Book of the Season – Spring 2023

Paradisi in Sole Paradisus Terrestris
by John Parkinson

This should have been the Book of the Month for April 2023, but, as it looks likely that there will be very little, if any, of April left by the time it goes on display, it has been redesignated Book of the Season, for Spring, instead!

And, as Spring is the time of new life and regrowth, when thoughts turn to gardens, if you have one (whether to maintaining your carefully manicured lawns and beds, or trying to keep rampant nettles and thistles at bay), it seemed appropriate to have a book on gardening. So here is one of the first gardening manuals written in English: Paradisi in sole paradisus terrestris, or, A garden of all sorts of pleasant flowers which our English ayre will permitt to be noursed up; with A kitchen garden of all manner of herbes, rootes, & fruites, for meate or sause used with us, and An orchard of all sorte of fruitbearing trees and shrubbes fit for our land, together with the right orderinge planting & preseruing of them and their uses & vertues.

Its author, John Parkinson, came to London in 1585 at the age of fourteen, to be apprenticed to Francis Slater, an apothecary. This profession was very similar to that of the modern-day pharmacist – apothecaries prepared medicines, which they sold to physicians and surgeons, as well as to the public, and gave general medical advice. As merchants who bought in goods wholesale, they were represented in London by the Worshipful Company of Grocers, but by the early seventeenth century felt this was no longer adequate and formed the Society of Apothecaries, which was granted its royal charter in 1617. Parkinson was by now a fully-fledged apothecary, and a highly respected one; he was appointed to the Court of Assistants of the new Society, which together with the Master and Wardens formed its governing body. But institutional distinction and administration held no great appeal for him; at the beginning of 1622 he was granted permission to step down from his role, leaving him free to devote himself to his real passion: his garden.

Access to a garden was essential for an apothecary, as so many remedies were prepared from plants and herbs. Parkinson’s garden was situated in Long Acre, west of the City of London; Long Acre survives as the name of a street, north-west of Covent Garden, but all trace of Parkinson’s garden has disappeared, so we know neither its precise location nor its extent. However, we know something of the plants which he grew there, as among the papers of the botanist John Goodyer (c.1592-1664) are two copies of a list of plants marked up with the letters C, F and P in the margins, which are assumed to refer to his fellow plant-collectors William Coys, John de Franqueville and John Parkinson. The second list, which has dated additions, has a P against 264 entries, which suggests a garden of some size; as well as traditional medicinal plants, such as camomile (used to relieve the symptoms of a cold), there are plants recently introduced from overseas, such as the Virginia creeper.

New plants for his garden were collected from a wide circle of friends and fellow plant-lovers: the physician Robert Fludd brought him plants from the garden of the University of Pisa; his Yucca bush came from John de Franqueville, who had been given it by the son of the French king’s gardener, Jean Robin, who grew it from a Yucca given to him by the English herbalist John Gerard. Parkinson probably financed the plant-collecting expedition made to Spain, Portugal and North Africa by the Flemish Dr William Boel in 1607-8; he was also a close friend of the Tradescants, father and son (whose extensive collection of botanical and other specimens and curiosities was acquired by Elias Ashmole and formed the basis of the Oxford museum which bears his name). Nor were his contacts exclusively male: Mistress Thomasin Tunstall is credited with sending him roots of the Lady’s Slipper orchid, and other plants.

It may seem surprising that the eminent apothecary Parkinson covers the flower garden, kitchen garden and orchard in his book, but says little about the medicinal uses of the plants he describes. For the kitchen garden and the orchard, he describes how the produce is used as food; for the ‘garden of pleasant flowers’, which takes up three-quarters of the volume, each entry includes ‘The place’ (where the plant can be found growing), ‘The times’ (of its flowering), and ‘The names’ (both Latin, and variant names in English), and for some ‘The vertues’, stating, but only briefly, what ailments they may be used to treat. However, he makes several references to his intention of bringing out a fourth part, the ‘garden of simples’ (medicinal herbs). This became Theatrum botanicum – The theater of plants, published in 1640 when Parkinson was 73, a monumental work of over 1700 pages, in which nearly 4,000 plants are described, with their properties.

Parkinson died in 1650, and was buried at the church of St Martin-in-the-Fields, close to his beloved garden.

The title Paradisi in sole paradisus terrestris has caused some head-scratching over the years, as it seems to mean something like ‘The earthly Paradise in the sun of Paradise’. But the word Paradisus originally meant simply a pleasure-garden or park – giving ‘Park-in-sun’s earthly Paradise’.

Book of the Month – March 2023

The History and Antiquities of the Exchequer of the Kings of England
by Thomas Madox

Very little is known about the personal life of Thomas Madox. He was probably born around 1666, but there is no known record of his birth or baptism, nor is there any evidence that he attended either Oxford or Cambridge University. He was admitted to the Middle Temple, to study law, but was never called to the bar. He held administrative posts in the government, but took no part in politics or in public life, instead applying himself conscientiously to his work, both as an official and as a scholar and antiquarian.

His first post was as a sworn clerk in the office of the Lord Treasurer’s Remembrancer. At this point in history, the primary responsibility of the Lord Treasurer’s Remembrancer was to collect and record regular and established revenues (rather than revenues derived from taxation and customs), especially rents and other income from Crown lands, or from the grants of liberties and franchises. Madox was later made joint clerk in the Augmentation Office of the Exchequer, the successor to the Court of Augmentations which had been set up in 1536 to administer the revenues accruing to the Crown follow­ing the dissolution of the monasteries and other church institutions. He there­fore spent his working days surrounded by his­torical records both from the past and in the making, and was con­scious that they should be kept in good order – in February 1716 he and a fellow clerk reported that there was much disorder in the Remembrancer’s office, one of their chief com­plaints being that for many years the senior sworn clerk had not been entering important ac­counts in the parchment rolls (known as pipe rolls, because when rolled up they resembled a length of piping) which were designed as a perma­nent re­cord, but only in paper books.

