permanent communities with particular spiritual aims sustained by books. Reading was woven into the fabric of their lives through the regulations that governed every part of each day. Prescriptive texts directed how the nuns should interpret what they read, and the vow of obedience made it more likely that practice followed prescription. However, the education and training undertaken by the choir nuns gave them skills that enabled many of them to develop their own personal reading habits in their search for the ultimate goals of their religious life.

Glossary

Definitions relate to the English convents in this period: Meanings often change over time. Aspirants: candidates for membership. The first stage toward full membership was acceptance by the community to become a postulant and then voted on in Chapter to be accepted as a novice followed by clothing. Canonesses: followed the Augustinian Rule and combined elements of the active and contemplative life. Chapter: a weekly meeting of choir nuns in which superiors catechized and taught the community, discussed potential members, and punished transgressors of the rule. Charism: refers to the key purpose and way of life of a particular order, Page 188 →whether contemplative or active, and, for instance, how austere was the daily life according to the rule. It was established and maintained through foundational texts and teaching. Choir nun: the heart of the community. She brought a substantial dowry before profession; she could vote in all convent elections and on business matters. She had to know Latin in order to perform the Office. Clothing: highly symbolic ceremony usually attended by the parents and family where a candidate moved from the world to the cloister becoming a novice. Postulants for the choir arrived at the ceremony dressed as brides of Christ. During the ceremony, the candidates moved into the enclosure receiving the habit and veil of the novice. Confessor: heard confessions at all stages of a nun’s life. Appointments of confessors should always have the agreement of the mother superior of the convent. Occasionally they were imposed from outside and as a result were the cause of disputes. Confessors were of great importance in the spiritual life of the convent. They might also say Mass and act as spiritual director. Constitutions, also known as Statutes: detailed regulations for daily life in a community; instructions for office holders, etc. Divine Office: the daily round of services in the Breviary for each of the canonical hours held in the Choir and performed by the choir nuns. Examination: held before clothing and profession by a representative of the Visitor, to confirm that the candidate made her decision to enter without any pressure and that she was free from worldly ties, such as betrothal or marriage. Records were kept by the diocese. Lay or converse sister: served the convent by carrying out practical work and brought a much lower dowry than a choir sister. She could not vote on most matters. Monastic Office: daily office as prayed by contemplative convents. The Canonesses differed slightly but still followed a daily cycle. Matins, the office of Readings; Lauds; Midday office; Vespers and Compline. Novice: second step (following postulancy) in formation process. At her clothing, a novice was officially accepted as a member of the religious community and received the holy habit and often a new name. During the novitiate, the new member learned the rule and constitutions as well as undergoing a more intensive study of the spirituality. The Noviceship or novitiate period for most of the English communities lasted for at least one year. The community would eventually vote in Chapter whether or not to admit a candidate to profession. Equally, Page 189 →some candidates decided that religious life was not for them and decided to leave. Novice Mistress: The nun responsible for implementing the education and daily routine of the novices. Considered to be a senior member in the convent as she played an important role in setting standards for the community. Pensioners: Refers to either girls or adults who boarded at the convent. Generally the context makes clear which is referred to. They were expected to lead quiet religious lives. Postulant: first step in formation process, the postulant learns the basic elements of convent life and the spirituality

of the convent. Spiritual Director: advised individual nuns and there might be several at any one time. Although Jesuits were not able to serve as confessors, a number were linked to the English convents as spiritual directors carrying out Spiritual Exercises on the Ignatian model. Statutes—see also constitutions: A list of rules and prescriptions drawn up by male clerics (usually an Archbishop or Bishop) with the nuns; formally voted upon and implemented by the convent community. Superior: the term includes both Prioress and Abbess as head of the community. Augustinian and Carmelite convents led by Prioress; Benedictines and Poor Clares led by an Abbess (except Benedictines Paris). Visitor: in most convents, the local bishop or his representative. Responsible for good order and the supervision of management. Visitations were generally carried out every three years. Nuns had the right to write to the Visitor if they were troubled.

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Part Three Collecting Women’s Collections Evidence, Methods, Projects

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Ten Hiding in Plain Sight How Electronic Records Can Lead Us to Early Modern Women Readers Sarah Lindenbaum In October 2013, I met a copy of Lady Mary Wroth’s 1621 prose romance, The Countesse of Mountgomeries Urania, at Illinois State University. It was dressed in old calf, the hinges lined in printed waste from a Bible. Numerous readings had creased its leaves to a woolen softness. It was not a book that had been abandoned midway through; the wear extended all the way to Wroth’s sonnet sequence, “Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, ” on the final forty-eight pages. Between the pages lay a wealth of material evidence: pencil marginalia from a later reader; ink spatters; a thin grey seed; an insect or two, trapped in the margins when the book was closed; large crumbs from what appeared to be a long-ago meal; even two seventeenth-century straight pins, hidden in the gutters. Most remarkable, though, was its provenance. In a thick-lettered script, an early owner had signed the book in three places, “frances wolfreston hor bouk.”482 The inscription on the front paste-down was appended with the phrase “bot at london.” Though the university had purchased the book in the early 1970s, Wolfreston’s name was not mentioned anywhere in the catalog record, and for forty years her ownership of the Urania went unrecognized. Page 194 → Using Online Public Access Catalogs, or OPACs, I have since discovered twenty-one more previously unrecorded books bearing Wolfreston’s distinctive signature. Her case demonstrates that items owned by early modern women invariably emerge when rare-book institutions make a practice of recording marks of ownership and other provenance in bibliographic records. The twenty-one books reveal new details about Wolfreston’s collecting and reading habits: how much she paid for books, where she obtained them, what she thought of their contents. Better cataloging policies, therefore, have the power to illuminate underrepresented readers, particularly women, and facilitate the construction of a global bookscape out of local institutional holdings. There are many approaches libraries can take to make “ordinary” early modern women readers visible in their electronic catalogs, and many strategies scholars can use to find this information once it has been integrated into bibliographic records. Material evidence in individual books is crucial to reconstructing the libraries and reading of early women readers, who may not have left behind wills, inventories, or other documents that substantiate book ownership, and whose written records—if they ever existed—may no longer survive. William H. Sherman stresses that in contrast to women writers of the English Renaissance, “women readers of the period remain elusive,” but women readers are out there—and in much greater numbers than once supposed.483 As my research shows, their books have been in library collections for decades, hiding in plain sight.

“Unnoticed and Unheeded”: Wolfreston’s Books Frances Wolfreston could never have imagined a single one of her books, let alone dozens, coming to reside more than six thousand miles away from the Wolfreston family seat of Statfold Hall. Hers was a geographically bounded existence; with the exception of trips to London, she appears to have spent most of her life in the West Midlands. She was born a Middlemore in 1607 in the town of Kings Norton, the first of twenty-two children and one of at least eleven daughters to survive to adulthood.484 At age twenty-four, she marriedPage 195 → nineteenyear-old Francis Wolfreston and moved to Statfold, a country estate in Warwickshire near Tamworth. She and her husband had no fewer than eleven children, six of whom outlived them. Though rental income from Statfold ensured that Wolfreston and her family enjoyed a comfortable standard of living, she was not part of the aristocracy. Her station is perhaps best illustrated by a 1657 visit she paid to London with two of her three

daughters to take out a device at the College of Arms.485 The event was of great importance to her family, if the Wolfreston coat-of-arms assiduously doodled and dated “1657” by her eldest son, Francis, in his copy of John Cleveland’s A Character of a Diurnal-Maker and Poems can be taken as proof.486 When her husband died in November 1666, Wolfreston took a house in Tamworth, ceding Statfold to son Francis and his new bride. She lived the last decade of her life in Tamworth. In July of 1676, six months before she died, Wolfreston drafted her own will. In it, she asks that her books be preserved, concluding with a directive to her youngest child Stanford to “carefully keepe them together.”487 She appears to have wasted no time in enacting the terms of the document, for one of her annotations in a Poor Robin almanac488 reveals that in the same month, “stanford sent to woten489 a hors lode of bouks, and went himselue to continew thear the 26 day of this month being wensday, 1676.”490 One of the final acts of her life would seem to have been, thus, to perpetuate her library. In time, Statfold Hall devolved on Stanford’s eldest son491 and the horse-load of books, or a portion of it, was restored to Statfold by Wolfreston’s grandson. Page 196 →Wolfreston’s library disappeared from known written records until 1856, when a Miss Frances Wolferstan told the London auction firm of Sotheby and Wilkinson about an assortment of “unnoticed and unheeded” books that had “lain in a corner of the library” of Statfold Hall for some time.492 The disesteemed collection, encompassing hundreds of Wolferstan family books dating from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, was sold at auction in late May of that year. It is this auction from which most of Wolfreston’s traced books originate. Following the sale, some books were accessioned by libraries, while others passed from private collector to private collector, and ultimately to institutions concentrated in England and the United States. Almost half of the identified Wolfreston books now reside at the British Library, and sizable numbers were acquired by the Huntington and Folger libraries. The remainder are scattered across several libraries, some large like the Beinecke and the Harry Ransom Center, and others small like Illinois State University. Books once owned by Frances Wolfreston are distinguishable by the unvarying inscription she wrote in most of them: “frances wolfreston hor [or her] bouk.” Paul Morgan was the first to attempt a significant partial reconstruction of her library, identifying more than one hundred volumes that she had signed. His total was added to, twenty years later, by Arnold Hunt, who traced dated accession stamps in known Wolfreston books at the British Library to old sales invoices and verified twenty-nine others that had been acquired by the library at the same time.493 Other books have surfaced haphazardly throughout the years as happy and illuminating accidents, yielding new information about Wolfreston’s sources. Stephen Ferguson of the Princeton University Library, for instance, noted in a 2011 blog post494 a 1605 edition of poet Du Bartas’s works, which Wolfreston “bot of soldars [soldiers],” while in 2005 the Folger purchased a printed volume of Chaucer “geuen hor by hor motherilaw.”495 Since stumbling upon the Urania, I have Page 197 →been further piecing together her library. As of May 2018, I have helped expand the total of located Wolfreston books to 220. This ever-growing number hints at a library of remarkable size, one of the largest amassed by a seventeenthcentury Englishwoman of Wolfreston’s station. The catalog of the Countess of Bridgewater, Frances Egerton (1583–1636) lists 241 books and manuscripts.496 In contrast, Wolfreston may have owned over two hundred books more than her titled contemporary, since the 388 lots in the Sotheby’s catalog of the Wolferstan sale enumerate roughly 450 titles published prior to her death. Her Oxonian and Cantabrigian sons Francis and Stanford undoubtedly owned a few of these pre-1677 books, namely those in Latin and those dealing with ecclesiastical topics, but the remainder align with authors and subjects she favored. An accurate picture of just how many of her books made it into the auction is complicated by the multigenerational contents of the auction and by the fact that the auction house lumped some damaged books, unnamed and unnumbered, into “parcels.” Furthermore, there is the enticing matter of books that were not in the sale; the thirty-one so far identified likely make up a small percentage of a much larger whole. Alas, if Wolfreston kept a comprehensive booklist like Elizabeth Isham (see chapters 4 and 11), it has yet to be unearthed. The question of how typical Wolfreston’s collection was for a woman of her rank and period is not settled,

and is complicated by the sparseness of identifiable women-owned libraries from the early modern period. Devotional and theological books comprise around a quarter of her library, and she owned a smattering of domestic treatises.497 However, if we take the pre-1677 books in the Sotheby’s auction to be representative of her reading tastes, works of drama, romance, and other light literature constitute at least 50 percent. She owned multiple plays by Christopher Marlowe, Robert Greene, Ben Jonson, Thomas Heywood, James Shirley, George Chapman, and Thomas Dekker, as well as thirteen Shakespeare quartos. Among the quartos are two editions of Venus and Adonis, the solitary known surviving copy of the first quarto of 1593 and the sixteenth edition of 1636.498 While she copied religious verses into a handful of books, she annotated her playbooks with far greater frequency, making pithy comments on the Page 198 →title pages or caption titles. The Taming of the Shrew she pronounces “a very prity mery one,” and Heywood’s A Pleasant Conceited Comedy, another play exploring a wife’s fidelity, is “a exeding prity on[e].”499 She judges Eastward Hoe, jointly authored by George Chapman, Ben Jonson, and John Marston, to be “a resnabell prity one,” but only after crossing out “prity one.” She mentions, too, what this playbook cost her: “pris 1s 6d,” or one shilling and six pence, perhaps a notable sum for a then decades-old book. She also noted what she paid for Martin Parker’s A Memoriall of Those Two French Princes, Valentine and Orson (1657): “pris 6d.” Wolfreston even retained one playbook whose storyline she apparently did not find agreeable. In a 1661 edition of James Shirley’s Love Will Finde out the Way (“pris 1s”) now held at the Harry Ransom Center, she writes, “i doe not lik this.” Beneath her comment another reader, possibly her eldest son Francis (judging by the script), retorts, “It is no matter whether you do or not.”500

Newly Noticed and Heeded: Twenty-One Finds The twenty-one books I have tracked via OPACs represent Wolfreston’s library and literary predilections on a microscale, corresponding to the subject percentages determined by Paul Morgan in his analysis of the pre-1677 imprints in the Sotheby’s catalog.501 Five books are spiritual in nature: Francis Quarles’s posthumously published Solomons Recantation, Entituled Ecclesiastes, Paraphrased (1648); Bishop John Woolton’s A Treatise of the Immortalitie of the Soule (1576); preacher John Prime’s A Short Treatise of the Sacraments Generally (1583); John Andrewes’s A Subpaena from the High Imperiall Court of Heaven (1620), one of eight of the author’s titles she possessed; and Otto WerdmГјller’s A Spiritual and Most Precious Perle (ca. 1555), which Morgan mistakenly places at the Bodleian rather than The National Library of Wales. Three can be categorized as works of history, including Sir John Weever’s The Mirror of Martyrs (1601), about Lollard rebel John Oldcastle. Thirteen Page 199 →of the books are the kind of droll “trifles” for which her library is renowned, humorous works by English playwrights such as William Davenant, Shackerley Marmion, and Robert Chamberlain. One especially curious find is the 1640 comedy Wit in a Constable by Henry Glapthorne. His characters’ witty digs at popular literature, formal education, and bibliomania must have appealed tremendously to the literature-loving, book-amassing Wolfreston, whose sex barred her from a university education. The play opens on an unworldly and conceited Cambridge student, Jeremy Holdfast, and his beleaguered manservant, Tristram, who has just finished organizing his master’s library after their departure from the university. Tristram gripes that he spent two dayes in sorting Poets from Historians, As many nights in placing the divines On their owne chayres, I meane their shelves, and then In separating Philosophers from those people That kill men with a license: your Physitians

Cost me a whole dayes labourВ .В .В . 502 Holdfast ignores the impudent remark, musing on his own idleness since leaving Cambridge. He directs Tristram to fetch his stationer so he can order Francesco SuГЎrez’s “Metaphysickes.” To this request, Tristram is deprecating. TRISTRAM: I admire How he retaines these Authors names, of which He understands no sillable, ’twere better I bought the Authenticke Legend of Sir Bevis, Some six new Ballads and the famous Poems Writ by the learned waterman. HOLDFAST: John Taylor, get me his nonsense. TRISTRAM: You mean all his workes sir.503 Wolfreston shared Holdfast’s partiality for Taylor: she owned twelve titles by this “nonsense” poet.504 Tristram’s quips about Holdfast’s rapacious bibliophiliaPage 200 → no doubt amused Wolfreston, a dedicated book collector herself. Early in the play, Tristram accuses Holdfast, “Out of an itch to this same foolish learning,” of “Bestow[ing] more money yearely upon books: / Then would for convert sisters build an almes-house.”505 Another character, Thorowgood, scolds Holdfast for his preoccupation with books when he should be courting maids, calling him a “booke-worme” who is “Fit only to devour more paper then / A thousand grand tobacco men or a legion / Of boyes in pellets to their elderne gunnes.”506 Wroth’s romance, Urania, imparts more direct clues to the shape of Wolfreston’s reading. To begin with, it is only the third documented book she owned by or about a female author, the first being Dorothy Leigh’s The Mothers Blessing (1622) at the Bodleian and the second Here Begynneth the Lyf of Saint Katherin of Senis the Blessid Virgin (1492[?]), a volume now in the possession of Det Kongelige Bibliotekin Denmark and, like her copy of Du Bartas’s works, “bot of a solder.”507 Additionally, Urania—featuring the inscription “bot at london”—is the first firm evidence that she purchased books outside of the Midlands. Her bookbuying sources have been until recently the subject of speculation rather than fact. Morgan conjectured that Wolfreston may have bought books on her 1657 trip to London, but he concludes, “as no notes of provenance have been found in works containing the ownership inscription, her sources can only be guessed at.”508 Yet we now know that she obtained at least two books in the metropolis. A 2014 query in Princeton University Library’s electronic catalog led University of Illinois scholar Lori Humphrey Newcomb to a second folio “bot in london,” a 1641 English translation of Jean Desmarets’s romance L’Ariane. Again, Wolfreston left three inscriptions in the book, one on the front paste-down, one on the rear paste-down, and one toward the end of the first part. The inscriptions in Urania and Ariana are, then, proof that she acquired portions of her extensive library in the city. This humble gentlewoman had the ambition and ability to procure books in diverse ways, whether during trips far afield or from sources closer to home. Moreover, the occasion of certain purchases was momentous enough to chronicle with an addition to her usual inscription. Page 201 →Almost without fail, Wolfreston signed her books on their title pages, caption titles, or printed preliminaries, but the location of the inscriptions in Urania and Ariana, both folios, differs. Her method of inscribing the quartos and shorter books was doubtless a matter of convenience; the quartos remained unbound as issued (possibly for ease of lending or possibly because custom bindings were costly) and lacked flyleaves or endpapers as a consequence.509 The most logical location for a signature, therefore, was a title page or an interior

leaf. As for the folios, paste-downs offered a wealth of blank space in which to assert ownership. Leaf 2M1v in Urania, however, exhibits a third ownership inscription in her hand, written along the upper margin. The choice of the leaf would seem arbitrary but for the straight pin tucked into the recesses of the gutter. The presence of this pin considered in conjunction with a second pin in another section of the book suggests that the positioning of both (and thus that of the inscription) was not accidental. The signed leaf is to all appearances marked with the pin. Halfway down 2M1v begins a scene where the lover Amphilanthus requests of Pamphilia “some Verses of hers” and follows her into the intimate space of “her Cabinet to fetch them.” When they were there, she tooke a deske, wherein her papers lay, and kissing them, delivered all shee had saved from the fire, being in her owne hand unto him, yet blushing told him, she was ashamed, so much of her folly should present her selfe unto his eyes. He told her, that for any other, they might speake for their excellencies, yet in comparison of her excelling vertues, they were but shadowes to set the others forth withall, and yet the best he had seene made by woman: but one thing (said he) I must find fault with, that you counterfeit loving so well, as if you were a lover, and as we are, yet you are free; pitie it is you suffer not, that can faigne so well. She smild, and blusht, and softly said (fearing that he or her selfe should heare her say so much) Alas my Lord, you are deceived in this for I doe love. He caught her in his armes, she chid him not, nor did so much as frowne, which shewed she was betrayd. In the same boxe also he saw a little tablet lie, which, his unlooked for discourse had so surpressed her, as shee had forgot to lay aside. He tooke it up and looking in it, found her picture curiously drawne Page 202 →by the best hand of that time; her haire was downe, some part curld, some more plaine, as naturally it hung, of great length it seemd to bee, some of it comming up againe, shee held in her right hand, which also she held upon her heart, a wastcoate shee had of needle worke, wrought with those flowers she loved best. He beheld it a good space, at last shutting it up, told her, he must have that to carry with him to the field. She said, it was made for her sister. Shee may have others said he, let me have this. You may command, my Lord, said she.510 The scene is weighted with suggestive moments. It depicts a man and a woman alone in the woman’s personal closet examining a female-authored text in which the man, not the woman, is the object of desire. It also sees the lovers in a romantic embrace after Pamphilia admits to Amphilanthus that her poetry is an authentic expression of love. Pamphilia’s beauty, her carnal appeal, is underscored in the scene. Like her words, her physical form comes under scrutiny when Amphilanthus discovers her portrait miniature and claims it for his own. Her appearance is described in fond detail, down to the curled portions of her hair and the needlework on her bodice. Out of countless others, it is this erotic passage, where lust and the printed word are intertwined, that seemingly captured Wolfreston’s attention. In his De Institutione Feminae Christianae, published one hundred years before the Urania, humanist scholar Juan Luis Vives allowed that writings by classical authors and the Church Fathers were acceptable reading for women, but cautioned them against reading chivalric romances and books concerning love. Most of his contemporaries agreed that literature and secular reading were poisonous to the feminine mind. Thomas Salter, author of A Mirrhor Mete for All Mothers, Matrones, and Maidens, Intituled the Mirrhor of Modestie (1579), endorsed a limited education for women; too much reading, he insisted, and they would lose their capacity to be controlled.511 Others believed that female readers were given to gossip and idleness. In Vives’s view, women who persisted in reading forbidden fruit such as literature deserved to be deprived of the activity. And if a woman is so enthralled by the reading of these books that Page 203 →she will not put them down, they should be wrested from her hands, but if she shows unwillingness to peruse better books, her parents or friends should see to it that she read no books at all and become disaccustomed to the reading of literature, and if possible, unlearn it altogether.В .В .В . A good woman will not take such

books into her hands.В .В .В .512

Of course, these prescriptions were by no means universal and their influence may have softened by the time Wolfreston started her book collection. Still, her discreet approach to singling out the passage in Urania may suggest reluctance to admit in writing to her fondness for it. Margins were not, after all, private spaces. Any literate person in the household, from a husband to an older child, might access a female owner’s book and parse it at will; the snide remark (“it is no matter whether you do or not”) beneath her unfavorable commentary in the Shirley play suggests as much.513 Urania and Ariana are not the only newly uncovered books that provide fresh insight as to how Wolfreston built her library. In addition to buying books in London, she appears to have made excursions to Worcester to grow her collection. Into her 1628 edition of Owen Felltham’s Resolves, now held by the University of Illinois, Wolfreston tucked a scrap of paper on which are written the words: “frances wolfreston hor bouk, i brot it from woster with me and a meny more.” On the raw vellum inside the rear cover is her husband’s signature, “Fransis Wolferstone,” and at the head of the caption title the usual inscription from Wolfreston herself.514 She also mentions the town in her annotated Poor Robin almanacs, noting in September 1669 that “i went to woster.”515 This was not the same visit when she purchased Felltham’s book and “a meny more,” as her husband had been dead almost three years and could not have signed the Felltham later than 1666. Notes John Hinks, “Booksellers and stationersВ .В .В . were already trading in many West Midlands towns before 1695, being particularly well established in Birmingham,Page 204 → Coventry, Lichfield, Shrewsbury and Worcester.”516 We know that Wolfreston took advantage of several sources to pursue her passion, and can infer that trips to places like Worcester were included.

Finding Aids, Aiding Finds I did not find Wolfreston’s copy of Felltham’s book through keyword searches in an electronic catalog. I found it because, as a former cataloger for the University of Illinois Rare Book & Manuscript Library, I had privileged access to the closed rare-book stacks. I thought to examine the book because the imprint was the same as lot 270 of the Sotheby’s sale. Prior to my discovery, the book’s bibliographic record was a stub, providing rudimentary information about publisher and format, but little else. Notes about Wolfreston’s previous ownership and other material details of the book were missing altogether. The electronic record had been copied from the card catalog between the mid-1980s and 1990s; the book, like tens of thousands at the University of Illinois—and like tens of thousands more at hundreds of other institutions—was never examined anew. The physical limitations of card catalogs are responsible for concealing legions of books like Wolfreston’s Urania and Resolves. Though few libraries depend on them today, their influence persists in the form of minimallevel bibliographic records like the one for Owen Felltham’s Resolves. A standard card measured around 9.5 x 12.5 cm in size and supported only a finite amount of information, so books were accessible foremost according to author, title, and publisher. With this data prioritized, there was insufficient space—sometimes none—for notes about previous ownership. A number of libraries circumvented this problem by creating what M. Winslow Lundy calls “legacy files,” supplemental card catalogs that documented noteworthy bindings, bookplates, donors, insertions, and inscriptions in their collections; but several had no strategy for exposing the unique characteristics of particular copies.517 Regrettably, when libraries did record copy-specific features, they did not do so systematically, and Page 205 →individuals without perceived historical significance were prone to being overlooked. In a 1996 survey of provenance records in special collections, Judith A. Overmier and Elaine Doak report that libraries tend to record “noted individuals” or those with “widely recognized prominence” over ordinary readers.518 Early modern women readers, so many of them common, are surely victims of this tendency. Libraries began replacing their card catalogs with OPACs in the 1980s and 1990s. Typescript cards were supplanted by electronic MAchine-Readable Cataloging (MARC) records. During this transitional period, the

majority of libraries did not catalog books afresh, a task that would have demanded considerable time and financial resources. Instead, they adapted information from card catalogs to the new electronic catalogs in a process defined as retrospective conversion, or “reconning,” in library parlance. The main problem with the procedure is that “retrospective conversions typically work from existing, often brief, cataloging cards and not the actual itemВ .В .В . [and] they also rarely allow for cataloging to current rare-book standards, which requires much additional time, research, and expertise.”519 As a result, millions of bibliographic records in rare-book institutions have never been updated. Their basic structure, and content, may date back to the early twentieth century and, because so few libraries maintained legacy files, copy-specific features are minimal or missing entirely. Even supposing that card catalogs could have supported more information, many libraries probably would not have thought to include it. Provenance was not extensively studied prior to the 1980s and its valuation varied from institution to institution. Neither was there consensus on what the function of the bibliographic record should be. Archibald Cary Coolidge, Harvard University Library’s first director, has been quoted (apocryphally perhaps) as proclaiming, “Why should the card catalog describe the book? The library has it.”520 His ambivalence was likely shared by untold librarians, past and present. With spartan bibliographic records the rule rather than the exception, the books of early women readers were further buried. Scholars have acknowledged for more than thirty years that provenance Page 206 →evidence is important and worthy of inclusion in bibliographical records, but rare-book cataloging in many institutions has failed to keep pace with this recognition, despite the arrival of electronic catalogs. According to Elaine Beckley Bradshaw and Stephen C. Wagner, “The primary institutional constraint is budget. The largest budget item for most libraries is staff salary, which translates into time spent working. For a library administration concerned with limiting spending in an era of slow growth or even cutbacks, assigning staff to the highly labor-intensive effort of rarebook cataloging, which benefits only a small portion of the overall library’s holdings and patron use, may seem problematic.”521 Then there is the amount of time needed to train a cataloger of rare materials. Rare-book catalogers must know terminology for book printing, production, and binding; be capable of using classification schemes, Library of Congress Subject Headings, and controlled vocabularies; be familiar with multiple languages; know when and how to consult a cornucopia of reference sources; be sufficiently proficient in paleography to decipher handwriting styles across centuries; and possess a basic background in European and American history—all of this on top of memorizing the highly circumscribed metadata standards known as MARC 21. Not lightly has my mentor Linda LaPuma Bial, a veteran rare-book cataloger, likened the training to an apprenticeship. A cataloger’s primary duty, moreover, is usually to new acquisitions, with any spare time devoted to more conventional hidden collections, that is, materials that were never cataloged when first accessioned. As rare-book catalogers endeavor to keep up with incoming materials and longstanding arrearages, it is difficult for them to return to undercataloged materials like the Urania. Now may be the ideal time, however, to reframe the term “backlog” to include what James. P. Ascher calls “hidden aspects of collections.”522 Ascher argues for “progressive bibliography” or “enhancing the description as knowledge changes over time.”523 Few libraries make a systematic attempt to return to underdescribed materials. It is possible that the archival concept of “more product, less process”524 has proved detrimental to rare books, where Page 207 →the devil is in the details. Susan A. Adkins emphasizes that “the description [of a rare book] itself may also be a major access point of interest to the user,”525 while Ascher says that “scholars of rare books and book history have also begun doing research using the data within library catalogs.”526 And since visiting myriad far-flung institutions to track dispersed libraries is prohibitively expensive “in an era of reduced travel budgets, ” as Bradshaw and Wagner point out, “scholars are becoming more—not less—dependent on fuller cataloging records.”527 Yet in the case of a multispatial collection like Wolfreston’s, the abundance of surviving copies of works she owned makes it challenging—without provenance records in bibliographic records—to identify which belonged to her.528 Finally, when early women readers’ books are held by institutions whose stacks are closed, scholars depend on bibliographic records in OPACs to supply the details that distinguish them. In the absence of full-level records, these readers vanish.529 Early female ownership inscriptions are nevertheless still plentiful in today’s OPACs. In tracing the twenty-

one Wolfreston books, I targeted the provenance-rich note fields of bibliographic records in US and UK catalogs. Data in MARC records is divided into fields, and copy-specific features are located in what are referred to as 5xx fields (also known as note fields). In online catalogs, users can find information in the note fields by performing keyword searches or searching under the headings “notes” or “local notes.” Limiting a provenance search to note fields gives more precise results than a keyword search. If searching note fields is not possible, the results of a keyword search may be winnowed down by language, date range, physical format, and other features to generate more relevant hits. Most library catalogs offer guidelines and search tips on how to truncate words, exclude certain search terms, and locate phrases. Another valuable resource in tracking women’s books is the British Page 208 →Library’s English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC) online, a union catalog for pre-1801 monographic imprints. I discovered a handful of untraced Wolfreston books using the ESTC. The advanced search provides a drop-down menu where a user can search copy-specific notes. Female surnames, forenames, and proprietary expressions like “her book” are discoverable through this method. It is important to be flexible with spellings of early modern names and surnames, as they are frequently variable. The drawback of this strategy is that it depends on institutions to report holdings and copy-specific features. Provenance search and retrieval is an imperfect science, necessitating lots of trial and error, but the information it uncovers can be rich. Even partial transcription of ownership markings can be of great value to scholars. While early modern scripts are often hard to decipher, conjectures about inscriptions are preferable to general notes such as “unread inscription,” which give no information about the nature of an inscription or its probable century. I was able to identify three of Wolfreston’s books in this way. Her hand can be difficult to read at times and the following transcriptions—all sound guesses by catalogers—told me precisely what I wanted to know. One inscription at the Beinecke had been transcribed “Fraues Volketon hor bouk,” another at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust read “Fra[nces?] wott[?] her bouk,” and still another at the Huntington read “[?] Mattieston (?) her book.” I confirmed that all three were owned by Wolfreston. The consistency of her inscription is an advantage, but seemingly insignificant ownership marks may be meaningful to scholars as well. McKitterick notes that early modern reader Elizabeth Puckering often marked her books with a simple “EP.”530 Leah Knight notes in chapter 13 that Anne Clifford’s book ownership can sometimes be ascertained by armorial bindings bearing the gilt-stamped initials “A D” for Anne Dorset, her first married name. These examples show that libraries should faithfully transcribe when possible all marks of ownership, long and short.

Conclusion Wolfreston’s presence in OPACs is far from unique. The University of Illinois’ electronic catalog chronicles dozens of women readers from the sixteenth, seventeenth, and early eighteenth centuries: none as renowned as Wolfreston but all with equally insistent ownership inscriptions. Their books Page 209 →run the gamut from theology and physic to literature, Latin, and history, and were acquired from other women and men alike. As Micheline White and Leah Knight point out in their introduction to this volume, occasionally “an absence of evidence has been taken for an evidence of absence,” but the ordinary women readers mentioned here are anything but absent: Jane Long her booke given her by her cosen Mrs Norton Smith531 Elizabeth Fishpoole532 Bridgett Chorley her booke given mee by my sister Faith 1649В .В .В . Given to Mrs. Fowk by Bridgett Saltmarsh of Sevenoake in Kent anno 1707533 Margaret Smith 1674534 Margaret Langelys given her by Mr. William Cooper June the second 1667535 Phebe Siedell536 Ann Gatton 1669537 Mary ffarmors booke 1598538 Mary R 1668539 Jane Synge540

Magdilin Russell her Booke 1640541Page 210 → Hannah Buxton her book 1688542 Anna Hatton her Book give [sic] her by no body543 Mary ChamberlayneВ .В .В . homo homer lupusВ .В .В . home ore that my suit be made and service thorougly known I shall be laid in grave full low soo cold as marble stone544 Crucially, all of these books were cataloged within the last decade, suggesting that a systematic return to books with minimal descriptions would likely turn up a similar proportion of early women owners. “We know extraordinarily little about exactly which books belonged to women in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, ” McKitterick wrote at the beginning of this century, but better knowledge is within reach.545 There are several factors for individual libraries to consider when devising policies to address what Beth M. Whittaker calls “вЂunderlogs’ of material with inadequate access.”546 Inscriptions, bookplates, marginalia, annotations, and items enclosed in books are all significant to the study of the material history of the book and should be recorded as accurately as possible. Libraries must also recognize weaknesses in their local systems and ensure that local notes are visible and searchable on the user’s end. Further, employing controlled vocabularies in bibliographic records would improve access to books owned by early women readers. The Rare Books and Manuscripts Section (RBMS) of the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) maintains thesauri “for retrieving special collections materials by form, genre, or by various physical characteristics,” which catalogers can then use in creating and enhancing MARC records (RBMS Controlled Vocabularies 2014).547 These vocabulary terms behave as tags within an electronic catalog, linking books with related features. Establishing a new RBMS controlled vocabulary heading for women owners and applying it consistently to bibliographic records would allow scholars to access books in a library’s collectionPage 211 → owned by female readers. Finally, libraries should collaborate with staff, faculty, and scholars to uncover marks of ownership and other material evidence in books. Urania and other newly identified books owned by Frances Wolfreston demonstrate how vital good cataloging practices are to our understanding of early modern female book ownership and reading. For ordinary owners for whom historical evidence is scant, provenance information in OPACs is one of the best tactics for revealing new evidence of their readership. Detailed records act as surrogates for physical books, allowing researchers to decide in advance whether they need to examine the copies in question and even enabling them to conduct remote research. The more early modern women’s books that we unveil, the more complete our picture becomes of what they owned and how they may have used their books. When scholars are able to examine multiple femaleowned books from multiple collections, they can begin to construct a fuller picture of the kinds of books early modern women read and discover what makes their reading distinctive.

Appendix Books from Frances Wolfreston’s library supplementary to Morgan’s and Hunt’s checklists. Andrewes, John. A Subpaena from the High Imperiall Court of Heaven (London, 1620) On A2r; lot 169 Huntington (48298); ESTC S111263 Brewer, Thomas. A Knot of Fooles (London, 1658) Lot 232 Huntington (112941); ESTC R20108. Chamberlain, Robert. The Swaggering Damsel (London, 1640) On B1r; lot 242 Beinecke (Eliz 31); ESTC S107945. Chapman, George. Eastward Hoe: As It Was Playd in the Black-friers (London, 1605) On A2r; comment “frances wolfreston her book pris 1s 3d a resnabell prity one”; lot 241 Boston Public Library (G.3962.2); ESTC S107691 Page 212 →Cox, Robert. Actaeon and Diana (London, 1656)

On B1r; lot 253 University of Illinois (IUA03441); ESTC R207340 Davenant, William. The Witts: A Comedie (London, 1636) On B1r; lot 257 Huntington (60154); ESTC S109311 Desmarets de Saint-Sorlin, Jean. Ariana: In Two Parts (London, 1641) On Z4v and paste-downs Princeton University Library (3245.74.312.5); ESTC R22411 Felltham, Owen. Resolves: A Duple Century (London, 1628) On B1r and laid-in note; 1629 inscriptions of “Raphe Wood”; lot 270 University of Illinois (170 F34r1628); ESTC S101839 Glapthorne, Henry. Wit in a Constable (London, 1640) Lot 276 Huntington (59942); ESTC S103219 A Helpe to Discourse, or, A Miscelany of Merriment Consisting of Wittie, Philosophical and Astronomicall Questions and Answers (London, 1621) On A6v; inscription on t.p. of “W.B. 1622”; lot 202 University of Illinois (MINI00121); ESTC S125903 Heywood, Thomas. A Challenge for Beautie (London, 1636) On A4r; lot 287 Shakespeare Birthplace Trust (SR80); ESTC S104032 Jonson, Ben. The Divell is an Asse: A Comedie Acted in the Yeare, 1616 (London, 1631) On N2r Harry Ransom Center (-q- PR 2610 A1 1631) Markham, Gervase. The Dumbe Knight: An Historicall Comedy (London, 1633) On A3r University of Pennsylvania (PR2659.M3 A7 1633 RBC copy); ESTC S112119 Marmion, Shackerley. A Fine Companion (London, 1633) Lot 312 Huntington (62472); ESTC S112201 Parker, Martin. A Memoriall of Those Two French Princes, Valentine and Orson, Sons of the High and Mighty Alexander, the Grecian Emperour (London, 1657) Beinecke (1993 668); ESTC R181452 Prime, John. A Short Treatise of the Sacraments Generally, and in Speciall Page 213 →of Baptisme, and of the Supper (London, 1582) On A4v; ownership inscription on A4r “Hugh Owen his booke 1638” Lambeth Palace Library (A56.0/P93); ESTC S1280 Quarles, Francis. Solomons Recantation, Entituled Ecclesiastes, Paraphrased (London, 1648) On A3r; comment of son on title page; lot 337 Huntington (147373); ESTC R6110 Raleigh, Walter. The Prerogatiue of Parlaments in England (London, 1628) On B1r; lot 340 Sutro Library (328.42R163ph); ESTC S1667 Taylor, John. The Number and Names of all the Kings of England and Scotland (London, 1649) With comment “frances wolfreston hor bouk a cronickall”; lot 172 Huntington (148050); ESTC R10068 Weever, John. The Mirror of Martyrs (London, 1601) Lot 193 Huntington (81677); ESTC S111646 WerdmГјller, Otto. A Spiritual and Most Precious Perle (London, 1555?) A1r; lot 194; marginalia in different hands, not Wolfreston’s National Library of Wales (OA213); ESTC S119840 [?] Woolton, John. A Treatise of the Immortalitie of the Soule (London, 1576)

Huntington (449194); ESTC S105342 Wroth, Mary, Lady. The Countesse of Mountgomeries Urania (London, 1621) On 2M1v and paste-downs Illinois State University (PR2399.W7 U7 1621); ESTC S122291

