Volume 84, Number 1 Spring 2021
PREFACE
Women, Book History, and the Long Eighteenth Century: Taking Stock, Moving Forward
Betty A. Schellenberg, Michelle Levy
THIS SPECIAL ISSUE of the Huntington Library Quarterly aims to present new knowledge about the cultural, historical, and economic significance of female labor in manuscript and print production and circulation throughout the long eighteenth century. The interdisciplinary field of book history has at times been narrowly understood to refer only to print production of the codex form in the era of movable type, along with its supporting technologies and social contexts. In keeping with more recent approaches, we take book history's area of inquiry to encompass textual arti-facts in their broadest material and historical manifestations, and in every aspect of their production, circulation, and reception.
Introduction
Invisible Women, 1983–2021
Margaret J. M. Ezell
ONE OF THE MANY PLEASURES of attending a symposium1 where there are no concurrent sessions is the natural, ongoing conversations that arise over its course as panelists connect with each other about their topics, about the challenges of their work, and about the strategies for negotiating them. While many of the writers discussed in the "Women in Book History" symposium were already familiar to me—from Elizabeth Montagu, Charlotte Smith, Eliza Haywood, and Frances Burney to Dorothy Wordsworth and Mary Wollstonecraft—I also encountered what one speaker termed "a multitude of stars," also called by some "obscure women": women known only to their family circle or their immediate social group. At this symposium, I was the wrap-up speaker in the program; as I listened, I found myself recalling and reflecting on some of my own first encounters some thirty years ago with obscure women writers, evolving methodologies, and our findings back then.
Section 1: Theorizing Women’s Book History as Feminist Practice
Restoring Authority for Women Writers: Name Authority Records as Digital Recovery Scholarship
Kirstyn Leuner
Personal name authority records in the Library of Congress Name Authority File (LCNAF), which feeds directly into the Virtual International Authority File, are valuable for recovering women writers whose texts are electronically circulated yet whose identities as authors and people are often difficult to research. Using The Stainforth Library of Women's Writing as a case study, this essay encourages close collaboration with catalog librarians who are certified by the Name Authority Cooperative Program to create and contribute name authority records to the LCNAF for lesser-known women writers. This methodology can advance feminist recovery scholarship by curating a global women's book history that values women's identities on and beyond the page.
Revising the Professional Woman Writer: Mary Wollstonecraft and Precarious Income
E. J. Clery
Mary Wollstonecraft's experience as a female staff writer in the publishing workplace was apparently unique in her time. This essay examines debate on the category of the professional woman writer and reconsiders its relevance to Wollstonecraft's authorial career, using correspondence with her publisher, Joseph Johnson, to argue for the applicability of the concept of the precariat. Focusing on precarious income in the literary marketplace enables a new appreciation of Wollstonecraft's feminism at the intersection of gender and class, particularly of the way she foregrounds issues of workplace sexual discrimination and harassment in her final publication, The Wrongs of Woman: Or, Maria (1798).
Dorothy Wordsworth's Decomposing Compositions: Preservation, Loss, and the Remediation of the Modern Manuscript
Kandice Sharren
In "Floating Island at Hawkshead, An Incident in the Schemes of Nature," a poem dated to the late 1820s, Dorothy Wordsworth (1771–1855) expresses, resists, and embraces ephemerality. She imagines an island breaking off from the shore and eventually vanishing, when it becomes "[b]uried beneath the glittering Lake" where "the lost fragments shall remain, / To fertilize some other ground." Reading this poem as a commentary on the fragmentary nature of both the archive and posthumous literary circulation, especially as it relates to the processes of remediation, this essay uses the poem's media history to account for the biographical construction of Wordsworth as a private, domestic writer.
Response to Section 1
Naming and Narratives of Authorship in Women's Book History
E. J. Clery, Kirstyn Leuner, Kandice Sharren
AUTHORSHIP is a fraught category at the intersection of feminist literary history and women's book history, a node for the often-overlooked dialogue between them. The cross-disciplinary conversation has made women's book history conceptually fertile and methodologically inventive, and it has led to shifts in the narratives and classifications within feminist literary scholarship. Scholars privilege the category of "author" in feminist recovery projects, even while the implied agency of authorship is diluted by methodological emphases on the social production of texts as objects and, increasingly, large textual corpuses gathered into datasets for distant reading. With their focus on authorship, the three essays in this section disclose productive tensions between literary and book histories.
