Volume 85, Number 1  Spring 2022

ARTICLES 

Introduction: Performance and the Paper Stage, 1640–1700
Emma Depledge, Rachel Willie

THE SECOND HALF OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY was marked by attempts to limit access to the London theaters and by important developments in the trade in playbooks. The public theaters were closed when civil war broke out in 1642, and they remained closed for eighteen years. The punishments for performing plays during the ban were severe; as ordinances for theater closure state, punitive measures included the confiscation of profits and costumes, public whipping, arrests, and fines for audience members. The theaters were reopened shortly after the monarchy was restored in 1660, but only two playhouses were licensed for performance in London for most of the period 1660–1700, with their managers—William Davenant (Duke's Company) and Thomas Killigrew (King's Company)—to "suffer no rival companies."

 

Foreword: Early Printed Responses to the Closing of London's Playhouses, 1641–43
Christopher Highley

IN ONE OF EARLY MODERN ENGLAND's most unlikely volte-faces, the notorious antitheatricalist William Prynne penned a tract defending the public stage. Published in 1649, Mr William Prynn His Defence of Stage-Plays reversed the same author's landmark denunciation of theater in his Histrio-mastix. The Players Scourge, or, Actors Tragædie (1633). Prynne's reference in the earlier work to "Women-Actors, notorious whores" was widely seen as glancing at Henrietta Maria's participation in court plays; as a result, he was quickly condemned by the court of Star Chamber to stand in the pillory and have his ears "trimmed." Prynne's outrage in the 1630s at what he considered the growing authoritarianism of the king, and the threats from bishops and a Catholic queen, had turned by 1649 into alarm at "a Tyrannical, abominable, lewd, schismatical [and] hæretical Army" that not only held the king captive but also controlled Parliament following Pride's Purge of its moderate members in December 1648.

 

Ladies Rampant: Thomas Middleton's Two New Playes in the English Republic
Justin Kuhn

This essay examines the joint publication of Thomas Middleton's More Dissemblers besides Women (1614) and Women Beware Women (1621) as Two New Playes in protectorate England. Scholars have highlighted these Jacobean plays' sympathetic treatment of female characters and Middleton's interest in the plight of women generally. When these two plays were published together in 1657, however, their depiction of gender-based hierarchies gained new meaning and significance. Instead of critiquing patriarchal oppression, the plays helped to define the republican body politic as exclusively masculine, promoting a patriarchal model of republican governance at a time of unprecedented political participation among women.

 

Holland House in the 1650s: Evidence and Possibilities of Interregnum Theatrical Entertainment
Christopher Matusiak

According to James Wright's Historia Histrionica (1699), when professional stage players were prohibited from acting publicly during the English civil wars, they gravitated toward aristocratic residences, "in particular Holland-house at Kensington." This essay identifies the experiences of Holland House's principal proprietor, Isabel Rich (née Cope), first Countess of Holland, as the principal sponsor of these clandestine Kensington performances. Motivating her patronage, the essay argues, were the countess's obligations within an aristocratic moral economy; contemporary nostalgia for the prewar King's Men; the postwar affective dimensions of "mirth"; and investment in theater as a form of passive resistance to the authority of the new English republic.

 

The Paper Feast in Late Stuart London: Feast Tickets, Advertisements, Songs, Sermons, and Entertainments
Newton Key

Late Stuart London hosted a variety of semipublic feasts; the most common were for those born in a particular county or town, but others fêted alumni or those sharing a patronymic. Although the antecedents of these feasts extend to the early seventeenth century, the number of such feasts expanded from the 1650s onward. And the printed ephemera associated with these feasts—newspaper advertisements, sermons, printed tickets or forms, poems, songs, and even a playbook—were new. This essay explores the performative roles of this feast ephemera, from publicizing feasts, to commemorating the event, to providing charity circulars, to creating a wider community than that formed solely by commensality.