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Eleven Women’s Libraries in the Private Libraries in Renaissance England Project Joseph L. Black In 1649, the Northamptonshire diarist and memoirist Elizabeth Isham (1609–54) wrote “A note of my mothers Bookes in the Chest” on a small leaf of scrap paper; on the other side she wrote “A note of my Sisters Judiths Bookes.”548 Her mother and sister had both died many years earlier: her mother, Judith Isham (nГ©e Lewin) (b. 1590), in 1625, and her sister, Judith Isham (b. 1610), in 1636. By the time she made these notes Elizabeth Isham had also collected her own substantial library of more than one hundred volumes, which she listed in three other documents, including a leaf headed “My own Bookes,” between c.1645 and 1648.549 After so many years it would seem natural enough for Elizabeth to have incorporated her mother’s and sister’s books into her own library.550 But the wording of these two notes Page 215 →strongly suggests that Elizabeth thought it important to maintain the integrity of these other collections: they remained “my mothers Bookes” and “my Sisters Judiths Bookes” long after the deaths of their deeply mourned owners. That Elizabeth could even make these lists suggests that she had kept her sister Judith’s books together somewhere in Lamport Hall, the family manor, just as she had kept her mother’s books together all those years in their chest. Elizabeth Isham’s autobiographical writings reveal that shared experiences with books and reading had played a central role in her relationships with both her mother and her sister. In her stewardship of these collections, Elizabeth registers the importance not only of individual books as repositories of personal associations but also of private libraries in their own collective right as sites of memory and identity. To Elizabeth Isham, “my mothers Bookes” and “my Sisters Judiths Bookes” existed as self-defining collections within a broader domestic bookscape, collections shaped by and imbued with the interests, concerns, and tastes of their memorialized owners. All five known surviving booklists associated with the women of the Isham family have been edited, with introductions, for volume 9 (2017) of the Private Libraries in Renaissance England (PLRE) project, the major ongoing editorial project devoted to private book ownership in early modern England. In recent years, the PLRE project has been actively seeking records of book ownership by early modern women to set alongside the records of the men’s libraries that have traditionally received more attention from book historians. In addition to the Isham lists, volume 9 includes editions of substantial booklists associated with Lady Alice Hatton (nГ©e Fanshawe) (d. 1638) and Lady Anne Clifford (d. 1676), and a short list associated with Lady Anne Clifford’s mother, Lady Margaret Clifford (d. 1616). These booklists join those already published in PLRE volume 8 (2014), which included the libraries of Lady Dorothy Cockayne (d. 1595), Lady Mary Grey (Keys) (d. 1578), and Lady Elizabeth Ireton (also Sleigh, nГ©e Winch) (d. 1686, booklist dated 1647), as well as edited records of books seized in the 1580s from four recusant women and of books listed in the Norfolk wills of six women between 1587 and 1601. Furthermore, the project’s complementary online database (discussed in more detail below) includes not only all records that appear in the published volumes but also additional records of women’s book ownership (some published elsewhere, others never previously published),Page 216 → and plans are underway to add many more records to this database. PLRE will continue to publish significant women’s booklists in future print volumes: lists in progress include the substantial libraries of Lady Anne Holles (nГ©e Stanhope), dowager Countess of Clare (d. 1651), Lady Margaret Heath (nГ©e Miller) (d. 1647), and Elizabeth Grey (nГ©e Talbot), Countess of Kent (d. 1651). The variety of women’s booklists edited in PLRE reveals that records of women’s book ownership are not quite as uncommon as standard reference sources suggest. In his Library Catalogues of the English Renaissance (1956, reissued 1983), Sears Jayne notes that “Records of the ownership of books by women are unfortunately very spare”: of the 574 private libraries in his survey to 1640, only three (he writes) are lists of

books owned by women, and “two of these are clearly collections left by deceased husbands.” Perhaps emblematic of the tendency of women to become invisible in the archives, Jayne miscounts the records in his own book, which in fact includes booklists associated with seven women, with an eighth mentioned in his introduction. Of course, evidence for women’s libraries in this period will always be scarcer than evidence for men’s collections. Women’s levels of book ownership were lower than those of men for a variety of reasons, including women’s limited property rights, their lower levels of literacy, and their restricted educational and economic opportunities. In addition, there are only a limited number of reasons, mainly legal, why booklists even tend to get made: the collections of many women would have been dispersed without it occurring to anyone to catalogue their contents.551 But these records do exist: as with the search for women’s writing, the finding is largely a matter of looking. David Pearson’s valuable online resource, “English Book Owners in the Seventeenth Century: A Work in Progress Listing,” mentions twenty-four women among its approximately 1,300 entries, including several women listed as contributors to family libraries assembled over time or as part of a husband-and-wife team collecting together.552 Of these twenty-four, nineteen are present because of provenance evidence such as signatures in survivingPage 217 → books. Provenances are invaluable evidence of women’s book ownership, but (as will be discussed below) the focus of the PLRE project is on records of collections, complete in their own right, rather than on individual provenance records. Two of the remaining five listings offered by Pearson comprise unitemized books given a lump sum value in inventories. The only itemized booklists associated with women in Pearson’s finding guide are those of Frances Egerton, Countess of Bridgewater (1585–1636), edited by Heidi Brayman Hackel (forthcoming in PLRE’s online database),553 Lady Anne Holles (Stanhope), and Elizabeth (Talbot) Grey, both forthcoming in PLRE volume 10. While three booklists in 1,300 entries sounds unpromising, Pearson’s focus is the seventeenth century, so his list does not include records of book ownership from the sixteenth century, such as the library of the learned Mildred Cooke Cecil, Lady Burghley (d. 1589), now in PLRE’s online database,554 or the half-dozen or so (mainly aristocratic) book-owning women mentioned in the survey of private libraries from 1560 to 1640 by Pamela Selwyn and David Selwyn.555 But even for the seventeenth century, Pearson’s finding guide, admittedly a work in progress, is selective: it omits many of the seventeenth-century booklists published by PLRE through 2014, for example, including those of Elizabeth Ireton and Lady Anne Southwell, as well as lists recently published elsewhere, such as the inventory of the eighty-volume library of Dorothy Sidney (nГ©e Percy), Countess of Leicester (d. 1659), also now in PLRE’s online database.556 “English Book Owners” includes an entry for the Isham family but does not mention any booklists associated with the female Ishams; and Pearson mentions Lady Anne Clifford but not the “pictorial” booklist depicted in The Great Picture of 1646 and now edited for PLRE.557 Page 218 →Finally, Pearson’s provision of just two records of books from inventories in women’s wills suggests that these sorts of records are unusual. But similar records of book ownership by women are scattered throughout the numerous collections of edited wills and inventories available for the period, and many more are likely to be found among unedited records. The booklists PLRE edited from a selection of seventy-five unpublished Norfolk wills, for example, included records for nine book-owning women. All owned fewer than ten books (the same is true of many of the male book owners in this sample), but even such small collections can be interesting. The seven books owned by Elizabeth Walden (d. 1601), for example, comprised a Bible, two prayer books, and two “apothecary bokes” along with the sermons of Hugh Latimer and a biblical paraphrase by Erasmus, two unexpectedly substantial presences. Cecily Brewse (d. 1590) owned just one book, but it was a copy of John Foxe’s even more substantial and expensive Acts and monuments. Mary Tye (d. 1592) and her husband also owned a copy of Foxe, along with two Bibles (presumably one each). While it is a commonplace that copies of Foxe were culturally ubiquitous in early modern England, the 162 Oxford scholars and officials listed in PLRE collectively owned just one copy, and copies are similarly scarce in the Cambridge University inventories. We need to look in these provincial inventories, including those of women, to find documented examples of those supposedly common libraries that consisted of Foxe and a Bible. Other collections of wills provide similar percentages of women book owners: of the 312 inventories from New England’s Plymouth Colony from 1632 to 1692 that mention books, twenty-one record book ownership by women (and two others inventory the possessions of a husband and wife jointly).558 PLRE has received permission to include the

ownership records of these edited Plymouth records in its database, and it is also starting to collaborate with similar archival and editorial projects, such as RECIRC (see chapter 12 in this volume). Nine records out of seventy-five or twenty-one out of 321 might sound like low percentages. But given the hundreds of surviving collections of edited and unedited wills, these low numbers will add up: once edited into searchable form, inventories like these will start to provide usefully interpretable data of women’s book ownership in this period. Page 219 →In sum: evidence does survive for women’s book ownership in the early modern period, but the published records remain scattered among selective finding guides, surveys in articles and chapters that cite representative examples, individual case studies, stand-alone editions, and numerous will and inventory projects with a local or regional focus. Unpublished early modern booklists will also continue to turn up: many scholars, librarians, and archivists have started to keep an eye out for such records, written on the endpapers of books, buried in collections of family papers, or included within larger household inventories. As of 2018, the PLRE database includes records of over 1,400 books owned by more than 50 women. The question now is: once we find and edit these early modern women’s booklists, what can they tell us? What do they reveal not only about their individual owners but also about women book owners in the period? On the basis of this sample size, can we generalize about women’s literacy, the kinds of books they owned, their access to book-based knowledge or information networks, their cultural, religious, or political interests, and the similarities or differences between their collections and those of early modern men? In other words, how can we draw on these booklists to “read” the libraries of early modern women? The remainder of this chapter suggests some of the ways we can do so after situating recent work on women’s libraries in the PLRE project within the project’s larger development. Founded by R. J. Fehrenbach in the late 1980s,559 PLRE offers editions of early modern booklists so that records of book ownership in Britain before about 1650 can be examined both as components of individual collections and comparatively across a range of owners. PLRE published its first volume in 1992 and eight additional volumes through 2017; the project has started editing lists that will appear in volume 10. Including volume 9, PLRE has edited 335 early modern English booklists for a total of about 14,500 records representing about 17,000 books. The project’s fundamental mandate is to anchor books in a specific place and time, and to situate them in the context of other books owned by the same person. Of course, in the Renaissance, as now, people do not own all the books they read, nor do they read all the books they own. The female Ishams, for example, had access to a substantial library at Lamport Hall collected by the men in the family, and in her autobiographical writings Elizabeth Isham mentions reading many authors Page 220 →who do not appear in the lists she made of her own books.560 But a project like PLRE rests on the well-grounded assumption that possession is in itself legible. By documenting the presence of a given work in a given place at a given time in given hands, PLRE offers an important resource not only for the histories of reading and book circulation but also for more general work on early modern social and intellectual culture. The “interpretability” of booklists holds true regardless of the size of the collection. Some of the lists PLRE edits represent very small libraries, if library is even the right word for collections of fewer than ten books. But many of the libraries in PLRE contain scores of volumes, and the largest lists edited so far range up to five hundred or six hundred volumes. With the publication of volume 7 (2009), PLRE completed editions of the 162 surviving booklists contained in Oxford inventories (1507 through 1653) to complement the inventories edited by E. S. Leedham-Green in Books in Cambridge Inventories (1986). Not surprisingly, these university inventories are overwhelmingly dominated by male owners of scholarly books. Volume 8 (2014) consequently marked a new beginning for the PLRE project: we expanded the social and geographical range of our represented owners, balancing the learned clerical libraries found in the Oxford inventories with libraries compiled by rural vicars, by members of underground religious communities, by noble, gentry, and middle-class women, and by a widely representative group of forty-five book owners (male and female) from Norfolk. Volume 9 continues to balance booklists associated with the politically, socially, and culturally prominent alongside other kinds of collections. In addition to the women’s booklists mentioned at the start of this chapter, the libraries in this volume were collected by statesmen, diplomats, government officials, and estate landowners; by merchants and tradesmen (a cooper, an apothecary, a clothier, a

merchant adventurer); and by a churchwarden and a lawyer. Volume 9 furthermore represents a range of locations within England, with records of libraries situated in Westmorland, Lancashire, Warwickshire, Yorkshire, Hertfordshire, Northamptonshire, Norfolk, Suffolk, Cornwall, and the Isle of Wight in addition to London. The other major shift for PLRE in the past few years has been the addition of an online database component: PLRE.Folger, publicly accessible at Page 221 →plre.folger.edu, contains all records in the print volumes plus additional records, some of booklists too small or insufficiently detailed to be edited usefully for print publication, others from lists already published elsewhere, their data reproduced with permission. A project of the Folger Shakespeare Library, PLRE.Folger allows multiple-term Boolean and wildcard searches in sixteen fields in addition to full text, including fields associated with the owner (social status, profession, location, sex) as well as with books. Women can be found by searching for “woman” in the “Identifier” field. Books can be searched by any of twenty-four major subject categories as well as by author, other contributors, title, stationer, date of publication, and several other fields. The database and print components of PLRE complement one another: each offers some material not included in the other. Each booklist in the printed volumes, for example, includes an introductory headnote treating biographical and bibliographical matters relating to the owner and the collection; these introductions are not available in the database, which is designed primarily for comparative searching. As its name implies, PLRE focuses on privately owned books: we do not edit booklists associated with institutions or with the book trade. The lists we edit are of various types, mainly inventories, wills, catalogues, and donations, but the project has also edited lists of books seized in house raids, or brought back to England after a posting abroad, or taken abroad for a posting overseas. Some early modern booklists survive because somebody simply decided to record their library on a blank leaf in a book they owned or, like Elizabeth Isham, on a convenient piece of scrap paper. While many of these documents might not represent all the books a given person ever owned, we edit records that are contextually complete in themselves: that is, they offer a snapshot of all books associated with a given owner at a given place or time. What we do not include are stray provenances, however many might be discovered for a single owner. For example, the substantial library of the book collector Frances Wolfreston (see chapter 10 in this volume) has been reconstructed from surviving books bearing her signature. If she had left a catalogue of her collection, PLRE would edit that list even if the books themselves had not survived or were not identifiable (as is the case with the great majority of booklists). But as a selection from an unknowably larger whole, these provenances fall outside our mandate. One of the pleasures of the PLRE editing process over the years has been the serendipitous discovery that reveals something interesting about a book’s publication history, the book trade, a book’s owner, or the cultural role of a given book when encountered in a given context. As we edit more booklistsPage 222 → associated with women, their bookscapes are also starting to become sites of productively unexpected encounters. For example, Judith Isham (nГ©e Lewin), like her two daughters, had access to a broad range of reading material in the family library at Lamport Hall. The list Elizabeth made of her mother’s books consequently represents a distinct collection her mother put together for her own purposes. As the selection of books makes clear, these purposes were largely devotional. About twenty of her thirty books are theological: the list begins with what was likely her most expensive book, the three-volume Works of the moderate puritan William Perkins, then moves on to popular works of devotion, meditation, and prayers. But the remaining third of her collection is interestingly eclectic. Like many women in charge of households, Judith Isham owned what is probably a manuscript collection of household medical recipes (a “Booke of Distillations”) in addition to a standard printed medical guide, Thomas Cogan’s The haven of health. She also owned a “worke Booke,” probably a pattern book for needlework or embroidery. Two works offer popular moral philosophy: Joseph Hall’s Quo vadis? A just censure of travell attacks the grand tour as a corrupting exercise, and William Wrednot’s Palladis palatium: wisedoms palace collects aphorisms and proverbs. Finally, she owned two books of poetry. Her copy of Barnabe Barnes’s Divine centurie of spirituall sonnets accords well with her collection’s strengths in devotional writings. On the other hand, her copy of Christopher Marlowe’s Hero and Leander is an intriguingly unexpected presence. A near contemporary, Lady Anne Southwell (1573–1636), dismissed Hero and Leander as a “busye nothing” that scandalized the art of proper poetry.561 Yet here is Marlowe, in a booklist headed

by the surely disapproving William Perkins, and even sharing a line in the manuscript with her pattern book, that quintessential reflection of early modern women’s cultural work. We can only speculate when and how Marlowe made his way into this chest of books in a Northamptonshire manor, or what its owner made of this work, so different (it would seem to us) from the other books in her collection. But Marlowe’s presence here reminds us that any library, looked at as a collection, with the books jostling one another on a shelf, in a cupboard, or locked in a trunk, can retain the power to surprise, to raise questions, to challenge the generalizations that spring initially to mind when we see a list that, as in this case, gives pride of place to the theological works of William Perkins. Page 223 →Books speak to us through time not only through their contents but also through the company they keep. Some uncommon titles in the library of Lady Mary Grey, sister of the unfortunate Lady Jane Grey, also challenge expectations. But they do so in ways that are interpretable both as signs of confessional affiliation and as a form of rebellion. Her marriage prospects ruined by the execution of her father for treason and consequent loss of a large inheritance, Mary secretly married in the summer of 1565 Thomas Keys, the Queen’s Sergeant Porter and a widower almost twice Mary’s age, with several children already. Mary’s royal lineage—by some calculations, she was Elizabeth’s legal heir after the death of her sister Katherine in 1568—made her marriage a royal concern, so when news of the marriage leaked, the couple were interrogated, forcibly separated, and made prisoners. Mary would spend the next few years effectively under house arrest and economically dependent on the households she was ordered to live within. When she arrived in 1567 at the house of her stepgrandmother, Katherine Willoughby, dowager duchess of Suffolk (d. 1580), Willoughby sent William Cecil a shocked letter describing Mary’s torn and patched belongings and asking to borrow materials from the queen to furnish Mary a room.562 Documented in an inventory on decease, Mary’s library of about thirty books contains works in French and Italian as well as English, and reveals her to have been a well-educated woman, though her family’s fall meant that she missed access to the superb tutoring afforded her precociously learned sister Jane. The collection’s emphasis is theological, with many of the books having a decidedly reformminded character. What is unusual for an inventory of this period is the presence of radical Presbyterian polemic: John Field and Thomas Wilcox’s Admonition to the parliament (1572) and Thomas Cartwright’s two replies to John Whitgift (1573, 1575) were secretly printed books, suppressed by a royal proclamation. Many contemporaries considered Presbyterianism a form of treason, its explicit challenge to hierarchy in the church an implicit challenge to political hierarchy: “No bishop, no king,” as James I would later summarize.563 It is tempting to imagine a downtrodden yet defiant Mary in effect thumbing her nose at the queen as she read these illegal, treasonous publications. Lady Mary Grey’s library has been described by several historians, accuratelyPage 224 → enough, as largely theological. The same is often said of most early modern women’s collections. The numbers in the PLRE database bear out the generalization: of the book records it currently contains associated with women, almost 70 percent are categorized as theology. In comparison, theology constitutes 36 percent of the thousands of book records associated with men: a sizeable proportion, but not nearly as dominating a presence. Admittedly, these percentages might be misleading, given the over-representation among the men’s lists of scholarly libraries and among the women’s lists of small collections consisting entirely of Bibles, psalters, and liturgical works. But the general pattern would likely hold even if the selection of men’s booklists were more widely representative. Furthermore, the kind of theology that appears in women’s booklists tends to the devotional more than the theological per se. These lists are well populated with vernacular prayers, sermons, meditations, commentaries, and popular guides to the Christian life, many of them the best sellers of their age. About 90 percent of the theology owned by women currently in the PLRE database is in English, whereas books in English constitute only 30 percent of the theology in men’s collections—a reminder of the limited educational opportunities offered most women. Furthermore, aside from a few Latin liturgical works seized from recusants and a scattering of French testaments, all the theology in languages other than English appears so far in just two women’s libraries, those of Lady Mary Grey and Lady Anne Holles, whose library (discussed below) contains about twenty-five theological works in French, four in Italian, and one in Spanish. But it is Lady Mary Grey’s “largely theological” collection that reminds us of the need to take care

when we unpack these libraries. Collections can all be largely theological and yet signify in different ways. Lady Mary’s library is not merely theological, for instance: it is edgily theological. In addition to her copies of banned Presbyterian manifestos, she owned midcentury Protestant polemic such as William Turner’s The rescuynge of the romishe fox (1545) and the anonymous An exposition touching al the bokes of holie scripture (1553) along with works by such prominent evangelical or puritan figures as William Fulke, Edward Dering, John Knox, Roger Hutchinson, and John Knewstub. Two of the French works in her collection address the persecution of the Huguenots in France: published around the same time as the works of English Presbyterianism she owned, these books reveal her up-to-date interest in the state of reform on the Continent as well as in England. The decidedly reform-minded character of these writings is in line with the patronage activities of Katherine Willoughby, who had provided important Page 225 →support to the Protestant cause and publications since 1547.564 Books dedicated to or otherwise associated with the Duchess include William Tyndale’s biblical translations and commentaries, Katherine Parr’s Lamentacion of a sinner, and the translation of Calvin attributed to Anne Lock. Lady Mary owned a copy of Foxe’s Acts and monuments, which included Willoughby’s narrative of her travails as a Marian exile as well as an account of the death of Mary’s sister Jane. Lady Mary’s theological books constituted a tradition of radical Protestantism with roots in Edwardian reform that had been maintained and promoted over subsequent decades by a community of interconnected authors, patrons, publishers, editors, translators, distributors, and, in Mary’s case, book owners. To label a collection like this “largely theological” does little justice to its social, personal, and religio-political legibility, and it erases the personal distinctiveness that historians have tended reflexively to accord men’s libraries. Of course, many women’s libraries in the period do conform to traditional expectations, consisting largely of vernacular theology with a strongly devotional focus. Elizabeth Isham’s sister Judith owned nineteen books, all works in English of popular theology, several of them devotional best sellers; the same is true of Dorothy Percy Sidney’s eighty-volume library. The twenty books in the c.1594 library of Lady Dorothy Cockayne include a “Statute booke,” an unidentified “cronycles,” A myrrour for magistrates, and A short treatise of hunting (1591) by her husband Sir Thomas Cockayne, but are otherwise theological. Forty-eight of the fifty-two books in the 1647 library of Lady Elizabeth Ireton are primarily theological, with the remaining four comprising two unidentified books in French and two medical books (one of them Jacques Guillemeau’s Child-birth or, the happy deliverie of women). Libraries like these can nonetheless be usefully compared to tease out nuance: theological and ecclesiological issues were fiercely contested from the mid-sixteenth to the mid-seventeenth century, and even in libraries lacking explicitly polemical works, the decade-by-decade shifts on many subjects of religio-political controversy could be traced through the sermons and popular devotional writings found in such collections. Elizabeth Ireton’s husband John was the last of the Commonwealth Lord Mayors of London and the regicide Henry Ireton was her brother-in-law: not surprisingly, her collection is well stocked with writers from the hotter end of the theologicalPage 226 → spectrum. In addition, the presence of older publications by such godly Elizabethans as George Gifford, Richard Greenham, and Edward Dering and by such earlier seventeenthcentury puritans as William Bradshaw and John Brinsley suggests her sense of the ecclesiological tradition in which her books from the 1630s and 1640s were participating. A half-century earlier, Dorothy Cockayne also collected books with a reformist/evangelical character (including works by Calvin, William Perkins, ThГ©odore de BГЁze, and Thomas Becon): but compared with the books owned by either Mary Grey or Elizabeth Ireton, Cockayne’s library is, for its kind, devotionally more mainstream. Another way to read these devotionally focused libraries, however, is to consider related issues of space, place, identity, social context, and use as well as content. Like Judith Isham, Dorothy Percy Sidney had access in her home to a substantial family library, in her case the Sidney family library at Penshurst Place, consisting in the mid-seventeenth century of about 4,800 volumes.565 The eighty books she collected constitute a separate, personal library that the countess kept in her “closet” or private study: accounts in the family papers distinguish between books bought “for his lordship” and books bought “for her ladyship.” That this collection consists entirely of theology and devotion should not be read as evidence that she lacked other interests. Like Elizabeth Isham, Dorothy Sidney and other women in the Sidney family likely read books kept in the much larger family library. Instead, this is the collection she created for her own uses in her private space, a space that

evidently served primarily devotional purposes.566 And it is as a collection kept in that particular space that these otherwise rather ordinary books speak to us of their owner, as the collections of her mother and sister still spoke to Elizabeth Isham long after their deaths. Elizabeth Isham’s own small cluster of five works in French offers another potential way to read the presence of books that could seem unremarkable if encountered in a different kind of bookscape. The focus of these books appears to be devotional: a testament, a catechism, a grammar, and two others, unfortunately unidentifiable. But one obvious motive for owning books in a language other than English is language learning and reading practice, Page 227 →and what better way to learn a language than to read familiar works like the Bible and a catechism? Isham’s diary reveals an active engagement with ideas and the pursuit of self-understanding, and the presence of this French testament and catechism seems likely to have been motivated by intellectual and linguistic as much as by devotional considerations. A 1638 list of books owned by Lady Alice Hamilton in Dublin also seems conventional enough at first glance: her fourteen books are mostly theological and include several devotional best sellers. But she also owned a Greek New Testament and a devotional work in French along with a French dictionary. However aspirational these possessions, their presence widens our sense of Lady Alice’s perspective on the role of books in devotional practice.567 In some contexts, even the most conventional of onebook theological libraries—a solitary Bible—can tell a story. When Ester Woodfeild of New England’s Plymouth Colony died in 1672, she bequeathed her servant Hannah Ewell what were evidently her three most prized possessions: “my browne Cow and my bible and my best hatt.”568 A cow was a valuable commodity, and the implicit equivalences here remind us that books can have value to their owners beyond that which an inventory might assign them. The transmission of a Bible from a woman to her female servant also provides a glimpse of books as agents in the creation of female community, and it reminds us to look for similar traces in other records. Mary Grey, for example, likely received some of her books from Katherine Willoughby: her copy of Foxe’s Acts and monuments, for example, seems a pricey two-volume folio for somebody who had to borrow money for new clothes. Like the theology that dominates many women’s libraries of the period, the nontheological books in these collections can also often be described as “books for use.” The conjunction of physical with spiritual health is a common feature in many of these booklists, the result of the household medical and other caregiving responsibilities accorded many women in this period. Many lists include popular handbooks addressing health and domestic medicine, but some also contain substantial works aimed toward medical professionals. Lady Alice Fanshawe owned books such as Joannes Baptista Montanus’ Consilia medica omnia, Joannes de Vigo’s The most excellent workes of chirurgerye, Thomas Thayre’s A treatise of the pestilence, and Page 228 →John Woodall’s The surgeons mate or military & domestique surgery. Books of recipes, distillations, preservation, and preparations—often manuscripts—constitute a related subject cluster. These books remind us of the sophisticated knowledge-base anchored in natural history and biology that underlies domestic work in such areas as physic, cosmetics, perfumes, and food preparation. Also related are the books on gardening and herbals that appear regularly in these lists: Lady Margaret Heath owned two copies of Gerard’s folio herbal, one “uncolourd” and the other “colourd,” as well as several other books on physic, surgery, natural history, gardening, orchards, and a “treatise of tunbridge water.”569 The library of Lady Anne Holles contains books in all of these interconnected categories: Gerard’s herbal; Hanss Jacob Wecker’s Secrets et merveilles de nature; Joannes Tagaultius’s Les institutions chirurgiques; Philbert Guybert’s MГ©decin charitable; Jacques Dubois’s PharmacopГ©e; Antonius Chalmeteus’s Enchiridion ou livret portatif pour les chirurgiens, the Regimen sanitatis Salernitatum; Laurent Joubert’s TraittГ© de la peste; Thomas Spackman’s practical guide for curing bites from mad dogs; Hugh Platt’s Delightes for ladies, to adorne their persons, tables, closets, and distillatories, a “Manuscritto d’herbe, radici & frutti”; and books on Italian cookery by Cristoforo di Messisbugo and Giovanni Battista Rossetti. Entries for “work books” remind us of a different area of women’s cultural domain. When Elizabeth Isham uses the phrase “work book” to describe two books in her collection and one in her mother’s, she is almost certainly referring to printed pattern books for needlework, embroidery, or sewing. A unique (if imperfect) copy of Cesare Vecellio’s The true perfection of cutworks (1598) remains in the Isham family

library at Lamport Hall and is probably one of the works Elizabeth Isham lists. Margaret Heath also owned “patternes of worke,” probably a printed pattern book or at least patterns taken from one (possibly also manuscript versions). These “work” patterns appear among the contents of a cabinet used for storing materials connected with needlework as well as papers, quills, perfumes, cordials, bodkins, and other oddments, a reminder that all entries in women’s household inventories should be examined for potential books. Inventories of the possessions of Frances Jodrell (d. 1631), for example, record sixty-two books left in boxes and cupboards as well as a separately stored “note book” (probably manuscript) found in a coffer containing materials for sewing and needlework.570 Page 229 →Pattern books are the type of publication likely to get used to pieces, like books of cookery, books for children, or books of popular devotion: many of the “books for use” that women might own are also books with very low rates of survival. They are also the kinds of books that inventory-makers might bundle into entries such as “ten old pamphlets,” or omit from lists due to their poor condition, or overlook entirely because they were kept in parts of the house separate from other books. Even more so than with men’s lists, the possibility of exclusions needs to be kept in mind when reading booklists associated with women. Finally, there are women’s libraries in the period characterized by the presence of the kinds of books often described as “read for action” in the period—at least, described as such when owned by men. The shelves of Lady Anne Clifford’s Great Picture, for example, feature works by Eusebius, Ammianus Marcellinus, Plutarch’s Vies des hommes illustres, Francesco Guicciardini’s L’Histoire d’Italie, the memoirs of Philippe de Comines, Castiglione’s Courtier (probably in Italian as well as in English translation), and Pierre de La Primaudaye’s French academie. But the most remarkable library collected by an early modern women to be edited so far for PLRE is that of Lady Anne Holles (forthcoming in PLRE volume 10).571 Lady Anne collected a substantial library of 164 books, of which 69 are in French, about the same number in English, about 30 in Italian, and five in Spanish. In addition to the works of theology, medicine, botany, and cookery already mentioned, the library includes a wide and eclectic range of publications in subjects such as history, politics, philosophy, literature, science, and mathematics by authors such as Petrarch, Boccaccio, Rabelais, Donne, Bacon, Browne, Bandello, Marino, Nostradamus, and the mathematician Marie Crous. The subjects and authors Holles collected in European vernaculars, especially the contemporary history, politics, letters, memoirs, and translations of classical historians in French, are the same as those that appear on the shelves of prominent diplomats and statesman such as Sir Robert Sidney, Sir Thomas Roe, and Sir Edward Conway.572 For Sidney, Roe, Conway, and Holles, these Page 230 →are the books English readers looked to as offering the best guide to a professional, up-to-date understanding of the contemporary European world. All book collections are individual, each particular combination of titles and authors reflecting to some extent and in varying ways the interests, desires, and personal history of its owner. With its current archive of about 350 early modern booklists either edited or in progress, the PLRE project has made it much easier to compare these collections with one another and to see what stories each collection can tell. The project of PLRE is to edit a range of early modern booklists so that scholars can start to browse the books they contain, develop ways of reading these collections as collections, and then compare lists across time, place, class, and occupation, as well as by the sex of the book owners. With women’s booklists, the hope is that aggregating as many of the surviving records as possible will make it easier to recreate the bookscapes they inhabited and to trace larger patterns of book ownership, patterns that will help anchor the history of books and reading in the specifics of the volumes kept on shelves or in trunks in the households of their early modern owners.

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Twelve Women’s Book Ownership and the Reception of Early Modern Women’s Texts, 1545–1700 Marie-Louise Coolahan and Mark Empey This chapter aims to build on existing studies of early modern women’s reading practices by synthesizing current scholarship on individual women’s book collections and clearing the ground for quantitative, comparative analysis of the libraries owned by women in England and Scotland. It draws on and complements the work of the Private Libraries in Renaissance England (PLRE) project, supplementing Joseph L. Black’s pioneering work (see chapter 11) with additional catalogues, including both those compiled in the bibliophile’s lifetime as well as those since reconstructed by modern scholars. We discuss here the collections of thirty-seven female book owners (and thirty-five collections) between 1545 and 1700 (see appendix) to assess the relative size of women’s collections, the different kinds of book ownership in which women participated, and attitudes toward writing by women. This bookscape envisages a panorama of owning, reading, and lending practices; our investigation anticipates the ways in which its contours are likely to sharpen and shift. Our sample is socially variegated. Nine women were members of the aristocracy, either by marriage or birth.573 Of Page 232 →the remaining twenty-eight, sixteen have been identified as members of the gentry.574 Twelve broadly conform to the “middling sort.”575 The majority were Protestant, but our sample also includes four recusants: Elizabeth and Bridget Brome of Holton Hall in Suffolk, Lady Isabel Hampden from Stoke Poges in Buckinghamshire, and Mercy Deane from Winchester in Hampshire. A fifth, Alice Bacy from Norfolk, may have been Catholic, although this is not certain.576 Given the idiosyncrasies of early modern book catalogues and consequent obstacles to comparative analysis, our methodology requires some explication. The sources vary from probate inventories and wills to large booklists—comprehensive stocktakes made as a result of the greater resources of the nobility—and reconstructions of women’s libraries that result from the painstaking work of scholars who have laboriously searched for an individual’s signature in books. Statistical analysis of this corpus requires acknowledgment of key variables between the sources. Contemporary catalogues were inevitably inconsistent when taking stock of items, raising questions over which items should be considered separate. For example, the 1627 catalogue of books belonging to Frances Egerton, Countess of Bridgewater (1583–1636), opens with “[John] Speeds Chronicles in 3 volumes,” each numbered separately: in this instance, we consider Speed’s work to be a single item. Conversely, additions made to this catalogue in 1631 record multiple works such as “Two Accompt Bookes, in 4to” and “Three Bookes of French Songes” as individual items.577 In this case, we have counted these as five distinct works. There are similar issues with the library of Dame Page 233 →Bridget Bennet (fl. 1668–99). In the catalogue made of her collection in 1680, the multivolume editions of Joseph Hall’s Works (first printed 1625; reprinted 1627, 1628, 1634, 1662) and Madame de Villedieu’s Les ExilГ©s de la cour d’Auguste (1672–78) are counted as three and six works respectively, whereas the twovolume edition of Plutarch’s Lives is listed as one entry. In this case, we have considered each of these to be a single work, prioritizing the title over its format. Frequently, cataloguers were unclear in stating whether the owner had multiple copies of a book or the same item was composed in two parts or “books.” For example, the library catalogue of Anne Stanhope, dowager Countess of Clare (d. 1651), included “deux liures de la mode,” understood as two items in the catalogue, but the Dominican Luis de Granada’s “Simbole de la foy 2 liures” and the Huguenot Pierre Du Moulin’s “Combat chrestien 2 liures” were each considered single works.578 Distinguishing between the two is not always easy, but these books composed by Du Moulin and Granada were single volumes and are counted as such. Of course, contemporary definitions of the term “book” did not necessarily mean a bound item: authors regularly subdivided their work into two or more parts, and this urges caution on the would-be statistician, who must take each case on its own terms in order to calculate exactly the number of distinct books held in the collection.

Probate inventories pose another question: how comprehensive is the document of the deceased’s estate? The primary objective of such documents was to record goods of monetary value; aimed at estimating resale value, less commodifiable items—such as manuscripts—could be excluded from the record. The probate inventory of vintner Agnes Cheke (d. 1549) of Cambridgeshire, for example, lists one Bible, a book of sermons and homilies, Edwardian church injunctions, and “the bysshope of cullens booke,” with her library valued at five shillings on her death.579 As the mother of John Cheke (1514–57), who was regius professor of Greek at Cambridge and tutor to Prince Edward, Agnes Cheke’s household would have prized elite books. A female connection is suggested by the Archbishop of Cologne’s book: Katherine Brandon, Duchess of Suffolk, sponsored the English translation of A Simple, and Religious Consultation, published in 1548.580 Moreover, probate inventories often featured unspecified items grouped together. For example,Page 234 → that of Katherine Scarlet (d. 1595), a widow of Warwickshire, records “a Geneva byble, an olde Testament and other bookes.”581 Consequently, it is only possible to estimate how many works were in some women’s possession and, as in these cases, that estimate is likely to be on the low side. There are also cases where multiple catalogues reflect an evolving library. Two differing catalogues dated 1680 and 1699 survive for Bennet’s collection.582 The two sometimes overlap, but the French books in the earlier list are conspicuously absent from the later one. Curiously, Bennet’s earlier list contains 223 books, though the 1699 catalogue compiled at her residence at Golden Square, London, contains only 206. The reduction could be attributed to her lending or discarding books, or to the fact there was a second library at her family estate of Dawley, Middlesex.583 As indicated, our statistical analysis is based on the principle that any printed work, whether a single- or multivolume edition, counts as one item. Therefore, the two volumes of Les six voyages de Jean-Baptiste Tavernier (1677) owned by Bennet are treated as one work despite being listed as two entries in her 1680 catalogue. Likewise, Purchas his Pilgrimage (London, 1614), owned by Mary Dudley, Countess of Home (d. 1644) and Margaret Home, Countess of Moray (ca. 1607–83), itemized as being in ten “books” in the catalogue is considered here as a single work.584 All items are incorporated into our calculations. This includes works that were subsequently struck through—usually an indication of book lending (see below). Accordingly, the booklist of Lady Margaret Heath (1578–1647) has eighty-eight items with a further Page 235 →three titles struck through; this is counted as ninety-one items.585 Egerton’s total includes three books that were crossed out in her library catalogue, while seventeen works belonging to Bennet were struck through after her list of books was compiled. References to manuscript books are assessed on a case-by-case basis. Take the final work listed in the collection belonging to Lady Alice Hatton (1581–1639), which notes “Manuscript bookes of Cookerie Rhisciat [sic.] Receipts & Perfumes in .4. Vollumes.” These were likely distinct volumes. However, the imprecise nature of the entry means that we have considered the four manuscripts as one item, for consistency’s sake.586 Notwithstanding the various degrees of caution determined by such idiosyncratic early modern cataloguing practices, these various kinds of lists are instructive barometers for understanding both women’s book ownership and the circulation of female-authored works.

Size of Collections The size of women’s book collections varied greatly. Seven women—Egerton, Stanhope, Anne Clifford, Wolfreston, Bennet, Southwell, Isham—boasted libraries in excess of one hundred items. The largest of these is Egerton’s collection, which comprised 241 works by 1632. Substantial collections were not limited to wealthy elites. The most famous case among the “middling sort” is Frances Wolfreston, whose library continues to expand, as detailed in Sarah Lindenbaum’s essay (chapter 10).587 Women of the minor gentry, such as Anne, Lady Southwell (with her husband) and Elizabeth Isham (see chapter 4) also amassed considerable collections, of 110 and 100 items respectively, and have garnered critical attention.588 Yet significant gentry book owners such as Dame Bridget Bennet have hitherto been overlooked.589 She married Page 236 →Sir John Bennet (1616–95) of Dawley, who served as a royalist captain in the civil wars and subsequently led a successful political career under Charles II.590 The size of her library, between 206 and 223 books, indicates that the couple had a comfortable lifestyle. However, as printed works became more popular and accessible and private libraries became symbols of prestige, it should come as no surprise that all seven bibliophiles with large libraries accrued

their collections during the seventeenth century. The most prominent group in our sample consists of women with medium-sized libraries: between ten and ninetyone items. Sixteen women, nearly half in this study, fall into this category. Some collections were concentrated in one field. For example, the collections of Lady Dorothy Cockayne (d. 1595), Lady Alice Hatton (d. 1639), and Lady Elizabeth Ireton (d. 1686)—of twenty, seventy-seven, and fifty-two books, respectively—placed a heavy emphasis on Protestant texts. By contrast, the thirty-eight items belonging to Mildred Cooke Cecil, Lady Burghley (1526–89), or ninety-one books owned by Heath, contained a broad selection ranging from poetry to classical and medicinal books. Almost the same number of women were small book collectors; thirteen possessed between one and seven items. This figure could be skewed by the fact that it is grounded in the evidence of probate inventories, which document wealth at death; the book lists for ten members of this group are derived from such probate inventories. An eleventh, Mercy Deane, is unique in that her “Greate Masse Booke in Latyn” was recorded from an inventory compiled while she was in jail in 1583, probably after she was arrested and convicted of recusancy.591 It is unlikely, then, to represent her entire collection. The book lists of the final two women in this category—Lady Margaret Clifford (1560–1616) and Jane, Lady Lumley (1537–78)—are also suggestive of larger collections. Educated women with undoubted access to large familial libraries, their inclusion here is due to our focus on books explicitly in their possession. In the triptych painting The Great Picture, commissioned by her daughter Anne as a monument to her own dynasty and property Page 237 →rights, Clifford has the book of Psalms in her hand while the shelf behind her includes a manuscript, Seneca’s Workes (1614) and the Bible. Lumley, whose family library was bequeathed from generation to generation and comprised 2,609 books by 1609, wrote her name on seven books she used, all sixteenth-century works in Latin and published on the Continent—the hallmarks of an elite classical education.592 Clifford’s four and Lumley’s seven works, of course, represent only a fraction of their collections. As Leah Knight shows, Clifford’s literary interests were well known, yet the writers who dedicated their works to her appear in the side panels associated with her daughter, suggesting that these items had been inherited by Anne by the time the triptych was commissioned in 1646.593 Similarly, Lumley’s considerable learning was shaped by her father’s extensive library, which not only included a wide range of English and Continental works but also those composed by herself.

Collective Ownership Bibliophilia was not necessarily an individual pursuit and book ownership not at all a private matter. The collections outlined above are all associated with women but not all were wholly acquired nor maintained by individuals. The range illustrates different models of collective ownership. Jane Lumley’s signature may survive in only seven of the 2,609 volumes in the Lumley library catalogue, but she had access to all the books maintained by her father and subsequently bequeathed via her husband. In addition to the thirty-nine works exclusively owned by Lady Margaret Hoby (1571–1633), she also had access to the books owned by her husband, Thomas Posthumous Hoby.594 The Southwell-Sibthorpe booklist was made after Anne Southwell’s death in 1636 and denotes a collection she shared with her husband, Captain Henry Sibthorpe. Yet she was certainly also a collector in her Page 238 →own right; a 1631 inventory of her possessions lists three trunks of books.595 Sibthorpe’s military occupation suggests that he was the procurer of works such as Lawes & Ordinances of Warr. The couple were settlers of the Munster Plantation in Ireland—a factor that may inform their having owned a copy of The Faerie Queene by their neighbor, Edmund Spenser. Anne wrote poetry to Daniel Featley and Roger Cocks, vicar and curate of the parish at Acton, London, where she and her husband moved in the 1630s. This makes it likely that she was the enthusiast for works by these clergymen. Southwell’s poetic philosophy would certainly have informed the couple’s acquisition of George Herbert’s The Temple.596 The Puckering library is more properly considered that of Elizabeth (1622–89) and her husband, Henry Newton (later Puckering); unusually, McKitterick observes, her marks of ownership occur significantly more often than those of her husband.597 The majority of probate inventories are those of widows; it is likely that, had they been survived by their husbands, the collections now associated with them would have been attributed to males. The vagaries of mortality and the fluidity of communal familial space can obscure distinctions relating to ownership of books and other material goods. In one such case, the legacy is

explicitly spousal: the items attributed to Mary Tye (d. 1592) were taken from a joint inventory with a grant of administration for the estate she and her husband, Edward, made in 1592.598 Joint ownership by women, as visually projected by The Great Picture, also existed within the Scottish aristocracy. The catalogue of books “in my ladies cabinet” at Donibristle House lists eighty books belonging to Mary Dudley and her daughter Margaret Home and possibly Theodosia Harington, making no differentiation between owners.599 Collective ownership is sometimes revealed through the lens of state seizure. The raid on Lady Isabel Hampden’s Buckinghamshire home, a safe haven for recusants, involved the sequestration of a large collection of papist Page 239 →books (see chapter 6 for another contemporary raid). In this case, closer investigation of the collection attributed to her reveals that at least three other individuals owned some of the books taken in this haul: Henry Fitton, Thomas Metham, and one Mr. Carelton. It is likely that Henry Fitton was a priest, as “an Instruction to saye masse” and “A book of the masses of sundry saintes” were found in “Mr Fittons Chamber.” A further “hamper or basket of papisticall books” was found in his room, “wch as mr Fytton sayde do apperteyne unto one metham prisoner in wisbiche”—the Jesuit Thomas Metham, who died in Wisbech prison in 1592. The prosecutors had stumbled upon a network of underground book distribution: “one old printed service booke” was apparently “sent unto mr Fytton from one mr Byrde of the Quenes Maties Chapple”—William Byrd, composer of the Chapel Royal. A group of “popishe books the devell and all whereof taken away” were found in “Careltons chamberВ .В .В . and in his study.” Finally, “dyverse papisticall books” were found in the servants’ quarters: “in the chamber over the stable where the baylif of husbandrye and housekeeper do lye.”600 Such inventories are inevitably skewed in terms of content—the authorities were motivated to uncover evidence of illegal underground activism—and also often in favor of female ownership. The legal distinction between husbands and wives meant that recusant fines were commonly leveled against women rather than their male kin. As Jenna Lay explains, married women “could not control their own property and were subject to their husbands. Practically, this meant that it was almost impossible for the state to punish them: monetary fines would necessarily be imposed on their husbands.”601 It is possible that the attribution of such collections to women was similarly intended to minimize repercussions.

