Mapping Early Modern Libraries

Benlowes’s publishing activities began around 1630 when he returned home to England after two years of travel abroad. He had seen the court at Brussels and the university at Louvain, visited famous presses and printshops in Antwerp, sailed the Rhine, and crossed the eastern Alps over the Semmering Pass. In the sun-soaked southern provinces, he would have toured glittering porphyry palaces brimming with larger-than-life portraits, carved imprese, and hand-fitted stone mosaics known as pietra dura. Virtuosic displays of technical proficiency appealed to his aesthetic sensibilities, and the art and architecture that he saw in Florence would later influence his own publishing projects. He may also have visited Rome, the epicenter of both Catholicism and the exuberantly baroque style of decoration then spreading across the continent. No doubt Benlowes’s nascent Protestantism, wavering under pressure from his recusant family, would have been tested by the pomp of the Vatican, as well as the religious iconography and dazzling cathedrals of France as he made his way home. Yet there was also something vulgar to his eye in this ostentatious opulence, and judging from his later comments, Benlowes seems to have been equally impressed with the muted displays of Reformed humanism that he had encountered in small German university towns. When he finally came home to Brent Hall laden with crates full of printed books, Flemish engravings, and Italian ornaments, it was as a man more nuanced in his opinions on religion, more cosmopolitan in his knowledge of art, and most importantly committed to nurturing these trends at home, particularly within his intellectual community at nearby Cambridge. Like the Ferrars of Little Gidding, who were just then completing their first cut-up harmonies, he was eager to infuse the appealingly simple rhythms of his country gentleman’s life with the rich refrains of the great cities he had visited, cultivating uniquely English, and Anglican, patterns of reading and writing.

Returning with him was Jan Schoren, a printer from Brussels and the man who would become his companion of several decades. Benlowes had met Schoren early in his travels, while still in the Low Countries. His knowledge of the arts of mechanical reproduction must have endeared him to the Englishman, as did his facility with foreign languages, and soon Benlowes was offering to pay him twenty marks a year to serve him during his travels.27 Schoren agreed, and the existing English servant was dispatched home. When their relationship later soured over a money dispute, Schoren would claim Benlowes was less than honest in these early dealings with him. In a 1662 suit with the Court of Chancery, he stated that Benlowes had “earnestly Desired [him] to waite on him in his travells and made many p[ro]mises and faire pretencies of what he would do for him,” and by that way “did inveigle [him] from his trade goods and Country,” phrasing that suggests the eagerness with which Benlowes may have sought the printer’s company.28 At this point, however, the agreement seems to have been mutually desirable, and the two journeyed together for nearly two years, experiencing all the thrills and tediousness of seventeenth-century travel together. When Benlowes fell ill with a near-fatal case of smallpox in Venice, Schoren patiently nursed him back to health, an act that neither man would forget.29 And when Benlowes, still weak from illness, decided it was time to return home, he asked Schoren to come back to live with him at Finchingfield and serve as his secretary, responsible for managing his finances and estates. Schoren—at this point perhaps himself as dependent upon Benlowes as the latter was attached to him—again agreed, and together the young English gentleman and this printer from Brussels settled into life at Brent Hall.

In his role as secretary, Schoren was invaluable to the inveterately disorganized Benlowes. More than a servant, though, he became a crucial collaborator on a variety of creative publishing projects and indeed “one of the most important persons in [Benlowes’] life,” as Jenkins puts it.30 It can be difficult to find traces of their work together—Schoren is not named in any of the books they made, for instance, but he does appear obliquely in moments of contention or distraction. For instance, in the same suit cited above, Schoren claims that he helped Benlowes set up a rolling press in Brent Hall, turning a part of his house into a domestic printing workshop and makerspace much like the Concordance Room at Little Gidding.31 More, Benlowes seems to have profited from his labor:

[Schoren] wrought with him in his trade to worke at the Rouling presse vpon cutts in Brasse which [Benlowes] made greate benefits thereby and alsoe in painting guilding and severall other wayes which [he] made vse of him soe that he neuer maintained him vppon Charrity.32

In addition to his technical skills, Schoren’s ties to the printing trade in the Low Countries may have been especially useful to Benlowes, serving as a conduit to the overseas market.33

But the Dutch printer also comes into view in the archives in more touching ways. At the Bodleian is one of Benlowes’s youthful Latin exercise books, a small quarto bound in marbled pasteboard. It contains Latin prose and poetry, all neatly copied onto ruled lines in an inexperienced italic hand, some embellished with red initials or an ornate signature. This was no working notebook, but instead a fair copy of young Benlowes’s most-prized compositions, neatly compiled in ways that anticipate his later publishing projects. At some point in the 1630s or 40s, Benlowes returned to the manuscript and added two new lines of verse in his more confident adult hand to the last poem. He also used a flyleaf to work out some fragments of verse, borrowing rhymes and plundering other poems for turns of phrase. There is even, as Jenkins notices, “a whole string of words to see which offered the best possibilities in his quest for a rhyme: ‘provide descry’d side imply’d spy’d defy’d ty’d ride.’”34 Finally, on the recto of this first flyleaf, Benlowes has written his own name with great ornament around several iterations of the words “morere mundo ut vivas deo” (“you must die to the world, so that you may live with God”), a phrase that would become one of his mottos, worked into Theophila and his broadside A Glance at the Glories of Sacred Friendship (1657). The original source of the motto seems to be the funeral monument of John Colet, an early-sixteenth-century humanist educator, and coincidentally a distant relative of the Collets at Little Gidding, as discussed in the previous chapter. Then, on the leaf after Benlowes’s name, he has added a florid “Johannes Schoren” above another pen trial of the word “understanding.”35 More than a secretary or servant, Schoren was something like family to Benlowes and a partner in his creative work, situated firmly at the center of his thoughts and writing process.

All of this was yet to come, though. Between the childish Latin exercises and the more mature inscriptions, Benlowes and Schoren returned from the continent and undertook their first project together, a donation to the new library at St. John’s College, Cambridge, Benlowes’s alma mater. Gently stretching our own sense of the verb “publish” to better match the more flexible early modern use, we might imagine this donation as Brent Hall’s first major publication: it was a means of making public Benlowes’s increasingly baroque and Protestant commitments to a scholarly cohort within the collective space of the college’s library, completed in 1624. Materially, it laid the groundwork for the poetics made manifest in later projects like The Purple Island and Theophila. The donation included two globes, now lost, and some scaglioli ornaments of carved stone, probably acquired in Florence. The ornaments were an unusual enough addition to the college’s decor to warrant comment by several subsequent visitors. In a diary entry of September 1654, John Evelyn writes of seeing “all the ornaments of Pietra Commessa” given by “one Mr. Benlous” to the library, “whereof a Table, and one piece of Perspective is very fine.”36 The gift also included £50 worth of books, some of which may have been acquired during his travels.37 Each binding is stamped with a supralibros of the same design of his arms Benlowes would later use on copies of books he published and is pasted with a large, letterpress-printed bookplate naming “Benevolus” (the benevolent) as the donor. Long before such practices were standard in libraries or even private collections, Benlowes conceived of and marked his gift to the library as a coherent set of documents, the product of a particular person and the output of his atelier.

In some lines of Latin printed on the bookplate, Benlowes theorizes the purpose of a library and the role of his gift books within it, writing:

In typical Benlowes fashion, the first two lines naming God as the life of the soul and the soul as the life of the body are borrowed from elsewhere. They quote Augustine, perhaps by way of John of Salisbury’s Policraticus; Benlowes probably encountered the fragment secondhand in a book like William Sparke’s recently published The Mystery of Godlinesse (1628), where it annotates a passage on one of his favorite topics, the union of body and soul.38 Taking up Sparke’s chain of analogies, Benlowes pushes the comparisons further, adding more links between the physical and spiritual worlds. Just as the heavens infuse the sky, he writes, and just as the spirit animates the body or citizens people the world, so too do books give life to a library’s building. The thought anticipates Milton’s famous line in Areopagitica that describes books as containing “a potencie of life in them to be as active as that soule was whose progeny they are”; but more concretely and to the point, it also shows Benlowes imagining his gift as knowledge that imbues and dwells within but also transcends the limitations of the physical space. By giving a case (theca) of little books to his college’s biblio-theca—its library, or literally its “book-case”—Benlowes has breathed a spirit into the new building.

The idea that a library encompasses both a physical space and the collection that inhabits it was relatively new in the 1630s. Throughout much of the sixteenth century, the college libraries had largely retained their medieval form: they were small rooms, anywhere from thirty-five to sixty feet long, capable of holding between roughly two hundred and five hundred volumes.39 The books were mostly manuscripts and would have been chained to lecterns and laid flat rather than shelved upright. Political upheaval and unrest at the colleges after the Marian persecutions slowed collecting to a halt, and in fact, between 1530 and 1573, there are no extant records of any Cambridge University expenditure on its library, not for purchases, chaining, binding, or repair.40 At the same time, scholars were acquiring for themselves the books that they needed in the smaller printed formats being pumped out of presses in Antwerp, Geneva, and Lyon, such that by the end of the century a scholar might have more books in his personal collection than any college library had available to him as reference works. Most of these books would have been printed abroad, and nearly all of them would have been too flimsy to be chained, and thus considered unsuitable for a college’s furniture.41 The discrepancy between personal and institutional collections increased over the course of the sixteenth century, coming to a head in the last decades as a generation of scholars (perhaps the first generation who had never known a world before print) began passing away and donating their books to their alma maters.42 This new influx of printed work forced the universities and their colleges to rethink the structure and purpose of their libraries, much as we have seen them doing today in the wake of the digital turn.43 Why maintain an aggregated, corporate collection when printed editions were so readily available to students? Should the library serve as a repository responsible for saving a record of all human knowledge? Or should it buy only the latest editions of any given text, regularly exfoliating all that is obsolete? Should it skew toward preservation and accumulation, or access and dispersal?

Answering these questions led to a spate of new building at Oxford and Cambridge and eventually the wholesale reconceptualization of the library as such. Emerging from the dust of these projects was what Clare Sargent calls the “concept of the virtual library”: the idea that “a college’s books belong to the college wherever they are stored, and the majority of those books were stored in the place where they were of most use, according to their function.”44 That place was no longer a small reference room of tomes chained to lecterns, but a single building outfitted with bookcases designed to enable the storage and circulation of “the greatest number of books for the greatest number of scholars.”45 Thus, if a student in the second half of the sixteenth century could own more books than his college, by the early seventeenth century the colleges had reconstructed themselves as access points to a proliferation of printed texts, ideally to more texts than any individual could acquire.46 They began designating fees for purchasing new books, set up a system for borrowing materials, and hired a dedicated staff responsible for maintaining them.47 Henry Savile, the warden of Merton College and a forerunner in implementing these changes, even traveled to the continent on a book-buying mission with the express aim of increasing his college’s collection.48 Institutional libraries also began keeping a catalogue of their holdings, further ensconcing the notion of a “virtual library” through the accumulation of metadata. As we will see in the next chapter, these new mechanisms for information storage and retrieval would encourage the kind of comparative textual scholarship and antiquarianism that slowly blossomed over the course of the seventeenth century, giving fruit to the great editorial and collecting projects of the eighteenth century. For now, though, we might find the seeds of these changes sown in Benlowes’s bookplate of 1631 and its few lines of verse figuring books as the soul of a library’s physical space.

Benlowes’s donation, then, represents one small fulcrum in a much larger turn in the history of collecting. By constellating his singular case study with other contemporaneous private libraries and bequests, the contours of this shift—painted in broad strokes above—come into relief. Here, three libraries offer themselves up for comparison, each of which may be explored in more depth in the accompanying map and datasets derived from the Private Libraries in Renaissance England (PLRE) project and database.49 The first inventory, edited by Alain J. Wijffels, records Sir Edward Stanhope’s 1608 bequest of £20 worth of books to Trinity College, Cambridge, as the foundational collection of the new college library.50 Stanhope was roughly fifty years older than Benlowes, and his library of just over two hundred books (including around fifteen manuscripts) represents the interests of an Elizabethan chancellor and scholar. Nearly all of the books are in Latin and were printed abroad. They mostly come from centers of the book trade like Lyon and Venice, although one comes from as far away as Lisbon and another from Ostroh, a small town in what is now western Ukraine. Lacking a robust scholarly or Latin press at home, sixteenth-century scholars like Stanhope relied heavily on foreign imports bought through agents, as is clear on the map. By comparison, only about one-third of Benlowes’s donated books are in Latin, and while many were produced abroad, the majority come from London, Cambridge, or Oxford, a fact that points to the growth of the English trade in the decades around the turn of the century and especially to the advancement of the university presses.

Though Benlowes’s and Stanhope’s donations are separated by just over two decades and motivated by similar desires and aims, they contain none of the same volumes. By contrast, Benlowes’s donation has seven books in common with the library of Sir Edward Dering as inventoried in the 1630s and 40s and edited by Nati H. Krivatsy and Laetitia Yeandle.51 This overlap is the most by number (rather than percentage) between Benlowes’s donation and any library in the PLRE database, and it is explainable in part by the sheer size of Dering’s collection, nearly seven hundred editions in total. But it also points to the similarities between him and Benlowes as educated, curious gentleman-scholars who were roughly the same age. Both Benlowes and Dering bought John Weever’s Ancient Funerall Monuments (1631; Short Title Catalogue52 [STC] 25223), a hefty antiquarian folio and a harbinger of the historical fads discussed in the next chapter. Dering was a founding member of the Society of Antiquaries in 1638 and an avid collector of manuscripts; it is no surprise that he would have owned Weever’s book. That it would have caught Benlowes’s eye, too, suggests its role as a storehouse for Latin epigraphs, mined by scribes for their verse miscellanies and poets like Benlowes for lines of rhyming Latin.53 Both Benlowes and Dering also owned Fynes Moryson’s An Itinerary (1617; STC 18205), the standard guide for gentleman traveling on the continent. Finally, they both purchased several works of controversialist and devotional literature, not uncommon for a gentleman-scholar to own; these include John Davenant’s Praelectiones de duobus in theologia controversis captibus (1631; STC 6301), Arthur Lake’s Sermons With some Religious and Diuine Meditations (1629; STC 15134), Francis Mason’s Of the Consecration of the Bishops in the Church of England (1613; STC 17597), Pedro de Ledesma’s Theologia moralis (Douai, 1630), and Pierre Charron’s Of wisdome (1630; STC 5054). All told, about half of Dering’s books are in English and half are in Latin, compared to a roughly 60/40 percent split in Benlowes’s donation, although Dering has a wider range of other languages represented in general, including Scottish, Arabic, and Old English, a fact indicative of Dering’s antiquarian studies.

