Jason McElligott
Over the past decade, pioneering work in an Irish context means that we know much more about women writers. Yet we still know comparatively little about women as readers and participants in book and print culture. Máire Kennedy has initiated research into the practices of women readers in Georgian Ireland, and work by Amy Prendergast on the literary salon in eighteenth-century Britain and Ireland shows what can be done with a sensitive use of a range of historical and literary sources: personal correspondence, family papers, private diaries, and original literary texts.1 Such sources are very sparse for those who wish to explore the female experience in earlier centuries. One potentially very important source has not, as yet, been utilized in any systematic fashion in an Irish context: ownership marks and inscriptions in books owned by women.
Books were often valued as precious objects by their owners in both a financial and cultural sense; they could be rare or expensive items that bore witness to the power and status of their owners. They could have sentimental value in terms of personal and family connections or be important elements of the owners’ religious, political, or national sense of themselves. The range of ways in which books and manuscripts could be valuable meant that owners often inscribed their names and other personal details into texts they owned. As one might expect, we know much more about male ownership of books in every period of history, but in a British context there has long been interest in the ownership of books by women as a subfield of the history of reading and of the history of the book.2
This chapter uses the holdings of Marsh’s Library, Dublin, as a case study of how a broader history of female book ownership might be conceived and executed. It uses a sample of the twenty thousand early modern books in the founding collections to consider how common it is to find books owned by women in collections amassed by men. It examines what types of books these women owned and whether they acquired them actively (by purchase) or passively (by bequest or as gifts). Is it possible to say something about the significance that women might have attached to these books? What might we learn about a woman’s life by examining the books she owned? Apart from the inscription of their names as marks of ownership, did women ever write anything else in their books? Might female-owned books be a useful source for the discovery of manuscript jottings, marginalia, and writings by women? In the context of this particular volume, might these inscriptions and jottings be read as life writing?
Marsh’s Library provides a useful test case because the collection consists of the personal libraries of four scholars (Edward Stillingfleet, Elias Bouhéreau, Narcissus Marsh, and John Stearne), which have remained separate from one another and are almost entirely intact, apart from some thefts that occurred over the centuries. The library has never loaned books to the public. Readers must consult all items in situ. The four collections preserve echoes of their owners’ familial, professional, social, and personal networks in the form of books inscribed with the names of earlier owners. These inscriptions are overwhelmingly male, but they do provide evidence for female ownership. Preowned books usually ended up in the libraries of these four scholars because they were presented as gifts, bequeathed by friends of family, or bought on the secondhand market. Some books were evidently loaned to the scholars by friends or family with the expectation that they would be returned, but they somehow never made their way back to their rightful owners. Many preowned books, usually those published shortly before they came into the hands of our collectors, contain the inscriptions of only one or, sometimes, two previous owners. Some items, however, particularly those published within the first hundred years of the invention of printing, bear evidence of multiple owners across several generations.
Marsh’s Library aims to be the first rare-book library in the world to provide details of provenance and ownership evidence for every item in its collection. In doing so, it is particularly interested in logging every instance in which a female name has been written on or into a book or pamphlet. This project faces a series of well-documented, interlocking methodological problems when trying to assess the meaning and significance of ownership marks. It is evident that not all women (or men) signed their names or left any other marks in their personal books. The absence of a mark of ownership does not, therefore, signify an absence of ownership or a lack of interest on the part of an owner. It is obvious that women (and men) did not own every book that they read, so even a total history of book ownership—were such a thing possible—could not provide evidence about reading and readership in the early modern period. Very many items in rare-book libraries with an ownership mark do not contain any annotations or marginalia that might shed light on how the owners engaged with the text, if they happened to read it. Even if one does find an ownership inscription in a book alongside annotations and marginalia, it is often not possible to link those marks with the person or persons who have inscribed their name(s) into the book. The annotations could have been made by anybody, either before or after the book entered the library. An attempt to understand something about patterns of book ownership among women and girls in the early modern period is not, and cannot be, a history of that most elusive and fleeting of experiences: reading.
The collections in Marsh’s Library have been remarkably static over the centuries. They have not suffered the same depredations as collections in many other libraries, which have been dispersed, depleted, or destroyed over time by a curious mixture of overuse, indifference, recycling, fire or water damage, accidents, and the sheer bad luck of being in the midst of sites of political or military conflict. Sometimes, however, fads in library collection management and a desire to update, rationalize, and make collections “relevant” to contemporary users can cause the loss or deaccessioning of valuable historical material. Until relatively recently, even professional conservators habitually destroyed much provenance information when rebacking and conserving damaged books, because inscription marks were often made on the flyleaves or the front and back boards of books, and these were usually discarded when books were “repaired.” Even when scholars discover instances of female ownership among books that happen to have survived the centuries, it will often not be possible to find out anything about the women involved, let alone how or why they owned or used these books. For all its lacunae, however, a systematic study of ownership marks offers the possibility of breaking new ground in gender history, book history, and the history of possessions and consumerism. It will provide much new evidence for the breadth of book ownership in the early modern period. It will also suggest patterns of ownership, purchases, borrowings, and bequests and may also shed light—if used with proper care—on aspects of the history of reading.
At the time of writing, in early June 2016, staff at Marsh’s Library had worked systematically through all 2,100 books bequeathed by John Stearne for evidence of provenance and ownership. This number constitutes slightly more than 10 percent of the 20,000 books in the core collections. The library began here because books fetched for readers over recent years suggested that an intriguing number of female names were present in Stearne’s collection. No systematic survey of the books in the Stillingfleet, Bouhéreau, and Marsh collections has yet been undertaken, but the details in this article rely on careful observation of ownership marks in over 1,500 books fetched for readers from these subcollections over the past three years. In addition, we have been able to consult a printed list compiled during the 1920s by Newport B. White of signatures found in books in the library.3 This list is by no means exhaustive, and it is now evident that it underrecords instances of female ownership, but when one considers it alongside the sampling across three subcollections and the systematic survey of Stearne’s collection, it is possible to report on the presence of more than sixty female names in nearly fifty different books and pamphlets.
