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Katherine Austen’s Reckoning with Plague in Book M

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Book cover The Literary Culture of Plague in Early Modern England

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

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Abstract

Following the death of King James, Anna Ley composed a poem on the plague outbreak of 1625. The verse, collected with her and her husband’s writing in the ‘William Andrews Clark Memorial Library MS L6815 M3 C734’, weaves a complex tale of causality between the chaos brought on by pestilence and the death of a king. Describing the grim state of the plague epidemic and the national hardship of a lost monarch, Ley writes:

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The manuscript, ‘a quarto of 262 folios’, is described as ‘a fair copy, with a number of corrections’. Marie-Louise Coolahan, ‘Anna Ley’s Posthumously Collected Writings: William Andrews Clark Memorial Library MS L6815 M3 C734’, in Early Modern Women’s Manuscript Poetry, ed. by Jill Seal Millman, Gillian Wright, Victoria E. Burke and Marie-Louise Coolahan (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), pp. 77–86 (p. 77). (Coolahan 2005)

  2. 2.

    Anna Ley, ‘Anna Ley’s Posthumously Collected Writings: William Andrews Clark Memorial Library MS L6815 M3 C734’, in Early Modern Women’s Manuscript Poetry, ed. by Jill Seal Millman, Gillian Wright, Victoria E. Burke and Marie-Louise Coolahan (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), p. 82. (Ley 2005)

  3. 3.

    For further discussion of providence and the providentialist mindset in early modern England, please see Alexandra Walsham, Providence in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).

  4. 4.

    The Book of Common Prayer: The Texts of 1549, 1559, and 1662, ed. by Brian Cummings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 252. (The Book of Common Prayer 2011)

  5. 5.

    Katherine Austen, Katherine Austen’s Book M British Library, Additional Manuscript 4454, ed. by Sarah C. E. Ross (Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2011). (Austen 2011)

  6. 6.

    Sarah C. E. Ross provides the following physical details: ‘It is a small quarto volume of 116 leaves that has been rebound in a modern brown cloth and leather binding, the covers measuring 210 x 205 mm…The manuscript is in a single hand throughout, a legible italic that I presume to be Austen’s own’. Sarah C. E. Ross, ‘Textual Introduction’, in Katherine Austen’s Book M British Library, Additional Manuscript 4454, ed. by Sarah C. E. Ross (Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2011), pp. 41–47 (p. 41). (Ross 2011)

  7. 7.

    Margaret J. M. Ezell, ‘Domestic Papers: Manuscript Culture and Early Modern Women’s Life Writing’, in Genre and Women’s Life Writing in Early Modern England: Re-Imagining Forms of Selfhood, ed. by Michelle M. Dowd and Julie A. Eckerle (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), pp.33–48 (p.46). (Ezell 2007)

  8. 8.

    Ross, ‘Textual Introduction’, in Katherine Austen’s Book M, p. 42. (Ross 2011)

  9. 9.

    Austen, Katherine Austen’s Book M, p. 53. (Austen 2011)

  10. 10.

    For an extended discussion of the relative merits of this statement of privacy and the likelihood that some parts of Book M were written for a selected readership, see Sarah Ross, ‘“And Trophes of his praises make”: Providence and Poetry in Katherine Austen’s Book M, 1664–1668’, in Early Modern Women’s Manuscript Writing: Selected Papers from the Trinity/Trent Colloquium, ed. by Victoria E. Burke and Jonathan Gibson (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2004), pp. 181–204. (Ross 2004)

  11. 11.

    Samuel Pepys, The Diary of Samuel Pepys, ed. by Robert Latham and William Matthews, 10 vols (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 2000). (Pepys 2000)

  12. 12.

    Michelle M. Dowd and Julie A. Eckerle, ‘Introduction’, in Genre and Women’s Life Writing in Early Modern England: Re-Imagining Forms of Selfhood, ed. by Michelle M. Dowd and Julie A. Eckerle (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2007), pp. 1–13 (p. 1). (Dowd and Eckerle 2007)

  13. 13.

