Abstract
This article introduces the fragments of an unattested and unstudied Elizabethan printed text, The Remedy of Loue (1584), a prose adaptation of Ovid’s Remedia Amoris, which survives within the binding of MS EDC 1/27 (1590-1593), a folio-sized court-book produced for the Consistory Court of the Diocese of Chester. The article begins by considering what kind of literary text has surfaced here and why its recovery matters; it then moves on to offer some provisional scenarios to account for The Remedy becoming available as binding materials in Chester, as well as suggesting some connections between Chester stationers and London.
ENGLISH COUNTY RECORD OFFICES OFTEN play second fiddle to larger archival repositories; however, they offer a rich resource for the study of medieval manuscript and early-modern printed fragments, which survive by virtue of the fact that they have been repurposed as binding materials for later books. Ralph Hanna and Thorlac Turville-Petre’s 2015 study has, for instance, highlighted at least sixty leaves of medieval manuscript fragments in the bindings of books held in the ‘non-institutional’ setting of the Staffordshire Record Office in Stafford, many of which were unattested.1 My own survey of twenty-one sixteenth-century court-books, which were produced for the Consistory Court of the diocese of Chester and are now held at the Cheshire Record Office in Chester (henceforth CRO), supports Hanna and Turville-Petre’s conclusion that the collection in Stafford might not be ‘exceptional’.2
From a sample covering the period between 1543 and 1601,3 I have encountered several fragments that have significant research potential, most notably those that point to an unattested printed book: the anonymous prose advice manual, The Remedy of Loue, an ‘English’ translation of a ‘Pleasantly penned’ book of Ovidian origins, which was printed in London by ‘John VVindet’ (fl. 1584–1611) and ‘Thomas Iudson’ (fl. 1584–1600) in 1584, presumably from their printing house at the sign of the White Bear in Addle Hill.4 These fragments take the form of two two-sided printed sheets showing octavo imposition, which together feature the remnants of the outer and inner formes of sheet A of The Remedy (Figs. 1 and 2). Incorporating The Remedy’s title page, snippets of the book’s ‘Preface’ (sig. A2r–v), and a chunk of its main body (beginning at A3r), these text-bearing substrates were, at some point after 1584 and before 1591, recycled to serve as paste downs on the upper and lower boards of the folio-sized court-book, MS EDC 1/27 (Fig. 3).
The upper board of MS EDC 1/27 (1590–93), featuring the remnants of sheet A of The Remedy of Loue (1584). Reproduced by kind permission of the Cheshire Archives and Local Studies, Chester.
The lower board of EDC 1/27, with another copy of sheet A of The Remedy. Reproduced by kind permission of the Cheshire Archives and Local Studies, Chester.
The leather binding that accompanies EDC 1/27. Reproduced by kind permission of the Cheshire Archives and Local Studies, Chester.
Many thanks to the Bibliographical Society, who awarded a Minor Grant to the broader research project behind this article. I would also like to thank Helen Wilcox, Andrew Hiscock, and Karen Waring for their brilliant (as always) insights. And thanks also to the Archive Assistants at CRO for their kind assistance, and for their archival labours, which led me to The Remedy in the first place.
The Library, 7th series, vol. 25, no. 3 (September 2024)
© The Author 2024; Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Bibliographical Society. All rights reserved. For commercial re-use, please contact [email protected] for reprints and translation rights for reprints. All other permissions can be obtained through our RightsLink service via the Permissions link on the article page on our site—for further information please contact [email protected].
At the point at which I first encountered these sheets, their presence within EDC 1/27 had already been recorded by CRO cataloguers (‘Fragments of “The Remedy of Love” … used in binding’); however, The Remedy’s status as an unattested book, absent from the Short Title Catalogue (STC) or its successor, the English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC), was not. I brought this discovery to the attention of the archivists at CRO, as well as of one of the editors of the ESTC, who has since added The Remedy as a bibliographic record to that database (citation number S509162). My intention in this article is to introduce The Remedy to a wider audience: firstly, by considering what kind of literary text has surfaced here and why its recovery matters; and secondly, by offering some provisional scenarios to account for this copy of The Remedy’s becoming available as binding materials in Chester, as well as suggesting some connections between Chester stationers and London. A short conclusion will reflect on the research potentials embodied by The Remedy and its present situation within a Chester court-book.