In 1702 Madox published his first work, the Formulare Anglicanum. This was a large collection of charters (formal legal documents recording transactions such as grants of privileges, contracts, or conveyances of property) from the Norman Conquest to the end of the reign of Henry VIII. This was valuable to scholars not only for the meticulous transcriptions, which were made from the original documents rather than the cartularies into which medieval scribes often copied them, but also for Madox’s lengthy introductory essay, in which he discussed the scribal conventions and palaeography of the documents themselves, and also their use as guides to social and economic developments.

His second work, The History and Antiquities of the Exchequer of the Kings of England, is displayed above. This was published in 1711, and is not simply a study of the records of what had in the Middle Ages been one of the most important departments of state; it is also an account of how it changed and grew over the centuries, and impacted on the general legal and financial history of the kingdom. Madox’s aim was to provide not only a history, but also a methodology: ‘My ambition,’ he states in his preface, ‘was, to form this History in such a manner, that it may be a pattern for the antiquaries to follow … in reference to the method of vouching testimonies.’ He goes on to say that England is so well furnished with records that any history of it should be grounded in them, as they will vouch for what is said; in modern terms, the history should be backed up by evidence from primary sources.

In July 1714 Madox was appointed Historiographer Royal. This office had been more or less invented for himself by its first holder, James Howell, in 1660, who urged that other states, such as France, had such an official ‘to transmit to posterity the actions and counsels of that state as also to vindicate them’; ‘historiographer’, in this context, seems to mean one who writes history in the sense of recording what will become history. The title brought with it an annual stipend of £200, but what duties were required of its holders was very vague. Madox continued with his medieval researches: in 1726 he published Firma Burgi, an essay on the history of England’s medieval boroughs, and intended to follow it with a history of the feudal system, but died in January 1727 before he had finished making revisions to it; what he had completed was published in 1736 as Baronia Anglica. The material he had collected in the course of his researches was bequeathed by his widow to the British Museum, and comprised ninety-three volumes.

This copy of Madox’s History of the Exchequer was given to Somerville by the family of Sir Edward Fry. Sir Edward was a distinguished lawyer and judge; his daughter, (Sara) Margery, entered Somerville in 1894 to read mathematics, but did not take a degree – her parents had told the then Principal, Miss Maitland, that, now that she had qualified for Somerville, they wished her to sit no more examinations. In 1899 she was appointed Librarian at Somerville, and with Miss Maitland was chiefly responsible for the building of the library, opened in 1904. Shortly after this she left to become warden of a hall of residence for women students at the University of Birmingham. After war work with the Friends’ War Victims Relief Committee, followed by active membership of the Howard League for Penal Reform and of the University Grants Committee, she was persuaded to return to Somerville as Principal in 1926. She was popular with the undergraduates – one of whom is reported to have said that they had heard she was an authority on food reform and prison reform, and these were the two things Somerville needed – but was out of sympathy with the university in general, which she found too entrenched in privilege and tradition. She resigned less than five years later, and returned to her work in support of reform, particularly of the penal system, a cause in which she remained active until her death in 1958. The portrait of her which hangs in Somerville’s Dining Hall was painted by her brother, the art historian and critic Roger Fry.

Book of the Month – February 2023

Travels in the interior districts of Africa : performed under the direction and patronage of the African Association, in the years 1795, 1796, and 1797
By Mungo Park

Mungo Park was born at Foulshiels near Selkirk, roughly midway between Glasgow and Edinburgh, in 1771. At the age of fourteen he was apprenticed to a surgeon in Selkirk, and in 1788 entered Edinburgh University to study medicine. In 1792 he moved to London, where his brother-in-law, James Dickson, was a well-known botanist with his own seed and plant business in Covent Garden. Through Dickson, he met Sir Joseph Banks, the great explorer and collector of natural history specimens. Banks arranged for Park to travel as surgeon’s mate on an East India Company ship sailing to Sumatra, where Park collected botanical specimens for him.

The eighteenth century was a time of intellectual revolution; the key to understanding the universe was seen to be human reason rather than divine revelation, and there was a drive to systematize, to discern order in the natural world, and to make knowledge of it as complete as possible. This applied to geography as well: by the 1780s most of the world’s seas had been explored and mapped, but there were still big blank spaces inland on European maps, and one in particular was almost on Europe’s door-step – the interior of Africa.

In 1788, Banks and eleven others founded the Association for Promoting the Discovery of the Interior Parts of Africa, generally known as the African Association. Members were to pay an annual fee of five guineas, and the money was to be used to fund expeditions. Motives for supporting the Association were probably various: it is likely Banks sought to extend scientific knowledge, and to make his own collection of botanical specimens more complete, but others of the founding members were merchants, looking for new sources of raw materials and new markets for finished goods. In particular, they wanted to trace the courses of two of Africa’s greatest rivers: the Nile and the Niger.

The lower reaches of the Nile had long been familiar to Europeans; in the second century BCE, the Greek writer Eratosthenes had sketched, largely accurately, the Nile as far as the confluence of the Blue and White Niles at Khartoum (although the ultimate source of the White Nile was not established until the 1870s). But the Niger, like the city of Timbuktu on its banks, was half-mythical; there were travellers’ reports of a great river south-west of the Libyan desert, but it was usually assumed to be a continuation of the Nile.