Religious Books Small book collectors are important to our understanding of women’s book ownership, not least because clear patterns emerge in such streamlined samples. By far the most prominent item was the Bible: nine of these women had Page 240 →a copy. If we exclude Margaret Clifford and Lumley from this category, this constitutes 82 percent. Mary Tye of Suffolk owned “one great Bible in folio” and “one other Bible in quarto,” in conjunction with a copy of John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments.602 Surveying the collections more broadly reveals that religious or theological items were central to women’s reading, a finding that confirms existing scholarship. Prayer or service books, psalters, and sermons all feature in these lists. Religious works were usually the dominant genre in a small-sized collection. The solitary item listed in Dame Cecily Brewse’s (d. 1590) legacy was Foxe’s Acts and Monuments. Of the five books owned by Lady Jane Buttes (d. 1593) of Norfolk, there was a Bible, a medieval work on the Ten Commandments, another by the pro-episcopacy Bishop Bilson of Winchester, and one “English Bible in the handes of the La: Bacon”—Lady Anne Bacon, translator and Buttes’s niece by marriage.603 Agnes Cheke bequeathed a collection of four devotional and liturgical books. Those books that are identifiable tend to be religious, as in the cases of Agnes Basepool (d. 1590) of Norfolk, who owned a Bible and “Service Booke” (the Book of Common Prayer), in tandem with two “ould books” and “a storye.”604 On the other hand, the recusant women did not own Bibles. As already noted, Mercy Deane had a mass book, possibly the cause of her arrest. The “latyn book” belonging to Alice Bacy, a widow from Norfolk—the only book listed in her probate inventory—was likely of the Catholic persuasion; a woman who had benefited from elite humanist education, like Mildred Cooke Cecil or Jane Lumley, would have left additional works in Latin.605 The ten books seized from convicted recusants Bridget and Elizabeth Brome (d. 1629) in Buckinghamshire around 1586 were printed on the Continent and smuggled into the country. They comprised a prayer manual that included a Jesus psalter, three Latin psalters, a treatise of confession and penance, and a work

of instruction about the Mass, as well as printed works by the English priest Laurence Vaux, Jesuits Robert Parsons and Gaspare Loarte, and Luis de Granada, a French translation of whose Del simbolo de la fe was owned by Anne Stanhope (see above).606 Earle Havens has contrasted the sisters’ “complete focus on practical devotion and spirituality” with the polemical and cosmopolitan collection seized from their brother George, a comrade of the Page 241 →conspirator Anthony Babington.607 The universal appeal of a writer such as Granada reminds us that the interests of confessionalized readers were not simplistically polarized. Frances Egerton’s ownership of a Jesus psalter (usually associated with Catholic devotion), two works by Granada, the Catholic martyr and poet Robert Southwell’s Mary Magdalen’s Funeral Tears and Saint Peter’s Complaint, and multiple Bibles and anti-Catholic polemics suggests a particularly broad spectrum of religious interests.608 But the absence of Bibles from recusant collections surely reflects doctrinal belief. The seizure of books held at the home of Isabel Hampden also included works by Vaux and Granada, in addition to three Jesus psalters and Mass liturgies, presumably for the priest she had harbored there.609 In stark contrast, virtually all of their Protestant counterparts owned a Bible. Of five who did not list a Bible, these omissions can be explained in at least three cases. David McKitterick surmises of Elizabeth Puckering that “Neither her prayer book nor her Bible appears to have survived,” while Anne Sadleir, whose library has been reconstructed by Arnold Hunt via her donations to the Inner Temple, Bodleian, and Cambridge libraries, explicitly stated in her correspondence that she read the Bible.610 Lumley also had access to scripture via her father’s library. The only two apparent exceptions turn out not to be so: Judith (nГ©e Lewin) Isham (1590–1625) was a staunch puritan, and Alice Edwards’s (d. 1546?) booklist—including Ovid, Horace, Tully, Erasmus, and “an hymnal & antiphonal”—is too early to bear the hallmarks of confessional bifurcation.611

Print/Manuscript Scholars have identified manuscript culture as a dynamic, thriving medium for the exchange of verse and politically dangerous texts; might we find the Page 242 →traces of such exchange in these women’s libraries?612 The swapping of texts most associated with manuscript miscellanies is unlikely to manifest at the level of the booklist, but the existence of a manuscript book could point to such activity. Caveats persist: the economic emphasis of probate inventories mitigates against the registering of manuscripts, and the catch-all signification of “book” in early modern catalogues may muddy the lines between manuscript and print. In total, manuscript ownership was recorded for eleven collections in this sample. Among the ninety-one volumes belonging to Heath was “a manuscript in fol[io].”613 Stanhope owned three manuscripts and 161 printed books; Sadleir, ten manuscripts and twenty-five print volumes. Egerton’s library contained nine manuscripts and 232 published items, while six out of the seventy-seven works belonging to Hatton were manuscripts: two unidentified sermons and the four “volumes” that included medicinal and cooking recipes for cooking, mentioned above.614 McKitterick has reconstructed Puckering’s library from bequests made to Trinity College Cambridge by her husband in 1691 and again following his death in 1701. Advising that this tally is likely incomplete and subject to the kind of upward revisions that have occurred in relation to Wolfreston’s library (see chapter 10), McKitterick calculates that Puckering owned thirty-eight books and two manuscripts.615 As previously mentioned, Margaret Clifford had three books and one alchemical manuscript, but her daughter, Anne Clifford, had the largest collection of manuscripts in this corpus. Of the sixty-three items listed in the “closset in the Passage Room next the Pantry in Skipton Castle,” twenty-two were manuscripts.616 Of course, this enumerates only the books kept near the pantry. Among the thirty works belonging to Judith (nГ©e Lewin) Isham, there were two manuscript books attributed to one Mr Bunings. An additional two works, “a writ Booke of the Med:[itation] of death” and “a worke Booke,” might also have been manuscripts,Page 243 → which would bring the total to four.617 Isham’s daughter, the diarist Elizabeth (1609–54), owned “4 or 5” manuscript sermons; her “Preserving Booke” and “2 work Books,” with their intimations of daily occupational routine, were likely manuscripts.618 The items listed in Hoby’s diary suggest that she had manuscripts in her possession. Cambers identifies six works in particular: her household book, diary, and Isabel Bowes’s meditations, as well as “the book for the placing of the people in the church,” her husband’s remarks on Stephen Egerton’s sermons, and “a book that was mad, as it was saied, by my lord of Essex in defence of his owne Causes.”619

Female-Authored Books Three of Hoby’s manuscripts were female-authored: her own household book, her diary, and “some meditations of the Lady Bowes hir Makinge.”620 This suggests an attitude to female-authored texts that sees them not as books to be collected but as working texts by women of one’s acquaintance. The everyday domestic and spiritual functions of these genres lend this act of transmission a pragmatic quality. These are manuscript books for living and using rather than for display. But they are not evidence of restricted worldviews. As Julie Crawford has argued, Hoby’s reading of Bowes is part of a wider “regional activist movement” of reform and dissent in predominantly recusant Yorkshire.621 Similarly, of the forty-five works that Hunt has identified as Sadleir’s, the three that are female-authored are her own: a collection of letters to her with her replies; her commonplace book “written with my owne hand, which I composed”; and another volume in her own hand that she gave to her cousin John Crew.622 These are texts for circulation, manuscripts that document her epistolary and intellectual engagement with the world. One of five books owned by Lady Jane Buttes was a Bible “in the handes of the La: Bacon”—Anne Bacon, sister to Mildred Cooke Cecil. Bacon’s translations of Ochino’s Sermons (1548) and Jewel’s Apology Page 244 →of the Church of England (1564) were important interventions for reform of the Elizabethan church. The extent to which she had a hand in this Bible is intriguing; at the very least, it points to the exchange of texts by and between educated kinswomen. The flipside of this practical, self-generated approach to writing is that female-authored books were not considered prestigious, an observation that is reinforced by examination of women known to modern scholars as “women writers.” Anne Southwell, now firmly in the canon of early modern women writers, appears not to have collected volumes by other women, a finding that stands in contrast to the evidence of her verse, which strongly encourages others—including Cecily Ridgeway, the Countess of Londonderry—to write to her. Southwell was immersed in efforts to establish a poetic coterie, first in Ireland and then in London, but the surviving booklist bears no traces of this engagement with female authorship. Similarly, Anne Clifford—diarist, legal pioneer—retained a volume of her mother’s letters, yet appears not to have valued female-authored books in the same way as those displayed in her Great Picture (see chapter 13). Mildred Cooke Cecil, whose writerly accomplishment is attested by her translations, a letter, and a poem, owned books that reflected her humanist interests and piety: classical works in Greek and Latin, a polyglot Bible, and works by Boccaccio and Erasmus; but her collection is devoid of female authors.623 None of the books signed by Jane Lumley is female-authored, conforming with this apparent pattern. However, there are eight works by female authors in the Lumley catalogue, as well as a further three authored by Jane Lumley herself: Iphigenia at Aulis and two coauthored manuscript exercises in Greek and Latin. These range from the writings of international female saints (Brigit of Sweden, Elizabeth of Schonau, Hildegard of Bingen, and Matilda of Ringelheim), to the Cambridge and Oxford Orations of Elizabeth I in 1564 and 1592, to the contemporary Italian poets Isabella Cortese and Isabella Sforza. Who did own female-authored texts? Which women’s works occupied space in early modern women’s book collections? Of these thirty-five collections, eight include books composed or translated by female writers. We might add a ninth collector, Lady Margaret Clifford, if we were to consider “a written hand Booke of Alkimme Extractions, of Distillations, and Excellent Medicines” to be of her own composition (this was one of four books Page 245 →Leah Knight has identified as belonging to Clifford from the triptych).624 Of 241 books owned by Frances Egerton, four are authored by women: Mary Wroth’s Urania (1621); Anna Wigmore’s A Lady’s Present to a Princess or Godly Prayers (1627); Diana Primrose’s A Chain of Pearl (1630); Mary Sidney Herbert’s 1592 publication encompassing two translations, A Discourse of Life and Death [And] Antonius—1.66 percent of the total.625 Stanhope had three female-authored books out of 164 volumes (1.83 percent): “Madame de Crous arithmetic [Advis de Marie Crous aux filles exersants l’arithmГ©tique (Paris, 1636, 1641)], Qu. Margerits memoires [The memoirs of Queen Marguerite of France], my [lady] Arbella Wentworths book.”626 Bridget Bennet’s aforementioned 1680 catalogue included four books by French women writers, representing 1.79 percent of her total collection: the Duchess of Mazarin’s Memoirs, Madame de la Fayette’s Princess of Cleves, Madame de Colonne’s Memoirs, and Madame de Villedieu’s Les Г©xilГ©s de la cour d’Auguste.627 There is, however, a noticeable difference in the 1699 catalogue. Of the 206 items then catalogued, five were authored by women but only

one—Mazarin’s memoirs—survives from 1680. The new arrivals were Katherine Philips’s Poems, Madam d’Aulnoy’s “Memoires of the Court of France,” Aphra Behn’s “Luckey mistake, ” and Mary Astell’s “Proposall to ye Ladys.” Thus, the proportion of female-authored works was only slightly higher, at 2.43 percent, yet the contents had diversified. The mobility of books transported between homes in London and Dawley might account for this. Of the 106 books identified by Paul Morgan as belonging to Frances Wolfreston, only two—Catherine of Siena’s Here beginneth the Orchard of Syon (1519) and Dorothy Leigh’s The Mother’s Blessing (ca. 1619/20)—or 1.89 percent, are by women writers.628 Of the eighty works in the library of Mary Dudley and Margaret Home, an unidentifiable work by Ester Inglis represents just 1.25 percent.629 A single translation by a woman—Anne Lock Prowse’s translation of Jean Tafflin’s Of the Marks of the Children of God—constitutes 1.1 percent of Heath’s ninety-one items.630 Turning to manuscripts, three in Hoby’s collection of thirty-nine constitutes 7.69 percent. The three selfauthored books Page 246 →by Anne Sadleir, of forty-five traced by Hunt, represent 6.66 percent of her relatively modest library.631

Book Lending Evidence of book lending offers explicit proof of readerly engagement and the transmission of books. According to the 1680 Bennet catalogue, for example, fourteen works were lent to her son, Charles. Henry FitzRoy, first Duke of Grafton (second illegitimate son of Charles II and Bennet’s nephew through marriage), received a loan of two French books.632 The first was “Amoureuse Gal:,” most likely Roger de Bussy-Rabutin’s Histoire amoureuse des Gaule (Amsterdam, 1677); the second, La Fayette’s The Princess of Cleves (London, 1679). A third name that appears in the Bennet catalogue is “Mrs Reverwest.” She borrowed both volumes of an unidentified French work, “Galan Des Ancie,” presumably an historical work as it is listed alongside books such as “Histoir[e] Romaine” and “Etat de la France.” We have no biographical information on Reverwest, but this reference suggests the existence of a circle in which men and women participated, sharing and reading books. Whether sought by Reverwest or recommended by Bennet, women were welcome readers to the family’s library. As Arnold Hunt has demonstrated, the heavily annotated books and manuscripts in Anne Sadleir’s possession show that she was very well read in contemporary English Protestant divinity. Surviving correspondence between Sadleir and her cousin Elizabeth Capell, Baroness Capell of Hadham, reveals her active engagement in the circulation of manuscript material, mainly political poems from the 1640s and 1650s.633 Similarly, Heidi Brayman Hackel has noted the existence of a female network of family members and close friends loaning books to one another. On November 16, 1628, Egerton sent a quarto Bible (seemingly the King James version) to “my lady Marie” as well as a playbook in vellum at an unspecified date. On another occasion, she gave her daughter Penelope a copy of Johann Habermann’s Page 247 →The Enemy to Atheism. The catalogue also records items given to Egerton as gifts from other women. Among the additions to her library in 1632 was “an english Bible giuen by Mrs Bagner” and John Preston’s The New Covenant, or the Saint’s Portion (1629) donated by her sister, Elizabeth Hastings, Countess of Huntingdon. Thus, Egerton emerges as a central figure in the movement of books among women, acting as both lender and borrower. Based on Egerton, Brayman Hackel has argued that “the recorded circulation of books supports the contemporary notion that the most appropriate gifts for women were devotional works and Bibles”; however, the examples of Bennet and Sadleir suggest a more capacious picture of textual exchange.634

Conclusions What do these catalogues tell us about women’s readership and access to books? In terms of size, women’s libraries ranged from the small (1–7 items) and medium (10–91 items) to large (over 100 items), although aristocratic women also had access to far larger family libraries. Women living prior to 1600 had comparatively smaller collections: only three of the sixteenth-century women in this sample had sizeable libraries, of between twenty and thirty-eight books: Mary Grey, Dorothy Cockayne, and Mildred Cooke Cecil. The remaining fourteen owned fewer than ten items. The size of an individual’s library should not, however, be seen as an indication of affluence. On the contrary, Jane Buttes’s probate inventory reveals a woman of

significant wealth but records only five books in her possession.635 Indeed, in many cases it is not possible to gauge the full extent of an individual library because of the biases of the statistical evidence. But wealth could determine individual as opposed to collective ownership. The latter could be a matter of official bequest, spousal partnership, or the preservation of libraries for dynastic purposes. These women’s collections, especially the smaller ones, were dominated by religious works. Women’s writing circulated in a variety of forms, from prestigious print publications to manuscripts of significant pragmatic value and usefulness—but all in relatively small numbers. The reading and circulation of their own and others’ work were routine and sociable. Much research remains to be done in this field. In his chapter, Joseph L. Page 248 →Black discusses ways to define a collection as “contextually complete.” Our own bookscape has included less coherent forms of booklist(s), and we have benefited enormously from editions of catalogues and booklists produced by fellow scholars. Most importantly, the terrain is fluid and shifting, as will be most obvious from our tentative figures relating to the library of Frances Wolfreston, 216 at the time of going to press. Forthcoming work by Jason McElligott on the seventeenth-century library of Margaret Ussher, based on books bearing her distinctive signature found in Marsh’s Library, Dublin, offers an exciting example of new vistas opening up as book historians increasingly look for and find ways to interpret the signs of early modern readers’ ownership.636 Often the scholarly clue is provided by the record of a book donation to a library. Such donations can help us in finding individual books owned by women. Ciara Bell’s recent study of the library at the Royal Hospital in Kilmainham, Dublin, has found donations of a New Testament commentary by Katherin Hamilton, and of Fuller’s Church History of Britain (1655) and Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1706) by Lady Ursula Feilding—all three donated at the turn of the eighteenth century. Mary (nГ©e Curzon) Fermor (d. 1628) of Easton Neston, Northamptonshire, is another example. She donated three printed books (a Bible in Italian, a Latin glossary of Pliny the Elder’s natural history, and Maximiliano Calvi’s Del tratado de la hermosura y del amor [1576]) and two manuscripts (a Middle English psalter and Prolemy’s Quadripartitum) to the Bodleian Library, Oxford. Thomas Bodley inscribed the Bible, “The gifte of ye Lady Farmor,” in ink.637 The pioneering work of David Pearson, in combination with the thousands of heraldic stamps identified in the British Armorial Bindings database, is another route to locating female owners of individual books. For example, the autobiographer and traveler Anne Fanshawe (1625–80) is identified by her stamps as the owner of Elias Ashmole’s Institution, Laws, and Ceremonies of the Most Noble Order of Page 249 →the Garter (1672); four copies of Querer por solo querer: to love only for love’s sake by the Spanish dramatist Antonio Hurtado de Mendoza (1670, 1671, 1672), translated by her husband Richard and published posthumously; a manuscript copy of her own memoirs (signed and dated 1676); and a copy of Richard Fanshawe’s translation of Guarini’s Il pastor fido (1647).638 Eleven books owned by Elizabeth Talbot Grey, Countess of Kent (1581–1651) can be identified in this way.639 Given the breadth and increase of such projects, it is a certainty that women’s libraries of the early modern period will far exceed the numbers itemized here before long.640

Appendix: Book Owners, Sources, and Numbers (Note: Given in chronological order based on death date, where known, or otherwise floruit) Alice Edwards (d. 1546?) Sears Jayne, Library Catalogues of the English Renaissance, 2nd ed. (Godalming: St. Paul’s, 1983), 186: 12 works Agnes Cheke (d. 1549) PLRE Ad30: 4 works Jane, Lady Lumley (1537–78) Sears Jayne and Francis R. Johnson, eds., The Lumley Library: The Catalogue of 1609 (London: British Museum, 1956): 7 books with ownership inscription Lady Mary Grey (d. 1578) PLRE 253: 30 works Mercy Deane (fl. 1583) PLRE 224: 1 work Lady Isabel Hampden (fl. 1583)

Page 250 →PLRE 248: more than 19 works Mary Bacon (d. 1587) PLRE 168: 4 works Alice Bacy (d. 1589) PLRE Ad35: 1 work Mildred Cooke Cecil, Lady Burghley (d. 1589) Caroline Bowden, “The Library of Mildred Cooke Cecil, Lady Burghley,” Library, 7th ser. 6.1 (2005): 3–29: 38 works Dame Cecily Brewse (d. 1590) PLRE Ad38: 1 work Mary Tye (d. 1592) PLRE Ad43: 3 works Lady Jane Buttes (d. 1593) PLRE 186: 5 works Lady Dorothy Cockayne (d. 1594) PLRE 254: 20 works Katherine Scarlet (d. 1595) PLRE 192: more than 2 works Agnes Basepool (d. 1596) PLRE 194: 5 works Margaret Partridge (d. 1597) PLRE 196: 5 works Elizabeth Walden (d. 1600) PLRE 202: 7 works Margaret Clifford (1560–1616) PLRE 268: 4 works Judith (nГ©e Lewin) Isham (1590–1625) PLRE 270: 30 works Elizabeth Brome (d. 1629) and Bridget Brome (n.d.) PLRE 244: 10 works Lady Margaret Hoby (1571–1633) Joanna Moody, ed., The Private Life of an Elizabethan Lady: The Diary of Lady Margaret Hoby 1599–1605 (Sutton: Stroud, 1998) Andrew Cambers, “Readers’ Marks and Religious Practice: Margaret Hoby’s Marginalia,” in Tudor Books and Their Readers: Materiality and the Construction of Meaning, ed. John N. King (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 211–31: 39 works Anne, Lady Southwell (1574–1636) and Henry Sibthorpe Jean Cavanaugh, “The Library of Lady Southwell and Captain Sibthorpe,”Page 251 → Studies in Bibliography 20 (1967): 243–54: 110 works Jean Klene, ed., The Southwell-Sibthorpe Commonplace Book: Folger MS V.b.198 (Tempe: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1997), 98–101. PLRE Ad3 Frances Egerton, Countess of Bridgewater (1583–1636) Heidi Brayman Hackel, Reading Material in Early Modern England: Print, Gender, and Literacy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 258–81: 241 works Judith Isham (1610–1636) PLRE 272: 19 works Lady Alice Hatton (d. 1639) PLRE 273: 77 works Mary Dudley, Countess of Home (1586–1645) and Lady Margaret Home, Countess of Moray (ca. 1607–83) Michael Pearce, “Vanished Comforts,” unpublished PhD diss., University of Dundee (2016), Appendix 2: 80 works

Lady Margaret Heath (1578–1647) British Library, Egerton MS 2983, fols 79r-v, 86v: 91 works Anne Stanhope, dowager Countess of Clare (d. 1651) University of Nottingham, Portland Collection, MS Pw V 4, pp. 192–94: 164 works Elizabeth Isham (1609–1654) PLRE 276: 100 works Anne Sadleir (1585–1671/2) Arnold Hunt, “The Books, Manuscripts and Literary Patronage of Mrs Anne Sadleir (1583–1670),” in Early Modern Women’s Manuscript Writing: Selected Papers from the Trinity/Trent Colloquium, ed. Victoria E. Burke and Jonathan Gibson (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), 205–36: 45 works Lady Anne Clifford, Countess of Pembroke, Dorset and Montgomery (1590–1676) PLRE 277 Richard T. Spence, Lady Anne Clifford: Countess of Pembroke, Dorset and Montgomery (1590–1676) (Sutton: Stroud, 1997): 112 works Frances Wolfreston (d. 1677) Paul Morgan, “Frances Wolfreston and вЂHour Bouks’: A Seventeenth-century Woman Book-collector,” Library, 6th ser., 11.3 (1989): 197–219. Page 252 →Arnold Hunt, “Libraries in the Archives: Researching Provenance in the British Library Invoices,” in Libraries within the Library: The Origins of the British Library’s Printed Collections, ed. Giles Mandelbrote and Barry Taylor (London: British Library, 2009), 363–84: more than 135 works; current estimate by Sarah Lindenbaum is 216. Lady Elizabeth Ireton (d. 1686) PLRE 255: 52 works Elizabeth Puckering (1621/2–1689) David McKitterick, “Women and Their Books in Seventeenth-Century England: The Case of Elizabeth Puckering,” Library, 7th ser., 1.4 (2000): 359–80: more than 40 books (incomplete catalogue) Dame Bridget Bennet (fl. 1668–1699) The National Archives, Chancery Exchequer C104/82: 223 works (1680 catalogue); 206 (1699 catalogue)

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Thirteen Reading Proof Or, Problems and Possibilities in the Text Life of Anne Clifford Leah Knight Over the past quarter century, Anne Clifford has become a textbook case in the history of early modern women’s reading. That she was an outstanding reader has long been a matter of public note, a tradition beginning not later than her eulogy in 1676. More recently, the role played by reading in her life has attracted interdisciplinary interest in general overviews and close readings of items Clifford owned, annotated, or wrote about reading.641 Clifford’s bookscape offers a valuable case study in part because the evidence is extraordinarily diverse, ranging from association copies with extensive marginalia to a well-ordered archive of family papers—themselves often annotated with Clifford’s corrections—and, uniquely, a massive triptych portrait featuring, in each panel, younger and older depictions of Clifford standing before shelves stocked by dozens of volumes legibly inscribed with authors and titles. To this extensive array of testaments to the role of reading in her Page 254 →life one must add Clifford’s carefully scrutinized financial accounts, which themselves record purchases of other books. Then there are remarks in her early diaries about what, when, where, and with whom she read, plus later annals and a diary from her final months that show Clifford interpolating lifelong biblical studies into personal and familial historiography through scriptural citations. With much of this probative material already treated by scholars, Clifford provides rich ground for an overview of methodological and evidentiary problems and possibilities in the history of book use by early modern women in Britain. This chapter identifies challenges associated with Clifford’s reading legacy, along with opportunities for extending our understanding of her text life. By marshalling a summary of the complex proofs pertaining to the bookscape of a single early modern woman, this chapter suggests the trials scholars new to this field can anticipate, as well as angles available for deepening our treatment of the text lives of readers like Clifford—if any like her existed before or since. Countess, baroness, and sheriff of various parts of England during various periods of her life, Anne Clifford (1590–1676) is well-known for her equally various life-writings, early surviving secular examples in English of such accounts kept by a woman. Clifford is also famed for long-fought lawsuits instigated by her mother, Margaret Clifford (born Russell), to secure Anne’s inheritance of titles and lands from her late father, despite his will to the contrary. In the north of England, she is remembered for restoring her estates after she attained this inheritance. These aspects of Clifford’s remarkable life and writings have long held scholarly and popular interest;642 the significance of reading in her life, however, has only received comparable attention over the past quarter century.643 Page 255 →Clifford’s reading is almost inevitably summed up with reference to The Great Picture, a triptych portrait she commissioned in the 1640s.644 The central panel shows Clifford’s nuclear family, while each wing features her alone: on the left as a teenager and on the right in her fifties, as she appeared when the painting was made. Each figure is surrounded by reading material: both inscriptions offering familial biographies and several dozen books shelved overhead, on tables, and in piles at her feet. These books do not form what would become the conventional generic backdrop for similar portraits (particularly of gentlemen); instead, they comprise precisely identified volumes. These virtual libraries proffer tantalizing if obviously problematic perspectives on Clifford’s actual reading materialsPage 256 → and preferences. One cannot ascertain from pigment left by a brush wielded by a hired painter what one determines from a reader’s marginalia: whether Clifford actually cracked the spines of these tomes, let alone read them through, or what she thought of them. Marginalia, at their best, let us closely read an earlier close reading, while a portrait of closed books forecloses that possibility. But the problematic nature of painted evidence is countered, here, by its intersection with other proofs of Clifford’s text life that raise the probative value of The Great Picture.

For instance: Clifford sometimes wrote about her reading, primarily in diaries dated to 1616, 1617, and 1619—although these survive, problematically, only in eighteenth-century copies, such that this corroborating evidence is also flawed.645 These life-writings include references to her reading, or having read to her, a surprising variety and enormous quantity of texts, including several in The Great Picture: Chaucer’s works, Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Montaigne’s Essays, Sidney’s Arcadia, Augustine’s City of God, and the Bible.646 Do half a dozen cross-referenced volumes entitle us to extrapolate to forty more in the painting and presume they were also read? Correspondences are compelling, but neither diary nor painting offers an independent witness of Clifford’s text life: they are just different media for selfreportage. Yet self-reportage is often the only evidence of a person’s reading; historians in the field thus tend (if only because they must) to extend trust to those whose reading they reconstruct. We suspend disbelief in a manner perhaps more acceptable to students of literature than of history. Between Clifford’s diaries of 1619 and her triptych portrait of the 1640s, evidence of Clifford’s text life is more fragmentary; what does survive is mainly found in letters. At Wilton House with her second husband, for instance, she received at least one letter from George Herbert (whose work also appears in The Great Picture: another cross-referenced proof). This solitary survival from Herbert to Clifford evinces his sympathy with, or canny flattery of, her all-consuming obsession with what began as her mother’s quest to secure the family’s ancestral lands and titles: Herbert thus prays that Page 257 →“the Lord make good the blessing of your Mother upon you, and cause all her wishes, diligences, prayers and tears to bud, blow and bear fruit.”647 Clifford’s inclusion of Herbert in The Great Picture might, therefore, acknowledge his support of her great cause as much as her support of his great poetry. At such a crux, the problems and possibilities in the history of reading unite. A letter from two decades later, after Clifford acceded to those lands, offers remarkably dense evidence of her text life. The letter derives from shortly after she had traveled north to estates in disarray (economic and architectural) after years of neglect and military depredations. Scholars interested in Clifford’s reading regularly cite this letter, yet it remains unclear what to make of what it says—and, even more problematically, precisely what it does say. According to George C. Williamson, writing in 1922, Clifford asks the letter’s recipient, the Countess of Kent, to tell John Selden that “if I had not excellent Chaucer’s book here to comfort me, I were in a pitable case, having so many troubles as I have here, but, when I read in that, I scorn and make light of them all, and a little part of his beauteous spirit infuses itself in me.”648 As Barbara Lewalski long ago noticed, Clifford’s phrasing echoes Spenser’s invocation of Chaucer in The Faerie Queene, when Spenser informs Chaucer that “through infusion sweete / Of thine own spirit, which doth in me survive, / I follow here the footing of thy feete” (4.2.34.6–8).649 This brief epistolary passage thus offers triple-barreled evidence of Clifford’s reading: from it, we know she read Chaucer and Spenser—claims corroborated by her diary and The Great Picture—but also how she read these authors. That is, she read Chaucer as Spenser had read him: in order to transfer the author’s “spirit” to herself and buoy herself with it. Clifford thus found inspiration not only in Spenser’s writing but also in his way of reading. So much sheds new light on her commissioning of Spenser’s funerary monument in Westminster Abbey: while we might otherwise see this as a tribute to his authorship, evidence from her pen suggests the import of Spenser’s modeling of an ideal (and idealizing) way of reading.650 Moreover, in desiring that her appreciation of Chaucer should be relayed to Selden, Clifford appears to acknowledge a debt: it seems likely that her Chaucer was a gift from Selden (whose Titles of Honor she owned, read, and annotated).651 One early modern woman’s Page 258 →bookscape is richly imbricated in the writerly and readerly relations of past and present cultural heavyweights. But when one turns a lens with higher resolution on this microscopic element of Clifford’s bookscape, we see as many problems as possibilities. In 1991, Lewalski quoted Clifford’s letter thus: “if I hade nott exelent Chacor’s booke heare to comfortt mee I wer in a pitifull case, having so manny trubles as I have butt when I rede in thatt I scorne and make little of them alle, and a little part of his beauteous sperett infusses ittselfe in mee.”652 In transcribing Clifford’s adjective as “beauteous,” Lewalski echoed Williamson, although she provided original spelling where he modernized it, and she leaves out a second “heere”—a potentially significant term, given Clifford’s vigorous sense of emplacement. Lewalski cited “British Library ADD MS 15232,” a different source from any cited by Williamson, who referred to the letter breezily

as being somewhere “in the British Museum,” a haystack rendered only slightly less dense by his specifying in his bibliography just two manuscripts from that institution: Harleian MSS 6177 and 7001.653 Two years after quoting Clifford on Chaucer’s “beauteous sperett,” Lewalski silently revised her reading to “devine,” again citing Additional MS 15232; the citation appears to be in error, however, since that manuscript comprises sixteenth-century materials from the Sidney family.654 One year later, in her first edition of Clifford’s diaries, Acheson echoed Lewalski’s use of “devine” while citing both an unspecified “BM Add MSS” and Harleian 6177, the latter being one of Williamson’s sources; this citation also appears to be in error, since Harleian 6177 offers an eighteenth-century abridgment of Clifford’s account of her family’s lives.655 Two years after Acheson’s diaries, Spence used the same phrasing as Acheson while citing Williamson’s other source, BL Harleian MS 7001, Page 259 →folio 212.656 About a decade later, Brayman Hackel, also citing Harleian 7001, folio 212r, concurred, almost—her version is “Deuine.”657 Chaucer’s beauty has thus been quietly elevated over the decades to divinity; with this revision, Clifford’s valuation of Chaucer skyrockets (as her theology grows more complex). Yet “beauteous” and “divine” share few letters and are of considerably different length. Could this adjective—one word charged with so much import in Clifford’s reading—operate as a kind of Rorschach test? In Clifford’s bookscape, these variant interpretations of her interpretation constitute a palimpsest that conceals rather than offers a trace of the original.658 Some of these interpreters, moreover, met the manuscript decades after others, so the word may have blurred since others took a look. Did a dripping nose or drop of sweat render this point moot, leaving Clifford’s perception of Chaucer’s spirit—admirable or celestial—eternally up in the air? Both problems and possibilities in the history of reading can be local to what individuals see on the page and infer from that notoriously unstable basis. Letters continued to form a considerable portion of Clifford’s reading experience when her long-distance correspondence directed enormous estates far in England’s south, as well as nearby in the north, where even local work required many written exchanges and agreements. Her descendants also remained in the south, and some of their letters survive with Clifford’s papers. Clifford valued certain missives enough to endorse them with summaries, suggesting she wanted to locate them with ease for personal rereading or aimed to preserve their meaning for future readers. Clifford even had a selection of her mother’s correspondence copied out in a “Letter Booke,” a choice bespeaking her perception of its lasting significance—to her or a wider audience, we do not know.659 Page 260 →Clifford not only read letters sent to her but also those sent by her, not only in composing them but again years later, in the case of letters from a beleaguered Clifford, stranded in the south during her first marriage, sent to her mother, guarding the disputed estates in the north. Clifford later became the recipient of these same letters, likely after her deceased mother’s papers were conveyed to her; she writes, of early 1619, “I brought down with me my Lady’s great trunk of papers to pass away the time which trunk was full of writingsВ .В .В . with certain letters of her friends.”660 In the contrast between the main text and later marginalia, we see the careful penmanship of Clifford’s youth shift to the jagged hand of her maturity. Her later annotation of her own letters confirms another of her distinctive habits as a reader of her own writings: the addition of supplementary marginal notes years after initial composition, as in her diaries of the 1610s.661 Letter and diary, although two very different genres, evince a regularity in Clifford’s reading practices. Clifford’s striking habit of self-annotation also reminds one of a fact so obvious that it may be overlooked: every writer is a reader first, especially of her own work—which makes the history of reading not a peripheral or narrow field but one central to literary studies. Clifford’s rereading of her letters also signals the problematic name of the field in which the history of reading participates, since “book history” cannot sensibly be—and, practically, is not—limited to studies of bound codices, but rightly takes any legible object as fair game. It is simply not likely that the spined Spenser and his bound brethren made up most of Clifford’s reading experience; after all, even the four dozen volumes in The Great Picture, so often privileged in accounts of Clifford’s reading, are shelved in a scene populated by far more trompe-l’oeil scrolls and slips. So much reminds us that any attempt to account for a person’s experience of textual culture must reckon not just with books but with letters and loose papers, even

if their meanings and even whereabouts are often more elusive than that of a self-contained tome. Loose papers may have played a peculiarly important role in Clifford’s text life. According to the bishop who spoke at her funeral, Clifford routinely papered her chamber with inscribed slips not unlike those in The Great Picture: Page 261 → she would frequently bring out of the rich Store-house of her Memory, things new and old, Sentences, or Sayings of remark, which she had read or learned out of Authors, and with these her Walls, her Bed, her Hangings, and Furniture must be adorned; causing her Servants to write them in Papers, and her Maids to pin them up, that she, or they, in the time of their dressing, or as occasion served, might remember and make their descants on them. So that, though she had not many Books in her chamber, yet it was dressed up with the Flowers of a Library.662 Like Clifford’s comment on Chaucer, the ghosts of these long-dead flowers appear to offer compound evidence, since they not only provided intellectual fodder for herself and her servants but also grew out of her earlier reading. Rainbowe’s imagery might be irresistibly vivid, but none of these ephemeral documents survives. Their disappearance contrasts with the endurance of Clifford’s complex financial accounts. This genre is rarely noticed in histories of reading—perhaps because literary scholars, at least, have only recently begun to find ways to interpret such a genre—but Clifford’s hand attests to her reading these records regularly and carefully.663 Her scrutiny of purchases, investments, and returns makes sense given how much the success of her estates bore upon her hard-won landholding identity; her account books thus merit a place in a representation of her reading experience—and not least because such texts record purchases of still other texts. On November 16, 1669, she paid her secretary William Watkinson to transcribe Aristotle on the topic of affection from his “Rhetoricks.”664 This entry seems to correlate with a manuscript in a catalogue of books inventoried in 1739 “in the Closset in the PassagePage 262 → room next to the Pantry in Skipton Castle,” one of her residences: once again, cross-referencing creates possibilities in the history of reading, despite problems like the disappearance of the Aristotle manuscript seen in 1739.665 From these accounts, we learn that Clifford bought The Lord Hatton’s Psalter in 1668, its most recent printing, and George Herbert’s Remains of 1652 the next year in 1669: corroboration that “things new and old,” in Rainbowe’s words, both interested Clifford.666 The Herbert purchase shows Clifford seeking a title almost twenty years old, by an author she had known twenty years earlier still—but she also kept up with items hot off the press, as with her acquisition of Edward Chamberlain’s Angliae Notitia, Or, The Present State of England (1669) shortly after it appeared. Similarly, Izaak Walton’s Lives of Dr. John Donne, Sir Henry Wotton, Mr. Richard Hooker, Mr. George Herbert was purchased September 29, 1670, when it had only been licensed on June 21.667 Walton’s book and Herbert’s Remains offer further cross-referenced evidence of her reading, since books by Donne, Wotton, and Herbert are also represented in The Great Picture; one medium of proof enriches, if it can never quite substantiate, another. Our knowledge of her purchase of Walton’s 1670 work also makes it likelier that Clifford contributed to that book’s expansion in 1675, since the latter edition includes the letter Herbert sent her in 1631: how else could such a missive wind up in print so many decades on, if not from the rigorous archives of Anne Clifford? The accounts also note purchases of materials—ten shillings for pencils, for instance—used in making books that form a formidable tranche of evidence of Clifford’s reading: the three surviving three-volume sets of bound manuscripts known as The Great Books of Record.668 These compilations, built on the foundation of her mother’s earlier legal research, consist largely of transcripts and summaries of records substantiating the Clifford genealogy and historical property rights, but also biographies of her chief ancestors, up Page 263 →to and including her parents, as well as her own autobiography and annals from her arrival in the north until her death. The documents in the first two volumes are often remarkably dry bureaucratic materials; what makes them interesting is how much they are not the kind of reading material commonly associated with early modern women. Yet Clifford, like her mother, not only commissioned their compilation: her marginalia attest that she carefully

read them, even planning corrections for subsequent copies. For instance, in her hand is this marginal correction: “I beeleve ther in [is] a mistake in this and thatt it shoud bee the furst yeare of Henry 5 or 6.”669 Beyond reading for accuracy, however, Clifford read with zestful appreciation for specific documents (one note reads simply, “This is a spetiall fine record”) and figures who located them: “This is the first exemplification that was taken out of the records by the industrious and excellent Lady Margarett Russell.”670 While some marginalia are in her hand, others appear in what becomes recognizable as her voice, dictating to an amanuensis. Dictated marginalia are more problematic than the straightforward kind, but also more interesting: they, like The Great Books generally, reveal a collaborative culture of textual production, reception, and revision. While the first two volumes of The Great Books evince Clifford’s widespread reading in unusual archival materials, the final volume shows how much the common or garden variety of Bible reading shaped Clifford’s outlook. In the autobiography especially, many paragraphs in a scribe’s graceful hand conclude with a string of scriptural citations in Clifford’s trademark angular script. She thus adumbrates her first marriage (“my said Lord, and I came then to be Earle and Countess of Dorsett”) with “Job 7:1: Ecclesiastes 3:1,” verses signaling her stoical resignation to this fate: “Is there not an appointed time to man upon earth? Are not his days also like the days of an hireling?”; “To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven.”671 Clifford never relinquished the typologically linking of autobiographical and scriptural intertexts; similar citations append many entries in the diary kept until the day before her death. Most frequently, Clifford cites scripture to confirm her providentialist interpretation of her inheritance; for instance, after she writes “I, whose destinie was guarded by a mercifull and divine providence, escaped the subtiltie of all his [her brother-in-law’s] practices and the evils which hee plotted against mee, ” she Page 264 →cites (among other things) Psalm 33:10: “The Lord bringeth the counsel of the heathen to nought: he maketh the devices of the people of none effect.”672 A surprising proportion of Clifford’s reading—not just her writing—helped substantiate her identity as landowner. What looks like devotion involved service of self, which suggests one problem with assumptions about the motives behind religious reading. The evidence so far of Clifford’s reading consists mainly of materials she in part created: The Great Picture she commissioned and The Great Books she compiled collaboratively, while she authored or authorized many of the letters, diaries, annotations, and accounts discussed. But we have more conventional evidence of Clifford’s reading in several printed books she owned. Association copies include Philip Sidney’s Arcadia; A Mirror for Magistrates; John Barclay’s Argenis; Anthony Weldon’s The Court and Character of King James; John Selden’s Titles of Honor; Joannes Boemus’s The Manners, Lawes, and Customs of All Nations; George Chapman’s translation of Homer; and Livy’s Romane Historie.673 One of her Bibles, a rare-books dealer told me, is at a university in Japan; he also alluded to a large cache of her books held by descendants. A problem for scholars may be, for dealers, rich with possibility (the possibility of riches). In some cases, ownership is determined through a combination of paleography (that jagged hand) and the content of marginalia (such as the assertion that George, third earl of Cumberland, was her father; Clifford was his only legitimate child to reach adulthood).674 Some nonverbal marks—distinctive underlining or marginal crosses—are consistent across several association copies, but not all can be identified with Clifford, since books remaining in the family may be marked by others. In other cases, Clifford’s ownership is attested by an armorial binding (with initials “A D” for Anne Dorset, her Page 265 →name in her first marriage) stamped in gold along with her crest.675 Here, Clifford’s nonreading-based book use matters most: as “one of the first non-royal English women to identify her books in this way,” her choice of the Clifford rather than the Sackville family crest (that of her first husband) “mak[es] an extraordinary declaration of independence and of her own right to bear arms as Baroness Clifford.”676 Not only the contents but also the covers of her books were customized to advance Clifford’s quest. Several ghosts of books Clifford once owned also haunt the records. These include items recently examined, such as her copy of Francois De Sales’s Introduction to a Devout Life (1648); the inscription associating it with Clifford was transcribed in an addendum to Williamson’s 1922 biography after he spotted the book in a private home. According to Williamson, the note read, “This Book was begun to be read to your Ladyship in

Brougham Castle the 9 day of March, 1664–1665 by Messers Geo. Sedgwick, Thos. Strickland and John Taylor. and they made an end of reading it to you in the same Castle the 15th day of the same month.”677 The volume has vanished without further remark, likely in the dispersal of the family library. The same is true of Clifford’s copy of Henry Wotton’s Elements of Architecture (London, 1624), also spotted by Williamson at Appleby Castle in his researches.678 Another phantom is John Harington’s translation of Orlando Furioso: that Clifford owned it is verified only by a rubbing of her crest; crest, binding, and book are lost.679 Clifford’s books have also disappeared into private hands, as with Plutarch’s Morals (1603), auctioned by Sotheby’s in 1968, or her copy of Louis Turquet de Mayerne’s Generall Historie of Spaine (1612), for sale in 2000.680 When the books of public figures enter private libraries, Page 266 →so does key evidence in the history of reading—although some collectors solve this problem by generously sharing their studies of the books, as with Stephen Orgel’s treatments of Clifford’s Mirror for Magistrates.681 Some association copies also corroborate weaker evidence. Plutarch’s Morals appears in The Great Picture; the material existence of Clifford’s copy (in 1968, at least) substantiates the painted claim. However, as often in the history of reading, evidence moving us two steps forward also takes us one step back, since the 1603 copy at Sotheby’s was in English, while that in the painting is labeled as French. Perhaps Clifford read the book in more than one language with a view to polishing her second-language skills: the step back thus introduces a possible step forward. Clifford’s Arcadia, similarly, is not just in the Bodleian: it is also mentioned in her diaries and portrayed in The Great Picture.682 Again, the material book substantiates more suspect probative forms, as with the three-volume set of Pierre de la Primaudaye’s The French Academie (1602, 1605, 1610)—at least if it could be seen again, after being sighted by a book dealer in a family collection in the late twentieth century, as well as being painted in the triptych’s left panel.683 Likewise, a manuscript of John Harington’s translation of Petrarch’s Praise of a Solitary Life with Clifford’s papers in Cumbria supports her claim to have read such a text after inheriting it from her mother.684 Finally, Clifford’s heavily annotated Argenis correlates not only with its portrayal in The Great Picture but with remarks by Rainbowe about Clifford’s commendation of a book he mistakenly identifies as “William Barklay’s dispute with Bellarmine.” Rainbowe says Clifford remarked that the former had well stated a main point, and opposed that learned cardinal, for giving too much power, even in temporals, to the Pope, over kings and secular princes; which, she seemed to think, the main thing aimed at by followers of that court [was] to pretend a claim only to govern directly in spirituals; but to intend chiefly (though indirectly) Page 267 →to hook in temporals, and in them to gain power, dominion, and tribute; money and rule being the gods to which the Roman courtiers and their partisans chiefly sacrifice.685 Rainbowe’s elaboration suggests the complexity of Clifford’s reading and of our attempts to interpret her motives in reading what she did. John (not William) Barclay’s Argenis—which “criticizes the position of Roberto Bellarmine (1542–1621), Jesuit cardinal, who defended the Catholic Church to Englishmen during the reign of King James I”686—is memorably discussed by Clifford in relation to its religious critique, even though the allegorical romance could otherwise be considered recreational or even scandalous reading material (often treated as a roman Г clef satirizing bigwigs).687 Our understanding of Clifford’s valuation of Argenis is enriched by triangulating the evidence: the book’s representation in The Great Picture; the Bishop’s remarks on her interpretation; and her own extensive annotations in the copy that survives. In her Argenis, as in other volumes she owned, we see Clifford’s pervasive accountancy, which shaped not only her financial records, diaries, and annals but also the title pages of her books, where notes assert (as in the De Sales inscription above) precisely when, where, and with whom her readings took place; similarly detailed inscriptions are found in her Arcadia, Titles of Honor, Argenis, and Mirror for Magistrates.688 While we often have only Clifford’s say-so in such inscriptions, as in her diaries, such particularized claims are sometimes supported by the fact that other readers were present. Named co-readers were also witnesses should anyone have queried Clifford’s claims during their lifetimes. Rainbowe’s claims in his funeral sermon were similarly witnessed: among the mourners, those who visited Clifford’s chamber (and her 1676 diary records many visitors) would have noted discrepancies between his depiction of her inscription-riddled room and their

observations. Even The Great Picture had many witnesses whose potential testimony renders it more reliable evidence of Clifford’s reading—since she would have been hard-pressed, after welcoming guests to Appleby or Skipton Castle (where copies once hung), to hold up her end of the conversation if she were not familiar with the tomes portrayed. Page 268 →Little evidence for Clifford’s text life is simple or straightforward to assess: it is fragmentary, self-reported, or from otherwise partial parties (like a eulogist, who customarily skews toward effusion). Some of the most intriguing evidence of her reading consists of mere flecks of paint—even if some flecks spell out inscriptions that certainly belonged to Clifford’s reading experience whenever she passed the paintings on display. However, a closer look at the painting—the kind of scrutiny made possible by recent digital developments—suggests that at least one inscription has been painted over: we must wonder if Clifford read what we read, in this case, about her reading.689 Problems with authenticating Clifford’s reading abound, since even written remarks in her voice are rarely in her hand; worse, many are not even in the hands of her contemporaries, since the diaries survive only in later copies. Barring a few association copies, most (if they ever existed) have vanished. What can one possibly make of such problematic proofs of reading? I propose to make a book-length study of Clifford’s lifetime of reading experiences, practices, and materials—her bookscape—with edited excerpts organized chronologically to help readers understand what it was like to be Anne Clifford, reading, by reading not only what she did but as she did: with an eye to her individual, social, and cultural habits, constraints, biases, mentalities and methods. Headnotes will condition readers (incompletely, of course) to interpret as early moderns did: typologically, or in quest of sententious commonplaces. Editions of loose papers will feature along with inscriptions Clifford composed for, and later read upon, the walls of various castles, churches, and monuments. Once this representation of Clifford’s lifetime as a reader is complete, my aim will be to join those who might mine that representation for what else it might reveal: through comparative studies of other readers like Elizabeth Isham—who, like Clifford, read works by Du Bartas, Ovid, Spenser, Herbert, Donne, Chaucer, Hatton, and Sorocold—or of women reading in other locales or cultural circumstances, such as the nuns for whom “convent libraries were fundamentally a communal resource,” not wholly unlike Clifford’s commonplace bedroom.690 Even a Page 269 →bound anthology of Clifford’s reading, in other words, must remain a work in progress—as the best kind of reading, like its history, tends to do.