The Remedy of Loue
‘Treating the harmes that followe vnlawful Loue’, and offering necessary ‘councel for the avoiding of such dangers’, The Remedy appears to be a prose adaptation of the Roman source to which its anglicized title gestures. That is, Ovid’s eroto-didactic elegy, Remedia amoris, a self-help poem that offers (often satiric and contradictory) guidelines for falling out of love, and a sequel to Ovid’s Ars amatoria, which offers advice on how a lover may sexually satisfy his mistress, and how the mistress might retain her lover’s erotic affections in turn.5
Nowhere in the surviving text are we given the name of The Remedy’s author/translator or its publisher (presuming the publisher was not either Windet, Judson, or both working in partnership). Furthermore, the preliminary address does not appear to identify a dedicatee. What is clear is that, not unusually for the period, The Remedy adopts the basic didactic premise of Ovid’s Remedia only to rework it, advocating in place of Ovid’s post-love praxis a more austere program of celibacy.6 This is grounded in an anti-feminist rhetoric, in which unchaste and wanton women are castigated as a threat to patriarchal prerogatives: ‘in such womē, is neither faith nor stabilitie, credyte, goodnes, or fidelitie’ (A6v); she brings nothing ‘but diseases, great expences, cruelty, & craft’ (A7r). A subsequent reference to the Italian Carmelite humanist reformer and poet, Baptista Spagnuoli Mantuanus, or ‘Mantuan’ (1447–1516)—possibly alluding to Mantuan’s lengthy denunciation of women in his fourth Latin Eclogue—authorizes the characterisation of all women, ‘lewd’ or otherwise, as being, ‘by nature’, ‘spitefull, full of poison, cruell and proude’ (A8r). Aligning women and the feminine with factors and forces that threaten to undermine masculine ‘consideration’ (A5r), and counselling its male readers to ‘fly’ from feminine ‘dāgers’ (A6v), The Remedy predicates masculine self-control upon the wholesale rejection of feminine influence. In doing so, the text invites the possibility that classical Stoicism and its appropriations influenced The Remedy’s negative representation of women, who, in an echo of Justus Lipsius’s (1547–1606) two-part Neo-Stoic bestseller, De Constantia (1584), epitomize the antithesis of ‘faith, lawe, [and] reason, despising right, iustice, and equity’ (A8r), and who function as symbols of the ‘unconstant and wauering’ (A8v) passions that the text’s male readers must relinquish.7
If we were to look at the other print products manufactured by Windet and Judson in 1584, we can see their involvement in the production of another Ovidian text: a reprint of Arthur Golding’s (c. 1536–1606) English translation of the Metamorphoses (STC 18958), which appeared in no less than eight full editions of between 1567 and 1612. This popularity may well have tempted The Remedy’s publisher to cash in with their Remedia adaptation,8 and it is not impossible that Golding’s translation, which renders Ovid’s scenes of bodily transformation as didactic metaphors for the spiritual corruption of ‘un-policed sexuality’, provides another relevant context for The Remedy’s moralizing approach to the Remedia.9 Windet and Judson were also the go-to printers for another print product interested in the self-improving virtues of ‘Stoic detachment’: namely, Robert Greene’s (bap. 1558, d. 1592) Arbasto (STC 12217), a fashionable prose romance that, like The Remedy, makes a title-page promise to ‘counsell’ its readers in the affective misfortunes of love.10 Elsewhere, Windet and Judson printed products with an explicitly instructional, but also a religiously reformist, agenda, including Richard Greenham’s (1535–1594) A Godlie Exhortation (STC 11503); George Gifford’s (c. 1548–1600) Foure Sermons (STC 11858.5); A Commentarie of M. Iohn Caluine (STC 4402); and John Undall’s (1560–1592) Peters Fall (STC 24503). All of this would make Windet and Judson’s involvement in the publication of The Remedy unremarkable: like other products issuing from the Windet-Judson press in 1584, The Remedy appears to have been tapping into an increasing commercial appetite for practical prose texts that sought to classify knowledge about virtuous conduct.
