Collaboration, Compilation, and Confession in Folger MS E.a.1*

Abstract

ABSTRACT Over a forty-year period, at least five men and women transcribed texts into a quarto manuscript miscellany (Folger MS E.a.1). Anne Denton (née Willison) seems to have started compiling the manuscript around the time of her 1564 marriage to Alexander Denton of Hillesden, Buckinghamshire. Denton’s involvement with the book ended with her death two years later, but her “friends” continued to add to the volume over the next four decades. The eclectic collection is drawn from manuscript sources and printed books on a wide range of topics. Folger MS E.a.1 documents a sixteenth-century gentry family’s religious engagements and reveals the ambidextrous nature of some religious manuscript miscellanies. It also sheds new light on the emergence of an international quasi-Catholicism that challenges current scholarly categories, most notably “recusant.”