 

Ballads, Tudor Vagabonds, and Roundhead Reputations: The Restoration Afterlife of Cook Laurel
Rachel Willie

This essay examines how ballad song was appropriated to present the demise of the Rump Parliament and commemorate the restoration of the monarchy. Songs not only provide a tune through which words can be performed but also weave together disparate texts through memory of past utterances and performances. The tune "Cook Laurel" establishes a mnemonic connection between parliamentarian figures and ubiquitous rascals in Elizabethan folklore and in Ben Jonson's Gypsies Metamorphosed, performed in 1621. This use of song emphasizes and consolidates representations of parliamentarians as rogues, thus offering royalists a way to lament the regicide and to celebrate the Restoration.

 

Proliferating Performance, Propagating Print: The Many Lives of Restoration Drama
Stephen Watkins

This essay explores the myriad stage and paper engagements with one of the most popular plays of the Restoration period: William Davenant and John Dryden's The Tempest, or the Enchanted Island (1670). It examines the flurry of printed materials circulated in the wake of the theatrical production, tracing The Tempest's migration from performance to print and back again. By charting how audiences and readers encountered the play beyond the playhouse, Stephen Watkins argues that we will begin to more accurately assess the role that commercial drama played in the cultural and imaginative lives of the people it originally entertained.

 

Aphra Behn's Adaptations: Paper and Stage Sources for The Rover (1677) and Sir Patient Fancy (1678)
Claire Bowditch, Elaine Hobby

As early as 1687, Gerard Langbaine noted the tendency of the most prolific Restoration playwrights to borrow from a plurality of sources for a single play. While Langbaine's identifications of playwrights' source materials, or "thefts," have been widely expanded upon in recent decades, the precise nature (and implications) of such borrowings have been underexplored. This essay will demonstrate how close comparison between a Restoration play and its paper stage sources contributes to an understanding of what might be at issue in such "thefts." This essay's focus is on two plays by Aphra Behn: The Rover (1677) and Sir Patient Fancy (1678).

 

The King's Servants in Printed Paratexts, 1594–1695
Heidi Craig

This essay examines cast and actor lists, as well as other allusions to actors in prologues and epilogues, in plays printed and reprinted between 1594 and 1695. Heidi Craig addresses the evolution of attempts to record actors' involvement in print in the seventeenth century, focusing on three distinct moments in playbook publishing: before 1642, during 1642–60, and after 1660. Analyzing cast and actor lists in collections and in single-text playbooks printed to 1695, Craig argues that they function as marketing devices and as documents of theater history, revealing how revivals and print format influenced contemporary interest in the theatrical past.

 

Francis Kirkman, Theatrical Historian
Francis X. Connor

The authors staged most frequently during the first decade of the Restoration were John Fletcher, William Shakespeare, and Ben Jonson, codifying the post-Restoration critical history of the English theater around the "triumvirate of wit." However, patrons also saw plays by nontriumvirate authors, and publishers played an essential role in the formation of the English theatrical canon, notably by issuing catalogs. Francis Kirkman produced two of the most comprehensive and influential play catalogs of the late seventeenth century and can be identified as one of the first British literary figures to take an interest in theater that postdated classical writers but predated the "modern" triumvirate.

Volume 84, Number 4  Winter 2021

ARTICLES 

Birdsongs and Sonnets: Acoustic Imitation in Renaissance Lyric
Micha Lazarus

Nightingale poetry draws on an ancient literary topos that attributes human meaning to the pure voice of birdsong. Yet a branch of this tradition pulls in the opposite direction, in which the ancient simile between human and bird instead collapses semantics into sound. Largely neglected in existing scholarship, this extraordinary family of poems, musical settings, and ad sonumtranslation moves among and between the languages of Renaissance Europe, expanding the work of “imitation” and demanding new strategies of reading lyric.

To listen to a performance of “The Nightingale” by the Choir of Trinity College, Cambridge, directed by Stephen Layton, on March 17, 2018, follow this link: https://muse.jhu.edu/resolve/154.