Postscript: Proof of Work in Progress, and Progress in the Work of Proof As has become apparent in editing this volume, some problems and possibilities in early modern women’s bookscapes crystallize in a three-page list of sixty-three printed books and manuscripts, endorsed on August 28, 1739, as “A Catalogue of the Books in the Closset in the Passage Room next the Pantry in Skipton Castle.”691 Skipton was among the properties Clifford inherited from her father’s family in 1643, then renovated and inhabited periodically until her death in 1676. In the current volume, Marie-Louise Coolahan and Mark Empey count the books inventoried in 1739 as the personal property of Clifford, who had been dead for over half a century when the list was composed (see chapter 12). Their rationale for attributing the books to Clifford is that the items listed predate her death;692 the matter is not, however, necessarily that simple, and its complexity points to the vitality of work unfolding in this field and the challenges of defining seemingly basic terms like “ownership” or “association” in relation to books. Although the list in question was not compiled until 1739, none of the dated books is from later than the early seventeenth century, a period when Clifford, by her own account, was reading widely and deeply: sometime after the death of her second husband, she wrote that, during both of her marriages (1609 to 1624 and 1630 to 1650), she “made good bookesВ .В .В . [her] companions.”693 The fact that the vast majority of the years of publication cited in the inventory fall within Clifford’s lifetime seems to favor attributing those books to her, but other items long predate her birth: the alchemical manuscripts, for instance, dated by Spence to the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.694 Moreover, Clifford was not the only person with access to SkiptonPage 270 → Castle in the period correlating with these dates of publication; during the first decades of the seventeenth century, the property was held by an uncle and cousin. On their own, dates offer insufficient evidence of Clifford’s

ownership of all or any books in the inventory. The localization of the book-bearing architectural “passage” within Skipton Castle—a property Clifford owned, renovated, and inhabited periodically over about a quarter century—is similarly insufficient to attribute ownership to Clifford, since her ancestors and descendants also lived there. More significant than dates or place alone, however, is the fact that a number of inventoried items overlap with books in The Great Picture. Both sources feature works by Plutarch, Du Bartas, Sidney, Spenser, and Daniel; the inventory includes a response to Camden, and the portrait the work of Camden himself.695 Again, however, an association with Clifford does not allow definite attribution. Except Sidney’s Arcadia, moreover, none of the inventoried works is identical with any portrayed in The Great Picture. Where the inventory has “Plutarch of the Education of Children,” the painting has his Morals (from which that essay is drawn) as an entire volume. The inventory has what sounds like Spenser’s “Shepherds Calender,” while the painting more comprehensively features “All Edmond Spencers Workes.” The inventoried Plutarch, Du Bartas, Sidney, Spenser, and Daniel suggest Page 271 →that a reader with interests similar to Clifford’s collected these books, just as Clifford commissioned a bibliographic gathering on canvas. That reader was possibly Clifford, but many of these works were relatively popular, which weakens our ability to identify them with one person, even based on overlapping interests. Yet more may be done to associate some of the 1739 items with Clifford. The fourth item is “My Lord of Cumberlands Sea Voyages 1586 & 1587,” and Clifford expressed interest in similar documents in November 1619: “Sir Francis Slingsby came hither to me and read to me in the sea papers upon my father’s voyages.”696 As late as 1675, Clifford remained interested in such materials, since her account books record her payment “for writing over a coppy of the book of my ffathers George Earle of Cumberland’s Sea voyages.”697 The first item inventoried in 1739, moreover—“A folio Manuscript being a Translation of Boetuis dedicated to the Countess of Cumberland”—is clearly associated with Clifford’s mother (the countess in question), from whom we know she inherited books; and a copy of “Boetius his Philosophicall comfort” also appears in The Great Picture.698 Could the painted version represent her mother’s copy, bequeathed to her daughter? It could abstractly, but not in a stricter sense, since it does not appear to be a folio. The next item in the 1739 list, however—“The Praise of Private Life, a folio Manuscript”—seems identical with another book of her mother’s that Clifford claimed to read: “This day I made an end of my Lady’s book in the praise of a Solitary Life.”699 A manuscript of a similar name is with Clifford’s archive.700 These three items (the sea voyages, the Boethius, and Praise of Private Life) appear to hold distinctive, even unique, links to Clifford—and, as a combination, only to Clifford. Other items inventoried seem even more distinctly associated with Clifford and—importantly—dissociated from her father’s relations (that uncle Page 272 →and cousin who preceded her at Skipton Castle). The third item inventoried is “A Brief Commemoration of the Voyage of the Right Honble the Lord Buckhurst in his Embassage to the States of Holland and Zealand.” Although this item is not dated, the Lord Buckhurst in question appears to have been first of that title: the Thomas Sackville (ca. 1536–1608) who undertook official travels to the Netherlands in 1587 and sent home related reports to the queen and privy council;701 he also became Clifford’s grandfather-in-law through her first marriage, and we know she was interested in his works because, in her copy of A Mirror for Magistrates, marginal notes in her voice remark on his famous “Induction” to that book.702 Two items further down the 1739 list appears another text with a Sackville connection—while the only connection between Skipton Castle and the Sackvilles, as far as I know, came through Clifford’s marriage into that family. This next text is labelled “The case of Anne Glemham presented to the Lords of the Counsell, no date.” Glemham was the daughter of Henry, who married Lady Anne Sackville, in turn the daughter of the Thomas mentioned above, and thus Clifford’s aunt-in-law by her first marriage. There was some resemblance between the lawsuits undertaken by these Annes with respect to their fathers’ estates, at least according to one account of “the efforts [of] Glemham’s wifeВ .В .В . to secure the largest possible share of her indulgent father’s estate,” which efforts apparently “had a disastrous effect on Buckhurst’s administration of the lord treasurership,” such that “in 1602 her venality and influence on Buckhurst were the subject of a

libel involving the whole Sackville family.”703 Anne Clifford, far more than any other inhabitant of Skipton Castle throughout the seventeenth century, had personal, marital, and possibly legal reasons to interest herself in this case. The most compelling association between the books inventoried in 1739 and Anne Clifford—and only her—is the correlation between a single listed item and a manuscript created apparently at her behest: an item listed in 1739 as “Certain Notes etc. for the better Understanding of the two Books of Aristotles Rhetoricks concerning Affections.” These notes match well with material Clifford’s household officer, William Watkinson, copied for her: Page 273 →“Aristotle on affection from his вЂRhetoricks’ on 16 November 1669.”704 How many copies of this excerpt were likely made—by how many people connected to Skipton Castle? It seems reasonable to conclude that these items were one and the same; but, having disappeared, one is the same as none. Aware of the varied limits of these pieces and kinds of evidence, but resting on unique and varied associations between several inventoried items and Clifford, it feels reasonable to postulate that many 1739 items came to Clifford from family sources, while others (like the Aristotle) were first acquired by Clifford herself. Many of these books were likely Clifford’s for a significant period of time—since her mother’s death in 1616, in some cases, and since her inheritance of Skipton in 1643, in others. Yet such claims suit different contexts to different extents. The 1739 inventory would not fit under Clifford’s name in Private Libraries in Renaissance England (PLRE), with its cut-off date of 1650 for inventories of interest; even if it could be proven to itemize works untouched since her death in 1676, that would still be too late. More significantly, PLRE interests itself in self-contained collections attributed to one owner; the fact that several 1739 items are associated with prior owners renders such attribution impossible. The fact that a few items inventoried show strong associations with Clifford, moreover, does not lend the whole list that association, and PLRE treats lists first and foremost. My project on Clifford is, in contrast, less defined by ownership and a self-contained corpus of evidence; instead, I seek all evidence of Clifford’s reading experiences, which of course extended beyond materials she might call her own. In this framework, problematic proof offers new possibilities. That does not make PLRE right and me or Coolahan and Empey wrong about the inventory: it only means we read it through different lenses to diverse ends. The 1739 list thus remains an intriguing locus of problems and possibilities for anyone trying to generate comprehensive and responsible accounts of the text life of Anne Clifford or the wider landscape of early modern women and their books.

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Afterword Mapping Early Modern Women’s Literary History Margaret J. M. Ezell One way of conceptualizing English literary history done in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was to imagine the past as being a landscape that could be mapped using distinctive landmarks, like a modern tourist map, indicating scenic spots not to be missed. Samuel Taylor Coleridge in Biographia Literaria famously placed Shakespeare and Milton occupying the poetic mountaintop of Parnassus, “the two glory-smitten summits of the poetic mountain.”705 The organization of literary historical narratives around individual great writers lent itself well to such spatial conceptions of literary landscapes, with prominent writers occupying the high places and lesser ones dwelling on the slopes and wandering the valleys. Such imagined maps dealing with the early modern period offered few guides to seeing women writers and claiming the map reader’s attention for them—Queen Elizabeth and Sir Thomas More’s learned daughters no doubt deserved a lofty peak, Katherine Philips might be permitted to occupy a pleasant hillside, but Aphra Behn surely would be consigned to a slough. For readers of such literary histories, what was important was mapping the individual writers and their accomplishments, not their audiences or their habits as readers. Page 275 →In contrast, this landmark collection of essays on early modern women and their books asks that we reimagine literary mapping: can we find evidence of women’s engagement with reading and writing? Can we then map this new evidence not as part of a competitive activity designed to demonstrate artistic merit or to fix an author with a literary pin in their allotted place but instead to reveal complex networks of exchange and support and thus to reimagine the foundations of early modern women’s literary history? From Virginia Woolf’s 1920s imaginative creation of Shakespeare’s unhappy literary sister to the 1980s formulations of women’s literary history, as the introduction to this volume notes, the shared perspective was that women’s absence from the literary landscape was due in part because of their supposed illiteracy and in part because of cultural constraints that did not permit them to appear there. The essays in this collection draw on not only recent work reconceptualizing the nature of literacy across social classes—who read and what they read—but also of the ways in which material artefacts and evidence of women’s involvement in literary culture can be recovered and interpreted—how they read and to what ends. The continuing development of important databases such as the PLRE and data-mining tools as highlighted by the RECIRC Projects and the creative use of OPACs reveal that what initially seemed a barren landscape may indeed have a sizeable population, and they are only at the beginning of their work. The case studies of individual early modern women in this volume do invite us to consider what experiences of reading and writing were unique to a powerful figure such as Katherine Parr or Margaret Cavendish, but they also encourage us to consider them in the context of the experiences and habits shared with women occupying very different social positions and roles. We see for example in the textual evidence left behind by queens and duchesses links to the evidence of reading and writing practices discovered in gentry family households in the provinces, in London, and in the New World. Cloistered nuns in English convents on the Continent and lay Catholics abroad in England likewise had sophisticated patterns and structures to foster and enable reading, writing, and making books, as well as important social networks to circulate those ideas and writings. This is a different type of “mapping” of literary history than that suggested in Franco Moretti’s recent attempts to quantitatively analyze genres, Graphs, Maps, Trees, but it shares with his controversial text a desire to provide a new way of thinking about literary landscapes. These essays, too, challenge a type of history writing where the “rare and curious works, that do Page 276 →not repeat themselves, [the] exceptional,” dominate our sense of who occupies the landscape.706 Reading the essays in this collection, one is permitted to shift one’s gaze from “the extraordinary to the everyday, from exceptional events to the large mass of facts, ” to move away from the image of the early modern woman as defined by isolation and anomaly, a passive

figure placed in the shallows and the shadows of literary history.707 Mapping, as opposed to other diachronic or linear schemes used to record women’s participation in the past, such as lists of eminent women or genealogies of influence, lets us see more than one figure at a time and as they are engaged in more than one activity. In addition to identifying prominent places from which we can navigate from one point to another, maps also are tools that permit us to visualize literary activities spatially, areas of overlap as well as where the boundaries traditionally have been drawn to make them distinct, proprietary territories. Typically, we investigate readers and writers in separate studies, using different approaches as they are different fields. In the bookscape offered in this collection, we can see evidence of each activity happening but also the shared places, where readers in convents or communities, for example, were also writers and what these writers did with their readings. Rather than leave the book on a writer or an owner’s shelf, using this type of literary mapping, we can follow it through space as well as time, tracking Margaret Cavendish’s strategic targeting of the universities as homes for her books or finding through electronic means Frances Wolfreston’s volumes scattered far and wide. This in turn leads to a consideration of early modern women as collaborative agents rather than isolated ones in a literary landscape. In her list, Elizabeth Isham proudly identified titles as being “her books,” but it was in the context of her literate and literary family that she read, wrote about them, and preserved them. Geographically, Little Gidding is not typically on the same map as New England, but ways in which the Ferrar and Bradstreet families shared, created, and preserved their books and readings are revealed in their patterns of habits and practices. In the same way that the study of early modern drama has moved away from the idea of the solitary Shakespeare alone in his garret, recognizing in women’s books the markers of familial and social reading and writing assists us in seeing women as collaborativePage 277 → agents in a broader sense of the term: it expands the notion of collaboration from its association with writing for the commercial London theater, where several male authors worked at various stages on a play, or as John Aubrey depicted Beaumont and Fletcher, two bachelors sharing a unified dramatic sensibility as well as a room and “one wench in the house between them, which they did so admire; the same cloathes and cloake, &c, betweene them.”708 Sharing, annotating, copying, and making books, early modern women are actively part of these larger practices of collaborative reading and writing. Perhaps this is one reason why it has been so hard to see these female figures in the literary landscape. The women readers and book owners aspired to create libraries, not commercial monuments. While we typically think of personal libraries as private, quiet spaces, these early modern women’s bookscapes are sites of complex networks of exchange; as James Raven suggests in his geography of London printing and publishing, place and spaces are connected to practice and activity, with sophisticated networks of support and sharing.709 Instead of the isolation and singularity of early modern women writers and readers imagined by previous generations, we see in their bookscapes, too, evidence of intricately connected, networked patterns and habits of reading, linking them with family, community, and the world of ideas.

Footnotes 1. David McKitterick, “Women and Their Books in Seventeenth-Century England: The Case of Elizabeth Puckering,” Library, 7th ser., 1.4 (2000): 363. An extensive body of work focuses exclusively or primarily on the libraries, books, and reading practices of elite, educated men in the early modern period. The impetus for much of this scholarship was Lisa Jardine and Anthony Grafton’s “вЂStudied for Action’: How Gabriel Harvey Read His Livy,” Past and Present 129 (1990): 30–78, which mapped a methodology for historicizing connections among Renaissance texts, readers, and historical action. Important monographs and essay collections on this subject include: Jennifer Andersen and Elizabeth M. Sauer, eds., Books and Readers in Early Modern England: Material Studies (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002); Private Libraries in Renaissance England: A Collection and Catalogue of Tudor and Early Stuart Book-Lists, gen. ed. R. J. Fehrenbach, 9 vols. (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 1992–2017); H. J. Jackson, Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001); Sears Reynolds Jayne, Library Catalogues of the English Renaissance: Reissue with New Preface and Notes (Godalming, Surrey: St Paul’s Bibliographies, 1983); Elisabeth Leedham-Green and Teresa Webber, eds., The Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland, vol. I: To 1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Giles Mandelbrote and K. A. Manley, eds., The Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland, vol. II: 1640–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); James P. Carley, ed., The Libraries of King Henry VIII (London: British Library in Association with the British Academy, 2000); James A. Riddell and Stanley Stewart, Jonson’s Spenser: Evidence and Historical Criticism (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1995); Kevin Sharpe, Reading Revolutions: The Politics of Reading in Early Modern England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000); Kevin Sharpe and Stephen N. Zwicker, eds., Reading, Society and Politics in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); William H. Sherman, John Dee: The Politics of Reading and Writing in the English Renaissance (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995) and Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008); Virginia F. Stern, Gabriel Harvey: His Life, Marginalia and Library (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979); Germaine Warkentin, Joseph L. Black, and William R. Bowen, eds., The Library of the Sidneys of Penshurst Place Circa 1665 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013). 2. Heidi Brayman Hackel and Catherine E. Kelly, eds., Reading Women: Literacy, Authorship, and Culture in the Atlantic World, 1500–1800 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 3. See note 3 for other studies. 3. This scholarship is extensive. For representative early work, see the essays in Silent but for the Word: Tudor Women as Patrons, Translators, and Writers of Religious Works, ed. Margaret P. Hannay (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1985); Victoria E. Burke maintains that the study of early modern women’s manuscript compilations encourages examinations of writers “who are representative of a more widespread literary practice” (“Women and Early Seventeenth-Century Manuscript Culture: Four Miscellanies,” The Seventeenth Century 12.2 [1997]: 147). Mary Ellen Lamb, “The Sociality of Margaret Hoby’s Reading Practices and the Representation of Reformation Interiority,” Critical Survey 12.2 (2000): 17–32; Eve Rachele Sanders and Margaret W. Ferguson, eds., Literacies in Early Modern England, Special Issue of Critical Survey 14.1 (2002): 1–8; Margaret Ferguson, Dido’s Daughters: Literacy, Gender, and Empire in Early Modern England and France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003); James Daybell, “Interpreting Letters and Reading Script: Evidence for Female Education and Literacy in Tudor England,” History of Education 34.6 (November 2005): 695–715; Edith Snook, Women, Reading, and the Cultural Politics of Early Modern England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005); Edith Snook, “Reading Women,” in The Cambridge Companion to Early Modern Women’s Writing, ed. Laura L. Knoppers (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 40–53. 4. See, for example, Paul Morgan, “Frances Wolfreston and вЂHor Bouks’: A Seventeenth-Century Woman Book Collector,” The Library, 6th series 11 (1989): 197–219; McKitterick, “Women and Their Books”; James P. Carley, The Books of King Henry VIII and His Wives (London: The British Library, 2004); Heidi Brayman Hackel, “The Countess of Bridgewater’s London Library,” in Books and Readers in Early Modern England, 138–59, and “Consuming Readers: Ladies, Lapdogs,

and Libraries,” in Reading Material in Early Modern England: Print, Gender, and Literacy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 196–255; Stephen Orgel, “Marginal Maternity: Reading Lady Anne Clifford’s A Mirror for Magistrates,” in Printing and Parenting in Early Modern England, ed. Douglas A. Brooks (Burlington: Ashgate, 2005), 267–91; William H. Sherman, “Reading the Matriarchive,” in Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 53–67. 5. Recent work in the field includes Valerie Schutte, Mary I and the Art of Book Dedications: Royal Women, Power, and Persuasion (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015); Femke Molekamp, Women and the Bible in Early Modern England: Religious Reading and Writing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); Helen Smith, “Grossly Material Things”: Women and Book Production in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Kate Narveson, Bible Readers and Lay Writers in Early Modern England: Gender and Self-Definition in an Emergent Writing Culture (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2012); Andrew Cambers, Godly Reading: Print, Manuscript, and Puritanism in Early Modern England, 1580–1720 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Jennifer Richards and Fred Schurink, eds., “The Textuality and Materiality of Reading in Early Modern England,” Special Issue of Huntington Library Quarterly 73.3 (2010); Joseph L. Black and R. J. Fehrenbach, eds., Private Libraries in Renaissance England, vol. 8 (2014); Heidi Brayman Hackel and Catherine E. Kelly, eds., Reading Women. 6. Heather Wolfe, “Reading Bells and Loose Papers: Reading and Writing Practices of the English Benedictine Nuns of Cambrai and Paris,” in Early Modern Women’s Manuscript Writing, ed. Victoria E. Burke and Jonathan Gibson (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), 135–56; Caroline Bowden, “The Library of Mildred Cooke Cecil, Lady Burghley,” The Library 6.1 (2005): 3–29, and “Building Libraries in Exile: The English Convents and Their Book Collections in the Seventeenth Century,” British Catholic History 32.3 (2015): 343–82; Andrew Cambers, “Readers’ Marks and Religious Practice: Margaret Hoby’s Marginalia,” in Tudor Books and Readers: Materiality and the Construction of Meaning, ed. John N. King (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 211–31; Julie Crawford, “Reconsidering Early Modern Women’s Reading, or, How Margaret Hoby Read Her Mornay,” Huntington Library Quarterly 73.2 (2010): 193–223; and Rosalind Smith, “вЂLe Pouvoir de faire dire’: Marginalia in Mary Queen of Scots’ Book of Hours,” in Material Cultures of Early Modern Women’s Writing, ed. Patricia Pender and Rosalind Smith (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2014), 55–75. 7. Robert Darnton, The Case for Books: Past, Present, and Future (New York: PublicAffairs, 2010); David Pearson, “The English Private Library in the Seventeenth Century,” Library 13.4 (2012): 379. 8. While Raven refers to his titular term as a “neologism” (Bookscape: Geographies of Printing and Publishing in London Before 1800 [London: British Library, 2014], 144), others previously invoked it: George Edgar Slusser, in Mindscapes: The Geographies of Imagined Worlds (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Press, 1989), referred to “the science-fiction bookscape” (101); a year later, Thomas J. Roberts contrasted paperback and literary bookscapes in An Aesthetics of Junk Fiction (Athens: Georgia University Press, 1990), 186; half a decade after, Tanure Ojaide alluded to “the scanty literary bookscape” in “New Trends in Modern African Poetry,” Research in African Literatures 26.1 (1995): 5. As early as 1969, Michael Banks disparaged an “arid Bookscape” in a review in International Affairs 45.2 (1969): 299. Princeton University has a children’s gallery of the same name (“Explore Bookscape, ” https://princeton.edu/cotsen/gallery-programs/our-gallery). Richard Rabinowitz relies on a variation in Curating America: Journeys through Storyscapes of the American Past (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016). 9. Raven, Bookscapes, 5–6, 144. 10. James Raven, “Memorializing a London Bookscape: The Mapping and Reading of Paternoster Row and St. Paul’s Churchyard, 1695–1814,” in Order and Connexion: Studies in Bibliography and Book History: Selected Papers from the Munby Seminar, Cambridge, July 1994, ed. R. C. Alston (Cambridge: Boydell & Brewer, 1997), 178. 11. See the Oxford English Dictionary for the eighteenth century’s rock-skip, prison-scape, and seaskip and the early nineteenth century’s sky-scape, noonscape, water-scape, streetscape, ice-scape, riverscape, city-scape, town-scape, and cloud-scape. 12. OED, s.v. “scape,” sense n.4.

13. Kirschenbaum, “Bookscapes: Modeling Books in Electronic Space,” https://mkirschenbaum.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/bookscapes.pdf; Prose, “Bookscapes & Times That Never Were,” https://theprose.com/post/33935/bookscapes-times-that-never-were 14. A. Gibson in J. Guillim, Display of Heraldrie (London, 1610), (a)3v. 15. See, for instance, PLRE.Folger (http://plre.folger.edu; discussed in detail in chapter 10); the Reading Experience Database (RED), 1450–1945 (http://www.open.ac.uk/Arts/RED); the Consortium of European Research Libraries’s Material Evidence in Incunabula (http://data.cerl.org/mei/_search) and Early Bookowners in Britain: British Provenances from 1450 to 1550 (https://ebob.cerl.org/cgi-bin /search.pl?start=true); John Morris and Philip Oldfield’s British Armorial Bindings (https://armorial.library.utoronto.ca); Jeremy Dibbell’s “Legacy Libraries” in Librarything (https://www.librarything.com/legacylibraries); David Pearson’s English Book Owners in the Seventeenth Century: A Work in Progress Listing (http://www.bibsoc.org.uk/content/english-book-ownersseventeeth-century); and Annotated Books Online (http://www.annotatedbooksonline.com). 16. OED, s.v. “landscape,” 2a. 17. John Milton, “L’Allegro,” Poems of Mr. John Milton (London, 1645), 33. 18. The essays on Catholic women that dominate this section of Women’s Bookscapes provide a useful complement to studies of earlier, late-medieval Catholic women and their books, such as Mary C. Erler, Women, Reading, and Piety in Late Medieval England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); David N. Bell, What Nuns Read: Books and Libraries in Medieval English Nunneries (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1995); and Ann M. Hutchison, “What the Nuns Read: Literary Evidence from the English Bridgettine House, Syon Abbey,” Medieval Studies 57 (1995): 205–22. 19. Frances E. Dolan, “Reading, Work and Catholic Women’s Biographies,” English Literary Renaissance 33.3 (2003): 328–57; Heather Wolfe, “Reading Bells and Loose Papers.” 20. See Ezell, The Patriarch’s Wife: Literary Evidence and the History of the Family (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987, 2009), Writing Women’s Literary History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), and Social Authorship and the Advent of Print (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999); and Ezell and Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe, eds., Cultural Artifacts and the Production of Meaning (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994). I am grateful to Lady Elizabeth Ashcombe for allowing me to examine Parr’s books at Sudeley Castle, Winchcombe, and to Derek Maddock (Sudeley Archivist) for facilitating and assisting my research. I thank James P. Carley and Julie Crawford for commenting on this chapter and I thank Carleton University for a Research Development Grant. 21. This scholarship was pioneered by Janel Mueller. All three of Parr’s published works are printed in Katherine Parr: Complete Works and Correspondence, ed. Janel Mueller (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). 22. According to John Foxe, Parr’s enemies sought to “understand what books, by law forbidden, she had in her closet” and decided to search the “closet and coffers” of three of her ladies. John Foxe, Acts and Monuments (London, 1570; RSTC 11223), 1423. See Thomas S. Freeman, “One Survived: The Account of the Katherine Parr in Foxe’s вЂBooks of Martyrs,’” in Henry VIII and the Court: Art, Politics and Performance, ed. Thomas Betteridge and Suzannah Lipscomb (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), 235–52. 23. Katherine Parr, Mueller, 159. He also claimed that “queens and ladies of most high estate and progeny” have set aside “courtly dalliance” in order to “embrace virtuous exercises of reading and writing.” 24. Ibid., 94–95. This dedication is dated September 30, 1545. 25. James P. Carley, ed. The Libraries of King Henry VIII (London: British Library in Association with the British Academy, 2000), lxi. For the inventories, see 273–79. After becoming queen, Parr also took possession of four books that had belonged to Katherine Howard: two Missals, a New Testament, and a French book. Ibid., 31. 26. Ibid., lxiv–lxv. 27. Ibid., 273–79.

28. For these sources, see Micheline White, “The Psalms, War, and Royal Iconography: Katherine Parr’s Psalms or Prayers (1544) and Henry VIII as David,” Renaissance Studies 29.4 (2015): 554–75; C. Fenno Hoffman Jr., “Catherine Parr as a Woman of Letters,” Huntington Library Quarterly 23.4 (1960): 349–67; and Kimberly Ann Coles, Religion, Reform, and Women’s Writing in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 68–74. 29. Frances B. Rose-Troup, “Two Book Bills of Katherine Parr,” Library, 3rd ser. 2 (1911): 40–48. Carley, Libraries, lxi–lxii. 30. For brief discussions of these books see, James P. Carley, The Books of King Henry VIII and His Wives (London: The British Library, 2004), 138–42; Carley, Libraries, lxii; and Mueller, Katherine Parr, 37–38, 47–48, 625. 31. A Sammelband is a book in which separately printed books have been bound together by the owner. In this case, five books are by Thomas Lupset and one is by Thomas Elyot. All were printed in London by Thomas Berthelet. The books are: A Sermon of Saint Chrysostom, translated by Thomas Lupset (1542; RSTC 14639); A Sweet and Devout Sermon of Holy Saint Cyprian of Mortality of Man. The Rules of a Christian Life made by Picus, earl of Mirandola, translated by Thomas Elyot (1539; RSTC 6158); Thomas Lupset’s An Exhortation to Young Men (1538; RSTC 16937); Thomas Lupset’s A Treatise of Charity (1539; RSTC 16941); Here be Gathered the Counsells of Saint Isidore, translated Thomas Lupset (1539; RSTC 14270.5); and Thomas Lupset’s A Compendious and a Very Fruitful Treatise teaching the Way of Dying Well (1541; RSCT 16935). The printing dates given by E. Charlton are often incorrect. E. Charlton, “Devotional Tracts Belonging to Queen Katherine Parr,” Notes and Queries 44 (1850): 212. 32. Berthelet’s title page compartment features the date 1534, but this book was printed in 1542. 33. In 1951, the book was sent to the British Museum by the owner (Mrs. Dent-Brocklehurst) and by Sotheby & Co. for appraisal, and the museum’s experts concluded that the signature and handwritten verses were in Parr’s hand. Letter from Sotheby and Co. to Mrs. Dent-Brocklehurst, December 12, 1951. Sudeley Castle. Susan E. James, Kateryn Parr: The Making of a Queen (Aldershot: 1999), 211–12, and Mueller, Katherine Parr, 47, agree that the verses are in Parr’s hand. I have examined the handwriting and I agree with this attribution. 34. Mueller, Katherine Parr, 47. The book has other writing in it as well. The recto of the flyleaf has a poem, “Respect,” but it has been difficult for scholars to identify the hand. Although Charlton and Mueller (39–40) have ascribed it to Henry VIII, the British Museum experts from 1951 and Ray Siemens express doubts. R. G. Siemens, “вЂRespect’: Verses Attributed to Henry VIII in a Prayer Book Owned by Katherine Parr,” Notes and Queries, n.s. 46.2 (1999): 186–89. James identifies the hand as Thomas Seymour’s. James, Kateryn Parr, 413. I will not consider this poem in this essay. I would like to add that there is a trace of another reader as well. In An Exhortation to Young Men by Thomas Lupset, an unknown reader has placed a mark next to a passage (32r) warning lay readers to submit themselves to the biblical interpretations taught by “doctors.” It is hard not to read this intriguing annotation in relation to Parr’s apparent near arrest in 1546. 35. For recent essays that foreground this approach to women’s marginalia see “The Bookscape, ” note 6. 36. Henry owned works by Chrysostom printed before the break from Rome. See Carley, Libraries, 351–52. Here I focus on the English translations that appeared in the 1540s. 37. Parr’s extractions from Ecclesiasticus are clearly tied to the Chrysostom sermon, but they also resonate with the fifth item in the Sammelband, Here be Gathered the Counsells of Saint Isidore (1539). 38. These handwritten annotations were certainly part of Parr’s and Henry’s personal reading, but because the monarchs read with others and knew that their reading was observed, I will also treat the annotations as performative. 39. See Wendy Mayer, “John Chrysostom” in Wiley Blackwell Companion to Patristics, ed. Ken Parry (Chichester, UK: Wiley Blackwell, 2015), 141–54. 40. In a study of Margaret Hoby’s marginalia, Julie Crawford argues that a signature can function as a kind of organizing principle, identifying marginalia as traces of reading “under a name” or under the aegis of “a person, a family, a household, a faction, a cause.” Julie Crawford, “Reconsidering Early Modern Women’s Reading, or, How Margaret Hoby Read Her Mornay,” Huntington Library

Quarterly 73.2 (2010): 211. 41. Charles Chavalary, A Compendious treatise of Saint Chrysostom proving that no man is hurt but of himself (London: John Mayler for John Gough, 1542; RSTC 14640). 42. J. Christopher Warner, Henry VIII’s Divorce: Literature and the Politics of the Printing Press (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1998), 82. 43. Carley, Libraries, 238. 44. Personal communication with James Carley. 45. For differing assessment of Parr’s involvement in Cheke’s appointment, see James, Kateryn Parr, 138–42 and Maria Dowling, “The Gospel and the Court: Reformation under Henry VIII,” in Protestantism and the National Church in Sixteenth Century England, ed. Peter Lake and Maria Dowling (London: Croom Helm, 1987), 36–77. 46. John Cheke, trans. ΤΟΥ ΕΝ ΑΓΙΟΙΣ ΙΩΑΝΝΟΥ ΤΟΥ ΧΡΥΣΟΣΤΟΜΟΥ ὉΜΙΛΙΑΙ ΔΥΟ. . . . D. Joannis Chrysostomi, homilæ duæ, nunc primum in lucem æditæ, et ad Sereniss. Angliæ Regem latinæ factæ (London: Reyner Wolfe, 1543; RSTC 14634). The sermons were In Kalendas and a sermon on 1 Thessalonians 4:13. 47. Winthrop S. Hudson, The Cambridge Connection and the Elizabethan Settlement of 1559 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1980), 74n29. 48. Thomas Chaloner, trans. An Homily of Saint John Chrysostom, upon that saying of St. Paul (London: Berthelet, 1544; RSTC 14637), A1v. This is the sermon on 1 Thessalonians 4:13. 49. John Cheke, trans. D. Joannis Chrysostomi de Providentia Dei, ac Fato, orationes sex (London: Reyner Wolfe, 1545; RSTC 14630). This book does not include the fancy Greek font. 50. Cheke, trans. ΤΟΥ ΕΝ ΑΓΙΟΙΣ, A2r. I thank Tristan Wicks for helping me with the translations. 51. Ibid., A2v. 52. Peter Blayney, The Stationers’ Company and the Printers of London, 1501–1557 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 1: 493. 53. Cheke, trans. ΤΟΥ ΕΝ ΑΓΙΟΙΣ, A3r. 54. The question of whether Cheke used the translations to subtly advocate for further religious reform has been debated. Aysha Pollnitz argues that the translations align with the views in the King’s Book. Princely Education in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 144–45. On the other hand, John F. McDiarmid previously argued that they subtly press for further reformation (in “Sir John Cheke’s Preface to De Superstitione,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 48 [1997]: 100–120), and plans to expand on this point in an upcoming study (personal communication). There is no evidence that Henry read these gift-books carefully. 55. David G. Selwyn, The Library of Thomas Cranmer (Oxford: Oxford Bibliographical Society, 1996), 47–48, 59. 56. Thomas Cranmer, An Exhortation unto Prayer . . . Also a Litany with Suffrages (London: Berthelet, 1544; RSTC 10620), C4. Cranmer’s annotated copy of D. Joannis Chrysostomi Missa græcolatina. D. Erasmo Roterodamo interprete (Paris: Wecheli, 1537) is at Lambeth Library. Selwyn, Library, 59. 57. Parr’s book was printed on April 25 and May 25, 1544; Cranmer’s Litany was printed on May 27, 1544. 58. William H. Sherman, Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 59. 59. Kate Narveson, Bible Readers and Lay Writers in Early Modern England: Gender and Self-Definition in an Emergent Writing Culture (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2012) and Eugene R. Kintgen, Reading in Tudor England (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1996). 60. Parr’s use of Solomon and Chrysostom is particularly fascinating in light of the fact that Cheke’s gifts depicted Henry as a new Solomon welcoming Chrysostom into his court. 61. A Sermon of Saint Chrysostom, translated by Thomas Lupset (1542; RSTC 14639), A2v–3r. All subsequent parenthetical citations will be from this edition. 62. John N. King, Tudor Royal Iconography: Literature and Art in an Age of Religious Crisis (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989). 63. Anthony Cope, The History of Two the Most Noble Captains of the World, Hannibal and Scipio

(London: Berthelet, 1544; RSTC 5718), A2v–3r. See also A2r. 64. Miles Coverdale, trans., The Books of Solomon, namely: Proverbia, Ecclesiastes, Sapientia, and Ecclesiasticus, or Jesus the son of Sirach (London: Whitchurch, 1545?; RSTC 2754). See Carley, Libraries, 202. The marginalia in this book have been discussed by Michael Hattaway, “Marginalia by Henry VIII in His Copy of The Bokes of Salomon,” Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographic Society 4 (1965): 166–70; Pamela Tudor-Craig, “Henry VIII and King David,” in Early Tudor England: Proceedings of the 1987 Harlaxton Symposium, ed. Daniel Williams (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1989), 183–205; and King Henry’s Prayer Book: Facsimile and Commentary, 2 vols., Commentary by James P. Carley (London: The Folio Society, 2009), 2: 80–84. 65. Unfortunately, there is no dated colophon. The STC suggested 1544 as the date of publication but this was revised to 1545 in the RSTC. Carley decisively refutes Hattaway’s suggestion that Henry annotated this book just after the execution of Katherine Howard in 1542. King Henry’s Prayer Book, Carley 2: 82–83. 66. King Henry’s Prayer Book, Carley 2: 81–82. Hattaway characterized many annotations as being about “salvation and judgment,” but they are more about action—about obeying God’s laws and walking in his paths. 67. He also placed a manicule beside this passage: “Then shall thou walk safely in thy way, and thy foot shall not stumble.” A5r. 68. See also the manicule beside a passage about mercy and faithfulness on A4r. 69. King Henry’s Prayer Book, Carley 2: 82–84. 70. Katherine Parr, Mueller, 159. 71. Craig Muldrew, The Economy of Obligation: The Culture of Credit and Social Relations in Early Modern England (Houndsmills: Macmillan, 1998), 20–21. 72. As Edith Snook has eloquently stated, for women writers between 1540 and 1640, “being a reader provides a way of speaking a technique for authoritative self-invention.” Women, Reading and the Cultural Politics of Early Modern England (Burlington: Ashgate, 2005), 3. 73. For both authors, I am using the facsimile edition The Floures of Philosophie (1572) by Hugh Plat and A Sweet Nosgay (1573) and The Copy of a Letter (1567) by Isabella Whitney, ed. Richard Panofsky (Delmar, NY: Scholars’ Facsimilies and Reprints, 1982); pages are indicated parenthetically by signatures in the text. 74. Wendy Wall relates the infections to the dangers of circulation whether of a “wandering book” or of a woman’s sexual reputation. The Imprint of Gender: Authorship and Publication in the English Renaissance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 299. In “Isabella Whitney’s Herbs: Print Medical Texts and London Satire,” Rebecca Laroche reads Sweet Nosgay against contemporary herbals and the “economic inaccessibility of licensed medical care.” Medical Authority and Englishwomen’s Herbal Texts, 1550–1650 (Burlington: Ashgate, 2009), 142. See also Cora Fox, “Isabella Whitney’s Nosegay and the Smell of Women’s Writing,” Senses and Society 5.1 (2010): 131–43. 75. Danielle Clarke, The Politics of Early Modern Women’s Writing (Harlow: Pearson, 2001), 201. 76. Craig Muldrew notes that “this process of change [В .В .В .В ] was much more intense and problematic than in the eighteenth century” (The Economy of Obligation, 20–21). 77. For other readings see Ann Rosalind Jones, The Currency of Eros: Women’s Love Lyrics in Europe 1540–1620 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 39, and Patricia Phillippy, “The Maid’s Lawful Liberty: Service, the Household, and вЂMother B’ in Isabella Whitney’s Sweet Nosegay,” Modern Philology 95 (1998): 459. 78. Particularly good discussions of the challenge to gender ideology posed by Copy include Paul A. Marquis, “Oppositional Ideologies of Gender in Isabella Whitney’s Copy of a Letter,” in Ashgate Critical Essays on Women Writers in England, 1550–1700, vol. 3, Anne Lock, Isabella Whitney, and Aemilia Lanyer, ed. Micheline White (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009), 113–23; Jones, Currency, 43–52 and “Nets and Bridles: Early Modern Conduct Books and Sixteenth-Century Women’s Lyrics,” in Ideology of Conduct: Essays on Literature and the History of Sexuality, ed. Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse (London: Methuen, 1987), 39–72; and Clarke, Politics of Early Modern Women’s Writing, 194–200.