By the mid-1700s, it had been established that the Niger was a separate river, but its source and mouth were still unknown. The first expedition sponsored by the African Association was that of John Ledyard, a native of Connecticut, whose plan was to trek west across Africa from the Red Sea to the Niger and follow it to the Atlantic coast, but he got no further than Cairo, where he accidentally poisoned himself while trying to cure a bilious attack. Shortly after Ledyard’s departure, the Association recruited a second explorer, Simon Lucas, whose brief was to head south across the desert from Tripoli, but he was thwarted by tribal wars in the region he was to cross. Their third explorer, Daniel Houghton, set off in November 1790 to travel up the Gambia River as far as he could, and then to find his way, if possible, to Timbuktu and the Niger. He survived a fire which destroyed most of his belongings and a gun which exploded in his hands, and travelled further inland than any European before him, but was then abandoned by merchants whose caravan he had joined, and either starved to death or was killed.

When Mungo Park returned to London from Sumatra in 1794, Banks suggested that he should take on the search for the Niger, to which both Park and the other members of the Association agreed. Park left England for Africa on 22 May 1795.

At first, he followed Houghton’s route up the Gambia. Having reached Pisania, 200 miles up-river, he spent five months there in the house of Dr John Laidley learning the local language, before heading eastwards towards Segou, capital of the kingdom of Bambara, which was known to be on the Niger. His reception was often hostile, as local rulers forbade European traders from travelling inland; when he explained he was not a trader, he was allowed to go on, but still had to make gifts and pay transit duties out of the small stock of goods he had with him, or even out of his own possessions.

Hearing of unrest and possible war ahead of him, he diverted his route to head north, but was captured by Moors, who, thinking him to be not only a Christian but also a spy, tormented and humiliated him, sometimes leaving him without food and water. After three months he was allowed to go on, but with little more than the clothes he stood up in.

He struggled on, and was finally rewarded with his first sight of the Niger, ‘glittering to the morning sun, as broad as the Thames at Westminster’. He reached Segou, but the ruler refused to let him enter (although he sent him some cowrie shells to pay his way). Park carried on, to Sansanding and then Silla, but there, exhausted and almost destitute, decided to turn back.

He followed the Niger to Bamako, struggling through the heavy rains which had now begun. At Bamako he turned west, was robbed of his horse and most of his clothes, regained them, and, severely ill with fever, struggled on to Kamalia, where a kindly Muslim trader undertook to look after him and eventually take him to the Gambia. Seven months later he set out again, this time travelling with a large caravan, and finally reached home, arriving in London on Christmas Day 1797.

His account of his travels, published in 1799, became an immediate best-seller. It is a simple, factual account, and very sym­pathetic to the native villagers (who were often far more charitable to Park than their rulers). He is also sympathetic to the plight of individual slaves, although he sees no problem in slavery as an institution.

This copy of Mungo Park’s Travels was given to the library by Alice Gillett (née Boycott), who studied Agriculture at Somerville 1958-1961, and went on to become Administrator at St Peter’s School in Mmadinare, Botswana.

Book of the Month – January 2023

Cottoni Posthuma: Divers choice pieces of that renowned antiquary Sir Robert Cotton, Knight and Baronet, preserved from the injury of time, and expos’d to public light, for the benefit of posterity

Sir Robert Cotton was born on 22 January 1571 in Denton, a hamlet a few miles south-west of Peterborough. He attended Westminster School, and then Jesus College, Cambridge, graduating with a BA in 1586; in 1588 he entered the Middle Temple in London to continue his studies.

One of his schoolmasters at Westminster was William Camden, the pioneering antiquary and historian, and author of Britannia, a topo­graphical and historical survey of the British Isles county by county. Cotton shared Camden’s fascination with the origins and development of Britain and its people, and accompanied him on a trip to Hadrian’s Wall to study inscriptions and other artefacts left by the Romans. In the late 1580s they and others with antiquarian interests began to meet weekly to discuss topics of mutual interest, such as the origins of British titles of nobility, the various terms used in English for land measurement, and the epitaphs on tombs and monuments.

Such topics may appear to be of only harmless scholarly interest, but in the early seventeenth century they often touched on matters of hot political controversy. One such controversy was the question of who would succeed the childless Queen Elizabeth I; two days after her death, Cotton wrote a tract demonstrating King James VI of Scotland’s descent from ancient English kings, and it is possibly for this that he was knighted by James on his accession as James I of England in 1603. But other topics considered by this society of antiquaries, such as the origins and privileges of Parliament, and by implication what constraints these laid on the power of the monarch, were less to the royal liking; when an attempt to revive the society, which had rather petered out as members died or moved out of London, was made in 1614, the antiquaries were told after their first meeting that ‘his Majesty took a little mislike of our society’, and thought it prudent not to proceed to further meetings.

This did not, of course, stop them pursuing their antiquarian investigations and discussing them in private. Sir Robert was by now a member of the House of Commons, where he was appointed to numerous committees and commissions, to which his ability to produce documentary evidence of procedures and precedents was a great asset. His collection of manuscripts and printed books was extensive in both size and scope, and shared freely with other researchers. In 1622 he purchased a house within the precincts of the Palace of Westminster, adjoining the House of Commons; thus, even in those periods when he himself did not have a seat in the Commons, the resources of his library and his own knowledge were readily available to those in government.