Still, the identification of a new English-language adaptation of the Remedia is significant for scholars investigating Ovid’s early-modern reception and textual appropriations. It helps us to update, for example, the bibliography compiled by Stuart Gillespie and Robert Cummings, who estimated that there were eleven English-language translations, adaptations, and/or imitations of the Ovidian corpus printed in England in the 1500s.11 These include the schoolboy primer, The Flores of Ovide, printed by Wynkin de Worde (d. 1534) in 1513 (STC 18934); Golding’s Ovidius Nasos Worke, intitled Metamorphosis of 1565 (STC 18955); and George Turberville’s (1540–1597) Heroycall Epistles of … Publius Ovidius Naso, printed in 1567 (STC 18940). According to Gillespie and Cummings, it was not until 1600 that the Remedia appeared in its own separately printed English translation, published alongside Heroides in F.L.’s Ovid his Remedie of Love (STC 18974).12 This was followed by The First and Second Part of the Remedy of Love (STC 18975), a 1620 translation that has been attributed to both Sir Thomas Overbury (1581–1613) and Thomas Haywood (1575–1641).13 Now that we know of the existence of The Remedy, we can revise Gillespie and Cummings’s bibliographical tally from eleven to twelve Ovidian translations, adaptations, and/or imitations printed in England in the 1500s.
Accordingly, The Remedy helps us to complicate our understanding of the Remedia’s cultural standing in England prior to 1600. Gary Taylor posits that of all of Ovid’s works, including (or, perhaps, especially) his Metamorphoses, the Remedia was the least ‘frequently cited’ by Elizabethan authors, although Taylor does identify Thomas Watson (1555–1592) as one figure who displayed an especial interest in this more marginalized Ovidian text.14 At some point between 1577 and 1582, Watson wrote an English verse translation of the Remedia, the now lost ‘De Remedio Amoris’, which was apparently circulated in manuscript form but never printed. Taylor uses this piece of information to build the thesis that Watson was implicated in the authorship of the 1592 domestic tragedy, Arden of Faversham (STC 733), which makes specific use of Ovid’s Remedia to structure the dialogue for Franklin, friend and terrible advice-giver to the equally naïve Arden. ‘No other Elizabethan playwright had such a demonstrably strong interest in this particular Ovidian text’, writes Taylor, though the survival of The Remedy does indicate that there were writers outside of the playhouse who were interested in adapting the Remedia before 1600, and a publisher or publishers willing to invest in it.15 Given the fact that his ‘De Remedio’ was circulating in manuscript form not long before the publication of The Remedy 1584, it is also tempting to speculate that The Remedy was a prose response to, or in some way capitalizing upon, Watson’s lost verse translation, which, by the estimation of its author, was critically successful, having been met with ‘the good likinge of many that haue seene and perused it’.16
MS EDC 1/27
As noted above, EDC 1/27 is one of twenty-one court-books I have consulted at CRO. My original intention was to establish whether other volumes in the same series were bound in identifiable printed waste, or even with other sheets from the unattested Remedy of Loue. The answer is, unfortunately, no, although placing these objects side-by-side did illuminate material patterns as well as idiosyncrasies, since the court-books in my sample exist in diverse physical states. This is due to material decay and also the fact that these court-books are differently bound. Fourteen of them feature undecorated parchment bindings, which were simply wrapped around the text-block, and look as if were bound in-house by court assistants;17 another five, including The Remedy’s host, look like the work of a professional binder, since they are bound in more durable tanned leather bindings, featuring leather bands that wrap around the spine and are affixed with criss-crossed vellum tackets, as well as blind-tooled decoration.18
Alongside this shift between make-do bindings and more professional-looking ones, the count-books in my sample contain a diverse range of wastepaper used in the binding process, especially text-bearing materials derived from pre-Reformation manuscripts—the ‘unwanted legacy of the Middle Ages’, according to Neil Ker.19 Fragments of Petrus Comestor’s (d. 1178) twelfth-century biblical paraphrase, Historia scholastica (EDC 1/11), leaves from medieval biblical commentaries (EDC 1/12, EDC 1/13, EDC 1/17, EDC 1/25) and fourteenth-century service books (EDC 1/17, EDC 1/18, EDC 1/26), serve variously as pastedowns, flyleaves, spine linings, and makeshift wrappers. It seems possible that much of this waste material had been farmed from sites nearby: drawn, for example, from local churches, one or more of the dissolved monastic houses in Chester, or inherited from the library of the dissolved Benedictine abbey of St Werburgh’s, which, in the early fourteenth century, contained ‘a minimum of 18 shelves and cupboards’ generously stocked with ‘theological works’, ‘medieval chronicles’, as well as ‘a number of classical authors such as Ovid, Seneca, and Virgil’.20