79. Anthony Grafton, “The Humanist as Reader,” in A History of Reading in the West, ed. Guglielmo Cavallo and Roger Chartier, trans. Lydia Cochrane (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999), 210; Lisa Jardine and Anthony Grafton, “вЂStudied for Action’: How Gabriel Harvey Read His Livy,” Past and Present 129 (1990): 30–78; Edith Snook, “Recent Studies in Early Modern Reading,” ELR 43 (2013): 367 provides a useful summary of recent work in humanist reading. 80. Timothy 2:11 (Geneva Bible [1560]); Luis Vives, Instruction of a Christian Woman, in Vives and the Renaissance Education of Women, ed. Foster Watson (New York: Longmans, 1912), 62. 81. Jean-Francois Gilmont, “Protestant Reformations and Reading,” in A History of Reading in the West, 219–23. 82. Richard Panofsky notes that these commonplaces, claimed by Plat as Senecan, were actually a “voluminous pseudo-Senecan literature of the Middle Ages” (vi) written by Publius Syrus and St. Martin of Braga, as well as “typical Tudor precepts, sentences, or proverbs” (vii). 83. Ann Rosalind Jones advances a market consideration: it is “a potentially profitable genre, the collection of Tudor commonplaces popular with Tudor audiences.” Currency, 42. Jean Howard interprets Whitney’s praise of Plat’s “rather tedious book” as tactical, as only a seeming subordination to “invite the reader into the pages of her own, rather better, florilegium.” “Textualizing an Urban Life: The Case of Isabella Whitney,” in Early Modern Autobiography: Theories, Genres, Practices, ed. Ronald Bedford, Lloyd Davis, and Philippa Kelly (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006), 222. Andrew Gordon suggests a “playful game of literary one-upmanship” not only with Plat but also with George Gascoigne’s newly published A hundredth sundrie flowres (1573). Writing Early Modern London: Memory, Text and Community (London: Palgrave, 2013), 91. 84. See Gordon, Writing Early Modern London, 91. 85. Kim Walker, Women Writers of the English Renaissance, Twayne English Authors Series, 521 (New York: Twayne, 1996), 159. 86. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “posy.” 87. Mary Crane, Framing Authority: Sayings, Self, and Society in Sixteenth Century England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 127. 88. Crystal Bartolovich describes how her choice to versify the earlier portion of his work accommodates her resistance to the “casual misogyny” of the later ones. “вЂOptimism of the Will’: Isabella Whitney and Utopia,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 39.2 (2009), 414–15. Ann Rosalind Jones describes her “pro-woman modifications” in undercutting “masculine claims to rationality” (Currency, 41–42). 89. Panofsky, ix. 90. Panofsky, ix. 91. The numerous proverbs concerning friendship include Whitney #1 #4, #7, #8, #14, #15, #28, #30, #33, #41, #42, #52, #53, #54, #55, #56, #57, #58, #59, #60: True friends reinforce moral behavior by admonishing each other in secret and with tact (Wh#14-P#13, Wh#15-P#14); willingly admonished themselves, true friends accuse themselves of their friends’ faults (Wh#16-P#15, Wh#54-P#53). 92. Muldrew, The Economy of Obligation, 1–7. 93. A “daysman” was an arbitrator or a mediator (OED). 94. Muldrew, The Economy of Obligation, 195. 95. There is no evidence either way for the biographical truth of Whitney’s narrative. Betty Travitsky’s entry for Whitney in the ODNB (2004) draws from her poetry; Howard, “Textualizing an Urban Life,” 218, notes an inconsistency in Whitney’s claim that her parents dwelled in Smithfield rather than the Cheshire of Geoffrey Whitney, possibly her brother. Howard notes the “autobiographical effect” of Whitney’s self-references (220). This issue is discussed by Meredith Skura, Tudor Autobiography: Listening for Inwardness (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 150–67. For rhetorical simplicity, I will refer to her narrative as her own. 96. Panofsky, xii–xiii; numerous scholars have paid particular attention to this aspect of her work (Jones, Currency, 42; Walker, 157; Wall, Imprint of Gender, 298–99). 97. OED, s.v. “flyting.” 98. Boyd Berry, “вЂWe are not all alyke nor of complexion one’: Truism and Isabella Whitney’s Multiple Readers,” in Renaissance Papers, ed. T. H. Howard-Hill and Philip Rollinson

(Rochester, NY: Boydell & Brewer, 2000): 13–23. 99. Louise Schleiner, Tudor and Stuart Women Writers (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 4. 100. Excellent readings of this poem and its implications for maidservants include Ann Rosalind Jones, “Maidservants of London: Sisterhoods of Kinship and Labor,” in Maids and Mistresses, Cousins and Queens: Women’s Alliances in Early Modern England, ed. Susan Frye and Karen Robertson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 21–32, and Phillippy, “The Maid’s Lawful Liberty,” in Ashgate Critical Essays, vol. 3, 147–70. 101. Lorna Hutson, The Usurer’s Daughter: Male Friendship and Fictions of Women in SixteenthCentury England (London: Routledge, 2002), 127; see also Jill Ingram, “A Case for Credit: Isabella Whitney’s вЂWyll and Testament’ and the Mock Testament Tradition,” Early Modern Culture: An Electronic Seminar 5 (2006). 102. Hutson, Usurer’s Daughter, 116. 103. Muldrew discusses the importance of reputation in a culture of credit (The Economy of Obligation, 195). 104. See Laurie Ellinghausen, “Literary Property and the Single Woman in Isabella Whitney’s A Sweet Nosgay,” in Ashgate Critical Essays, vol. 3, 126, 132; also Ingram, “A Case for Credit,” para. 3. 105. Hutson, Usurer’s Daughter, 122–28; Ingram, “A Case for Credit.” 106. Skura, Tudor Autobiography, 155, notes this connection. 107. A. L. Beier, Masterless Men: The Vagrancy Problem in England 1540–1640 (London: Methuen, 1985), 4; Linda Woodbridge, Vagrancy, Homelessness and English Renaissance Literature (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2001), 109–48. I am greatly appreciative of Leah Knight’s and Julie Crawford’s valuable critiques of this essay. 108. Winthrop, The Journal of John Winthrop, 1630–1649: Abridged Edition, ed. Richard S. Dunn and Laetitia Yeandle (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996), 273. 109. Mather, Ornaments for the Daughters of Zion (Cambridge, MA, 1692), 5–6. 110. Bradstreet, The Tenth Muse lately sprung up in America. Or severall poems, .В .В .В By a Gentlewoman in those parts (London: Stephen Bowtell, 1650). 111. Bradstreet, “An Elegy UponВ .В .В . Sir Philip Sidney,” Several Poems Compiled with great variety of Wit and LearningВ .В .В . The Second Edition (Boston: Printed by John Foster, 1678), in Anne Bradstreet, Anne Bradstreet: The Works of Anne Bradstreet, ed. Jeannine Hensley (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967, 2010), p. 202, l. 43. All quotations from the 1678 edition of Bradstreet’s volume are from Hensley’s edition. 112. See, for example, Hugh Amory, “British Books Abroad: The American Colonies,” The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, ed. John Barnard and D. F. McKenzie, 7 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 4:744–52. 113. Pattie Cowell, “The Early Distribution of Anne Bradstreet’s Poems,” Critical Essays on Anne Bradstreet, ed. Pattie Cowell and Ann Stanford (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1983), 270–79, esp. 271. 114. Cotton Mather, Magnalia Christi Americana: Or, The ecclesiastical history of New-England (London, 1702), book 3, ch. 1, p. 25. 115. John Winthrop, July 28, 1642, Journal: History of New England, ed. James Kendall Hosmer, 2 vols. (1908; New York: Barnes & Noble, 1946; rpt. 1966), 2:69–70; David D. Hall, Ways of Writing: The Practice and Politics of Text-Making in Seventeenth-Century New England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 81. 116. Thomas Shepard, Letter, October 27, 1657, qtd. in Giles Firmin, The Real Christian, or a Treatise of Effectual Calling (London, 1670), 214. 117. “The Author to Her Book,” Anne Bradstreet, ed. Hensley, p. 238, ll. 1, 4. 118. Keith L. Sprunger, Trumpets from the Tower: Puritan Printing in the Netherlands, 1600–1640 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1994), 128, 130. 119. Thomas Goddard Wright, Literary Culture in Early New England, 1620–1730 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1920), 30, 54.

120. Bradstreet, “His Epitaph,” appended to “To the Memory of My Dear and Ever Honoured Father Thomas Dudley Esq. Who Deceased, July 31, 1653, and of His Age 77,” Anne Bradstreet, ed. Hensley, p. 218. 121. John Harvard Ellis, “Introduction,” The Works of Anne Bradstreet in Prose and Verse, ed. John Harvard Ellis (1867; rpt., New York: Peter Smith, 1932), lxi-lxii. See Anne Bradstreet’s account of the house fire in “Here Follows [sic] Some Verses Upon the Burning of Our House July 10th, 1666. Copied Out of a Loose Paper,” Anne Bradstreet, ed. Hensley, 318–20. 122. The Four Monarchies, Anne Bradstreet, ed. Hensley, p. 190, l. 3566. 123. Jones, The Life and Work of Thomas Dudley, The Second Governor of Massachusetts (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin and Co., 1899), 259–62. 124. Jones, Life and Work, 259–61. 125. McKitterick, “Women and their Books in Seventeenth-Century England: The Case of Elizabeth Puckering,” The Library, 7th ser., 1.4 (2000): 367. 126. Elizabeth Wade White, Anne Bradstreet: The Tenth Muse (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), offers a nearly complete annotated list of the books identified in the inventory, 383–90. 127. McKitterick, “Women and their Books,” 367; Wright, Literary Culture, 39. 128. White, Anne Bradstreet, 385. 129. Hayes, Reading Women: A Colonial Woman’s Bookshelf (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1996), 16–17. 130. Heidi Brayman Hackel and Catherine E. Kelly, Introduction, Reading Women: Literacy, Authorship, and Culture in the Atlantic World, 1500–1800, ed. Heidi Brayman Hackel and Catherine E. Kelly (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 3. 131. Jones, Life and Work, 28. Elizabeth Wade White, “The Tenth Muse—A Tercentenary Appraisal of Anne Bradstreet,” Critical Essays on Anne Bradstreet (1983), 60. 132. Nathaniel Ward, [“Mercury shew’d Apollo, Bartas Book”], The Tenth Muse lately sprung up in America, sig. A4. 133. Du Bartas, “Dialogue upon the Troubles past: Betweene Heraclitus and Democritus, the weeping and the laughing Philosophers,” Divine Weekes and Workes, trans. Josuah Sylvester (London, 1611), 759–63. I am grateful to John L. Lepage for drawing my attention to this poem. 134. Tenth Muse (1650), 200. 135. Christopher D’Addario, “Nostalgia and Nationalism in New England Literature,” Exile and Journey in Seventeenth-Century Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 38. 136. Anne Bradstreet, “A Dialogue between Old England and New, concerning their present troubles. Anno 1642,” The Tenth Muse lately sprung up in America, 180–90. Line numbers from the 1650 edition of “A Dialogue” in Reading the Nation in English Literature, ed. Elizabeth Sauer and Julia M. Wright (New York: Routledge, 2010), 67–68, esp. ll. 158–203. 137. David Cressy, Coming Over: Migration and Communication between England and New England in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 236. 138. Bradstreet, “A Dialogue,” 1. 35, 1650 edn. 139. Carla Gardina Pestana repeats the phrase in The English Atlantic in an Age of Revolution, 1640–1661 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 26, 28. 140. Winthrop, Journal: History of New England, 2:81 (September 22, 1642); Winthrop, Journal: History, 2:91 (February 12, 1643). 141. Matt Cohen, The Networked Wilderness: Communicating in Early New England (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010). 142. Cressy, Coming Over, 246. 143. Reyce mentioned, for example, William Prynne’s anti-episcopal Newes from Ipswich (March 1, 1637, Winthrop Papers, vol. III 1631–1637, ed. Allyn Bailey Forbes [Boston: Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 1943], 371–76). See “Robert Ryece to John Winthrop” on the anti-episcopal campaign and William Prynne’s punishment (3:355–63). 144. Francis J. Bremer, Puritan Crisis: New England and the English Civil Wars, 1630–1670 (New York: Garland), 126–27. 145. In her first poem in the 1678 edition, Bradstreet refers to her father’s “bounden handmaids”

in “To Her Most Honoured Father Thomas Dudley Esq. These Humbly Presented” (1642), Anne Bradstreet, ed. Hensley, p. 14, l. 19. See also Gillian Wright, Producing Women’s Poetry, 1600–1730: Text and Paratext, Manuscript and Print (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 75. 146. “Letter from Deputy Governor Thomas Dudley to Lady Bridget, Countess of Lincoln,” March 1631, qtd. in Jones, Life and Work of Thomas Dudley, 447. 147. Philip L. Barbour, The Three Worlds of Captain John Smith (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1964), 390. 148. Elizabeth Wade White, Anne Bradstreet, 159; Winthrop Papers, vol. IV 1638–1644 (1944), 235–36. 149. Kate Chedgzoy, Women’s Writing in the British Atlantic World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 129. 150. Nathaniel Ward, The Simple Cobler of Aggawam in America (London, for S. Bowtell, 1647; rpt. Boston, 1713). 151. Phillip Round, By Nature and by Custom Cursed: Transatlantic Civil Discourse and New England Cultural Production, 1620–1660 (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1999), 156. 152. Obadiah Sedgwick, “Books Printed, and are to be sold by Adoniram Byfield, at the Bible in Popeshead Alley, neer Lumbard-street,” Humbled sinner resolved what he should do to be saved (London, 1657), end matter, n.p. 153. The Four Monarchies, in Anne Bradstreet, ed. Hensley, p. 190, l. 3566. 154. “An Apology,” Anne Bradstreet, ed. Hensley, p. 190; l. 3553. 155. “Fire,” Several Poems, Anne Bradstreet, ed. Hensley, p. 22 ll. 118–21. 156. Tenth Muse (1650), 54. 157. “Old Age,” Several Poems, Anne Bradstreet, ed. Hensley, p. 66, ll. 401–6. 158. Line numbers for the 1678 edition are taken from Bradstreet, “A Dialogue,” Anne Bradstreet, ed. Hensley, pp. 191–200. 159. Note the change in the 1678 edition to “recompense that good I’ve done to thee” (l. 212, 1678 edn.), maternal England being less helpless in the postwar era. 160. Hensley, “Anne Bradstreet’s Wreath of Thyme,” Anne Bradstreet, ed. Hensley, xxxvii–xxxviii n5. Cf. Joseph R. McElrath, “The Text of Anne Bradstreet: Biographical and Critical Consequences,” Seventeenth-Century News 34 (Summer-Fall 1976): 62. 161. London, “A Catalogue of the most Vendible Books in England” (London, 1658), n.p. 162. Makin, “An Essay to Revive the Antient Education of Gentlewomen” (1673), 20. 163. Phillips, “Women Among the Moderns Eminent for Poetry,” Theatrum Poetarum, Or a Compleat Collection of the Poets (London, 1675), 254. 164. Taylor’s library holdings are identified in Thomas H. Johnson, The Poetical Works of Edward Taylor (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1943), 204–20. Thomas H. Johnson, “Edward Taylor: A Puritan вЂSacred Poet,’” The New England Quarterly 10.2 (June 1937), 320–21. 165. Higginson, “An Attestation to this Church-History of New-England,” Cotton Mather, Magnalia Christi Americana: Or, the Ecclesiastical History of New-England (London, 1702), A3v. 166. Mather, Magnalia Christi Americana, book 2, ch. 5, p. 17. 167. Elizabeth Isham, Book of Rememberance, Constructing Elizabeth Isham, ed. Elizabeth Clarke and Erica Longfellow, online ed.; Elizabeth Isham, Diary, Constructing Elizabeth Isham, ed. Elizabeth Clarke and Erica Longfellow. All citations are to these editions. The originals are available as MS no. 62, Robert H. Taylor Collection, Princeton University Library and c. 1636–1646, MS IL 3365, Northamptonshire Record Office, Northampton, UK (hereafter NRO). 168. Letter, Susanna Stuteville to Elizabeth Isham, May 27 [1648], MS IC 4829, NRO. 169. All of the books on the list were printed for the first time before 1647. I have followed the identifications made for Isham’s book list in the forthcoming publication of this list in Joseph L. Black, Erica Longfellow, and Jill Seal Millman, “Elizabeth Isham. Gentry,” in Private Libraries in Renaissance England, vol. 9 (forthcoming). The dates provided for the printed books on Isham’s list, unless otherwise noted, are for the first date of publication. 170. Mary E. Finch, Five Northamptonshire Families 1540–1640 (Oxford: Northamptonshire Record Society, 1956), 30.

171. Ibid., 34, 35; Isaac Stephens, “The Courtship and Singlehood of Elizabeth Isham, 1630–1634, ” The Historical Journal 51 (2008), 7,8, 21. 172. Will of Elizabeth Isham, Spinster of Lamport, May 27, 1654, Prob/11/237, National Archives, Kew, UK. 173. Amy Louise Erickson, Women and Property in Early Modern England (London: Routledge, 1993), 33. 174. Autograph book list and list of quotations, MS IC 4825, NRO. I am not discussing this list here because Isham does not claim these books as her own. This second list is included in the edited catalogue (276) of Elizabeth Isham’s library in Black et al., PLRE. 175. Book lists, Judith Lewyn Isham and Judith Isham, MS IL 4046, NRO. Thank you to Joseph Black for drawing my attention to these lists, which are also forthcoming in PLRE. 176. For more on the Lamport Hall library, see Isaac Stephens, The Gentlewoman’s Remembrance: Patriarchy, Piety, and Singlehood in Early Stuart England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016), 6, 144. Thank you to Isaac Stephens for sharing an advance copy. Seventeen of the books on Elizabeth Isham’s book lists remain in the Lamport Hall library and one is in the Folger Library (with Isham provenance), but none contain evidence of ownership by Elizabeth Isham. See Black et al., PLRE (forthcoming). 177. Adam Smyth, Autobiography in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 2. 178. On wills as life-writing, see Karen O’Brien, “Intimate Worlds: Kinship Relations and Emotional Investment among Nantwich Women 1603–1685,” Journal of Family History 41 (2016): 13–53; on autobiography and book lists compiled by authors of the books they had written, see JГјrgen Beyer and Leigh T. I. Penman, “Printed Autobibliographies from the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” in Documenting the Early Modern Book World: Inventories and Catalogues in Manuscript and Print, ed. Malcolm Walsby and Natasha Constantinidou (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2013), 161–84. 179. Isham, Book, fol. 34v. 180. Augustine, Saint Augustines Confessions Translated, trans. William Watts (London, 1631), 596–97. Augustine later repeats his praise: “Great is this power of Memory; a thing, O my God, to be amazed at, a very profound and infinite multiplicity” (622). 181. Jennifer Summit, Memory’s Library: Medieval Books in Early Modern England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 1, presents sources for this library metaphor, including Jerome’s Epistolaie (#60) and Spenser’s Faerie Queene (Book 2.9.59–60). Isham read Spenser (Book, fol. 28r) but does not mention this poem, and Jerome’s reference to the “library of Christ” is in the letter to Heliodorus, which is not in the edition of Jerome’s epistles on Isham’s book list. 182. On Isham as an autobiographer, see Anne Cotterill, “Fit Words at the вЂpitts brinke’: The Achievement of Elizabeth Isham,” Huntington Library Quarterly 73 (2010): 225–48; Julie A. Eckerle, “Coming to Knowledge: Elizabeth Isham’s Autobiography and the Self-Construction of the Intellectual Woman,” a/b Autobiography Studies 25 (2010): 97–121. 183. Isham, Book, fol. 17v. 184. Ibid., fols. 16v, 32v. 185. In Justinian Isham to Elizabeth Isham, MS IC 3274, NRO, Elizabeth uses the abbreviation B; she uses these abbreviations for her father, mother, sister, brother, and herself throughout the diary (see 1612 [M], 1618 [F, B], 1616 [S]). While the memoir and diary do not record the acquisition of every book on the list, where they do, the abbreviations match, with two exceptions: (1) the list has SFB beside the three psalm books but the memoir’s only reference to psalm book acquisition is that Elizabeth’s mother gave all her children psalm books (Book, fol. 5r); (2) neither the title “Christian Prayers & Meditations” nor “An old Book of Christian Prar” are marked with an M (instead with \. and S respectively), while Elizabeth specifically mentions her mother let her keep “Christian praiers and meditations” (Book, fol. 16v). 186. Isham, Book, fol. 14r. 187. Ibid., fol. 8r. 188. Ibid., fol. 27v. 189. Ibid., fol. 28r. This is The Meditations of Iohn Gerhard Doctr of Divinitie, and Superintendent of Heldburge, trans. Ralphe Winterton (Cambridge, 1627).

190. The diary uses the abbreviation S for Judith’s name in 1616, 1619, 1620, 1622, 1624, and other years thereafter. 191. Ibid., fol. 13v. 192. Ibid., fol. 26v. 193. Ibid., fol. 16v. 194. Christian Prayers and Meditations is likely Henry Bull, Christian Praiers and Holy Meditations (London, 1568). The copy of the work in Isham’s library appears to have been acquired independently, marked as it is on Isham’s book list with \.. 195. Stephens, Gentlewoman’s Remembrance, 153–59. 196. Eusebius Pagit’s mother was Katherine Isham, the sister of John Isham, Elizabeth’s greatgrandfather. 197. Richard L. Greaves, “Pagit, Eusebius (1546/7–1617),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); online ed., January 2008 (hereafter ODNB). 198. For a fuller discussion of this text, see Black et al., PLRE, 276.10. 199. Isham, Book, fol. 10v. 200. The editors of Isham’s Book of Rememberance suggest that her comment on proofs likely refers to later editions that have a preface from Robert Openshaw implying that he added biblical references (fol. 10v, note 48). 201. Eusebius Pagit, Christianographie, or the Description of the Multitude and Sundry Sorts of Christians in the World not Subject to the Pope (London, 1635). 202. John Morgan, “Brinsley, John (bap. 1566, d. in or after 1624),” ODNB, online ed., October 2009; Arnold Hunt, “Featley, Daniel (1582–1645),” ODNB, online ed., January 2008; S. A. Baron, “Sparke, Michael (b. in or before 1586, d. 1653),” ODNB, online ed., January 2008. She also owns books by Timothy Rogers, an advocate for Presbyterianism, and William Fulke and John Randall, known as Puritans. 203. Erica Longfellow, “вЂTake unto ye words’: Elizabeth Isham’s вЂBook of Rememberance’ and Puritan Cultural Forms,” in The Intellectual Culture of Puritan Women, 1558–1680, ed. Johanna Harris and Elizabeth Scott-Baumann (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 122–34; Isaac Stephens, “Confessional Identity in Early Stuart England: The вЂPrayer Book Puritanism’ of Elizabeth Isham,” Journal of British Studies 50 (2011): 24–47. 204. John Fosbroke, Six Sermons Delivered in the Lecture at Kettering in the Countie of Northampton, and in Certain Other Places (Cambridge, 1633). 205. J. Fielding, “Cawdrey, Daniel (1587/8–1664),” ODNB, online ed., January 2008. 206. Isham’s memoir also indicates she “read in Mr Dods Booke on the commandements” (Book, fol. 24r). 207. Ibid., fols. 11v–12r. 208. Ibid., fol. 12r. Dod was also an intermediary in the marriage negotiations between Sir John Isham and Sir Erasmus Dryden over the proposed marriage of Elizabeth to Dryden’s grandson John. See J. Fielding, “Dod, John (1550–1645),” ODNB, online ed., 2008. 209. Isham, Book, fol. 14v. 210. Stephens, Gentlewoman’s Remembrance, 144–85. 211. David Lemmings, “Women’s Property, Popular Cultures, and the Consistory Court of London in the Eighteenth Century,” in Women, Property, and the Letters of the Law in Early Modern England, ed. Nancy E. Wright, Margaret W. Ferguson, and A. R. Buck (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 69. 212. On the policing of women’s reading, see Jacqueline Pearson, “Women Reading, Reading Women,” in Women and Literature in Britain, 1500–1700, ed. Helen Wilcox (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 80–99. 213. Isham, Diary, 1647. 214. Isham, Book, fols. 30r, 17r; Diary 1645. 215. Lady Denton to Elizabeth Isham, December 10 [no year], IC 4823, NRO. 216. On Elizabeth Isham’s herbal reading, see Rebecca Laroche, Medical Authority and Englishwomen’s Herbal Texts, 1550–1650 (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2009), 121–35.

217. The Treasury of Healthe (London, 1585), sig. Ai. The title page ascribes the work of gathering to Petrus Hispanus, Peter of Spain, who had taught medicine in Sienna and became Pope XXI (1276–77). 218. Black et al., PLRE, 276, items 14:1–2 (forthcoming). 219. Either Abuses Strip, and Whipt. Or Satirical Essayes (1613) or Satyre (1614) and Wither’s Motto (1621). 220. Diary, 1632. 221. Isham, Book, fols. 34v, 29v. 222. Ibid., fol. 20v. 223. Ibid., fol. 28r. 224. Ibid., fol. 28r. 225. Hannibal Hamlin, Psalm Culture and Early Modern English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 1–16. 226. Ibid., fol. 5r. 227. Isham, Book, fol. 5r–5v. 228. Ibid., fol. 25r. 229. A second part to John Norden, A Pensive Mans Practise (London, 1584) appeared in 1597 and a third in 1598. The ESTC indicates that parts one and two are part of the Lamport Hall library. It is not possible to tell which volume Isham owned. The title page of Crumms of Comfort (London, 1627) says that this is the sixth edition, but the ESTC does not record the existence of earlier editions. 230. Isham, Diary, 1625. 231. Isham, Book, fol. 16v. 232. Elizabeth Isham, Autograph Petition to King Charles I, IC 4621, NRO fol. 1v. 233. Victor Stater, “Hatton, Christopher, first Baron Hatton (bap. 1605, d. 1670),” ODNB, online ed. A partially legible 1646 entry in the diary may mention this work: “my f[athe]r {.В .В .} my L[or]d {HatВ .В .В .} o[n?] the psal[m]s.” 234. Summit, Memory’s, 1–2. 235. Isham, Book, fol. 10r. 236. Justinian Isham to Elizabeth Isham, with reply, March 20, 164?, IC 3274, NRO. 237. Mary Anne Everett Green, ed. Calendar of the Proceedings of the Committee for Compounding &c., 1643–1660 (London, 1889), 109; The English Baronetage, vol. 2 (London, 1741), 40. 238. Margaret Cavendish, Natures Pictures Drawn by Fancies Pencil to the Life (London, 1656), c2v. 239. Cavendish, Philosophical Fancies (London, 1653), A2. Philosophical Letters: or, Modest Reflections Upon Some Opinions in Natural Philosophy (London, 1664), 3. 240. Cavendish, Playes (London, 1662), “A General Prologue to all my Playes,” A7v. Subsequent references to the Playes will be cited parenthetically within the text. For Cavendish’s reading of “Plutarch’s Lives, or some call them, Plutarch’s Lies,” in Sociable Companions, see Lara Dodds, “Reading and Writing in Sociable Letters; Or, How Margaret Cavendish Read Her Plutarch,” English Literary Renaissance 41.1 (2011): 189–218. James Fitzmaurice argues that Margaret Cavendish serves as the Plutarch to her husband’s Julius Caesar. “Margaret Cavendish’s Life of William, Plutarch, and Mixed Genre,” in Authorial Conquests: Essays on Genre in the Writings of Margaret Cavendish, ed. Line Cottegnies and Nancy Weitz (Madison, NJ and London: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press/Associated University Press, 2003), 85. 241. On reading for action, see Lisa Jardine and Anthony Grafton, “вЂStudied for Action’: How Gabriel Harvey Read His Livy,” Past and Present 129.1 (1990): 30–78. 242. Bibliotheca Nobilissimi Principis Johannis Ducis de Novo-Castro, &c. Being a large collection of books Contain’d in the Libraries of the most Noble William and Henry Cavendish, and John Hollis, Late Dukes of Newcastle. Which will be sold by Nath. NoelВ .В .В . The books may be view’d from the 2d of March 1718–19 (London, 1719), 43. Subsequent references to the Bibliotheca are cited parenthetically within the text. 243. The entry reads: “Charles I (King and Martyr) his Eikon Basilike (in large Print, ruled with Red Lines) 1649” (36). See also the “Collection of Dying Speeches of the Murtherers of King Charles I, 1661” (55). 244. The Bibliotheca Nobilissimi lists: “Hotomani (Franc.) Francogallia Wechel, 1586” (58);

“Hakewil’s (Will) Liberty of the Subject against Impositions, with 11 more tracts on the same Subject (1641)” (58); “Sadler’s Rights of the Kingdom 1649” (59); “Privileges of the Baronage of England, 1642” (67); and “Harrington (James) of Popular Government 1658” (58). 245. Harrington, Prerogative, 53; Sadler, Rights, 78. 246. Ibid. 247. Since Catherine Gallagher’s “Embracing the Absolute: Margaret Cavendish and the Politics of the Female Subject in Seventeenth-Century England,” Genders 1 (1988): 24–29, it has been axiomatic in Cavendish criticism to see her as an absolutist. See, for example, Deborah Boyle’s claim that Cavendish was “unwaveringly devoted to absolute sovereignty,” “Fame, Virtue, and Government: Margaret Cavendish on Ethics and Politics,” Journal of the History of Ideas 67.2 (2006): 282. 248. The Bibliotheca Nobilissimi lists: “(John) Hayward’s Lives of William I William II Henry I Henry IV and Edward I” (52), “History of Edward VI and Queen Elizabeth by Hayward 1636” (54), and “History of Edward III in Verse by Tho. May 1635” (54). The latter two are The Life and Reign of King Edward the Sixth (London, 1636) and Thomas May, The Victorious Reign of King Edward the Third (London, 1635). 249. Cited in F. J. Levy, “Hayward, Daniel, and the Beginnings of Politic History in England,” Huntington Library Quarterly 50.1 (1987): 17. Hayward’s The First Part of the Life and Raigne of King Henrie the IIII was dedicated to Essex. 250. Ibid. 251. Ibid. 252. Thucydides, Eight bookes of the Peloponnesian Warre [В .В .В .В ] InterpretedВ .В .В . out of the Greeke by Thomas Hobbes (London, 1629), A2. 253. The Bibliotheca entry described as “Dial of Princes London 1619” (40) is Antonio de Guevara, Archontorologion, or The Diall of Princes [В .В .В .В ] Declaring what excellcncy [sic] consisteth in a prince that is a good Christian: and what evils attend on him that is a cruell tirant (London, 1619). The first edition, in 1557, features the woodcut. Subsequent references to The Diall are taken from the 1619 edition and cited parenthetically. 254. The Annals of Cornelius Tacitus. The Description of Germanie (London, 1604), Lipsius’s Six Bookes of Politics or Civil Doctrine (London, 1594), Lorenzo Ducci, Ars Aulica or The Courtiers Art (London, 1607), and Jean Hotman, A Casket Full of Rich Jewels (London, 1609). 255. Here is Tacitus on Augustus in The Annals: “little and little taking upon him, he drew to himself the affaires of Senate; the dutie of magistrates and laws, without contradiction of any.” Most of the nobility, seeing “their preferment to grow by new government, did rather choose the present estate with securitie, than strive to recover their olde with danger” (2). 256. Alan T. Bradford, “Stuart Absolutism and the вЂUtility’ of Tacitus,” Huntington Library Quarterly 46.2 (1983): 132. 257. Cited in Bradford, “Stuart Absolutism,” 128. 258. Malcolm Smuts, “Court-Centred Politics and the Uses of Roman Historians, c. 1590–1630,” in Culture and Politics in Early Stuart England, ed. Kevin Sharpe and Peter Lake (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), 40. 259. Edmund Bolton’s Nero Caesar, or Monarchy Depraved (London, 1623), cited in David Norbrook, “Lucan, Thomas May, and the Creation of a Republican Literary Culture,” in Culture and Politics, ed. Sharpe and Lake, 56. On Bolton, see Smuts, “Court-Centred Politics,” 39, Bradford, “Stuart Absolutism,” 139. 260. Cited in Bradford, “Stuart Absolutism,” 129. 261. On Milton, see Bradford, “Stuart Absolutism,” 174. On the Dutchman Dorislaus who lost his position at Cambridge for lecturing on Tacitus, see Bradford, “Stuart Absolutism,” 148–49. 262. Ibid, 177. 263. Cited in Dodds, “Reading,” 209. 264. Smuts, “Court-Centred Politics,” 40. 265. Traiano Boccalini, The New-found Politick, trans. John Florio (London, 1626), 17, cited in Bradford, “Stuart Absolutism,” 136.

266. Ibid. 267. On the relationship between Machiavelli and Tacitus, see Bradford, “Stuart Absolutism,” 134. On William Cavendish’s advice, see Ideology and Politics on the Eve of the Restoration: Newcastle’s Advice to Charles II, intro. by Thomas P. Slaughter (Philadelphia: The American Philosophical Society, 1984). 268. Cavendish, Ideology and Politics, 21. See also the fourth book of her Life: “XXIV. That all Books of Controversies should be writ in Latin, that none but the Learned may read them, and that there should be no Disputations but in Schools, lest it breed Factions amongst the Vulgar; for Disputations and Controversies are a kind of Civil War, maintained by the Pen, and often draw out the sword soon after” (The Life of the Thrice Noble, High and Puissant Prince William Cavendish, Duke, Marquess and Earl of Newcastle [London, 1667]). Subsequent references are cited parenthetically. 269. See “Margaret Cavendish, Wife,” in Family Politics in Early Modern Literature, ed. Hannah Crawforth and Sarah Lewis (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 19–38. 270. See Hero Chalmers, Royalist Women Writers, 1650–1689 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 40. 271. Suetonius, The Historie of Twelve Caesars Emperours of Rome (London, 1606). Subsequent references are cited parenthetically within the text. 272. Lipsius, 20. Lipsius gives many examples of “worthie Queenes.” “The Germaines preferred them before men [ . . . ] were of opinion, that some sacred, and provident thing remained in them: For which cause, they did neither reject their counsels, nor set light by their answers” (20). Tacitus refers to Agrippina, 48. 273. On analogical reading, see Bradford, “Stuart Absolutism,” 135, and Albert Tricomi, “Philip, Earl of Pembroke, and the Analogical Way of Reading Political Tragedy,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 85 (1986): 332–45. 274. This has been the case since Henry Ten Eyck Perry’s The First Duchess of Newcastle and her Husband as Figures in Literary History (1918; New York: Johnson Reprint, 1968). 275. Letters and Poems in Honour of the Incomparable Princess, Margaret, Duchess of Newcastle (London, 1676), 11, 12. Subsequent references are cited parenthetically. 276. CCXI Sociable Letters (London, 1664), Av. 277. In the Fifth Book of the Annals, we learn that at “The death of Julia. Tiberius crueltie increaseth” (117). 278. Hayward had to defend his use of invented speeches in his trial (Levy, “Hayward, Daniel, and the Beginnings,” 18). 279. See Levy, “Hayward, Daniel, and the Beginnings,” passim. 280. Cavendish, Ideology and Politics, 21. 281. Life, 197. For William Cavendish’s “own” words on the rewards forthcoming from the Crown, see Life, 184–85. On how the royal family went from being William’s “very good, and affectionate friends” promising “recompense” to claiming to be unable to “assist” him for his “suffering for the King,” see my “Convents and Pleasures: Margaret Cavendish and the Drama of Property,” Renaissance Drama 32 (2003): 177–223, 194. 282. The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romanes (London, 1579), 717, 719. Plutarch’s Lives is one of the books listed in the Cavendish library under “Lives of Illustrious Persons, in English, in Folio” (65). 283. Lucan’s Pharsalia: or The Civill Wars of Rome, Between Pompey the Great, and Julius Caesar [ . . . ] Englished, by Thomas May (London, 1627). Subsequent references are cited parenthetically within the text. 284. Francis Young, “The Bishop’s Palace at Ely as a Prison for Recusants, 1577–1597,” Recusant History 32.2 (2014): 195–216. 285. Lansdowne MS 33/62, fols. 152r–v, British Library. 286. Earle Havens and Elizabeth Patton, “Underground Networks, Prisons and the Circulation of Counter-Reformation Books in Elizabethan England,” in Early Modern English Catholicism: Identity, Memory and Counter-Reformation, ed. James E. Kelly and Susan Royal (Leiden: Brill, 2017), 164. 287. Luis de Granada, A Memorial of a Christian Life, wherein Are Treated All Such Thinges, as

Appertayne unto a Christian to Doe, from the Beginninge of His Conversion, until the End of His Perfection, trans. Richard Hopkins (Rouen: George L’Oyselet, 1586). The inventory lists seventy-eight copies of the Memorial, a bulk delivery that was exceeded on the inventory only by two other listings; see Havens and Patton, “Underground Networks,” 170–71. 288. Havens and Patton, “Underground Networks,” 164. 289. Mary Tregian’s half-sister, Dorothy Arundell, is also named on the inventory as expecting an “olde meditation.” Ibid. 290. Ibid. In 1582 and 1583, Alford was accused of harboring priests, but in both instances charges were dismissed. 291. Ibid., 166–67, 180–87. 292. For a larger discussion of the “peregrinations of Luis de Granada’s works in England” see Alexandra Walsham, “Luis de Granada’s Mission to Protestant England: Translating the Devotional Literature of the Spanish Counter-Reformation,” in Publishing Subversive Texts in Elizabethan England and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, ed. Clarinda Calma et al. (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 131. 293. Ibid. 294. Genealogical connections between the Fitzalan Earls of Arundel and the Arundells of Lanherne, Cornwall are distant despite later intermarriages. 295. July 1, 1570; see Frederic Youngs, Jr., The Proclamations of the Tudor Queens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 258–62. 296. Granada, Memorial, 1–2; Quintilian, Institutio Oratio (1st century BCE); NiccolГІ Machiavelli, Il Principe (ca. 1513); and Baldessare Castiglione, Il libro del Cortegiano (1528). 297. Granada’s Of Prayer and Meditation was also translated by Richard Hopkins; see Walsham, “Luis de Granada’s Mission,” 132–34. 298. I am grateful to Atria Larson for this formulation. On the Council’s several sessions, see John O’Malley, SJ, Trent: What Happened at the Council (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 130 and 150–54; see also Alexandra Walsham, “Translating Trent? English Catholicism and the Counter-Reformation,” Historical Research 78 (2005): 288–310. 299. Granada, Memorial, 90; Council of Trent, Session 14 (November 25, 1551). See Heinrich Denziger, “Council of Trent: Doctrine on the Sacrament of Penance,” in Compendium of Creeds, Definitions, and Declarations on Matters of Faith and Morals (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2012), 401. 300. Ibid., 403. 301. Granada, Memorial, 325–26. 302. Ibid., 85. 303. Ibid., 208; see also Walsham, “Luis de Granada’s Mission,” 138–40. 304. 13 Eliz. C. 2. See Michael Questier, Conversion, Politics and Religion in England, 1580–1625 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 69ff. 305. The seminal study is Alexandra Walsham’s Church Papists: Catholicism, Conformity and Confessional Polemic in Early Modern England (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 1999). 306. Walsham, “Luis de Granada’s Mission,” 142, notes that the Memorial “empowered laymen” and in this case laywomen “to step into the shoes of preachers and teachers themselves.” This essay particularizes such observations. See also Alexandra Walsham, “вЂDomme Preachers?’: Post-Reformation English Catholicism and the Culture of Print,” Past and Present 168 (2000): 109–10. 307. Earlier marital ties among the Howard, Browne, and Arundell families were strengthened near the time of Sir John Arundell’s death in 1590 by the marriage of his son, also John Arundell, to Anne Jernigan, daughter of Eleanor Dacre, who was herself a sibling of both Lady Montague and the Countess’s father, Thomas, fourth Lord Dacre of Gilsland. 308. Henry Foley, Records of the English Province of the Society of Jesus, vol. 3 (London: Burns and Oates, 1878), 437. 309. For a discussion of extant translations of both narratives, see Elizabeth Patton, “Four Contemporary Translations of Dorothy Arundell’s Lost English Narratives,” in “The Translator’s Voice in Early Modern Literature and History,” ed. A. E. B. Coldiron, special issue, Philological Quarterly 95.3–4 (2016): 398–400.

310. Ibid., 399. The “Letter” was published anonymously in Arundell’s lifetime in a Spanish translation in Diego de Yepes, ed., Historia Particular de la Persecucion de Inglaterra (Madrid: Luis Sanchez, 1599), 633–40. English translations of the de Yepes chapter are from an anonymous manuscript translation, “YepesВ .В .В . Chapter IV,” in the “Blessed John Cornelius” folder, Archives of the British Province of the Society of Jesus, London. (hereafter, ABSI MS “Yepes”). 311. “Punti della vita et morte del Beato Martyre Padre Giovanni Cornelio della Compagnia di Giesu, ” MS Anglia 31 I–II, Archivum Romanum Societatis Iesu (ARSI), Rome, fols. 48r–59v at 50v. The English translation of ARSI MS Anglia 31 used here was produced by nuns in an unidentified convent in Rome in the early 1970s, at the request of a local Dorset historian, Anthony Craddock-Jones, who published it privately under the title, “The Acta of Dorothy Arundell,” in Myths of Chideock (n.p., 1976), 58–71 at 71 (hereafter “Acta”). I am grateful to members of the Arundell and Weld families for access to this now out-of-print source. 312. “Acta,” 71. 313. Ibid., 60. 314. Ibid., 61. 315. ABSI MS “Yepes,” 1. 316. “Acta,” 62. 317. On this and other details of the raid, see Foley, Records, 459. 318. Ibid. 319. Robert Parsons, Elizabethae Angliae reginae haeresim Calvinianum propugnantis, saevissimum in Catholicos sui regni edictumВ .В .В . per D. Andream Philopatrum (Lyon: Didier, 1592). 320. In the 1594 “Letter,” Arundell describes herself as having “promised her virginity to God in the Order of St Bridgit,” a vow witnessed by Cornelius; she also took a vow of obedience (ABSI MS “Yepes,” 2). Jesuits did not accept vows of obedience but might witness them, as Cornelius did in this instance; for an inclusive post-Tridentine Jesuit perspective on “the beata who complements a vow of virginity with a vow of obedience to a confessor,” see Alison Weber, “Jesuit Apologias for Laywomen’s Spirituality,” in Devout Laywomen in the Early Modern World, ed. Alison Weber (Abington/New York: Routledge, 2016), 332–33. 321. See Nicholas Kiessling, “James Molloy and Sales of Recusant Books to the United States,” Catholic Historical Review (2016), 563n22. Copies of at least two additional titles from the MarshalseaNewgate book inventory are among volumes from the Haslemere library of the Brussels Benedictines now being archived at Douai Abbey Library in Woolhampton, England: Robert Persons’s The First Booke of the Christian Exercise (n.p. [Rouen: Robert Persons’s press], 1582), and Luis de Granada’s Of Prayer and Meditation (1584 and 1586). I am grateful to Abbot Geoffrey Scott for access to these volumes. 322. Granada, Memorial, 4. 323. “Acta,” 59. 324. Ibid.; see also Walsham, “Luis de Granada’s Mission,” 130. 325. On the disappearance of this passage from the Life’s later transmission history, see Patton, “Four Contemporary Translations,” 410–14. 326. “Acta,” 60. Arundell was in her mid-thirties. 327. Foley, Records, 459. 328. “Acta,” 68. 329. Granada, Memorial, 486. This connection between Catholic women and Chideock persisted; MarieLouise Coolahan discusses a seventeenth-century martyrology of a priest by a woman with ties to Chideock Castle in “Transnational Reception and Early Modern Women’s вЂLost’ Texts,” Early Modern Women 7 (2012): 261–70. 330. “The Life of the Right Honourable & Virtuouse Lady, the Lady Anne Late Countesse of Arundell & Surrey,” Arundel Castle Archives (hereafter, “Arundel Castle MS”); a scholarly edition of the Countess’s biography edited by Susannah Monta and Elizabeth Patton is forthcoming from the Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies in 2019. 331. See Susannah Brietz Monta, “Anne Dacre Howard, Countess of Arundel and Catholic Patronage, ” in English Women, Religion, and Textual Production, 1500–1625, ed. Micheline White (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), 59–82; see also Nancy Pollard Brown, “Paper Chase: The Dissemination of Catholic

Texts in Elizabethan England,” English Manuscript Studies, 1100–1700 1 (1989): 120–43. 332. The Earl was imprisoned for his religion in 1586 and remained in the Tower of London until his death in 1595. 333. See Havens and Patton, “Underground Networks,” 164, 170n9. 334. Thomas Lodge, The Flowers of Lodowicke of Granado: The First Part, in Which Is Handled the Conversion of a Sinner (London: J. Roberts, 1601). For a survey of English translations of Granada’s works, see Walsham, “Luis de Granada’s Mission,” 138–42. An annotated presentation copy of a manuscript receipt book later dedicated by Lodge to the Countess, The Poore Man’s Talent (c. 1623) is at the Folger Shakespeare Library (MS V.a.136). 335. Arundel Castle MS, 29–30. 336. Likely Gregory Martin’s A Treatise of Schisme (1578); see Arundel Castle MS, 61. 337. Ibid., 13. 338. Ibid. 339. Ibid., 88–89. 340. Ibid., 58. 341. Ibid., 57–58. 342. Ibid., 30, 60–62. 343. Ibid., 62. 344. Ibid., 27. Southwell wrote “A Shorte Rule of Good Life” for the Countess, who supported its publication; see Brown, “Paper Chase,” 134–35. 345. Arundel Castle MS, 27. 346. Ibid., 28. Blount is noticeably careful to distance himself from this event, saying that he “understood” it only later, by means of “relations” provided to him by individuals present at the time. For accounts of similarly urgent efforts to connect English penitents with priests (and corresponding Jesuit attempts at distancing) see Laurence Lux-Sterritt, “Mary Ward’s English Institute: The Apostolate as Self-Affirmation,” Recusant History 28 (2006): 192–208. 347. Arundell Castle MS, 27. 348. Alexandra Walsham, “Domme Preachers,” 86. 349. Richard Smith, The Life of the Most Honourable and Vertuous Lady, the Lady Magdalen, Viscountesse Montague (London, 1627), 27–30. For details on the press at Montague House, see Michael Questier, Catholicism and Community in Early Modern England: Politics, Aristocratic Patronage and Religion, c. 1550–1640 (New York: Cambridge University Press), 161. 350. Life of Lady Montague, title page (1627) and “The Preface of the Author,” sig. 3v. 351. Ibid., 5–7, 32. 352. Ibid., 25. 353. Ibid. 354. Ibid. 355. Ibid., 31–32. 356. The book’s title begins The Actions & Doctrine & Other Passages touching Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. It is in the collections of the British Library, shelfmark C.23.e.4. 357. Helen Smith, “Grossly Material Things”: Women and Book Production in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 9, 12. 358. On family and parish, see Joyce Ransome, “Monotessaron: The Harmonies of Little Gidding,” The Seventeenth Century 20 (2005): 23. While the Little Gidding community was influenced by continental faith communities, both lay and ordained, it differed from the latter in involving no vows and no rule besides that which was mutually agreed (at least ideally). This said, the reading practices described throughout this section by Elizabeth Patton, Jaime Goodrich, and Caroline Bowden are at times deeply resonant with life at Little Gidding. Particularly relevant is Bowden’s attention to the role of reading in the formation of vocation, and the directing of all reading to the aims of religious life, and Patton’s attention to the quietly expansive role of women in spiritual teaching within lay networks. 359. Mary and Anna Collet, mentioned above, were the oldest, born in 1600 and 1602, respectively. The youngest, Judith, was born in 1624. See Joyce Ransome, The Web of Friendship: Nicholas Ferrar and Little Gidding (Cambridge: James Clarke & Co, 2011), 258–59.

