Early Modern Englishwoman: A Facsimile Library of Essential Works & Printed Writings, 1500-1640: Series I, Part Two – serie

Anne Cooke Bacon was highly educated and was known for her ability to read Latin, Greek, Italian and French. She married Sir Nicholas Bacon, Queen’s Keeper of the Great Seal and a member of Elizabeth’s Privy Council. The directions of the new Church of England were heavily influenced by her husband and Anne too was actively involved in the religious controversies of her day, her translations position her as a strong advocate for the Protestant cause. Whilst in her early 20s she translated the sermons of Bernardino Ochino, a popular Italian preacher who converted to Calvinism. Her translations were printed in four different volumes of Ochino’s sermons (between 1548 and 1570) although the publishers of these editions did not always see fit to name her as the translator. Translations by R. Argentyne were often included in the volumes and, in the earlier editions, he was credited with her work. The text reproduced here comes from the 1551 edition of Fouretene sermons of Barnardine Ochyne ... translated by AC as it not only includes Anne’s dedication to her mother and a preface in praise of Anne’s work but is the only edition of more than five sermons that does not also reprint translations by Argentyne. As an appendix to the present volume the five sermons translated by AC in the 1551 edition of Certayne sermons of the ryghte famous and excellent clerke ... are included. These five plus the fourteen reprinted in the body of this book constitute all of the sermons that Anne Cooke is known to have translated and published. In 1562 John Jewel’s Apologia ecclesiae anglicanae was published in England and was viewed as the authoritative defence of the English Church. Anne Cooke Bacon’s translation of it was published in 1564 and became the official English version. The text reprinted here is unusually clear and also has the advantage of including an engraving of Lady Bacon.

The works by the four protestant women authors collected in this volume participate in the ars moriandi (art of dying) tradition which became increasingly powerful over the 16th and 17th centuries. The moment of death was thought to reveal the ’true’ state of the individual’s soul. This volume provides four varying forms of heroic subjectivity offered by middle class and aristocratic women by the act of dying well. In all four cases their heroic deaths also proclaimed and thus helped to define specifically Protestant doctrines. When so few women’s words appeared in print, this ideological function probably represented a primary reason for the recording and publishing of these works.

Little is known of the upbringing of Lady Eleanor Davies, what is known is that her life was mired in both flamboyant personal conflict and in the notoriety of the Castlehaven scandal (resulting in the execution of her brother), and that her writings were embroiled in political affairs. Married in 1609 to Sir John Davies, her husband tried to discourage her prophetic writing and burned her early treatises. Her second husband, Sir Archibald Douglas was equally critical. Once free from the censorship of her husbands, her prophetic career spanned the years between 1625 and 1652. During that time she published some 69 treatises, spent years in prison, and some time in Bedlam, and made astonishing predictions on a wide range of subjects. Viewed as both an inspired seer and a mad ’ladie’ by her contemporaries, Lady Eleanor has received a great deal of scholarly attention, not least of all because of her densely allusive and complex prose style. Reproduced here is the 1625 treatise A Warning to the Dragon and all his Angels which is a classic example of the kind of apocalyptic writing that predominates in late-sixteenth- and early-seventeenth-century England. All the kings of the earth shall prayse thee (1633) is one of three texts that Lady Eleanor had printed in Amsterdam and is an exegetical treatise on the visions of Daniel. Woe to the House (1633) is the first of Lady Eleanor’s four treatises that defended the innocence of her brother, Mervin Touchet.

