Tails of Cross-Channel Comets: From Acclaim to Obscurity

This article explores the diverse materialities of texts created by three female luminaries that expand our understanding of translation and transformation in early modern Europe. Lady Anne Cooke Bacon’s translation of Bishop Jewel’s Apologia was praised as the official text of the Elizabethan Settlement and printed without change for the edification of both English readers and Continental sceptics. Yet despite its centrality in the vitriolic controversy between Jewel and Louvain Romanist Thomas Harding, within a generation Bacon’s name disappeared. Bilingual calligrapher and miniaturist Esther Inglis prepared and presented stunning manuscript gift books, often including self-portraits, to patrons on both sides of the Channel. Her artisanal expertise emulated and often outdid the typographic variety of the printed text. Scholarly and lionized participant in the Neo-Latin Republic of Letters, Anna Maria van Schurman, whose landmark Dissertatio was translated as The Learned Maid, scandalized her conservative Calvinist supporters by embracing Labadism and praising its simple ways in her autobiography Eukleria. These three early modern women, distinct in temperament, time, and social status, are the subject of this exploration, which seeks to understand the dynamics and fluctuations of cross-Channel transmission and the role played by the Channel divide or bridge in creating a brief notoriety soon to be followed by obscurity.

Afterword

If we imagine that a Victorian common reader of devotion has accumulated all the devotional books and print that have been the subject of this study we might see, gathered together on a table or shelf, a jumble of things: devotional poetry, family prayer manuals, Sunday-reading books and periodicals, gift books, and daily textbooks. Reading meant for the masses lies alongside serious works, cheap print mingles with expensive gift volumes. Broad Church, Tractarian, and Nonconformist doctrine sit together in easy company. In considering the range of what counted as devotional reading materials for Victorians, I have endeavoured to think beyond generic categories and denominational affiliations. The companionability of these items, their miscellany and assortment, reminds us that they were objects that were handled and re-read by their owners. And even when they were not being read, they remained as materials on display and as available to the next reader who might come along. This was the case with Monica Madden’s only occasionally- (and possibly never-) read copy of Keble in Chapter One. The profusion of religious publishing in the nineteenth century meant that devotional observance could also be a leisurely and a consumerist pursuit. But Elaine Freedgood (2013), who has pointed out how “things … still do not get taken seriously” in literary criticism,...

Arranging Daily Gifts of Devotion

This chapter begins by examining some of the ways that Victorian readers inscribed, marked, and altered devotional books. Some kept albums, scrapbooks, and commonplace books in order to pluck and transplant, as it were, verse from original sources to their own blank books, while others annotated the pages of existing books or wrote lengthy dedications. Even as readers were engaged in their own tactile interactions with devotional texts, the religious publishing marketplace was emulating these material reading practices as though they were a form of domestic handicraft, as in Frances Ridley Havergal’s Four-Fold Counsel tetralogy, a series of botanically inspired devotional gift books. Another of Havergal’s popular gift book sets, known as the Royal Series, is instructive, moreover, of how the material organization of devotional books could make a gift-time of daily reading.

