Notes
Introduction
Committee on Preservation of Historical Records et al., Preservation of Historical Records (Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 1986), ix.
Nicholson Baker, Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper (New York: Vintage, 2002), 201.
Ibid. Baker also points out that Waters probably adapted the idea to crumble and blow from “brittle book” demonstrations given by his former boss, preservationist Frazer Poole.
The Edgerton Digital Collections Project, accessed August 14, 2020, edgerton-digital-collections.org/; Todd McLellan, Things Come Apart: A Teardown Manual for Modern Living (London: Thames and Hudson, 2013).
This is evident in the rising interest in histories of literary studies as a field; see: Rachel Sagner Buurma and Laura Heffernan, The Teaching Archive: A New History for Literary Study (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020); Ted Underwood, Why Literary Periods Mattered: Historical Contrast and the Prestige of Literary Studies (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2013).
Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early Modern Europe, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 16.
This trend began with several influential forays into material text and culture studies, including: Margreta de Grazia, Maureen Quilligan, and Peter Stallybrass, eds., Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Juliet Fleming, Graffiti and the Writing Arts of Early Modern England (London: Reaktion, 2001); Jennifer Anderson and Elizabeth Sauer, eds., Books and Readers in Early Modern England: Material Studies (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002). More recently, the Material Texts series from University of Pennsylvania Press, edited by Roger Chartier, Joseph Farrell, Anthony Grafton, Leah Price, Peter Stallybrass, and Michael F. Suarez, has been particularly influential in this area, but see also: Heidi Brayman, Jesse M. Lander, and Zachary Lesser, eds., The Book in History, The Book as History: New Intersections of the Material Text (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2016); Paula Findlen, ed., Early Modern Things: Objects and their Histories, 1500–1800 (New York: Routledge, 2013); Helen Smith, “Grossly Material Things”: Women and Book Production in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). Around the same time material text studies was taking shape, others began to consider how digital technologies were changing what can be seen in the early modern period; see, e.g., Neil Rhodes and Jonathan Sawday, eds. The Renaissance Computer: Knowledge Technology in the First Age of Print (New York: Routledge, 2000). More recent explicit engagements with media studies in the early modern period include: Scott Trudell, ed., “The Intermedia Restoration,” special issue, Restoration: Studies in English Literary Culture, 1660–1770 42, no. 2 (2018); Trudell, Unwritten Poetry: Song, Performance, and Media in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019); Alan Galey, The Shakespearean Archive: Experiments in New Media from the Renaissance to Postmodernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014); Jen E. Boyle, Anamorphosis in Early Modern Literature: Mediation and Affect (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2010).
Megan Heffernan, Making the Miscellany: The Poetics of Compiling in Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021); Laura Estill, Dramatic Extracts in Seventeenth-Century English Manuscripts: Watching, Reading, Changing Plays (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2015); Wendy Wall, Recipes for Thought: Knowledge and Taste in the Early Modern English Kitchen (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015); Joshua Eckhardt and Daniel Starza Smith, eds., Manuscript Miscellanies in Early Modern England (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2014); Joshua Eckhardt, Manuscript Verse Collectors and the Politics of Anti-Courtly Love Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); Victoria E. Burke and Jonathan Gibson, Early Modern Women’s Manuscript Writing. Selected Papers from the Trinity/Trent Colloquium (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2004); David McKitterick, Print, Manuscript and the Search for Order, 1450–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Margaret J. M. Ezell, Social Authorship and the Advent of Print (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999); Arthur F. Marotti, Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1995). Samuel Fallon discusses how semifictional personas, too, migrated across media in Paper Monsters: Persona and Literary Culture in Elizabethan England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019).
Kathryn M. Rudy, Image, Knife, and Gluepot: Early Assemblage in Manuscript and Print (Cambridge: Open Book, 2019); Adam Smyth, Material Texts in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018); William H. Sherman, Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007).
Peter Beal, ed., Catalogue of English Literary Manuscripts 1450–1700, accessed August 14, 2020, celm-ms.org.uk/; Heather Wolfe, ed., Early Modern Manuscripts Online, accessed August 14, 2020, emmo.folger.edu/; Laura Estill and Beatrice Montedoro, eds., DEx: A Database of Dramatic Extracts, accessed August 14, 2020, dex.itercommunity.org/; David Rundle, ed., Lost Manuscripts, accessed August 14, 2020, lostmss.org.uk/project; Wendy Wall and Leah Knight, eds., The Pulter Project, accessed August 14, 2020, pulterproject.northwestern.edu/.
Aaron Pratt, “Stab-Stitching and the Status of Early English Playbooks as Literature,” The Library 16, no. 3 (2015): 304–28; David Pearson, English Bookbinding Styles 1450–1800 (New Castle, Del.: Oak Knoll, 2014); Jeffrey Todd Knight, Bound to Read: Compilations, Collections, and the Making of Renaissance Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013); Tara Lyons, “Serials, Spinoffs, and Histories: Selling ‘Shakespeare’ in Collection before the Folio,” Philological Quarterly 91, no. 2 (2012): 185–220; Lyons, “New Evidence for Ben Jonson’s Epigrammes (ca. 1612) in Bodleian Library Records,” Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 114, no. 3 (2020): 343–64; Mirjam Foot, Bookbinders at Work: Their Roles and Methods (New Castle, Del.: Oak Knoll, 2006). For a medieval perspective that has influenced my thinking, see Arthur Bahr, Fragments and Assemblages: Forming Compilations of Medieval London (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013); and Kathleen E. Kennedy, Medieval Hackers (New York: punctum books, 2015).
Ann Blair, Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information Before the Modern Age (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2010); George Henderson, “Bible Illustration in the Age of Laud,” Transactions of the Bibliographical Society 8, no. 2 (1982): 173–216; Michael Hunter, ed., Printed Images in Early Modern Britain: Essays in Interpretation (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2010).
Katherine Larson, Scott Trudell, and Sarah Williams, eds., Early Modern Songscapes, accessed August 14, 2020, ems.digitalscholarship.utsc.utoronto.ca/; Patricia Fumerton and Carl Stahmer, eds., English Broadside Ballad Archive, accessed August 14, 2020, ebba.english.ucsb.edu/; Giles Bergel and Alexandra Franklin, eds., Broadside Ballads Online, accessed August 14, 2020, ballads.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/. See also Linda Phyllis Austern, Both from the Ears and Mind: Thinking about Music in Early Modern England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020); Katherine R. Larson, The Matter of Song in Early Modern England: Texts in and of the Air (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019); Trudell, Unwritten Poetry; Patricia Fumerton, Andrew Griffin, and Carl Stahmer, The Making of a Broadside Ballad (Santa Barbara, Calif.: EMC Imprint, 2015); Sarah Williams, Damnable Practises: Music, Witches, and Dangerous Women in Seventeenth-Century English Broadside Ballads (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2015); Patricia Fumerton, Anita Guerrini, and Kris McAbee, eds., Ballads and Broadside in Britain, 1500–1800 (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2010); Bruce Smith, The Acoustic World of Early Modern England: Attending to the O-Factor (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1999); Tessa Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
John N. Wall, ed., Virtual Paul’s Cross Project, accessed August 14, 2020, https://vpcp.chass.ncsu.edu/.
Suzanne Karr Schmidt, Altered and Adorned: Using Renaissance Prints in Daily Life (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2011); Susan Frye, Pens and Needles: Women’s Textualities in Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010); Andrew Morrall and Melinda Watt, eds., English Embroidery from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1580–1700 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2008).
Claire Bourne, Typographies of Performance in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020).
Trudell, Unwritten Poetry, 13.
Kathryn Rudy, Image, Knife, and Gluepot: Early Assemblage in Manuscript and Print (Cambridge: Open Book, 2019); David McKitterick, Old Books, New Technologies: The Representation, Conservation, and Transformation of Books since 1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Zachary Lesser,“Hamlet” After Q1: An Uncanny History of the Shakespearean Text (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016); Bonnie Mak, How the Page Matters (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011); Sherman, Used Books; Martin Foys, “Medieval Manuscripts: Media Archaeology and the Digital Incunable,” in The Medieval Manuscript Book: Cultural Approaches, ed. Michael Johnston and Michael van Dussen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 119–39; Michelle Warren and Laura R. Braunstein, Remix the Manuscript: A Chronicle of Digital Experiments, https://sites.dartmouth.edu/RemixBrut/.
Kari Kraus, “The Care of Enchanted Things,” in Debates in the Digital Humanities 2019, ed. Matthew K. Gold and Lauren F. Klein (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019), 161–78.
Laura Mandell, Breaking the Book: Print Humanities in the Digital Age (Malden, Mass.: Wiley Blackwell, 2015); and Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy (New York: New York University Press, 2011), have both extensively discussed these limitations. Martin Foys approaches this problem specifically in relation to medieval media in Virtually Anglo-Saxon: Old Media, New Media, and Early Medieval Studies in the Late Age of Print (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2007).
Amy Earhart, “Can Information Be Unfettered? Race and the New Digital Humanities Canon,” in Debates in the Digital Humanities, ed. Matthew K. Gold (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 309–32; Earhart, Traces of the Old, Uses of the New: The Emergence of Digital Literary Studies (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2015), esp. 62–89 (ch. 3: “What’s In and What’s Out?: Digital Canon Cautions”).
Kim Gallon, “Making a Case for Black Digital Humanities,” in Debates in the Digital Humanities, ed. Matthew K. Gold and Lauren F. Klein (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), 42–49.
Nicole N. Aljoe, Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, Benjamin J. Doyle, and Elizabeth Hopwood, “Obeah and the Early Caribbean Digital Archive,” Atlantic Studies 12, no. 2 (2015): 260. Inspiring recent digital projects in these fields include: the many published in archipelagos: a journal of Caribbean digital praxis (ed. by Kaima L. Glover and Alex Gil); Tao Leigh Goffe, Unmapping the Caribbean: Sanctuary and Sound, nyuds.maps.arcgis.com/apps/MapSeries/index.html?appid=489f1aee6b324a75b709d5d37f0cea2a; Laurent Dubois, David K. Garner, and Mary Caton Lingold, Musical Passage: A Voyage to 1688 Jamaica, musicalpassage.org/; Nicole Aljoe and Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, Early Caribbean Digital Archive, ecda.northeastern.edu; Cameron Blevins, Yan Wu, and Steven Braun, Gossamer Network, gossamernetwork.com; and Yomaira C. Figueroa Vásquez and Jessica Marie Johnson, Taller Electric Marronage, electricmarronage.com.
Katherine Bode, A World of Fiction: Digital Collections and the Future of Literary History (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2018), 4.
Ted Underwood helpfully emphasizes the need for multiple perspectives when modeling history, as I have tried to do; see Distant Horizons: Digital Evidence and Literary Change (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019), esp. 27. My understanding of data modeling for the humanities has been informed by discussions in Andrew Piper, “Introduction: Reading’s Refrain,” in Enumerations: Data and Literary Study (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018), 1–21; and Julia Flanders and Fotis Jannidis, eds., The Shape of Data in the Digital Humanities: Modeling Texts and Text-Based Resources (New York: Routledge, 2019).
Kim Christen, “Relationships Not Records: Digital Heritage and the Ethics of Sharing Indigenous Knowledge Online,” in Routledge Companion to Media Studies and Digital Humanities, ed. Jentery Sayers (New York: Routledge, 2018), 403–12; Christen, “On Not Looking: Economies of Visuality in Digital Museums,” in The International Handbooks of Museum Studies, vol. 4; Museum Transformations, ed. Annie E. Coombes and Ruth B. Phillips (Chichester, Eng.: John Wiley & Sons, 2015), 365–86; Cait McKinney, “Body, Sex, Interface: Reckoning with Images at the Lesbian Herstory Archives,” Radical History Review 122 (2015): 115–28; Micha Cárdenas, “Dark Shimmers: The Rhythm of Necropolitical Affect in Digital Media,” in Trap Door: Trans Cultural Production and the Politics of Visibility, ed. Reina Gossett, Eric A. Stanley, and Johanna Burton (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2017); Zach Blas and Jacob Gaboury, “Biometrics and Opacity: A Conversation,” Camera Obscura 31, no. 2 (2016): 155–65; Jessica Marie Johnson, “Markup Bodies: Black [Life] Studies and Slavery [Death] Studies at the Digital Crossroads,” Social Text 36, no. 4 (2018): 57–79; Simone Brown, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2015); Tim Sherratt, “A Life Reduced to Data” (keynote address, Migrant (Re)Collections Workshop, Leiden, Neth., 2016); Anastasia Salter and Bridget Blodgett, “Playing the Humanities: Feminist Game Studies and Public Discourse,” in Bodies of Information: Intersectional Feminism and the Digital Humanities, ed. Jacqueline Wernimont and Elizabeth Losh (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018), 466–76. For critiques of open access publishing specifically, see: Gary Hall, Pirate Philosophy: For a Digital Posthumanities (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2016); Sarah Kember, “At Risk? The Humanities and the Future of Academic Publishing,” Journal of Electronic Publishing 19, no. 2 (2016), https://quod.lib.umich.edu/j/jep/3336451.0019.210?view=text;rgn=main; Janneke Adema and Gary Hall, “The Political Nature of the Book: On Artists’ Books and Radical Open Access,” New Formations 78, no. 1 (2013): 138–56.
Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren F. Klein, Data Feminism (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2020); Kate Ozment, “Rationale for Feminist Bibliography,” Textual Cultures 13, no. 1 (2020): 149–78; Jamie “Skye” Bianco, “Man and His Tool, Again? Queer and Feminist Notes on Practices in the Digital Humanities and Object Orientations Everywhere,” Digital Humanities Quarterly 9, no. 2 (2015), http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/9/2/000216/000216.html; Jacqueline Wernimont and Elizabeth Losh, “Wear and Care: Feminisms at the Long Maker Table,” in Routledge Companion to Media Studies and Digital Humanities, ed. Jentery Sayers (New York: Routledge, 2018), 97–107; and “Introduction,” Bodies of Information: Intersectional Feminism and the Digital Humanities, ed. Jacqueline Wernimont and Elizabeth Losh (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018), ix–xxvi; Moya Z. Bailey, “All the Digital Humanists Are White, All the Nerds Are Men, but Some of Us Are Brave,” Journal of Digital Humanities 1, no. 1 (2011), http://journalofdigitalhumanities.org/1-1/all-the-digital-humanists-are-white-all-the-nerds-are-men-but-some-of-us-are-brave-by-moya-z-bailey/; Gallon, “Making a Case”; Safiya Umoja Noble, “Toward a Critical Black Digital Humanities,” in Gold and Klein, Debates in Digital Humanities, 27–35; Roopika Risam, “Beyond the Margins: Intersectionality and the Digital Humanities,” Digital Humanities Quarterly 9, no. 2 (2015), http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/9/2/000208/000208.html.
Greg Robinson, “The Man Behind the Camera: The Story of Yoichi Okamoto, LBJ’s Shadow,” Discover Nikkei, October 18, 2018, http://www.discovernikkei.org/en/journal/2018/10/11/yoichi-okamoto/.