The research on women owners at Marsh’s Library is at a relatively early stage, but it is possible to make some preliminary observations. It may be possible to write a history of books from the early modern period that happen to survive in Ireland, but this is very different from a study of book ownership in early modern Ireland, because only one of the four subcollections in the library (the books of John Stearne) was amassed by an Irish man. By contrast, Edward Stillingfleet was an Englishman who never visited Ireland. His collection was bought for the library after Stillingfleet’s death and then transported across the Irish Sea. Two of the other collections (those of Bouhéreau and Marsh) belonged to men who went to Ireland only late in life. In other words, a book from the early modern period that happens to survive in a repository in Ireland often had no contact with, connection to, or bearing on Ireland in the early modern period. Furthermore, insofar as one might be able to envisage a history of aspects of book ownership in early modern Ireland, this will not be a study of Irish book ownership. There was no distinctly Irish print culture in the early modern period, and that is true whether one chooses to define Irish in a geographic or cultural sense.4 It is perhaps more useful to see books in Ireland being produced and consumed within a broader geographically and culturally British context. So, for example, even the subcollection within Marsh’s Library of the Dublin-born John Stearne is explicitly part of a broader British and Protestant culture, both in terms of the books collected and the assumptions and mindset of the collector himself. This is true of almost all collections of early modern books that happen to survive in Ireland.
It will be possible to reconstruct something of the extent of the engagement with print culture of the Irish Catholic religious who went into exile during this period from the records of their libraries in Irish colleges and institutions spread across the continent. Once again, though, there will be a wider context to this print culture; in this case, it will be explicitly and self-consciously European rather than British. As for educated lay Irish Catholics in Ireland and on the continent, the unfortunate reality of the frequent dispersal and destruction (both deliberate and accidental) of their book collections may mean that it will never be possible to attempt a study of Irish Catholic book ownership in general, let alone that of female Irish Catholics. In the context of Marsh’s Library, it is not evident that any of the more than sixty female names discovered in the books are those of Roman Catholics, and it is currently possible to suggest only that four of these women had any connection with Ireland. As will be discussed later, Grace Marsh was living in the archiepiscopal palace of Saint Sepulchre in Dublin with her English-born uncle in 1695. Jane Westmeath may have been the wife of the First Earl of Westmeath. Margaret Ussher almost certainly lived in Ireland during the 1670s and 1680s, but it is unclear whether she was born there, and Elizabeth Davys emigrated to the kingdom, almost certainly from somewhere in Britain, in May 1677.
The presence of a woman’s name in a book does not always signify her ownership of the item. The name of “Lydia Measton” is written in black in large, thick letters on the flyleaf of a copy of the 1654 pamphlet A Discourse Touching the Spanish Monarchy, but some disjointed scribbles on the same page suggest that her name may have been written by a certain Henry James, who signed his name on December 16, 1659. James’s marks on the flyleaf may also suggest that Measton, at the time he wrote her name, was a patient in a hospital, possibly in Bride Street in Dublin. There was probably a relationship of some type between Henry James and Lydia Measton, and the act of writing her name may have been inspired by ill health on the part of the latter, but the broader context, meaning, and significance of the inscription are lost to history.5 It is equally difficult to decipher the context within which a seventeenth-century hand wrote the words “Sweet Mrs Lucy Cooke” into the back flyleaf of a copy of the 1579 Compendium Scientiae Naturalis.6 It seems unlikely that Cooke would have described herself in these terms, so perhaps the inscription is the product of the admiration of a female friend or relative. It might conceivably be the product of a male named Cooke practicing what his sweetheart’s name would look like if she were married to him. It is also possible that the inscription might refer to the scribbler’s admiration for a married woman of that name. This inscription, like very many other examples of marginalia and annotation, is too fleeting, too fragmentary, and too highly personal to provide us with the necessary context.
