Anthony Wood Research Articles

The Lost Plays of Ralph Sheldon (1623–1684)

Abstract This article traces the fate of an important group of early English plays in fifty-six volumes, collected by the Warwickshire antiquary Ralph Sheldon (1623-1684) and sold at a Christie’s country house sale at his home nearly a hundred years later. The sale itself in 1781 was an early example of the booksellers ‘ring’ and involved some of the major collectors of early English drama, notably David Garrick, Edmond Malone, and the Earl of Charlemont. The earlier portion of the Sheldon plays, recorded by Anthony Wood in a manuscript list, may have survived as part of the Malone bequest to the Bodleian Library. The Restoration Plays remained largely intact, in some thirty volumes, until the ill-fated sale of Lord Charlemont’s library by his descendants at Sotheby’s in 1865, discussed by Arthur and Janet Ing Freeman in The Library, VII, 23 (March 2022).

Reading Marvell with John Aubrey (and occasionally Anthony Wood)

This paper explores how the recent critical reassessment of the biographer and antiquarian John Aubrey (1626–97) and the increasing availability of his writings can reveal new perspectives on Marvell’s early reception. Aubrey read all available instances of Marvell’s writing and studied them carefully and incisively, but criticism has not yet examined his engagement with Marvell as a comprehensive whole. This reveals that his primary interest was in data gathering: I use Aubrey’s letters, unpublished research manuscripts, and his biographical study Brief Lives, alongside the papers of his friend and collaborator Anthony Wood, to demonstrate how Marvell’s verse and prose were recognized as a valuable source for antiquarian and biographical research by early readers. For example, Aubrey emphasizes the importance of Marvell’s often neglected epitaphs. Aubrey also recognized that there were potential limitations for researchers using Marvell’s writing, not least his tendency to “severe” representations of his subjects. This severity could also endanger readers themselves, and I show how Aubrey and Wood tried to counteract accusations in the 1690s that they had shared the “Advice to a Painter” satires. This case demonstrates how the printed editions of the 1660s continued to possess an exceptional reputation for sedition which could be reactivated at moments of heightened political tension, and which far outstripped their actual content.

Avant la lettre: Philip Perry, Reconversionist Aesthetics, and the Medieval Literary

<i>Avant la lettre</i>: Philip Perry, Reconversionist Aesthetics, and the Medieval Literary

Antiquarianism as a Vital Historiography for the Twenty-First Century

Antiquarianism as a Vital Historiography for the Twenty-First Century

The Royal Martyr Discover'd: Thomas Pierce and Nicholas Lanier

An overlooked pamphlet of Thomas Pierce's civil-war Latin polemic appends four unascribed English verse-texts dated 1647-9. Pierce's contemporary Anthony Wood ascribed them to him, and named musical setters: William Child, Nicholas Lanier, and Arthur Phillips. Ejected for royalism from Magdalen College, Oxford, Pierce returned as its Restoration President. In 1649, though, why would Lanier, Master of the King's Music, have set a then-ousted don's ‘Funeral Hymn’ for Charles I?

Sociable Knowledge: Natural History and the Nation in Early Modern Britain. Elizabeth Yale. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016. Pp. xii+346.

Sociable Knowledge: Natural History and the Nation in Early Modern Britain. Elizabeth Yale. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016. Pp. xii+346. Consider this depiction of “An Antiquary” offered by John Earle (ca.1600–1665), bishop of Salisbury: “A great admirer he is of the rust of old Monuments. … Printed bookes he contemnes, as a novelty of this latter age; but a Manu-script he pores on everlastingly, especially if the cover be all Moth-eaten, and the dust make a Parenthesis between every Syllable.”1 Written before some of the people in the book under review were born, Earle’s caricature catches aspects of their behavior, but only superficially. Men such as Elias Ashmole, John Aubrey, Anthony Wood, Edward Lhuyd, John Evelyn, and Robert Plot cannot be fully captured by the label “antiquary,” in part because their interests embraced natural history, and also because they did not work alone, as Earle implied. They were linked by correspondence in intellectual collaboration, using both manuscript and print.