Waters’s wife Sheila Waters documents his work on the 1966 flood in Waters Rising: Letters from Florence; Peter Waters and Book Conservation at the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze after the 1966 Flood (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Legacy, 2016).
Waters called this “Phased Conservation,” and it remains the standard practice; see Peter Waters, “Phased Conservation” (paper presented at the Library Collections Conservation Discussion Group Session, American Institute for Conservation 26th Annual Meeting, June 1–7, 1998, Arlington, Va.), cool.culturalheritage.org/coolaic/sg/bpg/annual/v17/bp17-17.html.
Robert Darnton, “The New Age of the Book,” New York Review of Books, March 18, 1999, 5–7.
Brown’s “readies” was first outlined in Bob Brown, The Readies (Bad Ems, Germany: Roving Eye Press, 1930). For criticism, see: Craig Saper, The Amazing Adventures of Bob Brown: A Real-life Zelig Who Wrote His Way through the 20th Century (New York: Empire State Editions, 2016), esp. ch. 5; Paul Stephens, The Poetics of Information Overload: From Gertrude Stein to Conceptual Writing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), esp. ch. 2; Jessica Pressman, Digital Modernism: Making It New in New Media (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), esp. ch. 2. Vannevar Bush introduced his Memex in “As We May Think,” Atlantic Monthly, July 1945; for a history of this project as an imaginary reading machine, see Terry Harpold, Ex-foliations: Reading Machines and the Upgrade Path (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009). On Robles, Crugnola, and Rigamonti, see Amaranth Borsuk, The Book (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2018), 231–32.
Darnton, “New Age.”
Roy Rosenzweig, guest ed., “Hypertext Scholarship in American Studies,” special issue in collaboration with the American Studies Crossroads Project at Georgetown University and the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, American Quarterly, chnm.gmu.edu/aq; and “Forum on Hypertext Scholarship: AQ as Web-Zine: Responses to AQ’s Experimental Online Issue,” American Quarterly 51.2 (June 1999): 237–46.
Douglas Eyman, “The Arrow and the Loom: A Decade of Kairos,” Kairos 11, no. 1 (Fall 2006), http://kairos.technorhetoric.net/11.1/binder.html?topoi/eyman/index.html. I am grateful to Cheryl Ball for sharing some of this history with me.
Cheryl Ball, “The Shifting Genres of Scholarly Multimedia: Webtexts as Innovation,” Journal of Media Innovations 3, no. 2 (2016): 53. On the aims of Kairos at its founding, see Mick Doherty, “Kairos Layers of Meaning,” Kairos 1, no. 1 (1996), kairos.technorhetoric.net/layers/start.html.
Random Cloud, “FIAT fLUX,” in Crisis in Editing: Texts of the English Renaissance, ed. Randall McLeod (New York: AMS, 1994), 61–172.
On the origins and history of this project, see: Bernd Wingert, “Flusser hören—lesen—studieren. Der ‘Flusser-Hypertext’—von der Nachgeschichte zur Vorgeschichte,” Flusser Studies 24 (December 2017), flusserstudies.net/sites/www.flusserstudies.net/files/media/attachments/wingert-flusser-hypertext.pdf; Wingert, “Flusser-Hypertext Prototyp und Entwicklungserfahrungen,” in Hypertext und Multimedia, ed. U. Glowalla and E. Schoop (Heidelberg, Ger.: Springer, 1992).
Tara McPherson and Steve Anderson, “Editorial Statement,” Vectors, http://vectors.usc.edu/journal/index.php?page=EditorialStatement.
Tara McPherson describes the history and theory of Vectors in Feminist in a Software Lab: Difference + Design (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2018). Many artists who work with books call their pieces “book works” or “bookworks,” e.g., Les Krims, Fictcryptokrimsographs: A Book-Work (Buffalo, N.Y: Humpy, 1975); Matthew Tickle, Idyll: A Bookwork (London: Matt’s Gallery, 2001); Beverly Naidus, What Kinda Name Is That? A Bookwork (self-published, 1995); Denis Mizzi, Bookwork 1997–2010: Nyx Press (Tamarama, Australia: Polar Bear, 2019); Doug Beube, Breaking the Codex: Bookwork, Collage, and Mixed Media (New York: Etc. Etc. The Iconoclastic Museum Press, 2011).
Juhaz, Learning from YouTube; Nicole Starosielski, Erik Loyer, and Shane Brennan, Surfacing, accessed July 23, 2020, http://www.surfacing.in/; Fumerton, Griffin, and Stahmer, The Making of a Broadside Ballad. The EMC Imprint has also recently released the digital book Early Modern Criticism in a Time of Crisis, edited by David J. Baker and Patricia Palmer (2021).
Other initiatives include the Mellon Foundation’s interest in Monograph Publishing in the Digital Age, summarized by Donald J. Waters in “Monograph Publishing in the Digital Age: A View from the Mellon Foundation,” Against the Grain 28, no. 3 (2016): 17–20; and the Arts and Humanities Research Council–funded project The Academic Book of the Future (2014–2016).
Janneke Adema is working on a history of these experiments, tentatively titled Living Books: Experiments in the Posthumanities.
Wulfstan von York, Die “Institutes of Polity, Civil and Ecclesiastical,” ed. Karl Jost (Bern: Francke, 1959), 75. On bocweorc as meaning more than reading, see also Jane Roberts, “Silent Reading,” in Mapping English Metaphor Through Time, ed. Wendy Anderson, Ellen Bramwell, and Carole Hough (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 246.
Ulise Carrión, “Bookworks Revisited,” The Print Collector’s Newsletter 11, no. 1 (1980): 6–9.
Garrett Stewart, Bookwork: Medium to Object to Concept to Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), xiii.
As Stewart writes, “when the familiar verbal transmitter, the book as paper manifold, is either dismembered and rebound or closed upon itself to become a virtual black box not only empty but unplugged, it is only so as to mark out—in the abstract—the never strictly spatial shape of our reading machines to begin with” (Bookwork, 13).
Jessica Pressman, “Bookwork and Bookishness: An Interview with Doug Beube and Brian Dettmer,” in Book Presence in the Digital Age, ed. Kiene Brillenburg Wurth, Kári Driscoll, and Jessica Pressman (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018), 60–67; Pressman, “The Aesthetic of Bookishness in Twenty-First-Century Literature,” Michigan Quarterly Review 48, no. 4 (2009), hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.act2080.0048.402. See also: Jonathan Freedman’s introduction to this issue of Michigan Quarterly Review, “bookishNess: A Brief Introduction,” hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.act2080.0048.401; Leah Price, How To Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2012). I am also thinking of Andrew Piper’s use of the term “bibliographic imagination” in Dreaming in Books: The Making of the Bibliographic Imagination in the Romantic Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). Rita Raley has taught a class at University of California, Santa Barbara, that specifically uses the term bookwork in its title, “Bookwork after New Media.”
Arthur Phillips, “Computer-Aided Composition,” in Encyclopedia of Computer Science and Technology, vol. 5, ed. Jack Belzer, Albert G. Holzman, and Allen Kent (New York: Marcel Dekker, 1976), 305.
Juliet Fleming, Cultural Graphology: Writing after Derrida (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2016); Smyth, Material Texts, 6; Zachary Lesser, Ghosts, Holes, Rips, and Scrapes: Shakespeare in 1619, Bibliography in the Longue Durée (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021).
Jacques Derrida, “The Book to Come,” in Paper Machines, trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2015), 15.
I of course channel Walter Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” trans. Harry Zohn, in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (Boston: Mariner, 2019), 196–209.
Friedrich Kittler, Discourse Networks 1800/1900, trans. Michael Metteer with Chris Cullens (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1990); Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999); Cornelia Vismann, Files: Law and Media Technology, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2008); Siegfried Zielinski, Deep Time of the Media: Toward an Archaeology of Hearing and Seeing by Technical Means, trans. by Gloria Custance (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006); Wolfgang Ernst, Digital Memory and the Archive (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013). Definitional texts in media archaeology include: Jussi Parikka, What Is Media Archaeology? (Malden, Mass.: Polity, 2012); Erkki Huhtamo, Illusions in Motion: Media Archaeology of the Moving Panorama and Related Spectacles (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2013); Huhtamo and Parikka, eds., Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications, and Implications (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011).
Lisa Gitelman, Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006); Rita Raley, Tactical Media (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009); Lori Emerson, Reading Writing Interfaces: From the Digital to the Bookbound (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016); Matthew Kirschenbaum, Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2012); Jentery Sayers, “Prototyping the Past,” Visible Language 49, no. 3 (2015), visiblelanguagejournal.com/issue/172/article/1232; Judy Malloy, Social Media Archaeology and Poetics (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2016); Jamie “Skye” Bianco, “Techno-Cinema: Image Matters in the Affective Unfoldings of Analog Cinema and New Media,” in The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social, ed. Patricia Ticineto Clough with Jean Halley (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2007), 47–76; Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006); Jussi Parikka, Insect Media: An Archaeology of Animals and Technology (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010) and Digital Contagions: A Media Archaeology of Computer Viruses (New York: Peter Lang, 2007); David Parisi, Archaeologies of Touch: Interfacing with Haptics from Electricity to Computing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018); Grant Bollmer, Inhuman Networks: Social Media and the Archaeology of Connection (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016). Two important edited collections are Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Anna Watkins Fisher, and Thomas W. Keenan, eds., New Media, Old Media: A History and Theory Reader (London: Routledge, 2016); and Lisa Gitelman and Geoffrey B. Pingree, eds., New Media 1740–1915 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003). I see Carolyn Marvin as an important precursor to this strand of media history in Anglophone media studies; see esp. When Old Technologies Were New (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988).
In the United States, the Media Archaeology Lab at the University of Colorado, Boulder, founded and directed by Lori Emerson, has been particularly influential; in Europe, the Medienarchäologischer Fundus [Media Archaeological Fundus] at Humboldt University in Berlin, supervised by Wolfgang Ernst. For more on labs, see Lori Emerson, Jussi Parikka, and Darren Wershler, The Lab Book: Situated Practices in Media Studies, an in-progress series of interviews with lab directors hosted by University of Minnesota Press’s Manifold Scholarship.
I am particularly persuaded by Thomas Elsaesser’s argument that media archaeology is a symptom rather than a method, and a means of crisis management—the crisis being a more general loss of belief in the Enlightenment project of progress; see “Media Archaeology as Symptom,” New Review of Film and Television Studies 14, no. 2 (2016): 181–215.
Gitelman, Always Already New, 7, 4.
Matt Cohen, “Time and the Bibliographer: A Meditation on the Spirit of Book Studies,” Textual Cultures 13, no. 1 (2020): 179–206; Ari Friedlander, Melissa Sanchez, and Will Stockton, eds., “Desiring History and Historicizing Desire,” special issue, Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 16, no. 2 (2016); Carolyn Dinshaw, How Soon Is Now? Medieval Texts, Amateur Readers, and the Queerness of Time (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2012); Jonathan Goldberg and Madhavi Menon, “Queering History,” PMLA 120, no. 5 (2005): 1608–17. For recent critical reflections on queering historicism, see Valerie Traub, “The New Unhistoricism in Queer Studies,” in Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 57–81.
Michelle Caswell, “Dusting for Fingerprints: Introducing Feminist Standpoint Appraisal,” Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies 3 (2020): 3–36; Jarrett M. Drake, “Liberatory Archives: Toward Belonging and Believing (Part 1),” On Archivy (October 22, 2016), medium.com/on-archivy/liberatory-archives-towards-belonging-and-believing-part-1-d26aaeb0edd1; and projects like BitCurator (bit curator.net), Collections as Data (ollectionsasdata.github.io), The Blackivists (www.theblackivists.com), and Documenting the Now (docnow.io).
Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Generous Thinking: A Radical Approach to Saving the University (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019).
Marisa Parham, “.break .dance,” sx archipelagos 3 (July 2019), http://archipelagosjournal.org/issue03/parham/parham.html; Sarah Kember, iMedia: The Gendering of Objects, Environments and Smart Materials (New York: Palgrave Pivot, 2016); Carla Nappi and Dominic Pettman, Metagestures (New York: punctum books, 2019); Janneke Adema, “Performative Publications,” Journal of Media Practice 19, no. 1 (2018): 68–81; Gabriela Aceves-Sepúlveda, “[Re]Activating Mamá Pina’s Cookbook,” Feminist Media Histories 3, no. 3 (2017), http://www.criticalmediartstudio.com/RemediatingMamaPina/.
Cornelia Vismann, “The Love of Ruins,” Perspectives in Science 9, no. 2 (2001): 196–209. On recent turns in philology, see Jeffery Masten, Queer Philologies; Sex, Language, and Affect in Shakespeare’s Time (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016); Sean Gurd and Vincent W. J. van Gerven Oei, eds., Pataphilology: An Irreader (New York: punctum books, 2018); Markus Stock, “Introduction: Philological Moves,” in “Rethinking Philology: Twenty-Five Years after the New Philology,” special issue, Florilegium 32 (2015): 1–17; Roberta Magnani and Diane Watt, “Toward a Queer Philology,” in “Queer Manuscripts,” special issue, postmedieval 9, no. 3 (2018): 252–68; Michelle Warren, “Shimmering Philology,” in “Philology and the Mirage of Time,” special issue, postmedieval 5, no. 4 (2015): 389–97; Jerome McGann, “Philology in a New Key,” Critical Inquiry 39, no. 2 (2013): 327–46.
Zielinski, Deep Time, 3.
Cut
Leslie C. Craig, “The Earliest Little Gidding Concordance,” Harvard Library Bulletin 1, no. 3 (1947): 316.
Nicholas Ferrar to Arthur Woodnoth, May 10, 1630, Ferrar Papers 722, Virginia Company Archives.
Official Guidebook of the New York World’s Fair, 1939 (New York: Exposition Publications, 1939).
“Manuscripts at the World’s Fair” and “Historical Books at World’s Fair,” newspaper clippings in the Fanny Reed Hammond scrapbooks, GEN MSS 258, scrapbook 2, box 1, folder 6, Beinecke Library at Yale University.
Auction catalog in Fanny Reed Hammond scrapbooks, GEN MSS 258, scrapbook 2, box 1, folder 7, Beinecke Library at Yale University.
Alan Maycock, Nicholas Ferrar of Little Gidding (London: SPCK, 1938), 20. Maycock also claims that letters and treatises signed and authored by Virginia Ferrar regarding her family’s interest in the Virginia colony (after which she was named) must actually have been penned by John Ferrar, since “Virginia would have been incapable of writing the kind of reports that were needed” (79).
Quoted in J. E. B. Mayor, ed., Nicholas Ferrar, Two Lives (Cambridge: Macmillan, 1855), 361.
John Ferrar, 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, ed. Lynette R. Muir and John A. White (Leeds, England: Leeds Philosophical and Literary Society, 2006), §99. All future quotes from John Ferrar’s memoirs will be cited as Muir and White, Materials, by section.
