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The Canonization of Italian Women Writers in Early Modern Britain by Diana Robin

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The Canonization of Italian Women Writers in Early Modern Britain by Diana Robin Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal 2011, vol. 6 The Canonization of Italian Women Writers in Early Modern Britain By Diana Robin amela Benson’s keynote lecture on the reception of Italian women writ- Pers in early modern England, delivered in 2008 at the meeting of the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women, was the inspiration for this paper. We learned from Professor Benson that, far from being influenced by the works of the celebrated women writers of the Italian Renaissance, British women writing in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had no first-hand knowledge of the works of their female counterparts in Italy.1 And yet, by 1823 the works of these early modern Italian women writers formed a significant part of the holdings of the British Museum. In this sequel to Professor Benson’s paper, I have attempted to posit some of the circumstances under which the lost writings of the Italian Renaissance women poets were recovered in eighteenth-century Britain, after more than two centuries of oblivion. The Sale of Consul Joseph Smith’s Library to George III and its Entrance into the British Museum In 1756, following the Seven Years War, a tsunami of bank failures left not only Venice but the rest of Europe under water. The British Consul in Venice, Joseph Smith, perhaps the greatest art patron of his day,2 was facing bankruptcy. At the urging of friends and business associates in Venice and London, the Consul entered into negotiations in 1759 with King George III and his agents, the Earl of Bute and his brother, the 43 EMWJ_6_For11.indb 43 6/27/11 4:05:39 PM 44 EMWJ 2011, vol. 6 Diana Robin British envoy to Turin, for the sale of his entire art collection and library.3 At the time, Smith owned contemporary Italian paintings by Canaletto, Rosalba Carriera, Cignani, Tiepolo, and Marco and Sebastiano Ricci. Among the Italian Old Masters, he had pictures by Michelangelo, Titian, Raphael, Reni, and Palladio. He also had some Dutch and Flemish paint- ings, including a Rembrandt and a Vermeer. His library of incunables, rare printed Italian first editions of the classics, manuscripts, and atlases was one of the finest in Europe. By January 1763, Bute and his brother, representing the King, settled on a sale price of £10,000 for Smith’s entire library and another £10,000 for his paintings and drawings. It was Consul Smith’s library of over 6,000 rare books and manuscripts — including numerous editions of women writers of the Italian Renaissance and many contemporary Italian women poets, as well — that would form the core of the library of George III. This collection of rare books and manuscripts, known as the King’s Library, would enter the British Museum in its entirety sixty years later. In 1823, sixty-one early modern Italian women writers — fifty-eight of them from Consul Smith’s library — officially joined the rolls of the world’s most famous writers, entering the British Museum among the historical trea- sures of the King’s Library to become part of the British nation’s heritage. In sum, the entrance of Italian women writers into the British Museum and into the literary canon of early modern Britain came about through three inaugural events: first, the founding of the British Museum itself in 1753 by an Act of Parliament; second, the founding of the King’s Library, upon the purchase by George III of the Consul’s library in 1763; and third, the donation upon the death of George III by his son, George IV, of the King’s Library in its entirety — with its rich collection of Greek, Latin, and Italian classics and its trove of early modern printed books by Italian women writers — to the British Museum in 1823.4 In the appendix to this article, I have provided an index of the Italian women’s books listed in Consul Smith’s library catalogue, the Bibliotheca Smithiana seu Catalogus librorum Josephi Smithii Angli per cognomina authorum dispositus (Venice: Pasquali, 1755), and those included in the five-volume, folio-size King’s Library catalogue, the Bibliothecae Regiae cat- alogus (London: Bulmer and Nicol, 1820–29).5 The index lists fifty-seven EMWJ_6_For11.indb 44 6/27/11 4:05:39 PM The Canonization of Italian Women Writers 45 Italian women writers found with entries under their own names in the Bibliotheca Smithiana. Every woman author listed in Smith’s Bibliotheca is included in the King’s Library catalogue. However, rather than listing each woman whose work appears in an anthology as a separate entry, as Smith did in his Bibliotheca, the King’s Library catalogue simply lists the name of the anthology or its editor.6 Nonetheless, sixteen Italian women writers have entries of their own in the King’s Library catalogue, while a further forty-five women writers listed in the Smithiana are included in the King’s Library catalogue under the anthologies in