Section 2: Reading Women as Manuscript Authors and as Editors
"Rummaging, Sorting, Selecting, Preserving or Destroying": Frances Burney d'Arblay as Editor
Peter Sabor
Frances Burney d'Arblay (1752–1840) published her final novel, The Wanderer, in 1814. For the remainder of her life, she was engaged in three massive editorial projects, only one of which was brought to completion. This essay is concerned primarily with d'Arblay's editing of her own letters, focusing on a ten-year stretch of material: the period from 1802 to 1812 that she spent in France, initially as a visitor and then as a virtual prisoner of Napoleon. I am concerned with aspects of her editing that have been largely ignored: d'Arblay's prioritization of the letters available to her, the headnotes that she provided for them, and her retrospective insertions of additional material.
Eliza Fletcher's Private Authorship
Pam Perkins
This essay discusses the writing of Eliza Dawson Fletcher (1770–1858), a participant in the literary circles of early nineteenth-century Edinburgh. Though mainly remembered now, if at all, as a hostess and an observer of the scene, Fletcher was also a writer of poetry, verse drama, and autobiographical prose. While she published none of this material, she circulated it both in manuscript and, in one case, in a privately printed volume, among family and friends. Fletcher demonstrates the possibility, even into the early nineteenth century, of building a literary reputation and career at the margins of manuscript and print.
Manuscript Fiction and the Survival of Scribal Practices in the Age of Print
Emily C. Friedman
This essay is based on an assembled corpus of anglophone works of fiction not printed during the author's lifetime. Many of these texts have been detached from their moorings of author, recipient, or even geographic origin. Emily C. Friedman discusses what we can and cannot say about manuscript fiction during the age of print—where there is consensus and an existing knowledge base, and where there are still unknowns. She focuses on some reasons why a work might not have entered print, and why an author of fiction might have considered scribal publication or circulation superior to print. She also considers the work that fan studies has done to describe a wider array of circulation methods. While technology changes, many of the challenges remain the same for writers, especially women writers.
Response to Section 2
Authorial Choice and Modes of Circulation
Emily C. Friedman, Pam Perkins, Peter Sabor
ALL THREE OF THESE ESSAYS explore authorial choice—particularly, the choice to withhold part or all of a text from print. Peter Sabor and Pam Perkins examine this issue through specific case studies. Sabor discusses Frances Burney d'Arblay's neglected labor as editor of her own correspondence and that of her father during the final decades of her life. Perkins focuses on Eliza Dawson Fletcher's production of works that circulated among Edinburgh's literary elite but either did not pass into print or were not originally intended for commercial sale and distribution. Emily C. Friedman's essay pulls back from the individual case study to consider the production of manuscript fiction more generally.
Section 3: Reconstructing Women’s Work in the Book Trades and Social Networks
Women's Labor in the Mid-Eighteenth-Century English Literary Economy
Kate Ozment
This essay explores the careers of two mid-eighteenth-century Englishwomen—Elizabeth Boyd and Eliza Haywood—who wrote commercial literature and sold pamphlets and ephemera in retail shops. It argues that their careers put into question the emphasis that literary scholars have placed on writing as their primary occupation and instead suggest that, as commercial writers, they worked as members of the book trades who could leverage writing alongside other forms of labor to create various profit streams. Studying Boyd and Haywood uncovers gendered structures that influenced the trade positions that women were able to move in and out of easily. Their stories are less about marginality than about the use of gendered identities as tools; gender was one important factor among many that influenced how women moved within and without the midcentury literary economy.
Female Booksellers at the End of the Long Eighteenth Century
Michelle Levy
This essay presents case studies of three female booksellers—Ann Lemoine (fl. 1786–1820), Elizabeth Newbery (1745/6–1821), and Martha Gurney (1733–1816)—in an effort to disrupt prevailing narratives about women's waning involvement in the book trades over the long eighteenth century. Each of these women demonstrates astonishing productivity, longevity in the trade, and innovation and diversity in their publications. By uncovering women's durable presence in the book trades, the variety of roles they undertook, the range of books (both in terms of genre and format) they produced and disseminated, and the multiple strategies, both commercial and semicommercial, they devised to circulate publications, we encounter women as innovators in sourcing, compiling, marketing, and distributing their wares.
Obscure Women, Obscure Networks, and Women's Book History
Andrew O. Winckles
This essay explores how acts of forgetting in literary and book history take place by suggesting that obscurity is not merely the opposite of being recovered but is instead a powerful and multivalent force that operates in various and complex ways, often inflected by gender. Because obscurity is difficult to trace and define, Andrew Winckles argues in this essay, personal, familiar, and religious networks are an important nexus for studying it. He traces the intertwined lives of Sally Wesley and Marianne Francis as an exercise in discovering some of the conditions of obscurity and more broadly theorizing what it means for women in book history.
