Early Modern "How-To" Books: Impractical Manuals and the Construction of Englishness in the Atlantic World

Abstract

In 1620 the ship named Supply brought essential cargo to the struggling colony Jamestown. Among sixty tons of food, clothing, and tools were two husbandry manuals by Gervase Markham. The surviving account book of the ship reflects the needs of a colony that still struggled with subsistence-level farming and a high mortality rate; the most expensive goods were large stores of food and clothing the colony could not produce for itself, such as eighteen tons of beer and two hundred pairs of shoes. Although Markham's books were far from being the most expensive items on board, colonial leaders considered valuable enough that they worried the books would be stolen. John Smith and Richard Berkeley, who had purchased the ship's contents, warned George Thorpe: [the books] are nowe sent, which take into your owne hands . . . otherwise you will be defrauded of them (Kingsbury 400).1 All remaining evidence from England's settlements in the New World suggests that books-despite their weight, cost, and susceptibility to the elements-were considered indispensable by colonists from a wide range of wealth and status levels. Since the conditions of transporting books across the Atlantic in the seventeenth century limited frivolous purchasing or packing, we can safely assume that the books transported were of particular value to readers-and so, I argue, they should be to us.Most seventeenth-century households in English America contained least a Bible, and many boasted substantial libraries of London imprints.2 While the core of these libraries was devotional, surviving records indicate that practical manuals, especially books of husbandry and medicine, appeared in all but the smallest collections. Significantly, the most frequently circulated texts of the early Anglo-American book trade were already steady sellers in England, books that remained in print for several decades, sometimes centuries, and were, therefore, at the very center of traditional literacy (Hall, Uses 61-62) for English women and men. As a result, the trade's steady sellers cannot be understood simply as American books. Largely disregarded by scholars as lacking in aesthetic value and cultural significance, few of these steady sellers have become the subject of further investigation. In his influential 1937 essay on colonial book ownership, Louis Wright explains the high proportion of sheer utilitarian works (Purposeful 91) by invoking the nature of the founders of America: These were purposeful men (88-89). David Hall's more nuanced analysis acknowledges the range of uses books served for English settlers, but for him the presence of practical books in colonial inventories needs little explanation: they were handbooks that taught specific skills (Chesapeake 69).3 But surviving records show that the most successful colonial bookseller of the 1680s regularly imported English husbandry manuals, even though these books offered no information on maize, tobacco, and other important colonial crops (T. Wright 228-33). How do we account for the value of practical books in light of such evidence?By examining the impracticality of manuals popular in English North America, this article challenges the assumption that early modern howto books are merely transparent records indicating common practice. Though I am calling these manuals impractical, I do not mean to suggest that they were useless. Exploration of the apparent mismatch between the predominant economic and agricultural practices of the English Atlantic world and the manuals' contents highlights the importance of these books' ideological appeals. Furthermore, this cultural value helps account for the manuals' wide popularity in England and its colonies throughout the early modern period. I focus particularly on Gervase Markham's A Way to Get Wealth (1631) and Nicholas Culpeper's The London Dispensatory (1st edn., 1649) and The English Physician (1652) because each of these books sold steadily in England and appeared frequently in colonial libraries of a range of sizes between 1620 and 1700. …