which they appear. Joseph Smith and the Founders of the British Museum The story of the inclusion of Italian women writers into the Library of the British Museum begins not only with the inauguration of the institution itself in 1753, but also with the donations of its founders. The first ques- tion that arises is how did Smith’s library, with its unusually large number of women authors, fit into the project that the founders of the British Museum had originally conceived? The founders and donors of the British Museum were a formidable group, different in every respect from Joseph Smith. Among them were the world-renowned scientist Dr. Hans Sloane, the global explorer Sir Robert Banks and his sister Sarah Banks (also a noted collector), the barrister Sir William Musgrave, and the classicist and rare book collector Clayton Cracherode. The donation by Dr. Hans Sloane (1660–1753) of his library of some 50,000 books and manuscripts, which came into the British Museum upon his death, reflects his enormous international prestige and wealth.7 Royal physician to Queen Anne, George I, and George II, Sloane was a doctor of medicine with expertise in natural philosophy and phys- ics, botany and zoology, alchemy and chemistry, astronomy and optics, mechanics and engineering, and geometry and mathematics. He followed Sir Isaac Newton as President of the Royal Society and held memberships in learned academies in France, Prussia, Spain, and Germany. From Sir Joseph Banks (1743–1820) came books on botany and natural history into the British Museum.8 Already a pioneering natural- ist in his early twenties, Banks joined James Cook aboard the Endeavour EMWJ_6_For11.indb 45 6/27/11 4:05:39 PM 46 EMWJ 2011, vol. 6 Diana Robin on the captain’s first voyage around the world in 1768. President of the Royal Society for forty-two years and a world-renowned animal and plant breeder, Banks left some 11,000 titles in the sciences alone to the British Museum, representing what has been called one of the finest collections of scientific books of the time. Banks’s sister, Sarah Sophia Banks (1744–1818), left a sizeable col- lection of her own to the British Museum on her death.9 The printed and engraved ephemera she willed to the Museum totaled 19,000 separate items, including coins, portraits, satires, and a collection of nine volumes of broadsides and news cuttings. She also bequeathed her own collection of manuscripts and books, many of them on numismatics, heraldry, and archery, to the Museum. Sir William Musgrave (1735–1800), who came from a distinguished County Durham family, was educated for the bar though he never prac- ticed.10 A baronet, known for his extensive collection of engraved portraits, Musgrave began his lifelong career in the civil service as a Commissioner in the Customs Office. Elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1774 and a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries in 1778, he was named a Trustee of the British Museum in 1783. Clayton Mordaunt Cracherode (1730–1799), elected a Trustee of the British Museum in 1784, came from a well-established family whose origins went back to the fourteenth century, though he himself possessed neither landed estates nor wealth.11 Educated at Westminster, a school that produced a long line of Regius Professors of Greek at Oxford University, Cracherode took his M.A. at that university. He was ordained an Anglican priest, and he spent the rest of his life collecting rare editions of Pindar, Aristophanes, Euripides, and Callimachus, among other Greek poets. On his death, he left the British Museum 800 rare editions of the classics, including Aldine and Juntine imprints bound in vellum, and a Greek gram- mar published in 1495 by the great Byzantine scholar Theodore Gaza. Among these proper and pedigreed founders of the British Museum, Consul Joseph Smith (1673–1770) was the odd man out.12 He had neither a university education nor the lineage or privilege of the British Museum Trustees. He had settled in Venice as the junior partner in the London banking firm of Williams and Smith in 1700. Eventually heading the firm, EMWJ_6_For11.indb 46 6/27/11 4:05:39 PM The Canonization of Italian Women Writers 47 he secured the appointment of British Consul in Venice, holding that posi- tion from 1744 to 1760. In Venice he met and married the wealthy and successful British opera diva, Catherine Tofts, who had come to Italy in 1710.13 In the 1720s, Smith began collecting contemporary Venetian art- ists’ paintings both for his own pleasure and for other English art lovers for whom he acted as an agent.14 By the end of that decade, Smith was the lead- ing dealer in the sale of Canaletto’s paintings to British buyers, and among his clients were the Duke of Richmond, the Duke of Norfork, the Duke of Beaufort, the Duke of Northumberland, and the Earl of Warwick.15 Smith also managed the sales and negotiated commissions for British col- lectors of Sebastiano Ricci and Rosalba Carriera.16 During his early years in Venice, he also purchased paintings by the Italian Old Masters.
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