An Exploratory Study of the Use of Migrant Remittances at the Household Level in Barbados

An Exploratory Study of the Use of Migrant Remittances at the Household Level in Barbados Anthony Wood, Shari Watson Abstract Remittances have grown significantly over the last decade worldwide resulting in them becoming a major source of external development finance. In developing countries which account for approximately 74% of all remittances received worldwide, it is recognized that remittances play an essential role in their economic development. With the increasing importance of remittances as a source of capital flows to developing countries there has been a proliferation of research on various aspects of remittances. While studies for the wider Caribbean have focused on multiple aspects of remittances, research on the Barbadian economy has concentrated on the macroeconomic aspect of remittances and their impact on the economy. This paper takes a different approach by examining remittances to Barbados from a microeconomic perspective. In this connection, the paper seeks to determine the demographic profile of persons in Barbados receiving remittances and the primary uses of these remittances. Data were obtained via a survey conducted at the money transfer operator, Money Gram, between April and June 2013. The key finding is that remittances were used mainly for consumption purposes, in particular purchasing food and paying utility bills. This result corroborates the findings of other studies on developing economies. Full Text: PDF DOI: 10.15640/jeds.v3n1a3

Owners and Collectors of the Printed Books of the Early Modern Lord Mayors’ Shows

The annual London Lord Mayor’s Show, which saw its heyday in the early modern period, exists in printed form from 1585. These books stand as permanent witnesses to an ephemeral event. Until quite recently they have not been subject to any thoroughgoing bibliographical study, however. This article explores the evidence that remains of readers’ ownership of and interactions with these works from the seventeenth century to the end of the eighteenth. Copies of these works were owned by collectors including Humphrey Dyson, Robert Burton, Anthony Wood, and John Philip Kemble. Through an exploration of handlists and annotations, one can discover how these books were collected and categorized. Such an analysis reveals not just the original cultural meaning of these works but also the ways in which owners and collectors identified them in generic terms, thus suggesting their changing value to readers.

John Aubrey and the rhapsodic book

This article argues that John Aubrey and his biographical collaborator, Anthony Wood, pioneered a new kind of encyclopaedic collection, which they understood to be empirically grounded ‘truth’ but which contemporaries derided as a ‘rhapsody’. A ‘rhapsody’ implies a basis in a new empirical practice, and a rejection of rhetorical tradition. Aubrey's voluminous collections were never published, largely because his work was overwhelmed by its attempt at comprehensiveness. Aubrey collaborated with Wood in his biographical encyclopaedia Athenae Oxonienses, which was prosecuted for its political content and also widely criticised as ‘barbarous’ in style and ‘trivial’ in content for ‘heaping up’ biographical detail gleaned, via Aubrey, from letters, documents, and lives specially written by a vast range of people. The ‘rhapsody’ is therefore remarkably socially broad‐ranging. In this article I examine Aubrey's Brief Lives as an anti‐rhetorical rhapsody stuffed with strange bedfellows; also his play The Countrey Revell and his three‐volume antiquarian collection Monumenta Britannica. I explain how the ‘rhapsody’ was incompatible with print culture and therefore is most characteristically a manuscript, with Aubrey's failure to get his A Perambulation of Surrey printed given as an example.

Travel in Time: Local Travel Writing and Seventeenth-Century English Almanacs

This article focuses on almanac travel diaries, exploring both how and why seventeenth-century English readers used books of time as books of space. It seeks to broaden studies in early modern travel writing by examining the unique, nonnarrative marginalia that typify the almanac genre. As domestic travel writers, seventeenth-century almanac users such as Lady Isabella Twysden and Anthony Wood were remarkably uninterested in discourses of nationhood or the paradigm of self/other so widely featured in other genres of travel writing. Instead, the unique structural arrangement of the almanac page as well as the almanac’s integration of spatial and temporal systems of measurement produced a distinctive style of travel notation. Both the form and content of these marginalia, I suggest, highlight an additional, understudied discourse of mobility in the early modern period, one that is shaped less by tales of encounter and discovery than by systems of placement and tabulation.