 

Contesting Reformation: Truth-Telling, the Female Voice, and the Gendering of Political Polemic in Early Modern Scotland
Laura A. M. Stewart

Complaining women overheard in conversation was a trope deployed in Renaissance literature to criticize public figures and hold them to account. This essay discusses why, and with what effect, an anonymous author used a female persona known to readers of the popular sixteenth-century satirist Robert Sempill in order to comment on the political crisis generated in Scotland by demonstrations against the imposition of the Prayer Book in 1637 and the signing of the 1638 National Covenant. Drawing on interdisciplinary studies of the polemical battle over the reputation of Mary, Queen of Scots, the essay will show how presbyterians appropriated the figure of the lowborn female truth-teller to propagate a partisan narrative about the meaning and interpretation of Scotland’s Reformation.

 

Politics, Law, and Constructive Authorship: John Freke and “The Most Infamous Libel That Ever Was Written”
Geoff Kemp

This essay uncovers the use of constructive authorship as a political-legal strategy aimed against oppositional writing under the censorship regime of Charles II in seventeenth-century England. Constructive authorship is defined as the tactic of framing someone as author who is not the author, applying the “logic” that the author is the last discoverable source, principally as a threat in seeking to expose the real author to punishment. The process is illuminated by a detailed examination of a case in which it was notably attempted: the inquiry in 1676 into authorship of the satirical verses known as “The Chronicle” or “The History of Insipids.” Subsequently ascribed to Rochester, the poem was reattributed in the late twentieth century to the young lawyer John Freke on the basis that in 1676 he was “presumed to be the Author” when arrested. The essay demonstrates that literary-historical scholarship mistook a strategy of actively constructing authorship for the fact of authorship, unaware of how the tactic unraveled later in the year, in a case that also featured a youthful Jacob Tonson as prosecution witness and Andrew Marvell as interested observer. The outcome confirms the need for a critical stance toward the construction of authorship that includes a conception of the real author, asking not least whether the alleged author was framed.

Secret Writing and the Popish Plot: Deciphering the Shorthand of Sir George Treby
Andrea McKenzie

This essay examines the previously undeciphered shorthand notes of Sir George Treby, a Whig MP and lawyer and the chairman of the House of Commons Committee of Secrecy investigating the Popish Plot (1678–81). Andrea McKenzie’s exposition of how she cracked Treby’s particular system of “secret writing,” and the challenges, features, and practical principles of early modern stenography more broadly, will prove useful to other scholars attempting to decode seventeenth-century shorthand. Not least, these documents provide a fascinating snapshot of the private thoughts of one of the principal Whig opponents of Charles II and James II during two watershed moments in British history: the Exclusion Crisis and Tory Revenge.

“Here in Britain”: William Fleetwood, His Welsh Translators, and Anglo–Welsh Networks before 1717
Marion Löffler

This essay explores the circumstances, content, and locus of the first two privately financed political translations into Welsh. Published in 1716 and 1717, both rendered a 1716 anti-Jacobite thanksgiving sermon preached by William Fleetwood, bishop of Ely, into Welsh. An interlude will engage with a cross-genre English verse translation, also done in 1716. Whereas Fleetwood’s text, the 1716 Welsh translation of it, and the cross-genre translation pursued a radical Whig agenda, the 1717 translation of Fleetwood into Welsh took care to remove the most radical content of his sermon. All four texts, however, focused on advertising a Protestant nation centered on a national church and the House of Hanover. The present analysis contributes to explaining how Wales’s separate cultural identity was confirmed while being bound politically into a Hanoverian nation demarcated by the Anglican Church. It explores the uncharted Welsh-language dimension of early eighteenth-century British pamphleteering, non-elite Anglo–Welsh cross-border communication networks, and the role that cultural entrepreneurs and provincial publishing centers like Shrewsbury played in not only disseminating metropolitan ideas but also enabling wider participation in the political discourse.