Even as Dering’s interests generally track with those of Benlowes, there are significant portions of his library that have no counterpart in the latter’s donation. Most notable is his large collection of playbooks. Dering loved drama and performance: between 1619 and 1626 alone, his expense books show twenty-seven payments for “seeing a play,” as well as frequent small sums given to fiddlers, tumblers, and masquers.54 There was even discovered among his papers in the nineteenth century a contemporaneous manuscript that shows him combining Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part 1, and Henry IV, Part 2, into a single play, probably for an amateur performance with friends and family at his home in Kent. During the same years, he was purchasing playbooks, as many as 240 in total, many of them likely duplicates, and some bound together, as well as two copies of Shakespeare’s First Folio.55 It would seem, then, that he had a desire to purchase printed records of plays he had seen both for his own personal reading and repurposing and in order to preserve them for future readers. No such playbooks are in Benlowes’s donation, an absence that may point to the fraught status of dramatic works in college libraries. Nor did Benlowes buy any of the Catholic books secretly printed at the recusant press in Lancashire that are included in Dering’s library. It would have been risky for Benlowes, himself from a recusant family, to purchase such books or donate them to St. John’s College Library. It was not until the eighteenth century that the gap between scholarly libraries and the more capacious private collections would begin to close, as the former institutions came to be seen as repositories for a national cultural heritage and so aspired to universal coverage.

The last library to compare with Benlowes’s donation is that of Lady Anne Southwell and Captain Sibthorpe. Southwell, who continued to use her first husband’s name after his death and her remarriage to Sibthorpe, was an avid reader and poet. Most of her verse is preserved in a notebook now known as the Southwell-Sibthorpe commonplace book, which also contains an inventory of the books that she left to Sibthorpe upon her death in 1636.56 The collection is that of a woman with literary interests, rather than a scholar or gentleman, and thus is far from the other libraries discussed here. It contains no works in Latin, or indeed any books not in English, except perhaps a single “French testament in octavo.” In keeping with these trends, the vast majority of the works listed (roughly 77 percent) were printed in London; the rest were printed nearby at Cambridge (this is George Herbert’s The Temple), Dublin, and Edinburgh, with possibly a few other volumes printed just across the channel. Nevertheless, despite the social differences between Southwell, Sibthorpe, and Benlowes, the donation of Benlowes has six volumes in common with this library, only one less than the number in common with Dering’s much more extensive library and a higher percentage overall. They include three slightly older antipapal works, a large folio on the history of the Netherlands, lavishly illustrated with engravings (STC 12376), and a 1632 edition of Montaigne’s Essays (STC 18043), all books that an English reader of the first half of the seventeenth century would likely own.57 If Stanhope’s bequest reveals the breadth and depth of an Elizabethan scholar’s access to the foreign trade and the relative paucity of the London marketplace at the end of the sixteenth century, Southwell and Sibthorpe’s library shows how a burgeoning English trade in new translations and genres was expanding the average English reader’s, and especially women’s, access to texts in the first decades of the seventeenth century.58 Its overlap with Benlowes’s donation further illustrates the closing gap between domestic and institutional collections. Toggling between these datasets, the shift from the Elizabethan scholar-collector and his wide-ranging private library to a collegiate library as a cohesively English, and eventually British, institutional repository becomes visible.

When Benlowes traveled in the 1620s, gathering ornaments from Florence and books from Marburg, his own curiosities and desires cut a channel between the baroque stylings of the continent and the rural countryside around Cambridge. He was, of course, not the only young man to score this pathway in the first decades of the seventeenth century. When James took the throne in 1603 and ended hostilities with Spain a year later, continental travel opened up, and an entire generation of young English gentleman seized the opportunity.59 This Jacobean grand tour helped to flood the literary landscape with new verse, new emblems, new icons, and new ways of thinking about the relationship between text and image and sound. As we will see, the encounters sparked by these flows of culture into and across England helped foment much of the early modern mediascape. By zooming in at the edges of Benlowes’s donation, then panning wide to see it within broader cultures of collecting, we can begin to bring these shifts and their impact on royalist publishing and poetics into focus.

Collaboration and the Cambridge Press

Among Benlowes’s donated books, there is a copy of Thomas Lupton’s popular sixteenth-century recipe book, A thousand Notable things, of sundry sortes (1590; STC 16957.5).60 With advice on everything from curing gout to whitening one’s hands with sparrow dung, this vernacular work of folk wisdom—layered with different readers’ marks and annotations—seems an unusual book to include in a college bequest. Perhaps recognizing this, Benlowes bookends his copy with two Latin inscriptions. The first, written along the gutter of the title page, reframes the annotations found within. Directly addressing the reader, it states: “Huic Paruo quaecunq[ue] vides inscripta Libello / Lector, digna brevi sunt mihi visa nota,” or in a loose translation, “Reader, you see inscribed in this little book whatever notes have been seen by me as fitting to have been abbreviated.” Then, on a blank page just before the index, he has written three fragments of sententiae with his characteristic flourishes. The first is “non est mortale quod opto” (“I seek nothing that is mortal”), a frequent commonplace found, most notably, as the motto encircling Crispin de Passe’s engraving of Ganymede mounting the eagle to heaven, used in Gabriel Rollenhagen’s widely-read book of emblems. Next is “Omnia probato / Quod bonu[m] est teneto” (“examine everything, keep what is good”), another oft-copied phrase taken from 1 Thessalonians 5:2. Finally, he has written “sic nullu[m] vobis temp[us] abibit iners” (“thus no hour will slip wasted from you”), a line from book III of Ovid’s Ars amatoria teaching women how to win the love of a man. By literally framing Lupton’s recipes between these Latin inscriptions (a note to the “Lector” on the one end and a patchwork of repurposed sententiae on the other) Benlowes places this prosaic household book and its marginalia within the humanistic practice of commonplacing transcendent wisdom. Benlowes, or possibly the library, then binds it with John Reynold’s The Triumphs of Gods Revenge (1622; STC 20943.3), a series of sensational, moralistic stories of murder. Through singular acts of compilation and repackaging (slight shifts in the text’s material apparatus), the meaning of the work changes.

This fiddling at the fringe of a material text anticipates the kind of creative labor Benlowes would pursue in his first major literary project: publishing and packaging boutique copies of Fletcher’s The Purple Island, or The Isle of Man together with Piscatorie Eclogs and Other Poeticall Miscellanies (1633; STC 11082 and 11082.5), in partnership with Cambridge University Press. Fletcher was a generation older than his young patron and had penned most of his poetry between 1607 and 1612, when he was a student at Cambridge. This occasional, collegiate verse remained in manuscript until the later 1620s and early 1630s, when it began appearing belatedly in print, possibly at Benlowes’s instigation.61 In some instances, opportunistic London stationers bought or simply profited from the older texts. For example, Thomas Walkley published Fletcher’s Brittains Ida (1628; STC 11079.5), an erotic epillyon misattributed to Edmund Spenser, probably intentionally, since, as Zachary Lesser has shown, Walkley was at that time engaged in peddling a nostalgic brand of chivalry for his own political gain.62 Not all were fooled by the ruse: as one eighteenth-century reader wrote in his copy of Fletcher’s Piscatorie Eclogs, “Britain’s Ida perhaps may be a juve[nile piece of] Fletcher’s; It is more in Fletcher’s manner than Spensers.”63 The bibliographer Mary Ethel Seaton finally answered the question of authorship when she discovered an early manuscript in Sion College Library and published an edition of his work in 1926.64

Even as publishers like Walkley were exploiting Fletcher’s older occasional verse in the London marketplace, the rural university press at Cambridge was bringing it out under his name as an affiliate “Collegii Regalis Cantabrigiae” (of King’s College, Cambridge), as the title page of Locustae, vel Pietas Iesuitica (1627; STC 11081) puts it. Benlowes played a role in facilitating some of these publications and, in the case of The Purple Island, produced at Brent Hall a special issue bound in his arms and printed with homoerotic emblems of friendship and patronage. While some of these copies were presented to Benlowes’s friends and Fletcher’s patrons, most were likely sold as high-end literary products packaged by hand in an era when most printed texts were still sold in sheets, much like the books being made at the same time by the women of Little Gidding, another satellite workshop of the marginal university press.

The foundation for Benlowes’s work on The Purple Island is the emergence of Cambridge University Press as a more powerful and motivated publisher of what we might today call literary works, especially poetry. Although the university had held a patent to print books since 1534, well predating the Stationers’ Company’s Royal Charter of 1557, it had only exercised its privilege since 1584, and then had done so unevenly. Beginning with Thomas Thomas, a succession of printers struggled to make a profit in the rural university town. Most students bought or borrowed cheap imports of the texts they needed, draining the press’s local market.65 At the same time, repeated suits from a rotating group of London stationers holding lucrative patents continually challenged the university printer’s right to publish almost any profit-making text, as David McKitterick has shown.66 Caught between the continental book trade and the protectionist London company, the press survived its first few decades by printing the works of a few best-selling Cambridge theologians, like William Perkins, as well as ephemera like almanacs.67 It also served as a job printer, providing bookplates for the college libraries and blank forms for the town, including licenses for ale-houses and printed orders instructing beggars to leave a parish, with the name of the vagrant and place and date of his or her crime left blank, to be filled in later by hand.68

All of this began to change around 1625, when the university appointed Leonard Greene and the brothers Thomas and John Buck as university printers. Greene was a Cambridge bookseller who had married into a profitable business; he had ties to the London trade and was a freeman of the Stationers Company. When he died in 1630, he was replaced by Roger Daniel, another experienced stationer with knowledge of printmaking. By contrast, the Bucks were young Cambridge men who had never worked a press, a fact often brought up in disputes with the Company, which complained that they were “schollers not skillful in printinge.”69 What they lacked in technical expertise, though, the Bucks, especially energetic and egotistical Thomas, brought to the job something that earlier printers had not: access to the university’s unique textual ecology, its media and modes of transmission. Dominated by men, collegiate literature flourished in manuscript as occasional poems, short plays, Latin exercises, and bawdy jokes were passed between students, copied into blank notebooks, or self-published in quires that could be stitched into verse miscellanies.70 Local circuits of scribal publication in Cambridge or Oxford fed the coteries in and around the Inns of Court as students moved to London, making the reputations of poets like John Donne, most famously, but also many poets in Benlowes’s wider orbit, like Richard Crashaw.71 A mid-seventeenth-century manuscript now at Folger Shakespeare Library contains verse by Crashaw, Benlowes, Thomas Fuller, Thomas Philipott (who wrote commendatory verse for Benlowes’s Theophila), and others affiliated with Cambridge in the 1620s and 30s alongside sermons and some recontextualized Shakespearean verse from John Benson’s 1640 Poems, thus showing how literary coteries could continue to circulate together long after their formation, picking up other texts in manuscript and print along the way.72 Exploiting its own cohort of “muses,” the Oxford press had already begun printing university verse collections to mark and market public events, such as the death of Philip Sidney, and London stationers were beginning to capitalize on the popularity of poets like Donne, as Megan Heffernan shows in her history of John Marriott’s 1633 edition.73 Seeming to recognize the untapped potential of Cambridge’s own literary talents, Thomas Buck moved the press to larger quarters, bought more presses, and began what in hindsight seems an almost systematic program of printing and promoting Cambridge works that had until then circulated only in manuscript, much of it done through the intermediary of regional patrons and promotional agents like Nicholas Ferrar and Mary Collet at Little Gidding, who sent Herbert’s The Temple to the press after his death and who may have been serving the Bucks as binders.74

It is in this context that Benlowes helped the university press publish Fletcher’s The Purple Island. A singular, hybrid work initially composed around 1615, the book’s titular poem follows the shepherd Thyrsil over the course of twelve cantos as he narrates his travels over the “purple island,” a topographically figured human body. Bones are marble pitted in the ground, the fleshly earth rising from this foundation and running with rivers of blood. Prince Intellect, the mind and soul, rules the island’s three regions: the lower (the belly), the middle (the breast), and the highest (the head). The head and heart are cities within these regions. The mouth is a cave with porter teeth to receive provisions into the stomach’s storehouse, where the island’s cook ceaselessly concocts sustenance. The bowels are folded pipes, expelling the byproducts of the cook’s work; the bladder is a lake of urine. Marginal notes in the print edition anchor the poem to empirical knowledge gleaned from anatomical textbooks, tethering its pastoral geography to an emerging program of natural philosophy, as Lana Cable has shown.75 It is as if, Jonathan Sawday writes, “the poem has arrived complete with its own interpretation based on the spare observations of the new scientist: the Baconian philosopher intent on prying into the infinite recesses of Nature.”76 At the same time, the island not only allegorizes the human body but also specifically figures the British isle, and Thyrsil’s journey across this political landscape is spiritual. Weaving fragments from his brother Giles’s Christs Victorie and Guillaume de Salluste du Bartas into his imaginative anatomy, Fletcher maps the body politic onto the individual, who in turn becomes an idealized spiritual Everyman. As Fletcher’s editor, Johnathan Pope, emphasizes, the connective tissue here is nosce te ipsum, the ancient injunction to know thyself.77 “Study all arts devis’d since time began, / And not thy self,” warns Benlowes in commendatory verse printed with the poem, “thous studiest not, but play’st.”78

Modern critical debate has tended to center on how successfully (or not) Fletcher blends these anatomical, theological, and political discourses. Frank Kastor, one of the first scholars to grapple seriously with the text, considers it “one of the most unusual poems in English,” an “instructive but monumental failure,” while subsequent critics like Sawday have argued that “what tends to appear to us as a struggle between two discourses should more properly be understood as an attempt at synthesis.”79 Two points are worth drawing out from these discussions and emphasizing here, by way of underscoring Benlowes’s involvement. First, The Purple Island was, like Fletcher’s other youthful works, forged in the homosocial furnace of Cambridge. The fads and fashions of university men influenced Fletcher’s choice of the Spenserian form and genre, just as the textual world inhabited by students—a world of textbooks, lectures, dialogues, closet dramas, and dirty poems—helped to inform the poem’s structure and subject matter. For instance, as Pope points out, the anatomical cantos span three days in Thirsil’s song, exactly the amount of time needed to work through a corpse before its flesh putrefies, and in fact Fletcher’s “lecture” (as Pope calls it) follows the order in which the body would have been dissected.80 Thus the poem’s diegetic time, which seems awkwardly slow to a modern reader, actually tracks temporal rhythms that would have been familiar to students. By thickening the discursive registers of his text, layering allegory with anatomy or the poem with annotations, Fletcher sculpts his work for the university coterie in which it circulated.