This volume presents the texts of three Englishwomen remarkable both for writing and publishing their work during the first half of the sixteenth century. They also proved themselves nimble survivors of political and religious turmoil, Beaufort suffering for her Lancastrian connections and Roper and Basset for their Catholic allegiance. Significantly, these women turned to translation and to religious texts for their writing and publishing. The choice of devotional treatises authored by men not only mitigated the threat of the female pen, but more important to these writers, enabled them to perform spiritual and material work. Translation was considered to be the fruit of faith, contributing to the writer's own salvation and that of others, notably other women. Margaret Beaufort - Countess of Richmond and Derby, and mother of Henry VII. Lady Margaret's translation of the fourth book of Thomas à Kempis' De imitatione Christi was the first in English. Published in 1504 with Books 1-3, translated by William Atkinson. We reprint Pynson's 1517 edition notable for the clarity of its texts and woodcuts. Her translation from a French version of the anonymous text Speculum aureum animae peccatricis was published by Pynson in about 1506. It was reprinted three times after her death, twice in 1522 and once in 1526. We reprint the 1526 edition held by the British Library. Margaret More Roper was the eldest child of Sir Thomas More and was said to have been an outstanding scholar and writer. Her only published work is the translation reproduced here - Erasmus: A devout treatise upon the Pater noster, published c.1526 by T. Berthelet Mary Roper Clarke Basset was the daughter of Margaret Roper. She was a lady-in-waiting to Queen Mary and an expert in Latin and Greek. Reprinted here is a copy of her translation of her grandfather's final Tower work Of the sorrowe ... of Christ before hys taking from the 1557 edition of The English Workes of Sir Thomas More.

The two translators whose printed works are contained in this volume were the daughters of Henry VIII. Whilst they both suffered from their father's changes of wives and faiths, after his marriage in 1543 to Katherine Parr they both benefited from their new stepmother's kindness. In different ways, she was involved in the production of the texts contained in this volume. When Princess Elizabeth was eleven she began to translate Le Mirroir de l'âme pécheresse (1531), a verse meditation by Marguerite of Angoulême, sister of King Francis I of France. The Princess dedicated it to Katherine Parr as a New Year's present in January 1545. It is John Bale's 1548 edition that is reproduced here. Also the c.1568 edition published by Denham which includes a set of prayers by James Cancellar designed to be said by Elizabeth and an acrostic on 'Elizabeth Regina'. At about the same time as Elizabeth was working on her translation, Mary (1515-1558) was likewise helping Katherine Parr reform Tudor devotional life through scripture-based scholarship, literature and translation. The Queen asked her to join a group involved in translating the influential Paraphrases in Novum Testamentum by Desiderius Erasmus. Whilst the true translators of this long Latin text is debated it is thought that Mary was part way through the section of the Gospel of John when illness (or possibly her disagreement Parr's Reformist sympathies) caused her to pass the rest over to her chaplain, Francis Malet. The translations, including Mary's contribution, began to see print in 1548 under the editorship of Richard Grafton. Edward VI's government required all parishes to acquire copies, so that together with various English Bibles and the Book of Common Prayer, the Paraphrases long helped to shape English religious life. We reprint here the entire section of John's gospel from a copy of the 1548 edition including Erasmus' preface to the Archduke Ferdinand of Austria, and a letter, which credits the translation to Mary, from Nicholas Updall to Katherine Parr.

Despite the fame their work brought them, and despite the importance of their parents in mid-Tudor England, relatively little is known of the lives of Anne, Margaret and Jane Seymour - daughters of Anne Stanhope and the Duke of Somerset. In 1550, aged roughly eighteen, sixteen and nine, these three noblewomen composed a Latin poem of 104 distichs on the death of Marguerite de Navarre, which they sent to their former tutor, Nicolas Denisot, now living in Paris. Entitled Annae, Margaritae, Janae, Sororum virginum heroidum anglarum, in mortem Divae Margaritae Valesiae, navarrorum Reginae, Hecatodistichon, it was the first formal and original verse encomium in Latin penned by a female author to be printed in England. The Hecatodistichon was published in Paris in 1550 by Denisot, as the cornerstone of a collective tumulus, or commemorative volume, dedicated to Marguerite. The French literati were swift to respond to the appearance of the volume. In 1551 Denisot republished the Seymour's poem in a completely new volume with a French title that emphasised the collective nature of the Tombeau volume. Both volumes are reproduced here from editions held at the British Library.

