Abstract
In this chapter, I will expand the notion of news to take in the way that individuals processed information, reflected upon it, upon themselves, upon its social and political implications, and fed their thoughts back to a variety of audiences. I want to begin by looking at diaries, a genre that has by and large been left to the attention of the historians, who have been able to mine a range of diaries, along with other information, to compile the invaluable series of proceedings in parliament. Walter Yonge is an excellent example of a diarist who had an acute eye for social and political detail. Yonge is also a good example of a gentleman with forward Protestant sentiments (he became an active member of the Long Parliament). Yonge’s diary, kept from 1604, when he was 25, through to 1628, is an especially telling account of the unfolding events of the 1620s assessed by someone anxious about apparent encroaching Catholicism, both from without and from within the practices of the English Church. Information gathering was important for Yonge, because he lived in Devonshire at some distance from London.1 This is perhaps one reason why Yonge carefully checks rumours and adds in corrections to the diary entries: so for July 1621 Yonge writes ‘It is reported that the Emperor put twenty-four nobles of Bohemia to death. — True.’ (42), and ’27 of August 1621.
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Notes
References to Diary of Walter Yonge, ed. George Roberts (London: Camden Society, 1848).
See The Diary of Anne Clifford, ed. Katherine O. Acheson (New York: Garland, 1995);
I have discussed this aspect of Clifford in Paul Salzman, ‘Anne Clifford: Writing for Oneself, Writing for Others’, Parergon 27 (2010), pp. 125–42.
The Yale Center has published the proceedings of the parliaments of 1625, 1626 and 1628: see the brief use of D’Ewes, for example, in Proceedings in Parliament 1625, ed. Maija Jansson and William B. Bidwell (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), p. 16.
See Alexandra Walsham, Providence in Early Modern England (Oxford University Press, 1999), for a wide-ranging discussion of the significance of providentialist thinking; Walsham cites D’Ewes on a few occasions.
The Private Life of an Elizabethan Lady: The Diary of Lady Margaret Hoby c. 1599–1605, ed. Joanna Moody (Stroud: Sutton, 1998);
Diary of Anne Clifford, ed. Acheson; the edition of Anne Clifford’s Great Books contained in The Diaries of Lady Anne Clifford, ed. D. J. H. Clifford (Stroud: Sutton, 1990), while convenient, is unreliable; the new scholarly edition of the Great Books edited by Jessica Malay will be published by Manchester University Press in 2015. I have here referred directly to the manuscript Great Books held in the Cumbrian Records Office at Kendal: WD Hoth/Hothfield Manuscripts.
Two scholars in particular have stressed the political implications of Clifford’s activities, writings and memorializing: Wiseman, in Conspiracy and Virtue, chap. 2, and Julie Crawford, ‘The Case of Lady Anne Clifford: or, Did Women have a Mixed Monarchy?’, PMLA 121 (2006), pp. 1682–9.
Julie Crawford, ‘Reconsidering Early Modern Women’s Reading, or How Margaret Hoby Read Her de Mornay’, HLQ 73 (2010), p. 194.
Andrew Cambers, ‘Reading, the Godly, and Self-Writing in England, circa 1580–1720’, Journal of British Studies 46 (2007), pp. 796–825; and see Cambers’s more detailed and wide-ranging account of the way reading and Puritanism were intertwined: Godly Reading: Print, Manuscript and Puritanism in England, 1580–1720 (Cambridge University Press, 2011).
Two detailed studies of the mother’s advice book have been published: Marsha Urban, Seventeenth Century Mothers’ Advice Books (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006),
and Jennifer Heller, The Mother’s Legacy in Early Modern England (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011).
Lloyd Davis, ‘Redemptive Advice: Dorothy Leigh’s The Mother’s Blessing’, in Jo Wallwork and Paul Salzman, eds, Women Writing 1550–1700 (Bundoora: Meridian, 2000), p. 64.
Catharine Gray, ‘Feeding on the Seed of the Woman: Dorothy Leigh and the Figure of Maternal Dissent’, ELH 68 (2001), p. 564; see also Gray, Women Writers, chap. 1.
For a reproduction and detailed description see Cyril Davenport, English Embroidered Bookbindings (London: Kegan Paul, 1899), chap. 3 ill. 31.
See the detailed account of this complicated publishing history: Arthur Freeman, ‘The Fatal Vesper and The Doleful Evensong: Claim-Jumping in 1623’, The Library 22 (1967), pp. 128–35.
Lisa Jardine and Anthony Grafton, ‘“Studied for Action”: How Gabriel Harvey Read His Livy’, Past and Present 129 (1990), pp. 30–78.
The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson, ed. David Bevington et al. (Cambridge University Press, 2012), vol. 7 and see Hutson’s detailed account of the text on the electronic site, http://universitypublishingonline.org/cambridge/benjonson/k/essays/Discoveries_textual_essay/1/.
See the clever analysis through signatures and manuscript traces in William H. Sherman, Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), chap. 3, ‘Reading the Matriarchive’.
Kevin Sharpe, Reading Revolutions: The Politics of Reading in Early Modern England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000).
For a useful summing up of the field, see Edith Snook, ‘Recent Studies in Early Modern Reading’, ELR 43 (2013), pp. 343–78.
Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (Cambridge University Press, 1979).
Margaret Ezell, Social Authorship and the Advent of Print (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999); and especially her recent overview ‘The Laughing Tortoise: Speculations on Manuscript Sources and Women’s Book History’, ELR 38 (2008), pp. 331–55.
References to Matt Cohen, The Networked Wilderness: Communicating in Early New England (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010).
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Salzman, P. (2014). Public/Private. In: Literature and Politics in the 1620s. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137305985_8
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