Insight 2019

THE QUEEN’S COLLEGE LIBRARY
Issue 9, Michaelmas Term 2019
Inside this issue:
Michael Riordan writes about the College’s extensive collection of medieval
deeds
Will Poole on a recent discovery within our special collections
Christopher Hollings and Benjamin Wardhaugh look at a recent donation to our
special collections—Mathematical tables, contrived after a most comprehensive method
(1717)
Liza Blake on Margaret Cavendish (and her ‘glitter pen’)

W
elcome to Issue 9 of Insight. This will be
my final edition as I have now retired
from Queen’s.
There are four substantive articles this year. The first
features some of the earliest documents in the
College collections and is by my colleague Michael
Riordan, the College Archivist. Michael describes the
repatriation to Queen’s of the medieval deeds of the
College from their long sojourn in the Bodleian
Library.
Secondly, Will Poole of New College, a regular
contributor, has written about the exciting find of a
book from John Donne’s Library recently discovered
in our collections.
Thirdly, Christopher Hollings, the College Senior
Research Fellow in the History of Mathematics, and
Benjamin Wardhaugh from All Souls have written
about the recent gift to the College from Mr and Mrs
Steve Gooderham, of a copy of the 1717 edition of
Mathematical Tables by Briggs, Wallis, Halley and
Sharp.
The final article is by Liza Blake from the University
of Toronto about the Duchess of Newcastle’s books,
many of which she donated on publication to
Oxford and Cambridge College Libraries, including
Queen’s.
The remainder of this year’s issue is concerned with
the two major exhibitions in the Upper and New
Libraries held during the year. The first was entitled
Ancient Egyptian At Queen's and was curated by
Professor Richard Parkinson, the current Professor
of Egyptology and Jordan Miller, DPhil student in
Egyptology. Its theme was the history of Egyptology
in the college, from Peet to the present day.
Katherine Hunt, Career Development Fellow in
English and Dianne Mitchell, Junior Research Fellow
in English jointly curated the second exhibition,
Literary Matter in Early Modern England. It opened in
early June and explored the themes of the material
lives of literary texts from the 16th and 17th
centuries.
As always, I am very grateful to all the contributors
who wrote for this year’s issue and to my colleague,
Sarah Arkle, who took many of the photographs and
undertook the typesetting. As this is my final issue, I
would also like to record my thanks to everyone who
has written for Insight over the last nine years and to
my two former colleagues, Veronika Vernier and
Lynette Dobson, both of whom worked to produce
a number of earlier issues.
I hope Insight continues to go from strength to
strength, reflecting the great richness of the
collections in Queen’s.
Amanda Saville, Librarian
September 2019
***
Amanda Saville, Introduction and farewell…… p.3
Michael Riordan, ‘To Bodley and Back’…… p.4
Will Poole, ‘From China to John Donne via some
Exotic Alphabets: A Provenance Odyssey from
Queen’s College Library’…… p.9
Christopher Hollings and Benjamin Wardhaugh,
‘Mathematical tables, contrived after a most
comprehensive method (1717)’…… p.15
Liza Blake, ‘Women Writers and Women Scholars
in the Queen’s College Library: What Bindings and
Fleurons Can Tell Us about Cavendish’s University
Donations’…… p.18
Round up of the 2019 exhibitions hosted in the
library…… p. 24
***
If you have any queries about Insight please contact
the Technical Services Librarian, Ms. Sarah Arkle
E-mail: sarah.arkle@queens.ox.ac.uk
Phone: (01865) 279130
3

Michael Riordan, Archivist, The Queen’s
College
BEING A MEDIEVAL FOUNDATION it is not
surprising that the College Archives should have a
few medieval documents. In fact it has rather more
than that: there are about 2,500 medieval deeds and a
little over 500 medieval rolls. Only a few of these
relate directly to the College itself, most instead
derive from the estates that the College was
bequeathed or purchased. This explains why many of
the documents are older than the College itself, as
they were acquired as part of the estates whose
history they witness. A large part of them came to
the College in 1347 when Edward III made the
College the perpetual Warden of God’s House in
Southampton, or when Edward IV granted Pamber
Priory and its estates (also in Hampshire) to God’s
House, and therefore indirectly to the College, in
1462.
This collection, which today comprises 53 boxes
stored on nine metres of shelving, requires
considerable resources, not only to store it, but also
to ensure that the deeds are carefully preserved for
posterity, and that they can be safely used by
scholars and others. This was something that was
clearly worrying the College a century ago.
In 1928 the College formed a Muniment Committee
to consider what should be done with the College
Archive. The following year they took the advice of
Noel Denholm-Young, an eminent medieval
historian who was a research fellow at Magdalen, and
who had recently calendared the medieval deeds at
Christ Church. Denholm-Young advised that the
Queen’s deeds should be calendared in the same way
as those at Christ Church and from May 1929 he was
employed – at a rate of £1 a day! – to prepare a
calendar. By September he had worked through
1,700 of the deeds and hoped to finish early in 1930.
By May 1930 the work was done and the University
Typewriting Office was preparing several copies of
Grant by Robert de Eglesfield of his estate of Renwick to the
College, 1347. The College’s coat of arms is based on his personal
seal.
the calendar. Denholm-Young now turned his mind
to the more modern (i.e. post-1500) records. Over
the next year he worked on a calendar of these,
though one with briefer descriptions of the
documents. He was assisted on this by Miss EM
Snodgrass, who had taken a 3 rd in Modern History
from Somerville in 1930. It is not clear how the work
was divided between them except that Miss
Snodgrass seems to have put in more hours than
Denholm-Young.
The entries in the post-1500 calendar were shorter
than those in the medieval one because Denholm-
Young was in no doubt that these were much less
valuable than the medieval documents. He had two
pieces of advice for the Bursar. He noted that ‘there
appear to be a number of miscellaneous 19 th century
account books which might be discarded, but they
hardly come within the province of an archivist.’
More radically, he suggested that ‘a big step towards
cleaning up the muniment room could be made by
destroying those expired leases & counterparts of
leases of which copies exist in the lease books’. This
had apparently recently been done by St. John’s on
4

his advice. Queen’s, however, decided not to burn
the leases as Denholm-Young suggested, but instead
to offer them to a dealer in case, as the Bursar put it,
‘possibly some Americans or others might care to
have them.’ He was right; the College sold them for
£15 and they were acquired by an American who
ultimately gave them to the University of Kansas.
Denholm-Young was giving this, somewhat cavalier,
advice because the College was worried about the
storage of its records. At this time the older
documents, including all the medieval records were
in the Muniment Room (which was over the
passageway between the Hall and Chapel), but there
were also records stored in the Bursary, the Bell
Tower and in the wine cellar. The College’s solution
to this was to create a new Muniment Room in the
basement of Front Quad 1 where all the post-1500
records would be moved, creating a single, unified
store. This continued in use (albeit with a room in
Drawda Hall being added in the 1970s when the
Muniment Room became too full for new records)
until 2017 when the Archive was moved to the New
Library.
But the College’s plan, almost certainly on Denholm-
Young’s advice, for the medieval material was more
radical. In May 1930, just as Denholm-Young had
finished the calendar for the medieval deeds, the
College was in correspondence with HE Craster,
Keeper of Western Manuscripts at the Bodleian, and
on 2 nd June Bodley’s Librarian signed a
memorandum of agreement by which the medieval
deeds would be deposited in the Bodleian. This was
not just in order to free up space in College, but was
also done in the belief that the deeds would be much
more accessible to scholars at the Bodleian than they
would be in Queen’s. The agreement stated that ‘the
documents shall be treated with the same care and
on exactly the same footing as Bodleian documents,
except that all applications to borrow them shall be
referred to the College for decision.’
In his correspondence with Craster, the Bursar had
noted that ‘the deeds will be arranged and protected
in the same way as the Christ Church deeds’ and that
this would be done at a cost of £37 which the
College would pay. This must refer to the series of
envelopes and boxes in which the deeds were placed
(and remain in today) which are identical to those
housing the Christ Church deeds which were also
deposited in Bodley. The majority of the deeds were
placed in small envelopes which were part cardboard
and part textile, while the larger deeds or those with
large seals were placed in small cardboard boxes with
cotton wool to protect the seals. They were all then
placed in larger boxes 27x40cm and 14cm deep. This
system made good sense physically, with the
envelopes in one sequence and the small boxes in
another, but because the deeds were numbered
sequentially it was not always entirely clear which
sequence any particular deed might be in, which
caused some difficulty for Bodleian staff trying to
find deeds for readers.
Grant by Queen Philippa of 20 marks to the College, 1347.
And, indeed, the deeds have proved of interest to a
range of researchers. In his first report to the College
in 1929, Denholm-Young saw two principal uses for
the collection. First, he thought they would be of use
to the local historian and though he found that ‘there
is surprisingly little North country material of the
14 th century or earlier’ (despite the College’s
longstanding links to Cumberland and
Westmoreland, it has never owned much property
there), he observed that the ‘Hampshire and
Dorsetshire documents form a closely articulated
series by which many of the dark places of county
history, and especially the history of Southampton,
might be considerably illumined.’
He was certainly right. They have proved to be of
great interest to local historians across the country
5