 

NOTES AND DOCUMENTS

Samuel Daniel’s Life and Circumstances: New Findings
John Pitcher, John Gaisford

This essay considers Daniel in the context of his career-long dependence on elite patrons and the importance to him of his social reputation. The authors show how, when Daniel was threatened in 1605 by overwhelming disgrace, he mounted a determined self-defense; they also demonstrate the way in which his social value was measured by his contemporaries and the efforts he made to enhance his worth. Drawing on published works, letters, newly discovered archival documents, and surviving materials such as portraits, seals, and monumental inscriptions, the essay revises the assessments by biographers and scholars, giving new insights into the most elusive question: What was Daniel’s true sense of self-worth?

Volume 84, Number 3   Autumn 2021

ARTICLES 

Introduction: Moving Landscapes in the Transatlantic World
Stephen Bending, Jennifer Milam

OVER THE LAST FIFTY YEARS, some of the most compelling work on designed landscape on both sides of the Atlantic has focused on its symbolic power, on its ability to speak of nation and of national imaginings.1 Such histories of garden design, however, have also remained trapped within these imaginings of national landscapes and their geographies. This special issue explores the apparently "national" character of gardens in the context of their transatlantic connections during the long eighteenth century; here, we focus on shared cultures and outlooks, even as we recognize the powerful influence of local geographies and claims of national distinction. Central to this project is understanding designed landscape as constructed and contested by communities that defined themselves both by what they shared and by how they differed. Our aim is to explore the experiences of location and dislocation that might have played out on both sides of the eighteenth-century Atlantic world.

Disclosure and Unveiling of Nature in European and Early American Gardens
John Dixon Hunt

All landscape designs move—by pleasing people, or by enabling them to see the same materials in different ways in other places. One of the attributes of design is that it reveals the possibilities of the natural materials involved, a theme much taken up by Pierre Hadot's The Veil of Isis, here used to suggest some European models; but these models of unveiling changed when European design was adopted in America. Two Philadelphia gardenists, John Bartram and Francis Daniel Pastorius, are used to suggest the new ways in which nature was "unveiled" for a new population.

Production, Power, and the "Natural": Differences between English and American Gardens in the Eighteenth Century
Tom Williamson

Garden historians have often emphasized the divergent development of designed landscapes in America and England in the course of the eighteenth century. This essay argues that the extent of that divergence in the period before about 1760 has been exaggerated, largely as a consequence of misconceptions about the real nature of English gardens. Only after 1760 did landscape design on both sides of the Atlantic really follow different trajectories, for reasons that were essentially social and ideological in character.

A Transatlantic Dialogue: The Estate Landscape in Britain, the Caribbean, and North America in the Eighteenth Century
Jonathan Finch

This essay explores the contingent relationships between landownership and status in Britain, the Caribbean, and the East Coast of North America across the long eighteenth century. In Britain, where land was scarce, land was the measure of wealth and status, and the creation of landed estates bound the ruling elite together. As the global economy expanded, driven by colonialism, new relationships were embedded within very different cultural landscapes. In the Caribbean, plantation landscapes were high-risk investments that relied on enslaved labor to ensure returns on highly capitalized production. In America, the availability of land recast the relationship between improvement, landownership, and labor. Land played an important role in defining newfound freedoms increasingly at odds with coercion and enslavement.

"Without Partaking of the Follies of Luxury and Ostentation": Virtue, Nature, and the Human Presence at Mount Vernon
Joseph Manca

George Washington shaped his estate at Mount Vernon to indicate his moral position as an individual and as the leader of a new nation. He subscribed to the Scottish Enlightenment idea that the lure of luxury and the vice of ostentation were at the heart of personal ruin and the downfall of nations. In his landscape, he avoided luxury, and even removed or reduced human presence, including that of enslaved people. While Washington's descriptions emphasized Mount Vernon's rustic and unpretentious character, visitor accounts indicate that Washington's gardens achieved an elegance and fine sense of style, with a modesty and sobriety fitting the leader of a virtuous republic.