Response to Section 3:
Beyond Authorship: Reconstructing Women's Literary Labor
Michelle Levy, Kate Ozment, Andrew O. Winckles
OUR THREE ESSAYS OFFER ATTENTION to women's literary labor outside of authorship, although authorship is the field of activity that, to date, has attracted the most interest and prompted recovery work by literary scholars. The essays present case studies to describe the nature and range of women's activities and agency—in particular, their instrumentality in making, sharing, selling, and distributing books, both in manuscript and print, as well as their participation, through their varied activities, in social, economic, intellectual, and religious networks. The study of women writers has made our own contribution to women's textual history fundamentally possible; it is only through the efforts of authorship-focused women's literary recovery that we are able to understand how the theoretical framework of woman writer imperfectly captures the labor of these subjects. In shifting from an approach focused on women's literary studies to one focused on women's book history, we uncover the values that have shaped our historical understanding of these subjects and their work, and we draw new conclusions.
Section 4: Learning to Count: Women Compiling, Collecting, and Owning Books
My Lady's Books: Devising a Tool Kit for Quantitative Research; or, What Is a Book and How Do We Count It?
Marie-Louise Coolahan
This essay outlines the methodological challenges posed by quantitative analysis of women's book ownership in the early modern period, asking, how do we systematize the defiantly unsystematic? The sources from which we glean evidence of women's relationships with books are eclectic and idiosyncratic. This essay analyzes the function and context of such sources—booklists and catalogs, household inventories, wills and probate inventories, donation registers, ownership inscriptions, and bookplates—in order to identify the ways in which they may skew what we count. Arguing that a combination of methodological transparency with awareness of these potential pitfalls arms us to engage with comparative numbers, the essay concludes by assessing current ideas about the relative size and content of women's book collections. Ultimately, while such incomplete evidence attests to significant levels of book acquisition by women, the gaps that remain show that our current figures underestimate the full extent of their book ownership.
Women's Book Collecting in the Eighteenth Century: The Libraries of the Countess of Hertford and the Duchess of Northumberland
Melanie Bigold
The long eighteenth century is characterized as a watershed moment for women's increased engagement as both readers and writers. Key to understanding that engagement is the phenomenon of the personal library collection. Studying the development of women's personal libraries unearths hidden legacies of reading and reception that revise and extend existing histories. This essay explores the collecting practices and libraries of an aristocratic mother and daughter: Frances Seymour, the Countess of Hertford, later Duchess of Somerset (1699–1754); and Elizabeth Percy, the Duchess of Northumberland (1716–1776). Using six manuscript library catalogs from the Northumberland Archives as a case study, it illuminates trends and issues in the study of libraries, book collecting, and book ownership in the period. These lists have the potential to shed light on the broader question of cultural contributions by eighteenth-century women collectors to the circulation of ideas and the fashioning of taste.
Eighteenth-Century Manuscript Verse Miscellanies and the Print–Manuscript Interface
Betty A. Schellenberg
This essay argues for an expansion of the work of book history at the interface between the magazine and the personal verse miscellany. The manuscript verse miscellany was a widely practiced genre in the eighteenth century but has remained largely invisible to scholars. The genre forms an archive of interest for, among other things, how it adapts to, and exploits, the newly developed eighteenth-century print form of the periodical, especially the magazine. Existing at the intersection of new print forms and established strategies of literary production and networking through manuscript exchange, the verse miscellany reveals how readers, many of them women, "hacked" printed poetry that offered private, transferable affect that they could then repurpose to their own ends. One product of this dynamic exchange is a countercanon of manuscript-based poetry that varies significantly from the established print canon.
Response to Section 4
Rethinking and Re-viewing Data
Melanie Bigold, Marie-Louise Coolahan, Betty A. Schellenberg
THE THREE PROJECTS WE DESCRIBE HERE seek to expand the ways in which we understand women's relationships with texts by theorizing and applying robust methodologies to the study of early modern women's book ownership, eighteenthcentury women's libraries, and women's compilation of manuscript verse miscellanies. This work challenges assumptions and biases in book history—in particular, the perceived absence of evidence in terms of both the texts themselves and the textual and intellectual labor involved in their production. One of the most exciting aspects of women's book history is the variety and scope of "new" source materials hiding in plain sight in libraries and archives around the world.
