Translation and the English Book Trade c.1640–1660: The Cases of Humphrey Moseley and William London

Boutcher, Warren

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-72772-1_11

Translation and the English Book Trade c.1640–1660: The Cases of Humphrey Moseley and William London

Warren Boutcher⁵

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First Online: 29 July 2018

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Part of the book series: Early Modern Literature in History ((EMLH))

Abstract

Warren Boutcher approaches the questions of translation and cultural exchange in the 1640s and 1650s from the perspective of booksellers’ catalogues. Concentrating on the contrasting cases of Humphrey Moseley and William London, he examines the discourse on translation and print dissemination articulated through their catalogues, and identifies their respective strategies in advertising their lists of ‘vendible’ translations. By doing so, he highlights the place and status of translated material in the English book trade, as well as the agency of booksellers in circulating ‘foreign’ books among early modern print networks and shaping English literary tastes and readerships.

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Notes

1.
William London, A catalogue of the most vendible books in England (London: William London, 1658), sig. B4^r; Thomas Stanley, The history of philosophy (London: Humphrey Moseley and Thomas Dring, 1655). I cite the 1658 edition of London’s work, which includes the first, 1657 catalogue, with a supplement covering 1 August 1657 to 1 June 1658. We do not know for sure that London was the publisher or main retailer of these two works. A further supplement followed in 1660, for sale by Luke Fawn and Francis Tyton.
2.
London, A catalogue, sig. B4^r–v; Edward Leigh, Foelix consortium; or, A fit conjuncture of religion and learning (London: Charles Adams, 1663).
3.
Famiano Strada, The seige of Antwerp, trans. Thomas Lancaster (London: Humphrey Moseley, 1656); Michel de Montaigne, The essayes or morall, politike and millitarie discourses, trans. John Florio (London: Valentine Simmes for Edward Blount, 1603), sig. A5^r.
4.
I am grateful to Marie-Alice Belle and Brenda Hosington for giving me access to the database in its provisional form, before public release. For their model see Marie-Alice Belle and Brenda M. Hosington, ‘Translation, History, and Print: A Model for the Study of Printed Translations in Early Modern Britain’, Translation Studies, 10.1 (2017), 2–21.
5.
Taking only the 340 items Moseley says he has already published, I counted 117 translations, or 34.4 per cent. This is well above the average for the book trade as a whole (1475–1640 = 17 per cent, according to the ‘Renaissance Cultural Crossroads’ catalogue and ESTC).
6.
Margaret Schotte, ‘“Books for the use of the learned and studious”: William London’s Catalogue of Most Vendible Books’, Book History, 11 (2008), 33–57.
7.
John Barnard, ‘London Publishing, 1640–1660: Crisis, Continuity, and Innovation’, Book History, 4 (2001), 1–16; John Barnard, ‘Introduction’, in The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, Volume 4: 1557–1695, edited by John Barnard, D. F. McKenzie, and Maureen Bell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 1–25 (pp. 22–3); Ian Green and Kate Peters, ‘Religious Publishing in England 1640–1695’, in The Cambridge History of the Book, pp. 67–93 (pp. 67–70); John Barnard and Maureen Bell, ‘The English Provinces’, in The Cambridge History of the Book, pp. 665–86 (pp. 667–8, 671–8, 685–6).
8.
The study could be extended to the titles of translations as they appeared in advertisements in serials. See Joshua J. McEvilla, ‘A Catalogue of Book Advertisements from English Serials: Printed Drama, 1646–1668’, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 107.1 (2013), 10–48 (p. 18). It could also be extended to other sources such as the stationers’ registers and the term catalogues.
9.
There were also a small number of polyglot editions of the Psalms and the Bible. Another potential exception to investigate would be English Catholic literature in this period—perhaps not fully reflected in William London’s Catalogue.
10.
The most substantial introduction to Moseley and his paratexts remains John Curtis Reed, ‘Humphrey Moseley, Publisher’, Oxford Bibliographical Society Proceedings and Papers, 2 (1927–30), 57–142, with some corrections in the same journal, n.s. 1 (1947), p. 39.