Despite his ‘mislike’ of the early Society of Antiquaries, James I seems to have had cordial relations with Sir Robert personally, perhaps initially because Sir Robert could claim descent from Robert the Bruce. But when Charles I came to the throne in 1625, the tensions between King and Parliament escalated sharply. In November 1629, Charles ordered the closure of Cotton’s library on the grounds that he had circulated a seditious pamphlet, but in reality almost certainly because he allowed free access to it to those who sought arguments and precedents for opposing the king’s wishes. On 6 May 1631 Cotton died, reputedly of grief at being denied access to his library.

In 1702 Cotton’s grandson, Sir John Cotton, transferred ownership of the collection to the nation, to be ‘kept and preserved … for Publick Use and Advantage’, and in 1753 it formed one of the foundation collections of the newly-established British Museum; in 1973 it became part of the new British Library. It consists of over 1,400 manuscripts and more than 1,500 charters, rolls, and seals, ranging in date from the 4^th century to the 1600s; Cotton also owned printed books – probably several hundred – but what happened to them is unclear.

Despite his extensive knowledge, Cotton published almost nothing during his lifetime. But many of his tracts and speeches were circulated in hand-written copies, and after his death some were collected together in the volume displayed above. It was published in 1651, two years after the execution of Charles I, when the monarchy had been abolished and the apparently settled orders of church and state were crumbling. The contents demonstrate Cotton’s view that present policy should be informed by what had been done in the past, and that rights and privileges granted in the past should be respected. The final tract in the collection, ‘A Short View of the Long Life and Reign of Henry the Third, King of England’, had previously been published in 1627; in part it was an account of how Henry had allowed his favourite, Simon de Montfort (who eventually rebelled against him), too much influence over him at the expense of the advice of his Privy Council, and was taken to be a thinly-veiled attack on Charles I’s favourite, the Duke of Buckingham. Cotton was called to account for it, but he claimed it had been published without his knowledge or consent, and was able to prove that it had been written in 1614 and presented to James I.

Somerville’s copy of Cottoni Posthuma was bequeathed to the college by Anne de Villiers, who served the college as Librarian, Treasurer, and tutor in Modern History. She also edited the journal kept by Henry Hastings, fifth Earl of Huntingdon, of proceedings in the parliament of 1621, in which Cotton does not appear to have had a seat, although he is referred to for his ability to seek out precedents.

Book of the Month – December 2022

The Priviledges of the Baronage of England, When they sit in Parliament
by John Selden

John Selden was born on 16 December 1584 in the hamlet of Salvington in Sussex (now part of the town of Worthing). He attended the Prebendal Free School in Chichester, then entered Hart Hall (a predecessor of Hertford College) in Oxford. He left Oxford in 1602 without taking a degree – but it was not unusual at that time not to take a degree, unless intending to enter either academia or the church. Selden’s interest was the law, which Oxford under­graduates at that time could not study; he therefore moved to London, where he pursued the usual course for a student of law, which was to enter one of the Inns of Chancery, then one of the Inns of Court – in Selden’s case, the Inner Temple – and was called to the bar (and could therefore plead a case before a judge) on 14 June 1612.

But Selden’s interests were not limited to the legal knowledge he needed to practise as a lawyer. He was also deeply interested in the history of law, in tracing laws back to their foundations and seeing how they developed over time. His first book, published in 1610, was The Duello, or, Single Combat, a brief history of trial by single combat in England, and was followed in the same year by Jani Anglorum facies altera, a short treatise in Latin in which he endeavours to trace the origins and growth of English secular law from the time of the earliest records to the end of the reign of Henry II. Two years later the poet Michael Drayton published the first part of his Poly-Olbion, a description of England and Wales in verse going through county by county, which included ‘illustrations’ by Selden explaining various historical and mythological allusions – Selden’s learning was by no means limited to legal matters alone.

Over the next few years, among other works he published Titles of Honor, in which he traced the origins and transformations of titles such as Duke and Count, De Diis Syriis, a substantial treatise on the gods of peoples other than the Jews mentioned in the Old Testament, and a history of tithes – the money which was levied to pay for the upkeep of churches and clergy, and which Selden demonstrated was not a continuation of the Jewish Temple tithes, but a custom which had grown up in the early Middle Ages. This was a controversial conclusion when received opinion at the time was that tithes were collected by divine right.

In 1621 the House of Lords set up a committee to look into the privileges accorded to the Lords when sitting in Parliament, both as a body and as individuals. Selden was one of the antiquarians appointed to research precedents, and the book displayed here sets forth the fruits of his researches, published in 1642. The range of sources listed on the title page shows how conscientious he was, and his commitment to the then rather novel idea that historical research was best carried out by seeking out primary sources as close in time to the events they recorded as possible, rather than relying on what were considered to be authoritative secondary texts. The ‘baronage’ referred not just to those with the title of baron, but all those members of the nobility summoned to sit in Parliament; their main privileges included the right to appoint proxies, freedom from lawsuits for the duration of a Parliament, freedom of speech in proceedings, and the right to give their word of honour rather than swear an oath.

In 1624 Selden entered Parliament himself, as a member of the House of Commons, and from 1640 served as the member for the University of Oxford. His legal expertise and profound knowledge of historical precedents were much in demand, and he served on numerous committees. He remained an MP through the turbulent times leading up to and during the English Civil War, his belief, based on his historical researches, that the English constitution was one in which sovereignty was shared among monarchs, lords spiritual and temporal, and commons putting him in the Parliamentarian camp, opposing the absolutist tendencies of the King. However, in 1648 he was barred from his seat in ‘Pride’s Purge’, when all those who favoured negotiating with Charles I rather than calling for his trial and execution were excluded from the Commons.