Section 5: Practicing an Inclusive Women’s Book History
Pressed and Stitched: Empirical Bibliography and the Gendering of Books and Book History
Cait Coker
A growing body of empirical bibliography and critical making aims at re-creating historical practice and interrogating book history through firsthand material means. None of this work has questioned the role or place of gender in the book trades by investigating either how women labored physically or how they were treated in a male-dominated workplace. How does the immediate physical experience of the embodiment of art shift when the person working the press, casting the type, or binding the books is female? This essay draws on experiences in re-creating historical practices to reflect on how gendered work intersects with gendered book history.
This essay considers Charlotte Brooke in Ireland, Anne Grant in Scotland, and Felicia Hemans in Wales, analyzing the various ways in which they promoted their nations' oral culture during what is now called the Romantic era. Examining these women and their intermedial work can help us build a fuller picture of women's contributions to book history throughout the British Isles, as well as better appreciate the role of orality, including voice and song, within a book history tradition frequently oriented toward print and manuscript. The essay also discusses these women writers' subsequent disappearance from their respective national canons, as projects to legitimize the Irish, Scottish, and Welsh nations have focused overwhelmingly on the printed productions of male creative writers.
Critical Pedagogy and Feminist Scholarship in the Archives
Rachael Scarborough King
This essay discusses a collaborative research project undertaken with students from Howard University through the UC-HBCU Initiative, examining the Ballitore Collection in the University of California, Santa Barbara Library's Special Research Collections. Centered on the writings of Irish Quaker Mary Leadbeater, the collection connects to questions of female authorship, abolition, and colonialism, and it highlights how the voices of women and enslaved people are often excluded from archives. Rachael Scarborough King argues that introducing diverse students to the traditionally white fields of book history and eighteenth-century studies produces new insights into questions around the historical study of race, gender, and religion.
Response to Section 5
Minding the Gap(s)
Cait Coker, Leith Davis, Rachael Scarborough King
THIS CLUSTER OF ESSAYS explores women's labor in printing houses; women as composers and collectors of oral culture and national song on the peripheries of the British Isles; and a project to introduce a diverse group of students to a little-known eighteenth-century archive by a little-known eighteenth-century woman. Although the essays address very different subjects, they share common concerns: what has been left out of book historical narratives thus far, and how the perspective of women's book history can reframe those narratives.
Conclusion
Hiding in Plain Sight
Michelle Levy, Betty A. Schellenberg
MARGARET J. M. EZELL BEGINS THIS COLLECTION by recalling the state of women's invisibility in literary studies nearly four decades ago, when multiple strategies of denial, declassification, and diminution had the effect of, if not outright suppression, then "render[ing] the [women and other marginalized writers] and their work invisible." She recollects this history in order to underscore the continuing problem of women's invisibility, even as the literary canon has been enlarged, and the field of inquiry has broadened beyond women's textual history. Ezell notes that the early outcomes of archival recovery in the 1980s and 1990s were the result of acts of defiance, as feminist scholars questioned inherited narratives about whether and what women wrote, and about the significance of that writing; they sought out women's writing even when they were told that there was nothing to be found, and they insisted on the value of what they found even when they were told that there was none.
Volume 83, Number 4 Winter 2020
Special Issue: Frankenstein and Its Environments, Then and Now.
Edited by Jerrold E. Hogle
ARTICLES
Volume 83, Number 3 Autumn 2020
ARTICLES
Volume 83, Number 3 Autumn 2020
ARTICLES
Volume 83, Number 2 Summer 2020
ARTICLES
The Last Early Modern Epyllion: William Sampson’s Love’s Metamorphosis, Or: Apollo and Daphne
Emanuel Stelzer
William Sampson’s Ovidian epyllion Love’s Metamorphosis, Or: Apollo and Daphne, written after 1645, has remained in manuscript only (Harley MS 6947, no. 41, fols. 318–36, British Library) and has received virtually no scholarly attention. It is a willful archaism modeled on Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis. The poem was dedicated to Margaret Cavendish, perhaps on the occasion of her return from her exile on the Continent in 1651. This essay considers why Sampson chose this genre, what his relationship with the Cavendishes was, how he expected the poem to be received in the context of the Civil War and Interregnum, and what the dedication to Cavendish tells us about female readership.
Did Shakespeare Use a Manuscript of Samuel Daniel’s Civil Wars to Write Richard II ?