Quoted in Mayor, Nicholas Ferrar, 137 (emphasis original).
Muir and White, Materials, §105.
Ibid., §100. For a more extended discussion of this passage, see Paul Dyck, “‘So rare a use’: Scissors, Reading, and Devotion at Little Gidding,” George Herbert Journal 27, no. 1/2 (2003/2004): 67–81.
Thomas Fuller, The History of the Worthies of England (London, 1662), 48 (emphasis original).
Kimberly Anne Coles, Religion, Reform, and Women’s Writing in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Femke Molekamp, Women and the Bible in Early Modern England: Religious Reading and Writing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); see also Micheline White, ed., English Women, Religion, and Textual Production, 1520–1625 (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2011). An important precursor to Coles and Molekamp is Patricia Crawford, Women and Religion in England, 1500–1720 (New York: Routledge, 1993). I am using the common notion that women were enjoined to be chaste, silent, and obedient in the period, but for a nuancing of these three terms and expectations of women’s conduct more generally, see Jessica C. Murphy, Virtuous Necessity: Conduct Literature and the Making of the Virtuous Woman in Early Modern England (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2015).
Susan Frye, Pens and Needles: Women’s Textualities in Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010); Natasha Korda, Labors Lost: Women’s Work and the Early Modern Stage (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011). See also: Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass, Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Bianca F.-C. Calabresi, “‘you sow, Ile read’: Letters and Literacies in Early Modern Samplers,” in 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, 2008), 79–104; and the many important catalogues of Renaissance embroidery that have recently brought women’s textile objects to the attention of literary scholars, e.g.: Andrew Morrall and Melinda Watt, eds., English Embroidery from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1580–1700, ’twixt Art and Nature (New York: Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, Design, and Culture, 2008); Kathleen Epstein, British Embroidery: Curious Works from the Seventeenth Century (Williamsburg, Va.: Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, 1998); Liz Arthur, Embroidery, 1600–1700, at the Burrell Collection (London: John Murray, 1995); Xanthe Brooke, The Lady Lever Art Gallery: Catalogue of Embroideries (Stroud, England: A. Sutton, 1992); and the very thorough and extensive work of Santina M. Levey on the Hardwick Hall textiles in Elizabethan Treasures: The Hardwick Hall Textiles (London: The National Trust, 1998); The Embroideries at Hardwick Hall: A Catalogue (London: The National Trust, 2007); and with Peter Thornton, Of Houshold Stuff: The 1601 Inventories of Bess of Hardwick (London: National Trust, 2001). For more on the relations between prints used for embroidery and in the harmonies, see ch. 1 of Michael Gaudio, The Bible and the Printed Image in Early Modern England: Little Gidding and the Pursuit of Scriptural Harmony (NewYork: Routledge, 2016).
Muir and White, Materials, §80. It is unlikely that the community bought many, if any, of these vestments ready-made, as one of Nicholas Ferrar’s letters to his mother lists the materials that most likely became these furnishings: “greene Curtaynes / An Vallance / Blew silke & fring” in an undated letter, and “A peice broade perpetuano [a type of double wool fabric] / 3 ells Laune / 2 Peices Lace statute and silke” in a letter of June 10, 1631. Interestingly, the only other item Ferrar lists sending in his 1631 letter is “Ther Concordances,” without a cost; see Bernard Blackstone, ed., The Ferrar Papers: Containing a Life of Nicholas Ferrar (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1938), 244 (letter 6) and 261 (letter 19) and Ferrar Papers 794, Virginia Company Archives.
Mayor, Nicholas Ferrar, 38.
1641 Cambridge edition of The Temple by George Herbert, H1516 copy 1, Folger Shakespeare Library; sammelband containing a Book of Common Prayer, a King James Bible, and Sternhold and Hopkins Psalter, BX5145 A4 1629, University of Louisville Archives and Special Collections. For a rich discussion of the Folger book (with some speculation that it may not have a Little Gidding binding), see Kathleen Lynch, “Devotion Bound: A Social History of The Temple,” in Books and Readers in Early Modern England, ed. Jennifer Andersen, Elizabeth Sauer, and Stephen Orgel (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 181–84. As Lynch covers, this book is also discussed by Cyril Davenport in “Three Recently Discovered Bindings with Little Gidding Stamps,” The Library, n.s., 1 (1900): 210–12. Another folio set of the Book of Common Prayer, a Bible, and a Psalter with a leather binding attributed to Little Gidding is at the Morgan Library (016030), although more research is necessary to prove this attribution.
As early as 1899, Cyril Davenport warned against misattributing every needlework binding to Little Gidding (English Embroidered Bookbindings [London: Kegan Paul, Trench, and Trübner, 1899], 104). He pins the error on Fuller’s statement that the women’s “own Needles were employed in learned and pious work to binde Bible,” but needles are used in all forms of sewn bindings. More likely we are encountering here another patriarchal assumption that women must be responsible for textile labor. There are two examples of misattribution in the Beinecke Library at Yale University (MLm143 640B and MLm143 657) and at least two at the Morgan Library (006609 and 00209).
Annotation in Charles I, Eikon Basilike (London, 1679) C.27.d.15, British Library. On this book, see Davenport, “Three Recently Discovered Bindings,” 208–10.
While I specifically discuss the early modern period, the idea that scissors and needles might be considered “domestic technologies of publication” might be usefully compared with work on Emily Dickinson’s private, bespoke publications; see, e.g., Jeanne Holland, “Scraps, Stamps, and Cutouts: Emily Dickinson’s Domestic Technologies of Publication,” in Cultural Artifacts and the Production of Meaning: The Page, the Image, the Body, ed. Margaret J. M. Ezell and Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 139–81.
Two studies remain canonical touchstones: D. F. McKenzie, “Printers of the Mind: Some Notes on Bibliographical Theories and Printing-House Practices,” Studies in Bibliography 22 (1969): 1–75; Robert Darnton, “Workers Revolt: The Great Cat Massacre of the Rue Saint-Séverin,” in The Great Cat Massacre (New York: Basic Books, 1984), 75–106.
On domestic reading spaces, see: H. L. Meakin, The Painted Closet of Lady Anne Bacon Drury (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2013); Heidi Brayman Hackel, Reading Material in Early Modern England: Print, Gender, and Literacy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 34ff; Richard Rambuss, Closet Devotions (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1998), esp. ch. 3 (“The Prayer Closet”); Alan Stewart, “The Early Modern Closet Discovered,” Representations 50, no. 1 (1995): 76–100; Stewart; Close Readers: Humanism and Sodomy in Early Modern England (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997), esp. ch. 5 (“Epistemologies of the Early Modern Closet”).
Jentery Sayers, “Introduction: ‘I don’t know all the circuitry,’” in Making Things and Drawing Boundaries: Experiments in Digital Humanities, ed. Jentery Sayers (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), 1–17. On this shift in thinking, see: Amy Burek, Emily Alden Foster, Sarah Fox, and Daniela K. Rosner, “Feminist Hackerspaces: Hacking Culture, Not Devices (the zine!),” in Sayers, Making Things and Drawing Boundaries, 221–31; Melissa Rogers, “Making Queer Feminisms Matter: A Transdisciplinary Makerspace for the Rest of Us,” in Making Things and Drawing Boundaries, 234–48; Kim Martin, “Centering Gender: A Feminist Analysis of Makerspaces and Digital Humanities Centers,” presentation, at Institute for Digital Arts and Humanities Speaker Series, November 28, 2017, Indiana University; Daniela Rosner, Critical Fabulations: Reworking the Methods and Margins of Design (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2018); Jamie “Skye” Bianco, “This Digital Humanities Which Is Not One,” in Debates in Digital Humanities, ed. Matthew K. Gold (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 96–112. On makerspaces in libraries more generally, see: Ellyssa Kroski, ed., The Makerspace Librarian’s Sourcebook (Chicago: ALA Editions, 2017); Amy S. Jackson, Cindy Pierard, and Suzanne M. Schadl, eds., Scholarship in the Sandbox: Academic Libraries as Laboratories, Forums, and Archives for Student Work (Chicago: Association of College and Research Libraries, 2019).
Rogers, “Making Queer Feminisms Matter,” 234–35.
Paul Dyck, “‘So rare a use’”; Dyck, “‘A New Kind of Printing’: Cutting and Pasting a Book for a King at Little Gidding,” The Library 9, no. 3 (2008): 306–33; Dyck, “The Discovery of Pattern at Little Gidding,” in Women’s Bookscapes in Early Modern Britain, ed. Leah Knight, Micheline White, and Elizabeth Sauer (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2018), 135–52; Adam Smyth, “‘Shreds of holinesse’: George Herbert, Little Gidding, and Cutting Up Texts in Early Modern England,” English Literary Renaissance 9 (2012): 452–81; Smyth, “Little Clippings: Cutting and Pasting Bibles in the 1630s,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 43, no. 3 (2015): 595–613; Smyth, Material Texts in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), ch. 1; Patricia Badir, “Fixing Affections: Nicholas and John Ferrar and the Books of Little Gidding,” English Literary Renaissance 49, no. 3 (2019): 390–422; Debora Shuger, “Laudian Feminism and the Household Republic of Little Gidding,” JMEMS 44, no. 1 (2014): 69–94; Gaudio, The Bible and the Printed Image; Paul A. Parrish, “Richard Crashaw, Mary Collet, and the ‘Arminian Nunnery’ of Little Gidding,” in Representing Women in Renaissance England, ed. Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1997), 187–200; Joyce Ransome, Web of Friendship: Nicholas Ferrar and Little Gidding (Cambridge: James Clark, 2011); Ransome, “Monotesseron: The Harmonies of Little Gidding,” The Seventeenth Century 20, no. 1 (2005): 22–52.
Smyth, “‘Shreds of holinesse,’” 480–81.
Gaudio, The Bible and the Printed Image, 10, 7.
Margaret Ezell, Social Authorship and the Advent of Print (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999); Ezell, “Editing Early Modern Women’s Manuscripts: Theory, Electronic Editions, and the Accidental Copy-Text,” Literature Compass 7, no. 2 (2010): 102–9; Ezell, “Invisibility Optics: Apra Behn, Esther Inglis, and the Fortunes of Women’s Works,” in A History of Early Modern Women’s Writing, ed. Patricia Phillippy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018); Helen Smith, “Grossly Material Things”: Women and Book Production in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). More recently, on women’s involvement in the book trade, see Valerie Wayne, ed., Women’s Labour and the History of the Book in Early Modern England (New York: The Arden Shakespeare, 2020). Some have recently argued that we have gone too far in emphasizing the materiality of early modern women’s books and must return to reading the text, e.g.: Gillian Wright, Producing Women’s Poetry, 1600–1730: Text and Paratext, Manuscript and Print (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 10ff; Julie Crawford, Mediatrix: Women, Politics, and Literary Production in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 3. While I appreciate this counterpoint, it is my argument that we cannot understand the creativity of the women of Little Gidding’s harmonies without reading them as primarily material, rather than textual, documents.
Muir and White, Materials, §102.
Ibid.
Ibid, §103.
Ramie Targoff, Common Prayer: The Language of Public Devotion in Early Modern England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001).
Hannibal Hamlin, “Bunyan’s Biblical Progresses,” in The King James Bible after Four Hundred Years: Literary, Linguistic, and Cultural Influences, ed. Hannibal Hamlin and Norman W. Jones (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 214; Evelyn Tribble, Margins and Marginality: The Printed Page in Early Modern England (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1993), 52. My discussion of the Stuarts’ relationship to the Bible has been informed by Kevin Killeen, The Political Bible in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017).
I refer to some books parenthetically in my main text by their Short Title Catalogue (STC) number. When I do so, it is implied that I am referring to the second edition of A. W. Pollard and G. R. Redgrave, eds., A Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland and Ireland, and of English Books Printed Abroad 1475–1640 (London: Bibliographical Society, 1926), revised and enlarged by W. A. Jackson and F. S. Ferguson and then completed by K. F. Pantzer (London: Bibliographical Society, 1986–1991). “Wing” is Donald Goddard Wing’s continuation of the STC for works up through 1700: Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, and British America, and of English Books Printed in Other Countries, 1641–1700.
James I, A meditation upon the Lord’s Prayer (London, 1619), 23, 29.
Izaak Walton, The Life of Mr. George Herbert (London, 1670), 98.
George Herbert, “Judgment,” in The Works of George Herbert, ed. F. E. Hutchinson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1945), ll. 8–10.
Ibid., ll. 11–15.
Before this, the household had expressed some interest in publishing its work and may even have tried to print their harmony; however, as Ransome has convincingly argued, Johan Hiud’s similar book, The Storie of Stories (1632), beat them to press and they seem to have abandoned the project (Web of Friendship, 112). A harmony now at the Bodleian Library, also marked with the King’s marginalia, may have been made as a printer’s dummy for this project.
Dyck, “‘New Kind,’” 318.
Advertisement in a Gospel harmony from Little Gidding, CA.1735, fol. 3v, Cotsen Children’s Library at Princeton University.
The King’s Harmony, C.23.e.4, fol. 2r, British Library.
Ibid., fol. 7r. The remaining quotations in this paragraph are on the same page.
Gospel Harmony for William Cecil, 341, cols. 1–2, Cecil Papers, Hatfield House.
The Revelation of S Iohn the Divine, from Little Gidding, C.23.e.3, British Library.
Gaudio, The Bible and the Printed Image, 90–91.
The King’s Harmony, C.23.e.2, cols. 3–4, British Library.
Ibid., cols. 33–36.
Gospel Harmony for William Cecil, 341, cols. 31–2, Cecil Papers, Hatfield House.
Tessa Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 230. Brayman Hackel also points out that this broadside looks like printed marginalia in Reading Material, 129.
On this print, see Watt, Cheap Print, 176.
Johanna Drucker, Graphesis: Visual Forms of Knowledge Production (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2014), 7.
The King’s Harmony, C.23.e.2, cols. 37–40, British Library.
I am indebted to Paul Dyck for first pointing out this repetition.
Stanley Stewart, George Herbert (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1986), ch. 3 (esp. 65–67); Dyck, “‘So rare a use.’” On Little Gidding’s relationship to Herbert, see also Dyck, “‘Shreds of holiness,’” and Joyce Ransome, “George Herbert: Nicholas Ferrar, and the ‘Pious Works’ of Little Gidding,” George Herbert Journal 31, nos.1/2 (2007/2008): 1–19.
George Herbert, “The Holy Scriptures,” in Hutchinson, Works of George Herbert, l. I.2.
Ibid., ll. I.8–12.
Ibid., ll. II.5–6.
Muir and White, Materials, §84, §94; Ransome, Web of Friendship, 65.
Muir and White, Materials, §93; Mayor, Nicholas Ferrar, 40–43.
Muir and White, Materials, §87–90; Maycock, Nicholas Ferrar, 202–3.