(including those in Cumbria), though as perhaps half
of them relate to Hampshire, Denholm-Young’s
prediction has proved correct. Even as I write this
there are two members of a Hampshire local history
society looking at Denholm-Young’s calendar of the
medieval deeds in order to understand better how
the topography of their village has developed.
Perhaps the crowning glory of the College’s
contribution to Hampshire history was the
publication by John Kaye, for many years the
College’s Law tutor, in two volumes of the
Southampton Records Series of the God’s House
Cartulary. A cartulary is a volume in which an
institution made copies of its most important legal
documents. In one volume Kaye published a
transcript of the Cartulary, and in the second he
teased out from this the history of each tenement in
Southampton owned by God’s House.
Letters Patent of Edward III, 1347, confirming to the College the
Wardenship of God’s House, Southampton. The initial letter may
be a portrait of Queen Philippa.
The deeds are also particularly useful to the
historians of Oxford. They were used extensively by
the great historian of medieval Oxford, HE Salter, in
his Survey of Oxford which traces the history of the
tenements of Oxford in a similar way to that done
for Southampton by Kaye. There are also several
hundred deeds that relate directly to the College’s
own history. These include the Foundation Deed of
1341, which is Edward III’s licence to Robert de
Eglesfield to found the College and in which the
initial E of Edwardus should have been illuminated
6
but wasn’t (presumably nobody paid for it!). The
deed of 1347 in which Edward confirms to the
College the Wardenship of God’s House does,
however, have a beautifully illustrated initial letter,
which may be a portrait of Queen Philippa. The king
was issuing the deed at Philippa’s request because
many earlier records had been destroyed when the
French invaded Southampton!
Denholm-Young also thought that the deeds would
be of ‘use to the general historian … as a corpus to
which he could refer for evidence on particular
points of social or manorial history’. In other words,
by having such a large collection of deeds it would
be possible to see trends over time and to compare
and contrast practices across different parts of the
country. John Kaye, whose speciality as an academic
lawyer was the land law, used them in just this way.
In his 2009 book on Medieval English Conveyances he
states that ‘the idea of writing a book which would
draw attention to conveyancing transactions in
general came to me when I gave a course of lectures
on the subject’. Though it was necessary in the book
to cite deeds which had already been published, the
‘lectures were based exclusively on unpublished
deeds in the archives’ of the College.
This was possible because of the wide range of
different types of deed in the collection. At the most
basic level was the grant, in which one person gives
property to another person or an institution. More
often than not this is a piece of land, but there are
also examples in the collection, rather shockingly, of
serfs being conveyed. The grant could be a gift or it
could be for a consideration, i.e. the result of a sale.
Most of the grants still have the seal of the person
making the grant hanging from the bottom of the
deed; the seal authenticated the document as being
legitimately from that person, in the same way that
we would use a signature today.
The grants are occasionally accompanied by a
quitclaim. The land law was complicated and there
was no central Land Registry to provide authoritative
information. It was possible that even when granting
property to another person the grantor may have
overlooked some rights he had in the property which

he might not even be aware of. To ensure that the
purchaser or his heirs would have no legal difficulties
in the future, the grantor would also draw up a
quitclaim in which he renounced any remaining
rights he or his heirs might have in the property.
Another way of transferring property was the fine or
final concord. To a casual reader this looks like a
court case where the plaintiffs claim that the
defendants have agreed to sell them land and then
reneged on the deal. In fact, all the parties had every
intention of honouring the sale, but by levying the
fine in court it gives the purchase a better legal
standing. Not only did both sides keep a copy of the
fine but a third part – the ‘foot’ of the fine – was
kept in the court’s records.
The final concord was cut with an indenture, a wavy
line, and this was common with leases too. The idea
was that both counterpart deeds, one kept by each of
the parties in the agreement, could be fitted back
together like a jigsaw which would authenticate both
parts as genuine. The word ‘indentura’ was also often
written across the parchment before it was cut to
make the authentication even stronger.
In addition to the 2,500 deeds there are also about
500 rolls. The English medieval government did not
keep its records in books, as the papacy did, but as
rolls – the oldest surviving account roll is known as
the Pipe Roll due to its appearance, when rolled, like
a great pipe. Other English institutions tended to
follow suit. The College kept its own accounts (the
‘long rolls’) in roll form until 1692 when it started
using books instead. There are also accounts for the
God’s House in Southampton as well as for some of
the College’s manors. The rolls also include rentals
which list each property the College owned and the
rent at which it was leased.
Another important collection of rolls derives from
the fact that many of the properties which the
College acquired were by virtue of the fact that the
College was lord of the manor there. These manors
were governed by a series of meetings of manorial
courts, presided over by a steward appointed by the
College, which were then recorded on a roll. These
governed land tenure in the village meaning that the
7
‘copyholders’ had their title to the land confirmed by
the court roll (of which they were given copies). The
courts also dealt with grievances within the
community.
The earliest documents rarely included dates and so
it can be very difficult to determine exactly how old
they are. Denholm-Young correctly noted that ‘there
are numerous well-preserved charters of the 12 th
century’ and thought that there were ‘one or two that
are possibly of the 11 th century, but though this is
possible it doesn’t seem likely. It is probable that the
oldest document in the collection is a grant of Henry
de Port by which he founds the priory at Monk
Sherborne. Denholm-Young dates it in his calendar
as c.1120-30. He follows HE Salter who had used
internal evidence to determine that the deed must be
later than 1086 and earlier than 1166 and therefore
Grant of Henry de Port, c.1120-30, founding Sherborne Priory.
This is probably the oldest document in the Archive.