Selden retired to his extensive scholarly researches into the history and development of laws and customs, his final work, unfinished at his death on 30 November 1654, being a monumental study of the Sanhedrin and other judicial bodies of the ancient Hebrews. He bequeathed the majority of his vast personal library to the Bodleian, and in 1659 over 8,000 volumes of books and manuscripts were received and housed in the newly-built West End, which became the Selden End of Duke Humfrey’s.

This book bears evidence of two previous owners before it came to Somerville:

Inside the front board is the heraldic bookplate of Charles Plummer (1851-1927), Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Oxford from 1873 to his death, and a historian whose work ranged across Anglo-Saxon, Celtic, Old Icelandic and medieval history, palaeography and law. Opposite it is the autograph of William English Barnes, of Lincoln’s Inn, dated 1802. It seems fitting that a book by Selden should have belonged to a multilingual historian and a barrister, and now form part of a library in Oxford.

Book of the Month – November 2022

Lucan’s Pharsalia
Translated into English verse by Nicholas Rowe

London: printed for Jacob Tonson, 1718

The Roman poet Lucan (Marcus Annaeus Lucanus) was born in the Roman colony city of Corduba (now Cordoba) in southern Spain on 3 November 39 CE. When he was less than a year old, his father moved the family to Rome, where Lucan was educated as befitted a member of the elite, with an emphasis on literature and rhetoric. In 49 CE his uncle, Lucius Annaeus Seneca, was appointed tutor to Nero, who became Emperor on the death of his adoptive father Claudius in 54 CE; Lucan, who had gone to Athens to continue his studies, was recalled by Nero to become one of his inner circle of trusted friends and advisors. In 62 or 63 Lucan published the first three books of his epic poem De bello civili (On the Civil War, also known as the Pharsalia), which begins with a paean in praise of Nero. But relations between them clearly soured, and in early 65 Lucan joined the conspiracy led by Gaius Calpurnius Piso to assassinate Nero. The plot was discovered, and Lucan was forced to commit suicide (depicted on the title-page of the volume displayed here), as were his father and his uncle Seneca, who were also implicated in it.

Lucan was a prolific writer, but the ten books of the Pharsalia are the only work of which we have a complete text (and that is almost certainly unfinished). Its subject is the civil war which began in 49 BCE when Julius Caesar, at the head of an army, crossed the Rubicon, a stream which marked the boundary between Gaul, where Caesar had been given authority to wage war by the Roman Senate, and Italy, where he had no military authority and therefore to bring an army with him constituted an invasion.

Lucan’s portrayal of the war is as something of unspeakable horror, in which the Roman Republic is destroyed; his attitude is well illustrated by the frontispiece of the volume displayed above. It shows a personification of the city of Rome, accompanied by Romulus and Remus, the legendary founders of Rome, with the she-wolf which suckled them, being attacked by the Furies, with serpents wreathed in their hair; above them Mars, the god of war, directs the storm-winds to blow on her; the fasces – the rods and axe which symbolised Roman civil authority – and the eagle-topped military standard lie fallen on the ground.

The translator, Nicholas Rowe, was born in Little Barford, Bedfordshire, in 1674, and at first followed his father by becoming a barrister. But on his father’s death he inherited an income of £300 a year, which allowed him to leave the law and pursue his own inclination, which was for literature and in particular the theatre.

His first play, The Ambitious Stepmother, was produced in 1700, and was set in the imperial court of ancient Persia; his second, Tamerlane (1701), concerned the founder of the Central Asian Timurid empire. Both followed the Restoration fashion for tragedies to depict the great and powerful, and also had strong undertones of contemporary politics. But tastes were changing; his later plays were mostly ‘she-tragedies’ – a term he probably coined himself to refer to plays with a more domestic setting focusing on the sufferings of a woman. His most successful play was The Fair Penitent, described by Dr Samuel Johnson as ‘one of the most pleasing tragedies on the stage’, which brought into popular use the name Lothario to refer to a philanderer.

Rowe also produced the first modern edition of Shakespeare, published in six volumes in 1709, with modernised spelling and punctuation, and for the first time with the dramatis personae listed at the beginning of each play.

Like many of Shakespeare’s plays, Rowe’s plays were written in blank verse, and in 1715 he was appointed poet laureate. His most ambitious poetic venture was the translation of Lucan displayed here, which took him some twenty years to complete. Like his earlier plays, it may have had political undertones, as there were rumours and threats of civil war in Britain, culminating in the Jacobite rising of 1715. Rowe had completed it, but not yet published it, when he died on 6 December 1718. He is buried in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey.

Book of the Month – October 2022

Memoirs and Reflections upon the Reign and Government of King Charles the Ist and K. Charles the IId, by Sir Richard Bulstrode
London: printed by Nathaniel Mist, 1721
Given to Somerville by Lady Anne de Villiers

The Book of the Month should perhaps be renamed the Book of the Quarter, as there has been a hiatus of two months since the last one! In that time much has happened, not least the ending of an era with the death of Queen Elizabeth II and the accession of King Charles III. In recognition of that, here is a book on the life and character of the two previous kings to bear that name.

The first and second Charleses, who were father and son, lived in turbulent times. Charles I came to the throne in 1625, a short man (around five feet tall), shy and reserved, with a slight stammer. His father James had become King of Scotland in 1657 at the age of thirteen months, and on the death of Elizabeth I in 1603 also King of England, being her closest royal relative – his great-grandmother Margaret had been the older sister of Elizabeth’s father, Henry VIII. The English Reformation, when the English church broke away from the authority of the Pope and the Roman Catholic Church, and events such as the Spanish Armada, when the king of Spain, with the support of the Pope, sought to conquer England and return it to the Catholic church, were still recent history; Roman Catholics were regarded as deeply suspect, and possibly treasonous. Religion and politics were inextricably entwined; laws were enacted dictating where and how people should worship, and kings and parliaments sought to impose their own version of Christianity (which was almost exclusively the religion of Europe at the time) on their subjects and people.