11.
David Scott Kastan, ‘Humphrey Moseley and the Invention of English Literature’, in Agent of Change : Print Culture Studies after Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, edited by Sabrina A. Baron, Eric N. Lindquist, and Eleanor F. Shevlin (Amherst, Mass.: University of Massachusetts Press; Washington, D.C., in association with the Center for the Book, Library of Congress, 2007), pp. 105–24.
12.
Robert Wilcher, ‘Moseley, Humphrey (b. in or before 1603, d. 1661)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), http://0-www.oxforddnb.com.catalogue.libraries.london.ac.uk/view/article/19390, accessed 2 January 2017; Paulina Kewes, ‘“Give me the Sociable Pocket-Books”: Humphrey Moseley’s Serial Publication of Octavo Play Collections’, Publishing History, 38 (1995), 5–21; Peter Lindenbaum, ‘Publishers’ Booklists in Late Seventeenth-Century London’, The Library, 11.4 (2010), 381–404.
13.
G. E. B. Eyre, H. R. Plomer, and C. B. Rivington, eds., A Transcript of the Registers of the Worshipful Company of Stationers; From 1640–1708 A.D (London: privately printed, 1913–14), vol. 2, p. 232 (13 July 1659), p. 244 (3 December 1659).
14.
Peter Lindenbaum, ‘Humphrey Moseley’, in The British Literary Book Trade, 1475–1700, edited by James K. Bracken and Joel Silver (Detroit: Gale, 1996), pp. 177–83.
15.
ESTC R37653, R36544, R209434, R207262, R230554, R27879, R209429. See London, A catalogue, sig. C3^v for ‘Newcastle ministers’. For London’s location on the Tyne bridge, Kiséry (see below, note 17), cites Extracts from the Newcastle upon Tyne council minute book, 1639–1656 (Publications of the Newcastle upon Tyne Records Committee, vol. I; Newcastle upon Tyne Records Committee: Newcastle upon Tyne, 1920), pp. 110, 137.
16.
William London, The civil wars of France, during the bloody reign of Charles the Ninth (London: W. London, 1655).
17.
András Kiséry, ‘The Commonwealth of English Letters: William London, Long-Distance National Booktrade and the Commonwealth of English Letters’, paper given at Renaissance Society of America, Miami, 22–24 March 2007; András Kiséry, ‘“They are Least Usefull of Any”: Catalogues, Booksellers, and the Invention of Literature in Seventeenth-Century England’, paper given at Graduate Student Conference, Princeton University Centre for the Study of Books and Media, February 2005. I am grateful to Professor Kiséry for providing me with copies of his unpublished papers, which offer important evidence and arguments about William London not available elsewhere.
18.
Marja Smolenaars, ‘London, William (fl. 1653–1660)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), http://0-www.oxforddnb.com.catalogue.libraries.london.ac.uk/view/article/16958, accessed 2 January 2017; London, A catalogue, sig. C1^v.
19.
John Coffey, John Goodwin and the Puritan Revolution: Religion and Intellectual Change in Seventeenth-Century England (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2006), pp. 253–4.
20.
Schotte, ‘“Books for the use of the learned and studious”’, pp. 46–8.
21.
Peter Lindenbaum distinguishes between Moseley’s booklists, which were more like advertisements printed with and for specific publications, and his catalogues, which were printed separately. The difficulty lies in the fact that the catalogues are always found bound into the back of books published by Moseley , and occasionally by other publishers, and can therefore look like booklists which were printed with a particular volume. Further research is needed to confirm that the lists designated booklists by Lindenbaum appear in all copies of a given Moseley edition, but nowhere else, and that the lists designated catalogues appear at the back of copies of different Moseley editions, and even of editions published by others. See Lindenbaum, ‘Publishers’ Booklists’, pp. 381, 382n.1. The EEBO copy (British Library, Thomason / 169:E.1216[2]) of Electra of Sophocles presented to Her Highnesse the Lady Elizabeth, translated by Christopher Wase (The Hague: Sam Brown, 1649), has a Moseley booklist bound in at the back. This reinforces Moseley’s association with a clientele of royalist exiles at a very early stage in the Interregnum.
22.
Lindenbaum, ‘Humphrey Moseley, 1627–1661’, p. 178.
23.
Barnard and Bell, ‘The English Provinces’, p. 678; Kiséry, ‘Catalogues, Booksellers’.
