‘Rend and teare in peeces’: Textual Fragmentation in Seventeenth-Century England

Abstract

One discernable trend in early modern studies of the last decade has been a shift towards considerations of the reception of texts and, in particular, of readership. As part of this growing interest in consumption, several scholars have turned their attention to handwritten additions to printed books, considering moments when an early modern reader has altered a printed text or, more frequently, added a cross, a tick, a pointing hand, or, in the case of one verse collection I recently read, the repeated and endearing 'I like' beside various poems.1 But while readers' marginalia constitutes a small but emerging field, the related early modern practice of inserting, pasting or binding printed pages within a manuscript has been largely overlooked.2 This is not surprising: instances of the appropriation of a printed fragment within a manuscript are much less common than augmentations of a printed text with handwritten additions. However, the commonplace book of Sir John Gibson (British Library, Additional Manuscript 37719), compiled between 1655 and 1660, offers a sustained and often spectacular embodiment of just this practice, and a close account of this text presents compelling implications not only for the history of reading and of manuscript compilation, but also for our understanding of disenfranchised Royalists of the 1650s.The compiler's circumstances are as striking as the text produced: Gibson (1606-1665) was serving a prison sentence for debt in Durham Castle between 1653 and about 1661 while he compiled the manuscript.3 Gibson had been a wealthy Royalist landowner whose fortunes came crashing down as a result of the Civil War and its aftermath.4 Born in Welburn, North Riding, Yorkshire, and educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, Gibson's wealth was built on his substantial land holdings and the alum mining monopoly he inherited from his father. He expressed his politics through a conspicuous loyalty to the King: during the Civil War, Gibson was appointed to the Commission of Array for Yorkshire and rose to the rank of Colonel of the Horse. In 1644 Gibson's troop was ordered to guard York city during the siege of York which resulted in a Parliamentary victory.The origins of Gibson's imprisonment are both representative and opaque: representative in that Gibson, like many landowning Royalists, faced financial hardship as a consequence of his politics; yet opaque, in that the precise details are difficult to establish. In the early 1640s Gibson had stood as surety for John Redmayne and Henry Marshall in debts to a Yorkshire apothecary, William Wilson, and the demand to repay these debts in the 1650s coincided with a period of acute economic difficulty for Gibson. By then Gibson's estate - his primary source of income - had been compounded by Parliament, and his alum mine was rendered profitless when Parliament revoked the miners' patents in 1648, proclaiming them unfair monopolies. Gibson was thus unable to repay the debts he had guaranteed, and was imprisoned in Durham Castle in 1653.Like most early modern 'commonplace books', the manuscript Gibson compiled while serving this prison sentence is not really a commonplace book at all: not in the literal sense of a collection of sententiae, distributed across a range of headings.5 More useful as a bibliographical definition is that accommodating term 'miscellany': Gibson's single quarto volume (208 × 160mm) offers a diversity of inclusions - 602 entries across 564 pages - in English, Latin and Greek. The manuscript consists of thirty translations of sermons by (or attributed to) St John Chrysostom, translated 'by John Errington esq. 1656' (fol. 6), a fellow prisoner in Durham. The manuscript includes poetry by Gibson - an autobiographical verse and devotional poems - and by well-known sixteenth- and seventeenth-century authors including Christopher Marlowe, Philip Sidney, George Herbert, Francis Quarles, John Cleveland, and George Sandys, including extracts from Sandys' translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses. …