Evidence such as folds, holes resulting from stitching, and forms of marginalia that clearly pre-date the binding, indicate that these manuscript fragments are, to use Anna Reynolds’s phrase, ‘recovered’: that is, they are fragments that were circulating in codex form before they were taken apart and redeployed to form the binding of another codex.21 Conversely, The Remedy sheets belong to a different category of waste, since they have not been culled from a stitched and bound codex. What has surfaced within EDC 1/27 are two unfolded and uncut sheets, which were tacketed to the book’s boards during the binding process. These are unlikely to have been what Graham Pollard called ‘printer’s waste’, since the sheets of The Remedy have been printed on both sides, collated, and neither bear any manuscript evidence that they were proofs discarded by Windet and Judson during the printing process.22 Rather more likely is that this material constitutes a subset of waste that Reynolds defines as ‘unsold waste’, meaning sheets ‘that left the print shop, were transported to booksellers ready to be bound and sold … but remained unsold and were subsequently turned to waste’.23 This reading seems all the more likely given the fact that there is more than one copy of the same printed sheet in the binding of EDC 1/27: as Reynolds argues, this is a fairly reliable indicator that those sheets ‘came from multiple copies unsold in the bookseller’s shop or warehouse’.24
If early-modern ‘waste paper did not stray far from where it was first categorised as waste’, then one possibility is that a stationer procured The Remedy sheets as waste in London and subsequently brought them to Chester to use in their bindery.25 Another potential scenario is that, having left Windet and Judson’s London-based printing house, loose sheets from The Remedy may have journeyed to Chester as vendible commodities, but that those sheets remained unsold and so were repurposed as binding materials. If this were the case, the unsold stock could have been sold by a Chester-based bookseller to a local binder, who then subsequently used them in the making of EDC 1/27. Alternatively, the binder who repurposed The Remedy sheets as pastedowns may have been the same agent who was originally planning on selling them.26
Whoever that individual was, they did not sign or otherwise inscribe their work, at least in any of the ways that have been identified in other studies of early-modern bindings.27 However, evidence from MS ZG 17/1, the unpaginated ‘Minute Book of the Company of Painter-Stainers, Embroiderers, Glaziers and Stationers’ (1575–1621), tells us that there were at least three book-trade agents operating in Chester in the mid-to-late sixteenth century. These include ‘John Alleyne [or Allen]’, a journeyman ‘bookbindder’ whose name appears in an entry of 1592, and who was probably the father of two brothers named John Allen who were choristers at Chester cathedral in the 1590s.28 ZG 17/1 also makes reference to ‘William Holme [or Hulme]’ (d. 1617), a bookseller-publisher from a prominent Chester family.29 He was admitted to the guild in 1591, and he happens to be the first to be formally identified within that document as a ‘Stationer’. Holme had London connections: he began an apprenticeship there in 1569 and was admitted freeman of the London Stationers’ Company before he returned to Chester in 1591. (This Holme may have also had Shakespearean connections, since Geoffrey Caveney has recently argued that his younger cousin, also called William Holme [d. 1607], could be the ‘onlie begetter’ of Shake-speare’s Sonnets [1609]: the enigmatic ‘Mr. W.H.’.30) The earliest named reference to a book-trade agent within ZG 17/1 appears in 1566/7, which is the point at which that record itself begins. There, one ‘francys godlyf [or Godlif]’ (fl. 1562–1596), a bookbinder, paid £4 (the ‘foreigner’s’ fee) to be admitted as a freeman within the company (he is, however, never identified as a stationer). Godlif appears to have set up a bindery in the city, although like Holme, he had connections with London, having first established his business there. ‘Fraunces Godlyfe’ was made free of the London Stationers’ Company in 1562, and in that year he entered his rights to publish a ballad called A Desscrtption of a Monstrous Chylde (STC 6177), which was printed by Leonard Askel (b. 1556) for ‘Godlyf’; in 1577, ‘Frauncis Godly’ published Abraham Fleming’s (c. 1552–1607) A Straunge and Terrible Wunder (STC 11050), a pamphlet about the prodigious appearance of a monstrous black dog in Bungay, Suffolk, which was printed by John Allde (fl. 1555–1592) and sold at a shop Godlif kept near the west end of St Paul’s.