360. Ibid., 55. 361. Lynette R. Muir, and John A. White, eds., Materials for the Life of Nicholas Ferrar: A Reconstruction of John Ferrar’s Account of His Brother’s Life Based on All the Surviving Copies (Leeds: Leeds Philosophical and Literary Society, 1996), 86. 362. Ransome, Web, 111–12. 363. All quotations from Herbert from Helen Wilcox, ed., The English Poems of George Herbert (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 364. Femke Molekamp points out the importance of nonlinear reading for women in Women and the Bible in Early Modern England: Religious Reading and Writing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 83. 365. Biblical illustration became an increasingly hot topic in the 1630s and 1640s. George Henderson details the ways in which a particular set of Antwerp prints were tipped into the small format Bibles in London, and how the practice ignited puritan concern, even figuring in the trial of Laud. See “Biblical Illustration in the Age of Laud,” Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society 8.2 (1982): 173–216. Michael Gaudio insightfully comments on the ways that Little Gidding drew extensively and deeply on the Catholic iconic tradition while enacting a wariness of its idolatrous potential. See The Bible and the Printed Image in Early Modern England: Little Gidding and the Pursuit of Scriptural Harmony (London: Routledge, 2017). 366. Smith, “Grossly Material Things,” 9. 367. For a full account of the editions used in the king’s book, see Paul Dyck, “вЂA New Kind of Printing’: Cutting and Pasting a Book for a King at Little Gidding,” The Library: The Transactions of the Bibliographical Society 9.3 (2008): 306–33. 368. Cornelius Jansen, Concordia Evangelica (Antwerp, 1558). 369. John Ferrar described the technique as “a new kind of printing” (Muir and White, eds., Materials, 76). Gaudio strikingly describes their method as “a way of thinking with prints incarnationally” (105). 370. Debora Shuger, Religion in Early Stuart England, 1603–1638 (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2012), 592–93. 371. Christiaan Schuckman, Hollstein’s Dutch & Flemish Etchings Engravings and Woodcuts 1450–1700: Vol. 44. Maarten de Vos, ed. D. De Hoop Scheffer (Rotterdam: Sound & Vision Interactive, 1996), 621–28. 372. Muir and White, eds., Materials, 87. 373. Adam Smyth’s recent article on the community effectively summarizes Little Gidding’s own difficulties and the non-saintly details of their life together. See “Little Clippings: Cutting and Pasting Bibles in the 1630s,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 45.3 (2015): 595–613. 374. Reid Barbour, Literature and Religious Culture in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 375. A. M. Williams, Conversations at Little Gidding: “On the Retirement of Charles V,” “On the Austere Life” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 171–72. 376. E. Cruwys Sharland, The Story Books of Little Gidding: Being the Religious Dialogues Recited in the Great Room, 1631–2 (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1899), 42. 377. Gaudio explores at length the relationship of the Little Gidding concordances to pattern books. See 35–59. 378. They left out the burial of the dead, which is additional to the biblical text. 379. “They made their scissors to serve the altar or the poorВ .В .В . [and were] not nice of dressing with their own hands poor people’s wounds” (Sharland, Story Books, xxvi). 380. Williams, Conversations, 172. 381. The center column uses the community’s technique of combining typefaces to show both the harmonized account (black letter) and the alternate versions (roman). For a thorough analysis of the book’s textual arrangement see Dyck, “вЂA New Kind of Printing.’” 382. See Gaudio, 28, for the community’s construction of another image of John in prison, in the Hatfield House concordance. In that case, they literally have placed a figure behind bars. 383. The idea of the martyr as the friend of God, long held in Christian tradition, has come to me through my colleague Chris Huebner.

384. Williams, Conversations, 172. This essay is dedicated to the memory of J. T. Rhodes, an accomplished bibliographer who laid the groundwork for study of the Cambrai and Paris libraries. I am also grateful to the monastic archivists whose kind assistance and hospitality made this paper possible: Dame Benedict Rowell of Colwich Abbey, Dame Peter Smith of Oulton Abbey, Dame Scholastica Jacob of Stanbrook Abbey, and Abbot Geoffrey Scott of Douai Abbey. 385. “The English Benedictines of the Convent of Our Blessed Lady of Good Hope in Paris,” in Miscellanea VII (London: Catholic Record Society, 1911), 390–91. 386. “English Benedictines of [В .В .В .В ] Paris,” 391. 387. Victoria Van Hyning, “Expressing Selfhood in the Convent: Anonymous Chronicling and Subsumed Autobiography,” British Catholic History 32.2 (2014): 219–34; The English Convents in Exile, 1600–1800: Communities, Culture and Identity, ed. Caroline Bowden and James E. Kelly (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2013); Caroline Bowden, “вЂA distribution of tyme’: Reading and Writing Practices in the English Convents in Exile,” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 31.1–2 (2012): 99–116; and Heather Wolfe, “Reading Bells and Loose Papers: Reading and Writing Practices of the English Benedictine Nuns of Cambrai and Paris,” in Early Modern Women’s Manuscript Writing: Selected Papers from the Trinity/Trent Colloquium, ed. Victoria E. Burke and Jonathan Gibson (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2004), 135–56. 388. Caroline Bowden, “Building Libraries in Exile: The English Convents and Their Book Collections in the Seventeenth Century,” British Catholic History 32.3 (2015): 343–82; J. T. Rhodes, Catalogue des livres provenant des religieuses anglaises de Cambray (Salzburg: Institut fГјr Anglistik und Amerikanistik, 2013); J. T. Rhodes, “The Library Catalogue of the English Benedictine Nuns of Our Lady of Good Hope in Paris,” The Downside Review 130 (2012): 54–86; Caroline Bowden, “Books and Reading at Syon Abbey, Lisbon, in the Seventeenth Century,” in Syon Abbey and Its Books: Reading, Writing and Religion, c.1400–1700, ed. E. A. Jones and Alexandra Walsham (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press, 2010), 177–202. 389. Peter Guilday, The English Catholic Refugees on the Continent, 1558–1795, vol. 1, The English Colleges and Convents in the Catholic Low Countries, 1558–1795 (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1914), 256–82. 390. Heidi Brayman Hackel, Reading Material in Early Modern England: Print, Gender, and Legacy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 214–55; Caroline Bowden, “The Library of Mildred Cooke Cecil, Lady Burleigh,” The Library 6.1 (2005): 3–29; Arnold Hunt, “The Books, Manuscripts and Literary Patronage of Mrs Anne Sadleir (1585–1670),” in Early Modern Women’s Manuscript Writing, 205–36; David McKitterick, “Women and Their Books in Seventeenth-Century England: The Case of Elizabeth Puckering,” The Library, Seventh Series, 1.4 (2000): 359–80; and Paul Morgan, “Frances Wolfreston and вЂHor Bouks’: A SeventeenthCentury Woman Book-Collector,” The Library, Sixth Series, 11.3 (1989): 197–219. 391. On differences between laywomen and nuns, see Bowden, “Building Libraries,” 357–64. 392. The Rule of the Most Blissed Father Saint Benedict (1632), 55. Hereafter this text will be cited parenthetically as Rule. 393. Statutes Compiled for the Better Observation of the Holy Rule ofВ .В .В . S. Benedict (1632), В§1.2.1. Hereafter this text will be cited parenthetically as Brussels Statutes. 394. Cambrai Constitutions, MS 20 H 1, 30, Archives DГ©partementales du Nord, Lille. Hereafter this text will be cited parenthetically as Cambrai Constitutions. 395. Paris Constitutions, MS P2, В§4.1, Colwich Abbey, Staffordshire. Hereafter this text will be cited parenthetically as Paris Constitutions. 396. Also see Paris Constitutions, В§4.4. 397. Bowden, “Books and Reading,” 194. 398. Bowden, “Building Libraries,” 351–52. 399. Ibid., 350–51. 400. Claire Walker, Gender and Politics in Early Modern Europe: English Convents in France and the Low

Countries (Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 143–47. 401. Bowden, “Building Libraries,” 345–48. 402. Rhodes, Catalogue des livres. 403. Bowden, “Library of Mildred Cooke Cecil,” 17; Morgan, “Frances Wolfreston,” 197–98. 404. Bowden, “Building Libraries,” 353. 405. Psalterium Davidis (1619), M6, Douai Abbey, Berkshire; see Bowden, “Building Libraries,” 355. 406. Officium et Missa (1659), box T V 4, Douai Abbey, my translation. All translations from French and Latin are my own. 407. “Who Were the Nuns? A Prosopographical Study of the English Convents in Exile 1600–1800, ” Queen Mary, University of London, accessed January 18, 2016, http://wwtn.history.qmul.ac.uk/search /search.php. Sixteen members of the Caryll family professed in Continental convents over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. 408. MS G 30, Oulton Abbey, Staffordshire; Nathaniel Bacon, Journal of Meditations for Every Day in the Year (1659) and John Cross, Contemplations on the Life & Glory of Holy Mary (1685), Oulton books, Douai Abbey. 409. John Merbecke, The Lives of Holy Saints, Prophets, Patriarchs, Apostles, and Others (1685), Oulton books, Douai Abbey. 410. Gregory I, The Second Booke of the Dialogues of S. Gregorie the Greate (1639), box T V 4, Douai Abbey. 411. See chapter 9 in this volume for further discussion of books in the novitiate. 412. Rhodes, Catalogue des livres, inside back cover. 413. Augustine Baker, Sancta Sophia (1657), N 25.2, Colwich Abbey. 414. MS 35, Colwich Abbey. 415. Gregory, Dialogues, N 14.2, Colwich Abbey. 416. Box T V 6, Douai Abbey. 417. A Manuall of Godly Prayers and Litanies (1640), N 15, Colwich Abbey. 418. Author’s collection. 419. Anthony Batt, A Poor Man’s Mite (1674), N 14.a, Colwich Abbey. 420. Augustine Baker, “A Catalogue of such English Bookes as are in the house, most helping toward Contemplation,” MS Osborn b 268, 245, Beinecke Library, New Haven. Also see J. T. Rhodes, “Dom Augustine Baker’s Reading Lists,” Downside Review 111 (1993): 157–73. 421. Rhodes, “Library Catalogue,” 58, no. 4. 422. Rhodes, “Library Catalogue,” 85–86. 423. Thomas de Villacastin, Manuall of Devout Meditations and Exercises (1623), N 7, Colwich Abbey. 424. Similar memoranda in a Dunkirk book chronicle deaths in the Conyers family from 1656 to 1733, but these dates do not match those of any professed nun. Three and Thirty Devout Prayers Equal to the Dayes of Our Saviours Life for Relief of the Faithfull Departed (1684), box T V 5, Douai Abbey. 425. Dynckon notes that “my sister Petre” died on November 30, 1679; this “sister” may have been Lucy Fermor Petre (d. 1679), wife of William Petre (1602–1677). 426. Richard Lassels, The Voyage of Italy (1670), N 41, Colwich Abbey. 427. As ever, I am indebted to the communities cited for permission to read their books and particularly in this essay for discussions about reading practices in the novitiate with Sister Scholastica Jacob at Stanbrook Abbey, Sister Mary Aline at Nazareth, Bruges, and a group of Sisters at the History of Women Religious Conference, Santa Clara, California, in June 2016. I am grateful to James Kelly for reading an earlier draft of the paper and for his comments. Any mistakes are entirely my own. From Conference 13a, “Upon spiritual lecture” MS in undated seventeenth-century hand, in English Convents in Exile, 1600–1800, ed. Caroline Bowden, vol. 2, Spirituality, ed. Laurence Lux-Sterritt (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2012–13), 145–48. 428. Ibid. 429. For an overview of book collections in the English convents see my “Building Libraries in Exile: The English Convents and Their Book Collections in the Seventeenth Century,” British Catholic History

32.3 (2015): 343–82. For convents influenced by Augustine Baker, see Heather Wolfe, “Reading Bells and Loose Papers: Reading and Writing Practices of the English Benedictine Nuns of Cambrai and Paris,” in Early Modern Women’s Manuscript Writing, ed. Victoria E. Burke and Jonathan Gibson (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), 135–56, and “Dame Barbara Constable: Catholic Antiquarian, Advisor and Closet Missionary,” in Catholic Culture in Early Modern England, ed. Ronald Corthell et al. (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 2007), 158–88. 430. The process of joining a convent can be studied in Lux-Sterrit, Spirituality, 1–29. 431. Jaime Goodrich’s chapter in this volume shows how books were passed through the Benedictine communities in ways that reflected the spirit of their religious life, reinforcing the ideas and instructions contained in the texts. 432. See for instance the problems at Cambrai relating to the adoption of Augustine Baker’s texts as part of the reading material for the nuns in 1632 discussed by Jaime Goodrich. 433. For comments on the challenges of this process, see for example “Just Reproaches of our Lord,” Cambrai MS, Lux-Sterritt, Spirituality, 117–19. 434. “Constitutions” from Louvain, R.H.G. IV a 1, 53, Nazareth Archives, Bruges. 435. Statutes compiled for the Better Observation of the Holy Rule of . . . S. Benedict, The Firste Parte (Ghent, 1632; RSTC 17552), 3. 436. See Jan Rhodes, “Dom Augustine Baker’s Reading Lists,” The Downside Review 38.111 (1993): 157–73. 437. MS “Constitutions,” 1687, Preface and 1. Stanbrook Abbey, Yorkshire. 438. I am indebted to Laurence Lux-Sterritt and Sister Scholastica Jacob for their guidance in discussions on this matter. 439. “Gemitus Peccatorum” (1649), MS 82143, Downside Abbey. 440. From “Upon spiritual lecture,” in Lux-Sterritt, Spirituality, 147. 441. Quoted in Wolfe “Reading Bells,” 147. For further discussion, see Jaime Goodrich’s essay in this collection. 442. [Copy] Letter from Dorothy Radcliffe at Cambrai October 18, 1662, to her father Sir Edward Radcliffe, MS Radcliffe Papers, UC/P30/65a-b, Ushaw College, Durham. 443. Clare Radcliffe (1655–81). 444. For examples of these examinations see Lux-Sterritt, Spirituality, 37–46. 445. For comments from abbesses on qualities needed in members, see Mary Knatchbull’s “Letter of encouragement to the new community at Boulogne” (1652) and Lucy Herbert’s “Last Letter to the Community at Bruges” (1744), in English Convents in Exile, 1600–1800, ed. Caroline Bowden, vol. 5, Convent Management, ed. James E. Kelly (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2013), 250–55, 331–34. 446. For analysis of age at entry see Who were the Nuns? database located at: https://wwtn.history.qmul.ac.uk/analysis/officeholders.php. For examples of girls who entered convents, see the ODNB entries for Margaret Mostyn and Margaret Clement. 447. Elizabeth Grace Coghlan (1784–1838) and Anne Coghlan (1786–1829). 448. “Short Colections . . . with some few perticulars of our dear deceased Religious,” in English Convents in Exile, 1600–1800, ed. Caroline Bowden, part 2, vol. 4, Life Writing II, ed. Katrien Daemen-de Gelder (2013), see, for example, 99, 102, 105, 111–12, 121, 129, 137–38, 154, 156, 183, 186–87, 189. 449. Heather Wolfe’s ODNB entry on Barbara Constable. 450. Augustine Baker OSB, The Life and Death of Dame Gertrude More, ed. Ben Wekking, Analecta Cartusiana, 119:19 (Salzburg: Universität Salzburg, 2002), 22, 23, and Preliminaries, xiii. 451. Gertrude More, The Holy Practices of a Devine Lover (Paris, 1657) and The Spiritual Exercises (Paris, 1658). 452. For discussion see my “Building Libraries,” 343–82. 453. For examples, see Alexia Gray, ed., Statutes Compyled for the Better Observation of the Holy Rule of . . . S. Benedict (Ghent, 1632); The Rule of the Holy Virgin S. Clare (St Omer, 1621); The Rule of the Great S. Augustin . . . for the use of the English Augustin nuns (Bruges, 1697[?]). 454. “Constitutions” (1629), R M G IV.a.1, Prologue, English Convent Archives, Bruges. See A. F.

Allison, “The English Augustinian Convent of Our Lady of Syon at Paris: . . . 1634–1713,” Recusant History 21 (1993): 461. 455. “Constitutions (1675) for our Lady of Syon, Paris,” Preliminaries, unpaginated. Westminster Diocesan Archives. See Allison, “English Augustinian Convent,” 454. 456. The Rule of the Great S. Augustin . . . for the use of the English Augustin Nuns at Bridges (Bruges: John De Cock, n.d., but 1737). Similar texts are found elsewhere such as Poor Clares, “Meditations upon our holy Rule and ordinances,” early eighteenth century, MS 37. As with all the books and manuscripts from the Poor Clares cited here, they are now at Durham University Library: catalogue accessible online (Collection code: GB 033 PCD). 457. Rule of S Augustine Expounded, Library Collection, F1. a. 12, Nazareth Archives, Bruges. See also “Pious Considerations or Declarations on the Rule,” PCD MSS 58–61. 458. Discussed in Jaime Goodrich, “Nuns and Community-Centered Writing: The Benedictine Rule and Brussels Statutes,” Huntington Library Quarterly 77.3 (2014): 287–303. 459. The office of the B. V. Mary in English: to which is added the Vespers or Even-song, in Latin and English (London, 1685, 1687, 1699, 1720, 1736, 1780 and others). 460. “The Statutes,” R. M. G. III. d. Nazareth Archives, Bruges. See pp. 169–75, “Points to be practiced by Novices; Schollars for [the] order; and Religious.” 461. Teresa of Avila, The Second Part of the Life of the Holy Mother S. Teresa of Jesus (London, 1669, 1671, 1675) and The Flaming Hart or the Life of the Glorious S. Teresa (Antwerp, 1642). Edward Scarisbricke, SJ, The life of the Lady Warner . . . in Religion call’d Sister Clare of Jesus (London, 1691, 1692). 462. For instance, see Henry More, trans. Hierome Plautus, The Happiness of a Religious State (Rouen, 1632); Pinelli Lucas, SJ, The Mirrour of Religious Perfection (St Omer, 1618). Michel-Ange Marin, The Perfect Religious (1762), discussed by Lux-Sterritt, in Spirituality, 81–94. 463. The Perfect Religious, PCD 0013. 464. J. T. Rhodes, ed. Catalogue des livres . . . Book list of the English Benedictine nuns of Cambrai c. 1793 (Salzburg: Universität Salzburg, 2013). 465. Mary Stanford was one of twenty-six entrants 1710–19 who left the convent without professing. 466. See Lux-Sterritt, Spirituality, 15; “Considerations for the 10 Dayes Exercise,” MS R4 Box D1. 21–30, Canonesses of the Holy Sepulchre, Colchester. 467. Library Collection, A16. a. 84. Nazareth Archives, Bruges. 468. Les Psaumes en forme de prieres (Paris, 1765). PCD 0715. 469. “The duties and sentiments of a penitent soul contained in the 7 penitential psalms,” PCD MS 38. 470. I am grateful to Victoria Van Hyning for sharing her listing of the early books in the library at Nazareth, Bruges. Mary Agnes Jerningham professed in 1745 aged eighteen, Who Were the Nuns? database UID, BA121. 471. Ceremonies qui s’observent à la vêture, chez les Religieuses Angloises de Sainte Claire de pauvre Monastere de Jesus. Maria. Joseph. A Rouen en Normandie (Rouen, 1761), marked for the Noviciate. MS versions in French of clothing ceremonies survive from the Canonesses in Liège. 472. For further discussion of the role of the Novice Mistress see “The Diary of the Blue Nuns . . . 1658–1810,” ed. Joseph Gillow and Richard Trappes-Lomax. Catholic Record Society, Vol. 8, (London: CRS, 1910), 283. 473. “Manner of bringing up Novices,” originally from Carmelites, Hoogstraten, III, para. I. MS translated by Steven Robinson and dedicated to Sister Mary Anne, Mistress of Novices (probably Mary Anne of Jesus Hunter), 1751. From microfilm MSA SC 5366-3-7 in Maryland State Archives, Annapolis. 474. As outlined by the Benedictines in Brussels, MS in Haslemere Collection, currently uncatalogued, 1779, Downside Abbey. 475. “Instructions for Novice Mistress,” Archives R.M. H.R.II.k, p. 108, Nazareth Archives, Bruges. 476. “Short Collections . . . ,” in Life Writing II, Daemen-de Gelder, 65, 334–441. 477. See, for example, “Instructions for Novice Mistress” at Nazareth Archives, Bruges, and “The Manner of bringing up Novices,” Hoogstraten Carmelites, now on microfilm at Maryland State Archives, (MSA, SC 5366-3-7, Hoogstraete), as above.

478. “Manner of bringing up Novices,” Section VI, Hoogstraten, as above. 479. See, for example, St. Bonaventure, “The Mirror of Novices,” PCD MS 72 and “Pious considerations on the holy Rule of S. Clare,” PCD MS 60 and 61. 480. “The Manner of Receiving Novices,” uncatalogued MS, unpaginated and undated, seventeenth–eighteenth centuries. Augustinian Convent, Paris, Westminster Diocesan Archives. 481. For an example, see Julia Bolton Holloway, ed. “Colections” by an English nun in Exile: BibliothГЁque Mazarine 1202, Analecta Cartusiana, 119:26 (Salzburg: UniversitГ¤t Salzburg, 2006). Gertrude More left a catalogue of books she thought appropriate for contemplative nuns, see The Holy Practices of a Devine Lover, Paris, 1657, 34–37. For Poor Clare manuscripts, see “Translations from Blosius, Harphius and other works about prayer and spirituality,” PCD MS 66. For Paris survivals, see Jan Rhodes, “The Library Catalogue of the English Benedictine NunsВ .В .В . in Paris,” The Downside Review 259 (April 2012): 54–86. For further discussion, Wolfe, “Reading Bells,” 142–48. 482. Wolfreston is most famously memorialized in Paul Morgan’s essay “Frances Wolfreston and вЂHor Bouks’: A Seventeenth-Century Woman Book-Collector,” The Library, 6th ser., 11.3 (1989): 197–219. 483. William Sherman, Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 53. 484. W.P.W. Phillimore, Some Account of the Family of Middlemore of Warwickshire and Worcestershire (London: Phillimore, 1901), 106–9. 485. Morgan, “Frances Wolfreston,” 209. 486. John Cleveland, A Character of a Diurnal-Maker / Poems (London, 1654). University of Illinois IUA03098. 487. Lichfield Record Office, probate date November 30, 1677. Manuscript. 488. The Bodleian Library acquired a bound volume of Poor Robin almanacs in 2011 that once belonged to the Wolferstan family. The first twelve almanacs, dating from 1666 to 1677, are heavily annotated by Wolfreston. I am currently preparing a publication on the volume. 489. Stanford Wolferstan was the vicar of St. Peter’s Church in the Warwickshire village of Wootton Wawen. 490. William Winstanley, Poor Robin, 1676: An Almanack after a New Fashion (London, 1675), B3r. Bodleian Library, MS. Don. e. 246. 491. Francis Wolferstan, Wolfreston’s eldest son, died without male heirs. Stanford died in 1698, leaving his son Stanford to inherit Statfold. John Burke, A Genealogical and Heraldic History of the Commoners of Great Britain and Ireland (London: Published for Henry Colburn, 1833), 1:188. 492. William Carew Hazlitt, The Hazlitts: Part the Second: A Narrative of the Later Fortunes of the Family with a Survey of the Western and Other Suburbs of London as They Were Sixty Years Since (Edinburgh: Printed by Ballantyne, Hanson & Co., 1912), 326–27. 493. Arnold Hunt, “Libraries in the Archives: Researching Provenance in the British Library,” in Libraries within the Library: The Origins of the British Library’s Printed Collections, ed. Giles Mandelbrote and Barry Taylor (London: British Library, 2009), 380–81. 494. Stephen Ferguson. “Provenance Evidence on Flickr,” Princeton University, accessed December 1, 2016, https://blogs.princeton.edu/rarebooks/2011/11 495. Alison Wiggins, “Frances Wolfreston’s Chaucer,” in Women as Scribes and the Domestication of Print Culture, ed. Phillipa Hardman and Anne Lawrence-Mathers (Cambridge: Brewer, 2010), 79. 496. David McKitterick, “Women and Their Books in Seventeenth-Century England: The Case of Elizabeth Puckering,” The Library, 7th ser., 1.4 (2000): 363. 497. Morgan, “Frances Wolfreston,” 204. 498. The 1593 first edition is held by the Bodleian Library (Arch. G e.31 [2]), while the sixteenth belongs to the Folger (STC 22366). 499. Jay Moschella et al. “Frances Wolfreston and вЂHor’ Playbooks at the BPL,” Boston Public Library, accessed July 1, 2016, http://www.bpl.org/distinction/2015/12/21/frances-wolfreston-andhor-playbooks

500. Many thanks to Pforzheimer curator Aaron Pratt for noticing and transcribing these extraordinary annotations, which were washed by the book’s binder. The book is call number PFORZ 929 PFZ. 501. Morgan, “Frances Wolfreston,” 203–4. 502. Henry Glapthorne, Wit in a Constable: A Comedy Written 1639 (London, 1640), B1r. 503. Glapthorne, B1v. 504. One title by Taylor, The Number and Names of All the Kings of England and Scotland (London, 1649), numbers among the twenty-one books mentioned above. On its title page Wolfreston classes it as “a cronickall.” 505. Glapthorne, B1v. 506. Glapthorne, B2r. 507. The Forty-Sixth Annual Report of the Deputy Keeper of the Public Records: 11 August 1885 (London, 1886), 75. 508. Morgan, “Frances Wolfreston,” 209. 509. Seymour De Ricci, English Collectors of Books & Manuscripts (1530–1930) and Their Marks of Ownership (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, [1960]), 26. Reprint. 510. Mary Wroth, The Countesse of Mountgomeries Urania (London, 1621), 266. 511. Kim Walker, Women Writers of the English Renaissance (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1996), 17. 512. Juan LuГ-s Vives,De Institutione Feminae Christianae, trans. Charles Fantazzi (Leiden: Brill, 1996), 51. 513. Indeed, there is substantial ink underlining and an annotation—“a true charecter of a certain knight in Brittony”—by another contemporary reader on leaf 3X3r of Urania, in a script similar to her eldest son’s. 514. An earlier owner, Raphe Wood, signed the book on the inside front cover and several times on the front flyleaf, dating the flyleaf inscription “Anno domini 1629.” 515. William Winstanley, Poor Robin, 1669: An Almanack after a New Fashion (London, 1668), B4v. Bodleian Library, MS. Don. e. 246. 516. John Hinks, “Spreading the Word: Bookselling and Printing before 1800,” West Midlands History: People of Ideas, Innovation and Enterprise 1.3 (2013): 13. 517. M. Winslow Lundy, “Provenance Evidence in Bibliographic Records: Demonstrating the Value of Best Practices in Special Collections Cataloging,” Library Resources & Technical Services 52.3 (2008): 165. 518. Judith A. Overmier and Elaine M. Doak, “Provenance Records in Rare Book and Special Collections,” Rare Books and Manuscripts Librarianship 11.1 (1996): 96. 519. Elaine Beckley Bradshaw and Stephen C. Wagner, “A Common Ground: Communication and Alliance between Cataloger and Curator for Improved Access to Rare Books and Special Collections,” College & Research Libraries 61.6 (2000): 3. 520. Willis Kerr, “The Professor Looks at the Card Catalog,” College & Research Libraries 4.2 (1943): 135–36. 521. Elaine Beckley Bradshaw and Stephen C. Wagner, “A Common Ground: Communication and Alliance between Cataloger and Curator for Improved Access to Rare Books and Special Collections,” College & Research Libraries 61.6 (2000): 5. 522. James P. Ascher, “Progressing Towards Bibliography, or, Organic Growth in the Bibliographic Record,” RBM: A Journal of Rare Books, Manuscripts, and Cultural Heritage 10.2 (2009): 109. 523. Ascher, “Progressing Towards Bibliography,” 95. 524. This approach encourages minimal preservation, arrangement, and description except when absolutely necessary in order to make large, unprocessed collections available to researchers more quickly. 525. Susan A. Adkins, “Automated Cataloging of Rare Books: A Time for Implementation,” Collection Management 16:1 (1992): 91. 526. Ascher, “Progressing Towards Bibliography,” 110. 527. Bradshaw and Wagner, “A Common Ground,” 200. 528. For example, there are at least thirty-five copies of James Shirley’s 1637 play The Example in the English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC) online and no indication which one may conceal her signature. 529. Completeness of MARC records ranges from full level; full level, material not examined; and less-

than-full level, material not examined, to minimal level. 530. McKitterick, “Elizabeth Puckering,” 374. 531. T.W., An Exposition uppon the Booke of the Canticles, Otherwise Called Schelomons Song (London, 1585), IUA13122. 532. Robert Chamberlain, The Swaggering Damsel (London, 1640), IUA02679. 533. Tobias Venner, Via recta ad vitam longam, or, A Plain Philosophicall Demonstration of the Nature, Faculties, and Effects of All Such Things as by Way of Nourishments Make for the Preservation of Health (London, 1638), IUA12564. 534. John Withals, A Short Dictionarie in Latine and English (London, 1584), Baldwin 0525. 535. John Donne, Poems (London, 1654), IUA03997. 536. Thomas Wilson, Saints by Calling, or, Called to Be Saints (London, 1620), IUA13157. 537. Anthony Munday, Palmerin D’Oliva. The First Part: Shewing the Mirrour of Nobilitie, the Map of Honour, Anatomie of Rare Fortunes, Heroicall Presidents of Love, Wonder of Chivalrie, and the Most Accomplished Knight in All Perfection (London, 1637), IUA09456. 538. Saint Thomas More, The Workes of Sir Thomas More Knyght (London, 1557), 828 M811557. 539. John Dryden, Secret-love, or, The Maiden-Queen (London, 1668), IUA04181. 540. Arrigo Caterino Davlia, The History of the Civil Wars of France (London, 1678), IUQ00844. 541. R.F.H., Two Right Profitable and Fruitfull Concordances, or Large and Ample Tables Alphabeticall: The First Contayning the Interpretation of the Hebrue, Caldean, Greeke, and Latine Wordes and Names Scatteringly Dispersed throughout the Whole Bible, with Their Common Places Following Euery of ThemВ .В .В . (London, 1582), Baldwin 4685. 542. Thomas Farnaby, He tes anthologias anthologia: florilegium epigrammatum Graecorum (London, 1650), Baldwin 5253. 543. Pierre Le Moyne, The Gallery of Heroick Women (London, 1652), Q. 920.7 L54gew. 544. William Painter, The Second Tome of the Palace of Pleasure (London, 1567), IUA09423. 545. McKitterick, “Elizabeth Puckering,” 363. 546. Beth M. Whittaker, “вЂGet It, Catalog It, Promote It’: New Challenges to Providing Access to Special Collections,” RBM: A Journal of Rare Books, Manuscripts, and Cultural Heritage 7.2 (2006): 121. 547. “RBMS Controlled Vocabularies,” Rare Books and Manuscripts Section, American Library Association, accessed July 21, 2016, http://www.rbms.info/vocabularies/ 548. Northamptonshire Record Office IL 4046 and 4046a: for editions and discussions, see Joseph L. Black and Fan Wang, “Judith Isham (nГ©e Lewin)” and “Judith Isham,” in Private Libraries in Renaissance England: A Collection and Catalogue of Tudor and Early Stuart Book-Lists, vol. 9, ed. Joseph L. Black, gen. ed. R. J. Fehrenbach (Tempe: ACMRS, 2017), 179–89 and 201–8. 549. Northamptonshire Record Office IC 4829, 4829v, and 4825: see Joseph L. Black, Erica Longfellow, and Jill Seal Millman, “Elizabeth Isham,” in Private Libraries in Renaissance England, vol. 9 (2017), 319–45. For Elizabeth Isham, see also chapter 4 in this volume. 550. Elizabeth does share one book with her mother’s collection and seven with her sister’s. But these titles appear to represent individually owned copies of family favorites: a reference in Isham’s “Booke of Rememberance” (fol. 8r) makes clear, for example, that each sister had her own copy of A godlie gardeine (STC 11554.5 et seq.): Constructing Elizabeth Isham, www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/ren /projects/isham/ 551. For early modern booklists and the interpretative challenges they pose, see William Poole, “Analysing a Private Library, with a Shelflist Attributable to John Hales of Eton, c.1624,” in A Concise Companion to the Study of Manuscripts, Printed Books, and the Production of Early Modern Texts, ed. Edward Jones (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2015), 41–65. For a more general overview, see David Pearson, “The English Private Library in the Seventeenth Century,” The Library 13.4 (2012): 379–99. 552. David Pearson, “English Book Owners in the Seventeenth Century: A Work in Progress Listing, ” www.bibsocamer.org/BibSite/Pearson/Pearson.pdf (updated May 2016). 553. Heidi Brayman Hackel, Reading Material in Early Modern England: Print, Gender, and Literacy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 240–81.

554. Caroline Bowden, “The Library of Mildred Cooke Cecil, Lady Burghley,” The Library 6.1 (2005): 3–29. 555. Pamela Selwyn and David Selwyn, “вЂThe profession of a gentleman’: Books for the Gentry and the Nobility (c.1560 to 1640),” in The Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland, Volume 1: To 1640, ed. Elisabeth Leedham-Green and Teresa Webber (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 489–519. 556. For Ireton and Southwell, see plre.folger.edu. For Sidney, see “Dorothy Percy Sidney’s Personal Library (1659),” ed. Joseph L. Black and Noel J. Kinnamon, in The Correspondence (c.1626–1659) of Dorothy Percy Sidney, Countess of Leicester, ed. Michael G. Brennan, Noel J. Kinnamon, and Margaret P. Hannay (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010), 209–13. 557. Leah Knight, “Lady Anne Clifford,” in Private Libraries in Renaissance England, vol. 9 (2017), 348–63. For Clifford, see chap. 13 (this vol.). A March 2018 update adds these lists. 558. Jeremy Dupertuis Bangs, ed., Plymouth Colony’s Private Libraries (Leiden: Leiden American Pilgrim Museum, 2016). David McKitterick cites other examples from wills and inventories in “Women and Their Books in Seventeenth-Century England: The Case of Elizabeth Puckering,” Library, 7th ser., 1.4 (2000): 359–80. 559. R. J. Fehrenbach remains general editor of the series. E. S. Leedham-Green served as volume editor until 2007, when she was succeeded by Joseph L. Black. 560. For the books in Lamport Hall, see the entry for the “Isham family” in Pearson, “English Book Owners,” and Douglas H. Gordon, “The Book-Collecting Northamptonshire Ishams and Their Book-Loving Virginia and Massachusetts Cousins,” Harvard Library Bulletin 18 (1970): 282–97. For Elizabeth Isham’s reading, see chapter 4 in this volume. 561. Jean Klene, ed., The Southwell-Sibthorpe Commonplace Book: Folger MS V.b.198, Renaissance English Text Society, vol. 20 (Tempe, AZ: MRTS, 1997), 5. A booklist associated with Lady Anne Southwell has been edited for PLRE and is available at plre.folger.edu 562. Quoted in Leanda De Lisle, The Sisters Who Would be Queen: The Tragedy of Mary, Katherine, & Lady Jane Grey (London: Harper, 2008), 273–74. 563. William Barlow, The summe and substance of the conferenceВ .В .В . at Hampton Court (1604), 36. 564. Susan Wabuda, “Bertie (nГ©e Willoughby), Katherine, Duchess of Suffolk (1519–1580),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); online edn., January 2008. 565. See The Library of the Sidneys of Penshurst Place, ed. Germaine Warkentin, Joseph L. Black, and William R. Bowen (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013). 566. For the closet as a private reading space for women, see Sasha Roberts, “Shakespeare вЂcreepes into the womens closets about bedtime’: Women Reading in a Room of Their Own,” in Renaissance Configurations: Voices/Bodies/Spaces, 1580–1690, ed. Gordon McMullan (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998), 30–63. 567. Raymond Gillespie, Seventeenth-Century Dubliners and Their Books (Dublin: Dublin City Public Libraries, 2005), 22. PLRE has received permission to incorporate these records into its database. 568. Bangs, ed., Plymouth Colony’s Private Libraries (2016), 284. 569. BL Egerton MS 2983, fol. 78r–v (Heath and Verney papers vol. 6). 570. Stockport Probate Records 1620–1650, ed. C. B. Phillips and J. H. Smith, Record Society of Lancashire and Cheshire Vol. CXXXI (Stroud, Gloucestershire: for the Society, 1992), 315–22. Jodrell’s library included “one boxe with 53 bookes in it most of them ould historie bookes”: given the number of books in this box and the low collective valuation (4s), these are probably pamphlets or stitched quartos and probably include or even comprise “story” books such as romances or plays. 571. Leah Knight and Joseph L. Black, “Lady Anne Holles (Stanhope),” Private Libraries in Renaissance England, vol. 10 (in progress). 572. For Sidney, see Library of the Sidneys of Penshurst Place (2013); for Roe and Conway, see Private Libraries in Renaissance England, vol. 9 (2017). 573. Lady Mary Grey (d. 1578); Jane, Lady Lumley (1537–78); Lady Margaret Hoby (1571–1633); Frances Egerton, Countess of Bridgewater (1583–1636); Anne Stanhope, dowager Countess of Clare (d. 1651); Lady Anne Clifford, Countess of Pembroke, Dorset and Montgomery (1590–1676); Lady