plumps for c.1120-30 as being halfway between the
two dates. It could be 11 th century.
The deeds had gone to Bodley in 1930 and remained
there for nearly ninety years. In 2017 the College
completed the New Library and the post-1500
records were moved from FQ1 and Drawda Hall
into the new state-of-the-art ‘Vault’. A decision was
taken to return the medieval deeds to College and in
the summer of 2018 they made the short journey
from the Weston Library to the College and into the
Vault, to be reunited with the rest of the Archive for
the first time in almost a century.
Lease of land, now part of the Warden’s Garden, to New College,
1370. Two copies were written on one piece of parchment which was
cut to produce the wavy line. The two counterparts could be put
together again to authenticate the lease.
It was undoubtedly the right thing to do to deposit
the deeds in Bodley in 1930; the College did not have
proper storage facilities for them (the FQ cellar
where the modern deeds were placed proved to be
very damp) and nor could the College provide
proper facilities for the researchers who benefited
from access to them. The College is therefore
extremely grateful to the Bodleian and its staff who
have cared for our records for so long. But it was
also the right thing to do to bring them home in
2018.
Primarily this was because with the New Library we
now not only have sufficient space to store them,
but also proper environmentally controlled
conditions. In the Feinberg Room we also have a
suitable space in which researchers can study them.
But there are other reasons too. Even in 1930 when
Denholm-Young was creating a division in 1500 and
seeing the medieval deeds as inherently valuable and
of interest to scholars, while the modern deeds less
so and little more than administrative documents
useful only to the Bursar, this was already an old
fashioned view. It resulted in an arbitrary break
around the year 1500 with two completely different
cataloguing systems; today we would undoubtedly
create just one system with categories for each estate
so that, for example, all the records relating to Monk
Sherborne, from the 12 th century to the 21 st , would
be in one series and, similarly, all those for Oxford in
another.
Having brought the deeds back to College we can
now move forward with two projects. Over the next
two years conservators from the Oxford
Conservation Consortium (of which Queen’s is a
longstanding member) will clean and, where
necessary, repair the deeds and rolls and then replace
the envelopes and boxes, now almost a century old,
with new envelopes and boxes made from acid-free
paper and cardboard. This will keep them safely
preserved and robust enough to be read and studied
for another century or more to come.
We will also begin, in 2020, a longer, ten-year project
to recatalogue the Archive to modern international,
professional standards. This is only possible because
the medieval deeds have been reunited with their
later counterparts. They will be united intellectually
in the catalogue, making it easier to understand the
complete history of each estate and its relationship
with the College. And they will be united physically
so that researchers investigating those histories will
no longer have to leave the College and walk up
Catte Street to the Bodleian when their research
takes them earlier than 1500.
Michael Riordan is the Archivist at both The Queen’s College
and St. John’s College, Oxford. The Archivist is responsible
for maintaining the College archive, which consists of the
institutional records of the College. He oversees the preservation
and accessibility of the historic records and manages the transfer
of current records into the archive. He also answers enquiries,
from within and outside the College, relating to the history of
the College, its members and its estates.
8

A Provenance Odyssey from Queen’s
College Library
Will Poole, New College
IN A PREVIOUS ISSUE I drew attention to the
remarkable core of Queen’s early printed book
collections—the residue of the massive library of
Thomas Barlow (pictured below), Provost of
Queen’s from 1658 until his elevation to the
bishopric of Lincoln in 1675. When he died in 1691,
Barlow bequeathed his library to the Bodleian, where
he had been librarian from 1652 until 1660, with
whatever books the Bodleian had already to return to
Queen’s.
At the time this was very good news for the
Bodleian, as in 1675 Barlow had claimed that ‘he had
allready six hundred volumes at least which the
University library had not’. 1 In the event the
Bodleian chose two or three thousand books out of
a library perhaps twice or more that size, so many
books indeed that a whole new classification, the
‘Linc.’ series, named for Barlow’s bishopric, was
created, and new shelves built in the galleries of what
we now call Duke Humfrey’s Library. The additional
burden proved so great that the walls of the library
started to buckle, and Christopher Wren was called
in to fix the problem.
In theory the rest of Barlow’s books came back to
Queen’s, although it is very hard to be sure about
numbers. At least six hundred have been identified
in the collections today, but I think there must
originally have been more, and it was certainly this
influx that led to Queen’s itself building a new
library. As it says in Latin in the college’s register of
benefactors, ‘the old library not being capacious
enough for so many books, a burning desire arose to
build a new library’. Hence the Upper Library as we
see it today.
Barlow was an obsessive annotator of his books, and
it is this that has proved of most interest to modern
scholars. A grim theological conservative, a grim
defender of the privileges and rights of the
university, and a grim opponent of anything
smacking of heresy, novelty, or amateurism, Barlow
is in many ways poor company for most modern
readers. But Barlow had a professional librarian’s
passion for the correct dating and attribution of
texts, and his cantankerous annotations bring us
closer to what most learned readers actually thought
in the period than the flashier marks of pioneers and
progressives. Barlow for these two reasons is an
excellent ‘control’ figure for both bibliographers and
historians.
When Barlow died the Bodleian was the beststocked
library in the country. The kinds of books it
did not have that Barlow did were therefore likely to
be rarities in themselves. Conversely, the kinds of
books most likely to be rejected by the Bodleian as
duplicates were European scholarly classics of the
last century or so, or very recent, topical English
books—precisely the kinds of texts that Barlow was
likely to respond to with the most care and vigour. If
9

Queen’s got the smaller number of Barlow’s books,
there is an argument that it got a higher proportion
of books more likely to interest us today. And this
leads us to the book I stumbled on in Queen’s
recently, but for reasons that take us far away from
Barlow, and which remind us too that discoveries in
libraries are usually the result of a combination of
looking for something else, and luck.
WHAT IS THE MOST INCONGRUOUS MAN-MADE
THING ever dug up in Oxfordshire? My candidate is
a seal-stone inscribed in Chinese, found in the
grounds of the manor house at Yarnton, just north
of Oxford, at some point in the 1670s. It was handed
over to Robert Plot, then in the process of compiling
his landmark Natural History of Oxford-Shire (1677),
and soon to be appointed simultaneously Oxford’s
first professor of chemistry and first curator of the
newly-opened Ashmolean Museum (1683). Plot had
the stone drawn, and reproduced an image on the
last page of his Natural History (below).
The characters are legible—albeit, ironically, they are
the right way around, whereas on the seal itself they
must, in order for it to print correctly, have been
reversed—and the best current interpretation is that
it is a kind of shop stamp, of ‘the trading house of
Bao Si of Xihe County’. It was almost certainly a late
Ming piece, picked up as a curiosity by a seventeenth
-century trader in the East, and which somehow
found its way to Yarnton, where it was accidentally
dropped. It would be nice if the original turned up; it
may well be lurking somewhere in the Ashmolean,
but a few emails over the years to that doubtless
busy institution have not merited a response. The
one thing of which we can be sure is that the original
existed, because no-one in Oxford in the period
could have faked legible Chinese, a script and tongue
that remained entirely mysterious until the visit of
the Christian convert Shen Fuzong in 1687, who
unlocked a tiny portion of his language for the one
Oxonian prescient enough to interview this native
Chinese with a stack of paper and several quills to
hand. 2
I have been on the track of this stone for years.
Some months ago by chance I came across an entry
in the diaries of the eighteenth-century antiquary
Thomas Hearne. It reads:
In 1674. was dug up in the Grounds of Sir
Thomas Spencer at Yarnton near Oxford a
Stone with Chinese Characters. I have seen a
Copy of them in a loose Piece of Paper in a
Book in Queen’s Library, (viz. Bibliotheca
Vaticana by Rocco) C. n. 26. 3
10
Now Hearne here supplies an exact date for the
Yarnton find, something Plot does not, and so I
conjectured that the ‘Copy’ on a loose sheet seen by
Hearne was either Plot’s source drawing, or at least a
document a step closer to the lost stone than the one
account we have. I contacted the library in the
morning, and—in contrast to the Ashmolean—I
received an immediate response. By the afternoon I
had seen my book, and by the evening I had written
up my find.