There are several books that can be ascribed to a named, identifiable woman at a particular time and place. So, for example, a thick folio volume that contains two antipapal tracts has the name and armorial stamps of a certain Eleanor Beeston on the front and back boards of the book.7 Bookplates as marks of ownership were unknown in the early modern period, but it was relatively common for high-status individuals to have an armorial design stamped onto the covering boards of a book. It was not unknown for women to have their own armorial stamps with their names or crests, but it was unusual and noteworthy, as it suggests the existence of a woman’s library separate in some way from that of her male relatives.8 In the volume stamped with the name of “Eleanor Beeston” in Marsh’s Library, the later of the two polemical texts was published in 1612, so the texts must have been bound during or after that year. The owner may have been the Lady Eleanor Beeston who married Sir Thomas Roe, member of Parliament, in 1614. If this identification is correct, the volume in Marsh’s Library must have been stamped with her name between 1612 and her marriage in 1614, when her surname would obviously have changed. The inscription “Grace Marsh Her Booke 1689” is written into the front of a quarto volume in Marsh’s Library. The volume consists of two separate verse works from the 1610s. Grace was the niece of the founder of the library, Archbishop Marsh, and she famously caused him much “affliction” by running away to get married in a tavern in Castleknock outside Dublin.9 “Her Booke,” preserved in her uncle’s collection, contains a series of verse elegies occasioned by the death of Prince Henry in 1612 and an edition, published in the following year, of Guillaume de Salluste Du Bartas’s verse account of the first weeks of the creation of the universe by God. It was certainly not unusual for women to own items that were decades old, but this volume is unusual among the female-owned holdings in the library, both in terms of the length of the items (Du Bartas’s text alone runs to almost nine hundred pages) and the fact that they are in verse rather than prose.10
It may well be possible to posit a provisional identification for the “Jane Westmeath” whose name appears in a seventeenth-century hand on the verso and recto of the title page of the rare incunabula Fasciculus Temporum from 1494.11 She was probably the wife of the First Earl of Westmeath. Yet the vast majority of women are hard to trace, no matter how elevated their social standing or how broad their networks of friendship and kinship during their lives. The last page of the single surviving copy in the world of the 1507 apocryphal gospel of Nicodemus contains the inscription “Mistris ffrancys Saunder.” The inscription is in a clear sixteenth-century hand, but it is unclear who Frances Saunders might have been or where this unusual book was before it came into the possession of Bishop Stearne and was bequeathed to the library on his death in 1745.12 The woman who wrote “ye Lady Fenton her Book” at the front and back of a quarto volume containing several sermons published in the early 1630s may well be as hard to trace as the commoner “Mary Knight” who wrote her name seven times into the front and back of her copy of Thomas Shepard’s The Sincere Convert, Discovering the Paucity of True Beleevers.13
It is sometimes possible to gain a fleeting glimpse of a woman’s life from the inscriptions in her books. So, for example, when Alice Exton noted on her copy of Isaac Ambrose’s Prima, Media, & Ultima that it was “her Booke bought the 30th of March 1668,” she provides a specific date of acquisition, which may suggest that she had purchased it on the secondhand market.14 James Raven has commented on the paucity of knowledge about the sale of used books in the early modern period, so evidence for female purchases could be very significant if a pattern of involvement were to emerge.15 It may also be possible occasionally to detect momentous events in the lives of women through seemingly throwaway inscriptions in books. For example, a copy of Matthew Henry’s The Communicant’s Companion: Or, Instructions and Helps for the Right Receiving of the Lord’s Supper was owned by a “Margaret Edwards,” who signed her name on the title page and the flyleaf facing the title page. Yet the book also contains an inscription, apparently in the same hand, which reads “Margaret Stewart her book Anno Domini 1723.”16 This might conceivably reflect Margaret’s change of surname after marriage.
It is a rare thing indeed to have only one ownership inscription in a book and for that owner to be a woman. It is much more common to find the name of a woman present among one or more male names. In these circumstances it is often difficult, and sometimes impossible, to ascertain the sequence of ownership and the relationship (if any) between the names on the page. For example, the title page of Divinae plane expositiones records the name of the female “Frances Loftus” alongside the signatures of Edward Edgeworth and Michael Jephson, as well as the personal motto of Archbishop Marsh himself.17 Most instances of multiple female ownership in Marsh’s Library relate to religious texts such as Bibles, prayer books, and other devotional literature passed down through families, and this will almost certainly be true in other rare-book libraries.18 The library’s 1625 folio copy of the prose romance Barclay his Argenis: Or, The Loves of Poliarchus and Argenis contains the inscriptions of three women: “Sarah Bruce” (or “Brace,” the handwriting is unclear), “Doma Alicia Ayloffe,” and “Mary Berkingham.”19 It would be useful to know of the links (if any) between these women. Was the book passed between friends or relatives, or did it pass through the generations of a family? Might it have been bought on one (or more) occasions on the secondhand market? The key to answering these questions may lie in linking the data collected in Marsh’s with information in a range of other rare-book libraries and electronic platforms.
There are four women whose names are inscribed in more than one book in Marsh’s Library, suggesting that these women had personal collections of books, and it may well be the case that they owned a larger number of items that have either not survived or have not yet been identified in other rare-book collections. Their names appear in small numbers of items, certainly when compared with the size of surviving male collections, but recent work by Kate Loveman has shown what can be learned from analyzing small numbers of female-owned books. Loveman’s analysis of reading, news gathering, and sociability in the late seventeenth century draws on Samuel Pepys’s famous diary; his surviving collection of several thousand books in Magdalene College, Cambridge; and a variety of working manuscript letters and papers to investigate how, when, and where he and members of his circle read. Pepys has long been known as an avid reader, but it is Loveman’s ability to sketch the contours of the place of books in the life of his wife, Elizabeth, that is of interest here. Something of her reading habits feature in the diary, but Loveman has also identified five books that belonged to a personal collection of Elizabeth’s distinct from that of her husband. These three prose romances, an edition of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and John Guillim’s A Display of Heraldry shed new light on her interests and pursuits and provide new contexts in which to understand her appearances as a reader in the diary.20
There are two books in Marsh’s Library that belonged to a certain Sarah Batts. The inscription “Sarah Batts her book and pen” appears on the flyleaf of Hymen’s Praeludia: Or, Loves Master-Piece. Being the Ninth, and Tenth Part of that so much Admir’d Romance, Intituled Cleopatra.21 It was perhaps unremarkable for Batts to own this romance, yet it must surely have been unusual for her to own Joseph Moxon’s Mechanick Exercises: Or, The Doctrine of Handy-Works, which describes the practice of traditional “manly” trades and skills such as blacksmithing, the making of tools, joinery, carpentry, and wood turning.22 That she wrote such confident inscriptions about her book and “her pen” in two very different texts suggests that Batts may well have owned more books, items that have been either lost or destroyed over the centuries or that may be awaiting discovery in other libraries.