George Herbert, The Country Parson, The Temple, ed. John N. Wall (Mahwah, N.J.: Paulist, 1981), 69. Herbert’s The Country Parson was not published in print until 1652 as part of Herbert’s remains, or, sundry pieces of that sweet singer of the temple, Mr George Herbert, sometime orator of the University of Cambridge, ed. Barnabas Oley (London, 1652), but it seems almost certain the Ferrars would have known and read this text in manuscript. Writing on walls was a common feature in English manor houses of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with Martin Luther even prescribing such actions. The quintessential study of this practice remains Juliet Fleming, Graffiti and the Writing Arts of Early Modern England (London: Reaktion, 2001), but see also: Meakin, Painted Closet; Elizabeth MacCutcheon, Sir Nicholas Bacon’s Great House Sententiae, English Literary Renaissance Supplement III (Amherst, Mass.: University of Hawaii, 1977); Peter Davidson, “Spatial Texts: Women as Devisers of Environments and Iconographies,” in Phillippy, History of Early Modern Women’s Writing, 186–202.
Mayor, Nicholas Ferrar, 282.
Muir and White, Materials, §124.
Muir and White, Materials, §106. The green walls themselves are noteworthy, since it was, as Bruce Smith has shown, an important color in early modern English homes, where assemblages of “woven artifacts” turned bedchambers and closets into a “constant—and constantly varying—interplay between the verbal and the visual” (The Key of Green [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009], 127).
Muir and White, Materials, §106.
Ibid.
Bathsheba Ferrar to Henry Owen, ca. June 1636, Ferrar Papers 722, Virginia Company Archives, reproduced in Blackstone, Ferrar Papers, 288–89. On this anecdote, see also Bernard Blackstone, “Discord at Little Gidding,” Times Literary Supplement, August 1, 1936.
Bathsheba Ferrar to Henry Owen, ca. June 1636 (Blackstone, Ferrar Papers, 290).
John Ferrar to Nicholas Ferrar, July 16, 1632, Ferrar Papers 857, Virginia Company Archives (Blackstone, Ferrar Papers, 272).
John Ferrar to Nicholas Ferrar, November 22, 1633, Ferrar Papers 915, Virginia Company Archives (Blackstone, Ferrar Papers, 279).
E. Cruwys Sharland, ed., The Story Books of Little Gidding (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1899), 2.
Ibid.
A. M. Williams, ed., Conversations at Little Gidding, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), xxix–xxxiii. Williams uses as evidence Nicholas Ferrar’s description of the names, quoted from Blackstone, Ferrar Papers, 111–12.
Shuger, “Laudian Feminism.” Blackstone makes this point: the Little Academy “was a clearing house for ideas, a means of spiritual refreshment and recreation; and, above all, it offered opportunities for creative activity. Individual differences, which had been to some extent suppressed in the quiet round of community life, could here be recognised and discussed. The fruits of individual experience, reading, and meditation, could be compared, and given their due place in the synthesis of the Dialogues,” (Ferrar Papers, 97).
Williams, Conversations, 131.
Ibid., 135.
Three are currently at the British Library under the shelfmark MS Add 34657–59; an additional two are at Clare College, Cambridge, one of which copies a section of BL MS Add 34658. A sixth, mentioned by Williams, is at Magdalene College, Cambridge, and copies a section of a Clare College manuscript (Conversations, 316–17).
The poems at the end of the book, discussed below, are written in the first person and are clearly by Susanna Collet. For instance, in the mother’s legacy poem, she describes herself as giving counsels “Vnto her Children, they twise Seven.” According to genealogies available today, Susanna had fifteen children, although some are less easily traced in the extant records and it is possible that one may have died in infancy. More compellingly, the hand used throughout the book very closely matches that in a letter written by Susanna on January 6, 1635/1636, around the same time as the manuscript (Ferrar Papers 1006, Virginia Company Archives). Although there is no known sample of Joyce’s handwriting that might be used for comparison, the children at Little Gidding were taught a beautiful, distinctive italic hand in imitation of Nicholas Ferrar’s own formal script; were this book copied by Joyce, it is likely she would have used this more ornate style of writing.
Braccia and I have not discovered exactly when Joyce married Wallis and so cannot confirm that her marriage was the impetus for the gift, although Joyce’s age in 1635 (twenty-one) is suggestive of it.
Leah Knight and Micheline White, “The Bookscape,” in Knight, White, and Sauer, Women’s Bookscapes, 1–18.
Letters from Little Gidding Story Books, vol. 1, Add MS 34657, fols. 5r–7v, British Library.
Ibid., fol. 7r.
Ibid., fol. 7v.
Sharland, Story Books, li–lv.
Susanna Colllet’s commonplace book, 128838, Morgan Library.
Such self-representations through reading were important for women in the period, as Edith Snook has pointed out (Women, Reading, and the Cultural Politics of Early Modern England [Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2005]).
Ariel Hessayon, “The Apocrypha in Early Modern England,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Bible in Early Modern England, c. 1530–1700, ed. Kevin Killeen, Helen Smith, and Rachel Willie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 143.
William A. Jackson, ed., Records of the Court of the Stationers’ Company, 1602–1640, vol. 2 (London: Bibliographical Society, 1955–6), 77 (October 2, 1615). This incident is also mentioned in Hessayon, “The Apocrypha,” 143.
John Vicars, Unholsome henbane between two fragrant roses (London, 1645); Henry Burton, A Replie to a relation, of the conference between William Laude and Mr. Fisher the Jesuite (London, 1640), 197 (emphasis original). These and other examples are mentioned in Hessayon, “The Apocrypha,” 143.
Karl Josef Höltgen, “Sir Robert Dallington (1561–1637): Author, Traveler, and Pioneer of Taste,” Huntington Library Quarterly 47, no. 3 (1984): 147–77.
Patricia Patrick, “Cultivating Prudence: Robert Dallington’s Aphorismes Civill and Militarie,” Sixteenth Century Journal 43, no. 2 (2012): 351–70.
Muir and White, Materials, §184.
Fred Schurink, “Manuscript Commonplace Books, Literature, and Reading in Early Modern England,” Huntington Library Quarterly 73, no. 3 (2010): 453–69.
Mark Empey, ed., “PLRE 296: Lady Margaret (Miller) Heath (d. 1647),” Private Libraries of Renaissance England, vol. 10 (Binghamton, N.Y.: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 2020), 263–85.
For a nuanced argument about the value of digital searches that has informed our work, see: Daniel Shore, Cyberformalism: Histories of Linguistic Forms in the Digital Archive (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018); Jonathan Lamb, Shakespeare in the Marketplace of Words (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 27–29.
Ryan Cordell, “Speculative Bibliography,” presentation, Modern Language Association 2020 Convention, Seattle, Wash., January 10, 2020, ryancordell.org/research/speculative-bibliography/.
Poem by Susanna Colllet in her commonplace book, 128838, fols. 15.6r–15.7r, Morgan Library.
Ibid., fol. 17.2v.
Ibid., fol. 17.3r.
On the mother’s legacy, see Jennifer Heller, The Mother’s Legacy in Early Modern England (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2011).
Siobhan Keenan, “‘Embracing Submission’? Motherhood, Marriage, and Mourning in Katherine Thomas’s Seventeenth-Century ‘Commonplace Book,’” Women’s Writing 15, no. 1 (2008): 69–85.
George Henderson, “Bible Illustration in the Age of Laud,” Transactions of the Bibliographical Society 8, no. 2 (1982), 175–76.
E. Cruwys Sharland, “Richard Crashaw and Mary Collet,” Church Quarterly Review 73 (1912): 373.
David Ransome, “Little Gidding and the Eikon Basilike of King Charles I,” Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society 16, no. 3 (2018): 401–14.
Craig, “Earliest Little Gidding Harmony,” 316.
John Bidwell, “Julia Parker Wightman (1909–1994), Collector,” Miniature Book Society Newsletter, n.s., 60, no. 118 (2003): 9.
Robert M. Andrews, Lay Activism and the High Church Movement of the Late Eighteenth Century: The Life and Thought of William Stevens, 1732–1807 (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 61.
Henrietta Maria Bowdler and Thomas Bowdler, eds., The Family Shakspeare, in Ten Volumes (London, 1818), 1:viii.
Howard Marchitello, Remediating Shakespeare in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 65–68; Noel Perrin, Dr. Bowdler’s Legacy: A History of Expurgated Books in England and America (New York: Atheneum, 1969), 63.
Bowdler and Bowdler, Family Shakspeare, 1:xviii.
Henrietta Maria Bowdler, ed., The Family Shakespeare, in Four Volumes (London, 1807) 1:vii.
Ibid., 1:vi.
Ibid., 1:vii.
Bowdler and Bowdler, Family Shakespeare, in Ten Volumes, 1:xviii.
Quoted in Abigail Williams, The Social Life of Books: Reading Together in the Eighteenth-Century Home (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2018), 181, which also covers this controversy.
“Bowdlerize,” in Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), www.oed.com/view/Entry/22199.
Peter Benedict Nockles, The Oxford Movement in Context: Anglican High Churchmanship, 1760–1857 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 184.
John E. Acland, A Layman’s Life in the Days of the Tractarian Movement (London: James Parker, 1904), 127–30.
Ibid., 201.
John E. Acland, “An Account of the Harmonies Contrived by Nicholas Ferrar at Little Gidding,” Archaeologia 51, no. 2 (1888): 189–204.
The first edition of Masters’s abridgment seems to appear in 1852, and since I cannot locate a print copy of the 1869 edition used in this pamphlet, it may be the only known copy.
Smyth, “Little Clippings,” 595.
I am grateful to Emilie Friedman for her help editing this pamphlet in particular; see digitalbookhistory.com/littlegidding/neatline/show/gospel-harmony-1635.
Kate Navrra Thibodeau, Holyoke: The Skinner Family and Wistariahurst (Charleston, S.C.: Arcadia, 2005), 92.
Nils Ericsson and Fanny Reed Hammond, The Belle Skinner Collection of Old Musical Instruments, Holyoke, Massachusetts (1933), ix.
We know of her authorship through published indices of copyright, e.g., Catalogue of Copyright Entries, part 3: Musical Compositions, n.s. 15, no. 3 (1920): item 3414; n.s., 16, no. 11 (1921): items 22222, 23499; n.s., 16, no. 12 (1921): item 26278; n.s., 17, no. 3 (1922): item 3031.
The photographs are kept in a separate small red leather casing that may have been made by the Beinecke library.
Edward Reed to Fanny Reed Hammond, GEN MSS 258, scrapbook correspondence, box 2, folder 9, Beinecke Library at Yale University.
Ibid., scrapbook 2, box 1, folder 6.
Ibid., scrapbook correspondence, box 2, folder 10.
Ibid., scrapbook 1, box 1, folder 1.
Ibid.
Allison Margaret Bigelow has written about Virginia Ferrar’s scheme in “Gendered Language and the Science of Colonial Silk,” Early American Literature 49, no. 2 (2014): 271–300. Danielle Skeehan also addresses Little Gidding and colonialism in The Fabric of Empire: Material and Literary Cultures of the Global Atlantic, 1650–1850 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020).
Elsie Binns to Fanny Reed Hammond, GEN MSS 258, scrapbook 1, box 1, folder 1, Beinecke Library at Yale University.
Copy
Ferrar Print 325, Virginia Company Archives.
Jan van der Stock, Printing Images in Antwerp: The Introduction of Printmaking in a City, Fifteenth Century to 1585, trans. Beverley Jackson (Rotterdam, Neth.: Sound & Vision Interactive Rotterdam, 1998), 134–36.
J. E. B. Mayor, Nicholas Ferrar, Two Lives (Cambridge: Macmillan, 1855), 137.
Roger Gaskell, “Printing House and Engraving Shop: A Mysterious Collaboration,” The Book Collector 53 (2004): 213–51. On the rise of printmaking, see Anthony Griffiths, The Print Before Photography: An Introduction to European Printmaking, 1550–1820 (London: British Museum, 2016).
George Henderson, “Bible Illustration in the Age of Laud,” The Library 8, no. 2 (1982): 180–83; Peter Stallybrass, “Books and Scrolls: Navigating the Bible,” in Books and Readers in Early Modern England: Material Studies, ed. Jennifer Anderson and Elizabeth Sauer (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 51; Graham Parry, Glory, Laud, and Honour: The Arts of the Anglican Counter-Reformation (Rochester, N.Y.: Boydell, 2006), 129–30.
Alexander Globe, Peter Stent, London Printseller (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1985). On the growth of consumer demand, see David Baker, On Demand: Writing for the Market in Early Modern England (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2009).
Samuel Butler, Characters and Passages from Note-books, ed. A. R. Waller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1908), 53.
Ibid.
Ibid., 54.
Anthony Wood, Athenae Oxonienses, vol. 2 (London, 1692), 876.
J. Douglas Canfield, Tricksters & Estates: On the Ideology of Restoration Comedy (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1997), 158.
Alexander Pope, The Works of Alexander Pope, vol. 3, ed. Whitwell Elwin and William John Courthope (London, 1881), 260n6.
Alexander Pope, The Works of Alexander Pope, vol. 5, ed. William Warburton (London, 1751), 117–18.
Samuel Butler, The Genuine Remains in Verse and Prose of Mr. Samuel Butler, Author of Hudibras, vol. 2, ed. Robert Thyer (London, 1759), 118.
George Saintsbury, Minor Poets of the Caroline Period, vol. 1 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1905), 307.
Elizabeth Jane Bellamy, “Edward Benlowes’ Theophila’s Love-Sacrifice: The Paradox of the Mystical Poet” (PhD diss., Duke University, 1982).
Gunnar Qvarnström, Poetry and Numbers: On the Structural Use of Symbolic Numbers (Lund, Swed.: Gleerup, 1966), 76.
Ibid., 57.
In using the term “intermedia,” or occasionally “transmedia,” to describe Benlowes’s work, I signal my critical affiliation with a host of recent scholarship at the intersection of early material culture and media studies; for two especially trenchant collections of essays, see “The Intermedia Restoration,” special issue, Restoration: Studies in English Literary Culture, 1660–1770 42, no. 2 (2018), and Jen Boyle and Martin Foys, eds., “Becoming Media,” special issue, postmedieval 3, no. 1 (2012).
When quoting Theophila throughout this chapter, in main text, I will parenthetically cite signatures from the first folio edition of 1652 and, when relevant, canto and stanza.
Bruce Smith, Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare’s England: A Cultural Poetics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 192. See also Alan Stewart, Close Readers: Humanism and Sodomy in Early Modern England (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997), xvi–ix; James M. Saslow, Ganymede in the Renaissance: Homosexuality in Art and Society (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1986).
Lorrayne Y. Baird-Lange, “Victim Criminalized: Iconographic Traditions and Peacham’s Ganymede,” in Traditions and Innovations: Essays on British Literature of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, ed. David G. Allen and Robert A. White (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1990), 231–50.
Jonathan Goldberg, “Sodomy and Society: The Case of Christopher Marlowe,” Staging the Renaissance, ed. David Scott Kastan and Peter Stallybrass (New York: Routledge, 1991), 78.
Richard Rambuss, Closet Devotions (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1998), 54–57.