In one sense it was disappointing. Although the
book is still in Queen’s, the insert seen by Hearne
over three centuries ago is no longer in the book.
And at this point I must take leave of my oriental
tale: the trail of the elusive Yarnton Stone had gone
cold yet again, and so it remains.
THE BOOK ITSELF, HOWEVER, was full of other
surprises. First, a few words on what the ‘Bibliotheca
Vaticana’ is. The Bibliotheca Apostolica Vaticana (Rome,
1591) was the work of the librarian and churchman
Angelo Rocca (1545-1620), head of the Vatican
printing office since 1585, an atelier well known for
its elaborate stocks of type for all sorts of different
scripts. The Vatican Library itself sported famous
murals of the scripts of the ancient world, some
based on real languages, others distorted or fictitious.
Rocca’s book, functioning as a kind of guide-cumhistory
of the library and its décor, included a
catalogue of the library’s script-murals, and also a
world history of libraries in general. The Bibliotheca
Apostolica Vaticana therefore doubled as a history of
writing and of libraries, and circulated widely among
European scholars and librarians, even in the
Protestant North, where its status as a piece of
Counter-Reformation propaganda must have
infuriated many readers. It certainly infuriated
Barlow, for it is indeed one of his books.
The copy I had before me contained no slip of paper
bearing Chinese characters. But there were four
other things about it that leapt out, and more than
compensated for my initial disappointment. The first
was Barlow’s ownership: he has, as was his wont,
neatly signed the title-page with the place and date of
acquisition—Oxford, 1638, when Barlow was
around thirty and not yet an academic powerbroker—and
his characteristic Greek motto, αἰὲν
ἀριστεύειν (‘ever to excel’), a motto he shares with the
University of St Andrews. Barlow has also annotated
the text slightly, paying especial attention to Rocca’s
passages on the true nature of the original Hebrew
script.
This was a matter of some controversy at the time.
Some well-known passages in the Church Father
Jerome had claimed that the original script in which
the oldest books of the Bible had been written down
was the same as the script still used by the
Samaritans; whereas the Hebrew recognisable to
Jerome as such (and indeed to Barlow, and to us
today) was a much later scribal invention, dating
from the so-called ‘Second Temple’ period of
Judaism. As a good Roman Catholic, Rocca favoured
Jerome’s account, and by his time several old
‘Hebrew’ coins had turned up with inscriptions that
supported, or were deemed to support, the
‘Samaritan’ hypothesis. Barlow, as a Protestant
fundamentalist, found the idea that the Word of God
had been transmitted in the ‘wrong’ script
intolerable, and angrily said so. Today we would
judge Jerome and Rocca to be in the right, and
Barlow the wrong, but it is a complex issue, and in
fact many of the coins volunteered to ‘prove’ the
Samaritan hypothesis have turned out not to be quite
what they seemed to sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury
scholars. 4
The second surprise of the Queen’s Bibliotheca
Apostolica Vaticana was that at the front of the book
there had been pasted in four printed tables of
syllables in various scripts, clearly nothing to do with
the original Rocca text. (One is pictured above). A
little research soon revealed that these actually predated
the publication of their host book, having been
devised in 1583 by the eccentric Leonhard
11

Thurneisser zum Thurn, metallurgist, herbalist,
wonder-worker, and physician to the Elector of
Brandenburg, and printed by the Berlin academic
printer Nikolaus Voltz. These are rare survivals; they
were often bound in at the back of Thurneisser’s
Onomasticum of the same year, but separate sets are
unusual—I have located three on the continent, and
one among the seventeenth-century scholar John
Selden’s books in the Bodleian. Both the Queen’s
and the Selden sets are incomplete.
Once again, a little research confirmed quickly my
vague hunch that all of these derived from a famous
engraved copy-book of scripts, the Alphabeta et
Characteres of the brothers Theodore and Johann
Israel de Bry, first published in Frankfurt in 1596.
The third excitement was rather like the second, for
at the back of the book, there are yet more inserts of
various other alphabets (pictured, above and right),
this time all hand-written, comprising an
‘Alphabetum Croaticum’, an ‘Alphabetum
Muscoviticum’, remarks on the origin of Greek and
Latin letters, an inscription found on a tower named
‘Baych’ from ‘Panormus’ (i.e. from Palermo, Sicily,
and despite some wild claims for its antiquity in the
sixteenth century, obviously just garbled Arabic), two
‘Jacobite’ (i.e. Syriac) alphabets, and finally the
‘Aeolic’ (a Greek variant) and Cyrillic alphabets.
12

We do not know who placed these inserts in this
book, or even if it was the same person. But the least
complex solution is to suppose that they were placed
there by one owner, certainly after 1596. This cannot
be Barlow, but it might have been the person who
has added several notes in Latin to the blank page
facing the title-page, or the (different) person who
has copied out several of the De Bry plates, or once
again the (different) person whose signature
preceded Barlow’s on the title-page, and whose
presence Barlow, or an intermediary owner or seller,
has neatly defaced.
is already the proud custodian of another book from
Donne’s library, being Paolo Emilio Marcobruni’s
Raccolta di lettere di diversi principi, & altri signori
(Venice, 1595). But Donne’s copy of the Bibliotheca
Apostolica Vaticana (pictured left) has remained
unnoticed until now, and although Donne himself
does not appear to have annotated it, it is a striking
addition to his library.
That third person is the famous English
‘metaphysical’ poet John Donne (1572-1631). Donne
has placed his signature on the title-page in the lower
right-hand corner, and at the top of the page he has
added his typical motto in praise of the
contemplative life, ‘Per Rachel ho servito, & non per
Lea’, a quotation from Petrarch. These are exactly
where we find signature and motto on other books
surviving from Donne’s library. Queen’s, to be sure,
13
Now Donne famously apostatised from the Roman
Catholicism of his upbringing, and in adulthood he
was bracingly vicious about Jesuits in a manner that
gladdened the hearts of his now fellow Protestant
readers. Donne himself took holy orders, in 1615,
and, as Dean of St. Paul’s from 1621, became a
famous Anglican preacher whose neurotic and
egocentric sermons gained a cult following still
inexplicably staggering on today. Was this a book, I
initially wondered, read in that period in the 1590s
when Donne immersed himself in the debates
between Roman Catholic and Protestant theologians,
in order to decide his own spiritual trajectory? Or
was it the reading matter of his priestly years? And
regardless of when he acquired it, did it already
contain its additional inserts? These are hard
questions to answer, but the signature has been
judged ‘late’ by the authority on such matters, and I
have been able to match it very closely to another
book in Oxford once owned by Donne and
published in 1612. 5 And the later Donne acquired his
copy of Rocca, the more likely it is that he acquired it
with its inserts, or just perhaps even added them
himself.
Can we say any more? Tantalisingly, Donne was
abroad from 1619 to 1620, serving as chaplain
to Viscount Doncaster, who had been sent on a
diplomatic mission to the Holy Roman Emperor, at
that point kindling what would become the Thirty