Margaret Clifford, Countess of Cumberland (1560–1616); Mary Dudley, Countess of Home (1586–1645); and her daughter Lady Margaret Home, Countess of Moray (ca. 1607–83). For Katherine Parr’s ownership of books, see chapter 1. 574. Lady Isabel Hampden (fl. 1583); Mary Bacon (d. 1587); Mildred Cooke Cecil, Lady Burghley (d. 1589); Dame Cecily Brewse (d. 1590); Lady Jane Buttes (d. 1593); Lady Dorothy Cockayne (d. 1594); Judith (nГ©e Lewin) Isham (1590–1625); Anne, Lady Southwell (1574–1636); Lady Alice Hatton (d. 1639); Judith Isham (1610–36); Lady Margaret Heath (1578–1647); Elizabeth Isham (1609–54); Anne Sadleir (1585–1671/2); Lady Elizabeth Ireton (d. 1686); Elizabeth Puckering (1622–89); Dame Bridget Bennet (fl. 1668–99). 575. Alice Edwards (d. 1546?); Agnes Cheke (d. 1549); Mercy Deane (fl. 1583); Alice Bacy (d. 1589); Mary Tye (d. 1592); Katherine Scarlet (d. 1595); Agnes Basepool (d. 1596); Margaret Partridge (d. 1597); Elizabeth Walden (d. 1600); Elizabeth (d. 1629) and Bridget Brome (n.d.); Frances Wolfreston (d. 1677). 576. In cases of uncertainty, female religious identity is based on the books in their respective collections. 577. Heidi Brayman Hackel, Reading Material in Early Modern England: Print, Gender, and Literacy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 260, 279. 578. University of Nottingham, Portland Collection, MS Pw V 4 (miscellany volume of John Holles, 2nd Earl of Clare), 192–94. 579. Private Libraries of Renaissance England (http://plre.folger.edu), Ad30 (hereafter cited as PLRE). 580. We are grateful to Micheline White for this connection. 581. PLRE 192. 582. There are, in fact, four book catalogues in the records of the Bennet family. In addition to the aforementioned catalogues, there is an undated list of books entitled “A Catholock of Bookes.” This was likely recorded in the late seventeenth century since the preceding pages contain an account of items in “my Ladys great heire Trounk In the Closett” dated December 12, 1695. A fourth and more extensive catalogue of books was documented in 1722, which coincided with the death of Bridget’s son, Charles, earl of Tankerville (1674–1722). The National Archives, London, C104/82. 583. Similarly, the catalogue of books owned by Egerton, first made in 1627 (174 works), had sixty-seven added in 1631 and 1632. This is considered a single catalogue because the additions were inserted to the 1627 record; Brayman Hackel, Reading Material, 245. 584. Michael Pearce, “Vanished Comforts: Setting the Context for Furniture and Furnishing in Scotland 1500–1700,” unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Dundee (2016), Appendix 2, University of Dundee and National Museums of Scotland, NRAS 217 Box 5 (inventories), cited with the kind permission of John, Earl of Moray. We are grateful to Dr. Pearce for bringing this catalogue to our attention and sharing his work with us. Each of the editions of Purchas his Pilgrimage (1613, 1614, 1617, 1626) added further material to the work. 585. British Library, Egerton MS 2983, fols 79r–v, 86v. 586. PLRE 273. Similarly, Hatton’s “Diverse Sermons bound upp in Octavo from 11. to 20. Volume” and “Diverse sermons in quarto .1.2.3.4.5.6.8.9. [sic] volumes” are treated as two distinct items here, rather than as eighteen. 587. Paul Morgan, “Frances Wolfreston and вЂHor Bouks’: A Seventeenth-Century Woman BookCollector,” Library, 6th ser., 11.3 (1989): 197–219; Arnold Hunt, “Libraries in the Archives: Researching Provenance in the British Library Invoices,” in Libraries within the Library: The Origins of the British Library’s Printed Collections, ed. Giles Mandelbrote and Barry Taylor (London: British Library, 2009), 363–84. 588. Jean Cavanaugh, “The Library of Lady Southwell and Captain Sibthorpe,” Studies in Bibliography 20 (1967): 243–54. For Isham’s catalogue, see PLRE 276. 589. J. T. Cliffe and David McKitterick have both commented on the existence of Bennet’s 1680, but not the 1699, book catalogue. See Cliffe, The World of the Country House in the Seventeenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 167; David McKitterick, “Women and Their Books in Seventeenth-Century England: The Case of Elizabeth Puckering,” Library, 7th ser., 1.4 (2000): 363, n. 18. 590. On Sir John Bennet’s political career see http://www.historyofparliamentonline.org/volume /1660-1690/member/bennet-sir-john-1616-95. His brother Henry, first earl of Arlington, served as the

king’s secretary of state from 1662 to 1674. 591. PLRE 224. 592. Sears Jayne and Francis R. Johnson, eds., The Lumley Library: The Catalogue of 1609 (London: British Museum, 1956), 48, 60, 131, 149, 170, 198, 225. 593. PLRE 268; see also chapter 13. 594. Andrew Cambers, “Readers’ Marks and Religious Practice: Margaret Hoby’s Marginalia, ” in Tudor Books and Their Readers: Materiality and the Construction of Meaning, ed. John N. King (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 219–20; “Print, Manuscript, and Godly Cultures in the North of England c.1600–1650,” unpublished PhD dissertation (University of York, 2003), 57–65; Godly Reading: Print, Manuscript and Puritanism in England, 1580–1720 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). 595. Cavanaugh, “Library of Lady Southwell,” 243; Jean Klene, ed., The Southwell-Sibthorpe Commonplace Book: Folger MS V.b.198 (Tempe: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1997), 96. 596. For Southwell as poet, see Sarah C. E. Ross, Women, Poetry, and Politics in Seventeenth-Century Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 63–99; Victoria E. Burke, “Medium and Meaning in the Manuscripts of Anne, Lady Southwell,” in Women’s Writing and the Circulation of Ideas: Manuscript Publication in England, 1550–1800, ed. George L. Justice and Nathan Tinker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 94–120; Klene, Southwell-Sibthorpe Commonplace Book. 597. McKitterick, “Elizabeth Puckering,” 361. 598. PLRE Ad43. 599. Pearce, “Vanished Comforts,” Appendix 2. 600. PLRE 248. See also Earle Havens and Elizabeth Patton, “Underground Networks, Prisons and the Circulation of Counter-Reformation Books in Elizabethan England,” in Early Modern English Catholicism: Identity, Memory, and Counter-Reformation, ed. James Kelly and Susan Royal (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 165–88. 601. Jenna Lay, Beyond the Cloister: Catholic Englishwomen and Early Modern Literary Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 37. 602. PLRE Ad43. 603. PLRE 186. 604. PLRE 194. 605. PLRE Ad35. 606. PLRE 244. John Fox, “The Bromes of Holton Hall: A Forgotten Recusant Family,” Oxoniensia, 68 (2003): 86–87. 607. Earle Havens, “Lay Catholic Book Ownership and International Catholicism in Elizabethan England,” in Publishing Subversive Texts in Elizabethan England and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, ed. Teresa Bela, Clarinda Calma, and Jolanta Rzegocka (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 246–47. 608. Hackel, Reading Material, 273, 278, 271, 265. 609. PLRE 248. 610. McKitterick, “Elizabeth Puckering,” 378; Arnold Hunt, “The Books, Manuscripts and Literary Patronage of Mrs Anne Sadleir (1583–1670),” in Early Modern Women’s Manuscript Writing: Selected Papers from the Trinity/Trent Colloquium, ed. Victoria E. Burke and Jonathan Gibson (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), 216. 611. For the books belonging to Edwards see Sears Jayne, Library Catalogues of the English Renaissance, 2nd ed. (Godalming: St. Paul’s, 1983), 186. 612. The classic works on this topic are Arthur F. Marotti, Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995); Margaret J. M. Ezell, Writing Women’s Literary History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993); Harold Love, Scribal Publication in SeventeenthCentury England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993). 613. British Library, Egerton MS 2983, fol. 79. 614. PLRE 273. 615. McKitterick, “Elizabeth Puckering,” 359–80. 616. Richard T. Spence, Lady Anne Clifford: Countess of Pembroke, Dorset and Montgomery (1590–1676) (Sutton: Stroud, 1997), 257–59. This catalogue was taken in 1739 but is included in our

analysis because the items listed predate her death. 617. PLRE 270. 618. PLRE 276. 619. Cambers, “Print, Manuscript, and Godly Cultures,” 61–62. 620. Cambers, “Margaret Hoby’s Marginalia,” 219–20. 621. Julie Crawford, “Reconsidering Early Modern Women’s Reading, or, How Margaret Hoby Read Her de Mornay,” Huntington Library Quarterly 73 (2010): 218. 622. Hunt, “Anne Sadleir,” 213. 623. Caroline Bowden, “The Library of Mildred Cooke Cecil, Lady Burghley,” Library, 7th ser., 6.1 (2005): 3–29. 624. PLRE 268. 625. Hackel, Reading Material, 260–81. 626. Portland MS, Pw V 4, 192–94. 627. The National Archives, C104/82. 628. This tally does not appear to have improved as scholars have identified additional books owned by Wolfreston, rendering the percentage proportion even lower since. 629. Books at Donibristle House, Fife, ca. 1642, Moray papers, NRAS 217, box 5 no. 1. 630. British Library, Egerton MS 2983, fol. 79v. 631. Arnold Hunt, “Anne Sadleir,” 232–35. 632. J. D. Davies, “FitzRoy, Henry, first duke of Grafton (1663–1690),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online ed., January 2008 [http://www.oxforddnb.com /view/article/9636, accessed August 10, 2016]. Fitzroy married Isabella Bennet who was the daughter and heir of Henry Bennet, earl of Arlington, and niece to Sir John and Bridget Bennet. 633. Hunt, “Anne Sadleir,” 209. 634. Hackel, Reading Material, 252–53, 263, 266, 270, 281, 253. 635. See www.archives.norfolk.gov.uk/download/ncc099572 636. Jason McElligott, “вЂWe came into that ugely playce Ierland upon may ye 23 1677’: Ownership Inscriptions and Life Writing in the Books of Early Modern Women,” in Women’s Life Writing and Early Modern Ireland, ed. Julie A. Eckerle and Naomi McAreavey (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, forthcoming). 637. We are grateful to Robyn Adams and Matthew Symonds of the Centre for Editing Lives and Letters, University College London, for sharing this information, which is part of a forthcoming article on early women donors to the Bodleian Library. The Fermors’ daughter, Agnes Wenman (d. 1617), was a translator involved in scribal publication: Jane Griffiths, “Wenman, Agnes, Lady Wenman (d. 1617),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/29044, accessed October 18, 2017]. 638. (http://armorial.library.utoronto.ca/stamps/FAN003_s1; http://armorial.library.utoronto.ca/stamps /FAN003_s2). 639. Nine of these are in Italian, ranging from Boccaccio and Dante, to Ovid’s Metamorphoses, to a history of the Turkish and Persian wars. The two identified English works are heraldic (Brooke’s Catalogue and succession of the kingsВ .В .В . [1619]) and devotional (Henry Smith’s Sermons [1618]). 640. Research for this chapter was funded by the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP/2007–2013 / ERC Grant Agreement n. 615545). 641. For overviews of Clifford’s reading, see Mary Ellen Lamb, “The Agency of the Split Subject: Lady Anne Clifford and the Uses of Reading,” English Literary Renaissance 22.3 (1992): 347–68, and Heidi Brayman Hackel, Reading Material in Early Modern England: Print, Gender, and Literacy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 222–40 and “Turning to her вЂBest Companion[s]’: Lady Anne Clifford as Reader, Annotator and Book Collector,” in Lady Anne Clifford: Culture, Patronage and Gender in 17th-Century Britain, ed. Karen Hearn and Lynn Hulse, Yorkshire Archaeological Society Occasional Paper No. 7 (Leeds: Yorkshire Archaeological Society, 2009), 99–108. 642. For her life, see George Williamson, Lady Anne Clifford, Countess of Dorset, Pembroke &

Montgomery, 1590–1676: Her Life, Letters, and Work (Kendal, UK: S.R. Publishers, 1922; rpt. Wakefield, UK: S.R. Publishers, 1967) and Richard T. Spence, Lady Anne Clifford, Countess of Pembroke, Dorset and Montgomery, 1590–1676 (Woodbridge, UK: Sutton Publishing, 1997). Clifford’s lifewritings have been most recently edited by Katherine O. Acheson, The Memoir of 1603 and The Diary of 1616–1619 (Peterborough: Broadview, 2007), and by Jessica L. Malay, Anne Clifford’s Great Books of Record (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015) and Anne Clifford’s autobiographical writing, 1590–1676 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018). 643. Barbara Lewalski drew attention to Clifford as reader by commenting on how “reading and writing wereВ .В .В . of primary importance to Anne Clifford’s self-definition, and resistance to patriarchy, ” in “Re-writing Patriarchy and Patronage: Margaret Clifford, Anne Clifford, and Aemilia Lanyer, ” The Yearbook of English Studies 21 (1991): 93. The next year, Lamb’s “Agency of the Split Subject” shone a torch on Clifford’s reading; soon after, the topic was tackled by Graham Parry in “The Great Picture of Lady Anne Clifford,” in Art and Patronage in the Caroline Courts: Essays in Honour of Sir Oliver Millar, ed. David Howard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 202–19, and Nigel Wheale in Writing and Society: Literacy, Print and Politics in Britain 1590–1660 (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), 116–31. Recent work includes Brayman Hackel, Reading Material; Stephen Orgel, “Marginal Maternity: Reading Lady Anne Clifford’s A Mirror for Magistrates,” in Printing and Parenting in Early Modern England, ed. Douglas A. Brooks (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2005), 267–89; Stephen Orgel, “Reading Lady Anne Clifford’s A Mirovr for Magistrates,” in Lady Anne Clifford: Culture, Patronage and Gender, Hearn and Hulse, 109–16; Stephen Orgel, “Reading with the Countess of Pembroke and Montgomery,” in The Reader in the Book: A Study of Spaces and Traces (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 138–57; Paul Salzman, “Anne Clifford’s Annotated Copy of Sidney’s Arcadia,” Notes and Queries 56.4 (2009): 554–55 and “Anne Clifford: Writing for Oneself, Writing for Others,” Parergon 27.1 (2010): 125–42; Julie Crawford, “Lady Anne Clifford and the Uses of Christian Warfare,” in English Women, Religion, and Textual Production: 1500–1625, ed. Micheline White (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2011), 101–23; Michelle Dowd, “вЂOrder plays the soul’: Anne Clifford, The Temple, and the Spiritual Logic of Housework,” in George Herbert’s Travels: International Print and Cultural Legacies, ed. Christopher Hodgkins (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2011), 59–78; Jessica Stoll, “Petrarch’s De Vita Solitaria: Samuel Daniel’s Translation c. 1610,” The Modern Language Review 109.2 (2014): 313–32; Leah Knight, “Reading Across Borders: The Case of Anne Clifford’s вЂPopish’ Books,” Journal of the Canadian Historical Association 25.2 (2014): 27–56; Stephanie Elsky, “Lady Anne Clifford’s Common-Law Mind,” in Studies in Philology 111.3 (2014): 521–46; Antoinina Bevan Zlatar, “Anne Clifford and Her Bible,” Studies in English Literature 57.1 (2017): 157–80. 644. Two copies of the portrait were made; one survives in Abbot Hall Art Gallery, Kendal, Cumbria, UK. Oil on canvas, central panel, 254 Г— 254 cm., side panels, 254 Г— 119.38 cm. A digital reproduction may be viewed via at “The Great Picture,” Google Arts & Culture, https://www.google.com /culturalinstitute/beta/asset/the-great-picture/ugHL4_ozVj1f3g. See also Leah Knight, “Lady Anne Clifford,” in Private Libraries in Renaissance England, vol. 9, vol. ed. Joseph L. Black, gen. ed. R. J. Fehrenbach (Tempe: ACMRS, 2017), 348–63, and Leah Knight, “Lady Margaret Clifford,” in Private Libraries in Renaissance England, vol. 9 (2017), 157–61. 645. On these manuscripts, see Acheson’s “Note on the Text,” Memoir and Diary, 37–40. Respectively, they are Portland Papers Volume XXIII, fols 80–119, and Sackville Papers U269 F48/1, leaves 18-38-3, Kent History and Library Centre, Maidstone, Kent; the latter is catalogued as “Missing since 1999,” but a microfilm is available. 646. See Acheson, Memoir and Diary, 131 (on reading Chaucer), 117 (on Spenser), 179 (on Ovid), 99, 117 (on Montaigne), 145 (on Sidney), 159, 162 (on Augustine), and 121–29, 163 (on the Bible). 647. The letter appears to have been first published by Izaak Walton, The Lives of Dr. John Donne, Sir Henry Wotton, Mr. Richard Hooker, Mr. George Herbert (London, 1675), 347. 648. Quoted (and silently modernized) in Williamson, Lady Anne Clifford, 197. 649. Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene (London, 1596), 28. 650. On Clifford’s monument for Spenser, see Spence, Lady Anne Clifford, 67–68.

651. John Selden’s Titles of Honor (London, 1631), Folio STC 22178 copy 3, Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC; identified in the catalogue notes as “Lady Anne Clifford’s copy, with her note in ink: вЂI beegane to ourloke this booke the 18 of Febuarary and I did make an ende of reding, or ouer loking itt all ouer the first of Marche folloinge 1638.’” 652. “Re-writing Patriarchy,” 94. Lewalski includes most of the same quotation in “Writing Women and Reading the Renaissance,” Renaissance Quarterly 44.4 (1991): 797. 653. Williamson, Lady Anne Clifford, 197, 526. 654. Writing Women in Jacobean England (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 140, 375. On the contents of Additional MS 15232, see the British Library’s online Archives and Manuscripts catalogue. 655. Acheson, The Diary of Anne Clifford 1616–1619 (New York and London: Garland, 1995), 13–14, 164. On the contents of BL Harleian MS 6177, see the Catalogue of English Literary Manuscripts 1450–1700, http://www.celm-ms.org.uk/repositories/british-library-harley-6000.html 656. Spence, Lady Anne Clifford, 141, 270. 657. Brayman Hackel, Reading Material, 233. Brayman Hackel also restores the second “heere” present in Williamson’s 1922 transcription. 658. For this image, I am glad for the personal correspondence of Elizabeth Sauer, June 30, 2016. In my reading of BL MS Harley 7001 212r, on November 30, 2016, almost every letter of the word in question was illegible; however, in my view, it consisted of five or six letters, and the first letter appeared to be “b” (or possibly a cramped “h”), not “d.” Subsequent letters are all ambiguous, such that sensible possibilities rapidly ramify, from “bousm” (a phonetical spelling of “bosom”) to “hansm” (for “handsome”). There is not space here to discuss the similarly variable transcription, in the same sources discussed above, of “make litte,” “make little,” and “make light” in the same letter. 659. James Daybell, “Gendered Archival Practices and the Future Lives of Letters,” in Cultures of Correspondence in Early Modern Britain, ed. James Daybell and Andrew Gordon (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press 2016), 226–33. 660. Acheson, Memoir and Diary, 156. 661. A clear example of this habit relates to her account of her mother’s death. It took place on May 24, 1616, but she records learning of it only on the 29th; a marginal note, however, appears by entries from several days earlier: “Upon the 24thВ .В .В . died my dear mother.” Acheson, Memoir and Diary, 84–85. 662. Edward Rainbowe, A Sermon Preached at the Funeral of the Right Honorable Anne, Countess of Pembroke, Dorset, and Montgomery (London, 1677), 40. In Reading Material, Brayman Hackel tropes this space as “Clifford’s commonplace-book bedroom,” 232. 663. WD/Hoth/A988/17, 1665, 1667–1668, Cumbria Archive Service, Kendal, UK. For literary readings of Clifford’s accounts, see Adam Smyth, Autobiography in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 72–93 and Nancy E. Wright, “Accounting for a Life: The Household Accounts of Lady Anne Clifford,” in Early Modern Autobiography: Theories, Genres, Practices, ed. Ronald Bedford, Lloyd Davis, and Philippa Kelly (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006), 234–51. See also Spence, Lady Anne Clifford, 209–18. 664. Ibid., 218. 665. Ibid., 218, 258, 260. See “A Catalogue of the Books in the Closset in the Passage Room next the Pantry in Skipton Castle,” YAS DD121/111, Brotherton Library, Leeds University, UK; transcribed by Spence, Lady Anne Clifford, 257–60. 666. Ibid., 216–18. English Short Title Catalogue online (ESTC) associates Christopher Hatton with four editions of psalms Clifford might have known (from 1647, 1650, 1661, and 1668). 667. Spence, Lady Anne Clifford, 218. 668. WDHOTH/1/10 and WDCAT/16, Cumbria Archive Service, Kendal, UK; edited by Malay as Anne Clifford’s Great Books. On the pencils, see Spence, Lady Anne Clifford, 179. 669. Malay, Anne Clifford’s Great Books, 448. 670. Ibid., 434, 47. 671. Ibid., 803. Biblical quotations from KJV. 672. Ibid., 806.

673. For Clifford’s copies, see The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia (London, 1605), J-J Sidney 13, Bodleian Library, University of Oxford; A Mirour for Magistrates (London, 1610), private library of Stephen Orgel, Palo Alto, CA; Barclay his Argenis: or, The Loues of Poliarchus and Argenis, trans. Kingesmill Long (London, 1625), 97024, Huntington Library, San Marino, California; The Court and Character of King James (London, 1651), WDHOTH/1/22, Cumbria Archive Centre, Kendal, UK; Titles of Honor (see note 11); The Manners, Lawes, and Customs of All Nations (London, 1611), CLE E15, Clements Collection, National Art Library in London; Homer, Prince of Poets, trans. George Chapman (London, 1609), private library of Robert Sackville-West, Knole, Seven Oaks, UK; and Romane Historie (London, 1600), R4209481, John Rylands Library, University of Manchester. 674. For such an annotation, see Orgel, “Reading with the Countess of Pembroke,” 141. 675. John Morris, British Armorial Bindings, ed. Philip Oldfield, https://armorial.library.utoronto.ca 676. Books and Manuscripts in Early Modern Britain (1530–1680) (London: Maggs Bros. Catalogue 1272, 1999), 141. 677. Williamson, Lady Anne Clifford, 527. 678. Ibid., 344.

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Contributors Joseph L. Black is Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he specializes in Renaissance nondramatic literature and book history. His books include Private Libraries in Renaissance England vol. 7 (2009), vol. 8 (2014), and vol. 9 (2017); The Martin Marprelate Tracts (2008); and The Library of the Sidney Family of Penshurst Place (2013). He is currently coediting the works of Thomas Nashe. Caroline Bowden is Senior Research Fellow at Queen Mary University of London. She has published widely on the history of English convents, most recently as general editor of six volumes of sources comprising English Convents in Exile 1600–1800 (2013) and editor of “The Chronicles of Nazareth (The English Convent Bruges) 1629–1793” (2017). Her current research focuses on book collections in English convents. Marie-Louise Coolahan is Professor of English at the National University of Ireland, Galway. She is the author of Women, Writing, and Language in Early Modern Ireland (2010), as well as articles and book chapters on Renaissance manuscript culture, women’s writing, early modern identity, and textual transmission. Julie Crawford is the Mark van Doren Professor of Humanities and Chair of Literature Humanities at Columbia University. She works on topics ranging from the history of reading to the history of sexuality. Her most recent book is Mediatrix: Women, Politics, and Literary Production in Early Modern England (2014). She is currently working on a book entitled “Margaret Cavendish’s Political Career.”Page 280 → Paul Dyck is Professor of English at Canadian Mennonite University. He has published articles on George Herbert, Little Gidding, digital humanities, and rare book archives. Mark Empey is Lecturer in Early Modern British and Irish History at the National University of Ireland, Galway. A cultural historian with a particular interest in book history, he edited Early Stuart Irish Warrants, 1623–1639 (2015) and coedited The Church of Ireland and its Past (2017). Margaret J. M. Ezell is Distinguished Professor of English and Sara and John Lindsey Chair of Liberal Arts at Texas A&M University. Her books include The Patriarch’s Wife: Literary Evidence and the History of the Family (1987, 2011); Writing Women’s Literary History (1993); Social Authorship and the Advent of Print (1999); and, with Frances Teague, Educating English Daughters: Late Seventeenth-Century Debates by Bathsua Makin and Mary More (2016). Jaime Goodrich is Associate Professor of English at Wayne State University. Her work on early modern Englishwomen’s writings has appeared in many journals and several edited collections, and she is the author of Faithful Translators: Authorship, Gender, and Religion in Early Modern England (2014). Her current research examines textual production within English Benedictine convents on the Continent, 1600–1800. Leah Knight is Associate Professor of English Literature at Brock University. Her books Reading Green in Early Modern England (2014) and Of Books and Botany in Early Modern England: Sixteenth-Century Plants and Print Culture (2009) both won the British Society for Literature and Science’s annual book prize. Her current SSHRCC-funded research investigates the reading experience of Anne Clifford (1590–1676). Mary Ellen Lamb is Professor Emerita at Southern Illinois University. In addition to the anthologies, Staging Early Modern Romance (2009) and Oral Traditions and Gender in Early Modern Literary Texts (2008), her books include Gender and Authorship in the Sidney Circle (1990), The Popular Culture of Shakespeare, Spenser, and Jonson (2006), and an abridged version of Mary Wroth’s The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania (2011).Page 281 → Sarah Lindenbaum is Visiting Assistant Professor and outreach librarian at Illinois Wesleyan University. She researches reading practices and book ownership of early modern women in England and the issue of hidden and

minimally cataloged books in special collections. Lindenbaum is currently working on a book-length study of the life and library of Frances Wolfreston (1607–1677). Elizabeth Patton is Senior Lecturer in the Alexander Grass Humanities Institute, Johns Hopkins University. Her recent publications address early modern women and the production, reception, and circulation of devotional texts. She has reconstructed two lost Elizabethan narratives by Dorothy Arundell (1560–1613), who recounts the life and martyrdom of her Jesuit mentor, John Cornelius; a comparative edition of Arundell’s work is now in preparation. Elizabeth Sauer, Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and Killam Research Laureate, is Professor of English at Brock University. Select publications include Emergent Nation: Early Modern British Literature in Transition, ed. (2018); Milton in the Americas, coed. (2017); Milton, Toleration, and Nationhood (2014); The New Milton Criticism, coed. (2012); Milton and Toleration, coed. (2007; Milton Society of America book award); and Reading Early Modern Women, coed. (2004; SSEMW award winner). Edith Snook is Professor of English at the University of New Brunswick in Fredericton. She is the author of two books—Women, Beauty and Power in Early Modern England: A Feminist Literary History (2011) and Women, Reading, and the Cultural Politics of Early Modern England (2005)—as well as essays on women’s writing, reading, and health. Her current research examines how women’s medical practice informed women’s writing in seventeenth-century England. Micheline White is Associate Professor in the College of the Humanities and Department of English, Carleton University. She is editor of English Women, Religion, and Textual Production, 1500–1625 (2011) and Secondary Work on Early Modern Women Writers: Isabella Whitney, Aemilia Lanyer, and Anne Lock (2009). Her work on Katherine Parr has been featured on the CBC’s Tapestry and Radio Canada’s les voies de retour. She is completing a monograph on women’s writing and the reformation of public worship, 1500–1570.

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Index NOTE: Page numbers with italicized f or n indicate figures or notes respectively. An Abstract of Penal Statutes, 64 Acheson, Katherine O., 258 Actaeon and Diana (Cox), 211 Acts and monuments (Foxe), 218, 225, 227, 240 Adkins, Susan A., 207 Admonition to the parliament (Field and Wilcox), 223 Aldred, Joan, 129 Alford, Agnes, 118–19, 118n7 Ames, William, library of, 63 Ancilla Pietatis (Featley), 85 Andrewes, John, 198, 211 Andrewes, Lancelot, 85 Annals (Tacitus) on Augustus, 98n18 as Renaissance politicians’ guidebook, 100 Savile’s translation of, 98 on Tiberius’s cruelty, 109, 109n40 on wives going to war with men, 112–13 Annals of Queen Elizabeth (Camden), 64, 65, 67, 68 Anne, Lady Southwell booklist published by PLRE, 217 collective ownership and, 237–38 female-authored books and, 244 on Hero and Leander, 222 size of collection, 235 sources and numbers of books, 250–51

Antwerp Carmelites, 177, 184–85 “An Apology” (Bradstreet), 72 Appleby, Maria of the Blessed Sacrament, 153–54 appraisers, property lists made by, 79 Arcadia (Sidney), 264, 266, 267, 270, 270n55 archives, research in, 16 Argenis (Barclay), 264, 266–67 Ariana: In Two Parts (Desmarets), 200–201, 212 Ars Aulica (The Courtiers Art) (Ducci), 98, 100 Arundel, Fitzalan Earls of, 119n11 Arundell, Anne Jernigan, 122n24 Arundell, Dorothy biography of, 123 Chidecock Castle books of, 125–26 copy of Memorial for, 118n6 Cornelius biography by, 13, 123–25 as instructor of Christian doctrine, 127 Memorial as study guide for, 119, 122 on sin or virtue choices, 126–27 vows by, 126n37 Arundell, John (son), 122n24 Arundell of Lanherne, John, 117, 122n24Page 284 → Arundells of Lanherne, Cornwall, 119n11 Ascher, James. P., 206 Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL), Rare Books and Manuscripts Section (RBMS), 210 Atlantic, migration of books across, 11, 61. See also Bradstreet, Anne Aubrey, John, 277 Augustine, Rule of, 178–79 Augustine’s Confessions, 80, 80n14

Augustinian convent, Paris, 185 “The Author to her Book” (Bradstreet), 62, 74 autobiographies Isham and, 80n16 textual records of lives before, 79 Ayray, Victoria, 182 Babington, Anthony, 241 Bacon, Anne, 240, 243–44 Bacon, Mary, 232n2, 250 Bacy, Alice, 232, 232n3, 240, 250 Baker, Augustine Barlow and Jones scrutinizing writings of, 158 Cambrai house booklist and, 167 Constable as novice at Cambrai and, 177 on Ignatian meditative techniques, 169 Paris convent’s ownership inscription in Sancta Sophia by, 163, 164f Paris nuns and manuscript compendium by, 166 reading practices at Cambrai and, 175 treatise on admitting novices, 168 Barbour, Reid, 144 Barclay, John, 264, 267 Barker, Robert, 140 Barlow, Rudesind, 158 Bartolovich, Crystal, 50n18 Basepool, Agnes, 232n3, 240, 250 Batt, Anthony, 167 Battle Abbey, Sussex, 132–33 Becon, Thomas, 49 Behn, Aphra, 274

Beier, A. L., 57–58 Bell, Ciara, 248 Bell, Marie Anne, 160 Bellarmine, Roberto, 267 Bell in Campo (M. Cavendish), 102, 103, 104, 106, 112–13 Benedictine Abbey of the Assumption, Brussels. See also English Benedictine convents Arundell as founding member of, 123 book circulation in, 155–56 book ownership signatures at, 160–61 Memorial of a Christian Life of, 126, 126n38 personal property rules of, 156–57 Rules and Statutes of, 179–80 Benedictine Rule, 155, 156, 165, 170. See also Augustine, Rule of Benedictines, on Novice Mistresses, 184 Bennet, Bridget book collection analysis project and, 232n2, 233 book lending by, 246, 247 book titles crossed out in her library catalog, 235 female-authored books of, 245 multiple book catalogs for, 234, 234n10 size of collection, 235–36 Bennet, Charles, 234n10, 246 Bennet, John, 236, 246n60 Bernard, Richard, 88 Berthelet, Thomas, 24, 24n12, 27–28, 29 Bible. See also New Testament English, reading as habitation and, 139 illustration in 1630s and 1640s of, 139n10 Parr’s reading of, as example, 22

printed in England, 140 Bibliotheca Nobilissimi Principis Johannis Ducis de Novo-Castro, 95–96, 97, 97n11, 98, 101 Bill, John, widow of, 140 Biographia Literaria (Coleridge), 274 Black, Joseph L., 16–17, 88, 231, 247–48 Blount, Richard, 128, 129, 131, 131n63 Boadicea, Briton warrior Queen, 102 Bodley, Thomas, 248 Boethius, “Boetius his Philosophicall comfort,” 271, 271n58Page 285 → Bolton, Edmund, 100, 111 book collection analysis project book lending, 245–47 book owners, sources, and numbers, 249–52 Clifford’s book lists, 269–70 collective ownership, 237–39 female-authored books, 243–45 methodology, 232–35, 232n4 print/manuscript, 241–43 probate inventories, 233–34 religious books, 239–41 sample for, 231–32, 231–32nn1–3 size of collections, 235–37 A Booke of Curious and Strange Inventions, called the First Part of Needleworkes (Ciotti), 88 book history. See also marginalia; ownership inscriptions; ownership signatures material traces of women’s reading found in, 3 Book(e) of Rememberance (Isham), 77, 80, 84, 214–15n3 A Book of the Ten Commandments, 23 books. See also libraries; “My own Bookes”; reading communities censored, in convents, 159, 162, 168–69

confiscated, women’s reading and lists of, 4 confiscated illegal Catholic devotional, 13, 125, 160 consumer economy and, 43 donations of, book collection analysis project and, 248–49 forbidden, Parr accused of reading, 21–22 formation of novices and, 178–83 Isham’s list of, 11–12, 77–78 lists of, as life-writing, 89 ownership of, generalizations from, 219 private ownership from 1550 to 1580, 43–44 private ownership of, 16–17 Bookscape: Geographies of Printing and Publishing in London Before 1800 (Raven), 5–6 bookscapes religious, 172–73 use of term, 5–6n8, 5–9 Books in Cambridge Inventories (Leedham-Green), 220 The Books of Solomon, Henry VIII’s marginalia in, 10, 35–40 Boston, Massachusetts, 61, 72 Bowden, Caroline cloistered book collections studies and, 154 on nuns’ possession of books, 157 on ownership inscriptions in convents, 160 on reading in convents, 15, 137n3 Bowtell, Stephen, 71–72 Boyle, Deborah, 96n10 Bradford, Alan T., 100 Bradshaw, Elaine Beckley, 206, 207 Bradstreet, Anne alleged unauthorized printing of works by, 62

changes in republished editions of, 72–74 Du Bartas’s influence on, 68–69 Dudley library and, 67–68 on English civil war, 70, 71 and family, books and readings of, 276 on female-authored contributions to libraries, 60 library of, 11 as New World reader with English bloodline, 43–44 Parr’s book inventory compared with, 24 publication of, 71–73 reconstructing Dudley library and works of, 66–67 reference to father’s poetry, 70n38 seventeenth-century editorial intervention with, 74–75 transatlantic bonds of, 61 Bradstreet, Simon, 63, 64Page 286 → Brandon, Katherine (Willoughby), Duchess of Suffolk, 41, 223–25, 227, 233 Bray, William, 125 Brayman Hackel, Heidi Egerton booklist and, 217 on female book circulation networks, 246 on Clifford’s reading of Chaucer, 259, 259n17 on women’s books and reading research, 1–4 Brewer, Thomas, 211 Brewse, Cecily, 218, 232n2, 240, 250 Brinsley, John, 85 British Library English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC) online, 207–8 Henry VIII’s copy of The Books of Solomon in, 36 Wolfreston books in, 196

Brome, Bridget, 232, 232n3, 240–41, 250 Brome, Elizabeth, 232, 232n3, 240–41, 250 Brome, George, 240–41 Browne, Magdalen Dacre biography of, 13, 123 Anne Howard and, 129 Memorial as study guide for, 119, 122 personally orchestrated lay apostolate of, 132 Brussels. See Benedictine Abbey of the Assumption, Brussels Brussels Statutes, 156, 157, 158, 160, 170 Buchanan, George, 64 “The Bunch of Grapes” (Herbert), 139 Burke, Victoria E., 2n3 Buttes, Jane, 232n2, 240, 243, 247, 250 Butts, Denny and William, 28 Buxton, Hannah, 209 Byrd, William, 239 Caius, Thomas, 21 Calvin, John, 23, 64, 225 Cambers, Andrew, 3, 4, 243 Cambrai, English Benedictine convent at. See also English Benedictine convents book borrowing system at, 159 book circulation in, 155–56 books and manuscripts confiscated by France, 160 books for novices at, 182 Constable as novice at, 177–78 controversial books at, 168–69 inscriptions in books of, 163, 166–67 personal property rules of, 156, 157, 158

reading of spiritual books at, 174 Camden, William, 64. See also Annals of Queen Elizabeth Cannington Priory, 170. See also Paris, English Benedictine convent at Capell, Elizabeth, 246 capitalism. See also consumer economy emergence of, 45–46 Muldrew on rise of, 46n6 relationship between sense of interiority and consumer goods in, 58 Carew, Anne, book of, Parr’s signature in, 23 Carley, James P., 22, 36–37n45, 37, 40 Carmelites, on Novice Mistresses, 183–84. See also Antwerp, Carmelites Cartwright, Thomas, 223 Caryll, Alexius, 161 Caryll, Elizabeth (later, Dame Eugenia), 162–63 Caryll, Mary, 161 “The case of Anne Glemham presented to the Lords of the Counsell,” 272 case studies Bradstreet’s New England library, 59–76 Cavendish’s books, 94–114 Isham’s book lists, 77–93 overview of, 9–12 Parr’s marginalia, 21–42 Whitney and reading humanism, 43–58 A Casket Full of Rich Jewels (Hotman), 98 “A Catalogue of the Books in the Closset in the Passage Room next the Pantry in Skipton Castle,” 261–62, 269–72, 270–71n54 “Catalogue of the most Vendible Books in England” (London), 75Page 287 → Catholic books. See also English Benedictine convents; Marshalsea-Newgate book inventory; Memorial of a Christian Life surreptitious distribution by women of, 13–14

Catholic women. See also English Benedictine convents as preachers and teachers, 122, 122n23, 127, 128 Catholic women’s reading, 117–18. See also English Benedictine convents; Marshalsea-Newgate book inventory; women’s reading new evidence of, 4 studies of, 3 Cavendish, Henry, 95 Cavendish, Margaret autobiographical characters in plays of, 103–4, 103n37 in engraving for Playes, 105f homes for books of, 276 library of, 95–96 Parr’s book inventory compared with, 24 on poetic imagination and representing historical truth, 111 reading by, 94–95, 102 Roman history in plays of, 102–4, 106–13 as wise counsel purveyor, 44 on wives conquering the conquerors, 113 on women debating “Affairs of State,” 110–12 Cavendish, William, 95, 101, 106 Cawdry, Daniel, 85–86 Cecil, Mildred Cooke book collection analysis project and, 232n2 female-authored books and, 244 humanist education for, 240 library in PLRE database, 217, 250 as reader, patron, and annotator of religious books, 41 size of collection, 236, 247 Cecil, William, 223 Certaine Workes of Chirurgerie (Gale), 87

“Certain Notes etc. for the better Understanding of the two Books of Aristotles Rhetoricks concerning Affections,” 272–73 A Challenge for Beautie (Heywood), 212 Chalmers, Hero, 102 Chaloner, Thomas, 26 Chamberlain, Edward, 262 Chamberlain, Robert, 199, 211 Chapman, George, 197, 198, 211, 264 A Character of a Diurnal-Maker (Cleveland), 195 Charles I Bradstreet’s The Tenth Muse on, 73 Gospel Harmony for, 135, 136 John Isham knighted by, 78 Little Gidding concordance corrections by, 140–41 parliament’s deposition of (1649), 100–101 versification of Psalms printed under authority of, 92 Charles II, 101, 111 Charlton, E., 24n11, 25n14 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 257, 258–59 Chedgzoy, Kate, 71 Cheke, Agnes, 232n3, 233, 240, 249 Cheke, John as Chrysostom translator, 26, 28–29, 31n34, 33 dedications in Chrysostom translations by, 29, 30f, 31 depicting Henry as Solomon, 29, 30f, 31, 32n40, 36 Chideock Castle, Dorset, apostolic Catholic community at, 124–26, 127, 128n46 Chorley, Bridgett, 209 Christianographie (Pagit), 84 Christian Prayers and Meditations, 82–83 Chrysostom, John

Cranmer’s inscriptions or annotations in works of, 31, 32 Henry VIII’s works by, 26n16 Parr’s marginalia in sermon of, 32–35Page 288 → Chrysostom, John (continued) Parr’s signature in sermon of, 23–25, 25f, 26, 32 translations of works by, 27, 28–29, 30f, 31 visibility in Henry VIII’s court, 26 Ciotti, Giovanni Battista, 88 Clarke, Danielle, 45–46 Clarke, Mary Roper Bassett, 41 Cleveland, John, 195 Cliffe, J. T., 235–36n17 Clifford, Anne accountancy skills, 267 book owning, reading, and lending by, 10, 17–18, 231n1 bookscape study, 268–69 books once owned by, 265–67 books read for action by, 229 determining book ownership by, 264–65 “English Book Owners in the Seventeenth Century” and, 217 female-authored books and, 244 financial accounts of, 261–63 inheriting her mother’s books, 271, 271n58 letters as evidence of reading by, 256–57, 259–60 loose papers/inscribed slips of, 260–61 manuscript ownership by, 242, 242n44 overview of reading proof for, 252–53 Parr’s book inventory compared with, 24 PLRE project and books of, 215

religious books of, 240 size of collection, 235 Skipton Castle catalog of books and, 269–73 sources and numbers of books, 251 writing about her reading, 256 Clifford, Margaret book owning, reading, and lending by, 231n1 lawsuits to secure titles and lands for her daughter, 253 PLRE project and books of, 215 size of collection, 236–37, 250 as writer, 244–45 Clifford family crest, 265, 265n39 Clinton, Theophilus, 63–64 Cockayne, Dorothy book owning, reading, and lending by, 232n2 PLRE project and books of, 215, 225, 226 size of collection, 236, 247, 250 Cockayne, Thomas, 225 Cocks, Roger, 238 Coghlan, Anne, 177 Coghlan, Elizabeth Grace, 177 Cohen, Matt, 69 Coke, Edward, 97 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 274 Collet, Anna, 135–36, 138n4, 149 Collet, John, 137 Collet, Judith, 138n4 Collet, Mary, 135–36, 138n4, 144, 149 Collet, Susanna, 14, 138

Colwich Abbey, 169, 170. See also Paris, English Benedictine convent at Commentaries of the Wars of France, 64 commonplaces Plat’s, humanist education and, 49 Seneca’s: Plat’s translations of, 48, 48nn12–13, 55 Whitney modelling the benefits of Plat’s, 56 Concordance Room at Little Gidding, 136 concordances Charles I and production of, 140–41 Little Gidding production of, 138–39, 151–52 confession Cornelius’s hearing of, 127–28 of A. Howard heard by Blount, 128, 129–30 lay Catholics and sacrament of, 121–22 Constable, Barbara, 175, 177–78 consumer economy. See also capitalism books and, 43 infections as related to, 46, 58 Plat and Whitney on cost to the poor of, 56–57Page 289 → Whitney on credentials for employment, 54 Whitney on credit risk for a loan, 55–56 Whitney on friendship, slander and, 51–53 Whitney on service relationship and, 54–55 contrition Arundell as instructor on, 127 Granada and Hopkins on, 120–21 Convent of Nazareth, Bruges, 180, 184 convents, see English Benedictine convents and English convents conversion, sixteenth-century Catholic Church on, 121–22

Conway, Edward, 229–30 Cook, Elizabeth of the Blessed Lady, 167 Cook, Teresa of the Infant Jesus, 167 Cooke, Anne, 41 Coolahan, Marie-Louise, 17, 128n46, 269 Coolidge, Archibald Cary, 205 Cope, Anthony, 21, 36 The Copy of a Letter (Whitney), 10, 44n3, 46–47, 50 Cornelius, John, 13, 123–25, 126, 126n37 Cotton, John, 61–62, 64 Council of Trent, 120, 131 The Countesse of Mountgomeries Urania (Wroth) Illinois State University copy of, 193, 196 inscription in, 200–201 other marks and annotation in, 203n32 undercataloging of, 206 from Wolfreston’s library, 211, 213 Wolfreston’s marks on scene from, 201–2, 203 Coverdale, Miles, 36 Cowdray Castle, 132–33 Cox, Robert, 211 Craddock-Jones, Anthony, 124n28 Crane, Mary, 50 Cranmer, Thomas, 26, 31–32, 31n36 Crawford, Julie, 4, 12, 27n20, 243 Crewe, Thomas, 49 Crumms of Comfort (Sparke), 85, 91, 91–92n63 Curson, Margaret, 160 Dacre, Eleanor, 122n24

