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Additions to the Library of William Dowsing (1596-1668): a Reformation Tract Volume Reassembled

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Additions to the Library of William Dowsing (1596-1668): a Reformation Tract Volume Reassembled Additions to the Library of William Dowsing (1596-1668): A Reformation Tract Volume Reassembled Dunstan Roberts This article identifies several volumes from the library of the seventeenth-century puritan William Dowsing (1596-1668). Dowsing is primarily known for the campaign of iconoclasm which he conducted in East Anglia between late 1643 and 1644 and for the journal in which he kept a detailed record of these activities.1 This aspect of his life has been a long-standing object of scholarly interest. More recently, the work of John Morrill has revealed that Dowsing owned a sizeable collection of books and annotated many of them.2 We find, amongst surviving volumes, evidence of the thoroughness of his reading and the strength of his religious convictions. This article contributes to this work by identifying three books from Dowsing’s library (two of them from the British Library, the other from Balliol College, Oxford)3 which originally comprised a single volume of tracts and, by using the marginalia contained in these volumes, to identify further texts which were familiar to Dowsing and which he probably owned. Dowsing was born in Laxfield in north-east Suffolk and later moved to Coddenham in central Suffolk. In the early 1620s he married Thamar Lea, the daughter of a minor gentleman of puritan convictions, who bore him ten children before her death in 1640. It was around this time that Dowsing moved to Stratford St Mary (on the Suffolk side of the River Stour), where he lived until his death in 1668, marrying Mary Cooper in 1646 and fathering three more children. His brief but industrious career as a commissioner for the destruction of idolatrous and superstitious imagery was conducted between December 1643 and the autumn of 1644 on the authority of Edward Montagu, second Earl of Manchester, who commanded parliamentary forces in East Anglia. We know from Dowsing’s journal that, sometimes with the aid of hand- picked deputies, he visited around two hundred and fifty churches in Cambridgeshire and Suffolk, smashing stained glass, ripping up monumental brass inscriptions, destroying altar rails and steps, and pulling down crucifixes and crosses. The account of these activities which Dowsing gives in his journal is sometimes poignantly corroborated by surviving churchwardens’ accounts and by the fabric of churches themselves. There is a compelling parallel to be drawn between Dowsing the iconoclast and Dowsing the reader. His surviving books contain numerous annotations, giving evidence of thorough reading and strong religious convictions. These annotations, although not physically destructive, appear to be the product of the same zealous energy which he exerted as an iconoclast. There are numerous emendations, copious intertextual references, and notes which challenge and rebut the printed texts. It is difficult, however, to judge the scale of Dowsing’s bibliographic activities, since our knowledge of his library is largely based on the books which survive, rather than on 1 Trevor Cooper (ed.), The Journal of William Dowsing: Iconoclasm in East Anglia During the English Civil War (Woodbridge, 2001). 2 John Morrill, ‘William Dowsing, the Bureaucratic Puritan’, in Public Duty and Private Conscience in Seventeenth- Century England (Oxford, 1993), pp. 173-203; see also the substantially revised version of this essay, ‘William Dowsing and the Administration of Iconoclasm in the Puritan Revolution’, in The Journal of William Dowsing, pp. 1-28. Morrill has identified twenty-three surviving volumes and a further twenty-five works to which Dowsing refers in his annotations. 3 London, British Library, C.115.n.73 [2]; London, British Library, C.21.a.29 [2]; Oxford, Balliol College, Arch.C.8.22. 1 eBLJ 2013, Article 10 Additions to the Library of William Dowsing (1596-1668): A Reformation Tract Volume Reassembled secondary documents. On his death, Dowsing bequeathed his library, minus duplicates and one other exception, to his eldest son Samuel, who died in 1703.4 Samuel’s executor and half-brother, also named William, sold the collection to a London bookseller named ‘Mr Huse’.5 It is highly likely, as Trevor Cooper has argued, that this was Thomas Huse, who became active as a bookbinder, and presumably also as a bookseller, in the late seventeenth century.6 This, however, is where the trail stops and there are no known sources from which to conduct a wholesale reconstruction of the library. No inventory or booklist is known to survive, nor any sale catalogue in which William or Samuel Dowsing is named. But this impediment is not insurmountable. The growing attentiveness of librarians, researchers,7 and specialist booksellers8 to the copy-specific details of books makes the identification of volumes from Dowsing’s library increasingly practicable. We already