Charles I inherited from his father the idea of the divine right of kings – that kings were chosen by, and therefore answerable only to, God; they could not be held accountable to their parliaments, or bound by the law, and any rebellion against them was rebellion against God. Charles and his Parliaments did not get along, to put it mildly, and in 1642 their relationship deteriorated into civil war. Charles lost, was captured and put on trial for treason, found guilty, and beheaded on 30 January 1649. To some it was the death of a tyrant, to others that of a holy martyr. England was declared a Commonwealth – in effect a republic – and power was gradually taken over by Oliver Cromwell, the most successful of the Parliamentary army’s commanders, who was declared Lord Protector. In 1658 he died, and the title passed to his son, Richard, but Richard failed to establish his authority over the army and the political situation rapidly spiralled out of control, opening the way for the restoration of the monarchy in the person of Charles’s eldest son, also Charles, in May 1660.

Charles II was a complete contrast to his father – over six feet tall, and known as the ‘merry monarch’. He was also a much more astute politician than his father, and recognised the importance of conciliating rather than provoking confrontation with Parliament. He did not share his father’s stubborn adherence to imposing a set form of worship and church governance on his subjects, but favoured much greater tolerance of varieties of religion – although probably out of indifference rather than ideology. However, the majority of the British people retained their deep-seated suspicion of Roman Catholicism. When Charles II died in 1685 without leaving a legitimate child as heir (although plenty of illegitimate ones), the throne passed to his younger brother James. James had converted to Roman Catholicism, probably in the late 1660s, but at first he seemed willing to work with Parliament rather than against it. However, as time went on he used his powers as king more and more to promote his co-religionists to positions of influence. When his second wife, the Italian princess Mary of Modena, gave birth to a son in 1688, many feared that a Roman Catholic monarchy would become permanent.

The canny Charles had made sure that Mary, James’s elder daughter by his first wife, was brought up as an Anglican and married to the staunchly Protestant William of Orange. Approaches were made to William assuring him of support if he invaded. When William landed at Brixham in Devon at the head of a large fleet, support for James melted away and he fled to France.

The author of the book featured here, Richard Bulstrode, fought in several battles on the Royalist side during the Civil War, but once the cause was lost returned to his legal studies at the Inner Temple and was called to the bar in 1648. His connections with moderate supporters of the Parliamentary side (notably his cousin Bulstrode Whitelocke) meant that he was not sanctioned for his earlier Royalist sympathies, and he was twice appointed High Steward of the Borough of Reading. After the restoration of Charles II in 1660, his movements are difficult to date, but he spent some time in prison for theft in Bruges, and while there was converted to Roman Catholicism. By July 1674 he was back in official favour, and was appointed English agent at Brussels, and under James II was given the higher status of resident ambassador there. After the revolution of 1688 he remained loyal to the old regime, and stayed on in Brussels as agent and intelligence-gatherer for the exiled James II. He died, in dire poverty, at the age of ninety-five in 1711.

His Memoirs were not published until 1721; the publisher, Nathaniel Mist, relates in the preface how he met Richard Bulstrode’s younger son in Paris, who gave him a manuscript copy of them with freedom to publish. However, the autobiographical strand in them is filled out with descriptions of events and characters derived from and sometimes almost copied from other works such as the Earl of Clarendon’s History of the Rebellion; the historian C. H. Firth suggests in the English Historical Review of 1895 that the autobiographical details, and also the political digressions (due to their similarity in style to Bulstrode’s Essays, published in 1715, which Firth describes as ‘among the dullest of their kind’), were indeed written by Bulstrode, but the publisher then bulked them out with material from other sources. This copy of the subsequent book was given to Somerville by Lady Anne de Villiers, who read Modern History at Somerville 1922-1925 and went on to become Librarian, Treasurer, and Fellow in Modern History here.

Book(s) of the Month – July 2022

To make up for this month’s ‘Book of the Month’ being a little late, it is not one book but three – the ‘Archy and Mehitabel’ series by Don Marquis (which seemed a suitably not-too-serious choice for a month in the Long Vacation).

Don Marquis was born in the village of Walnut, Illinois, on 29 July 1878. In 1902 he moved to Atlanta, where he joined the Atlanta Journal as an editorial writer, then became associate editor of Uncle Remus’s Magazine, a monthly magazine aimed at families begun by Joel Chandler Harris (‘Uncle Remus’ being the fictional narrator of the African-American folktales collected and published by Harris). In 1909 Marquis moved to New York City, and in 1912 he became a writer for the Evening Sun, a daily newspaper, to which, for the next eleven years, he contributed a daily column, ‘The Sun Dial’.

