The PLRE series offers useful shelf-reader access to the libraries of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century book owners. Drawn from probate and other short-title lists, these edited bibliographies often necessarily approximate specific authors, titles, editions, or translations. They nevertheless frequently challenge unqualified scholarly assumptions that ideas and texts were simply in the air and abuzz in the popular imagination from their first appearance in print. While certain predictable genres predominate (e.g., bibles, psalms, Foxe's martyrology), other now-canonical literary works are scarcely in evidence; Shakespeare appears in but five entries across all of PLRE's 279 inventories.
Some of these books were inherited rather than bought, nor can scholars safely assume they were actively read or endorsed by their named owners. Few lists reveal anything of marginal annotations, provenance marks, or distinctive bindings. Book owners or law clerks rarely exceeded expectations, often providing the barest bones of bibliographical detail in these compilations. Abstract descriptions of manuscript books frustrate their proper identification, regardless of their potentially unique scholarly value. PLRE nevertheless offers compelling evidence of precisely who owned and had access to which Renaissance books when. The predominance of clerics, lawyers, university dons, and gentry in past volumes yields here in volume 9 to a more diverse and salutary dramatis personae, including a merchant adventurer, churchwarden, apothecary, cooper, clothier, diplomat, and a half-dozen women.
Surprises abound, beginning with the strikingly unclerical library of the hardworking Elizabethan privy council clerk Armagil Waad. The scale of Waad's natural philosophical collection is breathtaking, even presenting shades of John Dee's famous contemporary library; Waad, in fact, owned two copies of Dee's own so-called hieroglyphic monad tract. Geminus's Compendiosa anatomie, a seminal Vesalian English imprint, appears with folios of Vesalius's monumental De fabrica and its extremely rare “footpath” epitome (as Vesalius termed it). Several midcentury astrological ephemerides are augmented by Reinhold's determinedly Copernican Prutenic tables. An impressive nine titles by the polymath Girolamo Cardano appear alongside four by the medieval doctor illuminatus Ramon Llull. Such diversity contrasts sharply with the uniformly courtly and Francophone library of the Catholic Edward Arundell, with perhaps one exception: “an old Chronicle of parchment in miter which was the Lady Lumley's.” This terse reference offers a rare bibliographical connection between two of the great Elizabethan Catholic families—the Arundells of Cornwall and the Fitzalans and Lumleys of Arundel Castle and Nonsuch Palace.
The 1590 inventory of the London apothecary Edward Barlow's 180 books is rich in materia medica, admirably reflecting the universalist collecting theme common among members of his profession. (Nearly all of the first great printed Renaissance Wunderkammer books—e.g., Imperato, Besler, Calceolari—were by apothecaries.) By comparison, the 1627 inventory of the London cooper Samuel Rowlands communicates nothing of his day job, but much of his avocation as a satirical poet-pamphleteer. Among his several fellow earthy wits appears the clerk-cum-epigrammatist Henry Parrot's Young-whelpe of the olde-dogge, and George Wither's troublesome Abuses stript, and whipt. It is tempting to speculate that the two eponymous references—“Overberries” and “Sr Tho: Overberis”—might denote Rowlands's own illustrated broadside, Sir Thomas Overbury, or, The Poysoned Knights Complaint (1614), though the editor prefers his A Wife, Now a Widowe. Would such inventories have omitted pro forma the titles of single-sheet imprints? The final entry, “seven manuscripts or written books half full,” exasperates since the apparent sole survivor of that trove contains this very same Rowlands inventory (Houghton MS Eng 247).
Of the women's libraries, two are drawn from visual evidence: the legible spines in the 1646 Great Picture triptych of Anne Clifford, countess of Pembroke, and her mother Margaret, countess of Cumberland. Memento mori religious meditations reflecting the genre of allegorical family portraits include Moore's Mappe of Man's Mortalitie and Cuffe's Ages of Man's Life. Far more personal is the painting's select canonization of Elizabethan and early Stuart literati: Fulke Greville, Sir Henry Wotton, John Donne, Ben Jonson, George Sandys, and George Herbert. Nearly all were fairly recently deceased and bore direct familial and patronage connections to the Cliffords. This index of native English literary taste does possess Continental flair, including John Florio's au courant literary translation of Montaigne—which was twice mentioned in Anne's diary as having been read aloud in company. This multigenerational Clifford library group portrait contrasts with the several separate private chamber library inventories by the diarist Elizabeth Isham. Compiled for herself, her sister, and her mother (ca. 1645, 1648, 1649), they are heavily devotional and fiercely Protestant, and apparently distinct from the greater family library at Lamport Hall, where several are today preserved. (These may be profitably compared with the separate chamber inventories of the Catholic Brome sisters in PLRE vol. 8.)
The most substantial booklist belongs to the best-traveled Englishman of the early Stuart period, the diplomat Sir Thomas Roe. His 1647 inventory of 455 titles reveals much about a man on the move. Mercator's Atlas and another likely bespoke “book in folio of maps” are unsurprising, much as his nine eminently portable pocket Elzevir “Republics.” Philip Palmer's meticulous detective work on Roe nonetheless provides a vital, travel-intensive library catalogue that predates by over a half-century the famously vast collection inventories of the travel writer Edward Browne and the philosopher John Locke.