Years War. This mission took Donne from Calais
through the Low Countries into the German lands,
where his diplomatic train visited many cities
including Heidelberg, Munich, and Frankfurt. Now,
given the rarity of the Thurneisser printed inserts, I
am inclined to think that these must have been
acquired in Germany. As we can be fairly confident
that this book came into Donne’s possession only in
or after 1612, and as we can place him in the
German lands at the end of that decade, then Donne
might have acquired this book on his travels with its
inserts; or Donne might have acquired and inserted
these extra alphabets himself. Either way, it makes
sense to store new weird and wonderful examples of
outlandish scripts in a book already full of them, and
there is at least one other copy of Rocca’s book in
Oxford that was used in the same way.
There is one major problem with this line of
reasoning, however, and it is an object lesson in why
we must take care to assess the binding style of a
book. This book is bound in calf, with an oval
centrepiece featuring a small horizontal bar. The
style could possibly be continental, but the best
advice is that it is more likely English, specifically a
Cambridge style of the (in this case necessarily very)
late sixteenth century. 6 Unless this is a rare example
of a recycled binding, we shall have to concede that
this book arrived in England long before Donne
went to Germany.
or acquired and mounted these inserts separately. It
is possible that there was a middle owner (or owners)
between the first man and Donne, and it is possible
too that this was the man who copied the De Bry
inscriptions, and who may or may not have been the
man who acquired and mounted the Thurneisser
tables too. The most attractive possibility is that our
anonymous middle owner inserted the De Bry
scripts, and Donne, fresh from his diplomatic
mission to the German lands, pasted in the
Thurneisser material, which he had picked up as a
curiosity while abroad. We cannot exclude the
possibility that Barlow was the man behind the
inserts, but I doubt it: the added material is just too
old. On balance I think that the wonderful inserts of
various different scripts that we see in this book
today, Donne saw too.
When Donne died in 1631 this book was auctioned
in London with the rest of his library. 7 It was bought
in London by an owner now invisible to us, and
found its way to Oxford. There Thomas Barlow
acquired it in 1638. Barlow showed no interest in its
earlier provenances, and neither did the Bodleian
when it had the chance to claim this spectacular
copy. 8 So when Barlow died over half a century later,
it came (back) to his old college, where it has
slumbered ever since. But perhaps, now that I have
awoken it again and told its secrets, it will find it
harder to go back to sleep.
My partially conjectural reconstruction of this book’s
history therefore goes something like this. Printed in
Rome in 1591, this copy was soon acquired by the
first person to leave a mark in it, the continental who
wrote on the blank page facing the title-page his
brief Latin notes on the contents of the book, and
on Church Councils. This hand looks
contemporaneous with publication, and is not that of
an Englishman. If this did not happen in England,
the book however soon came to England, by means
unknown. Shortly after this point, still assuming a
short first continental phase, it was rebound,
probably in Cambridge. Its next known owner was
John Donne, who in the second decade of the
seventeenth century, either bought it with its inserts,
14
Notes
***
I am grateful to Hugh Adlington for advice on the chronology
of Donne’s evolving signature, to David Pearson for advice on
binding, and to the librarians of Queen’s for their unfailing
accommodation.
1. Bodleian, MS Eng. misc. b 247, fols. 178-79. For Barlow’s
books at Queen’s see my ‘Thomas Barlow’s Books at The
Queen’s College’, Insight (http://www.queens.ox.ac.uk/library/
publications), 2013, and for his library in general and its
dispersal my ‘Barlow’s Books: Prolegomena for the study of the
library of Thomas Barlow (1608/9-91)’, Bodleian Library Record
30 (2017), pp. 13-46.
2. William Poole, ‘The Letters of Shen Fuzong to Thomas
Hyde, 1687-88’, electronic British Library Journal (2015), article 9.

3. Thomas Hearne, Remarks and Collections of Thomas Hearne, 11
vols, ed. by C. E. Doble et al. (Oxford, 1885–1921), vol. 1, p.
263 = Bodleian, MS Hearne’s Diaries 21, p. 180.
4. William Poole, ‘Barton’s Coins: Eighteenth-Century
Numismatics in New College, Oxford’, Journal of the History of
Collections 30 (2018), pp. 385-93.
5. Compare his copy of Henningus Arnisaeus, De subjectione et
exemptione clericorum (Frankfurt, 1612), at Bodleian, 4 o A 9
Jur.Seld.
method: : viz. A table of logarithms, from 1 to 101000. To
which is added (upon the same page) the differences and
proportional parts, whereby the logarithm of any number under
10,000,000 may easily be found. Tables of natural sines,
tangents, and secants, with their logarithms, and logarithmick
differences to every minute of the quadrant. Tables of natural
versed sines, and their logarithms, to every minute of the
quadrant. With their construction and use.
6. David Pearson directs me to the similar but not identical
style applied to Christ’s, Cambridge (D.3.3, Massaeus,
Chronicorum . . . libri viginti (Antwerp, 1540), probably bound in
the 1590s). We must recall too that new books could not, by
law, be imported bound. For the outside chance, and on
reflection it is a slim one, that the binding is continental—
which would of course reactivate the possibility of Donne
acquiring it abroad—Pearson adduces the example illustrated in
Howard Nixon, Broxbourne Library (London, 1956), no. 46/p.
95.
7. This process seems to have taken time, to judge from a later
purchaser’s inscription, dated 13 December 1633, on Donne’s
copy of Paracelsus, of which only the title-page now survives
(Geoffrey Keynes, A Bibliography of Dr. John Donne, Dean of St
Paul’s, 4 th ed. (Oxford, 1973), p. 273 (L135); R. C. Bald, John
Donne: A Life (Oxford, 1986), p. 532).
8. Its own copy, then at R 2. 9 Art, now at BB 79 Art, is quite
unremarkable in comparison.
William Poole is Galsworthy Fellow and Tutor in English,
Senior Tutor and Fellow Librarian, at New College, Oxford.
His interests lie mainly in seventeenth century literary and
intellectual history, and his two most recent books are Milton
and the Making of 'Paradise Lost’ (2017) and John Fell’s
New Year Books, 1666–1686 (2018).
contrived after a most comprehensive
method (1717)
Christopher Hollings (Queen’s) & Benjamin
Wardhaugh (All Souls)
The College Library has recently received a donation
of an annotated volume of mathematical tables that
provides a tantalising glimpse of mathematical study
in the eighteenth century. The book in question was
printed in London in 1717 under the rather full title
of Mathematical tables, contrived after a most comprehensive
As its title tells us, this is a volume of mathematical
tables: the bulk of it is taken up with a table of
logarithms, but there are also some trigonometric
tables, and explanations at the front and back of the
book as to how the numbers have been calculated
and what to use them for. Logarithms were an early
17th century invention, and by 1717 their calculation
and use were well-established parts of the
mathematician’s tool kit. Much of this was reprinted
from papers in the Royal Society’s Philosophical
Transactions and elsewhere by then well-known
15

mathematicians, including the Savilian Professors of
Geometry Henry Briggs, John Wallis, and Edmond
Halley. It is because of the connection with Halley
that the donor chose Queen's as the destination for
this book.
The book is in good condition, with an 18th century
binding. An early owner has marked it up quite
extensively, as seen in the picture above, and it is a
pity that we have no real clues as to that person's
identity. The handwriting in the annotations is an
18th century one, but not really distinctive, and we
are unlikely to be able to identify it. There is no
owner’s signature, bookplate or stamp that would
provide a clue to the identity of the book's past
owners.
Readers of early modern mathematical books
frequently annotated quite heavily, and their
favourite activities were selecting (and sometimes
rearranging) bits from the printed text, correcting
minor errors in what they read, and using the
margins as rough paper while they rehearsed and
consolidated their understanding of the text. The
annotator of this book was typical in some ways, but
less so in others.
This owner was much concerned with the
correctness of the printed text, and put in rather
more than 200 minor corrections, usually of single
digits. At first glance this might give the impression
of someone who meticulously re-calculated the
numbers or compared them line-by-line with
another, more trusted volume of tables. But the
truth is more mundane. Like a lot of early modern
books this one was compared against its manuscript
source by someone working on behalf of the print
16

