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A Naval Wife: The Letters of Susannah Middleton
in
Bulletin of the John Rylands Library
In 1805 Susannah Middleton travelled with her husband, Captain Robert Middleton, to Gibraltar where he was to run the naval dockyard. Abroad for the first time, Susannah maintained a regular correspondence with her sister in England. Casting light on a collection of letters yet to be fully published, the paper gives an account of Susannah‘s experiences as described to her sister. Consideration is given to Susannah‘s position as the wife of a naval officer and her own view of the role she had to play in her husband‘s success. Written at a time when an officers wife could greatly improve his hopes for advancement through the judicious use of social skills, the Middleton letters provide evidence of an often overlooked aspect of the workings of the Royal Navy.
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‘With the Lady of Coucy’
Noble Communities and the Completion of the Psalter-Hours John Rylands Library Latin MS 117
Judging from repetitious appearances of her marital arms in the painted line-endings, the Psalter-Hours John Rylands Library Latin MS 117 probably belonged to Jeanne of Flanders (c.1272–1333), daughter of Count Robert III of Flanders and in 1288 second wife to Enguerrand IV of Coucy. Yet the line-endings also contain some 1,800 diminutive painted escutcheons, many of which refer to other members of the local nobility active during the 1280s. This study, based on an exhaustive survey of the total heraldic and codicological evidence, suggests that the majority of the extant Psalter predated the Hours and that the two parts were combined after the 1288 marriage. The ‘completed’ manuscript bears witness to major events that unfolded in and around the Coucy barony over the course of the decade. It suggests a complex relationship between Jeanne of Flanders and a lesser member of the local nobility, a certain Marien of Moÿ, who may have served as her attendant.
The letter collections of Greco-Roman antiquity dwarf in total size all of ancient drama or epic combined, but they have received far less attention than (say) the plays of Euripides or the epics of Homer or Virgil. Although classicists have long realised the crucial importance of the order and arrangement of poems into ‘poetry books’ for the reading and reception both of individual poems and the collection as a whole, the importance of order and arrangement in collections of letters and the consequences for their interpretation have long been neglected. This piece explores some of the most important Greek letter collections, such as the Letters attributed to Plato, and examines some of the key problems in studying and editing collections of such ancient letters.
The Circulation of Menasseh ben Israel’s Works in Puritan Libraries in England
The Testimony of Late Seventeenth-Century Library Auction Catalogues
In this article on book circulation, I survey twelve English library auction catalogues from the period 1676–97, in order to show how interest in the writings of the Amsterdam rabbi Menasseh ben Israel (1604–57) continued after his death. I do this by identifying the circulation of his works in Puritan personal libraries. I focus particularly on the library auction catalogues of leading Puritans, notably Lazarus Seaman, Thomas Manton, Stephen Charnock and John Owen. I also show that of all Menasseh’s books, De resurrectione mortuorum libri III was the one most frequently owned by Puritan divines. This article demonstrates how books helped to catalyse the boundary-crossing nature of the Jewish–Christian encounter in seventeenth-century England.