Second, print inevitably morphed that coterie context, changing how readers could engage with the text. No doubt The Purple Island had a social life in manuscript. Benlowes certainly encountered a copy, and as Pope points out, Izaak Walton misquotes lines from canto 12, suggesting he may have had access to a now-lost version.81 However, no manuscripts from that time are known to exist. All editions today stem from the 1633 book, printed decades after the poem’s creation; and while Fletcher sanctioned that printing, its structure, design, and textual apparatus were nontrivially shaped by its patron-publisher Benlowes and by Cambridge University Press. For instance, it seems likely that the marginal notes on anatomy were not part of the poem’s original design but in fact were added to the printed edition, perhaps to fortify the book’s content for an audience still more accustomed to seeing sermons and theological commentaries come off the university press beds than pastoral poetry. As if to further brand the printed book as a monument to the university, the printer has tacked onto the end of every canto a version of the “alma mater cantabrigia” device, an image that, as McKitterick puts it, had “helped more than any other innovation to establish a distinctive livery for Cambridge-printed books” in the press’s early days.82 Thus, attending to the book’s publication history and all the mediating technologies and readerships entailed in that history helps reconcile the seeming strangeness of its ready-made interpretive apparatus in print and the imaginative world of the poem.

The importance of these points becomes clear if we extend our critical lens beyond this single poem and its isolating modern editions to encompass the entire 1633 book as a material object. The Purple Island comprises only twenty-six sheets in quarto; after it ends, a second internal title page introduces a new eighteen-sheet book of poems, the Piscatorie Eclogs and Other Poeticall Miscellanies, with a new registration and pagination, as can be seen in the accompanying video. Another book within the Poetical Miscellanies contains Fletcher’s elegy Elisa, again with its own title page. With the exception of Elisa and a few shorter works, most poems in the book continue in the pastoral register of The Purple Island but extend its imaginative landscape to encompass the same masculine, Spenserian world found in Fletcher’s other poetry, including the Latin verse in Sylva Poetica, the “piscatory drama” Sicelides, and Venus and Achises, the manuscript version of Brittains Ida, which retains references to Fletcher’s authorship. At the center of this world is “Chamus,” Cambridge, an insular town full of guileless “fisher-boyes” and capricious flatterers. Homosociality and homoerotic patronage are key themes. For instance, in the first eclogue of the Piscatorie Eclogs, the old fisherman Thelgon (an eidolon for Phineas’s father Giles the Elder) laments losing the attention of the fair Amyntas (King James). Thelgon offers a thinly veiled critique of James and perhaps a truthful account of the Fletcher family’s own suffering due to the loss of his patronage. “I have a pipe, which once thou lovedst well,” he apostrophizes, but now “Amyntas hath forgot his Thelgons quill; / His promise, and his love are writ in sand.”83 In “To E. C. in Cambridge, my sonne by the University,” a poem not fully part of the pastoral universe, Fletcher extolls his bond as “father-friend, and a friend-father” to an absent younger man, his “sonne by the University.” In manuscript, these poems may have formed an interlaced gathering, traveling together in various configurations; in the printed book, they come together in a specific constellation that compels the reader to experience The Purple Island, Piscatorie Eclogs, and the poetical miscellany as conjugates, literally bound together.

While not unusual or unique among printed books of the time, the togetherness of these poems, when taken seriously, pushes us into new interpretive territory. On the one hand, the 1633 edition’s linked clusters of verse behave much like a manuscript verse miscellany, and we might mine the rich vein of work by Arthur Marotti, Mary Hobbs, Marcy North, Megan Heffernan, and others to see more clearly the milieu in which Fletcher’s book and the many others like it circulated.84 Such verse collections often show what Harold Love calls “significant shape,” a phrase that Michelle O’Callaghan glosses in her case study of two early Stuart manuscripts as “a discernible, if flexible, structure.”85 As Joshua Eckhard has argued, the associational resonances between the individual works within this shaped gathering, especially in university miscellanies of the sort made and encountered by Fletcher, helped give rise to new genres like the anticourtly lyric.86 Imagining The Purple Island as a print-mediated collection of coterie university verse thus helps highlight the purpose of its assembled form: it makes legible to readers Fletcher’s otherwise obscure system of cross-referencing and in-jokes, placing each poem in a meaningful context. On the other hand, the edition’s use of divisional title pages and discrete sections mimics the look of a sammelband, a single volume binding together many texts, like the copy of Lupton that Benlowes donated. Alexandra Gillespie, Jeffrey Todd Knight, and others have unpacked the creative labor that went into arranging such books, arguing that that early modern readers understood this work as itself a type of authorship.87 University libraries, too, regularly bound sets of texts together. As Knight writes, in a comment that might easily name Benlowes’s own publishing process, “the unsettled conventions of book assembly in the period helped foster an idea of the literary work as flexible and contingent, and a pervasive, underlying idea of writing as something closer to what we would call repurposing or decontextualization.”88

Yet, even while the 1633 edition formally reflects these readerly practices, it is, of course, neither a reader-assembled manuscript nor a sammelband, but a printed book issued from the press as a complete package. Its two halves are separately signed and paginated, but never found apart. This form (again, not uncommon for printed books at this time) suggests that the force of miscellaneity energizes a wide range of textual production in the period, indeed was a feature so ordinary that, as Eckhardt and Daniel Starza Smith point out, it did not warrant naming.89 Specifically, its packaging brings to the fore the ways in which the university press was belatedly drawing the scribal ecology of Cambridge into print and in the process inadvertently turning often dynamic collisions of occasional verse into static monuments to an earlier time, if not always from the perspective of contemporaneous readers accustomed to remixing their own books conceptually and literally, then at least from the perspective of the later readers who have struggled to read the queer togetherness of these texts.

To make this argument more concrete, consider the previously mentioned copy of the Piscatorie Eclogs annotated by “W. Thomson,” the reader who corrected the misidentification of Brittain’s Ida to Spenser in its margins. This “Thomson”—probably William Thompson, eighteenth-century editor of John Davies and William Browne—peppered other pages with hypertextual marginalia that reveal the historical individuals behind the pastoral pseudonyms (“The Author’s Father is shadow’d under Thelgon, Dr. Gyles Fletcher”; p. 1), cross-reference lines to classical works, and link the book to his own library of literary manuscripts (“I have a Vol. of Latin Poems in 4to in the Authors own MS”; p. 3). In short, his annotations attempt to make visible to later readers the by-then vestigial network of Cambridge-based literary production in which Fletcher’s own miscellaneous gathering of pastoral poems operated, both The Purple Island and the Piscatorie Eclogs together.

Yet, even as Thompson tries to place Fletcher’s texts within a more fluid and hybrid literary system, another owner treats the printed object as fixed in its arrangement and design, going so far as to supply a final missing leaf in manuscript.90 That this leaf contains Quarles’s poem to “the Spencer of this Age,” written over a page printed with a single woodcut ornament, renders it a fitting emblem for the book’s thickly mediated circuits of exchange between print and manuscript, between a vibrant, homosocial community of male poets and the entombed texts that memorialize their work. When Thompson’s copy later washes up in the British Library, the institution once again recontextualizes Fletcher’s authorship as part of a family history and its literary legacy by binding The Purple Island in a sammelband with two other Cambridge-printed Fletchers in quarto: Fletcher’s Locustae, vel Pietas Iesuitica (1627; STC 11081), an anti-Jesuit rejoinder to the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, and the second edition of Christs Victorie and Triumph in Heaven and Earth, Over and After Death (1632; STC 11060) by his brother Giles the Younger. Some of Thompson’s annotations were trimmed during this rebinding, an institutional decision that suggests the primacy of the printed text over the evidence of these eighteenth-century editorial notes. From Thompson’s marginal cross-referencing to the British Library’s clipped sammelband, tracking the movement of this single book over three centuries shows readers continually renegotiating the togetherness of Fletcher’s texts in print as attitudes toward print, authorship, and the pastoral tradition change.91

Appreciating the transtemporal, transmedia dynamics at play in a book like The Purple Island and later readings of it in turn makes legible the wider array of Cambridge’s literary production in print at the time, especially its many pamphlet-like octavos of neo-Latin verse. Little read today and neglected as material texts, these small gatherings of verse, epigrams, epistles, and devotional poems contain the same kind of academic in-jokes and debates found in Fletcher’s piscatory eclogues but are narrower in scope and audience. And like Fletcher’s faux sammelband, they tend to be found bound together in variously linked configurations, what Harold Love has called in the context of scribal publishing “rolling archetypes,” or Piers Brown has described in his work on Donne as a “rhapsodies,” a word that literally means “song-stitching” in ancient Greek and a pervasive term for fascicles of gathered texts in the period.92 For instance, Fletcher’s Sylva Poetica (1633) is always bound with his father Giles’s De literis antiquae Britanniae (1633; STC 11054); together, they function like a student’s exercise book or verse collection, marking and memorializing the university’s cultural capital. Benlowes also produced a neo-Latin octavo printed by the university press. Titled Sphinx Theologica, sive Musica Templi ubi Discordia concors (1636; STC 1880; “The Theological Sphinx, or Temple Music, where Discord harmonizes”), the book joins ten prose devotional meditations to scriptural extracts and song-like verse. It looks privately printed, as McKitterick points out, featuring ornate typography, unusual woodcut frames, and its publication date printed (with Benlowes’s typical enthusiasm for word games) as a chronogram (TrIn-VnVs DeVs Mea LVX & saLVs).93 Although Benlowes intended it as a three-part work, almost like a musical part-book, with each part issued separately, only the first was ever printed, and now it is regularly found bound together with other contemporaneous, Cambridge-printed octavos of verse.94 For instance, four extant copies in seventeenth-century bindings pair Sphinx Theologica with Richard Crashaw’s Epigrammatum sacrorum liber (1634; STC 6009).95 Two of these at Cambridge colleges additionally contain John Saltmarsh’s Poemata sacra (Cambridge, 1636; STC 21638) and Benlowes’s friend Alexander Ross’s cento or patchwork poem compiled from Virgil’s verses (1634; STC 24826.5), thus suggesting Benlowes, Crashaw, Saltmarsh, and Ross functioned together as a linked gathering. A third copy once held at Peterborough Cathedral is additionally bound with later books of poems by Richard Corbett and Robert Wild that themselves form a rhapsodic collection in other bound volumes.96 These “rolling archetypes” in print were probably generated in part by the college librarians when they chose to stitch certain volumes together. Another extant copy in seventeenth-century (and probably library) binding pairs Benlowes with six octavos printed abroad, including one as early as 1539, perhaps in a nod to Benlowes’s unique continental stylings.97 Sphinx Theologica is found by itself in bindings from Benlowes’s own time in his gift volumes, like the copies he gave to St. John’s College and Magdalene College, and one stab-stitched with a simple paper wrapper; unusually, it still awaits its more permanent casing.98 By contrast, extant copies in more recent bindings invariably contain Sphinx Theologica alone, having been pulled from sammelbands in many instances.99

With these practices in mind, we can return to the 1633 edition of The Purple Island and begin to see how Benlowes applies similar methods to it as its patron and publisher. First, he engineers its apparatus. In a warm dedicatory letter, Fletcher thanks him for his creative labor and encouragement: “How unseasonable are Blossomes in Autumne! But since you please to have them see more Day then their credit can well endure,” he continues, “marvel not if they lie under your Shadow, to cover them from the piercing eye of this very curious (yet more censorious) age.”100 This protective shadow includes the book’s preliminaries, which Benlowes organized, featuring a laudatory poem by Benlowes (“Benevolus”) himself, as well as verses from Quarles, Lodowick Roberts, and Abraham Cowley. Roberts and Quarles claim not to know the author personally, a fact that further suggests that Benlowes, who knew them both, served as an intermediary between Fletcher and the press. Another poem by Quarles previously published in the Divine Fancies is tacked to the end of the book, possibly as a way of capitalizing on Quarles’s celebrity. And there is short note to the reader signed by Daniel Featley, a leading controversialist. He writes:

Thou shalt finde here Philosophie, and Moralitie, two curious handmaids, dressing the Kings daughter, whose garments smell of Myrrhe and Cassia, and being wrought with needlework, and gold, shall make thee take pleasure in her beauty.101

Referring to Psalm 45, an epithalamium on the marriage of a king to a foreign woman, Featley casts the book as the beautiful bride adorned in perfumed garb and the reader as her husband-to-be. The gendered image of a feminine text made for the male reader’s gaze is conventional; however, by drawing attention especially to the poem’s ornate “garments,” Featley encourages the reader to take as much delight in the book’s material embellishment as in the Philosophie or Moralitie who helped compose the verse. Indeed, the book’s beauty is holy.102

Featley’s metaphor for Benlowes’s creative labor in dressing the book becomes literal in Benlowes’s second method of involvement: the bespoke packaging of The Purple Island’s so-called “large paper” issue (STC 11082.5). Three characteristics identify these variants. First, they were printed on thick, high-quality white paper and have extra wide margins. Second, pressed to blank pages around the main and internal title pages are three engravings celebrating patronage and friendship, probably printed by Benlowes and Schoren.103 The first image shows the Fletcher and Benlowes coats of arms entwined in a warm embrace. It is printed on the verso of the main title page, where it looks and functions somewhat like a bookplate, a statement not only of Benlowes’s and Fletcher’s closeness but also of their joint authorship and ownership over the printed product. The second image, discussed more below, adds an emblem to a blank leaf after the internal title page to the Piscatorie Eclogs.104 The last engraving, which does not appear in all copies, was printed on a separate leaf and inserted before the internal title page to the Poetical Miscellanies. Thus Benlowes takes a paratextual apparatus that so often seems merely a social or commercial necessity, designed to help promote a text or mark its sections, and transforms it into a platform upon which to stage his own literary interventions, stitching this miscellaneous gathering of printed poems into a coherent book.