shop, as the printed sheets came off the press. Some
errors might have been corrected while the book was
still being printed (so-called “stop press”
corrections), but most were simply noted, and a list
of them was printed and inserted into the book.
This volume has one list of errata pasted in at the
end of the introductory matter, and another longer
one bound in at the end of the tables proper.
initiative rather more in finding mistakes to correct,
although it would admittedly be labour-intensive to
correct mathematical tables autonomously.
Beyond the corrections, pictured left, and in more
detail above, there’s not much more than the odd
smudge to show that the tables in this book were
ever actually used, although the paper feels fairly well
thumbed and our guess is that it was in fact
consulted by a working mathematician as it was
intended to be. Somewhat more telling are the
annotations to be found in the accompanying text,
and on its flyleaves and endpapers (see the preceding
page).
The annotator has worked through these lists of
errors meticulously, and made the corrections they
indicate, very neatly and carefully. Wrong digits were
scraped out and correct ones inked in; missing words
or letters were neatly inserted. In some cases the
work is so neat it is hard to spot unless you already
know it’s there. The annotator seems to have made
no corrections other than the ones directed in the
errata lists. This is in fact quite unusual; most people
who annotated mathematical books used their
These consist of extra passages of text, ranging from
a couple of lines to a dense page and a half, marked
to be inserted at particular points in the explanatory
matter, and having the effect of supplementing those
explanations with more detail and more worked
examples. To find the logarithm belonging to any
proposed number. To find a number, whose
logarithm has been given. To find powers and roots
using logarithms. And so on.
These additions are fairly elementary; it would have
taken no great mathematical powers to write them,
and indeed anyone who understood the use of the
logarithm tables tolerably well would have had little
need for most of them. They are concentrated very
tightly in the second and third chapters of the
17

concluding section on the uses of the table of
logarithms, and they have the air of smoothing the
way for a beginner in those uses. It’s possible they
were copied from another printed book, but if so we
haven’t been able to identify it.
We can’t really say much more. The annotator may
well have been a teacher, supplementing the printed
book for use in teaching, or for presentation – they
are reasonably neatly done – to a favoured student.
The extra passages could have been drafts for the
annotator’s own book, but we haven’t found
anything in print that matches their wording closely.
An enigma, in other words, but an evocative one.
The book’s later history is almost a complete
mystery. There are a few annotations in pencil:
further corrections to the text, and some labels
added to one diagram. But these are too brief even
to guess at the date of the handwriting. In 1964
someone used a red pencil to work out on the flyleaf
how old the book then was: 1964 – 1717 = 247.
Most recently, the book was owned by the late
Norman Henry Gooderham, a government engineer.
It was in the winding up of his estate that his son
and daughter-in-law, Steve and Pam Gooderham,
came upon the book, and decided to donate it to
Queen’s. The book is an excellent addition to the
College Library, where it will sit alongside a later
(1726) edition of the same volume, not to mention
the College’s extensive collection of early modern
mathematics books.
What Bindings and Fleurons Can Tell
Us about Cavendish’s University
Donations
Liza Blake
University of Toronto
In 1643, Margaret Lucas—who would later marry
William Newcastle and become Margaret Cavendish,
Duchess of Newcastle—joined the Queen’s college
at Oxford. 1
Benjamin Wardhaugh is a fellow of All Souls College, where
he works on early modern mathematics and its place(s) in
culture. His most recent book is Gunpowder and
Geometry (2019), a biography of the mathematician and
educator Charles Hutton.
Christopher Hollings is a Departmental Lecturer in the
Oxford Mathematical Institute and a Senior Research Fellow
of The Queen’s College. His research concerns the development
of mathematics in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
18
Figure 1: Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, in an engraving
specifically designed for inclusion in her printed books. Photograph
by Liza Blake, from Cavendish’s 1666 Blazing World (call
number 131-516f), from the collections of the Folger Shakespeare
Library.
She did not, of course, join The Queen’s College, the
Oxford University institution that had been
educating men since it was established in 1341.
Rather, Margaret joined Queen Henrietta Maria, wife

of King Charles I, at Merton College, serving as a
lady in waiting for the Queen as they retreated to the
relative safety of royalist Oxford in the midst of the
English Civil War. As Cavendish’s biographer Katie
Whitaker has shown, the culture of the Queen’s
college at Merton was more court than university;
Margaret’s duties as lady-in-waiting would have
included sitting in the presence chamber or running
small errands, and she likely spent little time
brushing shoulders with the “gown-men” of Oxford
as they went about their scholastic pursuits. 2
Nevertheless, the future Margaret Cavendish would
spend her first year away from her family and out in
the world at Oxford, as a member of the Queen’s
college, where she apparently acquired an abiding
respect for the “learned Universities” of Oxford and
Cambridge, “where nature is best known, where
truth is oftenest found, where civility is most
practiced” 3 —and also saw enough of university life
to gently mock university scholars in several of her
publications. 4
Figure 2: Top of Cavendish’s letter “The Two Universities,” from
her 1655 Philosophical and Physical Opinions (Queen’s Library
copy, shelfmark PP.r.150).
In November 1644, the Queen, with Margaret Lucas
still in tow, retreated to France, where she set up
court in the apartments of the Louvre, and where
Margaret would eventually meet and marry William
Cavendish, Marquess and later Duke of Newcastle.
Cavendish would later write of the incredible
learning offered to her by her husband and his
brother Sir Charles Cavendish, both of whom made
it a point to continue and complete her sporadic
childhood education. She writes of the wonderful
opportunity she was given to learn, and to debate
new philosophical and scientific discoveries, in
several of her works; Sir Charles Cavendish
especially, to whom she dedicated her first three
books, was at the center of several scientific and
philosophical debates in Europe. 5
In other words, Cavendish was, because of her
gender, unable to enroll at Queen’s during her years
in Oxford. She later warned that the exclusion of
women from university life would be detrimental to
“our sex,” in that, “wanting the experiences of
nature, we must needs want the understanding and
knowledge and so consequently prudence, and
invention of men.” 6 Nevertheless, she still received a
focused education in the arts and sciences, debated
with some of the top minds of her day (including
Thomas Hobbes, while in exile), and spent a
formative year in Oxford. Though Cavendish did not
matriculate, she was not entirely excluded from the
universities. Adam Smyth has shown how the
widespread Renaissance practice of commonplacing
meant “that women, excluded from all-male sites of
commonplace book production (the grammar
school, university, Inns of Court), might nonetheless
encounter materials as texts circulated beyond those
restricted confines.” 7 And as I will demonstrate
below, even if Cavendish did not become a member
of The Queen’s College in person, she did enter and
establish herself in textual form.
In 2019, The Queen’s College celebrates its 40-year
anniversary of its first formal admission of women
into the college to pursue degrees. But although
Cavendish did not enroll at The Queen’s College
during her time in Oxford, Queen’s did open its
doors to Margaret Cavendish over 366 years ago, in
1655, when she began to deposit her books in The
Queen’s College Library—where they still reside
today.
Queen’s was not the only college to receive books
from Margaret Cavendish; over the course of her
life, she donated her books to every single college in
Oxford and in Cambridge that existed during her
lifetime, and 342 copies of her books survive in the
two universities today, most given by her to the
colleges and university libraries. 8
19