Margreta de Grazia, “Anachronism,” in Cultural Reformations: Medieval and Renaissance in Literary History, ed. James Simpson and Brian Cummings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); Alexander Nagel and Christoper S. Wood, Anachronic Renaissance (New York: Zone Books, 2010), 13–14. On preposterous historiography, see Mieke Bal, Loving Yusuf: Conceptual Travels from Past to Present (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 152. Patricia Parker connects the preposterous to early modern performance in “Preposterous Events,” Shakespeare Quarterly 43, no. 2 (1992): 186–213, while Jeffrey Masten connects it to Jeffrey Goldberg’s notion of “sodometries” in Queer Philologies: Sex, Language, and Affect in Shakespeare’s Time (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 180; both connections are rich with significance for Barlow’s etching.
In knitting together embodied acts of reading and the historical construction of desire, especially queer desire, this analysis is indebted to several influential books and collections, including: Madhavi Menon, Wanton Words: Rhetoric and Sexuality in English Renaissance Drama (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), esp. 31–32; James M. Bromley and Will Stockton, eds., Sex before Sex: Figuring the Act in Early Modern England (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013); Carla Freccero, Queer/Early/Modern (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006); Ben Saunders, Desiring Donne: Poetry, Sexuality, Interpretation (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006). For recent critical reflections on historicizing queer desire and queering historicism, see: Ari Friedlander, Melissa Sanchez, and Will Stockton, eds., “Desiring History and Historicizing Desire,” special issue, Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 16, no. 2 (2016); Valerie Traub, “The New Unhistoricism in Queer Studies,” in Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016). I am also indebted to Brooke Palmieri for her work on queer book history, as taught in her London Rare Book School class, “The Queer Book.”
Benlowes v. Scoreinge [Schoren] (1662), C 9/31/14, The National Archives (United Kingdom), defendant’s answer.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Harold Jenkins, Edward Benlowes, 1602–1676: Biography of a Minor Poet (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1952), 55.
Benlowes v. Scoreinge [Schoren] (1662), C 9/31/14, The National Archives (United Kingdom), defendant’s answer.
Ibid.
Foreigners were prohibited from becoming stationers in England without special permission, and sellers and collectors still relied on agents connected to overseas ports and fairs to acquire many books and prints; see Julian Roberts, “Extending the Frontiers: Scholar Collectors,” in The Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland, ed. Elisabeth Leedham-Green and Teresa Webber (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 294–95; Marika Keblusek, “Book Agents: Intermediaries in the Early Modern World of Books,” Your Humble Servant: Agents in Early Modern Europe, ed. Hans Cools, Marika Keblusek, and Badeloch Noldus (Hilversum, Netherlands: Uitgeverij Verloren, 2006): 97–107.
Jenkins, Edward Benlowes, 125.
Latin exercise book of Edward Benlowes, MS Rawlinson D 278, Bodleian Library.
John Evelyn, The Diary of John Evelyn: Kalendarium, 1650–1672, vol. 3, ed. E. S. de Beer, Oxford Scholarly Editions Online (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 136 (September 1, 1654).
The entire gift of globes, marbles, and books is recorded in the Liber Memorialis of St. John’s College and can be found in Thomas Baker, History of the College of St. John the Evangelist, Cambridge, ed. J. E. B. Mayor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1869), 340; see also A. F. Torry, Founders and Benefactors of St John’s College, Cambridge (Cambridge: W. Metcalfe, 1888), 27–28.
William Sparke, The Mystery of Godlinesse (1628; STC 23026), bk. 2, p. 13 (sig. B3r).
Philip Gaskell, Trinity College Library: The First 150 Years (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 4–6; N. R. Ker, “Oxford College Libraries in the Sixteenth Century,” in Books, Collectors and Libraries: Studies in the Medieval Heritage, ed. Andrew G. Watson (London: Hambledon, 1985), 379. On St. John’s College Library specifically in the sixteenth century, see David McKitterick, “Two Sixteenth-Century Catalogues of St. John’s College Library,” Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society 7, no. 2 (1978): 135–55.
J. C. T. Oates, Cambridge University Library: A History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 73. See also Clare Sargent, “The Early Modern Library (to c. 1640),” in Leedham-Green and Webber, Cambridge History of Libraries, 54.
Elisabeth Leedham-Green, “University Libraries and Book-sellers,” The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, ed. Lotte Hellinga and J. B. Trapp (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 347–49; Kristian Jensen, “Printing at Oxford in its European Context, 1478–1584,” in The History of Oxford University Press, vol. 1, Beginnings to 1780, ed. Ian Gadd (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 38–40.
For individual case studies exemplifying this trend, see: David Selwyn, Edmund Geste and His Books: Reconstructing the Library of a Cambridge Don and Elizabethan Bishop (London: Bibliographical Society, 2017); David McKitterick, “Andrew Perne and His Books,” in Andrew Perne: Quatercentenary Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge Bibliographical Society, 1991), 35–61; Charles Sayle, “The Library of Thomas Lorkyn,” Annals of Medical History 3, no. 4 (1921): 310–23.
Gaskell, Trinity College Library, 10; Jennifer Summit, Memory’s Library: Medieval Books in Early Modern England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 2.
Sargent, “The Early Modern Library,” 59.
Ibid., 62.
Kristian Jensen, “Universities and Colleges,” in Leedham-Green and Webber, Cambridge History of Libraries, 362.
N. R. Ker, “Oxford College Libraries in the Sixteenth Century,” Bodleian Library Review 6, no. 3 (1969): 507–8. On the emergence of institutional catalogues at the end of the sixteenth century, see: Archer Taylor, Book Catalogues: Their Varieties and Uses (Chicago: Newberry Library, 1957), 45–70; Sears Jayne, Library Catalogues of the English Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1956), 29–30; Albert Ehrman and Graham Pollard, The Distribution of Books by Catalogue from the Invention of Printing to A.D. 1800 (Cambridge: Roxburghe Club, 1965), 249–55.
Sargent, “Early Modern Library,” 55; Mark Sosower, “Greek Manuscripts Acquired by Henry and Thomas Savile in Padua,” The Bodleian Library Record 19, no. 2 (2006): 157–84.
R. J. Fehrenbach and Joseph Black, gen. eds., Private Libraries in Renaissance England: A Collection and Catalogue of Tudor and Early Stuart Book-lists, 10 vols. (Binghamton, N.Y.: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1992–2020). The PLRE book-lists can now be accessed via a database hosted by the Folger Shakespeare Library: plre.folger.edu.
Alain J. Wijffels, “PLRE 2: Sir Edward Stanhope’s Bequest of Books to Trinity College, 1608,” in Private Libraries in Renaissance England, 1:47–78.
Nati H. Krivatsy and Laetitia Yeandle, eds., “PLRE 4: Books of Sir Edward Dering, First Baronet, of Kent,” Private Libraries of Renaissance England, 1:164–269.
I refer to some books parenthetically in my main text by their Short Title Catalogue (STC) number. When I do so, it is implied that I am referring to the second edition of A. W. Pollard and G. R. Redgrave, eds., A Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland and Ireland, and of English Books Printed Abroad 1475–1640 (London: Bibliographical Society, 1926), revised and enlarged by W. A. Jackson and F. S. Ferguson and then completed by K. F. Pantzer (London: Bibliographical Society, 1986–1991). “Wing” is Donald Goddard Wing’s continuation of the STC for works up through 1700: Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, and British America, and of English Books Printed in Other Countries, 1641–1700.
Claire Bryony Williams, “Manuscript, Monument, Memory: The Circulation of Epitaphs in the Seventeenth Century,” Literature Compass 11, no. 8 (2014): 573–82.
T. N. S. Lennam, “Sir Edward Dering’s Collection of Playbooks, 1619–1624,” Shakespeare Quarterly 16, no. 2 (1965): 145–53; Nati H. Krivatsy and Laetitia Yeandle, “Sir Edward Dering,” in Fehrenbach and Black, Private Libraries in Renaissance England, 1:141.
Southwell-Sibthorpe commonplace book, PLRE 4.547; Lenham, “Sir Edward Dering’s Collection,” 147. See also: Lukas Erne, Shakespeare and the Book Trade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 201–2; Emma Smith, Shakespeare’s First Folio: Four Centuries of an Iconic Book (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 7–10.
Jean Carmel Cavanaugh, “The Library of Lady Southwell and Captain Sibthorpe,” Studies in Bibliography 20 (1967): 243–54. This inventory of Southwell and Sibthorpe’s books is included in PLRE as Ad3.
The antipapal works are: Andrew Willet, Synopsis papismi (1614; STC 25699a); Christopher Sibthorp, A friendly advertisement to the pretended Catholickes of Ireland (1622; STC 22522); John Copley, Doctrinall and morall obseruations concerning religion (1612; STC 5742).
David Pearson, English Book Owners in the Seventeenth Century, a work in progress published electronically by the Bibliographical Society (bibsoc.org.uk/sites/bibsoc.org.uk/files/English%20book%20owners%20in%20the%20seventeenth%20century_masterlist_2018_03.pdf, last updated March 2018, has informed this discussion).
Edward Chaney and Timothy Wilks, The Jacobean Grand Tour: Early Stuart Travellers in Europe (New York: I. B. Tauris, 2014); Alison Games, The Web of Empire: English Cosmopolitans in the Age of Expansion, 1560–1660 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). Nicholas Ferrar, too, had traveled abroad as a young man, returning with the boxes of books and piles of Flemish prints that would form the raw materials that were remade in the bookwork of Little Gidding.
Thomas Lupton, A thousand Notable things, of sundry sortes (1590), Uu.23.48(2), St. John’s College Library at Cambridge University.
It is A. B. Langdale who first assigns this composition date in Phineas Fletcher: Man of Letters, Science, and Divinity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1937), 40, 51. Langdale assumes Benlowes is responsible for Fletcher beginning to appear in print.
Zachary Lesser, Renaissance Drama and the Politics of Publication: Readings in the English Book Trade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 217. The decorative borders, doggerel “Arguments” added to each canto, and the removal of any characters linking Fletcher’s pastoral world to the text all point to a deliberate ruse to make the book appear more Elizabethan in tone and topic, what Langdale describes as a “complicated and successful hoax, involving Fletcher, Walkley, and possibly Benlowes” (95). That Walkley dedicated the short book to his client the Duke of Buckingham’s young daughter Mary—signing the dedication as “The humblest of your deuoted Seruants”—certainly suggests more of a motive for the misattribution than does ignorance or a desire for profit. Around this time, William Sheares also brought out Fletcher’s Sicelides a piscatory (1631, STC 10083), a pastoral drama first written for James’s royal visit to King’s College in 1615, without attribution.
Annotation in copy of Phineas Fletcher, Piscatorie Eclogs, 239.i.23.(1.), 69, British Library. Unfortunately, the letters in brackets and several other important annotations were cut off when the book was rebound. However, they are supplied in Frederick Boas, ed., The Poetical Works of Giles and Phineas Fletcher, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1909), xiv. In his letter to Sir John Duke Coleridge, published as Who Wrote ‘Brittain’s Ida’? (mis-assigned to Edmund Spenser) answered in a letter to Sir John Duke Coleridge (1869), Alexander Grosart assumes the “W. Thomson” of Queen’s College who owned and annotated this book was Rev. William Thompson (1712–1766), who edited Sir John Davies and other seventeenth-century English poets.
Mary Ethel Seaton, Venus & Anchises (Brittains Ida) and other poems (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1926).
James Willoughby, “Universities, Colleges, and Chantries,” in A Companion to the Early Printed Book in Britain, 1476–1558, ed. Vincent Gillespie and Susan Powell (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2014), 211.
David McKitterick, A History of Cambridge University Press, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 76.
M. H. Black, Cambridge University Press, 1584–1984 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 55–56. On the oft-undervalued importance of job printing to the handpress trade, see Peter Stallybrass, “‘Little Jobs’: Broadsides and the Printing Revolution,” in Agent of Change: Print Culture Studies after Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, ed. Sabrina Alcorn Baron, Eric N. Lindquist, and Eleanor F. Shevlin (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007): 315–41.
McKitterick, History of Cambridge University Press, 170–72.
Quoted in ibid., 167.
Arthur Marotti, Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1995), 31–40; H. R. Woudhuysen, Sir Philip Sidney and the Circulation of Manuscripts, 1558–1640 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 166–68. For case studies of manuscripts or poems that exemplify of this mode of transmission, see: Marotti, “‘Rolling Archetypes’: Christ Church, Oxford Poetry, Collections, and the Proliferation of Manuscript Verse Anthologies in Caroline England,” English Literary Renaissance 44, no. 3 (2014): 486–87; David Colclough, “‘The Muses Recreation’: John Hoskyns and the Manuscript Culture of the Seventeenth Century,” Huntington Library Quarterly 61, nos. 3–4 (2000): 369–400; Jessica Edmondes, “Poetic Exchanges and Scribal Agency in Early Modern Manuscript Culture,” Huntington Library Quarterly 80, no. 2 (2017): 239–55; Scott Nixon, “‘Aske me no more’ and the Manuscript Verse Miscellany,” English Literary Renaissance 29, no. 1 (1999): 97–130.
L. C. Martin, “Introduction,” in The Poems Latin, English, and Greek of Richard Crashaw (Oxford: Clarendon, 1927), xlvi; Harold Love, The Culture and Commerce of Texts: Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993), 52–53.
Mid-seventeenth-century sammelband containing verse by Richard Crashaw, Edward Benlowes, Thomas Fuller, Thomas Philipott, et al., and sermons and verse by John Benson, V.a.148, Folger Shakespeare Library.
Megan Heffernan, Making the Miscellany: The Poetics of Compiling in Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021).
Harold Forster, “The Rise and Fall of the Cambridge Muses (1603–1763),” Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society 8, no. 2 (1982): 141. See also: Paul Parrish, “Reading Poets Reading Poets: Herbert and Crashaw’s Literary Eclipse,” in Literary Circles and Cultural Communities in Renaissance England, ed. Claude J. Summers, Ted-Larry Pebworth (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2000): 115–27; Mary Hobbs, Early Seventeenth-Century Verse Miscellany Manuscripts (Brookfield, Vt.: Ashgate, 1992), 100–101. On the press’s move, see McKitterick, History of Cambridge University Press, 323.
Lana Cable, “‘Such nothing is terrestriall’: Philosophy of Mind on Phineas Fletcher’s Purple Island,” Journal of the History of Behavioral Sciences 19 (1983): 136–52.
Jonathan Sawday, The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture (London: Routledge, 1995), 177.
Johnathan H. Pope, “Introduction,” in The Purple Island: Or, the Isle of Man, ed. Johnathan Pope (Boston: Brill, 2017), 4.
Phineas Fletcher, The Purple Island, or The Isle of Man: Together with Piscatorie Eclogs and Other Poeticall Miscellanies (Cambridge, 1633; STC 11082), fol. ¶4v.
Frank Kastor, Giles and Phineas Fletcher (Boston: Twayne, 1978), 112, 116; Sawday, Body Emblazoned, 179.
Pope, “Introduction,” 13.