Finally, he had each copy bound in leather stamped with the same gold supralibros of his arms that he had already used on his donated books.105 This design functioned almost like an early version of what would become known in the nineteenth century as a publishers’ binding, a casing that branded a book as the product of a particular atelier. Perhaps Schoren even stamped the covers of these books himself at Brent Hall.106 Add to these three features some bibliographic evidence suggesting that these “large paper” copies were printed before the more common issue, and it would seem that they are not, as catalogues often assume, the exception to the cheap-paper norm, produced as an add-on or afterthought for Fletcher’s presentation copies. Rather, they represent the book as it was originally conceived: as a boutique, almost vanity publication in print, championed and subsidized by Benlowes the patron-publisher for coterie sale and presentation.107

Benlowes theorizes this creative and collaborative labor in the second engraving, a complex emblem of patronage and material making (Figure 14). Reaching toward a sun from either side of the print are two flowers, a sunflower and a pansy. An anagram of Benlowes’s name—Edward Benlowes / Sun-warde Beloved / Durus, a Deo Benevolus (obdurate, but beloved by God)—links the two flowers, framing a poem signed with Phineas Fletcher’s initials. The design copies the engraved title page to Heliotropium by Jeremias Drexel, a favorite religious author of his.108 However, whereas Drexel analogizes humankind to sunflowers or “heliotropes,” always turning to face the will of God, here Fletcher pastes over the human–God dyad with the poet–patron relationship, layering religious and literary hierarchies. The emblem’s poem amplifies these resonances by setting up a complex interchange between the heliotropic author/pansy and the God/patron/sun to whom he turns for inspiration:

Here, several familiar devices mix and mingle. There is the pun on pansies as pensée, thoughts, and Christ as the sun/son to whom the pansy/poet’s thoughts turn. There is also the pun on the leaves of the pansy as the leaves of the book, among which the reader will find a small imprint of divinity colorfully blossoming, much like the emblem itself. However, Fletcher’s wordplay on printing as a kind of sexual reproduction, as an act of pressing and penetration that pushes the heated plate into a moistened paper substrate, shedding ink and image, complicates the relations between these conventional figures.109 For, on the one hand, it is the sun, and thus Christ, who prints his form onto the pansy, a blue flower with a yellow, sun-like dot in the middle. It is Christ’s love that shines obliquely from Fletcher’s divinely inspired poetry, and to which both he and Benlowes, the “sun-ward,” turn. To suggest anything other would seem to be, as Jenkins points out, rejecting any other interpretations, “such blasphemy as Fletcher could not have intended.”110 Yet, on the other hand, it is Benlowes who designed and likely printed the special engraved ornament that blooms within the book’s leaves, shedding his “Love, & heat” on Fletcher’s verse. He warmly encouraged Fletcher’s “unseasonable . . . Blossomes,” then pressed their leaves with his own emblematic imagery. Thus while the anagram “Sun=warde beloved” suggests Benlowes too turns to the sun/son, just as the pansy, the link between the anagram and the poem’s first line implies that Benlowes is also the beloved sun, the younger “son” to his poetic father figure, Fletcher, and also the patron “sun” beloved by his “wards.” Blasphemous as it seems, this reading is further supported with evidence from Quarles’s Emblemes.111

The densely knotted imagery of this emblem links Benlowes’s patronage to other parts of the The Purple Island, too, as well as Fletcher’s broader creative network. For instance, the last line of the poem’s first stanza is repeated almost verbatim from one of the piscatory eclogues, the set of poems that the engraving prefaces:

In the context of the eclogue, Damon, a figure for Fletcher’s earlier patron Sir Henry Willoughby, is helping Algon (Fletcher) win the heart of his love Nicaea (Fletcher’s wife Elizabeth), imagined as a kind of marble statue, “more hard then diamond [sic].” Acting like the sun in Benlowes’s emblem, the patron Damon/Willoughby warms his cold friend and the stony Nicaea/Elizabeth, bringing them to bloom with love like the colorful primroses and violets around them. By repeating lines from the poem in the engraving that prefaces it, Fletcher links old eclogue to new emblem, printed poem to paratextual apparatus, and his earlier patron in manuscript, Willoughby (who introduced him to his wife), to his present patron in print, Benlowes, who dresses for him his new bride, the book.

These resonances take on new meaning yet again in the way the book circulates among living embodiments of these pastoral figures. For example, one copy now at the Morgan Library and still in its original binding bears an inscription from Fletcher to Willoughby’s daughter Anne. It reads:

Fletcher’s phrasing downplays the ornateness of the Benlowes-bedazzled book (“books are but leaues”) while emphasizing the importance of the “verse flowers” that Anne’s father coaxed to bloom with his patronage. In so doing, Fletcher’s simple inscription resituates the adorned book yet again within the context of The Purple Island’s original composition. Moving across different spaces, moments, and media, Benlowes’s bespoke assemblage diffuses and diffracts the process of literary production across a patchwork of repurposed identities.

Benlowes’s involvement in printing and packaging The Purple Island presses us to reconsider abiding assumptions about the nature of literary collaboration in the period, as well as the circulation and transmission of poetry through manuscript and print in the first half of the seventeenth century. More than just a financier or the subject of a flattering dedication, Benlowes served as the project’s patron-publisher, its muse and its champion; he pulled it from the dustbin of Cambridge history and, nearly twenty years after its initial composition, lavishly dressed its debut in print to commemorate his homosocial, almost familial coterie, both real and imagined. That his own desires, tastes, and money could accomplish this, leaving for us a legacy of unique verse that largely would have been lost otherwise, suggests how much more there is to early modern publishing than the competition of the London marketplace. From the rural peripheries, working together with the embattled Cambridge press and with Schoren and Fletcher in the intimate spaces of Brent Hall, Benlowes compiled books that model the affections between men. Nowhere is this more evident than in an inscription he began using around this time, including in several extant copies of The Purple Island near the emblem of his friendship with Fletcher. It reads:

These lines are poached from book 5 of the Aeneid, when Aeneas finds himself in Eryx, ruled by Acestes, one year after his father Anchises’s death. To commemorate his father’s passing, Aeneas and Acestes host a series of funeral games. During the archery contest, Acestes’s arrow catches fire mid-air; Aeneas interprets the event as an omen and showers Acestes with gifts once owned by his father Anchises, which “Cisseus ferre sui dederat monumentum et pignus amoris,” which Cisseus had given to him as a memorial of himself and pledge of his love.114 Through the patrilineal exchange of objects, men are bound together.115

Toward a Poetics of the Codex

Around the time he was working on The Purple Island, Benlowes began to form an attachment to another Cambridge man, Quarles. In 1633, Quarles had left his post as secretary to James Ussher in Ireland and returned to his home in Roxwell, Essex, where he lived about twenty miles south of Benlowes. Though Quarles, like Fletcher, was Benlowes’s senior, it seems natural that the two would become fast friends. Like his younger neighbor, Quarles was a studious, devout man and a lover of music. He was also a poet of some repute. By the time he became Benlowes’s neighbor, Quarles had already published nine books of poetry, including six Old Testament stories “paraphras’d” in verse, a popular adaptation of Sidney’s Arcadia, and two collections of epigrams, meditations, and other short works. As we saw in the previous chapter, Susanna Collet of Little Gidding was already quoting Quarles in her 1635 commonplace book. No doubt Benlowes was eager to befriend this widely-read author and invited him to visit Brent Hall. There, he would have met Schoren and seen Benlowes’s rolling press. Perhaps he even witnessed Schoren stamping leather covers or printing emblems on sheets of The Purple Island. He also would have perused Benlowes’s collection of art, prints, and books acquired during his travels, including perhaps his full set of de Jode’s Thesaurus sacrum, a large book of plates illustrating the Bible and one of the main sources of prints used by another neighbor, the women of Little Gidding, in illustrating their harmonies.

It seems “virtually certain,” as Karl Josef Höltgen puts it, that during one of these visits Benlowes introduced Quarles to two Jesuit emblem books, Typus mundi (1627) and Herman Hugo’s Pia desideria (1624).116 Each contains a series of small rectangular engravings dramatizing the battle between divine and human love as they struggle for the affections of the soul, depicted, after the Neoplatonic tradition, as a woman. The religious themes immediately appealed to Quarles, then England’s premiere versifier of biblical stories, just as the baroque symbolism of the prints had originally attracted their collector. Together, they hatched a plan: Benlowes would pay to have the plates of the Pia desideria copied, and Quarles would write new English verse and epigrams to go with each of the forty-five images. Later, they decided to include the images from the Typus mundi and some other emblem books as well, having the plates copied with slight modifications to render them more English.117 These additions brought the total number of engravings in the project to seventy-nine. Cutting this many plates cost Benlowes the enormous sum of 120 pounds, and producing such a heavily illustrated book that sets the engravings in line with the letterpress must have required careful coordination between the printer George Miller and those who operated the rolling press.118 It seems likely that Benlowes, by then an experienced publisher with intimate knowledge of a book’s form, helped design the highly regular structure of each emblem across exactly two page openings, a layout that made printing the many intaglio plates much quicker in octavo format, since they would all appear on the same side of a single sheet. The result of these manifold technical, literary, and visual collaborations was Emblemes (1635; STC 20540), a runaway bestseller brought to bloom in Benlowes’s library at Brent Hall.119

Quarles is clear about Benlowes’s cooperative and outsized influence on the project. In his dedication to his “much honoured, and no lesse truely beloved Friend” Edward Benlowes, he likens their collaboration to playing music together:

My deare Friend, You have put the theorbo into my hand and I have played: You gave the musician the first encouragement; The music returns to you for patronage. (sig. A2r)

Thus the Jesuit emblem books and engravings that Benlowes first handed Quarles in his library are imagined as musical instruments: they are things like a theorbo, freighted with sonic, performative potential. The poet teases this out by picking the books up and riffing on them, spinning his own fantasias or “fancies,” a seventeenth-century word for improvisational airs, from their emblematic imagery. In the book’s “Invocation,” Quarles augments this dedication to his patron with a more general emblem of divine inspiration. He opens by instructing his soul to:

The visual counterpart to this verbal invocation adapts the frontispiece from Typus mundi to the specific circumstances of Quarles’s English emblem book (Figure 15).121 Replacing St. Ignatius Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits, standing astride the world, is a flowing-haired muse and musician leaning languorously back, nuzzling a theorbo. It is the soul but also a portrait of Quarles’s friend and patron Benlowes reimagined as feminine divine love or anima spilling his generous wealth while crushing the cupid of human desire.122 The globe beneath Loyola’s feet marks the Jesuit colleges, the only worldly places worthy of note in his cosmography; by comparison, the English engraver spins the earth on its axis to show not Jesuit seminaries, but the two English villages of Roxwell, where Quarles lived, and Finchingfield, home to Benlowes and Brent Hall. The engraving’s motto has also been changed. The original print reads:

This line has been changed to:

The new phrase retains the basic semantics; however, instead of rejecting terra (“the earth”) as filthy, the speaker now despises solum, a word meaning earth or ground but also the singular self, working alone. To aspire to heaven in this new emblem, the muse must not only reject what is worldly but also the poet’s individualist ego in order to sing collective harmonies. Emphasizing this point, Quarles has hung the poet’s wreath and his own coat of arms on a withered branch next to the phrase “Vix ea nostra” (“scarcely these things [are] ours”), suggesting the futility of seeking earthly fame and title. Meanwhile, the muse exclaims, “Majora Canamus” (“let us [plural] sing of great things”).123 Thus Brent Hall and its library become a locus of divine collaboration and collective song, a domestic campus for reading books and playing them, for making books and making music.

