Margaret J. M. Ezell

The Laughing Tortoise: Speculations on Manuscript Sources and Women's Book History

The recovery and study of manuscript texts remains an important endeavor for those interested in early modern women writer, as much as it is an important part of recovering artifacts of literary history. These artifacts increase the amount of material on which we base our conclusions, but one could argue that such texts offer more than simply evidence of literary production. Unfortunately, the tendency in the new field of the history of the book to define “book” as being a printed object threatens once again to marginalize womens participation in literary culture in the same way that previous models of literary history based on “great man” or spirit of the age did in previous generations. Using as a case study the newly recovered manuscript volume by Hester Pulter (1595/96–1678), this essay concludes by examining some premises about early modern womens participation in various aspects of literary culture as being “exceptional,” or anomalous, or whether instead we are still in the process of recovering the materials that would make such conclusions warranted.

Seventeenth-Century Female Author Portraits, Or, The Company She Keeps

Abstract Looking at examples of author portrait frontispieces from the mid- and late seventeenth century in English books offers illumination on the nature of the relationship between author, image, and text in print culture, which, in turn, may coincide with issues raised about the circulation of these items in new media today. The use of the image of the author in these earlier texts also foregrounds questions pertinent to readers then and now: what need or desire does seeing the face of the author fulfill for the reader and who ultimately controls the author’s physical image? This essay looks at the use of women writers’ portraits in the context of a larger shift in the representation of the author from that found in posthumous editions, which serve as monuments to the departed through classical allusion and styling, to images that are contemporary and display the writer’s individuality, inviting a sense of intimacy and creating for the author an aura of celebrity.

Elizabeth Isham's Books of Remembrance and Forgetting

Elizabeth Isham, born the daughter of a comfortable provincial landowner in 1608, led an unremarkable life in many ways. As with many early modern women, it was Isham’s father, Sir John Isham (the first baronet) and her brother, the royalist Sir Justinian (an early member of the Royal Society), who in the past attracted the interest of historians. Elizabeth Isham nevertheless is now emerging as an even more intriguing figure, not so much because of the specific events that happened in her life but because she left behind her at her death in 1654 two remarkable manuscript texts, each different in content and format, each intent on preserving her life story. When one adds to the presence of two versions of one life story the romance of the very recent recovery and reunion of these previously separated and lost texts, it is little wonder that there have been in recent years two large projects to explore the life of this previously obscure seventeenthcentury provincial lady. The family motto of the Ishams, carved into the stonework at Lamport Hall in Northumberland, is ‘‘I Show, I Sham Not.’’ What better creed could a writer of memoirs have from the point of view of modern readers? And yet, perhaps it is not only memories of events, I will argue, that are preserved in these two strikingly different documents.

Looking Glass Histories

How many mirrors do you have where you live? How often do you see yourself in a mirror, either deliberately or in passing through a public space? Even relatively small contemporary apartments typically have half a dozen or more, and we are so accustomed to seeing ourselves in passing in most of them that we do not even notice we are doing so, much less remember or count the times this occurs. In public spaces, in glassy modern architecture, mirrored hotel lobbies, in restaurants seeking to give the impression of larger spaces, in every restroom no matter how humble, in gyms, salons, and saloons, one is constantly facing oneself, intentionally or not. Given the number of encounters one has on a casual daily basis with mirrors and accustomed as people are to the act of seeing them, would it surprise you terribly if you looked in a mirror and did not see yourself ? Would you be surprised, for example, if, instead of your face, you saw the devil exposing his backside to you? You would not apparently be surprised if you were an early modern European. When such people looked into a mirror, it would appear that it might have been entirely possible that instead of seeing themselves, there might be a host of totally different people and things looking back. Modern Anglo-Europeans are not now accustomed to thinking about looking glasses as possible sites of cultural memory or historical record. For us, the mirror is an instrument of the present or possibly the personal past, a last-minute assurance that the face you wish to present in public is

Late Seventeenth-Century Women Writers and the Penny Post: Early Social Media Forms and Access to Celebrity