Paroma Chatterjee. Review of "Framing Russian Art: From Early Icons to Malevich" by Oleg Tarasov, Robin Milner-Gulland, and Anthony Wood.

Paroma Chatterjee. Review of "Framing Russian Art: From Early Icons to Malevich" by Oleg Tarasov, Robin Milner-Gulland, and Anthony Wood.

NICOLAS K. KIESSLING (ed.), The Life of Anthony Wood in His Own Words.

STUDENTS of early modern England should be well aware of the debt they owe to Anthony Wood (1632–95). A biographer, antiquarian, and bibliophile, Wood assembled a library of nearly 7,000 items, including many unique ephemeral publications, kept a minute diary recording the rhythms of Oxford life during the latter half of the seventeenth century, and in 1691–92 published the monumental Athenae Oxonienses, a biographical dictionary of the writers and bishops associated with Oxford from 1500 to his own time. Modern scholarship has largely neglected him, however, and Nicolas K. Kiessling’s study of The Library of Anthony Wood (Oxford, 2002) was the first to recognize the immense potential for a better understanding of seventeenth-century intellectual and popular culture latent in Wood’s books and manuscripts. The Life is Kiessling’s second book dealing with Wood and is an edition of the latter’s autobiography, the so-called ‘Secretum Antonii’. It includes a full edition and collation of the two surviving manuscript drafts of the autobiography, now British Library MS Harley 5409 and Bodleian MS Tanner 102. Furthermore, Kiessling provides detailed notes and a new biography of Wood dealing with the period from 1672, where the manuscripts end, to his death in 1695. This is not, however, the first time these manuscripts have been published. Previous editions include those by Thomas Hearne (1730), Philip Bliss (1813), and Andrew Clark (1891–1900); indeed, Wood’s autobiography has enjoyed more frequent and better editions than most other scholarly manuscripts of the period.

The Life of Anthony Wood in his own Words

The Life of Anthony Wood in his own Words

Anthony Wood and the Catholics

Anthony Wood (1632–1695), the Oxford biographer and historian, was accused of being a ‘papist’ from the early 1670s until his death on 29 November 1695. These accusations were given credence because Wood had many Catholic friends and acquaintances; had a genuine affection for manuscripts and monuments of the pre-reformation past; wrote bio-bibliographies of many noteworthy Catholics who were graduates of Oxford colleges or were associated with the university; had a view of the reformation that Gilbert Burnet, later the bishop of Salisbury, saw as ‘unseemly’; and never joined any campaign against Catholics before or after James II reigned in Great Britain. This essay deals with Wood's relationships with Catholics and his attitude towards Catholicism.

Anthony Wood's Athenae Oxonienses and the Subscription Publication in Seventeenth-Century England

Anthony Wood's Athenae Oxonienses and the Subscription Publication in Seventeenth-Century England

The uncensored Boris Godunov: the case for Pushkin's original comedy, with annotated text and translation