In Quarles’s composite soul as muse and musician, we can begin to see the origins of Benlowes’s Theophila, the titular heroine of his most important literary creation, printed in 1652 and sold at the shops of Humphrey Moseley and Henry Seile. Benlowes began focusing his creative energies on Theophila around 1646, picking up threads from his publishing ventures in the 1630s and early 1640s and weaving them into his own divine epic. Its narrative kernel dramatizes the heroine’s “love’s sacrifice,” as the subtitle puts it, as she finds communion with her bridegroom Christ and ascends from the material and worldly realms to heaven and the eternal. Like Quarles’s muse, the heroine at the center of this epic is a Neoplatonic figure for anima and “Divine Love” (sig. E2r) as she struggles against the temptations of the world. She is also, like the muse, a musician who sings her way to heaven. The Emblemes were clearly an inspiration here, and the etchings that Benlowes commissioned for Theophila show her looking much like the feminized soul from Hugo’s Pia desideria as copied by Quarles and Benlowes. For instance, in emblem six in book 5, a woman in simple dress sits atop the world. As in the frontispiece, the place names on the globe have been altered, this time to London, Finchingfield, Quarles’s home of Roxwell, and Phineas Fletcher’s home in Hilgay, a nod toward their collaborations and friendships. She points down toward these locations with one hand while grasping up toward heaven with another, mediating the writers’ mortal relations to the divine. In this posture and gesture, she echoes not only the Benlowes-like muse of the frontispiece but also the many depictions of Theophila that illustrate the head of each of the first eight cantos. She is also, like Quarles’s muse, a double for Benlowes himself, serving as his female coauthor and divine collaborator in the “sacrifice” narrated by the poem. It is her voice that breaks through the text when the narrator fails, her eyes that see the “heav’nly Sphere,” a realm that he can only strive to reproduce imperfectly in language. By projecting onto Theophila his own authorship, Benlowes the poet creates for Benevolus the patron a female double whose journey to absolution mirrors his own “PNEUMATO-SARCO-MACHIA,” the title of a preliminary text, meaning literally “Spirit-Flesh-War.”

Yet if Quarles could imagine his own muse and patron reigning confidently over the workshop at Brent Hall in the 1630s, whiling away the hours with him at the rolling press or playing his theorbo, by the 1640s, Theophila could claim no such kingdom. Early in the decade, Schoren left Brent Hall after a dispute about money.124 He returned in 1645 with a wife, Sarah, a contentious personality who sowed further discord in an already fraught relationship.125 Between these momentous personal events, political upheaval tossed everything around Benlowes, as Parliamentarians staunchly supported in Essex and Cambridgeshire began sequestering goods of royalist sympathizers like Benlowes and seizing control of Cambridge University. At the end of 1642, the printer Roger Daniel was brought before the House of Commons to account for having used the Cambridge press to reprint royal declarations.126 A little over a year later, a parliamentary ordinance handed regulation of the university over to the Earl of Manchester, who began ejecting heads and fellows suspected of supporting the king, among them many of Benlowes’s friends and favorite poets.127 Abraham Cowley and John Cleveland fled to Oxford, where the king was camped, while Crashaw went into exile on the continent with Mary Collett of Little Gidding, installing her young cousin Ferrar Collett in his fellowship before he left.128

In the midst of these events, the older men whom Benlowes had patronized in earlier decades began passing away, first Quarles in 1644, followed by Fletcher in 1650, and he found himself in the role of the father-figure patron to a new generation of younger poets, among them Quarles’s son John and his flattering Finchingfield neighbor Clement Paman.129 Benlowes also struck up an epistolary friendship with James Howell, a royalist poet and historian then in prison by order of Parliament, where Benlowes sent him a copy of The Purple Island and his new antipapist broadside, Papa Perstrictus, an ornate echo poem printed in red and black and pasted onto boards for easy hanging.130 The gifts delighted Howell, who wrote in an effusive letter (included in his popular Epistolae Ho-elianae, published by Moseley) that Benlowes’s work deserves not to be printed on a slender frame but “engraven in such durable dainty stuff that it may be fit to hang up in the Temple of Apollo.”131 Through these new relationships, Benlowes’s reputation as a patron, poet, and publisher of bespoke objects continued to grow; but there was no way to escape the personal, political, and religious strife that rent everything around him. By the end of the decade, as he began the process of assembling Theophila, the harmoniously homosocial world imagined in Fletcher’s emblems or Quarles’s frontispiece, one safely centered at Brent Hall, must have seemed almost a distant memory.

And so he had to make a shift. Before, Benlowes tended to adapt his favorite sources to the specific context of a book that he wished to patronize. With Theophila, he also began interleaving and printing found plates and woodcuts directly into and onto the folded sheets. He became, in short, a bibliographic hoarder, saving up and inserting into his hand-assembled books anything that struck his fancy. As we will see, he reused woodblocks found in his printers’ warehouse, recycled popular plates from Wenceslaus Hollar or The Extravagant Shepherd, and interleaved frontispieces designed for books he never published. By the later 1640s and early 1650s, as a flood of newly unregulated printing washed over the marketplace, these older blocks and plates must have seemed like the fractured shards of a lost culture, and we might see in Benlowes’s care for them his desire to make material sense of his world’s dissolution.132 In addition to shoring up these fragments, he also commissioned new etchings from Barlow to illustrate the original eight cantos of his poem, as well as an authorial portrait and other images. He wrote copious preliminary poems and invited friends to add commendatory verse or translate portions of his poems into Latin, which Alexander Ross and Jeremy Collier did. And he asked John Jenkins, a popular domestic composer, to set several parts of the poem “to fit Aires,” as the title page puts it.133 As he pulled this assorted media into Theophila’s orbit, all these material bits and bobs gleaned from printers and poets, musicians and engravers, Benlowes’s bookwork began to rotate toward a more radical poetics of the codex: a method of literary composition where the physical structure of the book as a library-like gathering of loose sheets becomes spiritually and culturally reparative. He worked this method not only within each minute, metaphysical juxtaposition but also at the larger scale of the book as a miscellaneous assemblage. In the harmonious folds of a Theophila’s quires (a bibliographic pun that Benlowes returns to often), these orphaned prints and half-completed projects could literally find their place.

It is the argument of the present chapter and this monograph more broadly that the creativity and cultural work of books like Theophila become legible when we read them not as texts, but as multidimensional media objects designed with meaning and purpose. Appreciating Benlowes’s poetics, then, requires hewing close to his material text. Only by juxtaposing and comparing extant copies, identifying sites of variance or collision, does the totality of Benlowes’s project become evident. Of course, this kind of collation is unworkable in person: surviving books of Theophila are scattered across dozens of different libraries and several countries. However, digital methods make possible the partial reassembly of Benlowes’s farflung archive and thus facilitate new ways of researching and presenting to others this long-neglected and little-understood book. Taking advantage of these tools, as well as inspiration from the multidimensional King’s Harmony designed by the women of Little Gidding, as described in the previous chapter, the next section of this chapter widens to add, in addition to this prose narrative, two new ways of engaging with my argument. First, the reader may jump to Digital Theophila, an external site where a high-resolution digital facsimile of the University of Pennsylvania’s copy of Benlowes’s book is freely available for browsing. Built with Manicule, an open-source platform designed in collaboration with Liza Daly, this site brings into relief the material structure of a book and what Johanna Drucker describes as the phenomenal experience of reading it: “the complex production of meaning and effect that arises from dynamic interaction with the literal work.”134 Annotations at the edges of the page point out bibliographic features; color-coding identifies different elements of Benlowes’s project; and a tour walks through key features of the poem, its typography, and the sources of repurposed images. The site also offers a diagram of the book’s physical structure, especially useful to readers less familiar with early modern formats. Second, alongside this edition of a single Theophila I provide a dataset that describes the physical makeup of twenty-six of the forty-five known extant copies, twenty-five of which I have examined in person.

These data are provided in XML that adheres to the VisColl standard developed by Dot Porter and implemented in the BiblioPhilly database. Readers more advanced in digital methods may wish to download this set of collations and explore Theophila for themselves. While it is not necessary that readers engage with the digital tour or dataset in order to follow the contours of my argument, narrated in prose below, these resources form the foundation that undergirds my claims; it is in the parallax shift between Theophila as a physical object, here remediated digitally, and as abstracted metadata that the creative architecture of Benlowes’s queer project comes into view.

Assembling Theophila

At the beginning of Theophila, amongst the preliminaries, Benlowes addresses his female readers on how to use the text. “Ladies,” he writes, likening his gathered poems and prints to a songbook, “We jangle not in Shools, but strain to set / Church-Musick,”—that is, harmonious choirs from these quires—“at which Saints being met / May warble forth Heav’ns Praise, and thence Heav’ns Blessing get” (sig. A2r). He goes on to instruct women to “Survey Theophila,” both the figure and the book, for examples on how to live a virtuous life: “To this spring-garden, virgins, chaste and fair,” he commends, “Coacht in pure Thoughts, make your Repair.” Facing this poem in most extant copies is an inserted plate of a woman wrapped in furs. It is Hollar’s “Winter Woman,” taken from a widely-copied and popular series depicting English women’s seasonal costumes. In this half-length version, the caption has been scratched off, as is the case with other engravings that Benlowes recycles, suggesting he had access to the actual plate and may even have printed it at home. If the poem abounds with imagery of song and spring, the repurposed engraving is the opposite: cold, stark, the woman’s face not blooming with virtue but hidden under a mask and hood. From this contradiction, Benlowes draws tension that the reader must resolve by reading the plate and the poem in relation to each other. Thus the furs that signify winter in Hollar’s series, and which probably would have been known to readers as doing so, become an image of chaste covering. Here, the gatherings of the codex serve as a prism through which the reader’s understanding passes, diffracting her prior associations and relations to popular imagery.

Benlowes’s repurposing of Hollar’s plate epitomizes the method that he deploys throughout Theophila the book. His work on the project began with the actual poem “Theophila, or Love’s Sacrifice,” an eight-canto epic about the heroine Theophila’s ascent to heaven. Forming the narrative kernel of the book, the epic begins with the preliminary canto, “The Prelibation to the Sacrifice.” This canto ends with a Herbert-inspired altar poem, thereby setting the stage, in a literal-minded way, for Theophila’s sacrifice. A prose summary of the poem and the author’s prayer follows before the second canto, “The Humiliation.” Now the epic truly begins, and as if to mark that, Benlowes opens by recounting the origins of the world, illustrated in most copies with a large woodcut of Adam and Eve in Eden, printed on an inserted leaf. As with Hollar’s “Winter Woman,” Benlowes’s readers would likely have recognized this plate: it is the same image, and indeed the same block, that drifts in and out of various issues of Robert Barker’s Bibles beginning as early as 1602, appearing sometimes with an added strapwork frame. It was so popular that one amateur needleworker, Anne Cornwallis, even replicated it on her own Bible’s embroidered cover.135 Benlowes probably acquired the woodcut through his printer, Norton, who had himself likely seized it from the Barkers during his 1629 raid on the King’s Printing House, when he broke down a wall and removed a large quantity of books and stock, one particularly dramatic event in a decades-long dispute over certain patents and rights attending the office of the King’s Printer.136 It was at this time that Norton probably also acquired another, even older woodcut that Benlowes reuses later in Theophila, an image of Queen Elizabeth at prayer originally from the 1578 and 1581 editions of Richard and John Day’s A Booke of Christian Prayers (STC 6429 and STC 6430). By tucking this well-known image into the beginning of his epic, Benlowes roots the poem that follows not just in scripture, but in the actual material culture of the Bibles then in circulation.

About fifty stanzas into this second canto, Theophila finally enters. She is “unhing’d with Fear, / Clamm’d with chill sweat” at her sinfulness, a state depicted in the accompanying etching by Barlow, where she kneels in prayer “Besieg’d with deadly Sinnes” in the form of gnarling boars, tigers, and dragons. She weeps with shame and prostrates herself before God, offering a series of prayers that are set apart in italics in the text. God accepts Theophila’s prayers, and the poem moves on to the third canto, “The Restauration,” an early modern form of the word “restoration” with the specific sense of something being returned to its original condition. Scrubbed of her sin, Theophila here appears refulgent with “Heav’ns brighter Love,” her body blazoned in language excerpted from amorous poetry remade to describe God’s purified creation (3.25 [sig. G2v]). Her lips are “Rock-rubies, and her Veins wrought Saphyrs show” (3.26 [sig. G2v]). When Benlowes has exhausted that theme, Theophila’s body is stretched to become a temple to house the devout poet’s feast (3.46 [sig. G4r]) and a harp for his “mosts harmonious Musicks” (3.52 [sig. G4v]). Drawing out these musical themes, Barlow’s etching for this canto shows King David playing his harp while Theophila holds the tables of Moses and sings heavenward. In the text, her own italicized speech and the narrator’s voice begin to blend together typographically as her divine song mingles with his own. The end of the canto turns from the “restauration” of Theophila’s soul to the restoration of the monarchy, as Theophila sings against “dissembling Pulpeteers” and the civil wars they have brought (3.76 [sig. G6r]). “If, Theophil, thy Love-Song can’t Asswage / The Fate incumbent on this Age,” the canto ends, then there is “No Time to write, but weep; for we are ripe for Rage!”

With Theophila’s “restauration” as a fantasy of the restored monarchy established, the poem enters a more mystical register. In canto 4, “The Innamoration,” Theophila takes over the text’s narration, first in a long soliloquy on her infatuation with God’s cleansing light, followed by her “Love-Song,” modeled loosely after the Song of Songs. In Barlow’s etching, she battles temptations with a shield and flaming spear. At stanza 61, the poet takes over the text again and Jesus enters, “a comely Person, clad in white,” her bridegroom. “Give, give me Children, or I die!,” Theophila cries to Jesus; “Love, rest / Thy Head upon the Pillows of my Breast! / When me Thou shalt impregn’d with Vertues make / A fruitful Eden, All the Frutage take!” Later, in a Crashavian erotic fit, she “lay with flaming Love empierc’t to the Heart: / Wak’t, As She bled, She kist the Dart; / Then sigh’d. Take all as I am, or have! All, All Thou art!” (4.83 [sig. I1v]). After her consummation with Jesus, Theophila ascends to heaven, a journey depicted in the etching as the author watches, holding the pages of his book. Benlowes attempts to narrate her ascent in the next canto, “The Representation,” but fails to express the ineffable. “Since Time began,” he writes, “What constitutes a Gnat was ne’re found out by Man. / Dares mortal Slime, with ruder tongue, express What ev’n Celestials do confesse / Is inexpressible?” (5.14–15 [sig. I5r]).