    Henk Dragstra, Sheila Ottway and Helen Wilcox, ‘Introduction’, in Betraying Our Selves: Forms of Self-Representation in Early Modern English Texts, ed. by Henk Dragstra, Sheila Ottway and Helen Wilcox (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Macmillan Press, 2000), pp. 1–13 (p. 5). (Dragstra et al. 2000)

  14. 14.

    Effie Botonaki, ‘Seventeenth-Century Englishwomen’s Spiritual Diaries: Self-Examination, Covenanting, and Account Keeping’, The Sixteenth Century Journal, 30.1 (1999), 3–21, p. 3. (Botonaki 1999)

  15. 15.

    Botonaki, ‘Seventeenth-Century English Women’s Spiritual Diaries’, p. 4. (Botonaki 1999)

  16. 16.

    Ross, ‘Textual Introduction’, in Katherine Austen’s Book M, p. 43. (Ross 2011)

  17. 17.

    Marie-Louise Coolahan, ‘Redeeming Parcels of Time: Aesthetics and Practice of Occasional Meditation’, The Seventeenth Century, 22.1 (2007), 124–43, p. 125.

  18. 18.

    Ezell, ‘Domestic Papers: Manuscript Culture and Early Modern Women’s Life Writing’, in Genre and Women’s Life Writing in Early Modern England: Re-Imagining Forms of Selfhood, p. 46. (Ezell 2007)

  19. 19.

    Ross, ‘Introduction’, in Katherine Austen’s Book M, p. 6. (Ross 2011)

  20. 20.

    Ross, ‘Introduction’, in Katherine Austen’s Book M, p. 7. (Ross 2011)

  21. 21.

    Ross, ‘Introduction’, in Katherine Austen’s Book M, p. 6. (Ross 2011)

  22. 22.

    Ross, ‘Introduction’, in Katherine Austen’s Book M, p. 8, 9. (Ross 2011)

  23. 23.

    Ross, ‘Introduction’, in Katherine Austen’s Book M, p. 8. (Ross 2011)

  24. 24.

    Barbara J. Todd, ‘Property and a Woman’s Place in Restoration London’, Women’s History Review, 19.2 (2010), 181–200, p. 182, 186.

  25. 25.

    Ross writes of the French translation ‘“My defence consists of/in suffering patiently,” or perhaps, with a slightly different emphasis, “I defend myself, that is by suffering patiently”’. Ross, Katherine Austen’s Book M, p. 51; Pamela S. Hammons provides two possibilities, ‘My defense consists of knowing how to endure/to suffer’. Hamons provides what she notes is a less convincing translation in, ‘My defense consists of surfeiting on suffering’. Book M: A London Widow’s Life Writings, ed. by Pamela S. Hammons (Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2013), p. 41 (note 3). (Austen 2013)

  26. 26.

    Ross, ‘Introduction’, in Katherine Austen’s Book M, p. 10. (Ross 2011)

  27. 27.

    Ross, ‘Introduction’, in Katherine Austen’s Book M, p. 9. (Ross 2011)

  28. 28.

    Ross, ‘Introduction’, in Katherine Austen’s Book M, p. 11. (Ross 2011)

  29. 29.

    Ross, ‘Introduction’, in Katherine Austen’s Book M, p. 12. (Ross 2011)

  30. 30.

    Raymond A. Anselment states that ‘During the months the plague threatened London and forced Austen to flee to Essex...’. Raymond A. Anselment, ‘Katherine Austen and the Widow’s Might’, Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, 5.1 (2005), 5–25, p. 12 (Anselment 2005); Ross interprets the same travel differently, writing that ‘Austen also writes into the manuscript a trio of advice pieces or wills addressed to each of her children when she takes a journey to Essex at the height of the 1665 plague’. Ross, ‘And Trophes of his praises make’: Providence and Poetry in Katherine Austen’s Book M, 1664–1668’, p. 196; Sarah Ross, ‘Austen, Katherine (b. 1629, d. in or before 1683)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004. Online edition, Jan 2008 <www.oxforddnb.com> [accessed 22 Oct 2016].