David S. Weiss
Evidence indicates that Shakespeare may have used a scribal version of Samuel Daniel’s The Civil Wars, rather than the first printed edition, while writing Richard II. There are two extant manuscripts of portions of Daniel’s epic poem. A never-printed stanza in one manuscript employs imagery similar to Shakespeare’s to describe the same invented episode. To investigate possible influence, this essay assesses the dates of the manuscripts, analyzes variants from the printed edition, evaluates the shared imagery, and considers how Shakespeare’s possible use of a manuscript impacts the dating of Richard II. It also identifies social connections between the authors that explain how the playwright could have obtained access to an early version of the poet’s work.
“Be as a Planetary Plague”: Pestilence and Cure in Timon of Athens
Jodie Austin
In William Shakespeare and Thomas Middleton’s problem play, Timon of Athens, the fate of the city hangs in the balance as the eponymous character threatens it with literal and figurative diseases from outside its walls. Strikingly, the plague itself is evoked thirteen times throughout the play, rendering the drama itself exceptional in boldly referring to the disease that ravaged London in 1603, the approximate year in which the play was first performed. Jodie Austin examines the theme of plague in Timon of Athens to argue that Shakespeare and Middleton produced a radical representation of the plague as a force for good—more specifically, as a force designed to scourge the ailing body politic of disorder. Ultimately, her aim is to promote discursive alignment between early modern literary studies and disciplines related to the history of medicine through a close examination of a relatively rare dramatic treatment of plague from the seventeenth century.
The Context for the Text: The Masque Entertainments of the Egerton-Hastings Family
Vanessa Wilkie
Vanessa Wilkie argues that the Egerton-Hastings family had a long-established practice of literary patronage that involved commissioning and hosting masque entertainments in their homes to signal major legal victories and familial career advancements. John Marston’s Entertainment at Ashby marked the 1607 Act of Parliament that ended a major inheritance lawsuit, John Milton’s 1631 Arcades celebrated the family’s victory in the Castlehaven trials, and Milton’s Comus served as the entertainment at the Earl of Bridgewater’s installation as president of the Marches of Wales. This essay introduces Marston’s 1607 masque as part of what should be considered a trio of masques, not just a duo of Miltonic masques, and thus more accurately frames all three occasions and texts. The essay also narrows the possible date range of the performance of Milton’s Arcades. This reading expands our understanding of the genre and function of elite household entertainments and masques.
Writing Time: Charting the History of Clock Time in Seventeenth-Century Diaries
Daniel Patterson
In this essay, Daniel Patterson explores the representation of time in early modern diaries. In particular, he examines the presence and significance of clock time in a previously unknown seventeenth-century diary—that of an unassuming schoolmaster and customs official named George Lloyd (1642–1718). This source is examined alongside well-known diaries by Ralph Josselin, Samuel Pepys, and Constantijn Huygens. Taking the view that all diaries are innately temporal texts, the essay demonstrates that different temporal regimes can be discerned in each of these examples, from the mysterious, providential conception of time presented by Josselin to the quasi-realist narrative mimesis of Pepys. Lloyd, ultimately, was the first diarist to incorporate the new reality of accurate, widely available mechanical time as a fundamental feature of quotidian existence and self-narrative.
In this essay, Emily Vine traces the emergence, re-emergence, and impact of a distinct anti-Semitic narrative of Jewish infanticide and sacrifice by fire that appeared in print in London several times between 1674 and 1732. She identifies and links the versions of this specific narrative and directly connects the re-emergence of the narrative to outbreaks of anti-Semitic violence against the London Jewish community. This essay considers the published accounts themselves alongside evidence of their reception, situating this narrative within the context of the Jewish readmission to England (after 1656) and a wider proliferation of anti-Semitic literature. It analyzes the origins of this rumor, suggests ways in which the accusation was fueled by the misinterpretation of Jewish rituals, and demonstrates the direct effect that it had on Judeo-Christian relations in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century London. It argues that the repeated resonance of this particular narrative, unlike other anti-Semitic literature, lay in the geographical immediacy of the events described, events purported to take place within the streets and alleyways of London, in domestic spaces that ostensibly coexisted with the homes of Christian readers.