Chronometres

What does it mean to feel time, to sense its passing along the sinews and nerves of the body as much as the synapses of the mind? And how do books, as material arrangements of print and paper, mediate such temporal experiences? Chronometres: Devotional Literature, Duration, and Victorian Reading is a study of the time-inflected reading practices of religious literature, the single largest market for print in Victorian Britain. It examines poetic cycles by John Keble, Alfred Tennyson, Christina Rossetti, and Frances Ridley Havergal; family prayer manuals, Sunday-reading books and periodicals; and devotional gift books and daily textbooks. Designed for diurnal and weekly reading, chronometrical literature tuned its readers’ attentions to the idea of Eternity and the everlasting peace of spiritual transcendence, but only in so far as it parcelled out reading into discrete increments that resembled the new industrial time-scales of factories and railway schedules. Chronometres thus takes up print culture, affect theory, and the religious turn in literary studies in order to explore the intersections between devotional practice and the condition of modernity. It argues that what defines Victorian devotional literature is the experience of its time signatures, those structures of feeling associated with its reading durations. For many Victorians, reading devotionally increasingly meant reading in regular portions and often according to the calendar and workday in contrast to the liturgical year. Keeping pace with the temporal measures of modernity, devotion became a routinized practice: a way of synchronizing the interior life of spirit with the exigencies of clock time. This kind of devotional observance coincided with the publication, between 1827 and 1890, of a diverse array of largely Protestant books and print that shared formal and material relationships to temporality. By dispensing devotion as daily or weekly doses of reading, chronometrical literature imagined and arranged time in relation to time’s materiality. But in so doing, it also left open temporal spaces that could be filled by readers, some of whom marked temporality through their own practices like annotation and scrapbooking, which publishers were then quick to emulate. Chronometrical literature likewise produced a host of embodied cognitions that could include moments of absorption but, equally, ones of boredom and mental drift. Such texts therefore did not necessarily discipline Victorian readers according to the demands of the clock or even of religious doctrine. For their regular yet malleable temporal arrangements also meant that readers might discover their own agencies and affects through encounters with print, such that devotional readers themselves came to participate in a reciprocal process of both reading and writing in time. Chronometres considers how the deliverances afforded through time-scaled reading are persistently materialized in the body, both that of the book and of the reader. Recognizing that literature and devotion are not timeless abstractions, it asks how the materiality of books, conceived as horological relationships through reading, might bring about the felt experience of time. Even as Victorian devotion invites us to tarry over the page, it also prompts the question: what if it is “Eternity” that keeps time with the clock?

Classics in their Own Right

This chapter traces the reception of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s and Charles Kingsley’s mid-nineteenth-century myth collections for children (A Wonder-Book for Girls and Boys, Tanglewood Tales, and The Heroes) over a century-long period during which they dominated the field and came to be viewed as classics in their own right. It treats the general cultural impact of these works, their role as gift books, and their progressive transformation as they were republished in varying formats and with illustrations by an array of distinguished artists; it includes detailed analyses of selected illustrations by Frederick Church, Milo Winter, Arthur Rackham, Charles Kingsley, William Russell Flint, H. M. Brock, Joan Kiddell-Monroe, and Charles Keeping.

GIFTING CULTURES AND ARTISANAL GUILDS IN SIXTEENTH- AND EARLY SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY LONDON

This article reconsiders the gift within London's sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century livery companies. Previous research into guild gift-giving cultures has focused exclusively upon substantial bequests of money and property by mercantile elites to the ‘great twelve’ livery companies. Through charitable gifts, citizens established godly reputations and legacies, perpetuated through the guild institution. It is argued here that a rich culture of material gift-giving, hitherto overlooked by historians, also thrived within London's craft guilds. Drawing on company gift books, inventories, and material survivals from guild collections, this article examines typologies of donors and gifts, the anticipated ‘returns’ on the gift by the recipient company, and the ideal spatial and temporal contexts for gift-giving. This material approach reveals that master artisans negotiated civic status, authority, and memory through the presentation of a wide range of gifted artefacts for display and ritual use in London's livery halls. Moreover, this culture of gift-giving was so deep-rooted and significant that it survived the Reformation upheavals largely intact. Finally, the embellishment of rituals of gifting, and the synchronization of gifting and feasting rites from the second half of the sixteenth century, are further evidence for the resurgence of English civic culture in this era.

The Avant-Folkways of Lorine Niedecker

This chapter examines the ‘avant-folkways’ of Lorine Niedecker and her poetry and demonstrates how Niedecker’s poetry of the 1940s and 1950s draws on various aspects of folk, including folk speech, nursery rhymes and ballads, local history, and artisanal and domestic craft practices. Niedecker’s folk sensibility, chapter 1 argues, was enhanced considerably by her work on the Federal Writers’ Project, from 1938 to 1941. Niedecker’s poetry, it is argued, undermines the dichotomies that underpin the pervasive ideological construction of American folk in the twentieth century—notions of the regional versus the cosmopolitan, the modern versus the traditional—as well as popular distinctions regarding ‘formal’ versus ‘folk’ poetry, art, and aesthetics. Chapter 1 also examines the social implications of Niedecker’s folkways and their defining role in her own ‘renaissance’ across the Atlantic, in England and Scotland, via the channels of small press networks in the 1960s that her own handmade gift books, it is argued, significantly prefigures.