“I Reed a Hard Readinge a whill”: Reconstructing the Reading of Lady Margaret Hoby

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Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Gentlewomen such as the well-known Lady Anne Clifford (1590–1676), for example, represented herself with a great number of books in her self-commissioned Great Picture of the Clifford Family. The painting (1646) constitutes a pictorial catalog of Lady Clifford’s library, and the books are not simply artistic props: Lady Clifford took care that each book was identifiably labeled, so the bookshelves in the painting are an index of her wide range of reading, her humanist education, and her religious manifestation, all of which, as Heidi Brayman Hackel argues, visualize books as a theme of Lady Clifford’s life and a means for her to understand and influence the world to which she belonged (229, 240). More importantly for this present discussion, Lady Clifford’s pictorial booklist includes not only staple devotional writings such as John Donne’s sermons and George Herbert’s The Temple, but also the works of writers such as Miguel de Cervantes, Torquato Tasso, Baldassare Castiglione, Michel de Montaigne, Guillaume de Salluste Du Bartas, Geoffrey Chaucer, Sir Philip Sidney, and Edmund Spenser as well as translations of Boethius, Ovid, and Augustine.

2. For overviews of recent work on early modern women’s libraries, see Black, “Manuscript and Women’s Booklists,” in Palgrave Encyclopedia of Early Modern Women’s Writing in English: https://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007/978-3-030-01537-4_85–1; and Black, “Women’s Libraries in the Private Libraries in Renaissance England Project,” in Women’s Bookscapes in Early Modern Britain: Ownership, Circulation, Reading, 214–30.

3. For more information, see Slack, “Hoby [née Dakins], Margaret, Lady Hoby” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (henceforth ODNB): https://doi-org.silk.library.umass.edu/10.1093/ref:odnb/37555. For the highly educated Lady Elizabeth Russell (née Cooke) and her equally intellectual and religiously active sisters, see Allen, The Cooke Sisters: Education, Piety and Politics in Early Modern England (Manchester UP, 2013).

4. All quotations from Lady Hoby’s diary are taken from Joanna Moody’s edition, The Private Life of an Elizabethan Lady: The Diary of Lady Margaret Hoby 1599-1605 (Sutton, 1998), which is a transcription of MS Egerton 2614 in original spelling.

5. Crawford (206) identifies this book as Thomas Morton, Two Treatises (1597). Another possibility is STC 6832.65, A dyet for the Christian soule, constantly to be observed every day (London, 1600): books were often available in the autumn before the dates in their imprints. If not this edition, then an earlier edition of the same work that no longer survives is also a possibility. This book is unidentified by the editor of Lady Hoby’s diary.

6. George Gifford, Fifteene sermons, upon the Song of Solomon (London, 1598).

7. For a discussion of Perkins’s “moderate” Puritanism, see Michael Jinkins’s article in ODNB: https://doi-org.silk.library.umass.edu/10.1093/ref:odnb/21973.

8. See Patrick Collinson for the controversies Cartwright was involved in: https://doi-org.silk.library.umass.edu/10.1093/ref:odnb/4820.

9. For example, Puritans insultingly called the Pope the “Bishop of Rome”: while technically an accurate title, the phrase as used in controversy was designed to deny the universal supremacy suggested by the title “Pope.” Puritans also lampooned Whitgift as “the Pope of Lambeth” and “the Canterbury Caiaphas” for his persecution of Puritan ministers. Whitgift was one of the major targets of satire in the Marprelate tracts for his suppression of Puritan reform and his failure to answer Cartwright’s 1575 and 1577 books. For a detailed biography of Whitgift, see William Joseph Sheils in ODNB: https://doi-org.silk.library.umass.edu/10.1093/ref:odnb/29311.

10. For the detailed biography of Greenham, see Eric Josef Carlson in ODNB: https://doi-org.silk.library.umass.edu/10.1093/ref:odnb/11424.

11. For details of Boughton’s life and writing, see G. Lloyd Jones in ODNB: https://doi-org.silk.library.umass.edu/10.1093/ref:odnb/3585.

12. Udall harshly criticizes the bishops who had stopped “the mouth of the sheepeheard, and set at libertie the ravening wolves,” labeling them “the foxes among the lambes” (Diotrephes 8). For more details, see Claire Cross in ODNB: https://doi-org.silk.library.umass.edu/10.1093/ref:odnb/27973.

13. Udall’s Demonstration was printed in the house of Elizabeth Crane in East Molesey, Surrey, where the first Marprelate tract, The Epistle, was also printed. Both books were banned by Royal Proclamation. I am grateful to Professor Joseph Black for the link with the Marprelate publication.

14. For Throckmorton and his authorship of the Marprelate tracts, see Black, The Martin Marprelate Tracts: A Modernized and Annotated Edition (Cambridge UP, 2008), xxiv-xlv.

15. Hoby refers to “Ardenton” or “Ardington” in December 1599 (42), September 1600 (110-11), March 1601 (140-41), and August 1601 (158-60). For the persuasive identification with Henry Arthington see Crawford 217–18.

16. For detailed discussions of Elizabethan recusancy, see Questier 69–94; Lake and Questier 53–84.

17. Crawford, focusing particularly on Lady Hoby’s dialogic and communal reading exercises, contends that her reading exercises were “regional transactions in which her often very public reading intersected with other forms of sociability to influence local sentiment, belief, and religious and political action” (194).

18. An edited list of the books Lady Margaret Hoby mentions in her diary is forthcoming in the publicly accessible Private Libraries in Renaissance England (PLRE) database hosted by the Folger Library at plre.folger.edu.