24.
Ian Maclean, Scholarship, Commerce, Religion: The Learned Book in the Age of Confessions, 1560–1630 (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2012), pp. 176, 216.
25.
Schotte, ‘“Books for the use of the learned and studious”’, pp. 33–4, 37–8; Barnard and Bell, ‘The English Provinces’, pp. 673–4.
26.
London, A catalogue, ‘To the most candid and ingenious reader’, sig. C1^r.
27.
I used the version of the list as it occurs at the back of the British Library copy (pressmark 1483.b.5) of Robert Arnauld d’Andilly, The manner of ordering fruit-trees, trans. John Evelyn (London: Humphrey Moseley, 1660). It has 363 numbered items. The EEBO copy of the same edition (from the Huntington Library) has only 197 numbered items up to and including the section of ‘Bookes newly Printed for Humphrey Moseley’ in the list of subheadings transcribed here (with my italics).
28.
‘Books lately Printed’ recurs on five following pages as an extra running head beneath the main running head (‘Books Printed for Humphrey Moseley’).
29.
David Masson, Life of Milton Narrated in Connexion with the History of His Time, 6 vols. (London and New York: Macmillan and Co, 1859–80), vol. 3, p. 448.
30.
Thomas Stanley, Poems (London: Humphrey Moseley, 1652); Paul Davis, Translation and the Poet’s Life: The Ethics of Translating in English Culture, 1646–1726 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). I am drawing here on the draft version of the ‘Cultural Crosscurrents Catalogue of Translations in Stuart and Commonwealth Britain’. This edition of Stanley or one that is not extant appeared in Moseley’s 1660 catalogue as ‘Poems and Translations, the compleat works of Thomas Stanley Esq’ under ‘Poems lately Printed’.
31.
Kastan, ‘Humphrey Moseley’, pp. 121–2; Trevor Ross , The Making of the English Literary Canon: From the Middle Ages to the Late Eighteenth Century (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1998), pp. 133–4.
32.
William Cartwright, Comedies, tragi-comedies, with other poems (London: Humphrey Moseley, 1651), ‘To the Stationer (Mr Moseley) on his Printing Mr Cartwright’s Poems’, sig. *1^r–v.
33.
Famiano Strada, De bello Belgico. The history of the Low-Countrey warres, trans. Robert Stapylton (London: Humphrey Moseley, 1650).
34.
London, A catalogue, sig. R5^r–v, as ‘De juramenti Obligatione, of the Obligation of promissary Oathes: Seven Lectures read in the Divinity Schooles at Oxford, and translated by his Majesties appointment’.
35.
Brenda M. Hosington, ‘Commerce, Printing, and Patronage’, in The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English, Volume 2: 1550–1660, edited by Gordon Braden, Robert Cummings, and Stuart Gillespie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 47–57 (pp. 52–3).
36.
Carlos García, The antipathy bewteene the French and Spaniard, trans. Robert Gentili (London: R. Martine, 1641); Carlos García, The French-man and the Spaniard, trans. Robert Gentili (London: [Humphrey Moseley], 1642); London, A catalogue, sig. T4^r. The Houghton Library (Harvard University) copy of this 1642 edition (used on EEBO) has both the R. Martine engraved title-page and the imperfect Moseley title-page.
37.
Guido Bentivoglio, The compleat history of the warrs of Flanders, trans. Henry Carey Monmouth (London: Humphrey Moseley, 1654), sig. a1^r–v; Guido Bentivoglio, Historicall relations of the United Provinces of Flanders, trans. Henry Carey Monmouth (London: Humphrey Moseley, 1652).
38.
London, A catalogue, sigs. K1^v–K2^r, Q1^v, R5^r, R6^r.
39.
London, A catalogue, sigs. Q2^r, L2^v.
40.
London, A catalogue, sigs. M3^r, 2H2^r; William London, A catalogue of new books, by way of supplement to the former. Being such as have been printed from that time, till Easter-Term, 1660 (London: Luke Fawn and Francis Tyton, 1660), sig. B2^r.
41.
Schotte, ‘“Books for the use of the learned and studious”’, pp. 33–4; London, A catalogue, sig. C1^v.
42.
London, A catalogue, sig. C2^r.
43.
London, A catalogue, sig. 2E4^v.
44.
London, A catalogue, sigs. T4^r, V3^r.
45.
London, A catalogue, sig. A4^r–v.
46.
London, A catalogue, sigs. X1^r, Z4^r–v.
47.
London, A catalogue, sigs. T4^v, V4^r–v, X4^r.
48.
London, A catalogue of new books, sig. C2^r.
49.
Odoardo Fialetti, The whole art of drawing, painting, limning, and etching, trans. anon. (London: Peter Stint and Simon Miller, 1660). The source may have been Odouardo Fialetti, Il vero modo et ordine, per dissegnar tutte le parti et membra del corpo humano (Venice: Justus Sadeler, 1608).
