"This edition of Folger MS. V.b.198 is titled The Southwell-Sibthorpe Commonplace Book with the name 'Southwell' first because the manuscript is predominantly made up of 'The workes of the Lady Ann Sothwell' (fol. 1r), née Harris, who was born in 1573, married Thomas Southwell in 1593 and, after his death in 1626, Captain Henry Sibthorpe. She died in 1636. The name 'Sibthorpe' is joined to that of 'Southwell' because he not only gave Lady Anne the folios at the time of their wedding and composed at least two entries (probably fol. 27 and certainly most of fols. 73 and 74), but also critiqued the poetry of the woman he praised so effusively. The last phrase of the title, 'commonplace book,' indicates that the collection of poems, letters, aphorisms, inventories, a mini-bestiary, scriptural commentary, and receipts resembles similar collections of the early seventeenth century, called commonplace books, which gentlemen frequently kept. Because Folger MS. V.b.198 contains memorabilia significant for both Lady Anne Southwell and Captain Henry Sibthorpe and illustrates interaction between husband and wife in the making of the volume, the result offers a unique example of the genre." --

This collection of essays by leading scholars in the field reveals the major contribution of puritan women to the intellectual culture of the early modern period. It demonstrates that women's roles within puritan and broader communities encompassed translating and disseminating key texts, producing an impressive body of original writing.

Using printed and manuscript texts composed between 1575 and 1672, Jennifer Heller defines the genre of the mother's legacy as a distinct branch of the advice tradition in early modern England that takes the form of a dying mother's pious counsel to her children. Reading these texts in light of specific cultural contexts, social trends, and historical events, Heller explores how legacy writers used the genre to secure personal and family status, to shape their children's beliefs and behaviors, and to intervene in the period's tumultuous religious and political debates. The author's attention to the fine details of the period's religious and political swings, drawn from sources such as royal proclamations, sermons, and first-hand accounts of book-burnings, creates a fuller context for her analysis of the legacies. Similarly, Heller explains the appeal of the genre by connecting it to social factors including mortality rates and inheritance practices. Analyses of related genres, such as conduct books and fathers' legacies, highlight the unique features and functions of mothers' legacies. Heller also attends to the personal side of the genre, demonstrating that a writer's education, marriages, children, and turns of fortune affect her work within the genre.

Using printed and manuscript texts composed between 1575 and 1672, Jennifer Heller defines the genre of the mother's legacy as a distinct branch of the advice tradition in early modern England that takes the form of a dying mother's pious counsel to her children. Reading these texts in light of specific cultural contexts, social trends, and historical events, Heller explores how legacy writers used the genre to secure personal and family status, to shape their children's beliefs and behaviors, and to intervene in the period's tumultuous religious and political debates. The author's attention to the fine details of the period's religious and political swings, drawn from sources such as royal proclamations, sermons, and first-hand accounts of book-burnings, creates a fuller context for her analysis of the legacies. Similarly, Heller explains the appeal of the genre by connecting it to social factors including mortality rates and inheritance practices. Analyses of related genres, such as conduct books and fathers' legacies, highlight the unique features and functions of mothers' legacies. Heller also attends to the personal side of the genre, demonstrating that a writer's education, marriages, children, and turns of fortune affect her work within the genre.

Peter Mack examines the impact of humanist training in rhetoric and argument on a range of Elizabethan prose texts, including political orations, histories, romances, conduct manuals, privy council debates and personal letters. Elizabethan Rhetoric reconstructs the knowledge, skills and approaches which an Elizabethan would have acquired in order to participate in the political and religious debates of the time: the approaches to an audience, analysis and replication of textual structures, organisation of arguments and tactics for disputation. Study of the rhetorical codes and conventions in terms of which debates were conducted is currently a major area of historical and literary enquiry, and Mack provides a wealth of new information about what was taught and how these conventions were exploited in personal memoranda, court depositions, sermons and political and religious pamphlets. This important book will be invaluable for all those interested in the culture, literature and political history of the period.

This book examines the writing and manuscript publication of key authors from 1550 to 1800.

Women in 16th- and 17th-century Britain read, annotated, circulated, inventoried, cherished, criticized, prescribed, and proscribed books in various historically distinctive ways. Yet, unlike that of their male counterparts, the study of women’s reading practices and book ownership has been an elusive and largely overlooked field. In thirteen probing essays, Women’s Bookscapesin Early Modern Britain brings together the work of internationally renowned scholars investigating key questions about early modern British women’s figurative, material, and cultural relationships with books. What constitutes evidence of women’s readerly engagement? How did women use books to achieve personal, political, religious, literary, economic, social, familial, or communal goals? How does new evidence of women’s libraries and book usage challenge received ideas about gender in relation to knowledge, education, confessional affiliations, family ties, and sociability? How do digital tools offer new possibilities for the recovery of information on early modern women readers? The volume’s three-part structure highlights case studies of individual readers and their libraries; analyses of readers and readership in the context of their interpretive communities; and new types of scholarly evidence—lists of confiscated books and convent rules, for example—as well as new methodologies and technologies for ongoing research. These essays dismantle binaries of private and public; reading and writing; female and male literary engagement and production; and ownership and authorship. Interdisciplinary, timely, cohesive, and concise, this collection’s fresh, revisionary approaches represent substantial contributions to scholarship in early modern material culture; book history and print culture; women’s literary and cultural history; library studies; and reading and collecting practices more generally.