know that Dowsing’s library contained works of biblical exegesis, religious controversy, and history, both classical and modern.9 It will become apparent that his religious reading included more sixteenth-century religious material than has previously been recognized. This article arises from a pair of chance discoveries in the British Library, made during the course of a larger study of sixteenth-century readers’ annotations.10 Two composite volumes were found to contain William Dowsing’s distinctive annotations.11 Although neither of the volumes 4 Ipswich, Suffolk Record Office (SRO), Archdeaconry of Suffolk Wills, IC/AA1/98/14G. Dowsing bequeathed his duplicates to his wife to use during her lifetime and then to distribute amongst their children at her discretion. This detail (which has not been mentioned by previous scholars) hints that the library may have been somewhat larger than is suggested by our current knowledge of its contents. The other exception was Joseph Caryll’s multiple-volume commentary on the Book of Job, which Dowsing left to his wife as a remembrance. 5 SRO, Archdeaconry of Suffolk Wills, IC/AA1/133/79. Our knowledge of the sale is derived from a second- generation copy of Dowsing’s journal, which was made for the Suffolk antiquary Thomas Martin of Palgrave (1696-1771) and was based on the (no longer extant) copy made by the Revd Edward Leedes in 1704. The copy reproduces a note, originally written by Leedes, which states that the journal ‘was found amongst the sayd Mr William Dowsing’s books sold by his son Mr William Dowsing to Mr Huse a bookseller at Exeter Change in the Strand, London Septr 1704’. SRO, HD 1538/435/1/1. See Trevor Cooper, ‘The History and Nature of the Journal’, in The Journal of William Dowsing, pp. 138-47 (pp. 140-1). 6 Cooper, ‘The History and Nature of the Journal’, p. 141, n. 25 (p. 457). The Stationers’ Company’s records state that Huse began accepting apprentices in 1698, continuing until 1713, when his own son, Joseph, was apprenticed to him. The profession of Joseph’s father is recorded as being that of a bookbinder. See D. F. McKenzie (ed.), Stationers’ Company Apprentices, 1641-1700 (Oxford, 1974), p. 86; D. F. McKenzie (ed.), Stationers’ Company Apprentices, 1701-1800 (Oxford, 1978), p. 186. 7 Dowsing owned the copy of Appian of Alexandria’s An Auncient Historie and Exquisite Chronicle of the Romanes Warres (1578), which is Cambridge University Library, Syn.7.57.83. I am grateful to Jason Scott-Warren for this information. 8 Recent examples include Dowsing’s copy of The Chronicle of Fabian (1559), STC 10664, see Maggs Bros, 1324 (2002), item 37 (pp. 82-3); and a first edition Douai-Rheims New Testament (1582), STC 2884, which was sold by James & Devon Gray Booksellers (Cambridge, Massachusetts) in 2012. The former volume is mentioned in Morrill, ‘William Dowsing and the Administration of Iconoclasm in the Puritan Revolution’, plate 4a. 9 Morrill, ‘William Dowsing and the Administration of Iconoclasm in the Puritan Revolution’, pp. 5-10. 10 Dunstan Roberts, ‘Readers’ Annotations in Sixteenth-Century Religious Books’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Cambridge, 2012). 11 The first volume, British Library, C.115.n.73, contains three publications:The Reformation of Religion by Iosiah (1590?), STC 14815; William Tyndale, The Supper of the Lorde (1547?), STC 24470; and A Faythfull and moost Godlye Treatyse Concernyng the most Sacred Sacrament (1548?), STC 411, issued with The Order that the Churche and Congregation of Christ in Denmarke doth Vse. There are three pages of densely formulated notes, written by Dowsing, at the end of The Reformation of Religion by Iosiah. These begin on sig. D3v and then cover both sides of what the STC describes as a cancelland. The second volume, British Library, C.21.a.29, contains a further two publications: A Brife and Faythfull Declaration of the True Fayth of Christ (1547), STC 1034.7; and Henry Brinkelow or Robert Crowley, A Supplication of the Poore Commons (1546), STC 10884, issued with a reprint of Simon Fish, A Supplicacyon for the Beggers (first printed 1529?), STC 10883. 2 eBLJ 2013, Article 10 Additions to the Library of William Dowsing (1596-1668): A Reformation Tract Volume Reassembled contains Dowsing’s signature, the hand and the style of annotations enable a positive identification to be made. The absence of a signature probably explains why these volumes have not previously been connected with Dowsing. Dowsing annotated these volumes by numbering the individual works and their pages, a feature which enables us to identify a further item from his library. The Reformation of Religion by Iosiah, which appears at the beginning of the first volume, is numbered twice, the numbers running 1-27 and 65-91.12 All of the other works in the two volumes are numbered once. In the first volume these run 97-168, 3-68, 69-96 and in the second they run 265-309, 310-328, 233-264. In addition to adding these numbers, Dowsing also marked the title page of each of these works with ‘trea’ (i.e.
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