Alexander Pope and a Carracci Venus at the Court of James II and Mary of Modena
Timothy Erwin
When Alexander Pope published the 1714 Rape of the Lock, he included a frontispiece that recalls a seated Venus associated with the Carracci Accademia degli incamminati during the seventeenth century. The same iconography informs the author’s description of Belinda at her dressing table and appears in the headpiece for the poem in Pope’s Works (1717). Dating to antiquity, the Venus-adorned theme represents the Carracci academy’s aim to reconcile diverse artistic practice to a theory of formal design. Carracci-school images of the goddess often feature a braid of hair, symbolizing the creation of the beautiful. Via an engraving by Etienne Baudet, Francesco Albani’s Venus at Her Toilet, or The Air (1621–33), served Pope as a prime source of poetic imagery. Timothy Erwin argues that the iconography reaches Pope mediated by figures with ties to James II and Mary of Modena—above all, Anne Finch. Sharing a symbolic order with the braid of Venus, Belinda’s lost lock comes to represent the cultural disappearance of an ideal composite beauty celebrated by the Stuart court of James and Mary.
New Life Records for John Skelton as Rector of Diss, Norfolk (1514 and 1516)
Sebastian Sobecki
This note introduces three new life records for the poet John Skelton. These documents shed light on his life between 1512 and 1516, and they show that Skelton remained in Diss in Norfolk into 1514, and left Norfolk at or shortly before the beginning of 1516. All three documents are plea entries from the Court of Common Pleas. In the first record, Skelton submits a plea of debt against the goldsmith John Page of Bury St. Edmunds in Hilary Term of 1514, and in the second two, the poet appears as a defendant in two suits of debt dating from Hilary Term 1516, filed by the executors of Sir William Danvers. Sebastian Sobecki reproduces, transcribes, and translates all three documents in this note.
Volume 83, Number 1 Spring 2020
ARTICLES
"Longe Stories a Woord May Not Expresse": Tables of Contents in Lydgate's Fall of Princes
J. R. Mattison
John Lydgate's Fall of Princes is one of the longest poems in English, presenting readers—medieval, early modern, and modern—with an expansive sampling of lives of misbehaving monarchs to peruse. The daunting task of approaching this vast text perhaps motivated early readers to employ available technologies of reading to make the process manageable: tables of contents and other content-related lists. Examination of these tables reveals that Lydgate's various readers chose to break the Fall into discrete parts, each table-maker seemingly laying out a different path for reading. One sixteenth-century annotator of the Bodleian Library's MS Rawlinson C. 448 provided the most exhaustive table in manuscript form, not only cataloging his reading habits but also influencing future perusals. Ultimately, these tables represent ways of understanding the complex structure of the poem, departing from the organization imposed by the poem's form in manuscript to develop individual approaches to the literary work.
Civic Catholicism, Military Humanism, and the Decline of Justice in Thomas Lodge's The Wovnds of Ciuill War (1594)
D. Alan Orr
D. Alan Orr considers Thomas Lodge's The Wovnds of Ciuill War (1594) and its relationship to republican ideas during the "second" reign of Elizabeth I (ca. 1585–1603). Although Andrew Hadfield has argued that the play "contains many of the characteristics of republicanism," Lodge's marked skepticism toward Machiavellian-inspired military-humanist values suggests a more ambiguous relationship with early modern republicanism. Lodge was less the "republican," as Hadfield has asserted, than the Catholic, articulating a "civic Catholicism" in which the public observances and rituals of the "old religion" played an integral role in the maintenance of public morality, civil order, and justice.
"Men Are Lived Over Againe": The Transmigrations of Sir Thomas Browne
Jessica Lynn Wolfe
Jessica Lynn Wolfe considers the various and contradictory positions assumed by Sir Thomas Browne on the subject of metempsychosis, or the transmigration of souls, explaining his confusion over the doctrine in terms of his medical, theological, and literary habits of thought. By placing Browne's various discussions of the transmigrations of souls in conversation with other seventeenth-century scientific and religious thinkers, including John Donne, Kenelm Digby, Robert Boyle, and Alexander Ross, her essay seeks to anchor the era's palpable interest in—and its genuine puzzlement over—metempsychosis, in terms of the scientific and medical advances of the late Renaissance as well as more transdisciplinary investigations into the nature of change and perdurance and of community and singularity.
Dialogue and the Church: Beating the Bounds of a Jacobean Via Media?
Joshua Mark Rodda
In this essay, Joshua Mark Rodda reconsiders the early seventeenth-century English Church by way of four dialogues, written by the young conformist Oliver Ormerod and the wayward preacher Henoch Clapham. Within four years, in the first decade of the reign of James I, Ormerod and Clapham each produced a dialogue disputing puritan separation, followed by a matching anti-Catholic work. In their use of form and character, these dialogues demonstrate how the contemporary conscience navigated an unstable settlement, how confessional identity was constructed through encounters with the religious "other," and how the language of moderation was used to characterize and understand the period.