Elizabeth Stillingfleet, née Pedley, was the second wife of Bishop Edward Stillingfleet. Seven items survive within her husband’s collection in Marsh’s Library with her distinctive inscription, “Elizabeth Stillingfleet her book,” and there is also an eighth item in the bishop’s collection with the inscription “E. S. her book,” which may be in the same hand. Some of the books were clearly bought new by Elizabeth, but at least one seems to have had a previous owner before she acquired it (possibly on the secondhand market). Two were presents that give an inkling of her social and kinship networks and the ways in which these overlapped with the professional networks of her husband. Elizabeth did not write in her books, and they do not seem to have been handled very much. They are both physically clean and, disappointingly for historians of reading, clear of annotations and marginalia. Yet Elizabeth did have a standard place in which she inscribed her name and ownership of a book: the front inside board. This is a prominent place and may well suggest that she had a strong sense of her own identity and social status and was used to, and comfortable with, delineating her ownership of goods and personal property. The contrast with the repeated, almost furtive scribbles of Mary Knight (described earlier) is striking. Elizabeth’s confident inscription may also suggest that she had a relatively large collection of books. Unfortunately, the place where she chose to mark her books means that her ownership would have been erased from any of her books within Bishop Stillingfleet’s collection that were repaired and rebacked before the advent of modern conservation practices and techniques.
Elizabeth’s books include unremarkable works of contemporary Anglican religiosity and practical divinity by the likes of Richard Lucas, Henry More, and Bishop Seth Ward.23 There was nothing particularly unusual about her ownership of a pamphlet by the quarrelsome Presbyterian clergyman Richard Baxter.24 Yet two of her otherwise unexceptional religious books are interesting for the ways in which the ownership inscriptions within them can shed light on Elizabeth’s social networks. Her copy of More’s Discourses on Several Texts of Scripture records “Elizabeth Stillingfleet her Book, given her by the Most excellent Mrs. Berkley.”25 This was probably the author Elizabeth Berkley (1661–1709), the third wife of the prominent Anglican clergyman and historian Gilbert Burnet (1643–1715). Edward Stillingfleet and Gilbert Burnet were close friends, and the existence of some form of personal link between their wives is noteworthy, not least for the way in which it seems to have been iterated or reiterated by the gift of a book as a token of friendship and esteem. Similarly, Elizabeth’s copy of Anthony Horneck’s The Happy Ascetick contains the inscription “Elizabeth Stillingfleet Hers. Given me by my Couzen Mortlock.”26 This is presumably the Henry Mortlock who published The Happy Ascetick from his premises at the sign of the Phoenix in Saint Paul’s Churchyard. Here, a book has again been used as a gift, this time between “cousins,” but it may also have wider meaning in terms of the social circles in which Elizabeth and her husband moved. Mortlock published many of Edward Stillingfleet’s sermons and theological works, as well as hundreds of texts by other Anglican writers, during his long and prosperous career. Elizabeth’s copy of The Happy Ascetick preserves, therefore, clues to the interconnected nature of matrimonial, kinship, religious, and business links among the Anglican elite in the late seventeenth century.
Alongside these conventional works of Anglican religiosity, Elizabeth also owned some more intellectually stimulating items. She had Samuel Parker’s 1666 polemic against the works of the early Christian writer Origen (d. 253/54), who had argued that God created souls before he created the world and that these souls had become—depending on their degree of devotion to, and love for, God—devils, humans, or angels. Jesus Christ was, in Origen’s view, a preexisting soul who had remained utterly loyal and devoted to God.27 It need hardly be said that this heterodox theology was anathema to the church “as by law established.” Elizabeth owned Thomas Browne’s attack on Baruch Spinoza and Thomas Hobbes, titled Miracles Work’s Above and Contrary to Nature.28 This text might be considered as a relatively minor footnote to the prehistory of the early Enlightenment, but its ownership by a woman must have been unusual in the seventeenth century. Elizabeth’s husband, the bishop, owned copies of works by both Spinoza and Hobbes, and he involved himself in polemical arguments against what he saw as their atheistic tendencies. It would be fascinating to discover whether Elizabeth had access to her husband’s library of ten thousand books and whether she discussed these matters with him in any way. Because of the small number of surviving titles with Elizabeth’s name on them, there must be a suspicion that she, like Elizabeth Pepys, probably had a collection of books kept separate from those of her husband and that somehow a small number of her books became enmeshed with those of her spouse, possibly because they were borrowed by him. Whatever the actual scale of her complete library, we have here a hint of the types of books to which Elizabeth was exposed and the social and personal contexts and networks in which these items were produced, encountered, bought, read, and exchanged as social gifts and tokens of esteem.
There are three books in Bishop Stillingfleet’s library inscribed with the name of “Ann Stillingfleet.” This was probably one of the daughters born to Elizabeth Stillingfleet. With Ann, as with her mother, one can use these few books to suggest a deeper, possibly more nuanced familiarity with print. Her duodecimo Histoire de Soliman Troisieme suggests an interest in the East and contemporary affairs in the Levant. It also suggests that she was proficient at reading French.29 This is confirmed by the fact that Ann’s octavo edition of the Book of Isaiah, Traduit en Francois: Avec une explication tirée des SS. Peres, & des Auteurs Ecclesiastiques, contains an inscription in French that it had been given to her by her father.30 Her duodecimo of Louis Petit’s Dialogues Satyriques et Moraux contains an inscription indicating that it had been given to her by “ye Right Revnd father in God Edward Lord Bpp of Worcester.” She also recorded her opinion of the book as “A very pleasant one.”31 Here, with only three surviving books, we get a sense of a woman educated enough to read French, with access to continental printings. We also get a sense of the ways in which books were given as gifts and tokens of love between parents and children.