Ibid., 26.
McKitterick, History of Cambridge University Press, 156.
Fletcher, Purple Island (1633), 6 (sig. A3v), 5 (sig. A3r).
Marotti, Manuscript; Hobbs, Early Seventeenth-Century Verse Miscellany Manuscripts; Marcy North, “Household Scribes and the Production of Literary Manuscripts in Early Modern England,” Journal of Early Modern Studies 4 (2015): 133–57; Heffernan, Making the Miscellany.
Michelle O’Callaghan, “Collecting Verse: ‘Significant Shape’ and the Paper-Book in the Early Seventeenth Century,” Huntington Library Quarterly 80, no. 2 (2017): 310.
Joshua Eckhardt, Manuscript Verse Collectors and the Politics of Anti-Courtly Love Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 6.
Alexandra Gillespie, “Poets, Printers, and Early English Sammelbände,” Huntington Library Quarterly 67, no. 2 (2004): 189–214; Jeffrey Todd Knight, Bound to Read: Compilations, Collections, and the Making of Renaissance Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013). On the togetherness of early modern books more generally, see Nancy J. Vickers, “The Unauthored 1539 Volume in which is Printed the Hecatomphile,The Flowers of French Poetry, and Other Soothing Things,” in Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture, ed. Margreta de Grazia, Maureen Quilligan, and Peter Stallybrass (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996): 166–88.
Knight, Bound to Read, 9.
Joshua Eckhardt and Daniel Starza Smith, “Introduction: The Emergence of the English Miscellany,” Manuscript Miscellanies in Early Modern England, ed. Joshua Eckhardt and Daniel Starza Smith (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2014), 1.
This leaf may have been added by Thompson, but it does not appear to be in his handwriting. The title page to the Piscatorie Eclogs is also tipped in, pasted to the first leaf of the text; this may have been done during a later rebinding.
For an early collection of essays on how poems travel together in sequences over time, influential to my own readings here, see Neil Fraistat, ed., Poems in Their Place: The Intertextuality and Order of Poetic Collections (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986).
Love, Culture and Commerce of Texts, 346; Piers Brown, “Donne, Rhapsody, and Textual Order,” in Eckhardt and Starza Smith, Manuscript Miscellanies, 39–55. See also Marotti, “‘Rolling Archetypes.’”
McKitterick, History of Cambridge University Press, 296.
Part-books are an important and underexplored exemplar for these linked gatherings of text, especially for the musically and continentally inclined Benlowes. See: Kate van Orden, Materialities: Books, Readers, and the Chanson in Sixteenth-Century Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 4; D. W. Krummel, English Music Printing 1553–1700 (London: Bibliographical Society, 1975), 79.
Seventeenth-century sammelbands pairing Benlowes’s Sphinx Theologica with Crashaw’s Epigrammatum sacrorum liber (1634; STC 6009): Peterborough H.2.38, Cambridge University Library; Dd.18.24, St. John’s College Library at Cambridge University; Bd.w. STC 6009 copy 3, Folger Shakespeare Library (STC 1880); S11.4.71 (1–4), Emmanuel College at Cambridge University.
Sammelband of Benlowes’s Sphinx Theologica bound with poetry books by Richard Corbett and Robert Wild, Peterborough H.2.38, Cambridge University Library. The other books in this volume are Terentius Christianus (1601); Crashaw’s Epigrammatum sacrorum liber; Richard Corbett (Oxford clergyman), Certain Elegant Poems (1647; Wing C6269C); and Robert Wild, Iter Boreale, Together with Some Other Selected Poems (1661; Wing W2134). Corbett’s and Wild’s books are also found bound together with John Cleveland’s Poems (1651; Wing C4685A) in a book now at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UA03344). On Corbett’s circulation through Oxford manuscript coteries, see Christopher Burlinson, “Response and Accumulation: Textual Editors and Richard Corbett’s ‘Oxford Ballad,’” Studies in English Literature 52, no. 1 (2012): 35–50; and “Maecenas and ‘Oxford-Witts’: Pedagogy and Flattery in Seventeenth-Century Oxford,” in Re-evaluating the Literary Coterie, 1580–1830, ed. Will Bowers and Hannah Leah Crummé (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 35–52.
Sammelband binding Benlowes’s Sphinx Theologica with six octavos, 8° Z 40(6) Th.Seld, Bodleian Library.
Benlowes’s gift volumes of Sphinx Theologica bound alone: Dd.17.31, St. Johns College Library at Cambridge University; H.8.79, Magdalene College at Cambridge University; 11409.e.10, British Library. A copy is also found alone in a more ornate binding from Benlowes’s time at shelfmark STC 1880, Houghton Library at Harvard University, bearing ownership marks of Charles Moseley of Merton College (1713) and Nathaniell Butler, who received it from Walter Pheasant (1664). Aaron Pratt has convincingly challenged the idea that stab-stitching is a marker of ephemeral texts, an argument that the British Library’s stab-stitched Sphinx Theologica supports (“Stab-stitching and the Status of Early English Playbooks,” The Library 16, no. 3 [2015]: 304–28).
Examples of extant copies of Benlowes’s Sphinx Theologica bound alone include: 477969, Huntington Library; Case C 692.088, Newberry Library; Wj B438 626sb WRE, Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas.
Fletcher, Purple Island, sig. ¶3r.
Ibid., sig. ¶4r.
Wendy Wall, “Prefatorial Discourses: ‘Violent Enlargement’ and the Voyeuristic Text,” in The Imprint of Gender (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993), 169–226.
Without more evidence than has hitherto come to light, it is impossible to know for sure that Benlowes and Schoren printed the engravings themselves in Finchingfield. On the one hand, the printing appears to be the work of amateurs. Offset from stacking the completed sheets too soon mars nearly every extant copy, hinting at the possible limitations of the domestic atelier or Schoren’s expertise with the equipment. So too does a visible “stutter” effect in six of the seven “large paper” copies that I have examined. It comes from pressing the first plate onto the back of the title page while that page’s ink was still wet, causing it to offset onto waste paper used to pack the rolling press. When the next sheet was run through the press, this offset ink set off again from the packing paper onto the new sheet, effectively “printing” it with a double image. For a demonstration of this, see the embedded video introduction to The Purple Island. On the other hand, it seems unlikely that the ink on the preliminaries would stay wet enough to offset after the twenty-five-mile journey from Cambridge to Finchingfield. My tentative judgment is that Benlowes and Schoren printed the engravings at Finchingfield, and that the stutter might offer new insight into the drying times of ink, which might have been “reactivated” when the paper was moistened again for the rolling press. On wet paper and ink in relief processes, see Peter Blayney, “A Dry Discourse on Wet Paper (and Ink),” The Library 18, no. 4 (2017): 387–404. I am grateful to Randall McLeod for helping solve the mystery of the stutter; for more on offset, see his “Fearful Asymmetry,” The Cambridge Companion to Textual Scholarship, ed. Neil Fraistat and Julia Flanders (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 162–63.
To make this positioning work, Benlowes and Schoren have flipped the title page’s half-sheet bifolium inside out, thereby placing the blank leaf that precedes the Piscatorie Eclogs in later copies after it in their boutique issue, where it bears the emblem. Bibliographic evidence for this is abundant in the form of a clear and consistent blind impression showing that a page from Fletcher’s dedication to Benlowes (¶3v) was used as bearing type during the process of printing the unsigned internal title page to the Piscatorie Eclogs on a half-sheet. Most likely the printer swapped out type for ¶2r, the page imposed next to ¶3v, with the type for the internal title page. This suggests that two noncontiguous parts of the book were printed at the same time, and likely last: (1) two sheets of preliminaries from the front of the book, containing the main title page (¶2r), Phineas Fletcher’s dedication to Benlowes (¶3v–r), Daniel Featley’s note “To the Reader” (¶4r), and Benlowes’s commendatory poem (¶4v), as well as a second sheet of commendatory verse (¶¶1r–¶¶4v); and (2) one half-sheet bifolium from the middle of the book, containing the internal title page to Piscatorie Eclogs. In “large paper copies,” the remnants of the blind impression, when present, are on the leaf with the emblem, after the title page. For more on this, see the embedded video introduction.
This is Benlowes stamp 2 in the British Armorial Bindings database (ed. John Morris and Philip Oldfield, Bibliographical Society of London and the University of Toronto Libraries), armorial.library.utoronto.ca/stamps/IBEN001_s2.
Four of the seven extant copies that I have examined are in their original binding; the other three appear to have been re-bound later. Anne Dutton kindly informs me that Salisbury Cathedral’s copy is also in an original binding stamped with Benlowes’s arms.
As Pope has identified, there is one stop-press correction in the edition: the name “Echthros” at XII.14 in the special issue has been corrected to “Ecthros” in the normal issue. However, some regular-issue copies still have “Echthros,” suggesting the correction came some time after the printer decided to issue the book on cheaper paper without the engravings (“Introduction,” 31–32). Thus the more common issue likely came off the press bed after Benlowes’s boutique project. Perhaps Cambridge University Press wanted to recoup the costs of printing the boutique edition and so produced a cheaper edition for wider circulation. Or perhaps it was part of the press’s agreement with Benlowes to have the rights to reproduce and sell the copy after it was set in type. McKitterick describes an arrangement between Nathanael Carpenter and Oxford University Press to print his Geography delineated (1625): Carpenter paid for printing and retained the rights to sell the copies as he wished, gaining “a handsome return on his investment” (History of Cambridge University Press, 1:295).
Benlowes is largely responsible for introducing English audiences to the popular Drexel via Ralph Winterton. Benlowes had lent Winterton his copy of Jeremias Drexel’s De aeternitate considerationes that he had acquired while abroad, which Winterton translated (1632; STC 7235). In a glowing dedication, he names Benlowes as a former Catholic, “yet brought home again by divine providence” and now “wedded to his books and Devotion”—a phrase that presages the ways that his relationship with Schoren and the poets he patronized would take the place of marriage in Benlowes’s life, their books serving as his much-doted-upon inheritors.
Benlowes and Fletcher work within a discourse that consistently links textual and sexual reproduction, and does so in ways that queer the notion of literary production. Here, my reading has been crucially informed by: Stephen Guy-Bray, Against Reproduction: Where Renaissance Texts Come From (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009); David Glimp, Increase and Multiply: Governing Cultural Reproduction in Early Modern England (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003); Jeffrey Masten, Textual Intercourse: Collaboration, Authorship, and Sexualities in Early Modern Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
Jenkins, Edward Benlowes, 72n2.
G. S. Haight, “The Sources of Quarles’ Emblems,” The Library, ser. 4, vol. 16, no. 2 (1935): 193.
Copy of Phineas Fletcher’s Purple Island with inscription to Anne Willoughby, 78848, Morgan Library.
Jenkins, Edward Benlowes, 74.
Virgil, Aeneid 5.537–38, in Eclogues, Georgics, Aeneid: Books 1–6, trans. H. Rushton Fairclough, rev. G. P. Goold, Loeb Classical Library 63 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1916), loebclassics.com/view/virgil-aeneid/1916/pb_LCL063.509.xml.
On the homoerotics of these elegiac moments in the Aeneid, see Stephen Guy-Bray, Homoerotic Space: The Poetics of Loss in Renaissance Literature (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), esp. 67–73.
Karl Josef Höltgen, “Francis Quarles and the Low Countries,” in Anglo–Dutch Relations in the Field of the Emblem, ed. Bart Westerweel (New York: Brill, 1997), 135.
Eleanor James, “The Imagery of Francis Quarles’ ‘Emblemes,’” Studies in English 23 (1943), 30–31.
Although Benlowes paid for the engravings, the plates seem to have been owned by or transferred to Quarles, as they were later in security when Quarles obtained a loan from the printers Francis Eglesfield and John Williams; see John Horden, “The Publication of the Early Editions of Francis Quarles’s Emblemes (1635) and Hieroglyphikes (1638),” The Library 8, no. 1 (2007): 25–32.
Francis Quarles’s Emblemes is one of the few books to be continuously in print throughout the seventeenth century, with over a dozen editions before 1700. On Quarles’s contemporary popularity, see Rosemary Freeman, English Emblem Books (New York: Octagon, 1970), 114–15.
With the “Invocation,” Emblemes introduces pagination, and so I here cite the original’s page number rather than the signature.
Höltgen, “Francis Quarles,” 138–40.
On the gendering of this image, see Linda Phyllis Austern, “The Siren, the Muse, and the God of Love: Music and Gender in Seventeenth-century English Emblem Books,” Journal of Musicological Research 18, no. 2 (1999): 118–20.
“Vix ea nostra” is more commonly rendered “Vix ea nostra voco”; “I scarcely call these things our own.”
Schoren thought Benlowes owed him annuity that had gone unpaid for many years; Benlowes assumed he had been embezzling it from the rents he collected on his behalf and refused to pay (Schoren v. Benlowes [1658], C 10/711/87, The National Archives [United Kingdom], plaintiff’s bill and defendant’s answer); see Jenkins, Edward Benlowes, 130–31.
Jenkins, Edward Benlowes, 257.
James B. Mullinger, The University of Cambridge, vol. 3 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1911), 261.
“The University of Cambridge: The Early Stuarts and Civil War,” in A History of the County of Cambridge and the Isle of Ely, vol. 3, The City and University of Cambridge, ed. J. P. C. Roach (London: Victoria County History, 1959), 191–210. British History Online, accessed 14 August 2020, http://www.british-history.ac.uk/vch/cambs/vol3/pp191-210.
E. Cruwys Sharland, “Richard Crashaw and Mary Collett,” Church Quarterly Review 73 (1911–1912): 358–85. On this exile more generally and its effect on seventeenth-century culture, see Geoffrey Smith, The Cavaliers in Exile: 1640–1660 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).
Jenkins, Edward Benlowes, 158–61.
Ibid., 154–55.
James Howell, “LXVI. To E. Benlowes Esqr. upon the receipt of a Table of exquisit Latine Poems,” Epistolae Ho-elianae (1650; Wing H3072), 103–4.
On this desire in relation to masculinity, see Diane Purkiss, Literature, Gender, and Politics during the English Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), esp. chapter 1.
Thomas Ward describes a similar advertisement on the title page of Waller’s Poems as stretching the lyrical voice across multiple technologies and sites of replication (“Effacing the Music in Edmund Waller’s Poems,” Renaissance Studies 31, no. 5 [2016]: 735–54).
Johanna Drucker, SpecLab: Digital Aesthetics and Projects in Speculative Computing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 169.
Andrew Morrall, “Regaining Eden: Representations of Nature in Seventeenth-Century Embroidery,” in English Embroidery from The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1580–1700, ed. Andrew Morrall and Melinda Watt (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2008), cat. 74.