Could any of these three figures have had a role to play in the making of EDC 1/27? There is a circumstantial connection between Godlif and Windet that would take us back to The Remedy, which is that Godlif’s 1577 collaborator, Allde, happens to have served as master to Windet during his apprenticeship between 1572 and 1579.31 We might add that, as a book - binder who diversified his business by branching out into publishing and bookselling, Godlif was at least the kind of bookbinder who is likely to have had printed sheets near at hand in his bindery.32 Holme’s London connections, like Godlif’s, gesture towards trade networks linking the capital with Chester, and he, too, had tangential connections to Windet, since Holme served out his apprenticeship under John Harrison the elder (fl. 1556–1617), with whom Windet would go on to collaborate.33 Broadly, given their London connections and involvement in publishing and book - selling, it is at least conceivable that figures like Holme or Godlif could have played some intermediary role in The Remedy’s movements from London to Chester.
That said, there were clearly other routes of transmission. ZG 17/1 shows that there were travelling book-trade agents who came to Chester to sell their wares during the Michaelmas and Midsummer Fairs. These peripatetic figures appear to have been tolerated, but only up to a point. An entry made in ZG 17/1 in 1599 notes that a payment of 4d was made to company member Randall Eaton, to reimburse him for monies spent ‘helping to drive away the statyoner after the fayre’. In 1618, the same amount was paid to an officer for ‘shutting down’ the ‘windows’ of the stalls used by travelling stationers, again during the Midsummer Fair. ZG 17/1 also indicates that booksellers were surreptitiously operating during periods that fell outside of the city’s Michaelmas and Midsummer festivities. In 1636, the guild’s ‘Macebearer’ was reimbursed for suppressing a ‘Stationer’ called ‘Rich[ard] Thrope [or Thorpe]’—brother of Thomas Thorpe (c. 1569–1625), the printer of Shake-speare’s Sonnets—for illegally ‘setting up a shoppe in the City’. Similar entries appear in 1648, 1649, 1651, 1670, 1688, and 1691, with the latter two entries showing that the ‘selling of bookes’ was being carried out by two grocers, ‘Mr. Huitt’ and ‘Nathan Jolly [or Jolliffe]’, who were surreptitiously retailing in private rooms above their shops. The larger point of this evidence would be that printed texts like The Remedy must have been passing in and out of the city in a variety of ways, traded by agents whose presence in Chester was only ever temporary, or by those whose main occupation was not (officially, at least) bookselling. The Chester guild’s suppression of rogue traders, which included the closing of pop-up shops, the imposition of fines, and the confiscation of forfeited stock, might even offer another scenario to account for how The Remedy sheets became locally available as binding materials for EDC 1/27.
Before concluding, it is worth making one final observation about EDC 1/27 and The Remedy’s place within its binding. The Remedy sheets are accompanied by another form of waste material: a greyish, roughly-textured sheet, which has been wrapped around the spine of EDC 1/27 as an extra layer of support for the binding (Fig. 4). This spine lining, which is tapered at both ends, appears to have originally been used a kind of ream wrapper (i.e. packaging used to protect paper during its transportation and storage). We can identify this material as having served that purpose because a manuscript note, written on the portion of the lining visible between the lower board and the main text-block, identifies it as such: ‘10 Quires of b and crounde’. In the first instance, this note designates a unit of paper measure - ment: ‘10 Quires’ would, for example, equate to around 250 sheets of paper. It also specifies the type of paper that was contained within the wrapper, as well as its source: the ‘b’ in ‘b and crounde’ refers to the French papermaker Nicolas le Bé (d. 1605) of Troyes. His watermark features an upper-case letter ‘B’ inside a crowned (or ‘crounde’) shield, with the name ‘NICOLASLEBE’ on a scroll beneath. This watermark appears consistently throughout the 474 pages that make up the main text block of EDC 1/27 (Fig. 5), and so the likelihood is that the wrapper used to protect that paper in transmission was cannily redeployed in the bindery as an additional form of material support for that document.