and Oxford bindings don’t always match one
another: so while, for example, every Oxford copy of
her 1662 Orations is identical, and every Cambridge
copy of her 1662 Orations is identical, the Cambridge
and Oxford binding patterns are different. These
tooling patterns, I am arguing in a longer article,
both provide concrete information about localized
binding practices, and also point to larger questions
about how Cavendish understood different parts of
her corpus to relate to one another.
Figure 3: Thomas Barlow’s donor inscription, from her 1655
Philosophical and Physical Opinions (Queen’s Library copy,
shelfmark PP.r.150). Used by permission of the Provost and
Fellows of The Queen’s College Oxford.
Queen’s was the heart of her earliest Oxford
donation practices: Provost of Queen’s College
Thomas Barlow received books from her and
distributed them to colleges on her behalf. Barlow
also wrote her several letters thanking her for her
donations and certifying that he had undertaken “the
distribution of your Favours … Your Books.” 9
Inscriptions in Barlow’s hand survive in the Bodleian
Library and in libraries in the following Oxford
colleges: Balliol, Queen’s, Jesus, Pembroke, and St.
John’s. As Whitaker notes, Barlow’s “praise of
Margaret as ‘a most illustrious heroine’ continued in
his own copy of the Philosophical Fancies, on whose
title page he also wrote the motto αἰὲν αῤιστευέιν, a
quote from Homer’s Iliad, where a father advises his
son, departing to die in the Trojan war, ‘always to be
the best and excel over others’—a truly heroic
rendering of Margaret’s own lifelong quest for
excellence.” 10
Queen’s bindings, however, are an interesting
aberration in this general pattern; judging from the
evidence of the books that Cavendish donated that
are still present in the Queen’s College Library, the
library received her standard set of books that then,
later in their life in the library, received additional
toolings and decorations, especially on the spines of
her books. This is most obvious in the case of her
1662 Orations and 1663 Philosophical and Physical
Opinions (PPO), which, in their standard Oxford
bindings, has dark diagonal lines at the top and
bottom of the spine. Compare, for instance, the
decorations of a typical spine of a 1663 PPO (that
held at Magdalen College, Oxford) with that on the
Queen’s Library spine (in Figures 4 and 5). As the
pictures make clear, the gold fleurons or floral
stamps were clearly added on top of and in addition
to the original form of the spine as donated by
Cavendish herself.
As I have described in more detail elsewhere, the
bindings in Oxford (and Cambridge) books tell a
fascinating story. For any given one of her texts still
in its original binding, every copy in every Oxford
college library has an identical binding, and every
copy in every Cambridge college has an identical
binding; this tells us that she had her books batchbound
before distributing them to colleges en masse.
Even more fascinating, however, is that Cambridge
20
Figures 4 and 5: Typical tooling patterns on the spine of a copy of a
1663 PPO, from Magdalen College Library, shelfmark s.14.10
(Figure 4); Queen’s College Library version of the same book,
shelfmark PP.r.152 (Figure 5). Figure 4 courtesy of The President
and Fellows of Magdalen College, Oxford.

The reason for these additional fleurons on Queen’s
spines is not entirely clear. Perhaps a later decorator
wanted to spruce up the spines (usually quite plain,
with most decorations in “blind” tooling—that is,
with patterns pressed into the leather, without
additional coloring or gilding). Or, since books are
filed in the library with the spines facing out, these
additional fleurons on the spines may have been
used to make the books seem more in place with
other books in the library, to match others next to
them on the shelves. In other words, these additional
fleurons perhaps represent an attempt to make
Cavendish’s somewhat plain-tooled books fit into
the collections more generally, to look like they fit in,
belong on the shelf. They may also represent a
reflection of value: someone thought her books,
perhaps, deserved fancier covers. And indeed, as the
books exist today they make an impressive display
(see Figure 6, below).
was not an original presentation copy, partly because
its former call numbers mark it as out of sequence,
and partly because it lacks the glittery corrections
made to other Oxford copies of this book. 11
Figure 6: The gilded spines of Cavendish’s books at Queen’s College.
Another unique feature of The Queen’s College
Library’s Cavendish holdings is the fact that, unlike
nearly every other college in Oxford, Queen’s
Library has copies of her books not apparently given
by her, but collected by other means. This includes
an additional copy of the 1663 PPO, which we know
21
Figures 7 and 8: corrected page in PPO1, vs. uncorrected page in
PPO2.
Even more unique is the fact that Queen’s also has a
first edition of Cavendish’s combination treatise and
narrative Observations upon Experimental Philosophy
(OEP) and Description of a New World Called the Blazing
World (London, 1666). The second part of this book,
now commonly referred to as the Blazing World, is a
science-fiction narrative in which a woman travels to
another planet and sets up scientific societies, and it
is the text for which Cavendish is now arguably most
famous. Only two copies of this first edition exist in
Oxford: one in the English Faculty Library, and one
in the Queen’s Library. 12 This text was given not by
Cavendish, but by Queensman Sir Joseph
Williamson (1633–1701), who donated several books
to the Queen’s Library and whose initials survive on
the title page today. (See figure 9). 13
Although Cavendish did not donate this book
directly to Queen’s, however, its binding (whose
covers are original but whose spine was replaced at
some point in its life) bears marks of having once
been batch-bound, which in most cases I have

Figure 9: Title page of the Queen’s College Library copy of the
Observations upon Experimental Philosophy and Blazing World
(shelfmark PP.r.158), showing the initials of Sir Joseph
Williamson.
encountered means it started its life as a presentation
copy. The basic binding pattern, with six fourpetaled
fleurons displayed in two rectangles on both
the front and back covers, and with a filet of
alternating lozenges and small circles on the board
edges, matches the bindings of two other books in
Oxford colleges: the 1667 Life of the Duke of Newcastle,
Cavendish’s biography of her husband, held at
Corpus Christi and St. John’s College libraries. 14
Figures 10 and 11 show both a common fleuron,
commonly found on other uniform bindings (which
uniform bindings indicate that a book started its life
as a presentation copy) and the placement of the
fleurons in this particular binding pattern.
Figures 10 and 11: A scheme showing the placement of fleurons
(F1) on Queen’s 1666 OEP (Figure 10), with close-up of the
“F1” fleuron, from the cover of Cavendish, Philosophical Letters
(London, 1664), call number 131-517f (Figure 11). Figure 10
designed by Liza Blake; Figure 11 photograph by Liza Blake,
from the collections of the Folger Shakespeare Library.
The patterns of fleurons, then, tell us that although
Cavendish’s 1666 OEP and Blazing World was not
given by her directly to the college, because it
features one of her “standard” binding patterns, it
may have been given to Williamson, who in turn
passed it on to the college. However, the binding is
more interesting still, because whoever it is that
added the “bonus fleurons” to the spines of the
Queen’s Library Cavendish books also used the same
fleurons to alter this uniform binding pattern. Figure
12 shows a detail of the front cover of the Queen’s
OEP, where one can see both the original fourpetaled
fleuron (that of Figure 11, above) and an
additional fleuron pressed over it and partly
obscuring it. Figure 13 shows that additional fleuron,
as it is visible in a gilded form, on the spine of the
Queen’s Library’s 1662 Orations: clearly whoever
added decorations to the spines of Cavendish’s
Figures 12 (left) and 13
(above)
Detail of front cover of
Queen’s Library’s 1666
OEP, showing two layers
of fleurons (Figure 12, on
previous page); detail of
gilded fleuron on spine of
Queen’s Library’s 1662
Orations (Figure 13).
Used by permission of the
Provost and Fellows of
The Queen’s College
Oxford.
22

