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Women and Catholic Manuscript Networks in Seventeenth-Century England: New Research on Constance Aston Fowler’s Miscellany of Sacred and Secular Verse*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Helen Hackett
Helen Hackett*
Affiliation:
University College London
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Abstract

Huntington Library manuscript HM904 is a verse miscellany compiled by Constance Aston Fowler, daughter of Lord Aston, in 1630s Staffordshire. Constance operated as a kind of literary agent, soliciting, exchanging, and circulating poems, as well as preserving them in her book. Many of these poems are by or about family and friends, but they also indicate her connections with far-reaching networks of manuscript transmission. In particular, the volume contains Catholic devotional verses in an unusual and somewhat archaic hand (Hand B) that also appears in another Catholic miscellany from 1650s Warwickshire; and secular verses that may be by the Catholic love poet William Habington, or may be hybrid compositions that imitate or adapt his work. Both these ingredients have much to say about the complex compilation processes of manuscript verse miscellanies, and about the cultural participation of women and Catholics in seventeenth-century England.

Type
Studies
Information
Renaissance Quarterly , Volume 65 , Issue 4 , Winter 2012 , pp. 1094 - 1124
Copyright
Copyright © 2012 Renaissance Society of America

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Footnotes

*

Sincere thanks are due to the Catholic Record Society and UCL Faculty of Arts and Humanities for funding a research visit to the Huntington Library; the staff of the Huntington Library, especially Mary Robertson and Stephen Tabor; Victoria van Hyning (PhD candidate, University of Sheffield) for sharing with me her important discovery of Gertrude Aston Thimelby’s profession document; Abbot Geoffrey Scott, Archivist of Douai Abbey, for helping me to obtain an image of it; an audience at the University College London Centre for Early Modern Exchanges, especially Caroline Bowden, Edward Chaney, Sajed Chowdhury, Daniel Starza Smith, and Alan Nelson; and Rebecca Bailey, Cedric C. Brown, Nicky Hallett, Victoria van Hyning, Gerard Kilroy, Alison Shell, Adam Smyth, Henry Woudhuysen, and two anonymous readers for Renaissance Quarterly for their helpful comments on drafts.

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