A ream wrapper, used as a form of spine support within the binding of EDC 1/27. Reproduced by kind permission of the Cheshire Archives and Local Studies, Chester.
The watermark of the French papermaker Nicolas le Bé. Reproduced by kind permission of the Cheshire Archives and Local Studies, Chester.
Interestingly, the other four leatherbound court-books in my sample also contain roughly-textured sheets, which are similarly tapered at each end. Although these other examples lack inscriptions that might identify them as ream wrappers, they look and feel like the example found within EDC 1/27, and in each instance they have been put to use in a similar fashion, used as a thrifty means by which the spine can be lined and therefore reinforced. I have not found anything quite like this in the other court-books I have consulted, and we might well interpret these inclusions as a sign that the leatherbound documents were bound by the same agent, whose insertion of ream-wrapper-like materials within their stationary bindings represents something close to a house style.
Looking forward
It is hoped that there will be opportunities for other scholars to work more closely with The Remedy fragments. For those with an interest in Ovid’s Elizabethan reception, The Remedy fragments offer a window into the different ways in which the Remedia was reworked into new printed works prior to the 1590s, which is the period that ‘much of the existing work on early-modern English Ovidianism focuses’, and before the Remedia’s first known vernacular printing in 1600.34 The wastepaper that surrounds the central text block of EDC 1/27—from The Remedy sheets through to the paper-bailing materials—generates a compelling sense of the distributed and contingent nature of its making, and for (gender) historians interested in the materiality of ecclesiastical court records and the ‘circumstances of their production’, there is an unexpectedly apposite meeting of text and context here.35 Indeed, The Remedy—a text that is very much concerned with codifying the dangers of ‘the fleshly act of the wicked man & woman’ (A7r)—serves as a fitting paratext for its host, a record produced within the contexts of an English church court, whose jurisdiction covered such things as marriage, bastardy, and sexual morality (which is why early-modern church courts were known colloquially as ‘bawdy’ courts).
Bibliographical enquiries into the printing careers of Windet and Judson, of which Mark Bland’s is currently the most thoroughgoing, will be enriched by The Remedy’s survival.36 As will examinations of the book (and wastepaper) trade in early-modern Chester, which might do well to treat The Remedy sheets as a paper trail that guides us, somewhat obliquely, to the presence of trade routes that facilitated the transmission of books into that localized market, and to the activities of Chester Stationers, of whom we still ‘know little’.37 Finally, to return to Hanna and Turville-Petre, The Remedy sheets remind us of the ‘rewards of trawling’ English county record collections, where medieval and early-modern manuscript and printed fragments frequently appear in situ, having survived the impulse to separate waste from host, and where we might reasonably hope to identify other unattested books.38
Footnotes
Hanna and Turville-Petre, ‘Medieval Manuscript Fragments at the Staffordshire Record Office’, The Library, VII, 16 (2015), 405–28 (p. 409).
ibid. p. 419.
CRO, EDC: 1/11, Dec. 1543–Feb 1546/7; 1/12, Mar. 1546/7–Oct. 1551; 1/13, Nov. 1551–Jan. 1554/5; 1/14, Feb. 1554/5–Nov. 1557; 1/15, c. Dec. 1557–Jul. 1560; 1/16, Sep. 1560–Mar. 1562/3; 1/17, Dec. 1563–Oct. 1566; 1/18, Nov. 1566–Apr. 1570; 1/19, Feb. 1570–Sep. 1571; 1/20, Oct. 1572–Mar. 1575/6; 1/21, May 1576–Jan. 1579/80; 1/22, Jun. 1579–Nov. 1580; 1/23, Dec. 1579–Fed. 1581/2; 1/24, Mar. 1582–Feb. 1583/4; 1/25, Oct. 1583–Nov. 1586; 1/26, Dec. 1586–Nov. 1590; 1/27, Nov. 1590–Oct. 1593; 1/28, Oct. 1593–Aug. 1596; 1/29, Sep. 1596–Mar. 1597/8; 1/30, Mar. 1597/8–Dec. 1599; 1/31, Jan. 1599/1600–Sep. 1601.