  31. 31.

    Ross, Katherine Austen’s Book M, p. 67; Ross, ‘Introduction’, in Katherine Austen’s Book M, p. 26. (Ross 2011)

  32. 32.

    Ross, ‘Introduction’, in Katherine Austen’s Book M, p. 16. (Ross 2011)

  33. 33.

    Austen, Katherine Austen’s Book M, p. 96. (Austen 2011)

  34. 34.

    Austen, Katherine Austen’s Book M, pp. 53–54. (Austen 2011)

  35. 35.

    Ross, Katherine Austen’s Book M, p. 53. (Ross 2011)

  36. 36.

    Ross, Katherine Austen’s Book M, p. 90. (Ross 2011)

  37. 37.

    Austen, Katherine Austen’s Book M, p. 90. (Ross 2011)

  38. 38.

    Ross, Katherine Austen’s Book M, p. 123. (Ross 2011)

  39. 39.

    Ross, Katherine Austen’s Book M, p. 107. (Ross 2011)

  40. 40.

    Austen, Katherine Austen’s Book M, p. 107. (Ross 2011)

  41. 41.

    Elizabeth Freke, The Remembrances of Elizabeth Freke, 1671–1714, ed. by Raymond A. Anselment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 37.

  42. 42.

    Freke, The Remembrances of Elizabeth Freke, 1671–1714, p. 39. For further information on Freke, maternity and her reflections on her surviving children, see, Avra Kouffman, ‘Maternity and Child Loss in Stuart Women’s Diaries’, in Performing Maternity in Early Modern England, ed. by Kathryn M. Moncrief and Kathryn Read McPherson (Aldershot, UK; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007), pp. 171–182 (pp. 178–179) (Kouffman 2007).

  43. 43.

    Raymond A. Anselment, ‘Introduction’, in The Remembrances of Elizabeth Freke, 1671–1714, ed. by Raymond A. Anselment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 1–36 (p. 1).

  44. 44.

    Austen, Katherine Austen’s Book M, p. 153. (Austen 2011)

  45. 45.

    Due to Austen’s revisions and refilling of pages in Book M, plague appears earlier in her text when read cover to cover than it does in her chronologically ordered entries.

  46. 46.

    Austen, Katherine Austen’s Book M, p. 136. (Austen 2011)

  47. 47.

    Margaret Healy, Fictions of Disease in Early Modern England: Bodies, Plagues and Politics (Basingstoke, Hampshire and New York: Palgrave, 2001), p. 18. (Healy 2001)

  48. 48.

    Ross notes: ‘the occasional meditation is intertwined with a providential view of the world, in which the autobiographical event is the manifestation of God’s special or peculiar providences towards the subject’. Sarah C. E. Ross, ‘“Like Penelope, always employed”: Reading, Life-Writing, and the Early Modern Self in Katherine Austen’s Book M’, Literature Compass, 9.4 (2012), 306–316, p. 309.

  49. 49.

    Shari Benstock, ‘Authorizing the Autobiographical,’ in Women, Autobiography, Theory: A Reader, ed. by Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson (Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1998), pp. 145–156 (p. 151).

  50. 50.

    Barbara J. Todd, ‘A Young Widow of London’, in Women & History: Voices of Early Modern England, ed. by Valerie Frith (Toronto: Coach House Press, 1995), pp. 207–214 (p. 210). (Todd 1995)

  51. 51.

    Austen, Katherine Austen’s Book M, p. 153. (Austen 2011)

  52. 52.

    Austen, Katherine Austen’s Book M, p. 156, 158. (Austen 2011)

  53. 53.

    Austen, Katherine Austen’s Book M, p. 158. (Austen 2011)

  54. 54.

    Austen, Katherine Austen’s Book M, p. 158. (Austen 2011)

  55. 55.

    Pamela Hammons, ‘Katherine Austen’s Country-House Innovations’, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, 40.1 (2000), 123–137, p. 124.(Hammons 2000)

  56. 56.