Theophila reappears and takes over from the fumbling poet to describe her own passage from earth to the celestial stars, singing as she goes. The final three cantos (“The Association,” “The Contemplation,” and “The Admiration”) continue with her descriptions of heaven and its inhabitants, an extended meditation on God’s immensity, and some theological musings on the paradoxes of the Trinity and reincarnation, among other ejaculations. The abstruse, abstract nature of these subjects continue to stretch the limits of language. “Best Eloquence is languid, high’st Thoughts vail,” the narrator complains; “To think, to speak, Wit, Language fail; / Tis an Abysse, through which no Spirits Eye can fail!” (7.25 [sig. M1v]). They also stretch the limits of visual representation, and Barlow’s etchings become notably sparse, lacking the accompanying plate of verse and taking on a half-finished look. Formerly vibrant skies flatten into static geometrical shapes, and the prints often show a doubling effect from a sloppy use of acid and poor inking, as if the poet’s insufficiencies extend even to his technologies of reproduction. Lacking appropriate metaphors or images, the design of the text begins to bear more of meaning’s weight, to the extent that some pages are overwhelmed with capitals, italics, and exclamation points. Thus the teetering poem, leaning more and more on its typography, sputters to an end. Its narrative has evaporated, leaving a constellation of superlatives, and Theophila abandons the poet, “as vanisht Lightning” (8.97 [sig. O1r]). Having set himself the task of singing the song of Theophila’s sacrifice, in the end the narrator, still trapped in his physical body, is able only to “re-act her Part” as “Fleet Joy runs Races through [his] Blood through thousand Veins” (8.99–100 [sig. O1r–v]).

The nature of Theophila as a long, transformative journey and the structure of its cantos suggest that Benlowes conceived of it in part as a divine epic. While the tradition of the allegorical travels of the soul toward God stretches back to Dante, Benlowes’s immediate model is clearly Joseph Beaumont’s Psyche, or Loves Mysterie, a twenty-canto narration of the young woman Psyche’s spiritual journey to Christ. Beaumont was his Essex neighbor and a close friend of Crashaw’s; certainly Benlowes would have read his work when it came out in print in 1648 (Wing B1625), if not earlier in manuscript. The book’s influence is evident in the titles—Theophila, or Love’s Sacrifice and Psyche, or Loves Mysterie—in the Neoplatonic figure of the feminized soul, and in the use of Latinate nominatives for each canto, laid out in a prefatory table. However, whereas Beaumont’s epic maintains a narrative thrust throughout its roughly thirty thousand lines, Theophila does not. Its story constantly falters, snagged on myriad distractions as Benlowes digresses on his favorite subjects, from music to the civil wars. In an imaginative reading, Bellamy argues that these narrative failures constitute Benlowes’s comment on poetry’s inadequacy to investigate the spiritual realm, and certainly there is something to this.137 As mentioned above, much of the work is consumed by the inability of human language to describe the ineffable except through metaphysical paradox, contradictory figures, and eventually even the visual design of typography. When all else fails, the mortal poet-narrator hands the text over to the transcendent Theophila, who can sing more purely.

To assess Theophila’s structure only in terms of its narration, though, is to miss much of its generic innovation. Benlowes is as much indebted to Herbert’s The Temple, Crashaw’s Steps to the Temple, or Robert Aylett’s The Brides Ornament as he is to epics like Beaumont’s Psyche, and the narrative confusion often stems from his interest in the lyrical voice. In particular, he tends to probe the boundary between prayer, song, and lyric verse, freely switching modes of address. While Theophila is outlined like a divine epic, each of its cantos reads more like a loosely-linked series of verse portraits of the soul assuming various prayerful positions in relation to God. We see Theophila in her humiliation, in her inammoration, and in her contemplation and admiration of God’s nature, nouns that echo the titles of Herbert’s lyrics: “The Sacrifice,” “Judgment,” “Humilitie,” “Affliction.” They also parallel the allegorical titles assumed by the women of Little Gidding in the Story Books, as described in the previous chapter (the Obedient, Affectionate, Submiss). In such collections, the reader does not track an epic journey across narrative cantos so much as she enters into a textual architecture built to display these portraits of the penitent soul. Thus, Herbert’s book is a temple where the reader can overhear the “private ejaculations” of the striving Christian, Crashaw’s book the steps that lead there, and Benlowes’s tome a platform for Theophila’s sacrifice, a tomb for her transfigured ashes. What seem to be Theophila’s narrative failings, then, actually resonate with a particular type of thematically conjoined collection of religious poems popular in the 1630s and 1640s. By infusing the divine epic with these traditions, Theophila structurally mediates multiple emerging genres of devout verse.

However, the poem Theophila takes up only thirty sheets of this roughly seventy-nine-sheet book. Immediately following the end of canto 8, a more miscellaneous assemblage of material follows. Within this portion of the book, there are sensible albeit partially finished sequences, almost like “rolling archetypes.” For instance, canto 9 is a “Recapitulation” of Theophila in facing Latin and English translations, followed by Latin translations of cantos 1 and 3 done by Benlowes’s friend Ross. Together, these sections revisit Theophila as a Latin epic. After this, there appears a series of poems on the world’s vanity. It begins with a previously unpublished poem by Owen Feltham, “Upon the Vanitie of the World,” which launches Benlowes into his own poem “The Vanitie of the World.” This is a new work, with a new title, shifting away from Theophila and now addressing his “Headlesse, heady Age,” but nevertheless he numbers the cantos 10 and 11, as if they were continuing the earlier work. Canto 11 ends with no catchword, suggesting that, at one time, this page was considered by the printer, at least, to be the last. The illustration suggests this, too: here, in the blank area after the last lines, the plate of Hollar’s “Summer Woman” has been printed directly on the letterpress-printed sheet as a counterpoint to the “Winter Woman” who begins the book.

However, at some point seemingly after these extra segments were already in press, Benlowes decided to add even more content: more untitled Latin poems, some short Latin prose, and two new cantos on retiring to the countryside. The final section returns to Theophila with a Latin translation of canto 7 by Collier, followed by more untitled Latin fragments and, in most copies, two older, ornate pattern poems on inserted plates. This final miscellaneous chunk (sixteen sheets or sixty-four pages total) is printed on paper stock that is consistently different from the rest of the book, indicating it was completed at a separate time, and it is signed and gathered in simple bifolia rather than quires of three. Perhaps the printer, Norton, weary of Benlowes’s constant additions to the project, decided to choose a format more amenable to such accretions. By the time the printing was done, Theophila had grown from the 121 pages of the original eight cantos to 268 printed pages, not including the added plates. Benlowes assembled these materials by hand at Brent Hall, as always, inserting engravings, sometimes hand-correcting printed errors, inscribing dedications to friends, binding the book in his arms, and sometimes adding his favorite Latin mottos to the title page, including, of course, “Esse sui voluit monumentum, et pignus Amoris,” as he wanted it to be a monument and pledge to his love.

Like the poem’s narrative structure, the swelling assemblage of Theophila presents itself to modern readers as incoherence. Benlowes himself understood it differently. In the preliminary materials, he formulates his poetry as the marriage of masculine judgment, which “begets the Strength” of a poem, to feminine invention and “Ornaments”: “both These joyn’d form Wit, which is the Agility of Spirits” or, he continues, “Vivacity of Fancie in a florid Style,” which “disposeth Light and Life to a Poem” (sig. ¶¶2v). Key to Benlowes’s writing process, the word “fancy” is laden with meaning in the period. It implies something like “imagination,” the mind’s innate capacity to conjure objects that do not have a physical existence or events that never actually happened. Etymologically, it links to the noun “fantasy,” a fantastical or pleasure-giving mental image, and through this relationship begins to take on an erotic overtone in the seventeenth century, sometimes meaning something more like “desire” or “longing,” a sense still retained in today’s British usage of “fancy” as a verb for a physical attraction. Drawing together these various shades of meaning, Christine Varnado argues that early modern fancy constitutes a kind of queer desire: an insatiable longing for one’s own mental images, a fancy for one’s fantasies.138 Though infinitely reproducible, like the engravings shown in Nova Reperta, such desire is ultimately nonreproductive, since it always directs itself toward the imaginary object that the subject lacks, as Benlowes does with his feminine double Theophila.

Benlowes expounds this desire in a prefatory poem written “To My Fancie Upon Theophila” (Figure 19). In it, he instructs his imagination to leave off blazoning false beauty, abandon empty metaphors, and instead “With artful Method Misc’line sow.” “Miscelline,” literally “mixed seed,” with a pun here on the “masculine” judgment used to mix elements together, is nearly synonymous with the word “miscellany,” something composed of multiple elements brought together artfully. In other contemporaneous usages, it typically has a negative association, as when Joseph Hall denounces the “miscelline rabble of the prophane” or Ben Jonson disparages the “misc’line Enterludes” of other writers in his dedication of the 1607 Volpone quarto to Oxford and Cambridge.139 Here, though, Benlowes has rendered miscellaneity as desirable and, more precisely, his bookwork as a process of desiring: it feeds the composer’s bottomless craving for an ineffable, infinite God whose enormity can be glimpsed in this realm only through endless material recombinance.

Continuing, Benlowes mingles images of mixed writing with eating miscellaneous food:

A pun on “palate” treats the mouth as the “palette” for mixing the divine inks of the text, turning printed words to food, or “Manna,” perhaps another subtle pun on masculine judgment as meat for his method. The wordplay extends to the typography of the next line, where a long s on “Wise”—either a compositor’s choice or Benlowes’s intentional ambiguity—turns “strong Sense” and “deep Truth” into the poet’s wife and wisdom. Pulling together this various imagery, the final line grows from this mixed seed a “Grand-Sallet of choice Wit,” a “Grand-Sallet” being an early modern salad of greens, fruits, and nuts and more general metaphor for heterogeneous compositions, as discussed in John Evelyn’s Acetaria, a Discourse of Sallets.140 Thus the very mixed metaphors mocked by Benlowes’s critics are here placed at the core of his method, demanding of the reader a different relationship to the poem. By gathering together ever more cantos and translations, Theophila is not failing to cohere so much as it is fueling Benlowes’s queer fancy for God’s infinite love. As if to heighten the parallels between divine writing and divine longing, much like the printers’ ornaments of putti and boys analyzed by Jeffrey Masten in his work on queer philology, each stanza is printed with a large decorative initial shaped from naked human bodies.141 These are repurposed from an erotic alphabet, the Menschenalphabeten, first designed and published by Nuremberg printmaker Peter Flötner over one hundred years earlier.142

Yet as we saw with Quarles’s dedication to Benlowes in Emblemes, the word “fancy” in the seventeenth century also refers specifically to a genre of musical composition rooted in improvisation and erudition. In some early modern European traditions, the composer of a fancy, which is more commonly known today as a “fantasia,” may only set down the chords or motives of the piece. It would be the task of the instrumentalist to spin these differently with each playing, perhaps through arpeggiation or by improvising a solo. Sometimes a composer would record these variations as options for the performer or would write a section that simply sounds improvisatory; in other cases, a single variation might become standard in later settings of the music. Either way, the fancy allows space for infinite variation and virtuosic displays of skill, and the heard music emerges from the collaboration between a composer’s ideas and the player who actualizes them in performance. This sense of the fancy as a fundamentally improvisational (or faux-improvisatory) form seeps into the more common use of the term in seventeenth-century English music as learned polyphony.143 In these fancies, a composer might work through variations of harmonic relationships in a semisystematic way or offer ingenious inventions on a theme. This type of fancy not only pleasures the ear but also teases the educated mind and its refined judgment, which can recognize and appreciate the musical moves. John Jenkins, the composer who set parts of Theophila “to fit Aires” according to the title page, wrote more than one hundred such fantasias for viol consort.144 When the musically inclined Benlowes describes Theophila as a contrivance of his “fancy,” then, he refers not only to his imaginative process of intermingling texts, but to the improvised material product that he, its “Renowned COMPOSER,” assembles by hand, adding manuscript notes and interleaving engraved plates differently with the printed sheets. Each copy of the material text is a virtuosic performance generating new harmonic collisions between text and image, judgment and ornament, the pleasures of the mind and the pleasures of the eye.

The fanciful, fantastic nature of Theophila takes us beyond the text, beyond genre, beyond even interpretations of layout or typography, to fathom each copy as unique: the reader experiences one performance among many possible iterations. To appreciate the role of variation in Benlowes’s bookwork thus requires that the critic operate comparatively, shifting across copies to track sites that vibrate with difference across the entirety of the edition. In the dataset accompanying this text, three identifiable variants in the ordering of interleaved plates emerge. These are rough guides only. Certain moments in the text and locations in the book oscillate in their composition, as Benlowes works and reworks how the images relate to his verse across divergent registers of meaning; but no two copies contain the exact same number of plates in the same places. Confounding any interpretation is the fact that later readers—perhaps following Benlowes’s flight of fancy—often remade copies, as we shall see. Thus, every book is a palimpsest of different moments marked by different hands. As a result, it is impossible to assign sole creative agency to Benlowes, even in those very few copies that remain largely as they did in 1652. With Theophila, Benlowes’s queer collaborations expand to encompass not just his homosocial network at Brent Hall or his stationers and engravers in London, but the many readers, collectors, and antiquarians who, long after his death, saw in his “Misc’line” method an opportunity to fulfill their own bibliographic fantasies.

Consider, for instance, Benlowes’s gift to St. John’s College Library, Cambridge, an exemplar of what appears to be an early variant.145 Bound in a leather casing stamped with his arms and with manuscript waste still poking from the headbands, this book shows few signs of repair or rebinding over the intervening years, and in many ways, it is a typical presentation copy, done with Benlowes’s usual blustering humility. For instance, rather than inserting an authorial portrait opposite the title page, as is more common in Theophila’s arrangement, he has written “THEOPHILA” in elaborate calligraphy, surrounded by flourishes. Pasted in the center of this hand-drawn cartouche is an inscription claiming the book as an eternal monument to his love of and benevolence toward the college. He then bumps his portrait to the location opposite the poem Mens Authoris, the mind of the author, where it is pasted onto a large stub; it must be unfolded from the book to be seen. By switching out his portrait for this calligraphy and moving his own image to a poem about the book’s soul, Benlowes turns his authorial achievements toward glorifying his alma mater while, in a move that we have seen him make many times before, ensuring that no one forgets who channeled the work’s divine spirit.

