Memorializing the Everyday: The Evidence of the Final Decade of Frances Wolfreston’s Life

Abstract

ABSTRACT In 2010, the Oxford bookseller Christopher Edwards discovered a bound volume containing eleven annotated almanacs of the early modern woman reader and book owner Frances Wolfreston (1607–1677). Her annotated almanacs chronicle important events in her life and provide a fuller understanding of her as a person and a book-collector. While informal, they are the only surviving self-writing by this remarkable figure and reveal a careful process of selection and attention to accuracy. Wolfreston almost certainly intended the almanacs to be read by her children after her death and may have even used them as a temporary repository of material for another manuscript she was writing. A member of the minor landed gentry living near the market town of Tamworth for most of her life, she has been characterized as provincial, but her almanacs reveal an active, innovative, and self-sufficient widow who maintained relationships with prominent individuals in her community, helped managed her son’s estate, and lent money to men and women alike. They are a valuable glimpse into the life of a widow and bibliophile in the English Midlands in the 1660s and 1670s.