Windet and Judson’s partnership was officially sanctioned by the Stationers’ Company on Wednesday 15 January 1584: ‘Yt is ordered that they shall enter into bond one to another to be parten’s in printing for v yeres / And that duringe yt Tyme the said Windet shalbe accoumpted the maister printer. And yf after thexpiracon of the said v yeres they breake of from parten’ship by wyndetes meanes wthout consent of the mr wardens & assisttes or moore parte of them. That then from thensforth Iudson shall enioy the place of A maister printer according to thelection that hathe ben already made wherein the choise hathe fallen vpon him.’ See Stationers’ Company Archive (SCA), TSC/1/F/02/01-Liber B, 1575–1605: 15 January 1583/4, fol. 436r. Cited by W. W. Greg & E. Boswell, Records of the Court of the Stationers’ Company 1576–1602 (London: Bibliographical Society, 1930), p. 14.
On Ovid’s Remedia as a self-consciously ‘tongue-in-cheek’ text, see Lindsay Ann Reid, Ovidian Bibliofictions and the Tudor Book: Metamorphosing Classical Heroines in Late Medieval and Renaissance England (London and New York: Routledge, 2014), esp. p. 66.
For a broader discussion of this Ovide Moralisé tradition, see Genevieve Lively, ‘Ovid in Defeat? On the Reception of Ovid’s Ars amatoria and Remedia amoris’, in The Art of Love: Bimillennial Essays on Ovid’s Ars amatoria and Remedia amoris, ed. by Roy Gibson, Steven Green & Alison Sharrock (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 318–37. On Ovid’s Elizabethan reworkings, see Liz Oakley-Brown, Ovid and the Cultural Politics of Translation in Early Modern England (London and New York: Routledge, 2006).
On Lipsius and the abject feminine in Neo-Stoicism, see Marian Sperberg-McQueen, ‘Gardening Without Eve: The Role of Women in Justus Lipsius’ De Constantia and in Neo-Stoic Thought’, The German Quarterly, 68 (1995), 389–407.
Additionally, it might not be unimportant that The Remedy’s publication in 1584 coincides with the end of Thomas Vautrollier’s (d. 1587) initial ten-year patent for Ovid’s works in Latin (awarded 19 June 1574), and De remedio amoris seems to have been included in Vautrollier’s 1583 edition of Publii Ouidii Nasonis Heroidum Epistolae (STC 18928).
Gary G. Gibbs & Florinda Ruiz, ‘Arthur Golding’s Metamorphoses: Myth in an Elizabethan Political Context’, Renaissance Studies, 22 (2008), 557–75 (p. 575).
Brenda E. Richardson, ‘Two English Francophiles: Some French Influences on Fashionable Elizabethan Fiction’, Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy: Archaeology, Culture, History, Literature, 84C (1984), pp. 225–35 (p. 230).
Gillespie & Cummings, ‘A Bibliography of Ovidian Translations and Imitations in English’, Translation and Literature, 13/2: Versions of Ovid (2004), 207–18 (pp. 207–8); ‘Translations from Greek and Latin Classics 1550–1700: A Revised Bibliography’, Translation and Literature, 18 (2009), 1–42.
Interestingly, the 1600 edition of Remedie of Love was authorized by Windet in his role as the Company’s Underwarden according to its entrance in the Stationers’ Register for 25 December 1599.
See M. L. Stapleton, ‘A Remedy for Heywood?’, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 43: Renaissance Review: Wyatt, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Heywood (2001), 74–92, 94–115.
Taylor, ‘Shakespeare, Arden of Faversham, and Four Forgotten Playwrights’, The Review of English Studies 71/302 (2020), 867–95 (p. 892).
ibid. p. 892.
Headnotes 68 and 89 in Watson’s Hekatompathia, or, Passionate Century of Love (London: John Wolfe for Gabriell Cawood, 1582). Cited in Gerald Snare, ‘Translation and Transmutation in William Tyndale and Thomas Watson’, Translation and Literature, 12 (2003), 189–204 (p. 197 n. 16).