The largest number of female-owned books discovered so far in Marsh’s Library belonged to a certain Margaret Ussher, whose name appears on fourteen separate books and pamphlets published between 1503 and 1687. Her surname indicates that she was of the Irish family whose members had long held prominent positions in Trinity College Dublin and the Anglican Church. Whether she was a member of the family by birth or by marriage is unclear, but inscriptions on several of the books demonstrate that she was actively acquiring texts between 1675 and 1682.32 She may have been a relation of the Margaret Ussher of Dublin who died in 1664 and was probably related to Stearne, in whose collection all of her books in the library are found.33 Her surviving books encompass a range of topics, genres, formats, and dates. Some were bought new at the time of publication, or soon after, but others were items of some rarity, antiquity, and bibliographical curiosity even when she owned them. Even though her older books must have passed through generations of owners, there are surprisingly few other inscriptions in them, which might suggest that she bought some of them from dealers in secondhand books. This raises the possibility that Ussher may have been an active collector of old and rare books, rather than a passive recipient of books handed down through the male line of her family. Some of Ussher’s books have handwritten textual annotations or marginalia, but it is not possible definitively to assert that any of these marks were made by her. There are tantalizing instances, though, where it may be possible to suggest that she marked some of her books. Ussher (like Elizabeth Stillingfleet) had a standard place in which she signed her texts: the top right-hand corner of the title page. The last letter of her surname is always written with a distinctive flourish or tail. Without straying too far into the area of graphology, it seems self-evident that her signature shows Ussher was confident about her identity and status when marking her ownership of her books.
The only work of a literary nature with Ussher’s name on it is the English edition of The Choyce Letters of Monsieur De Balzac.34 The only polemical work of politics is a folio copy of Charles I’s A Large Declaration Concerning the Late Tumults in Scotland, on which she wrote the date “1675.”35 Between 1675 and 1678 she inscribed her name and the year on an account of the life and beliefs of the Anglican clergyman Dr. Robert Sanderson, bishop of Lincoln, and on a pamphlet by Nathaniel Ingelo titled A Discourse Concerning Repentance.36 She also had a half-century-old attack by the Puritan firebrand William Prynne on the alleged “Popish” inclinations of the Laudian cleric Dr. John Cousins.37 She owned two works relating to the law or legal matters. Two Dialogues in English, Between A Doctour of Divinity, and A Student in the Laws of England, of The Grounds of the said Laws, And of Conscience is a lively, vernacular pamphlet that discusses the basic laws of England concerning the rights and obligations of property owners, as well as the basis of the laws regulating religious conscience. It was based on a popular text first published in 1528 by Christopher Saint Germain (d. 1540).38 Ussher’s copy of The Learning Of Common Assurances would have provided her with a basic insight into contractual law and the law of property conveyancing in England, but it would have had limited usefulness in helping readers to navigate the complexities of the land market in Restoration Ireland.39 There can be no doubting the potential utility of Peter Lowe’s A Discourse of the Whole Art of Chyrurgery. This vernacular, quarto pamphlet was not a learned medical treatise for professionals but instead was intended for a general readership that wanted to know something of first aid and minor medical procedures, as well as those who were interested in “preventing of Sicknesse, and recovery of Health.”40 There are no annotations or marginalia in this book, which may suggest that it was not actively used in a domestic setting by Ussher or any other member of her household.
Almost all the books owned by women in Marsh’s Library were in English, but Ussher had a number of Latin items, such as a 1661 edition of the statutes of Oxford University and a 1687 edition of the public lectures by Johann Christoph Schambogen, a professor of law at Charles University in Prague.41 She also had several weighty sixteenth-century tomes, three of which were produced on the continent. The earliest of these is a very rare edition (only four copies are recorded on the Universal Short Title Catalogue) of the legal text Formulare Advocatorum et Procuratorum Romane Curie et Regii Perlamenti.42 Chronologically, the next of her Latin books is the devotional text Postilla siue expositio, on the title page of which there is a woodcut of Christ standing before the twelve kneeling Apostles.43 There was also a 1526 printing of the hugely popular biblical history first penned by the French theologian Petrus Comestor in the third quarter of the twelfth century.44 And, finally, Ussher owned a 1576 large folio edition of Summa Aurea, a work of Roman and canon law by the Italian lawyer Henry of Segusio (d. 1271), which was written largely during the 1250s.45 These were rare books, even when Ussher owned them. Despite the subject matter and authorship of these texts, there is no reason to suspect that Ussher was a crypto–Roman Catholic. Instead, it is much more likely that she, as a member of a prominent intellectual Anglican family, valued the bibliographical rarity of these items more than she would have been concerned at the religious contents of these pre-Reformation texts.
If the fourteen books owned by Ussher found in Marsh’s Library can tell us little about her life and inner thoughts, they do provide tantalizing clues about aspects of her interests and behavior. She seems to have actively acquired some items, possibly on the secondhand market, between 1675 and 1682, and did not confine herself to items considered by many contemporaries as appropriate for females: works of domestic and religious piety. Her ownership of learned Latin texts and books that were already old and rare by the 1680s is striking and must surely have been unusual in her day. All of Ussher’s books in Marsh’s Library are preserved within the collection bequeathed by Stearne; however, Marsh’s does not possess the entirety of Stearne’s books. Before his death his extensive collection of manuscripts and around 4,300 pamphlets were donated to Trinity College Dublin. Upon his death Marsh’s Library picked around 2,100 of what were deemed the most desirable books from what was left of Stearne’s collection, and the remaining items, the number of which is unknown, were sold to raise money for the benefit of curates in Stearne’s diocese of Clogher.46 This sale explains why the library of Exeter Cathedral possesses a copy of a theological tract from 1593 that has the distinctive inscription of Ussher on its title page.47 It seems likely that copies of other books owned by Ussher may survive in institutions that have not yet facilitated easy online searching of ownership records. There must surely be more of her possessions awaiting discovery among the Stearne pamphlets on the shelves of the Long Room in Trinity College Dublin. It will probably never be possible to write an intellectual biography of Ussher based on the books she owned, but it may well be possible to discover much more about the basic facts of her life and her range of preoccupations.