Maria Wakely, “Printing and Double-Dealing in Jacobean England: Robert Barker, John Bill, and Bonham Norton,” The Library 8, no. 2 (2007), 139. For further documents pertaining to this decades-long dispute, see the King’s Printer Project, directed by Graham Rees with assistance from Maria Walkley, http://www.english.qmul.ac.uk/kingsprinter/index.html. Other smaller engravings used by Benlowes that may have been owned by Norton include a plate of two cavaliers drinking and carousing by Peregrine Lovell, cut in half in Theophila and printed on sigs. Y[1]v and [Y2]v, and a small, ill-fitting map of the world printed on sig. Y[1]r.
Bellamy, “Edward Benlowes’ Theophila’s Love-Sacrifice,” 1.
Christine Varnado, The Shapes of Fancy: Reading for Queer Desire in Early Modern Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020).
Joseph Hall, A Common Apologie of the Church of England (1610; STC 14629), sig. C4v; Ben Jonson, Ben: Ionson his Volpone or The foxe (1607; STC 14783), sig. ¶3r.
I am grateful to Mary Learner for drawing my attention to this connection in her dissertation, “Material Sampling and Patterns of Thought in Early Modern England” (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 2021).
Masten, Queer Philologies, 138–40.
On Flötner’s alphabet, see Erika Mary Boeckeler, Playful Letters: A Study in Early Modern Alphabetics (Iowa City: University of Iowa, 2017), 83–84.
The Harvard Dictionary of Music, 4th ed. (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2003), s.v. “Fantasia” (306–8, esp. 307).
Andrew Ashbee, The Harmonious Musick of John Jenkins: The Fantasias for Viols (London: Toccata, 1992).
Copy of Theophila presented to St. Johns College Library, Bb.4.25, St. John’s College Library at Cambridge University.
Antony Griffiths, The Print in Stuart Britain (London: British Museum, 1998), cat. 71.
Two copies of Benlowes’s Theophila with extra engravings and markings: A.742.1 FOLIO, Boston Public Library; Wing B1879 folio, Chapin Library at Williams College, Chapin Library Wing B1879 folio.
The copy with authorial portrait opposite Mens Author is A.742.1 FOLIO, Boston Public Library.
Presentation copy of Theophila dedicated to the Earl of Westmorland, Mildmay Fane, HEW 7.10.9, Houghton Library at Harvard University.
Copy of Theophila with authorial portrait before Mens Authoris and Theophila stomping the serpent opposite translation as “The Authors Designe,” f Typ 605.52.202, Houghton Library at Harvard University.
Copies of Theophila with Astronomia introducing canto 9 and the vestigial frontispiece introducing canto 13: Z77 032, Beinecke Library at Yale University; folio Y 185.B43, Newberry Library Case; Aj B438t +1652, Harry Ransom Center at University of Texas; G.11598, British Library; C.30.m.8, British Library; Sss.28.2, Cambridge University Library; f PR3318.B25 T3, Clark Library at University of Los Angeles; Folio EC65 B4387 652t, Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts at the University of Pennsylvania. In some copies, the plates are situated with respect to recto and verso differently.
Copy of Theophila with Astronomia annotated “place this agst pag: 125,” f Typ 605.52.202, Houghton Library at Harvard University.
Copy of Theophila with Astronomia introducing canto 13 and the vestigial frontispiece introducing canto 9: Syn.4.65.1, Cambridge University Library. The other two copies with this order are f Typ 605.52.202 and HEW 7.10.9, Houghton Library at Harvard University.
Copy of Theophila with vestigial frontispiece facing prelude of canto 9, Manuscripts & Special Collections Folio EC65 B4387 652t, Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts at the University of Pennsylvania.
The frontispiece cut by William Marshall with Ludus Literarius Christianus, Anthreno-Tripsis seu Crabronum Tritura is facing sig. R3r in copies of Theophila that include it: f PR3318.B25 T3, Clark Library at University of Los Angeles; W 01 D, Morgan Library; f Typ 605.52.202, Houghton Library at Harvard University.
Copies with signed Bedford bindings include: f PR3318.B25 T3, Clark Library at University of Los Angeles; Sss.28.2, Cambridge University Library; W 01 D, Morgan Library; and Manuscripts & Special Collections Folio EC65 B4387 652t, Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts at the University of Pennsylvania. However, many others are in similar nineteenth-century bindings following Bedford’s style.
Copy of Theophila resembling Fane copy but with facing-page doubles of etchings for cantos 1–8, f Typ 605.52.202, Houghton Library at Harvard University.
G.11598, British Library; the other copy of Theophila with a doubled O2 leaf is C.30.m.8, British Library.
Copy of Theophila with Wenceslaus Hollar’s “Winter Woman” in usual location and captioned versions of “Spring,” “Summer,” and “Autumn,” Sss.28.2, Cambridge University Library.
Copy of Theophila with “Ex dono Authoris” flyleaf, Wing B1879 folio, Chapin Library at Williams College.
Copy of Theophila with many missing engravings and idiosyncratic positioning for others, B823B43 T 1652, Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Columbia University.
William Lowndes, The Bibliographer’s Manual of English Literature, vol. 1 (London, 1857), 153.
Grolier Club, Catalogue of Original and Early Editions of Some of the Poetical and Prose Works of English Writers from Wither to Prior, vol. 1 (New York: Grolier Club, 1905), 35 (cat. 43).
Lois Potter, Secret Rites and Secret Writing: Royalist Literature, 1641–1660 (New York: Cambridge University Press), 20–22; Marotti, Manuscript, 259; Ann Baynes Coiro, “Milton and Class Identity: The Publication of Areopagitica and the 1645 Poems,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 22, no. 2 (1992): 277.
Adam Hooks, Selling Shakespeare: Biography, Bibliography, and the Book Trade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 145–46.
Paulina Kewes, “‘Give Me the Sociable Pocket-Books . . .’: Humphrey Moseley’s Serial Publication of Octavo Play Collections,” Publishing History 38 (1995): 7.
Ibid., 8.
Timothy Raylor, “Moseley, Walkley, and the 1645 Editions of Waller,” The Library 2, no. 3 (2001): 236–65; David Scott Kastan, “Humphrey Moseley and the Invention of English Literature,” in Agent of Change: Print Culture Studies after Elizabeth Eisenstein, ed. Sabrina Alcorn Baron, Eric N. Lindquist, and Eleanor F. Shevlin (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007), 118–120. Ward also discusses this book in “Effacing the Music.”
Kastan, “Humphrey Moseley,” 111.
In thinking about how paratexts might form a social network, I have been influenced by Heidi Craig, Sonia Massai, and Thomas Berger and their ongoing work to produce an expanded digital edition of Massai and Berger’s Paratexts in English Printed Drama to 1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), as well as Johnathan R. Ladd, who has done a social network analysis of dedications in early modern printed books. See also Michael Gavin, “Historical Text Networks: The Sociology of Early English Criticism,” Eighteenth Century Studies 50, no. 1 (Fall 2016): 52–80.
Paste
“Public Libraries in London About the End of the Last Century,” The Gentleman’s Magazine, July 1790, 585.
“The Tenison Library,” The Saturday Review 295, no. 11 (June 22, 1861), 638.
William Blades, “The Minor Libraries of England,” The Book-Worm 10 (October 1866), 158.
Milton McC. Gatch, “Fragmenta Manuscripta and Varia at Missouri and Cambridge,” Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society 9, no. 5 (1990), 457. Gatch is responsible for identifying these books as Bagford’s.
T. A. Birrell, “Anthony Wood, John Bagford and Thomas Hearne as Bibliographers,” in Pioneers in Bibliography, ed. Robin Myers and Michael Harris (Winchester, England: St Paul’s Bibliographies, 1988), 29.
Thomas Frognall Dibdin, The Bibliomania, or Book-Madness (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, 1809), 14–15.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Thomas Frognall Dibdin, Bibliomania; or Book-Madness: A Bibliographical Romance in Six Parts (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1811), 431.
William Blades, The Enemies of Books (London: Elliot Stock, 1888), 117–19.
A. W. Pollard, Last Words on the History of the Title-Page with Notes on Some Colophons and Twenty-Seven Fac-Similes of Title-Pages (London: John C. Nimmo, 1891), 1.
Ibid, 3.
Ibid., 3 (emphasis original).
Ibid., 1.
Charles Isaac Elton and Mary Augusta Elton, The Great Book-Collectors (London, 1893), 121–22.
Quoted in Margaret Nickson, “Bagford and Sloane,” The British Library Journal 9 (1983): 52–53, bl.uk/eblj/1983articles/pdf/article4.pdf. The original text is MS Sloane 1435, fols. 3v–4, British Library.
Quoted in Milton McC. Gatch, “John Bagford as a Collector and Disseminator of Manuscript Fragments,” The Library, 6th ser., 7, no. 2 (1985): 107. The original is not in Bagford’s hand, hence the more standard spelling; it is MS Harley 5910.iii, fol. 120, British Library.
Gatch, “John Bagford,” 114.
W. Y. Fletcher, “Bagford and His Collections,” Transactions of the Bibliographical Society 4, no. 1 (1898): 195.
A Catalogue of the Harleian Collection of Manuscripts, vol. 2 (London, 1759); items 5892–998 are Bagford’s, with the exception of 5958.
Pollard, Last Words, 3.
Arthur Freeman, “Everyman and Others, Part I: Some Fragments of Early English Printing, and their Preservers,” The Library 9, no. 3 (2008): 267–305; and “Everyman and Others, Part II: The Bandinel Fragments,” The Library 9, no. 4 (2008): 397–427.
Quoted in C. E. Wright and Ruth Wright (eds.), “Introduction,” in The Diary of Humfrey Wanley 1715–1725, vol. 1 (London: Bibliographical Society, 1966), xxxviii.
Thomas Hearne, Remarks and Collections of Thomas Hearne, 11 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1885–1921), 7:287 (ed. Oxford Historical Society). Hearne also wrote a letter of May 8, 1716: “I am heartily sorry for the Death of honest Mr. John Bagford. He hath not left his Equal behind him. I hope his Collections will be carefully preserved, and that they will be reduced into Method by some judicious Hand. Be pleased to let me know his Age & the Place & manner of his Funeral, & to whom he bequeathed his Collections” (5:218 [ed. D. W. Rannie]).
Anna Reynolds, “‘Such dispersive scattredness’: Early Modern Encounters with Binding Waste,” Journal of the Northern Renaissance 8 (2017), northernrenaissance.org/such-dispersive-scattredness-early-modern-encounters-with-binding-waste/; Adam Smyth, “Printed Waste: ‘Tatters Allegoricall,’” Material Texts in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 137–74. For more nuanced histories of book destruction in general, see Gill Partington and Adam Smyth, eds, Book Destruction from the Medieval to the Contemporary (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). My idea here has also been influenced by Vera Keller, Anna Marie Roos, and Elizabeth Yale, eds., Archival Afterlives: Life, Death, and Knowledge-Making in Early Modern British Scientific and Medical Archives (Leiden: Brill, 2018).
Robert Hooke, Micrographia, or Some Physiological Descriptions of Minute Bodies Made by Magnifying Glasses (London, 1665), 3.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid, 126.
Matthew C. Hunter, Wicked Intelligence: Visual Art and the Science of Experiment in Restoration London (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 36. See also Hunter, “The Theory of the Impression according to Robert Hooke,” in Printed Images in Early Modern Britain: Essays in Interpretation, ed. Michael Hunter (Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2010): 167–92; Megan C. Doherty, “Discovering the ‘True Form:’ Hooke’s Micrographia and the Visual Vocabulary of Engraved Portraits,” Royal Society Journal of the History of Science 66, no. 3 (2012), https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsnr.2012.003.
Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 358. In this passage, Johns addresses specifically eighteenth-century histories of print, but throughout his monograph, he broadly explores the ways printers, authors, and publishers nurtured trust and credit in the printed word in ways relevant to this discussion.
Robert Hooke, “An Instrument of Use to Take the Draught or Picture of any Thing,” in Philosophical Experiments and Observations of the Late Eminent Dr. Robert Hooke, ed. W. Derham (London, 1726), 294.
Ibid.
James Raven, The Business of Books: Booksellers and the English Book Trade 1450–1850 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2007), 106.
Ibid.
An excerpt out of a book, shewing, that fluids rise not in the pump, in the syphon, and in the barometer, by the pressure of the air, but propter Fugam vacui. At the occasion of a dispute, in a coffee-house, with a doctor of Physick (London: To be had at Powell’s Coffee-House, date unknown); The coffee scuffle, occasioned by a contest between a learned knight, and a pitifull pedagogue. With the character of a coffee-house (London: Printed and are to be sold at the Latine Coffee House near the Stocks, 1662).
Balthazar Gerbier, Counsel and Advice to All Builders (London, 1663).
Samuel Pepys, The Diary of Samuel Pepys, vol. 4, 1663, ed. Robert Latham and William Matthews (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 162 (May 28, 1663).
Anthony Wood, The Life and Times of Anthony Wood, Antiquary of Oxford, 1632–1695, vol. 2, ed. Andrew Clark (Oxford: Clarendon, 1892), 147.
David McKitterick, The Invention of Rare Books: Private Interest and Public Memory, 1600–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).
William Cooper, Catalogus variorum & insignium librorum instructissimae bibliothecae clarissimi doctissimiq viri Lazari Seaman, S.T.D. (London, 1676).
Brian Cowan, The Social Life of Coffee: The Emergence of the British Coffeehouse (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2005), 134.
Harold Mattingly, I. A. K. Burnett, and A. W. Pollard, eds., List of Catalogues of English Book Sales, 1676–1900, Now in the British Museum (London: Printed by Order of the Trustees, 1915).
Cowan, Social Life, 134; Margaret Willes, The Curious World of Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2017), 241.
On the coffeehouse as a place where individuals could send and receive mail or conduct business, see Cowan, Social Life, 175–76.
For Bagford’s correspondence with Clavell, see MS Harley 5997, British Library.
Samuel Pepys, Letters and the Second Diary of Samuel Pepys, ed. R. J. Howarth (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1932), 266 (letter 249: March 16, 1697).
John Owens (book seller), Catalogus librorum incompactorum, in re theologica, historica, philologica, &c. (London, 1701).
Many original letters from clients inquiring after, asking Bagford to buy for them, or thanking him for certain books can be found in MS Harley 5910.iv, British Library.
For notes on private libraries, see Jeremiah Pepyat’s letters to Bagford, MS Harley 5910.iii, fols. 92–93, British Library.
John Beaver to John Bagford, 1712, MS Harley 5910.iv, fol. 55r, British Library.
Thomas Tanner to John Bagford, MS Harley 5910.ii, fol. 151r, British Library.
Catherine J. Minter, “John Dury’s Reformed Librarie-Keeper: Information and its Intellectual Contexts in Seventeenth-Century England,” Library & Information History 31, no. 1 (2015): 21, 23.
John Dury, The Reformed Librarie-Keeper (London, 1650), 16.
Ibid., 17.
Gabriel Naudé, Instructions Concerning Erecting of a Library, trans. John Evelyn (London, 1661), 87.
Jeffrey T. Schnapp and Matthew Battles, The Library Beyond the Book (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2014).