ooks in the library also altered the patterns on the
cover of this book (and only this book).
If the bonus fleurons on the spines indicate a
librarian adapting Cavendish’s own spines to fit in
with that of the library, then here those adaptations
move beyond the spine to the cover itself. The rest
of the Cavendish bindings in the Queen’s Library’s
collection 15 both gesture to their provenance
(donated by Cavendish herself, with tooling patterns
on covers matching those given to every other
Oxford college) and to their adoption into the
Library more generally (with their spines receiving
extra gilded decorations). The 1666 OEP and Blazing
World, uniquely, has its bonus fleurons not on the
spine, but on its covers, marking the book even
more emphatically as belonging to Queen’s and
matching the other books already present in the
library’s collections.
***
In one of the poems in praise of Cavendish
published after her death, Francis Fane writes of her
post-1660 home Welbeck Abbey, “The Court the
City, Schools and Camp agree, / Welbeck to make
an University.” 16 Though Welbeck was not actually a
university, and though Cavendish did not matriculate
at Oxford during her time at the Queen’s college in
Oxford, she was not entirely excluded from
universities and university learning. When thinking
about the role of women in universities it might be
just as productive to follow the lead of critics like
Natasha Simonova, who usefully demonstrates how
women were active in, and instrumental to,
university learning long before they were admitted as
degree-earning students. 17 Although Cavendish
recognised universities as “the Starrs of the First
Magnitude, whose Influence governs the World of
Learning,” 18 that is, she also recognized that learning
happened both inside and outside those hallowed
walls—but still made sure that at least a piece of
Cavendish’s would persist inside those walls.
Notes
1. Research for this article was supported by a SSHRC Insight
Development Grant.
2. Katie Whitaker, Mad Madge: The Extraordinary Life of Margaret
Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, the First Woman to Live by her Pen
(New York: Basic Books, 2002), 45–56.
3. Margaret Cavendish, “To the Two Universities,” in
Philosophical and Physical Opinions (London, 1655), sig. B2v. In all
quotations from early texts, I have regularized italics.
4. See “The School’s Quarrels, or Scholars Battles,” in
Cavendish, Nature’s Pictures (London, 1656), 105–07; and the
“Scholastical Orations” in Cavendish, Orations (London, 1662),
292–309.
5. Whitaker, Mad Madge, 64, 92.
6. Margaret Cavendish, “To the Two Universities,” sig. B2v.
7. Adam Smyth, “Commonplace Book Culture: A List of
Sixteen Traits,” in Women and Writing, c. 1340–c. 1650: The
Domestication of Print Culture,” ed. Anne Lawrence-Mathers and
Phillip Hardman (York: York Medieval Press, 2010), 90–110, at
103.
8. See Liza Blake, “Locating Cavendish’s Books: Database,
Map, and Analysis,” Digital Cavendish Project, published 14
November 2018, updated August 2019, http://
digitalcavendish.org/locating-margaret-cavendish/.
9. Letters and Poems in honour of the incomparable Princess, Margaret
Dutchess of Newcastle (London: In the Savoy, printed by Thomas
Newcombe, 1676), 66 (letter dated 24 March 1655).
10. Whitaker, Mad Madge, 314. The inscription is in the
Bodleian copy of Cavendish’s Philosophical Fancies, shelfmark 8 o
N2 Art. BS. William Poole, “Margaret Cavendish’s Books in
New College, and around Oxford,” New College Notes 6 (2015): 1
–8, reads Barlow’s praise far less charitably, apparently on the
evidence of Barlow repeating praise across letters.
11. On glittery corrections, see Liza Blake, “Pounced
Corrections in Oxford Copies of Cavendish’s Philosophical and
Physical Opinions; or, Margaret Cavendish’s Glitter Pen,” New
College Notes 10 (2018), no. 6: 1–11; on the second copy of the
PPO, see p. 7.
12. Blake, “Locating Cavendish’s Books.”
13. My thanks to Amanda Saville for this information; see also
Poole, “Cavendish’s Books,” 5.
14. This binding pattern is also found on copies of the 1666
OEP now held in the Glasgow University Library, shelfmark Sp
Coll Hunterian Do.2.14; the Victoria and Albert Library,
shelfmark Dyce S Fol. 6932; and the University College
London Library, shelfmark Strong Room Ogden Quarto 373. It
is also found on a copy of the 1667 Life also held at UCL,
Strong Room Ogden Quarto 375, which according to an
inscription on the verso of the last page used to belong to
23

“Hart Hall, Oxford” (i.e., today’s Hertford College). My thanks
to Sara Pennell for photographing Glasgow University Library
bindings on my behalf.
15. Except for that on the additional copy of the 1663 PPO,
shelfmark PP.r.151, which, as a late addition to the library,
corresponds to no other Cavendish binding that I have seen.
16. Letters and Poems, 163; the poem is anonymous in the Letters
volume, but is attributed to Fane in a MS copy: British Library
Add. MS 34217, f. 17.
17. Natasha Simonova, “Doctoring the Ladies,” History Today
69:8 (August 2019). Accessed 26 August 2019. https://
www.historytoday.com/archive/feature/doctoring-ladies.
Simonova’s headline reads: “Although not allowed to study at
university, women in 18th-century England still found ways to
join—and challenge—the scholarly world.”
18. Margaret Cavendish, “To All the Universities in Europe,” in
Grounds of Natural Philosophy (London, 1668), sig. A2r–v.
Liza Blake is an Assistant Professor at the University of
Toronto, working at the intersection of literature, science, and
philosophy in early modernity. She has produced two booklength
scholarly editions, Margaret Cavendish’s Poems
and Fancies: A Digital Critical Edition, and (with
Kathryn Vomero Santos) Arthur Golding’s A Moral
Fabletalk and Other Renaissance Fable Translations,
as well as the edited collection Lucretius and Modernity
(edited with Jacques Lezra). She is currently working on a
monograph entitled Early Modern Literary Physics, and a
multi-modal monograph entitled Choose Your Own
Poems and Fancies: A Digital Edition and Study of
Margaret Cavendish’s Atom Poems.
A Year in Exhibitions
We held two exhibitions this year, the posters used
to advertise them make up the end pages of this
issue.
The first was curated by Professor Richard B.
Parkinson and Mr. Jordan Miller. Richard is
Professor of Egyptology, and Jordan is the Barns
Student in Egyptology.
The exhibition was successfully launched with an
event held in the Shulman Auditorium. Clare Lewis
from UCL gave a presentation on the history of
Egyptology teaching in Oxford, pictured below.
Published by:
The Library,
The Queen’s College,
Oxford
OX1 4AW
©The Queen’s College, 2019
ISSN 2049-8349
Clare’s presentation was recorded as a podcast—the
first time we have done so with one of our
exhibition linked talks. This marks an exciting
expansion in our outreach and public engagement
work, as we are able to reach wider audiences, and
disseminate knowledge of our rich and interesting
collections throughout Oxford, and beyond. Clare’s
talk—and subsequent and future podcasts, are all
available online via http://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/series/
libcast-queens-college
24

Our second exhibition was titled ‘Literary Matter in
Early Modern England’ and was curated by Dr.
Katherine Hunt, Career Development Fellow in
English, and Dr. Dianne Mitchell, who sadly left
Queen’s this year to take up a post in Colorado.
This exhibition ties in with this issue of Insight
nicely. This is for two reasons—firstly, the Bibliotheca
Apostolica Vaticana once belonging to John Donne,
discussed in Will Poole’s article, is featured in the
exhibition (pictured in situ below).
The images at the bottom of the page are taken from
the presentation put together by Dianne and
Katherine, and coincidentally are all images taken by
Liza when she was conducting her research into
Cavendish. Collaborative practice is alive and well in
the academic community.
Secondly, the accompanying talk (also recorded as a
podcast) referenced the use of pounce to make
corrections to Margaret Cavendish’s works—the
‘glitter pen’ aforementioned in Liza Blake’s piece
featured in this issue.
The accompanying talk presented by Katherine and
Dianne showcased the material lives of literary texts
from the collections of the Queen’s College Library,
with both the exhibition and their presentation
exploring how books and manuscripts were created,
censored, annotated, and used, in order to reveal the
rich variety of ways in which early modern people
interacted with their books. The picture above shows
Katherine introducing the talk in the Shulman
Auditorium. The recording of the talk is also
available from the podcasts site referenced on the
previous page.
25

THE QUEEN’S COLLEGE LIBRARY
©The Queen’s College, 2019
ISSN 2049-8349