In some exceptional cases readers’ marginalia—occasionally extensive—constitute important literary or historical writings.48 The vast majority of surviving marginalia, annotations, and jottings, however, are too fragmentary, fleeting, and isolated to say anything substantial about the inner mental life of the author. In actual fact, the vast majority of surviving books from any period of history contain no marginalia. If marginalia left by men are rare, evidence for annotations by females in books is very unusual, because books were often shared in family settings, and women commonly seem to have internalized a belief that they had no authority to make comments.49
Around 40 percent of the female-owned books uncovered so far in Marsh’s Library have at least some evidence of marginalia or other markings within them, but it is almost never possible to decide who might have made these marks. There are extensive annotations in two of Ussher’s oldest books, but as they are written in a neat hand typical of the early sixteenth century, they cannot have been made by her.50 But two texts owned by Ussher, one from 1663 and the other from 1667, display dozens of textual emendations in a hand very similar to (and possibly identical to) that which signed her name in the books.51 This would be potentially very exciting evidence of how a long-dead woman unknown to history engaged with a number of texts, were it not for the fact that all the corrections merely reflect the printers’ lists of errata at the back of the books. In this context it is possible to suggest that Ussher may have been of a pedantic frame of mind, but it is impossible to understand whether or how she might have engaged intellectually with the texts.
As noted earlier, a copy of the 1625 romance Barclay his Argenis in Marsh’s Library contains the inscriptions of three women. One of the names is that of Sarah “Bruce” or “Brace.” Below this, in what looks like the same hand that wrote Sarah’s name, there is a short text of nine words, which somebody has tried unsuccessfully to erase: “a man had better have a good prick then.”52 This is certainly amusing in its incongruity, but its broader significance is, to say the least, uncertain. The few other snippets of marginalia in the female-owned books surveyed at Marsh’s are conventionally religious in nature. Margaret Dopping wrote the short phrase “O Christ hear us /o christ / hear us” beside her name on the front flyleaf of a book she owned.53 A 1628 Holy Bible with several female inscriptions has the following prayer written on the verso of the title page of the New Testament: “Blessed Lord. Who hast caused all holy scriptures to be written for our learning, grant that we may in such wise hear them, read, mark learn & inwardly digest them that by patience and comfort of thy holy word we may embrace & ever hold fast that blessed hope of everlasting life which thou hast given us in thy Son Jesus Christ our Lord.”54 This is not an original composition but a prayer first written by Thomas Cranmer in the sixteenth century. It appeared in the Book of Common Prayer and was used as the Collect on the second Sunday of Advent. The copy of Hymen’s Praeludia with the inscription “Sarah Batts her book and pen” also contains a handwritten prayer:
O God that art my richasness [i.e., ‘righteousness’]
Lord here me when I call
Thou hast set me at Liberty
When I was bound and thrall
Have mersey Lord therefore one me.55
This text is taken from Psalm 4 of Sternhold and Hopkins’s immensely popular sixteenth-century edition of the Psalms in English meter. Batts’s orthography is sufficiently distinctive to suggest that she may have written from memory, rather than having a printed copy in front of her. Both fragments of writing testify to the enduring popularity of best-selling religious texts.56 They also tend to suggest that further examples of women’s marginalia in Marsh’s Library are likely to be religious, and entirely conventional, in nature.
A certain Elizabeth Davys inscribed the following text on the front flyleaf of her copy of A Perfect Abridgment of the Eleaven Bookes of Reports, of . . . Edw[ard] Cook: “If thou relegon right would under Stand then have thes[e] answars all at thy command and they thy duty so well will te[a]ch that thou no farther ne[e]dst to re[a]ch.”57 This was probably intended as a positive comment on the legal text into which it was written, but this cannot be definitively asserted: it may conceivably be nothing more than a stock phrase reproduced by Davys from a still-unidentified catechism or other devotional work. Once again the necessary context is missing that would enable us to assess the meaning and significance of this snippet of female writing. One other inscription in Davys’s book does, however, provide evidence for her internal emotions in response to a significant change in her personal circumstances: “We came into that ugely playce Ierland upon may ye 23 1677.” It seems clear that Davys emigrated to Ireland from somewhere in Britain on that date, possibly due to a career move on the part of a husband or father, but that she was unhappy in her new surroundings. Her book subsequently ended up among the possessions of John Stearne and entered Marsh’s Library after his death in 1745. It has now sat in the same place on the shelves for over 270 years, which in one sense qualifies it to be thought of as an Irish book, despite the antipathy to Ireland and the explicitly British (and non-Irish) identity of the book itself; its author, printer, and publisher; and the female owner who inscribed into it her response to the island. The case of Elizabeth Davys clearly demonstrates that an early modern book (or a piece of life writing found within that book) that happens to survive in a repository in Ireland is often difficult to classify as geographically or culturally “Irish.”
1. Máire Kennedy, “Women and Reading in Eighteenth-Century Ireland,” in The Experience of Reading: Irish Historical Perspectives, ed. Bernadette Cunningham and Máire Kennedy (Dublin: Rare Books Group of the Library Association of Ireland/Economic and Social History Society of Ireland, 1999), 78–98; Kennedy, “Huguenot Readers in Eighteenth-Century Ireland,” in The Huguenots: France, Exile and Diaspora, ed. Jane McKee and Randolph Vigne (Eastbourne: Sussex Academic Press, 2013), 173–84; Amy Prendergast, Literary Salons across Britain and Ireland in the Long Eighteenth Century (London: Palgrave, 2015).