In a column from 1916, he describes how he came into his office early one morning and discovered a gigantic cockroach jumping up and down on the keys of his typewriter: ‘He would climb painfully upon the framework of the machine and cast himself with all his force upon a key, head downward, and his weight and the impact of the blow were just sufficient to operate the machine, one slow letter after another.’ The cockroach was unable to hold down the shift key, so could not use capital letters or punctuation, and after about an hour ‘he fell to the floor exhausted, and we saw him creep feebly into a nest of the poems which are always there in profusion.’ Fortunately, Marquis had left a blank sheet of paper in the machine the previous evening, and on it he found the cockroach had typed a poem beginning:

expression is the need of my soul
i was once a vers libre bard
but i died and my soul went
into the body of a cockroach
it has given me a new outlook on life

The cockroach goes on to complain that there is a cat, called Mehitabel, who is supposed to catch rats but doesn’t – there is one rat in particular he would like her to get rid of, into which the soul of another human poet has transmigrated, and which sneers at and then eats the poetry the cockroach types every night. The poem ends:

dont you ever eat any sandwiches in your office
i havent had a crumb of bread
for i dont know how long
or a piece of ham or anything but apple parings
and paste leave a piece of paper in your machine
every night you can call me archy

So begins a series of poems, supposedly typed out laboriously by Archy, chronicling his adventures and those of Mehitabel (who claims to have been Cleopatra in a former life), and Archy’s musings on them and the world in general.

Marquis himself probably found the task of providing copy for his column seven days a week almost as exhausting as Archy found typing by hurling himself at the keys. Archy first appeared in his office, he said, ‘about the same time that free verse began to commend itself to the multi­tudes because it looked as if it would be so easy to write’ – and while gently spoofing it he could also write in short lines, thus needing fewer words to fill up his column inches! The conceit that the poems were composed by a cockroach (albeit one with the soul of a poet) allowed him to criticise and satirise in a good-humoured way; ‘random thoughts by archy’ begins:

one thing that
shows that
insects are
superior to men
is the fact that
insects run their
affairs without
political campaigns
elections and so forth

The poems continued through the 1920s and 1930s; Marquis died in 1937 after a series of strokes. Three collections of them were published: archy and mehitabel (1927), archys life of mehitabel (1933) and archy does his part (1935). Somerville has copies of all three, given to the library by Lady Iris Capell and Mrs Dorothea S. Murphy.

Lady Iris Mary Athenais de Vere Capell, elder daughter of George, 7th Earl of Essex, came up to Somerville to read PPE in 1922 at the age of 27, having served as a nurse during the First World War. She was a keen rally-car driver, and one of the first Vice-Presidents of the Women’s Automobile and Sports Association. Dorothea Stanton Murphy (née Hardy) also came up in 1922, to read English; she was Canadian, and had already graduated from Toronto University.

Book of the Month – June 2022

This month’s Book of the Month is not one book, but fifty-two – which may be some compensation for there having been no book at all last month.

It is the Biographie Universelle, compiled by Louis Gabriel Michaud and his brother, Joseph François, and printed by them in Paris between 1811 and 1828. This proclaims itself to be a history of the public and private life of all those who are remarkable for their writings, their actions, their talents, their virtues or their crimes, in alphabetical order.

This was the Michaud brothers’ second venture into the field of biography; in 1802 they had produced the Biographie de tous les hommes morts et vivants ayant marqué, à la fin du XVIIIe siècle et au cours de celui actuel par leurs rangs, leurs emplois, leurs talents, leurs écrits, leurs malheurs, leurs vertus, leurs crimes, etc. (also known as the Biographie Moderne) in four volumes. The Biographie Universelle is much more ambitious in coverage, including notables from the ancient world and through the medieval and early modern periods. Nor is it limited to France, or to Europe: among the biographies in the final volume are those of the Polish general Joseph Zaionczek (1752-1802), of Zenobia, Queen of Palmyra 260-274 CE, of Zeuxis, a Greek painter of the fifth century BCE, of Zhinga or Zingha-Bandi, King of Angola (died 1663), of Zoheir (or Zuhayr), an Arab poet who lived in the sixth and beginning of the seventh centuries CE, and of Ulrich Zwingli, the Swiss theologian and reformer (1484-1531).

It was followed by three volumes of ‘Partie mythologique’, which, according to the sub-title, cover the gods and heroes of Greek, Roman, Egyptian, Hindu, Japanese, Scandinavian, Celtic and Mexican mythology and beyond. These were then followed by a Supplement, comprising a further thirty volumes, making a total of eighty-five volumes all together. Even so, the enterprise had not quite come to completion; volume 85 ends part way through the letter V, and was published in 1862 by Beck, following the death of Louis Gabriel Michaud in 1858 at the age of 83 (his brother having died in 1839 aged 72). It is still a standard reference work for biographies up to the mid-nineteenth century in France today.

Somerville has (perhaps fortunately, in terms of the space that would be needed!) only the fifty-two volumes of the original Biographie Universelle. These came from the library of Anna Morpurgo Davies, Professor of Comparative Philology and a fellow of Somerville 1971-2004.

Anna was born in Milan on 21 June 1937, into an Italian Jewish family. As Nazi influence grew in Italy, so did anti-Semitism; her father, an engineer, lost his job and was about to take his family to Brazil when he contracted pneumonia and died. Her mother took Anna and her three older brothers to live in Rome. In September 1943 the Nazis arrived and began rounding up Jews; Anna and her family just managed to escape and, through the kindness of friends and strangers alike, survived. (For a full account, see ‘Holocaust memories from Italy’, an address Anna gave in Somerville Chapel for Holocaust Memorial Day 2005, available on the college website.)

In her final years at school, she discovered the fascination of Ancient Greek and Latin, which she went on to study at the University of Rome. Here, she was introduced to Mycenaean Greek, the language of the clay tablets found in Late Bronze Age palace complexes such as Knossos and Mycenae. The script in which it was written, Linear B, had only recently been deciphered; it meant that the history of the Greek language and the way it was used and had changed could be traced through 3,000 years (and could also be compared with other ancient languages such as Sanskrit to posit an even older parent language). The first item in Anna’s extensive list of publications is the first ever dictionary of Mycenaean Greek.