Chester Dunning, with Caryl Emerson, Sergei Fomichev, Lidiia Lotman, and Anthony Wood. The Uncensored Boris Godunov: The Case for Pushkin's Original Comedy with Annotated Text and Translation. Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 2007. xv, 550 pp. $29.95, paper.Reading the extremely rich volume compiled by Chester Dunning and his esteemed colleagues, one begins to wonder just how many cultural resources were available to Pushkin during his Mikhailovskoe exile. How was someone living in virtual isolation able to keep track of so many intellectual currents at hand elsewhere in Russia and Western Europe? How was Pushkin able to exhibit such a detailed and oftentimes strikingly grasp of the Time of Troubles, while at the same time developing new generic possibilities that made all sorts of demands on the theatre? No matter how much one has studied what is increasingly received as Pushkin's most important single work, this volume greatly deepens one's appreciation for how much the poet was able to invest in a single text. It also expands our sense of what a work of art can be.Admittedly, the above are solely my impressions, for the authors focus almost exclusively on their argument that the 1825 text of Boris Godunov is a masterpiece of at least the rank of the version published in 1831. Readers unfamiliar with the textological issues at hand may be advised to turn first to Sergei Fomichev's catalogue of the major differences between the original redaction and the later version, which Pushkin rewrote to satisfy censors' demands (p. 155). Although much of the material cut from the 1825 version has long been available in appendices and notes, here it is reconstructed for the first time as a contiguous text. Fomichev meticulously deciphers Pushkin's manuscripts and Anthony Wood translates it in a manner that manages to be both illuminatingly and idiomatically playable for the stage. Dunning pays particular attention to the distinction in the final lines; the 1825 version ends with a historically accurate cheer for the Pretender, as opposed to the infamous narod bezmolvsrvuet of the 1831 version. While arguments have been made that the 1831 ending has its aesthetic merits, Dunning devotes most of the first chapter to detailing how recent scholarship usually has handled the matter inadequately, to the detriment of the play's reception and interpretation. This survey additionally provides an extensive introduction to the massive secondary literature on what Caryl Emerson later argues is something approaching a tragicomedy of history (p. …

Guest Editors’ Introduction to Special Theme issue: Town and Gown in the Bush

For Jim and Jonathan SimpsonWe need...a way of knowing and educating in ways that heal rather than wound us and our world.(Palmer, 1983, p. 2)This special theme issue of the International Journal of Pedagogies and Learning is entitled 'Town and Gown' in the Bush: Contemporary Regional Universities and Transforming Communities and provides a forum for multiple engagements with the relationships (or lack thereof) between contemporary regional universities and their communities, whether in Australia or in other countries.Many of the world's most prestigious universities, such as Oxford, Cambridge, Heidelberg and Yale, are located in regional settings. Indeed in some cases, such as Utrecht, the regional town has developed around the university. Certainly, owing to the concentration of academics and students within a relatively underpopulated location, the atmosphere within a regional university town seems to be quite distinctive.Such an atmosphere has not always been mutually fruitful, and there is a long history of distrust between the university and the town of which it is ostensibly a part. In the case of Oxford, tensions between townspeople, who resented the university's growing arrogance and authority, and students boiled over on 10 February 1354, the Feast of Scholastica: countrymen advanced crying...'Smyt fast, give gude knocks'....Such Scholars as they found...they killed or maimed, or grievously wounded....Our mother the University of Oxon, which had but two days before many sons is now almost forsaken and left forlorn (Anthony Wood, History and Antiquities of the University of Oxford, 1674; cited in Drake, 1991, p. 3). The battle led to 62 students being killed and the rest being driven from the town.In the case of Australia, most of the longstanding traditional universities were constructed within metropolitan centres and capital cities. One exception is the University of New England in Armidale. Indeed, up until the 1980s, higher education institutions in most country areas were limited to Technical and Further Education (TAFE) colleges and colleges of advanced education (CAEs). The reforms by John Dawkins, the then Federal Minister for Employment, Education and Training, to higher education in that decade saw these CAEs attain the status of universities, a change that enabled them to award postgraduate degrees and be recognised for research. Colloquially known as 'gumnut universities', these regional campuses have faced ongoing challenges in recruiting and retaining students and academics, building a competitive research profile and finding a secure niche within the Australian higher education field on the one hand and within the often culturally diverse and geographically dispersed regional communities from which they draw their allegiance on the other.While several discourses can be discerned in these relationships, commentators on regional universities and communities commonly invoke at least two distinct narratives:* Regional universities, like their communities, are marginalised and under threat, and their best chance for survival lies in working together to create alternative opportunities and futures.* Regional universities, like their metropolitan counterparts, must increasingly adopt free market ideologies and practices whereby regional communities will be sidelined unless they can compete with national and international clients in accessing services from 'their' universities.In interrogating, contesting and reconstructing these discourses, the authors of the articles in this issue address three key questions currently confronting regional universities and their communities:* What are the identities and the missions of contemporary regional universities?* How are those identities and missions manifested in the universities' negotiated relationships with their communities, only some of which might also be regional?* What are the implications of those relationships for the likely future sustainability and survival of both regional universities and communities? …