    Austen, Katherine Austen’s Book M, p. 158. (Austen 2011)

  57. 57.

    Austen, Katherine Austen’s Book M, p. 140. (Austen 2011)

  58. 58.

    Austen, Katherine Austen’s Book M, p. 140. (Austen 2011)

  59. 59.

    Richelle Munkhoff, ‘Reckoning Death: Women Searchers and the Bills of Mortality in Early Modern London’, in Rhetorics of Bodily Disease and Health in Medieval and Early Modern England, ed. by Jennifer C. Vaught (Surrey, UK: Ashgate, 2010), pp. 119–134 (pp. 119–120). (Munkhoff 2010)

  60. 60.

    Adam Smyth, Autobiography in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010)

  61. 61.

    Smyth, Autobiography in Early Modern England, p. 173. (Smyth 2010)

  62. 62.

    Smyth, Autobiography in Early Modern England, p. 182. (Smyth 2010)

  63. 63.

    Gilman, Plague Writing in Early Modern England, p. 225 (Gilman 2009); The construction seen in Pepys’ diary is not dissimilar to one Susan Wiseman notes in Book M in the section ‘Meditations on the Sickenes and of Highbury’ (fol. 99v), which sees Austen follow a providential reflection on death with bookkeeping that elucidates the author’s financial losses over the previous months. Wiseman explains: ‘Accounting to Michaelmas 1665, then, Austen’s spiritually inflected economic vocabulary makes Highbury a “bounteous blessing” (F100r), to be assayed in spiritual scales’, Susan Wiseman, ‘The Contemplative Woman’s Recreation? Katherine Austen and the Estate Poem’, in Early Modern Women and the Poem, ed. by Susan Wiseman (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2013), pp. 220–243 (p. 225). (Wiseman 2013)

  64. 64.

    Charles F. Mullett, ‘The English Plague Scare of 1720–23’, Osiris, 2 (1936), 484–516. (Mullett 1936)

  65. 65.

    Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year, p. 67. (Defoe 2010)

  66. 66.

    Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year, p. 3. (Defoe 2010)

  67. 67.

    Austen, Katherine Austen’s Book M, p. 139. (Austen 2011)

  68. 68.

    Austen, Katherine Austen’s Book M, p. 139. (Austen 2011)

  69. 69.

    Ross notes that the signature bears a resemblance to the inscription on folio 2r, where Austen also writes her name. Ross, Katherine Austen’s Book M, p. 146. (Ross 2011)

  70. 70.

    Austen, Katherine Austen’s Book M, p. 146. (Austen 2011)

  71. 71.

    Nathaniel Hodges, Loimologia: Or, An Historical Account of the Plague in London in 1665: With Precautionary Directions Against the Like Contagion, trans. by John Quincy (London: 1720), p. 16. (Hodges 1720)

  72. 72.

    Corporation of London, London’s Dreadful Visitation: Or, a Collection of All the Bills of Mortality for This Present Year: Beginning the 20 th of December 1664 Ending the 19 th of December Following (London: 1665), p. 36. (John 1665)

  73. 73.

    Austen, Katherine Austen’s Book M, p. 146. (Austen 2011)

  74. 74.

    Ross, ‘Introduction’, in Katherine Austen’s Book M, p. 5. (Ross 2011)

  75. 75.

    Austen, Katherine Austen’s Book M, p. 128,129. (Austen 2011)

  76. 76.

    Ross, Katherine Austen’s Book M, p. 128. (Ross 2011)

  77. 77.

    Austen, Katherine Austen’s Book M, p. 126. (Austen 2011)

  78. 78.

    Ross, Katherine Austen’s Book M, p. 127. (Ross 2011)

  79. 79.

    Austen, Katherine Austen’s Book M, p. 129. (Austen 2011)

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    Kathleen Miller

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Miller, K. (2016). Katherine Austen’s Reckoning with Plague in Book M . In: The Literary Culture of Plague in Early Modern England. Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-51057-0_5

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