2. Paul Morgan, “Frances Wolfreston and ‘Hor Bouks’: A Seventeenth-Century Woman Book-Collector,” Library 11, no. 3 (1989): 197–219; Jacqueline Pearson, “Women Reading, Reading Women,” in Women and Literature in Britain, 1500–1700, ed. Helen Wilcox (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 80–99; David McKitterick, “Women and Their Books in Seventeenth-Century England: The Case of Elizabeth Puckering,” Library 1, no. 4 (2000): 359–80; William Sherman, “What Did Renaissance Readers Write in Their Books?,” in Books and Readers in Early Modern England, ed. Jennifer Andersen and Elisabeth Sauer (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 119–27; Edith Snook, Women, Reading, and the Cultural Politics of Early Modern England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005); Heidi Brayman Hackel, Reading Material in Early Modern England: Print, Gender and Literacy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Heidi Brayman Hackel and Catherine E. Kelly, eds., Reading Women: Literacy, Authorship, and Culture in the Atlantic World, 1500–1800 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007); Snook, “Reading Women,” in The Cambridge Companion to Early Modern Women’s Writing, ed. Laura Lunger Knoppers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 40–53.
3. Newport B. White, comp., An Account of Archbishop Marsh’s Library, Dublin . . . with a Note on Autographs (Dublin: Hodges, Figgis, 1926).
4. See Raymond Gillespie and Andrew Hadfield, eds., The Irish Book in English, 1550–1800, vol. 3, The Oxford History of the Irish Book (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); Marc Caball and Andrew Carpenter, eds., Oral and Print Cultures in Ireland, 1600–1900 (Dublin: Four Courts, 2010).
5. Thomas Campanella, A Discourse Touching the Spanish Monarchy (London, 1654), Marsh’s Library, H4.6.1.
6. Hermolaus Barbarus, Compendium Scientiae Naturalis ([Lausanne], 1579), Marsh’s Library, P1.7.44; Maria O’Shea, The Unicorn and the Fencing Mouse: An Exhibition of Marginalia, Annotations and Doodles (Dublin: Marsh’s Library, 2015), 16.
7. The two texts bound in this volume, both by Philippe de Mornay, are Fowre books, of the institution, use and doctrine of the Holy Sacrament of the Eucharist in the Old Church (London, 1600), Marsh’s Library, F3.3.4(1); and The Mysterie of iniquitie: that is to say, the historie of the Papacie, trans. Samson Lennard (London, 1612), Marsh’s Library, F3.3.4(2).
8. See the British Armorial Bindings database, https://armorial.library.utoronto.ca/.
9. Qtd. in Raymond Gillespie, ed., Scholar Bishop: The Recollections and Diary of Narcissus Marsh, 1638–1696 (Cork: Cork University Press, 2003), 55.
10. Guillaume de Salluste Du Bartas, La Divina Settimana (Venice, 1613), Marsh’s Library, L3.2.15.
11. Werner Rolevinck, Fasciculus Temporum (Lyon, 1494), Marsh’s Library, F4.4.25.
12. Here Begynneth the Treatys of Nycodemus Gospell (London, 1507), Marsh’s Library, Z4.1.14(1).
13. The texts bound in the book signed by the “Lady Fenton” are by John Preston and include The Saints daily exercise: a treatise, unfolding the whole dutie of prayer (London, 1631), Marsh’s Library, J4.7.23(1); Life eternall: or, a treatise of the divine essence and attributes: delivered in XVIII sermons (London, 1631), Marsh’s Library, J4.7.23(2); The Breast-plate of faith and love: a treatise, wherein the ground and exercise of faith and love . . . delivered in 18 sermons (London, 1630), Marsh’s Library, J4.7.23(3); An Elegant and lively description of spirituall life and death: delivered in divers sermons in Lincolnes-Inne (London, 1632), Marsh’s Library, J4.7.23(4); and Three sermons upon the sacrament of the Lords Supper (London, 1631), Marsh’s Library J4.7.23(5). See also Thomas Shepard, The Sincere Convert, Discovering the Paucity of True Beleevers (London, 1643), Marsh’s Library, E3.5.11.
14. Isaac Ambrose, Prima, Media, & Ultima (London, 1654), Marsh’s Library, E3.4.13(1).
15. James Raven, The Business of Books: Booksellers and the English Book Trade, 1450–1850 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 136, 189.
16. Matthew Henry, The Communicant’s Companion: Or, Instructions and Helps for the Right Receiving of the Lord’s Supper (Dublin, 1716), Marsh’s Library, J3.9.18.
17. Jaime Perez de Valencia, Divinae plane expositiones (Paris, 1521), Marsh’s Library, A3.3.15; O’Shea, Unicorn, 8. Frances Loftus may be the individual mentioned in passing in Simon Loftus, The Invention of Memory: An Irish Family Scrapbook, 1560–1934 (London: Daunt Books, 2013), 105, 122.
18. See, for example, the family Bible: The Holy Bible containing the Old Testament and the New (London, 1628), Marsh’s Library, B2.8.54.
19. John Barclay, Barclay his Argenis: Or, The Loves of Poliarchus and Argenis, trans. Kingsmill Long (London, 1625), Marsh’s Library, J4.7.26.
20. Kate Loveman, Samuel Pepys and His Books: Reading, Newsgathering and Sociability, 1660–1703 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 48, 49, 53, 63, 141, 142, 146.
21. Gauthier de Costes, Hymen’s Praeludia: Or, Loves Master-Piece. Being the Ninth, and Tenth Part of that so much Admir’d Romance, Intituled Cleopatra, trans. J. D. (London, 1659), Marsh’s Library, L3.2.33.
22. Joseph Moxon, Mechanick Exercises: Or, The Doctrine of Handy-Works (London, 1677), Marsh’s Library, M3.3.29. On the central role of romance in female reading habits, see Helen Hackett, Women and Romance Fiction in the English Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Lori Humphrey Newcomb, Reading Popular Romance in Early Modern England (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002); and Pearson, “Women Reading, Reading Women,” 91–93.