More than just personalizing the inscription, though, Benlowes also varies the arrangement of the inserted plates to draw scriptural echoes from the figure of Theophila. Barlow’s original etchings preface all of the core eight cantos, and unusually so: many copies lack the illustrations for cantos 2, 3, 6, and 8, but two extra images have been repurposed in cantos 2 and 4 to illustrate aspects of Theophila’s transformation. First, in the middle of canto 2, when Theophila finally first appears weeping before God, there is interleaved an engraving by Pierre Lombart showing Theophila at prayer; a second plate of Latin and English verses, signed Collier, is printed below. Lombart designs the image like a frontispiece or title page for a smaller format, indeed beside Theophila is a loose sheet inscribed with an early title variant, “THEOPHILA’S LOVE SACRIFICE. WRITTEN BY EDW BENLOWES ESQU.” Perhaps Benlowes originally imagined Theophila as an octavo, much like Quarles’s Emblemes, with each canto being a poem paired with an emblematic image, and prematurely commissioned this frontispiece before switching to a folio format to accommodate his expanding text. By repurposing a vestigial frontispiece here, as Theophila enters the poem, Benlowes pins this location in the book as the true starting point of her journey, the beginning of a new text within the eight-canto text (which is itself nested within the bigger structure detailed above).

When placed in the second canto, this plate also forms a sequence with two other images, Barlow’s original illustration and the recycled woodcut of Adam and Eve (Figure 20). Resonating with each other and with the text, these three plates pulsate with proleptic, intertextual significance: Theophila is at prayer surrounded by the beasts of sin; she is Eve in Eden surrounded by the beasts of paradise; she is a soul prepared to transcend the world and climb with the seraphs to heaven, a second Eden. Another repurposed plate does similar work in canto 4. Placed during “The Innamoration,” Theophila’s sexualized union with Christ, it shows Theophila leaning against a pedestal. She crushes a serpent under foot and props a book open in her lap. A palm branch in her right hand signifies the victory of the spirit (her book) over the flesh (the serpent) and visually doubles as a quill, suggesting her increasing role as divine poet in canto 4 as she takes over the narrator’s faltering voice. It also resonates with the spear she holds in Barlow’s original etching for this canto: by her palm and her pen, she obtains the sword—another piercing phallic symbol, gifted through her union with Christ—to fight temptations and mortal death. If the orphaned title page seems too small for the book’s folio format, this engraving is too large, and making it seem larger still, it has been pasted onto a long stub, like the authorial portrait. To see it in its entirety, the reader must unfold the plate well outside the bounds of the book, a material gesture that links her again to Benlowes as author. Through not only the illustrative use of found images but also the actual repurposing of these plates’ formats, Benlowes elucidates in this copy and its relatives a new visual and material dimension of Theophila’s journey.

This interest in Theophila’s transformation continues in the second half of the St. John’s College presentation volume. At the text’s pivot point, just after canto 8, Benlowes has placed another recycled plate. It shows an allegorical depiction of astronomy alongside a curly-haired older man and eagle, and it comes from the German-born engraver and tapestry designer Francis Cleyn’s series Septem Liberales Artes (“the seven liberal arts”), first printed in 1645.146 While the original is labeled “ASTRONOMIA,” here, someone (probably Benlowes) has scratched the caption off the actual plate before it was printed. Without the caption to define it, this allegorical astronomy looks more like Theophila’s immortal soul ensconced in the celestial heavens, perhaps beside the author with his eagle (recalling the eagle on Barlow’s etchings for cantos 1 and 5). The plate has a note, possibly in Benlowes’s hand, indicating that it should be placed before page 125. This note appears on four of the extant copies that I have seen, but curiously, they have all been placed opposite page 122 facing the final lines of canto 8; indeed, none place Astronomia at page 125. Perhaps Benlowes changed his mind yet again when he actually began inserting plates. Finally, the image of Hollar’s “Summer Woman” has, in this copy, been tattooed with asterisks, crescent moons, dots, and other astrological or typographic marks written on her forehead and cheeks in ink, as if to annotate her body with the transcendent geometries figured in Barlow’s etchings for cantos 7 and 8, which she should be contemplating (Figure 21). From Theophila as Astronomia, pointing to the heavens, to Theophila as the Summer Woman marked by the celestial sphere, her after-image persists in the more miscellaneous second half of the book as an ethereal figure literally marked by her transfiguration.

Two other copies, both still bound in leather stamped with Benlowes’s arms, also contain the extra engravings placed in cantos 2 and 4, Astronomia at the end of canto 8, and manuscript markings on the “Summer Woman.”147 These copies also lack the plates for the later cantos, and in one, the authorial portrait is opposite Mens Authoris, as it is in the St. John’s presentation copy.148 Far from random, then, this visual meditation on Theophila as a palimpsest of different figures in variously interconnected stances and gestures constitutes one variation on the book’s theme, one flight of Benlowes’s fancy, and probably an early one at that, when Benlowes still conceived of his project as cohering around the eight cantos of his divine epic.

The template for a second variation might be seen in another presentation copy dedicated to the Earl of Westmorland, Mildmay Fane, now at Harvard’s Houghton Library.149 In an inscription dated October 17, 1653, Benlowes has again annotated the title page with his favorite phrase, “Author Esse sui hoc voluit Monumentu[m] & Pignus Honoraris” (“the author wanted this to be a monument and pledge of his love”). This volume has some similarities to the St. John’s presentation copy: it is also bound in Benlowes’s arms with few signs of tampering and contains a complete set of Barlow’s original etchings for cantos 1 through 8. However, in other places Benlowes uses the engravings in this copy to claim more authority over the poem’s interpretation. For instance, the authorial portrait has been moved back to its more common place opposite the title page and the large plate of Theophila stomping a serpent has been moved opposite Mens Authoris, where the portrait was in the St. John’s volume. By shuffling these plates, Benlowes reasserts his primary place as the book’s author but continues to treat Theophila as his authorial double, as the Mens Authoris, the mind of the author, emblematically stomping sins and pointing to heaven as she pens Benlowes’s book. This series resolves on the next opening where, as is typical in most copies, the plate of Hollar’s Winter Woman sits next to the address to ladies; but on this copy and another copy at Morgan Library, Benlowes has added a couplet explaining how to read the recycled image:

From a proud portrait of the book’s designer, to a feminized emblem for his mind, to this metaphysical memento of the female reader’s modesty, Benlowes uses the first three page openings of Fane’s copy to triangulate author, poem, and reader in a controlled relationship. A similar sequence is found in another volume at Houghton Library, except the authorial portrait has been moved before Mens Authoris and Theophila stomping the serpent sits opposite the poem’s translation as “The Authors Designe” on the next page.150 Thus the leaf with Mens Authoris on the recto and its translation as “The Authors Designe” on the verso is sandwiched between Benlowes’s portrait on the one end and Theophila as the divine writer on the other. Again, the plate showing Theophila as a divine writer is being drawn into a relationship with the author’s image and his writing process, one that anticipates her taking over the text from the fumbling poet in cantos 5 and 6. In short, she is literally positioned here as his coauthor.

With the Fane volume and its relatives, Benlowes’s interest in Theophila loosens, and he begins to experiment with ways of providing the miscellaneous materials and additional cantos with frontispieces from his cache of recycled images. For instance, the plate of Theophila at prayer moves from canto 2 to the head of canto 9, where it faces a prelude in Latin inviting the reader to “serve Poetry.” On the bottom of the page it faces is printed a plate of verse in Latin, the same size and design as the plates accompanying most of Barlow’s etchings. Thus the vestigial frontispiece serves as a visual echo of the text it sits opposite, and emblem and Latin prose reflect one another across the gutter. From this change unfolds another: Astronomia, facing the end of canto 8 in the earlier variant, is bumped further along in the text to serve as an illustration for the beginning of canto 13, “The Pleasure of Retirement.” This move suggests Benlowes’s falling interest in Theophila the divine epic and burgeoning desire to construct Theophila the book coherently, with plates evenly distributed across all cantos. In a third variant, these two plates are switched—Astronomia introduces canto 9, and the vestigial frontispiece canto 13—and most later readers take this to be the standard order, with the Fane copy representing an aberration.151 “This should be p 235,” a later reader has written on the image of Theophila at prayer in Fane’s presentation volume, adding that Astronomia “should be page 122.” In another volume at Houghton Library, where these images have also switched places, Astronomia is annotated in ink with the phrase, “place this agst pag: 125,” in the same handwriting as the similar note in the St. John’s volume; a later hand has added in pencil, “To be placed at page 125.”152 The switch that later readers found frustrating, though, is probably an intentional riff on what I am calling Benlowes’s second variant, since a third copy has the plates in the same order.153 Moreover, the coexistence of the two variants together (the Fane ordering and its reversal) supports the thesis that Benlowes was becoming more interested in the relationship between a plate and the book’s structure, rather than the plate and the book’s text.

This growing interest in the design of the codex results in other variants. For instance, canto 9 is, as mentioned, a facing-page Latin and English translation of a summary of the poem. In some copies, like that at the University of Pennsylvania, the vestigial frontispiece remains facing the canto’s prelude.154 The plate of Theophila stomping the serpent is then positioned to face the beginning of the English translation of the recapitulation, since it starts on a recto. Thus Astronomia and Theophila form parallel frontispieces to the dual beginnings of the English and Latin-translation facing-page versions of the poem’s summary in canto 9 (Figure 22). The one points up to the left and out of the book’s fore-edge, the other to the right and toward its gutter.

This variant continues to witness the compiler’s desire to illustrate the later cantos, and the book balloons with additional images. There are new original etchings for canto 10 and 12, probably made by Barlow after Benlowes decided to add new texts. The book was most likely already in press at this point: as mentioned above, the book’s format changes after canto 11, and canto 12 begins on a verso, suggesting the printer did not anticipate these extra visual frontispieces, and few copies have these late additions. There is also another vestigial frontispiece that begins to show up at the pivot between Ross’s translations of cantos 1 and 3 into Latin. Cut by William Marshall, the same engraver who copied many images for Quarles’s Emblemes at Benlowes’s request, it features an elaborate floral wreath that encircles the title Ludus Literarius Christianus, Anthreno-Tripsis seu Crabronum Tritura and the name of the author, “Edw. Benlosij. Armig” (Figure 23). Swarms of buzzing bees turn the flowers’ pollen into honey, while a clutch of putti squeeze grapes from a wine press, a machine that looks very much like the printing press, and indeed was the model for it. The octavo-sized image largely repeats the design of another frontispiece by Marshall to Benlowes’s Quarleis, a pamphlet that he had printed to celebrate the appearance of Quarles’s Emblemes and which now can often be found bound at its end. Perhaps Benlowes hoped to compile a book with the title Ludus Literarius Christianus and commissioned this frontispiece (again) prematurely. Or perhaps he uses it here to celebrate his friend Ross’s riff off Theophila, much as he does with Quarles in Quarleis.155

If the Fane volume presents interpretive problems, this later variant is nearly impossible to analyze, especially in relation to this question of Benlowes’s creative agency. Of the copies that I have seen that contain Ludus Literarius Christianus, none are in a contemporaneous binding, and in fact nearly all the copies that follow this template were rebound by Francis Bedford and his partner Charles Lewis, prominent bookbinders for the antiquarian marketplace at the beginning of the nineteenth century. One small clue as to Bedford’s possible influence on the book’s arrangement comes from the fact that all copies that I have seen rebound by him reverse the Adam and Eve woodcut: in copies in original or repaired bindings, the woodcut is positioned on the recto; in Bedford’s copies, it is on the verso.156 It is as if Bedford, straightening out Benlowes’s crooked book according to his own time’s standard of consistency, can imagine only plates set invariably on one side of an opening.

More than just rearranging the plates, though, nineteenth-century collectors also added new engravings in a futile quest to find, or more often make up, the most “complete” copy. Some sellers or owners took this obsessive urge to an extreme. For instance, one copy at the Houghton Library that otherwise follows the Fane variant in its composition also includes facing-page doubles of many etchings for the first eight cantos, the second cut and pasted onto a carefully lined blank leaf that has been inserted for this purpose.157 Two copies at the British Library also contain two O2 leaves, one with an added plate and one without. A nineteenth-century note in the copy owned by the bibliophile Thomas Grenville states, “This is the only perfect & compleat Copy that I have seen,” since it includes eighteen engravings and the duplicate leaf, which he wrongly believes “occurs only in Presentation Copies.”158 Yet another copy at Cambridge University Library has not only Hollar’s “Winter Woman” in its usual place, but also captioned versions of “Spring,” “Summer,” and “Autumn” interleaved seemingly at random throughout the preliminaries.159 One imagines the collector seeing “Winter Woman” alone and presuming the set incomplete until the rest of the series were added. While, from one perspective, this act destroyed Benlowes’s original intentions, disrupting his more purposeful recycling of Hollar’s plate, it also attests to the many ways that Theophila inspires readers to become like Benlowes, learned improvisers of his erudite and polyphonic fancies. The book’s boundaries are porous, and its work open to interpretation; it should be no surprise that later readers would, like Quarles browsing Benlowes’s library, treat his books as instruments to pick up and play.