Samuel Foote's farce The Mayor of Garret (1763) satirizes politics and electoral practices by restaging a contemporary parodic event: the mock elections at Garrat. Using two previously unstudied promptbooks for performances in York and Boston, Jane Wessel argues that our understanding of the play is seriously skewed if we look only at the text and the original London performances. These promptbooks reveal that across England and America in the decades following its premiere, the farce was performed without its central satiric scene: the hustings leading up to the election of a mayor. Using the story of The Mayor of Garret without the election as a case study, she argues for the necessity of including provincial performance in the history of British theater and drama.
The Palimpsest Captive: Narratives of Islam, the Essex, and Her Boy in Early Republican Culture
James R. Fichter
This essay considers the American encounter with Islam in the Early Republic through the lenses of Americans' stories about the 1806 destruction of the Essex, a New England merchantman trading in the Red Sea, and the subsequent captivity and conversion of the ship's boy, John Poll, at the hands of the alleged "pirate" Sayyid Muhammad ʿAqil. James R. Fichter traces the shifting, sometimes contradictory features of these stories, demonstrating how changing trade and military relations between the United States and Barbary led to them being interpreted in different ways over time. This essay broadens the geography of scholarship of the early national encounter with Islam beyond North Africa to the Indian Ocean.
NOTES AND DOCUMENTS
Viscounts in Virginia: A Proposal to Create American Noblemen (1619)
E. M. Rose
In 1619, the Virginia Company of London considered a proposal to create a hereditary peerage in the colony. E. M. Rose provides a transcription of the proposal, found among the company's business records. She places the proposal in the context of the desperate efforts of the company to raise funds for overseas settlement, the sale of other titles in the early Stuart period, and the attempts to establish a hereditary peerage in America.
REVIEW ESSAY
Western Europe in the Ottoman World: Media, Mediation, and Intermediaries
Humberto Garcia
Alexander Bevilacqua
The Republic of Arabic Letters: Islam and the European Enlightenment
John-Paul A. Ghobrial
The Whispers of Cities: Information Flows in Istanbul, London, and Paris in the Age of William Trumbull
Daniel O'Quinn
Engaging the Ottoman Empire: Vexed Mediations, 1690–1815
Volume 82, Number 4 Winter 2019
ARTICLES
Introduction: English Diplomatic Relations and Literary Cultures in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries
Joanna Craigwood, Tracey A. Sowerby
This introduction to the special issue situates its essays within the emergent field of literary-diplomatic studies. It fully discusses the state of current knowledge, providing the first chronological overview of the developing relationship between diplomacy and literary culture across two centuries of English history. Among the subjects addressed are the new literary milieux accessed by resident ambassadors; the use of the press to diplomatic ends; new diplomatic genres such as handbooks and letter-books; diplomacy and controversy on the public stage; literary wit in Restoration diplomacy; and the widening audiences for diplomatic literatures at the end of the seventeenth century. It draws out the findings of this special issue on the development of political publics in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, outlining a complex and multidirectional relationship between the government and public sphere; the role of self-interest in motivating engagement with publics; and the role of imitation in entering public debate.
"Lingua Eius Loquetur Mendacium": Pietro Aretino and the Margins of Reformation Diplomacy
William T. Rossiter
This essay examines how Pietro Aretino used the rhetorical practices of ambassadorial exchange to bring the diplomatic periphery into the center. Drawing together a series of episodes in which Aretino had correspondence with, influence on, or direct dealings with the Tudor court and its representatives, William T. Rossiter shows them to be part of a sustained dialogue instigated by Aretino and maintained by his English respondents. Aretino's use of the printing press was a paradiplomatic force that bypassed traditional channels of influence. It gave agency to an individual who would normally be excluded from international negotiations. This demonstrates how the soft powers of paradiplomacy, exercised through the burgeoning print culture of pre-Tridentine Venice with its transnational reach, could serve as effectively as the hard powers of formal negotiations.
