Attributing and Dating the Manuscript Miscellany of Elizabeth Newell: Sir Matthew Hale and Beinecke Library Osborn MS b49

Abstract

A late seventeenth-century commonplace book signed by Elizabeth Newell and held in the Osborne collection at Yale University’s Beinecke Library offers the promise of a collection of unpublished poetry written by an otherwise anonymous early-modern woman. However, all of the material in Newell’s commonplace book is directly attributable to other writers and furthermore that a full accounting of these sources allows us to adjust date of the book’s compilation from c . 1668 to, at the earliest, 1681. The poems derive from four sources: Sir Matthew Hale’s Contemplations Moral and Divine (1676), Gilbert Burnet’s biography, The Life and Death of Sir Matthew Hale (1681), Francis Quarles’ Emblemes (1635) and Samuel Clarke’s Mirror . . . both for saints and sinners (1657). Furthermore, the presence of a poem that is first recorded in Burnet’s biography of Hale establishes 1681 as the earliest likely date for the manuscript.