Two particularly interesting hybrid cases display the competing desires that have adulterated Theophila over time. The first is a copy at Williams College, noted as Ex dono Authoris, a gift from the author, on a flyleaf.160 Still in a binding stamped with Benlowes’s arms, it roughly follows the St. John’s College variant in the placement of images: it includes the vestigial frontispiece of Theophila at prayer in canto 2 and Theophila stomping the serpent in canto 4. However, when the binding was repaired, the owner inserted blank leaves where other engravings were thought to go, and then labeled and numbered them. Two of these leaves have the engravings carefully cut out and pasted in the center; the rest are empty but for their penciled title and placement notes, awaiting the time when that plate is found and repurposed for a second time. By adding these blank leaves, the owner imagines that an engraving’s absence is a gap or a loss rather than the product of variance, and thus grafts a later version of Theophila onto his own earlier variant. In so doing, he invents a composite that, according to the evidence available now, did not seem to exist in Benlowes’s own time.

The second copy, now at Columbia Library, shows a similar impulse.161 Having sat in the library’s open stacks for many years, it lacks many engravings, and those that are present deviate widely from other templates: the etching for canto 1 sits opposite the title page, Adam and Eve are juxtaposed with Mens Authoris, and Hollar’s “Winter Woman” has floated to the second half of the text. However, one particular lacuna bothered its owner, possibly a Columbia librarian: leaf O2 is missing. It has been supplied in manuscript on four interleaved pages that double the leaf, following the example led by the Grenville volume at the British Library, which may have been the copyist’s source. More, elements like canto 9’s title, the engraved plate of verse, and some words printed in large caps have been traced on tissue paper and pasted to the manuscript leaf. The result is a quasi facsimile transcription that amalgamates the text and its design, giving the reader a flavor for Benlowes’s exuberant typography without exactly reproducing the page. In the hybrid copies at Williams College and Columbia, the compiler’s error—insofar as we can call it that—is to misread variance, and to do so twice: first by interpreting alternative arrangements as a lack, and second by using another, inevitably different copy of Theophila to fill it. As the nineteenth century grappled with the queerness of Benlowes’s bookwork, two competing models of the printed book and readers’ desire for completeness butt heads.

Aiding these later efforts to repackage Theophila were new systematic bibliographies like William Lowndes’s Bibliographer’s Manual of English Literature (1853), the first work of its kind and an important precursor to the Short Title Catalogue. Lowndes describes Theophila with the somewhat exhausted bewilderment that most of its readers feel, as a “very extraordinary and rare Book” that “is seldom found complete,” before proceeding to outline its many “engravings and decorations.”162 He missed a few that are present in some variants, and the Grolier Club followed with a lengthier list in its 1905 catalogue.163 The Grolier numbers are now the standard reference in most MARC (Machine Readable Cataloging) records, which judge a particular copy according to how many are present, with a complete set of engravings often suggesting, with little evidence, that the volume must be more special, perhaps even an uninscribed presentation copy. Of course, these efforts to fix the order of plates, fill a book’s gaps, or measure its material integrity do little to help us understand Benlowes’s practice as a publisher and poet. Benlowes worked by principle and by design, but never according to the kinds of systems and standards that nineteenth-century cataloguers or collectors attempted to impose, or more often simply invented for Theophila. At the same time, it would be equally foolhardy to assume that the critic today can easily sweep away the fragments of old seller’s catalogues that line the endpapers of extant copies, erase the pencil markings noting where a plate “should” go, and thereby grasp Benlowes’s original intentions. Theophila always was, and remains, a book that vibrates with variance. A permeable system stitched together by a poetics of the codex, it invites readers to constellate their own desires with its often startling assemblages of text, image, typography, and material form. That nineteenth-century bibliophiles staged their own fancy for completeness on the platform of Benlowes’s book is, from this perspective, not a failure, but the project’s fulfillment. These remade copies spin one more riff in the boundless choir of Theophila. It remains for us today to decide collectively how we will remediate such unique bookwork in the digital catalogues and databases used by Benlowes’s future readers.

Humphrey Moseley’s Social Network

At the Morgan Library is a copy of Theophila that Benlowes gave as a gift to his bookseller Humphrey Moseley (plate 4). Shortly after, Moseley regifted the book to “his ff[r]eind The statio[ner] Mr Henry Seile,” another purveyor of Theophila, who then gave or sold the book to an unidentified owner. This owner soon set about personalizing this copy. On the title page, he recorded the birth of his son Peter in September 1657 in proud, careful Latin. To the “Winter Woman” plate, which was already inscribed with the couplet “This shewes a Lady should affect a Dresse, / That Modesty & Vertue may expresse,” he added anagrams in English, Latin, and Greek on the name of Sophia Lancaster, expressing her chaste virtue: for instance, “Sophia Lancaster. / A plain chast Rose” (Figure 25). That this Benlowes-bound and inscribed copy of Theophila would change hands between his booksellers so quickly, and that it would be seen as special enough by another contemporary owner to bear the handwritten record of his son’s birth and baptism, points to Theophila’s unique place in London’s bookstalls. On the one hand, it served as a beautiful, bespoke object, not a text so much as a token to be traded in the enduring gift economy that still ran parallel to the emerging capitalist market for printed books. On the other, there was, in reality, nothing special about this particular book. Benlowes used the same binding, even the same inscription, on nearly all presentation copies. Taken together, they look less like the handmade gift books of, for instance, the Elizabethan period, like Esther Inglis’s books of calligraphy or Jane Seager’s sibylline prophecies, and more like a boutique or private publication. Hence following the social life of this presentation copy as it moved between Benlowes’s booksellers and accrued family notes takes us out of Brent Hall and back into the broader world in which Theophila circulated, inviting one final question: how would mid-seventeenth-century readers have encountered such a seemingly idiosyncratic book?

Of the two booksellers that offered Theophila in their shops, Seile was the less prolific and more cautious of the two, publishing about 175 editions in his forty-two years in business. Many of these were reprints of reliable bestsellers, like John Willis’s manuals on stenography, and he tended to work with the same authors more than once, including several of Benlowes’s favorites, like Feltham. It seems possible that someone like Feltham first recommended Seile to him. By contrast, Moseley ran a bigger operation, publishing nearly twice as many books in just thirty-four years. All evidence suggests that Moseley was an ambitious innovator, and many of the features now considered standard in seventeenth-century books were pioneered and promoted by him at his shop, the Prince’s Arms, between 1637 and his death in 1661. He manipulated his books’ preliminaries to cement an image of literary authors and their works as transcendent and monumental, inviting commendatory verses, writing his own prefatory letters, adding authors’ portraits to the fronts of books, and commissioning elaborately emblematic engraved frontispieces to help advertise their contents.164 In the process, he forged relationships with engravers like Marshall, carving out a more stable place for printmakers in the English book trade. He also marketed editions using catalogues tacked to the end of his books and with an eye to his potential buyers.165 For instance, when a copy of John Fletcher’s The Wild Goose Chase was discovered after he had already published Fletcher and Beaumont’s collected Comedies and Tragedies in 1647, Moseley made sure to have it printed in folio—an unusual format for a single playbook—so that readers could add it to the earlier collection.166 He also used serial publication to package the work of lesser-known playwrights into octavo composites of “New Plays,” printing subsequent single playbooks in the same format for easy collecting.167 On the production end of the business, Moseley bought up unsold sheets from other stationers and mixed them with his own to form unacknowledged composite editions. The most notorious example today is one of his editions of Edmund Waller’s Poems (1645; Wing W511), which contains leaves printed for Thomas Walkley’s own edition of Waller’s Workes (1645; Wing W495).168 While none of these practices was invented by Moseley, his consistent program of packaging and promoting royalist literature has led David Scott Kastan to describe him as the publisher most responsible for “allow[ing] an idea of English literature to form and be generally recognized.”169

It is not clear whether Seile and Moseley sold copies of Theophila that Benlowes had made up at Brent Hall, just the printed sheets, or the printed sheets alongside the loose prints for readers to purchase piecemeal, as with Peake’s prints for Bibles. Given the consistency with which extant copies are bound in Benlowes’s arms, it seems likely that, like the “large paper” copies of The Purple Island, Benlowes produced an entire boutique edition himself. He probably set some copies aside to gift or sell to friends, adding custom inscriptions to these volumes, and offered the rest to Seile and Moseley to sell. Regardless, the placement of Theophila beside Moseley’s own composite volumes at the Prince’s Arms puts Benlowes’s seemingly idiosyncratic practices in a new light, making Benlowes the private, rural publisher and Moseley the entrepreneurial London stationer seem almost mirror images of each other. Both were invested in promoting royalist literature, especially the earlier poetry and drama of the century’s first decades, Moseley as publisher and Benlowes as patron. Both understood the added value of preliminary content and engraved illustrations, especially densely symbolic ones, and explored new ways to incorporate them into the technical processes of literary production. And both treated publishing as a practice of compiling works into coherent packages, Benlowes in his boutique editions and Moseley in his serial and made-up publications. Of course, they operated toward almost opposite ends, with their works accruing cultural and literal capital very differently. Moseley presented himself as a stationer, a member of a guild company who sold and published books for profit. Benlowes never saw himself in this light, calling himself not a printer or bookseller, but a composer, or Benevolus the patron; and while he may have made money from his boutique projects, as Schoren suggests in his suit against him, his motives followed his creative and aesthetic fancies. Nevertheless, their similarities of approach and practice point to a common royalist techne, a shared set of actions and uses of publishing technologies that together constitute the dynamic, emergent, and evolving trade in English printed literature in the turbulent decades of the 1640s and 50s.

Comparing Benlowes’s and Moseley’s use of preliminaries illuminates Benlowes’s position within this culture. As we have seen, Theophila swells with accretions. These named connections to printers, poets, and engravers map the social world of the material book: who wrote content for it and who helped in its production.170 When tallied, they offer a rough index of a book’s degree of collaboration within the field of literary production, with a single-author book printed and sold by the same person showing a low level of collaboration and a multi-author book padded with preliminaries and engravings, like Theophila, showing a high degree of collaboration. Even in comparison, this holds true. Of the books that name Moseley as seller or publisher on the imprint, Theophila has the third-highest number of named connections. One other book has the same number, Nicholas Murford’s Fragmenta poetica, a small duodecimo collection of poems with sixty-five pages of verse and fourteen pages of commendatory verse. The only two books with more connections are, not surprisingly, Moseley’s enormous posthumous folios of collected dramatic works: Beaumont and Fletcher’s Comedies and Tragedies (1647) and William Cartwright’s Comedies, Tragi-comedies, with Other Poems (1651). Thirty-seven commendatory verses pad the former and fifty-three the latter, more than twice as many as Benlowes’s or Murford’s books, and of course, many of them address not just the playwrights’ genius but also the stationer’s prowess in bringing the collection to press.

Not only, then, was Benlowes’s swollen book part of a small cadre of similarly bloated, publisher-assembled royalist books of verse, all produced around 1650, but it seems he may have wanted his own bespoke folio to be seen and interpreted alongside these large posthumous collections. One commendatory poem in Theophila even makes a direct connection to Cartwright’s folio and its enormous preliminary apparatus:

To the monumental royalist dramatists being invented by Moseley in ornate portraits and laudatory verse, Benlowes offers Theophila, a figure for infinite and divine desire dispersed across fragments of found images; to the posthumous folio of “fam’d Cartwright,” he offers the urn of her “love’s sacrifice.” In this soft imitation, Benlowes both flatters Moseley as a promoter of a homosocial literary network and critiques the hubris that attends his exaltation of dead poets over the immortal soul, mortal wit over devotion. Thus the very accretions that have caused so many later readers to dismiss Theophila as incomprehensibly odd may have lent the book literal and interpretive weight as it sat alongside other such folios, frontispieces, and authorial portraits in Seile’s and Moseley’s shops.

If Benlowes is imitating Moseley’s strategies, he nevertheless does so from his position as a rural poet and publisher, more committed to his own circle of close male friends and collaborators than to the institutions and ideologies that motivated the stationer. This becomes clear when the connections described are graphed as a network, showing links between the books that Moseley published and the printers, booksellers, writers, engravers, musicians, and dedicatees who were directly or indirectly involved in them (plate 5). Consider, for instance, the Beaumont and Fletcher folio. In the linked resource, this monumental volume sits at the center of a ring network showing, in the first circle, the individuals who contributed it. There are no fewer than thirty-five writers, indicated in green, who contributed some kind of text to the volume, most of which was commendatory verse, as well as one engraver, one dedicatee, and two stationers. Of those primary connections, many have a high number of connections to other books published by Moseley, indicated by the black dots on the second ring. Clicking on one of the primary connections—the people involved in the making of the book—recenters the network on that person, and their involvement in Moseley’s other projects becomes clearer. As the graph shows, Howell in particular worked with Moseley on a number of books, writing both his own and commendatory verse for others. A similar pattern can be seen with the network centered on the Cartwright folio.

We might compare these books to the ring network centered on Theophila. Although many people are involved in the book, they tend not to be thickly embroidered into Moseley’s broader circle. This is evident in the relatively few books shown in the outer ring, representing links between Benlowes’s collaborators and other books published by Moseley. Those who wrote commendatory verses are his friends, like Ross, John Gauden, and William D’Avenant, or poets he patronized, like Payne Fisher. His engraver, Barlow, never worked directly with Moseley, despite the stationer’s frequent commissions for plates. The author of the poem above comparing Theophila to Cartwright’s folio was even a family member, one “T. Benlowes,” whose identity is unknown to his biographer, Jenkins; I suspect it may be Benlowes himself, perhaps under the guise of “Theophila Benlowes,” given the verse structure and the poet’s penchant for coterie word games. This low degree of connection to his bookseller’s network demonstrates that Benlowes was, in a sense, self-publishing: he, not Moseley, commissioned and assembled the pieces of the book. But it also evinces his overall attitude toward the work that books might do. A country gentleman, Benlowes designed fabulously elaborate, collaborative books that were, for all that, the almost scribal output of a provincial workshop. He was still the muse of Quarles’s engraving, exclaiming from Finchingfield, “We sing together.”