This volume contains the work of the only two Renaissance Englishwomen known to have published collections (as opposed to compilations) of their Latin poetry. Elizabeth Jane Weston lived in Prague as a child, her stepfather being alchemist to Rudolph II. Her stepfather's disgrace, imprisonment and death in 1597 left her to try and support her destitute family household with her writing. Her facility at Latin verses and the support of Georg Martinius von Baldhoven quickly led her to international fame. For Poemata we reprint here the copy of the 1602 edition owned by the Folger Shakespeare Library and for Parthenica we reprint the copy of the 1608(?) edition owned by the Houghton Library. Bathsua Reginald (Makin) was the daughter of Henry Reginald, a London school-master. She is said to have been fluent in Greek, Latin and French and to have knowledge also of Hebrew and Syriac. Her Musa virginea Græco-Latino-Gallica of 1616 certainly confirm these claims to have been accurate. She later became tutor to Princess Elizabeth, daughter of Charles I. The work for which she is best known today is An Essay to Revive the Antient Education of Gentlewomen published in 1673. The work reproduced here is the 1616 edition of Musa virginea and as an appendix we also reprint an engraved card showing specimens of script.

Early modern works of advice can be typified by a number of texts by Erasmus falling into a variety of categories: advice on family conduct; manners; study plans and piety. A close relation to these works of advice was the parental advice book, usually written by a father to his son. It was not until the early 17th century that the mother's advice book evolved and even then these were often legitimated by the female authors claiming that sickness, or even impending death, made relaying their motherly advice by a means other than print impossible. The contents of the present volume, ordered chronologically by the date of the first edition of each advice book, are limited to works attributed to named mothers, even though information about these historical women is not always abundant. Miscellanea was the attempt of Elizabeth Grymeston to distill advice to her only surviving. It was first published in 1604. The text reproduced here is the 1608 edition which was the first to include the additional substantive Prayers. Even though listings indicate there were 19 editions of The Mother’s Blessing before 1640 very little is known of Dorothy Leigh. The first edition (1616), reproduced here, describes her as a gentle-woman, not long deceased and her dedicatory epistle to her three sons identifies her as a widow. Elizabeth Clinton wrote her advice book when she had become countess-dowager. It was dedicated to her daughter-in-law and addresses an area where she had apparently been deficient - the imperative directed at early modern women by domestic conduct books that mothers should nurse their own children. The edition reproduced here is the British Library copy. Elizabeth Brook Joceline composed her Legacy whilst awaiting the birth of her first child, having become convinced that she would die in childbirth. She died in 1622, nine days after the birth of a daughter. Possibly the most poignant of the mother's advice books, this was intended to stand in for her instructi

Few facts are known about Catholic recusant Jane Owen. The title page of this, her only work, tells us that in 1634 when this volume was published at St Omer, she was already deceased. However, she was necessarily still living after 1617 when the treatise of Bellarmine, which she here partially translates and comments on, De Gemitu Columbae, was first published. It seems likely that she spent most of her life in England but later lived in exile on the Continent, possibly returning regularly to collect alms for poverty stricken English recusants abroad. Her simple prose gives us unique glimpses of social history written by a recusant woman in the first person.