50.
Fialetti , The whole art of drawing, sig. A3^r.
51.
Lazare Rivière, The practice of physick, in seventeen several books …, trans. Nicholas Culpeper, Abdiah Cole, and William Rowland (London: Peter Cole, 1655); London, A catalogue, sig. Z4^r: ‘The Pract. of Physick, in 17 Books: wherein is plainly set down the nature, cause, differences, and sorts of signs; with the cure of them: by N.C. A.C. and W.R. Physicians; being the translation of the Works of that renowned Dr Lazarus Riverius, Counsellor and Physician to the King of France. 15000 of the said Books in Lat. having been sould in few years.’
52.
Feliz Würtz , An experimental treatise of surgerie, in four parts, trans. William Johnson (London: Gartrude Dawson, 1656), sigs. a1^v–a2^r.
53.
René Descartes, Renatus Des—Cartes excellent compendium of musick: with necessary and judicious animadversions thereupon. By a person of honour, trans. William Brouncker (London: Humphrey Moseley, 1653); Eyre, Plomer, and Rivington, Transcript, vol. 1, p. 402 (14 September 1652); London, A catalogue, sig. 2D4^r; René Descartes, Musicæ compendium (Utrecht: Gijsbert van Zijll and Dirck van Ackersdijck, 1650).
54.
G. S. McIntyre, ‘Brouncker , William, second Viscount Brouncker of Lyons (1620–1684)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), http://0-www.oxforddnb.com.catalogue.libraries.london.ac.uk/view/article/3597, accessed 5 January 2017. This article erroneously attributes the translation of the text to Brouncker.
55.
Renatus Des—Carte, sigs. a2^r, b2^r–v.
56.
René Descartes , Abrégé de musique = Compendium musicae, edited by Frédéric de Buzon (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1987), pp. 37–40.
57.
Madeleine de Scudéry, Artamenes, or The Grand Cyrus, trans. Francis Gifford, 5 vols. (London: Humphrey Moseley and Thomas Dring, 1653–5); London, A catalogue, sig. 2E4^r.
58.
See Chantal Morlet Chantalat, Madeleine de Scudéry (Bibliographie des écrivains français, 10; Paris: Memini, 1997), p. 30. USTC beta dates a ten-volume octavo edition by Augustin Courbé, the first, to 1649–53.The online catalogue of the Bibliothèque nationale de France attributes Courbé with a twenty-volume second edition (1650–3), and a thirty-volume third edition (1651–5), both in octavo, both still in ten ‘tomes’ or parts. But these were not clearly distinct new editions of the whole work.
59.
The French edition is BL pressmark 244.h.1–24, and the English is pressmark 86.k.15.
60.
Scudéry , Artamenes, vol. 3, before sig. A1^r (‘The Author to the Reader’, signed ‘Scudery’).
61.
Scudéry , Artamenes, vol. 2, sig. A2^v.
62.
Alice Eardley, ‘Fact, Fiction, and the Publication of French Romance’, in Seventeenth-Century Fiction: Text and Transmission, edited by Jacqueline Glomski and Isabelle Moreau (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 130–42 (pp. 138–9).
63.
John Bidwell, ‘French Paper in English Books’, in The Cambridge History of the Book, pp. 583–601 (pp. 591–3).
64.
See the OPAC SBN ‘Catalogo del Servizio Bibliotecario Nazionale’, http://www.sbn.it/opacsbn/opaclib. The Storti publishing house continued publishing the volumes until 1669. WorldCat indicates a Spanish version published in the 1680s and a German in the 1690s.
65.
London, A catalogue, sig. 2E4^r. This listing may refer to Herringman’s rather than to Moseley’s edition.
66.
Letter 57, assumed date Sunday, 12 February 1654, in Letters from Dorothy Osborne to Sir William Temple, 1652–54, edited by Edward Abbott Parry (London: Griffith, Farran & Co., 1888), pp. 236–7.

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Queen Mary University of London, London, UK
Warren Boutcher

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Université de Montréal, Montréal, QC, Canada
Marie-Alice Belle
Université de Montréal and University of Warwick, Coventry, United Kingdom
Brenda M. Hosington

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Boutcher, W. (2018). Translation and the English Book Trade c.1640–1660: The Cases of Humphrey Moseley and William London. In: Belle, MA., Hosington, B. (eds) Thresholds of Translation. Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72772-1_11

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72772-1_11
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