In 1962 she came to Oxford, and in 1964 was appointed Lecturer in Classical Philology at St Hilda’s. In 1971 the then Professor of Comparative Philology, Leonard Palmer, retired; Anna was waiting with some anxiety to see who his successor would be when to her surprise she was offered the Professorship herself. This required a move to Somerville, which, she said, ‘was somewhat shaken by the amount of book space I needed’! So began her long association with Somerville – long in more ways than one, as she could frequently be seen working away at her computer (she was one of the first people in college to use a personal computer) past midnight. The advent of computers and the internet did not diminish her need for book space; when she had covered all the available walls in her room (which is now the Eleanor Rathbone Room) and the short corridor leading up to it with bookshelves, she persuaded the college to let her take over the large but little-used bathroom opposite her room; it is now used as an overflow book-stack for the library. When she retired, she had an extension built on to her house in which she installed rolling book-stacks (although not all the books she kept there were learned tomes; she was also a great fan of Mills & Boon romances for ‘light reading’). She died in 2014, leaving her vast collection to various libraries in Oxford.

Book of the Month – April 2022

What (you have probably never wondered) were the fashionable mother and child wearing in April 1812? Below you may see the answer, in an illustration (hand-coloured, as the technology for commercial colour printing was yet to be invented) in The Lady’s Magazine, or Entertaining Companion for the Fair Sex.

A ‘morning dress’ was a relatively simple and loose-fitting dress worn while doing tasks around the house such as writing letters and doing embroidery; with the addition of a pelisse (a long, fitted coat) or spencer (a short jacket, as in the illustration) and a hat, it could be worn for walking to the shops or to church. Boys and girls alike wore frocks, until boys were ‘breeched’ (put into their first pair of breeches) at roughly the age of five.

The Lady’s Magazine was first pub­lished in August 1770 and continued monthly (merging with two other titles) until 1847. It took its title from The Gentleman’s Magazine, first published in 1731, the stated aim of which was ‘to treasure up, as in a magazine’ everything of note, or abridge­ments thereof, pub­lished in the news­papers – the word ‘magazine’ at this period referring to a storehouse or repository; its use specifically for non-academic, general interest peri­odicals was no doubt popular­ised by these publications.

Like its gentleman’s counterpart, The Lady’s Magazine provided a digest of the month’s news, both foreign and domestic. Much of the foreign news concerns the war in Europe; both magazines report Lord Wellington’s siege and successful storming of Badajoz in Spain (the gentlemen being given rather more military detail than the ladies). It is estimated that the two armies between them have devoured three-quarters of the sheep in Spain. The French have defeated Swedish troops in Pomerania, and a Russian army is massing on the borders of Poland. The ladies may be given fewer gory details than the men, but they are clearly not thought too delicate to take an interest in military matters.

The domestic news begins with a report on the state of health of the king, George III, who is said to be much improved in body, but ‘his mind continued as diseased as ever’. Then there are brief descriptions of events such as Luddite riots in Yorkshire, extreme weather in Hull, two women imprisoned for cruelty to children, the collapse of the Highgate Tunnel which was to take the Great North Road under Hornsey Lane, and petitions for religious liberty being brought before Parliament. Much the same news is reported in The Gentleman’s Magazine, but often at greater length, and there is also a very detailed report of proceedings in Parliament; politics is the preserve of the men.

Both have sections of poetry sent in by readers, but whereas The Gentleman’s Magazine has a long section of readers’ letters, some long enough to be called essays, almost three quarters of The Lady’s Magazine consists of instalments of serialised fiction. Many famous nineteenth-century novels began life as serials, but all those featured in this issue of The Lady’s Magazine have sunk without trace, so far as I can see. Their general character can probably be inferred from titles such as ‘The Fleet Prison, or a Cure for Extravagance, and a Convincing Proof of the Fallacy of Fashionable Friendship’ and ‘The Brothers: A Moral Tale’.

A similar magazine sparked the young Mary Somerville’s lifelong interest in mathematics – she describes visiting a Miss Ogilvie in the 1790s, who ‘showed me a monthly magazine with coloured plates of ladies’ dresses, charades, and puzzles. At the end of a page I read what appeared to me to be simply an arithmetical question; but on turning the page I was surprised to see strange looking lines mixed with letters, chiefly X’s and Y’s, and asked; “What is that?” “Oh,” said Miss Ogilvie, “it is a kind of arithmetic: they call it Algebra; but I can tell you nothing about it.”’

This bound volume of The Lady’s Magazine for 1812 came to the library as part of the bequest of Mrs Sarah Smithson in 1928. Although not an Old Somervillian herself, Mrs Smithson was a generous benefactor of the college and left one half of her residuary estate to promote the study of Modern Languages at Somerville, and the pick of her book collection for the library.

This volume also has what must be the signature of its original owner on the front fly-leaf: ‘Ann Maples, Spalding 1812’. There is in Spalding today a firm of solicitors named Maples, which was founded in the late 1820s by Ashley Maples, the son of Thomas and Ann Maples – it may well be she who first owned this book.

Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice was published the following year, in 1813. What, I wonder, would the Bennet sisters have made of The Lady’s Magazine? Kitty and Lydia would perhaps have seized it eagerly and scanned it for news of their officer friends, then read the serials and tossed it aside, declaring that it was too bad of the authors to break off just as things were getting interesting. Mary would have studied it intently, hoping to gather material for making witty and intelligent observations. Elizabeth would have cast a merry eye over it, noting choice examples of human absurdity to share with her father. And Jane would have shaken her head sorrowfully over the tales of human failings, then nodded approvingly when repentance and reform brought things to a satisfactory conclusion.