Makerspaces in public libraries are discussed in the library and information sciences; see Árni Már Einarsson, “Sustaining Library Makerspaces: Perspectives on Participation, Expertise, and Embeddedness,” The Library Quarterly 91, no. 2 (April 2021), 172–89.
Thomas Bodley to keeper of the Bodleian Library, in Reliquiæ Bodleianæ: or Some Genuine Remains of Sir Thomas Bodley (London, 1703), 277–78 (letter 167).
Richard Burt, Licensed by Authority: Ben Jonson and the Discourses of Censorship (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993), 44; Alexandra Halasz, The Marketplace of Print: Pamphlets and the Public Sphere in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 1; Joshua B. Fisher, “Toward a Pedagogy of the Ephemeral,” in Encountering Ephemera 1500–1800: Scholarship, Performance, Classroom, ed. Joshua B. Fisher and Rebecca Steinberger (Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Engl.: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012), 1.
Naudé, Instructions, 15.
Ibid., 64.
Ibid., 57.
Ibid.
Ibid., 46, 78. Writing about how newsbooks and pamphlets entered collections more generally, Michael Mendle iterates that, “because of their variety and their nature, the little books were difficult to accommodate into the scheme that had served to pigeonhole the books of the learned world” (“Preserving the Ephemeral: Reading, Collecting, and the Pamphlet Culture of Seventeenth-Century England,” in Books and Readers in Early Modern England, ed. Jennifer Andersen, Elizabeth Sauer, and Stephen Orgel [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008], 204).
On the history of Thomason’s collections, see Catalogue of the Pamphlets, Books, Newspapers, and Manuscripts Relating to the Civil War, the Commonwealth, and Restoration (London: Printed by Order of the Trustees, 1908), vol. 1, pt. 1.
Julian Roberts, “Opportunities for Building Collections and Libraries,” in The Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland, vol. 2, 1640–1850, ed. Giles Mandelbrote and Keith Manley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 39.
John C. Hirsh, “Samuel Pepys as a Collector and Student of Ballads,” Modern Language Review 106, no. 1 (2011): 47–62.
Richard Luckett, “The Collection: Origins and History,” Catalogue of the Pepys Library at Magdalene College Cambridge, vol. 2, Ballads, pt. 2, “Indexes,” comp. Helen Weinstein (Cambridge: Brewer, 1994). On Selden’s ballads in Pepys’s collection, see Leba M. Goldstein, “The Pepys Ballads,” The Library, 5th ser., 21 (1966): 282–92.
Hirsh, “Samuel Pepys,” 51.
Quoted in Ibid., 48. On this quote in relation to Pepys’s collecting habits, see Patricia Fumerton, “Recollecting Samuel Pepys: His Life, His Library, and His Legacy,” English Broadside Ballad Archive, ebba.english.ucsb.edu/page/pepys-collecting.
N. K. Kiessling, The Library of Anthony Wood (Oxford: Oxford Bibliographical Society, 2002). On many of these libraries, see Mendle, “Preserving the Ephemeral,” 215. For a rich discussion of the category of ephemera as it enters the eighteenth century, see Kevin D. Murphy and Sally O’Driscoll, “Introduction: ‘Fugitive Pieces’ and ‘Gaudy Books’: Textual, Historical, and Visual Interpretations of Ephemera in the Long Eighteenth Century,” in Studies in Ephemera: Text and Image in Eighteenth-Century Print, ed. Kevin Murphy and Sally O’Driscoll (Lewisburg, Penn.: Bucknell University Press, 2013): 1–30.
See MS Harley 5910.i, from fol. 33 on, British Library. The Bagford Ballads are catalogued in The Bagford Ballads: Illustrating the Last Years of the Stuarts, ed. Joseph Woodfall Ebsworth (Hertford, Engl.: Ballad Society, 1878).
John Bagford newspaper collection, MS Harley 5958, British Library.
Marjorie Swann, Curiosities and Texts: The Culture of Collecting in Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001).
A Catalogue of the Rarities to be seen at Don Saltero’s Coffee-house in Chelsea (London, 1735).
G. R. de Beer, Hans Sloane and the British Museum (London: Oxford University Press, 1953).
The Sloane Herbarium is at the Natural History Museum and is searchable online at data.nhm.ac.uk/dataset/sloane-herbarium; the paper samples are MS Sloane 526–27, British Library.
Gitelman, Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006), 7, 4.
Patricia Fumerton, “Remembering by Dismembering: Databases, Archiving, and the Recollection of Seventeenth-Century Broadside Ballads,” Early Modern Literary Studies, 14, no. 2 (2008), extra.shu.ac.uk/emls/14-2/Fumerrem.html.
Humphrey Wanley petition to curators of the Bodleian Library and the vice chancellor, MS Harley 5911, fol. 10r, British Library.
Two of John Bagford’s volumes of scraps owned by Thomas Hearne, MSS Rawlinson 893 and 894, Bodleian Library. See Gatch, “John Bagford,” 98. Gatch also points out that Hearne’s notes identify MS Rawlinson 894, fol. 32, as a gift from Bagford.
John Bagford’s collections of scraps owned by Hans Sloane, MSS Sloane 1086 and 1044, British Library.
Francisc Szekely, “Unreliable Observers, Flawed Instruments, ‘Disciplined Viewings’: Handling Specimens in Early Modern Microscopy,” Paragon 28, no. 1 (2011): 155–76.
Hooke, Micrographia, 152. Hooke uses “specimen” this way frequently throughout his writings; see, for instance, Michael Hunter, “Robert Boyle and the Early Royal Society: A Reciprocal Exchange in the Making of Baconian Science,” British Journal for the History of Science, 40, no. 1 (2007): 1.
Bruno Latour, “Visualization and Cognition: Drawing Things Together,” in Knowledge and Society: Studies in the Sociology of Culture Past and Present, vol. 6, ed. Henrika Kuklick and Elizabeth Long (Greenwich: JAI, 1986), 7; Martin Rudwick, “Georges Cuvier’s Paper Museum of Fossil Bones,” Archives of Natural History 27, no. 1 (2000): 51–68.
Nicholas Ferrar to Arthur Woodnoth, May 10, 1630, Ferrar Papers 722, Virginia Company Archives.
My thoughts on Bagford’s use of “speciments” has been informed by Kathryn James’s insightful work on Bagford, presented December 9, 2019, at the Material Texts Seminar at the University of Pennsylvania, as well as conversations with her afterward.
The foundational texts on new ways of looking in the seventeenth century are still Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle and the Experimental Life (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985); and Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983).
Description of Wanley’s methods in John Bagford’s notes, MS Sloane 1435, fol. 8r, British Library.
Medieval missal page in John Bagford’s notes, MS Harley 5910.i, fol. 82r, British Library. I am grateful to Nicholas Herman for helping me identify a rough date from the style of the illumination.
John Leland, The Itinerary of John Leland the Antiquary, vol. 9, ed. Thomas Hearne (Oxford, 1710), 163. Hearne’s footnote begins on 156 and annotates a passage from vol. 2, p. 41, on the castle at Sherborne.
Draft of “Of Booke Binding: Antient” in John Bagford’s notes, MS Harley 5910.i, fol. 131ff, British Library.
Description for MS Harley 5910.i, fol. 82r, British Library, in A Catalogue of the Harleian Collection of Manuscripts, vol. 2 (London, 1759).
An example of this pasteboard cover may be found at MS Harley 5910.i, fol. 146r, British Library, which is labeled “Caxton & Chaycerworkes.”
While it is difficult to tell handwriting from numbers alone, the foliation of the book’s original leaves seems to be continuous and in Bagford’s hand. The new numbers incorporate the inclusions and override Bagford’s original numbers.
Collected waste sheets in John Bagford scrapbook, MS Harley 5979, item 14, 2*, British Library.
Presentation manuscript by John Bagford, MS Lansdowne 808, British Library. Gatch suggests this volume “may, like Humfrey Wanley’s diary, have become separated from the Harleian collection and found its way into the collection of James West,” since “some of the lots in the sale of West’s library are described in ways reminiscent of Bagford materials, but attempts to trace these have so far been unsuccessful” (“John Bagford,” 99). However, it is composed by the same scribe and has the same appearance as MS Sloane 1085, one of Sloane’s acquisitions from Bagford; see Nickson, “Bagford and Sloane.” MS Sloane 1085 also contains the same table of contents as MS Lansdowne 808, tipped in at the end on a loose note (fol. 125r). It is at least possible this was the lost volume MS Sloane 1084.
It is also at the end of MS Sloane 1085.
Items 7–10 in British Library’s MS Harley 5949 are from the 1535 Coverdale Bible. Item 3 could be from the title page to Das neuw Testament (Basel, Switz.: A. Petri, 1522), but as mentioned above, the print also appears in Ptolemaeus, Geographia Universalis (Basel, Switz.: He. Petri, 1545), 32.
Woodcut of Matthew, MS Harley 5949, item 13, British Library.
J. F. Mozley, William Tyndale (New York: Macmillan, 1937), 61; John Fudge, Commerce and Print in the Early Reformation (Boston: Brill, 2007), 153.
Engraving of Jerome collected in John Bagford scrapbook, MS Harley 5949, item 37, British Library.
Image of Mark and lion and image of church fathers collected in John Bagford scrapbook, ibid., items 38, 40.
Images of sibyls, wise men, Grammatica, etc., collected in John Bagford’s scrapbook, ibid., items 43–44, 46–48, 51–52.
Numerical tables collected in John Bagford scrapbook, ibid., item 61, 64, 67.
Images of hands with pen collected in John Bagford scrapbook, ibid., items 87–93.
Images of grotesque human letters, ibid., item 117.
Hornbook pages with letters collected in John Bagford scrapbook, ibid., items 118–42.
Virginia copybook for writing collected in John Bagford scrapbook, ibid., item 243.
Advertisement for skins and scrivener advertisement for Edward Cocker collected in John Bagford scrapbook, ibid, items 247, 249.
Poem “Cocker’s Farewell to Brandy” collected in John Bagford scrapbook, ibid., item 295.
Blanks advertisement for Christopher Coningsby collected in John Bagford scrapbook, ibid., item 384. Item 390 also advertises blanks.
The other Bagford volume with advertisements for miracles medicines is MS Harley 5931, British Library.
Advertisement for inks at coffee house collected in John Bagford scrapbook, MS Harley 5949, British Library, item 381.
Advertisement for rarities at coffee house collected in John Bagford scrapbook, ibid., item 376.
William A. Churchill, Watermarks in Paper in Holland, England, France, Etc., in the XVII and XVIII Centuries and Their Interconnection (Amsterdam: M. Hertzberger, 1935), 42. The samples in the E. Williams Watermark Collection at the Folger Shakespeare Library are a receipt from John Hecklefield to Cornelius a Tilburge dated March 15, 1694 (shelfmark L.f.585) and a bond for the performance of covenants from Richard Lord of Clayweald in the parish of Ducklington, Oxfordshire, to Ann Martin of Finchstoke in the parish of Charlbury, Oxfordshire, dated 1699 (shelfmark L.f.734). I have not been able to trace the origins of the lily watermark over an E, but it is similar to the horn over an L or I on L.f.585. I am grateful to Aaron Pratt for suggesting I look more into the company.
Richard L. Hills, Papermaking in Britain, 1488–1988: A Short History (London: Athlone, 1988), 53; W. J. Cameron, The Company of White-Paper-Makers of England, 1686–1696 (Auckland, N.Z.: University of Auckland, 1964); John Bidwell, “French Paper in English Books,” in The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, vol. 4, ed. John Barnard, D. F. McKenzie, with Maureen Bell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 583–601; Alfred H. Shorter, Paper Mills and Paper Makers in England, 1495–1800 (Hilversum, Netherlands: Paper Publications Society, 1957), 32.
Vol. 9 of manuscript catalogue of Harley library, Add MS 45709, British Library; the ninth volume was written by William Hocker in the 1740s (Wright and Wright, “Introduction,” in Diary of Humfrey Wanley, 1:lxxxi).
Christina Duffy, “A Guide to British Library Book Stamps,” Collection Care (blog), British Library, September 23, 2013, blogs.bl.uk/collectioncare/2013/09/a-guide-to-british-library-book-stamps.html. There is also, stamped on nearly every pasted-down print, a red crown with “BRITISH MUSEUM” written in a circle around it; it dates from 1929 to 1973.
Ibid. On the Edwards bequest, see F. J. Hill, “The Shelving and Classification of Printed Books,” in The Library of the British Museum: Retrospective Essays on the Department of Printed Books, ed. P. R. Harris (London: British Library, 1991), 3.
Two bits of evidence run counter to this claim. First, Harley 5949 is described in the first printed catalogue of Harley manuscripts of 1759 as a “Porte-folio,” which, as we have seen, seems to indicate Bagford used some kind of folder to organize loose sheets, sometimes pasted with specimens; and second, the volume has clearly been rebound. The latter might be dismissed as insignificant, but the former invites the possibility that Bagford may have pasted his specimens to loose, folded bifolia rather than a blank bound book—unlikely, in my view, since the fragments are arranged on each side of a sheet in a manner that suggests a codex format rather than poster.
List of images extracted from Bagford scrapbooks and moved to Print Room in 1814, MS Add 57982, British Library.
Antony Griffiths has begun the work of reconnecting these prints (“The Bagford Collection,” Picturing Places, British Library, bl.uk/picturing-places/articles/the-bagford-collection).
List of nineteen prints extracted from Bagford scrapbooks and moved to Print Room in 1850, MS Add 57982, fol. 20r, British Library.
P. R. Harris, A History of the British Museum Library 1753–1973 (London: British Library, 1998), 351. I am grateful to Christian Algar for drawing my attention to this part of the history of Bagford’s collection.
1808 Harley catalogue, Rare Books and Music Reading Room RAC 000, British Library.
Handwritten French letter of 1659: originally MS Harley 5949, item 205, British Library; now foliated in the composite volume as item 24.
Letter in serifed roman script, originally MS Harley 5949, item 393, British Library, now foliated as item 29; Handwritten petition and letters originally ibid., items 362, 363, and 391; now foliated as items 25–28.
Harris, A History, 429.
Cyril Davenport has discussed this book in “Bagford’s Notes on Bookbindings,” Transactions of the Bibliographical Society 7 (1904): 123–42.
A Catalogue of the Harleian Collection of Manuscripts, vol. 2 (London, 1759).
A Catalogue of the Harleian Manuscripts in the British Museum, vol. 3 (London, 1808).
The list of inscriptions (fols. 8–9) is not in Bagford’s hand, contrary to what Davenport writes (“Bagford’s Notes,” 126).
Leland, Itinerary, 9:164.
The medieval manuscript cover and partial woodcut title page are in MS Harley 5943, British Library, originally items 21 and 22 in the scrapbook. They are now in a volume of printed fragments removed from the manuscript.
1517 Melanchthon titles page and sixteenth-century portrait stamp, ibid., items 27 (originally) and 48.
Early print with marginal text squared around main text, ibid., item 29 (originally), and sixteenth-century Netherlandish stamps, ibid., items 24–25. See Davenport, “Bagford’s Notes,” 127.