"The Last Polish of a Refined Nation": Philadelphia and Garden Art in the Atlantic World
Emily T. Cooperman

This essay explores notions and mechanisms of garden design in colonial and early national Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, addressing whether garden creators looked beyond the immediate region to conventions of design and design practice in the Atlantic world. Although the city was among the most prosperous and populous areas of settlement in the North American colonies by the mid-eighteenth century, information about Philadelphia gardens is remarkably slim, and thus we must contend with what this paucity conveys about them. Narratives of the inevitable progress of the garden creation process toward professionally designed, suburban landscape have tended to cast either a pejorative light on other processes or led to those processes and motives for them remaining unrecognized. In order to begin to develop other narratives of garden creation, this essay addresses the role of owners and garden-makers who differ from this model, looking at the religious ideas of early estate owners, the relationship between the British elite and garden owners, and the role of the earliest American garden artists and professional plantsmen.

Moving Landscapes to Saint-Domingue, Jamaica, and Ireland: Plantations, National Identity, and the Colonial Picturesque
Finola O'Kane

The traditional opposition between French and British landscapes—one the product of absolute monarchy, represented by Versailles; the other a marker of the ideals of a free parliament, encapsulated in the landscape garden—is well known. But how did the polarization of two national landscape types percolate down to their colonial possessions, particularly their highly exploitative landscapes? Maps, images, and the landscapes themselves indicate that the French colonial landscapes were more honest and unveiled than their British counterparts, whereas the ambivalence of Irish-Caribbean plantations to French and British narratives of landscape history may reveal an acutely paradigmatic interpretation of colonial space.

"A Reciprocal Exchange of the Productions of Nature": Plants and Place in France and America
Elizabeth Hyde

This essay explores the meaning of European plants in American gardens, and of American plants in French gardens, in the context of eighteenth-century French–American botanical exchange. Such exchanges, carried out in the Revolutionary Era, reveal Americans' eagerness to use plants to bring America into the intellectually and aesthetically cosmopolitan European cultural world as well as Europeans' simultaneous use of American plants to achieve colonial power in the world and to suit an aesthetic that communicated and reinforced that power. At the nexus of fashion, scientific curiosity, and geopolitics, transatlantic plants became potent vehicles of power.

The Transatlantic Garden in Philadelphia, ca. 1800
Therese O'Malley

Rembrandt Peale's Rubens Peale with a Geranium (1801) is a well-known and much-studied painting, but the story of the flowering plant Rubens Peale cradles opens a new avenue of research. Commonly known as the scarlet geranium, Pelargonium inquinans is indigenous to southern Africa; its prominence in this painting invites questions about non-native plants in late-colonial and early republican America. Much attention has been given to the Anglo-American passion for North American flora in the long eighteenth century. However, an increasing flow of plants from Africa, China, and Australia shifted botanical interest and horticultural taste, changing the character of garden-making permanently within the next few decades.

Landscape Vertigo
Jill H. Casid

Taking up the challenge of comprehending the history of gardening in the Atlantic world through the frame of "moving landscapes" demands that we confront the wake of the unfinished histories of transatlantic slavery, settler coloniality, and dispossession. Such a confrontation obliges us to reckon with the spectral violence of landscaping in the making of the Atlantic world, or what I call landscape vertigo. In understanding landscape vertigo not only as a matter of effects and affects but also as a call for praxis, I lay out four propositions for understanding landscaping as machine of necropower.

Gardens Fragmented
Rachel Crawford

The topos of the English cottage garden had become, by the end of the eighteenth century, a British ideal, its horticultural verbiage entwined in certain "traditional" georgic poems, though not those written by laborer poets. Garden fragments advanced an audience's proclivity to read georgics not merely as authentic, but unified, whereas their structure is founded on digression. The illusion of coherence is paradoxically maintained through juxtaposition and fragmentation, strategies reliant on readerly impulse to interpret georgic in terms of integration rather than assemblage; verse coheres because of grammatical tactics rather than internal logical strategy.

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.

Women, Oral Culture, and Book History in the Romantic-Era British Archipelago: Charlotte Brooke, Anne Grant, and Felicia Hemans
Leith Davis

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

 

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Volume 83, Number 2  Summer 2020

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Volume 83, Number 1  Spring 2020

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"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 The Mayor of Garret without the Election: What Promptbooks Can Tell Us about Provincial Theater
Jane Wessel

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

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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