In the eighteenth century, Susanna Centlivre (c. 1669–1723) was the most performed English playwright after Shakespeare. In the late 1690s, however, she was an obscure young woman with a chequered past trying to make her way in London’s commercial literary world. She made her London literary debut in 1700 by having a selection of her ‘private’ letters published in a miscellaneous collection of prose and verse collected by Tom Brown, Familiar and Courtly Letters, Written by Monsieur Voiture … to which is added a Collection of Letters of Friendship, and other Occasional Letters, Written by Mr. Dryden, Mr. Wycherley etc. This chapter will explore two features of this event: the strategic use of Centlivre’s letters as autobiographical documents in an initial step towards the creation of a commercial persona, one modelled on the posthumous marketing of Aphra Behn’s works, and how Centlivre and other women embraced new technologies for conveying their material texts to London printers and booksellers at the end of the seventeenth century and the beginning decades of the eighteenth century to enter the public literary market place, for celebrity, profit or both.

Afterword: “Her Book” and Early Modern Modes of Collaboration

This chapter considers the issues raised about the nature of collaboration as posed in the preceding chapters, including seventeenth-century definitions and descriptions of the practices. It looks at the ways in which authors, owners, readers, and collaborators described their relationship to the text, using as examples Esther Inglis, manuscript recipe volumes with multiple owners, and Elizabeth Cellier’s legal defense of her writings.

Big Books, Big Data, and Reading Literary Histories

This essay examines the ways in which the single-authored, period literary history has been challenged since the original Oxford History of English Literature series appeared in the mid twentieth century. The volumes in the new Oxford English Literary History appearing in the twenty-first century, intended for the “general reader,” must negotiate charges of imposing a reductive grand narrative whose scholarship is rapidly outdated on one hand, and of working with too small a sample of texts to make historical claims on the other. The advent of electronic databases such as EEBO and ECCO invite new forms of history writing, from “distant reading” by computer, to more inclusive documentary-style formats that emphasize richness of the particular and idiosyncratic as well as reveal the larger patterns.

Paul Trolander and Zeynep Tenger, Sociable Criticism in England, 1625–1725

Trolander and Tenger’s Sociable Criticism in England, 1625–1725 is an important and welcome contribution to the recent trend in literary history to reconsider the social and cultural contexts of writing and authorship in the early modern period. Specifically, it is concerned with shifting the paradigm of the history of literary criticism away from a professional and thus print-centered model or the neoclassical model to investigate what they refer to as the default mode of critical practice in seventeenth-century England, ‘‘sociable criticism.’’ In doing so, they are challenging not only our understanding of who ‘‘invented’’ English criticism (Dryden had appeared to be winning that race) but also our understanding of how relationships between authors, readers, and critics evolved under the new regime of print. Seventeenthand early eighteenth-century criticism has been linked with the development of censorship and rise of the modern hegemonic state and thus has been understood as being a legislative act to control literary production. In contrast, Trolander and Tenger argue that in its initial phases in England, the dominant mode of critical discourse, even in print, was the persona of the friend, seeking to praise and amend and invoking a personal or small social group connection, and that critics—such as Thomas Rymer, Jeremy Collier, and John Dennis—who did not adopt this stance provoked negative responses in their audience. Furthermore, they suggest this practice of sociable criticism was an important means of mediating between manuscript and print cultures at the turn of the century. This emphasis on ‘‘sociability’’ is tied by them to the recent studies by Naomi Tadmor, Anna Bryson, Lawrence Klein, and Susan Whyman on codes

Richard Waller, S. R. S.: 'In the Pursuit of Nature'

There is no puzzle more tantalizing than the fragments of a forgotten A life. Richard Waller (1660?—1715), linguist, artist, and amateur scientist, offers multiple challenges. A member of the Royal Society from 1681 and its Secretary from 1687-1709, 1710-1714, under the presidencies of Samuel Pepys and Sir Isaac Newton, Waller was a man of considerable standing during an important era in the history of science. His associates included Robert Hooke, Edmond Halley, James Pettiver, and Sir Hans Sloane. He conducted correspondence with some of the leading scientific figures and personalities abroad, such as van Leeuwenhoek, Malpighi, and Cotton Mather. History, however, has turned Waller into a footnote in the biographies of his more illustrious, or notorious, contemporaries.