23. Richard Lucas, Practical Christianity: Or, an Account of the Holiness which the Gospel Enjoins, 3rd ed. (London, 1685), Marsh’s Library, P2.4.33; Henry More, An Exposition of the Seven Epistles to the Seven Churches: Together with A Brief Discourse of Idolatry; with Application to the Church of Rome (London, 1669), Marsh’s Library, B2.8.17; Seth Ward, Six Sermons Preached by the Right Reverend Father in God, Seth Lord Bishop of Sarum (London, 1672), Marsh’s Library, B2.5.15.
24. Richard Baxter, Certain Disputations Of Right to Sacraments, and the true nature of Visible Christianity, 2nd ed. (London, 1658), Marsh’s Library, E2.5.27.
25. Henry More, Discourses on Several Texts of Scripture (London, 1692), Marsh’s Library, B2.5.5.
26. Anthony Horneck, The Happy Ascetick (London, 1681), Marsh’s Library, P2.7.76.
27. Samuel Parker, An Account of the Nature and Extent of the Divine Dominion & Goodnesse, Especially as they refer to the Origenian Hypothesis Concerning the Preexistence of Souls (Oxford, 1666), Marsh’s Library, S3.3.17(2).
28. Thomas Browne, Miracles Work’s Above and Contrary to Nature (London, 1683), Marsh’s Library, T3.4.2(1).
29. Histoire de Soliman Troisieme (Amsterdam, 1688), Marsh’s Library, O1.7.48.
30. Traduit en Francois: Avec une explication tirée des SS. Peres, & des Auteurs Ecclesiastiques (Paris, 1663), Marsh’s Library, A.4.25.
31. Louis Petit, Dialogues Satyriques et Moraux (Amsterdam, 1688), Marsh’s Library, P2.7.14.
32. Margaret wrote dates within the year “1675” alongside her name on both Charles I’s A Large Declaration Concerning the Late Tumults in Scotland (London, 1639), Marsh’s Library, G4.2.10; and William Prynne’s A Briefe Survay (London, 1628), Marsh’s Library, Z4.1.15(14). She wrote the year “1682” beside her name on her copy of Henricus Ostiensis’s Summa Aurea, ed. Franciscus Accursius([Lyon], 1576), Marsh’s Library, R*3.1.9.
33. Margaret Ussher, will, transcription, MS Z4.2.1(23), Marsh’s Library, Dublin.
34. Jean-Louis Guez Balzac, The Choyce Letters of Monsieur de Balzac (London, 1658), Marsh’s Library, F4.6.24.
35. Charles I, Large Declaration.
36. D.F., Reason and Judgement: Or, Special Remarques of the Life of the Renowned Dr. Sanderson, Late Lord Bishop of Lincoln (Oxford, 1663), Marsh’s Library, C4.6.5(1); Nathaniel Ingelo, A Discourse Concerning Repentance (London, 1677), Marsh’s Library, R*3.4.24.
37. Prynne, Briefe Survay.
38. Christopher Saint Germain, Two Dialogues in English, Between A Doctour of Divinity, and A Student in the Laws of England, of The Grounds of the said Laws, And of Conscience (1528; repr., London, 1673), Marsh’s Library, E4.5.38.
39. William Sheppard, The Learning Of Common Assurances (London, 1648), Marsh’s Library, E4.4.6.
40. Peter Lowe, A Discourse of the Whole Art of Chyrurgery (London, 1654), Marsh’s Library, L4.5.17.
41. Statuta selecta è compore statutorum universitatis Oxoniensis (Oxford, 1661), Marsh’s Library, E4.5.31; Johann Christoph Schambogen, Prae-lectiones publicae in D. Justiniani institutiorum juris quatuor libros compositae et in universitatis Carolo-Ferdinandeae Pragensis magnae aulae Carolinae auditorio juridico dictatae (Prague, 1687), Marsh’s Library, E4.4.24.
42. Formulare Advocatorum et Procuratorum Romane Curie et Regii Perlamenti (Hagenau, 1503), Marsh’s Library, E4.4.26.
43. Gulielmus Arvernus, Postilla siue exposition (London, 1509), Marsh’s Library, Z1.2.17.
44. Petrus Comestor, Historia Scholastica ([Lyon], 1526), Marsh’s Library, B4.6.8.
45. Ostiensis, Summa Aurea.
46. Peter Fox, Trinity College Library Dublin: A History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 75–78.
47. Richard Cosin, An Apologie For Sundrie Proceedings by Iurisdiction Ecclesiasticall (London, 1593), Exeter Cathedral Library, Item E9900189678. This book was located because Exeter Cathedral Library has uploaded provenance information to COPAC (http://copac.jisc.ac.uk/), the combined online catalog of more than ninety UK and Irish national, academic, and specialist libraries. I am grateful to Peter Thomas and Ellie Jones of Exeter Cathedral for providing me with photographs of this book.
48. H. J. Jackson, Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001). The entries on Isaac Casaubon, Samuel Clemens, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and John Dee are particularly appropriate in this context.
49. Snook, “Reading Women,” 40.
50. Formulare Advocatorum; Comestor, Historia Scholastica.
51. D. F., Reason and Judgement; Ingelo, Discourse Concerning Repentance.
52. Barclay, Barclay his Argenis.
53. John Gailhard, Two Discourses. The first concerning A Private Settlement at Home After Travel. The Second concerning the Statesman, Or Him who is in Publick Employments (London, 1682), Marsh’s Library, E4.6.7.
54. Holy Bible Containing the Old Testament.
55. De Costes, Hymen’s Praeludia.
56. Ian Green, Print and Protestantism in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Andy Kesson and Emma Smith, eds., The Elizabethan Top Ten: Defining Print Popularity in Early Modern England (London: Routledge, 2016).
57. Edward Coke, A Perfect Abridgment of the Eleaven Bookes of Reports, of . . . Edw[ard] Cook ([London], 1650), Marsh’s Library, E4.5.35.