Francis Thynne's Perfect Ambassadour and the Construction of Diplomatic Thought in Elizabethan England
Tracey A. Sowerby
Francis Thynne's Perfect Ambassadour, written in 1578, is the earliest surviving English treatise on the role of the ambassador. Thynne's conception of appropriate diplomatic activity was influenced by historical precedent. Thynne drew directly on ancient Greek and Roman authors; he also included information about classical and medieval diplomacy derived indirectly from more recent publications, such as Theodore Zwinger's Theatrum Vitae Humanae. After briefly outlining the content of the treatise, Tracey A. Sowerby assesses the significance of Thynne's method and explains what it tells us about the mediation of diplomatic knowledge. Sowerby then compares it to other early modern diplomatic treatises and Elizabethan ambassadors' understanding of their activities.
Diplomatic Letters as Political Literature: Copying Sir Henry Unton's Letters
Elizabeth R. Williamson
This essay examines the letter-books that record the correspondence of Sir Henry Unton, resident ambassador to Henry IV of France from 1591–92 and again in 1595–96. Several (different) copies of his letter-book survive, raising questions about their origin and their social, political, and antiquarian value. Evidence of textual elision in one copy suggests conscious editing, supporting a theory that diplomatic letters functioned as more than ephemeral carriers of information. The corpus of letters left by an embassy represented its lasting written record, and the compiling of select letters into a discrete collection was one of several reputation management techniques open to the vulnerable aspirant within the competitive political environment of the late sixteenth century.
Killing the Messenger: Diplomatic Translators in Late Elizabethan Culture
Edward Wilson-Lee
Edward Wilson-Lee examines the structural role of translators in the early modern period, both in actual embassies and in literary representations of diplomacy, analyzing a series of episodes that involve the erasure (violent or otherwise) of the translator. He argues that translators posed a threat in their ability to act as a conduit between nation states and cultures and that the erasure of these figures was necessary to preserve ideas of sovereign equality that were central to early modern conceptions of statehood. The different modes of erasure also shed light on a balancing act performed by England in the early modern period, defining itself both against supposedly barbaric Others while at the same time articulating its own identity by aligning itself with the same barbarous Others in proud opposition to Catholic Europe.
The Literary Glocal: Sir Walter Aston between Staffordshire and Madrid
Alexander Samson
England's ambassador in Madrid from 1620 to 1624 and from 1635 to 1638, Sir Walter Aston was a fluent speaker of Castilian and convert to Catholicism. His interest in Spanish literary culture, in circulation of poetry in manuscript, and in translation played a key role in his negotiation of the religious and political differences that affected him and his circle personally and divided the state he served. The Astons' ambivalent position made them valuable intermediaries and at the same time vulnerably peripheral. Alexander Samson identifies a key performance witnessed by Aston in Spain on the eve of the Spanish match that is linked with a sonnet found in Secretary of State Edward Conway's papers and with the later translation by Aston's secretary, Sir Richard Fanshawe, of Antonio Hurtado de Mendoza's play Querer por sólo querer.
Diplomacy, Poetry, and Publics in the Late Seventeenth Century: Elegies for Mary II by George Stepney and Matthew Prior
Joanna Craigwood
Growing political concern for public opinion toward the close of the seventeenth century intensified the demands on diplomats to address multiple publics, and it affected the ways in which diplomats produced and circulated poetry. Drawing on elegies for Mary II and related correspondence by two late seventeenth-century diplomats, George Stepney and Matthew Prior, Joanna Craigwood interrogates these increasing pressures. In composing poems commissioned by their Whig superiors for London publication, the two diplomat-writers faced competing demands from their English readerships, who expected highly conventionalized elegy, and from their international political publics, who had a more satirical take on William III's incapacitating grief following his wife's death. Stepney solved the dilemma by adhering to domestic norms but circulating manuscript satire on the Continent, Prior by paratextual reframing that allowed him to bypass the domestic poetic economy of the elegies. Their concerns, vacillations, and eventual solutions expose the extent to which diplomatic poetry was characterized by an almost obsessive concern with the ways in which a specific time, place, and audience placed particular demands and constraints on their words.
Afterword: Diplomats as Readers and Writers
John Watkins
This afterword by John Watkins draws together argumentative threads from across the essays and places them within the longer-term context of English and British diplomats' engagement with literature. From Niccolò Machiavelli to Henry Kissinger, diplomats and writers on diplomacy have drawn on humane literatures. Pointing out that the rise of what we generally think of as modern diplomacy coincided with the humanistic educational and cultural reforms of the Renaissance, Watkins asks what today's devaluation of humane learning within an increasingly technocratic diplomatic sphere means for our diplomatic future.
English Diplomacy and Literary Writing ca. 1500–1700: A Guide to Further Reading
Joanna Craigwood, Tracey A. Sowerby