Dacre of Gilsland, Thomas, 122n24 A Daily Exercise and Devotions for Young Ladies and Gentlewomen Pensioners (Herbert), 180 Dallyson, Martha, 160 Daniel, Samuel, 270–71 Darnton, Robert, 5 Davenant, William, 199, 212 Davenport, John, 69 da Vigo, Giovanni, 87 Deane, Mercy, 232, 232n3, 236, 240, 249 De Institutione Feminae Christianae (Vives), 202 de Jode, Gerard, 140, 142 Dekker, Thomas, 197 de Molina, Antonio, 167 Denny, Anthony, 28, 29 Denny, Joan Champernowne, 29, 41 Dering, Edward, 224 Desmarets de Saint-Sorlin, Jean, 200, 212 de Vos, Marten engraved prints by, 137, 140, 142–44, 145–52, 147f, 149–51f Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions (Donne), 88 de Yepes, Diego, 123n27 The Diall of Princes (Guevara), 97–98, 97–98n16, 99f, 102, 104 “A Dialogue between Old England and New” (Bradstreet), 60, 71–72, 73, 74 Dialogues (Gregory), 165, 168 “Dialogue upon the Troubles past” (Du Bartas), 68 diary writing Clifford’s, 260, 266 textual records of lives before, 79 digitized archives. See also Online Public Access Catalogs; PLRE.Folger

research in, 16 The Divell is an Asse (Jonson), 212Page 290 → Divine Office attendance at, 181 reading for, 180 Divine Weekes and Workes (Du Bartas), 68 Dod, John, 86, 86n42 Donne, John, 88, 89 Dorothea, Dame. See Arundell, Dorothy Dorset, Anne, 264–65. See also Clifford, Anne Douai, France, Benedictine college at, 168 Downing, James, 70 Dryden, Erasmus, 86n42 Dryden, John, 86n42 Du Bartas, Guillaume de Salluste, 68–69, 71, 89, 270–71, 270n55 Ducci, Lorenzo, 98 Dudley, Mary, 231n1, 234, 238, 245, 251 Dudley, Thomas Bradstreet’s works and, 66–67 Bradstreet’s writing compared with, 71 feminine metaphors in poetry of, 70–71 library of, 11, 63 networked wilderness and, 69–70 reconstructing library of, 64–67 1653 inventory of books of, 63–64 The Dumbe Knight (Markham), 212 Dunkirk, English Benedictine convent at. See also English Benedictine convents book circulation in, 155–56 inscriptions in books of, 166

personal property rules of, 156 signatures in books of, 160–61 Dyck, Paul, 14 Dynckon, Mary, 169–70 Earle, George, 271 Eastward Hoe (Chapman, Jonson, and Marston), 198, 211 Eccles, Mary Catherine, 160 economics. See also capitalism; consumer economy Whitney on friendship and, 50–51 Edwards, Alice, 232n3, 241, 249 Egerton, Frances book collection analysis project and, 231n1, 232 book lending by, 246–47 book titles crossed out in her library catalog, 235 catalog of books owned by, 234n11 female-authored books of, 245 library of, 197 manuscript ownership by, 242 Pearson’s finding guide and, 217 religious books of, 241 size of collection, 235 sources and numbers of books, 251 Eikon Basilike (Charles I), 96 Elements of Architecture (Wotton), 265, 268n49 Eliot, John, 100 “Eliot Tracts” authors, transatlantic bonds of, 61 Elizabeth I (earlier, Princess Elizabeth) Browne and, 132 Catholic texts prohibited under, 120, 125

mapping literary history and, 274 Parr and, 21, 23, 41 Elyot, Thomas, 24n11 Emblems (Quarles), 81, 88, 89 Empey, Mark, 17, 269 England troped as mother, Bradstreet on New World as daughter and, 71, 73–74 Englefield, Felix, 181 English Benedictine convents. See also English convents book circulation in, 14–15, 153–70 communal libraries of, 157–59 monastic book circulation in practice, 160–63, 165–69 monastic book circulation in theory, 156–59 reading, writing, and making books in, 275 “English Book Owners in the Seventeenth Century: A Work in Progress Listing” (Pearson), 216–18 English Civil War, 69, 70, 71, 93 English convents formation of novices and associated texts, 178–83Page 291 → four-stage reading process at, 174–75 glossary of significant terms used by, 186–89 guidance for reading at, 171–72 Novice Mistress’s role, 183–86 novices’ reading in, 175–78 novice year in, 173–74 as reading communities, 172–73 Statutes published at Ghent (1632) on, 174 English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC) online, 207–8 Erasmus, Desiderius Chrysostom’s liturgy in Missa grГ¦colatina of, 31

as Chrysostom translator, 27 Enchiridion, 23 Paraphrases on the New Testament, 21 Precationes aliquot Novæ, 23 The Preparation to Death, 23 Walden’s ownership of biblical paraphrase by, 218 Ewell, Hannah, 17, 227 The Example (Shirley), 207n47 An Exhortation to Young Men (Lupset), 26n14 An exposition touching al the bokes of holie scripture, 224 Ezell, Margaret J. M., 5, 18 The Faerie Queene (Spenser), 238, 257 Fanshawe, Alice, 227–28 Fanshawe, Anne, 248–49 Featley, Daniel, 85, 238 Fehrenbach, R. J., 219 Feilding, Ursula, 248 Felltham, Owen, 203, 212 The Female Academy (M. Cavendish), 104 female-authored books, book collection analysis project and, 243–45, 247 Ferguson, Stephen, 196 Fermor, Mary Curzon, 248 Ferrar, John, 137, 142n14 Ferrar, Mary, 14, 137, 138 Ferrar, Nicholas, 14, 137, 138, 141–42. See also Little Gidding Ferrar family, books and readings of, 276 Field, John, 223 Finch, Mary E., 78 A Fine Companion (Marmion), 212

The First Booke of the Christian Exercise, 126n38 Fisher, John, 23 Fishpoole, Elizabeth, 209 Fitton, Henry, 239 FitzRoy, Henry, 246, 246n60 Flemish prints. See also de Vos, Marten English Bibles and, 141, 142–44 The Floures of Philosophie (Plat) facsimile edition, 44n3 index to, 49–50 as “The Pleasures of Poetry,” 56 Whitney adoption of, as protection, 44–45 Whitney on credentials for employment using, 54 Whitney rejection of canonical literature in favor of, 46 Whitney’s pleasure in reading, 48–49 Folger Shakespeare Library. See also Private Libraries in Renaissance England PLRE.Folger and, 220–21 Wolfreston books in, 196 Formulae Precationum aliquot Evangelicarum (Witzel), 23 Fosbroke, John, 85 Foster, John, 72, 74 Four Monarchies (Bradstreet), 67, 72 Foxe, John, 218, 240 The French Academie (la Primaudaye), 266 Fulke, William, 85n36, 224 Gale, Thomas, 87 Gallagher, Catherine, 96n10 Gascoigne, George, 48n13 Gascoigne, Justina, 175

Gatton, Ann, 209 Gaudio, Michael, 139n10, 142n14, 145n22 “Gemitus Peccatorum” (Constable), 175 General History of the Netherlands, 64 Generall Historie of Spaine (Mayerne), 265 Gerard’s Meditations, 82Page 292 → Ghent, English Benedictine convent at. See also English Benedictine convents book circulation in, 155–56 Marin’s The Perfect Religious at, 182 personal property rules of, 156 reading of spiritual books at, 174 signatures in books of, 160–62 Glapthorne, Henry, 199, 212 Glemham, Anne, 272 Glemham, Henry, 272 Godfrey, Constantia Clementia of St. Laurence, 166 The Godly Garden, 81–82, 215n3 The Good Hous-wives Treasurie (Partridge), 88 Goodman, John, 78, 82 Goodrich, Jaime, 14–15, 137n3, 171–72, 179–80 Gordon, Andrew, 48n13 Gostlin, Benjamin, 71 Gough, Thomas, 28 Grafton, Anthony, 1n1, 95n4 Granada, Luis de, 118. See also Memorial of a Christian Life Graphs, Maps, Trees (Moretti), 275 Gray, Elizabeth Talbot, 216, 217 The Great Books of Record (Clifford), 262–64 The Great Picture (triptych). See also Clifford, Anne

authors and works portrayed in, 262 “Boetius his Philosophicall comfort” in, 271 Clifford’s bookscape and, 253, 255–56, 264, 266, 267–68, 268n49 digital reproduction of, 255n4 inscribed slips adorning walls in, 260–61 joint book ownership by women in, 238 M. Clifford depicted in, 236–37 Skipton Castle catalog of books and, 270–71 Greene, Robert, 197 Gregory the Great, St., 165 Grey, Elizabeth Talbot, 249 Grey, Jane, 223, 225 Grey, Mary book owning, reading, and lending by, 231n1 PLRE project and books of, 17, 215, 223–25 size of collection, 247 sources and numbers of books, 249 sources for books, 227 Guevara, Antonio de, 97–98, 97–98n16, 99f, 102, 104 “Gurcherdnies History in French,” 268n49 Hakewill, William, 96, 96n7 Hamilton, Alice, 227 Hamlin, Hannibal, 91 Hampden, Isabel, 232, 232n2, 238–39, 241, 249 handmade books, 4. See also Little Gidding Ferrar and, 14 handwritten excerpts, Parr’s, 10 Hannibal, Cope’s translation of Livy on military exploits by, 36 Harington, Anne, 102

Harington, John, 266 Harrington, James, 96, 96n7 Harvard, John, 63 Hastings, Elizabeth, 247 Hattaway, Michael, 36–37n45, 36n44, 37n46, 40 Hatton, Alice, 232n2, 235, 236, 242, 251 Hatton, Anna Fanshawe, 210, 215 Hatton, Christopher, 92, 92n67 Havens, Earle, 117, 240–41 Hayes, Kevin J., 63 Hayward, John, 97, 110n41 Heath, Margaret Miller book collection analysis project and, 232n2, 234–35 gardening and herbals books of, 228 manuscript ownership by, 242 PLRE project and books of, 216 size of collection, 236 sources and numbers of books, 251 A Helpe to Discourse, 212 Henderson, George, 139n10 Henrietta Maria, 141Page 293 → Henry VIII Cheke’s depictions of, in Chrysostom translations, 29, 30f, 31, 32n40, 36 Chrysostom works owned by, 26n16 interest in the “new learning,” 28 marginalia in The Books of Solomon by, 10, 35, 36–37, 37n47, 38–39f, 40 Parr’s annotations and those of, 40–41 postmortem library inventory of, 22–23 self-identifying with Solomon, 36

writing by, 25n14 Hensley, Jeannine, 74 Herault, Yorke, 270n55 Herbert, George, 89, 138, 238, 256–57, 262 Herbert, Lucy, 180 Herbert, William and Philip, 100 Here be Gathered the Counsells of Saint Isidore, 26n17 Here Begynneth the Lyf of Saint Katherin of Senis the Blessid Virgin, 200 heretics Catholic women and, 122 sixteenth-century Catholic Church on, 121 Hero and Leander (Marlowe), 222 Heroides (Ovid), 46, 47 Hewick, Ursula, 179 Heywood, Thomas, 197, 198, 212 Higginson, John, 75–76 Hilton, Walter, 166 Hinks, John, 203 Hippatia, 76 Hippisly, Ann, 170 Historie of Great Britaine (Speed), 67, 68 The Historie of Twelve Caesars (Suetonius), 102 History of Henry VII (Bacon), 64 History of Scotland (Buchanan), 64 The History of the Bible (Pagit), 83–84 History of the Peloponnesian Wars (Thucydides), 97 Hobbes, Thomas, 97, 101 Hoby, Margaret, 231n1, 237, 243, 245, 250 Hoby, Thomas Posthumous, 237

Holland, Philemon, 102 Holles, Anne Stanhope, 216, 217, 224, 228, 229–30 Hollis, John, 95 Home, Margaret, 231–32n1, 234, 238, 245, 251 Hopkins, Ann Yale, 59 Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 7 Hopkins, Richard, 118, 120–22 Hotman, François, 96, 96n7 Hotman, Jean, 98 Hovius, Matthias, 156 Howard, Anne Dacre biography of, 13, 123 in London, 132 Memorial as study guide for, 119, 122 religious instruction and pastoral care by, 130–31 Howard, Jean, 48n13, 53n25 Howard, Katherine, 22n5, 37n45, 40 Howard, Philip, Earl of Arundel, 129n49 “H. Scriptures II” (Herbert), 138–39 Hudson, Winthrop, 28 humanism commodified, Whitney on limits of, 58 democratization of discourse on, 44 Katherine Parr and, 26 humanist dialogue, Du Bartas’s use of, 68 humanist education, Plat’s commonplaces and, 49 humanist reading material Cavendish and, 12 for mass consumption, 10–11

Humbled sinner resolved (Sedgwick), 72 Humphrey, John, 61–62 A hundredth sundrie flowres (Gascoigne), 48n13 Hundreth Good Pointes of Husbandrie (Tusser), 88 Hunnis, William, 90–91 Hunt, Arnold, 196, 241, 243, 246 Huntington Library, 196 Hutchinson, Roger, 224 Hutson, Lorna, 54–55 Illinois State University Library, 193, 196 images. See also de Vos, MartenPage 294 → images (continued) in English Bibles, 139, 139n10 Little Gidding community’s use of, 135–36 sources for, 139–40 Imitation of Christ (Thomas Г Kempis), 183 infections of commerce, Whitney on, 58 dangerous to health, Whitney warned against, 45–46, 45n4 Inglis, Esther, 141 Institution de la Religion ChrГ©stienne (Calvin), 23 Institutiones piae or directions to pray (Andrewes), 85 Les Institutions divines, et salutaires enseignemens (Tauler), 163 intertextual reading, Parr’s, 32–33, 41 Introduction to a Devout Life (De Sales), 265 Ireton, Elizabeth Winch (also Sleigh) PLRE project and books of, 215, 217, 225–26, 232n2 size of collection, 236 sources and numbers of books, 252

Ireton, Henry, 225 Ireton, John, 225 Isham, Elizabeth. See also “My own Bookes” autobiographical practices, 11–12 bequests by, 78 book collection analysis project and, 232n2 books available to, 219–20 books defining her faith and her work, 86–87 comparing Clifford’s reading to, 268–69 French books owned by, 226–27 literate and literary family of, 276 manuscript ownership by, 243 notes on mothers and sisters books by, 214–15, 222 Parr’s book inventory compared with book list of, 24 as Protestant and Royalist, 44, 92 as Puritan with conformist and nonconformist religious books, 85, 85n36 sources and numbers of books, 81, 235, 251 types of books owned by, 222 work books of, 228 Isham, John (father) family of, 77 on feminine propriety, 89 marriage negotiations for Elizabeth and, 78, 86n42 as Pagit patron, 83–84 protecting order for Lamport and, 93 Isham, John (great-grandfather), 78 Isham, Judith Lewyn family of, 77 manuscript ownership by, 242–43

note on books of, 214–15, 222 PLRE project and books of, 232n2 religious books and, 241 size of collection, 250 Isham, Judith (sister) note on books of, 214–15, 222 PLRE project and books of, 225, 232n2 sources and numbers of books, 251 on Wither’s Motto, 89 Isham, Justinian, 78, 93 Isham, Thomas, 78 Isle of Man (Bernard), 88–89 Jacob, Sister Scholastica, 174–75 James, Susan E., 25n14, 35 James I, 223, 267 Jane, Lady Lumley collective ownership and, 237 female-authored books and, 244 humanist education for, 240 PLRE project and books of, 231n1 religious books of, 241 size of collection, 236, 237, 249 Jardine, Lisa, 1n1 Jayne, Sears, 216 Jerningham, Mary Agnes, 183 Jesuit mission to England, 118 Jodrell, Frances, 228, 229n23 Jones, Ann Rosalind, 48n13, 50n18Page 295 → Jones, Augustine, 64–65, 66

Jones, Leander, 158 Jones, William, 98, 100 Jonson, Ben, 197, 198, 212 Kelly, Catherine E., 2, 3, 8 Keys, Thomas, 223 King, John N., 36 Kintgen, Eugene, 32 Knatchbull, Lucy, 162 Knatchbull, Mary, I, 162 Knatchbull, Mary, II, 162 Knewstub, John, 224 Knight, Leah, 17–18, 208, 209, 245 A Knot of Fooles (Brewer), 211 Knox, John, 224 Lamb, Mary Ellen, 10–11 Lamentacion of a sinner (Parr), 225 landscapes. See also mapping literary history of early modern women women’s bookscapes and, 7–8, 9 Lansdowne inventory, 134 Lassels, Richard, 170 Latimer, Hugh, 218 Laud, Archbishop, 69, 70 Lay, Jenna, 239 lectio divina (reading practice), 174–75 Leedham-Green, E. S., 220 Leigh, Dorothy, 200 Lemmings, David, 87 “Letter Booke” (Clifford), 259 “A Letter from London” (D. Arundell), 123, 125

Leviathan (Hobbes), 101 Lewalski, Barbara, 253n3, 257, 258 The Libertie of the Subject (Hakewill), 96, 96n7 libraries. See also book collection analysis project; postmortem inventories; specific libraries card catalog transitions to digital versions for, 204–5 cataloging policies and underrepresented women in works of, 194 as collective identity-holders, 93 convent, corporate population and, 155–56 elite women’s, reconstruction of, 4 histories of English-speaking, 8–9 inventories, Cavendish’s, 12 inventories, women’s reading and, 3 rare-book, bibliographic records and, 205–6 reconstructing Dudley’s, 63–64 reconstructing Puckering’s, 64–65 Wolfreston’s, preservation of, 195–96 Library Catalogues of the English Renaissance (Jayne), 216 Life of Edward III (May), 97 Life of Father John Cornelius, SJ (D. Arundell), 123–24, 127–28, 127n42 Life of William Cavendish (M. Cavendish), 102, 112, 112n44, 113–14 Lindenbaum, Sarah, 16 Lipsius, Justus, 98, 100, 102–3, 103n35. See also Politics Litany (Cranmer’s vernacular), 31–32, 32n37 literacy, definition of, 18 Little Academy at Little Gidding dialogues of, 142, 144 story books of, 137 Little Gidding bookmaking community at, 14, 135–37, 276

community characteristics, 137–38 concordances made at, 138–39, 140–41 typeface combinations used by, 148n26 Works of Corporal Mercy by, 142–52, 147f, 149–51f Lives (of English kings) (Hayward), 97 Lives of Dr. John Donne, Sir Henry Wotton, Mr. Richard Hooker, Mr. George Herbert (Walton), 262 The Lives of Holy Saints, Prophets, Patriarchs, Apostles, and Others, 162 Livy, 36, 95, 264 Lock, Anne (Prowse), 225, 245 Lodge, Thomas, 129, 129n51 London, William, 75 Long, Jane, 209 Longfellow, Erica, 85Page 296 → Love Will Finde out the Way (Shirley), 198 Lucan’s Pharsalia (May), 113 Lundy, M. Winslow, 204 Lupset, Thomas, 24, 24n11, 26n14, 27–28, 33n41 Luther, Martin, 23, 120 Lux-Sterritt, Laurence, 174 Machiavelli, 101 Magnalia Christi Americana, 75–76 maids or maidservants, Whitney on, 54, 54n30 Makin, Bathsua, 75 “The Maner of Her Wyll” (Whitney), 44, 48, 56, 57 The Manners, Lawes, and Customs of All Nations (Boemus), 264 Manuall of Devout Meditations and Exercises (Villacastin), 169–70 A Manuall of Godly Prayers and Litanies, 166 manuscript culture, for exchange of verse and political texts, 241–42 mapping literary history of early modern women, 274–79

MARC (MAchine-Readable Cataloging) records, 205, 207, 207n48, 210 marginalia. See also ownership inscriptions; ownership signatures apostolic practice as evidence of readership vs., 134 Clifford’s, 260, 260n21, 263–65 Cranmer’s, 31, 32 Henry VIII’s, 27, 27n18 new evidence of, 4 Parr’s, in Chrysostom’s sermon, 25f, 26, 32 Parr’s and Henry VII’s, 40–41 women’s reading and, 3 Marguerite de Navarre, 23 Marin, Michel-Ange, 181 Markham, Gervase, 212 Marlowe, Christopher, 197, 222 Marmion, Shackerley, 199, 212 Marshalsea-Newgate book inventory, 117–19, 128–29 Marston, John, 198 Martin, Martha, 167 Mary Ward Sisters, 184 Massachusetts Bay Company, 62 Mather, Cotton, 59–60, 61, 70, 75, 76 May, Thomas, 97, 113 Mayerne, Louis Turquet de, 265 Mayler, John, 28 McDiarmid, John F., 31n34 McElligott, Jason, 248 McKitterick, David on Puckering’s library, 65–66, 241, 242 on Puckering’s marks in her books, 208

on size of Bennet’s collection, 235–36n17 on women’s book ownership studies, 1, 210 on women’s wills and inventories, 218n11 A Memoriall of Those Two French Princes, Valentine and Orson (Parker), 198, 212 Memorial of a Christian Life (Granada) Browne and, 132, 133–34 Brussels Benedictines’ copy of, 126, 126n38 Hopkins’s 1586 translation of, 118 A. Howard and, 129, 130 surreptitious distribution of, 13–14 three-part process of Penance as organizing principle for, 131–32 as tool for Chidecock Castle community, 128 mental mappings. See also mapping literary history of early modern women of women’s bookscapes, 6 Metham, Thomas, 239 Milton, John, 9, 100, 274 Miroir de l’Ame PГ©cheresse (Marguerite de Navarre), 23 A Mirrhor Mete for All Mothers, Matrones, and Maidens (Salter), 202 Mirror for Magistrates (T. Sackville), 96, 264, 266, 272 The Mirror of Martyrs (Weever), 198, 213 Molekamp, Femke, 3, 139n9 monastic communities. See also English Benedictine convents; English conventsPage 297 → book circulation among, 14–15 exiled, female readers in, 13, 15 library reconstruction, 4 Montague, Lady. See Browne Montague House, Southwark, 132 Morals (Plutarch), 265, 266 More, Agnes, 167

More, Gertrude, 168, 177, 186n55 More, Henry, 169 More, St. Thomas, 177 daughters of, 274 Moretti, Franco, 275 Morgan, Paul, 196, 198, 200, 245 The Most Excellent Workes of Chirurgerye (da Vigo), 87 The Mothers Blessing (Leigh), 200 Les mots françois selon l’ordre des lettres, 23 Mueller, Janel, 21n, 25 Muldrew, Craig, 43, 46n6, 50, 55n33 “My Lord of Cumberlands Sea Voyages 1586 & 1587,” 269–70n54, 271 “My own Bookes” (Isham) abbreviations in, 81, 81n19 catechisms and devotional texts, 91–92 as family property, 81–86 foreign language titles, 89–90 as form of property writing, 79–80 identifications for, 78n3 physical description of, 77–78 as proper property, 86–92 religious titles, 90–92 safeguarding identity, 93 The mysticall wolfe (Pagit), 84–85 Narveson, Kate, 3, 32 The National Library of Wales, 198 Natures Pictures (Cavendish), 94–95 Nero’s tyranny, Bolton on Tacitus’s account of, 100–101 Newcastle collection. See Bibliotheca Nobilissimi Principis Johannis Ducis de Novo-Castro

Newcomb, Lori Humphrey, 200 New England Bradstreet on home as domestic space in, 74 Bradstreet’s The Tenth Muse in, 75 as daughter, Bradstreet on England as mother and, 71, 73–74 women of, defense of the motherland by, 70 The New-found Politicke, 101 Newport, Clare of Our Blessed Lady and St. John Evangelist, 168 New Testament Little Gidding concordance production and, 141 Newton, Henry (later Puckering), 238 Norden, John, 91, 91–92n63 North, Thomas, 97–98, 99f Norton, John (alias Knatchbull), 162 The Nosegay of morall Philosophie (Crewe), 49 Novice Mistress, role of, 176–78, 180–81, 183–86 The Number and Names of All the Kings of England and Scotland (Taylor), 199n23, 213 Observations Upon Experimental Philosophy (Cavendish), 102 Of Prayer and Meditation (Granada), 120, 126n38 Ojaide, Tanure, 5n8 Oldcastle, John, 198 Online Public Access Catalogs (OPACs). See also Wolfreston, Frances card catalogs replaced by, 205 provenance information in, 211 research using, 16, 194, 275 Wolfreston’s presence in, 208–9 “On the Four Parts of the World” (Dudley), 70 “On the Sacrament of Penance,” 121 Openshaw, Robert, 84n34

Orgel, Stephen, 266 Orlando Furioso (Harington translation), 265 Ornaments for the Daughters of Zion (Mather), 59, 76 Ovid Heroides, 46, 47 Metamorphoses, 89Page 298 → ownership inscriptions in convents, 160–63, 164f, 165–69 Dynckon’s in Villacastin’s Manual, 169–70 partial transcriptions as helpful, 208 in today’s OPACs, 207 ownership signatures Crawford on, 27n20 Parr’s, 10, 23–24, 26 Ussher’s, 248, 248n64 L’Oyselet, George, 117 Pagit, Ephraim, 84–85 Pagit, Eusebius, 83–84 Pagit, Katherine Isham, 84n30 Pagit, Thomas, 90 Panofsky, Richard, 48n12, 50–51, 53 Paraphrases on the New Testament (Erasmus), 21 La Parfaite religieuse (The Perfect Religious, Marin), 181–82 Paris, English Benedictine convent at. See also English Benedictine convents book borrowing system at, 159 book circulation in, 155–56 censored books at, 159 controversial books at, 168–69 guidance for reading at, 171–72

Ignatian, 169 inscriptions in books of, 163, 164f, 165–66 personal property rules of, 156, 157, 158 Parker, Martin, 198, 212 Parr, Katherine advocating reform, 43 affinity between Henry’s annotations and those of, 40–41 handwritten biblical verses in Chrysostom’s sermon, 25–27, 25f, 32–35 Lamentacion of a sinner, 225 as patron and writer, 21 as reader, 21–22 reading community and, 27 signature in Chrysostom’s sermon, 23–25, 25f, 26, 32, 33, 34 traveling coffers of books, 22–23 Partridge, John, 88 Partridge, Margaret, 232n3, 250 paste-downs, Wolfreston inscriptions on, 201 patriarchy female literacy and education and, 2 topics for women’s reading and, 89, 194–95 women’s books and reading and, 8–9 pattern for Gospel concordances, 141–42, 151–52 for Little Gidding community bookmaking, 135, 136–37 multiple, complementary meanings for, 144–46 Patton, Elizabeth, 13–14, 137n3 Pearson, David, 216–18, 248–49 Pelham, Herbert, 69–70 Pembroke, Elkanah, 75

Penance Arundell as instructor on, 127 Granada and Hopkins on, 120–21 three-part process of, 131–32 A Pensive Mans Practise (Norden), 81, 91, 91–92n63 Percy, Mary, 123 Perkins, William, Works, 222 Persons, Robert, 117, 125, 126n38, 132 Il Petrarcha, con L’Expositione D’Alessandro Vellutello, 23 Petre, Lucy Fermor, 169n41 Philips, Katherine, 274 Phillips, Edward, library of, 75, 76 Philopater, 125 Philosophical Fancies (Cavendish), 94–95 Philosophical Letters (Cavendish), 94–95 Piers Plowman, 64 pins, straight, in Urania gutter, 201 Plat, Hugh, 44, 56–57. See also The Floures of Philosophie “Plat his Plot” (Whitney), 44–45, 48–49, 50Page 299 → Playes (Cavendish) on Cavendish as her husband’s keeper, 113 detail, 107f General Prologue to, 94–95 Roman history and, 102–4, 105f, 106–8 A Pleasant Conceited Comedy (Heywood), 198 A pleasaunt newe nosegay (Basil), 49 PLRE.Folger, 220–21 Plutarch, 95, 265, 270–71, 270n55 Plymouth Colony, New England’s. See also Bradstreet, Anne; New England

women’s book ownership lists for, 218 Poems (Cleveland), 195 Politics (Lipsius) on ancient Britton women rulers, 102–3, 103n35 detail, 110f on Livia’s wisdom, 109–10 in Newcastle library, 98 on Tacitus, 100 Pollnitz, Aysha, 31n34 Poor Clares Aire, 177 Rouen, 182–83 A Poor Man’s Mitt (Batt), 167 Poor Robin almanacs, 195, 203 Pordage, Xaveria, 161 postmortem inventories. See also probate inventories; wills new evidence of, 4 Praise of a Solitary Life (Plutarch), 266 “The Praise of Private Life, a folio Manuscript,” 271 Preface to the Romans (Luther), 23 The Prerogatiue of Parlaments in England (Raleigh), 213 The Prerogative of Popular Government (Harrington), 96, 96n7 Primaudaye, Pierre de la, 229, 266 Prime, John, 198, 212 Prince, Thomas, library of, 75 Princeton University Library electronic catalog, 200 Private Libraries in Renaissance England (PLRE). See also Wolfreston, Frances books read for action in, 229–30 continuing development of, 275

“interpretability” of booklists of, 219–20 language-learning and reading practice and, 226–27 nontheological books in, 227–28 serendipitous discoveries by, 221–24 1739 inventory of Clifford’s books and, 273 shift in focus of, 220–21 sources for women’s book ownership lists, 221 theological or devotional books among, 224–26 women’s book ownership records, 16–17, 215–16, 217 work books in, 228–29 Privileges of the Baronage of England (Selden), 96, 96n7 probate inventories, 233–34, 238, 240, 242. See also wills prospects, use of term, 6 Protestant women’s reading. See also women’s reading studies of, 3 Prynne, William, 70n36, 74 Psalmi seu Precationes (Fisher), 23 Psalms, translations of, spread of Reformation and, 90–91 The Psalms of King David, Translated by King James, 92 Psalter, reading of, 182–83 The Psalter of David (Hatton), 92 Puckering, Elizabeth book collection analysis project and, 232n2 collective ownership and, 238 library, 1 manuscript ownership by, 242 marks in books by, 208 reconstructing library of, 65–66 religious books of, 241

sources and numbers of books, 252Page 300 → Quarles, Frances, 88, 198, 213 quartos, Wolfreston inscriptions in, 201 Quod nemo laeditur nisi a semet ipso (Chrysostom sermon), 24 Rabinowitz, Richard, 5n8 Radcliffe, Clare, 176 Radcliffe, Dorothy, 176, 185 Rainbowe, Edward, 261, 266–67 Raleigh, Walter, 67, 213 Randall, John, 85n36 rare-book catalogers, skill set for, 206 Rare Books and Manuscripts Section (RBMS), of Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL), 210 rare-books dealers, Clifford’s books and, 264 Raven, James, 5–6, 5n8, 277 Rayment, Mary Anne, 161 RBMS Controlled Vocabularies, 210 reading communities bookscapes and, 276 English, in exile, 171–89 English Benedictine convents, 153–70 overview of, 12–15 pattern at Little Gidding, 135–52 women, books, and the lay apostolate, 117–34 Reception and Circulation of Early Modern Women’s Writing (RECIRC), 1545–1700, 17, 275 recusant communities. See also English Benedictine convents; under Catholic female readers in, 13 religious books book collection analysis project and, 239–41, 247 religious bookscapes, 172–73

Remains (Herbert), 262 Renaissance men, books and libraries of, 1, 1n1 The rescuynge of the romishe fox (Turner), 224 Resolves (Felltham), 203, 204 retrospective conversion (reconning), for card catalogs, 205 Reyce, Robert, 70 Rhodes, J. T., 154, 168 Ridgeway, Cecily, 244 Rights of the Kingdom (Sadler), 96, 96n7 Roberts, Thomas J., 5n8 Roe, Thomas, 229–30 Rogers, Timothy, 85n36 Romane Historie (Livy), 264 Roman history. See also Tacitus Cavendish’s writings and, 102–4, 105f, 106–14 Roper, Margaret More, 10 The Rule of the Great S. Augustin Expounded, 179 Russell, Daniel, 75 Ryther, Thomas, 271n58 Sackville, Anne, 272 Sackville, Richard, 270n54 Sackville, Thomas, 272 “The Sacrament of the Altar,” 121, 127 Sadleir, Anne book lending by, 246, 247 books by, 245–46 female-authored books of, 243 manuscript ownership by, 242 PLRE project and books of, 232n2

religious books of, 241 sources and numbers of books, 251 Sadler, John, 96, 96n7 Salter, Thomas, 202 Sammelband (book) contents of, 24n11 Here be Gathered the Counsells of Saint Isidore, 26n17 in Sudeley Castle, 24 Sancta Sophia (Baker), 163, 164f “Satyrs & Moto” (Withe), 88 Sauer, Elizabeth, 11 Savile, Henry, 98 The Scale (or Ladder) of Perfection (Hilton), 166–67 scapes, natural and cultural, 7–8, 7n11 Scarlet, Katherine, 232n3, 234, 250 schismatics, 121, 122, 129 Schleiner, Louise, 54Page 301 → Schurman, Anna Maria, 76 Schutte, Valerie, 3 Scipio, Cope’s translation of Livy on military exploits by, 36 Sedgwick, Obadiah, 72 Selden, John, 96, 257, 264 Selwyn, David G., 31, 217 Selwyn, Pamela, 217 La Semaine ou CrГ©ation du Monde (Du Bartas), 68 Seneca Plat’s translations of commonplaces by, 48, 48nn12–13, 55 as Whitney guiding source, 50 Sepulchrines, Liege, 182

A Sermon of Saint Chrysostom (1542), 10 Seven Sobs of a Sorrowfull Soule (Hunnis), 90–91 Seven Works of Corporal Mercy (de Vos), 137 Severall Excellent Methods of hearing Mass (Herbert), 180 Several Poems Compiled (Bradstreet), 72, 74–75 Seymour, Anne, 41 Seymour, Thomas, 22, 25n14 Shakespeare, William, 197, 274 Shepard, Thomas, 62 The Shepheardes Calender (Spenser), 62, 89 Sherman, William H., 32, 194 Shirley, James, 197, 198, 207n47 Short questions and answeares, conteyning the summe of Christian religion (Pagit), 84 A Short Treatise of the Sacraments (Prime), 198, 212 Shuger, Deborah, 142 Sibthorpe, Henry, 237, 238 Sidney, Dorothy Percy, 217, 225, 226 Sidney, Philip, 11, 60, 67, 270–71, 270n55 Sidney, Robert, 229–30 Siedell, Phebe, 209 Siemens, Ray G., 25n14 The Simple Cobler of Aggawam (Ward), 72 The Sincere Convert (Shepard), 62 Six sermons delivered in the lecture at Kettering (Fosbroke), 85 Six Spiritual Bookes Ful of Marvelous Pietie (Douai), 167 Skipton Castle, catalog of books in, 261–62, 269–72 Slingsby, Francis, 271 Slusser, George Edgar, 5n8 Smith, Helen, 3, 136, 140

Smith, John, 61, 71 Smith, Margaret, 166–67, 209 Smith, Richard, 132, 133 Smith, Rosalind, 4 Smuts, Malcolm, 101 Smyth, Adam, 79, 89, 144n18 Snook, Edith, 11–12, 43n2 Solomon. See also The Books of Solomon Book of Proverbs, Henry VIII’s annotations in, 27 Henry depicted as, in Cheke translation, 29, 30f, 31, 32n40, 36 as model for Christian kings, 35–36 Solomon’s Ecclesiasticus Parr applying the Bible and sermon to herself using, 32–35 Parr’s copying verses in Chrysostom’s sermon from, 10, 25–27, 25f Solomons Recantation (Quarles), 198, 213 Sorocold, Thomas, 91 Sotheby’s auction, 196, 197, 198, 265, 266 Southcott, Elizabeth, 179 Southwell, Robert, 13, 131, 132 Sparke, Michael, 85, 91 Speculum Mundi (Swan), 87 Speed, John, 67, 68 Spence, Richard T., 258–59, 269, 270–71n54 Spenser, Edmund, 62, 68, 238, 257, 270–71 A Spiritual and Most Precious Perle (Werdmüller), 198, 213 Stanford, Mary, 182, 182n39 Stanhope, Anne female-authored books of, 245 manuscript ownership by, 242

PLRE project and books of, 231n1, 233 size of collection, 235 sources and numbers of books, 251 state seizure of books, 238–39Page 302 → Statutes for English Benedictines, 174 Stephens, Isaac, 83, 85, 86 Strafford, Earl of, execution, 69, 70 Stuart kings, absolutism of, 100 Stuteville, Susannah Isham, 77 A Subpaena from the High Imperiall Court of Heaven (Andrewes), 198, 211 Sudeley Castle, Chrysostom’s sermon with Parr’s marginalia at, 24–26, 25f, 25n14, 41 Suetonius, 102, 109 Summit, Jennifer, 93 Supplications of Saints. A Booke of Prayers (Sorocold), 91 The Swaggering Damsel (Chamberlain), 211 Swan, John, 87 A Sweet Nosgay (Whitney) consumer economy bookspace and, 43 as emulation of humanism, 10 facsimile edition, 44n3 on friendship, slander, and economic security, 51–53 prefatory verse letter to, 44–45, 50 on religion, 47–48 Whitney’s reading of Plat and, 48–49 Synge, Jane, 209 Tacitus Cavendish’s plays and, 106–9 Cavendish’s reading of, 95, 102 Cavendish’s women on invented speeches by, 110–11

in Dudley library, 64 in Newcastle library, 98 Renaissance political thought and, 98, 98n18, 100–101 on women, 103 The Taming of the Shrew (Shakespeare), 197–98 Tauler, Johann, 163 Taylor, Edward, 75 Taylor, John, 199–200, 213 Tempest, Mechtilda of the Holy Ghost, 165–66 The Temple (Herbert), 238 The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung up in America (Bradstreet) afterlife for, 74–75 Camden’s Annals of Elizabeth and, 67 changes in subsequent editions of, 72–73 conceived in the New World and published in the Old, 11, 60, 71–72 contents of, 67–68 theological books, women vs. men as owners of, 224 Thomas à Kempis, 171, 183 Thomason, George, 72 Three Sermons (Cawdry), 85–86 Thucydides, 95, 97 Tintoretto, Jacopo, 140, 142–43 Titles of Honor (Selden), 257, 264, 267 transatlantic migration of books, 11. See also Bradstreet, Anne Travitsky, Betty, 53n25 The Treasure of Health, 82 The Treasurie of Commodious Conceits (Partridge), 88 The Treasury of Healthe (Partridge), 88 A Treatise of the Immortalitie of the Soule (Woolton), 198, 213

Treatise of the Modern Apostolic Mission into England of the Benedictine Order (Baker), 168 Tregian, Mary, 118 Tresham, Lord, 117 Tresham, Muriel, 118 Tridentine regulations on novices, 176 A True Christians Daily Delight, 91 The true perfection of cutworks (Vecellio), 228 The True Watch, and Rule of Life (Brinsley), 85 Tudor, Elizabeth. See Elizabeth I Tudor, Mary, 41 Turberville, George, 46 Turner, William, 224 Tusser, Thomas, 88 “Two Rules of Good Life,” 121 Tye, Edward, 238 Tye, Mary, 218, 232n3, 238, 240, 250Page 303 → Tyndale, William, 225 Tyrwhit, Elizabeth, 41 Udall, Nicholas, 21, 22, 22n3, 41 University of Illinois Rare Book & Manuscript Library, 203, 204, 208–9, 211–12 The Unnatural Tragedie (Cavendish), 110–11 Urania. See The Countesse of Mountgomeries Urania Usher, John, 75 Ussher, Margaret, 248 van Diepenbeke, Abraham, 104 Vaughn, Edmund, 78 Vaux, Lord, 117 Vaux, Mary, 118 Vecellio, Cesare, 228

Venus and Adonis (Shakespeare), 197 Villacastin, Thomas de, 169 Vincent, Anastasia, 161 Vives, Juan Luis, 202–3 The Voyage of Italy (Lassels), 170 Wagner, Stephen C., 206, 207 Wakeman, Chrysogona, 185 Walden, Elizabeth, 218, 232n3, 250 Walker, Kim, 49 Wall, Wendy, 45n4 Walton, Isaak, 262 Ward, Nathaniel, 61, 68, 72 Warner, J. Christopher, 28 Watkinson, William, 261, 272–73 Weever, John, 198, 213 Wells, Gertrude, 161 Wenman, Agnes, 248n65 Werdmüller, Otto, 198, 213 Whitchurch, Edward, 36 White, Elizabeth Wade, 66, 71 White, Marthy, 169 White, Micheline, 10, 208–9 Whitford, Richard, 23 Whitgift, John, 223 Whitney, Geoffrey, 53n25 Whitney, Isabella case study of, 10–11 on classical narratives, 46–47 consumer economy and, 43

on cost to the poor of consumer economy, 56, 57–58 on credit risk for a loan, 55–56 on friendship, slander, and economic security, 51–53, 51n21 gendered perspective of, 50–51 on history and scripture, 47–48 infections dangerous to, 44–46, 45n4 as reader, 44–45 readers of, as benefactors for, 55–56 Whittaker, Beth M., 210 The Widowes Treasure (Partridge), 88 Wigmore, Mary, 184–85 Wilcox, Thomas, 223 Williams, Roger, 61, 69 Williamson, George C., 257, 258, 265 Willoughby, Katherine. See Brandon, Katherine wills. See also postmortem inventories; probate inventories Isham’s, 78 as life-writing, 79–80 Wolfreston’s, 195 women’s book ownership lists in, 218 Windesheim tradition in the Low Countries, Paris Augustinians’ constitutions and, 179 Winthrop, John, 11 on Ann Hopkins’ devotion to books, 59 Gostlin’s letter to, 71 library of, 63 networked wilderness and, 70 reports on English civil war sent to, 69 transatlantic bonds of, 61 Witham, Maura of St. Mary Magdalen, 163, 165

Withe, George, 88 Wither’s Motto, 89 Wit in a Constable (Glapthorne), 199–200, 212 Wits Cabal (M. Cavendish), 103, 108–9 The Witts: A Comedie (Davenant), 212 Witzel, Georg, 23 Wolfe, Reyner, 29Page 304 → Wolferstan, Francis (son), 195, 195n10, 197 Wolferstan, Stanford (son), 195, 195n8, 195n10, 197 Wolferston, Stanford (grandson), 200–201 Wolfreston, Frances, 195, 203 book-buying sources for, 200 book collection analysis project and, 232n3 as book collector, 193 brief biography of, 194–95 cataloging practices and understanding ownership of, 211 digitized archives revealing library of, 16, 196–97, 276 ESTC records for books of, 207–8 female-authored books of, 245, 245n56 library size, 197 new books found of, 198–204 Parr’s book inventory compared with, 24 signature of, 194, 196 size of collection, 235, 248 sources and numbers of books, 251–52 subjects and types of books owned by, 197–98 variations in inscriptions by, 208 womanhood, book lists and evidence of propriety for, 87 women’s bookscapes

case studies, 9–12 landscapes and, 7–8, 9 mapping, 274–77 women’s reading. See also books; Catholic women’s reading; Protestant women’s reading men on acceptable topics for, 194–95 research in OPACs for, 194 studies of, 1–3, 2–3n3 women’s writing. See also Bradstreet, Anne; Cavendish, Margaret; Whitney, Isabella studies of, 2, 2n3 Wood, Ralphe, 203n33 Woodbridge, John, 71–72 Woodbridge, Linda, 58 Woodfeild, Ester, 17, 227 Woolf, Heather, 4 Woolf, Virginia, 275 Woolton, John, 198, 213 Worcester, Wolfreston’s book buying in, 203–4 Works of Corporal Mercy, 142–52, 147f, 149–51f The Worlds Olio (M. Cavendish), 103 Worsley, Ann, 185 Wotton, Henry, 266, 268n49 Wright, Thomas Goddard, 66 Wriothesley, Jane, 23 Wroth, Mary, 193, 213 Young, Robert, 141 Youths Glory, and Deaths Banquet (M. Cavendish), 103, 106–8