Isabella Whitney is the earliest Englishwoman known to have written original secular poetry in English for publication. The Copy of a Letter contains four poems written in the personae of persons jilted in love. The only known copy of this volume is held at the Bodleian Library and is reproduced here. Whitney’s second collection A Sweet Nosgay contains poetry in traditional stanzas and in prose format. Reproduced here is the unique copy held at the British Library. The French Historie by Anne Dowriche takes as its subject three events from the religious wars in France: the affair of the Rue St Jacques (1557); the Martyrdom of Annas Burgeus (1559) and the St Bartholomew’s Massacre (1572). Her work takes as its source Thomas Tymme’s The Three Partes of Commentaries, Containing the whole and perfect discourse of the Civill warres in Fraunce (1574). We reproduce here the fine copy of The French Historie held at the Huntington Library and also append two short poems thought to be hers. Ane Godlie Dreame, Compylit in Scottish Meter is Elizabeth Melville’s first person account of a pilgrim who is guided through the afterworld. While many of the variations in the different editions are merely accidental, there are some substantial changes. As an aid to bibliographic study of the poem therefore, copies of the following four editions are reproduced here: 1603 National Library of Scotland; 1604 National Library of Scotland; 1606 Huntington Library; 1620 British Library. Aemilia Lanyer was the first woman writing in English to produce a substantial volume of poetry designed to be printed and to attract patrongage. The Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum was published in 1611 and contains a series of poems to individual patrons, two short prose dedications, a title poem on Christ’s passion and the first country house poem printed in English. The volume is arguably the first genuinely feminist publication in England: all its dedicatees are women and the poem on the passion argu

The dates of Mary Fage are not known, it is assumed however that she was flourishing around 1637. Fames Roule comprises a series of over 400 acrostic verses, each containing an anagram and each addressed to one of the noble and powerful of Caroline England. As such it constitutes a verbal salute to court culture. While they may not be of great literary value, her verses are an extreme example of the pervasive word play of her time, and their contents afford an extended glimpse at social construction of upperclass reality in Caroline England. Reproduced here is the copy held at the Huntington Library.

As writers strongly committed to the Reformation, Anne Lock Prowse and Elizabeth Russell translated works which they believed were doctrinally useful for their Protestant readers. Lock translated Calvin’s four sermons from French, dedicating the work to Katharine, Duchess of Suffolk. These were published with the appended sonnet sequence A meditation of a penitent sinner. This appears to be the first sonnet sequence written in English. The present edition is a facsimile of the Folger Shakespeare Library copy of 1560. Of the markes of the children of God, and of their comforts in afflictions was published in 1590. Lock’s translation of Jean (or John) Taffin’s French treatise proved very popular as there were seven subsequent editions. The appended poem The necessitie and benefite of Affliction may reasonably be attributed to Prowse; it is written in common meter with alternating rhymes and continues the themes of the prose treatise. The present edition is a facsimile of the Huntington Library copy, which is an excellent copy. Elizabeth Cooke Hoby Russell was the sister of Anne Cooke Bacon. Her translation of Bishop John Ponet’s work from Latin was dedicated to her daughter Anne Herbert and in her dedication she suggests that the work was published in 1605, long after it was written, to prevent alterations to the text after her death. This edition is reproduced here from the one extant copy held at the Folger Library.

At a time when England was an officially Protestant country to translate Catholic works, thereby helping to propagate the faith, was a brave act and to actually identify oneself in print, as did Cary, as ’a Catholique, and a woman’ was a risky assertion of political opposition. One of Cary’s daughters asserts that Cary’s translation of Cardinal Du Perron’s Reply was largely motivated by a desire to convert scholars at Oxford and Cambridge. With her translation in 1630 she sought to reactivate a polemical war which had peaked in 1616 and she intervened in political debate that was far from resolved, and that would issue in revolution, regicide and restoration in the years to come. Although few copies escaped the burning ordered by Archbishop Abbot, at least ten survive. The copy reproduced here is from Cambridge University. Alexia Grey (baptised Margaret) joined the monastery of the Immaculate Conception in Ghent in 1629 at the age of twenty two or three. Hers was not the first translation of Benedict’s Rule but by that time a ’reformation’ and more than a century had rendered earlier translations unavailable. Her work was an important contribution to sustaining conventual life for Englishwomen abroad. Grey’s translation is sometimes bound, as in this volume, with Statutes compyled for the better observation of the holy rule of S. Benedict. The fine copy reproduced here is from the Downside Abbey in Bath.