This scenario is hinted at in Chester Cathedral’s treasurer’s accounts, which record the court’s sub-registrar having been reimbursed for buying ink and quires of blank paper for writing, as well as ‘for 3. quire[s] of paper parchment to cover 2. Bookes’. See CRO, EDD 3913/1/3 (1584–1610), fol. 15r.
Again, we do find evidence that might support this in the Cathedral’s treasurer’s accounts for the period, which, although incomplete, do record payments for ‘bookes of paper’ (i.e. bound stationary books for people to write in). See EDD 3913/1/3, fol. 191r.
Ker, Fragments of Medieval Manuscripts used as Pastedowns in Oxford Bindings with a Survey of Oxford Binding c. 1515–1629, corr. edn (Oxford: Oxford Bibliographical Society, 2004), p. x.
Jane Laughton, Life in a Medieval City: Chester 1275–1520 (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2008), p. 99; David Mills, Recycling the Cycle: The City of Chester and its Whitsun Plays (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998), p. 40. On the Dissolution and its impact on Chester’s monastic houses and their libraries, see Hanna, ‘The Descent of Some Chester Libraries’, The Library, VII, 22 (2021), 57–68 (pp. 61–62).
Reynolds, ‘“Worthy to be reserved”: Bookbindings and the Waste Paper Trade in Early Modern England and Scotland’, in The Paper Trade in Early Modern Europe: Practices, Materials, Networks, ed. by Daniel Bellingradt & A. Reynolds (Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2021), pp. 342–68 (pp. 351–52).
Pollard, ‘The Names of Some English Fifteenth-Century Binders’, The Library, V, 25 (1970), 193–218 (p. 196).
Reynolds, ‘“Worthy to be reserved”’, p. 348.
ibid. p. 355.
ibid. p. 342.
This might offer the more convincing scenario given that, as David Pearson suggests, early-modern provincial binders offered a wide range of services, which typically encompassed bookselling. See Pearson, English Bookbinding Styles, 1450–1800 (New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press, 2014), p. 176.
See Pearson, ‘Who, or What, is I W?’, The Book Collector, 50 (2001), 235–38.
See Joseph C. Bridge, ‘Items of Expenditure from the 16th Century Accounts of the Painters, Glaziers, Embroiderers, and Stationers’ Company, with Special Reference to the “Shepherds’ Play”’, Journal of the Chester Archaeological Society, 20 (1914), 153–91 (p. 178 n. 80).
On Holme, see J. P. Earwaker, ‘The Four Randle Holmes, of Chester, Antiquaries, Heralds, and Genealogists, c. 1571 to 1707’, Journal of the Chester Archaeological and Historic Society, 4 (1892), 113–70.
Caveney, ‘“Mr. W.H.”: Stationer, William Holme (d. 1607)’, Notes & Queries, 260 (2015), 120–24.
Mark Bland, ‘John Windet and the Transformation of the Book Trade, 1584–1610’, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 107 (2013), 151–92 (p. 153).
Godlif’s financial affairs in the 1580s might also prove relevant here. On 26 November 1582, he received 13s 4d in poor relief from the Stationers’ Company, and in 1587 he was chased for payment of a bill by Robert Walley. It is quite feasible that Godlif’s circumstances may have resulted in the ‘waste’ being brought to Chester, especially if he could procure it cheaply from former associates. See Greg & Boswell, Records of the Court, pp. 13 and 38.
See R. Stewart-Brown, ‘The Stationers, Booksellers, and Printers of Chester to about 1800’, Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, 83 (1932), 101–52 (p. 129).
Ann Reid, ‘Translating Ovid’s Metamorphoses in Tudor Balladry’, Renaissance Quarterly, 72 (2019), 537–81 (p. 541).
Laura Gowing, Domestic Dangers: Women, Words and Sex in Early Modern London (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 42.
Bland, ‘John Windet’; and id. ‘The Appearance of the Text in Early Modern England’, Text, 11 (1998), 91–154.
Robert Tittler, ‘Early Stuart Chester as a Centre for Regional Portraiture’, Urban History, 41 (2014), 3–21 (p. 14).
Hanna & Turville-Petre, ‘Medieval Manuscript Fragments’, p. 406.