English Biography in the Seventeenth Century: A Critical Account. By ALLAN PRITCHARD.

In his English Biography in the Seventeenth Century , Allan Pritchard offers an overview of this neglected subject in an accessible style. He begins with a chapter on ‘The Growth of Biographical Writing’; proceeding to chapters on lives of ‘Protestant Saints’ , on ‘Patterns in Religious Biography’ and on Izaak Walton's Lives , to lives of ‘public figures’ such as Thomas Ball's The Life of the Renowned Doctor Preston. He goes on to examine ‘Lives of Writers: Scientists and Antiquaries’, then lives of poets, then Thomas Fuller's Worthies of England and Anthony Wood's Athenae Oxonienses , before turning to Aubrey's Brief Lives , and concluding with ‘Biography as Family History’ and Roger North's Lives of members of the North family. This division of the subject is well thought through. But its immense range proves a weakness. The essential problem is that to achieve what Pritchard sets himself requires a deep understanding of the multiple contexts and circumstances of a vast range of different writings, as well as their relation to the facts of the lives of their historical subjects, combined with a power to select and illustrate which derives from that understanding. Pritchard has clearly not researched any area of his subject to the required level. There are promising lines of enquiry—he offers evidence of Aubrey's influence on the intimate form of biography produced by the virtuoso Roger North, e.g.—but they are disappointingly under-argued. It is proclaimed on the dust-jacket that the book fills a ‘scholarly void’: for, as Pritchard argues in the Preface, ‘little has been done to follow up’ Donald Stauffer's English Biography Before 1700 (1930) (p. 3). Sadly, what Pritchard offers is not ‘scholarly’, but a belles-lettriste survey, full of errors of fact and careless readings, which has the appearance of a work written quite some time ago that has not been re-cast or re-thought. He cites no articles in the bibliography; and seems quite unaware of much recent work in this area (such as the Clarendon Bacon), still less of related movements in critical and scholarly thinking. Thus all he has to say of Jessica Martin's Walton ' s Lives (2001), which he mentions only in a brief footnote, is that it ‘provides approaches and views different from my own’, with which he is not prepared to engage (p. 243). As ‘evidence’ of this ‘neglect’, he points to ‘the lack of good editions of seventeenth-century biographies’ and maintains that ‘no editor has thus far attempted to deal with’ the complex textual history of Walton's Lives (p. 4). This is untrue, and unfair to the successive editors of the Clarendon Walton, whose strenuous editorial labours deserve, at the very least, the status of ‘attempts’; and he has missed an article or two in which I describe work in progress on the Clarendon edition of Aubrey's Brief Lives .

Sir Thomas Browne's birthday

The mistaken belief that Sir Thomas Browne was born on 19 October 1605, exactly 77 years before his death, originated in the anonymous biography preceding Browne's Posthumous Works,1 which included his musings on such a rare coincidence of dates. It gathered credence by frequent repetition, as in Professor Breathnach's appreciative memoir (January 2005, JRSM2), and has endured for nearly 300 years. Yet it should have been abandoned by now.3 Sir Thomas himself, in answer to John Aubrey's request, wrote on 24 August 1672: 'I was borne Novemb. 19, 1605'.4 There is no reason to doubt his word, which was accepted by Anthony Wood for the first biography5 and is affirmed in the recent Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.6

Heresy, Authority and Filial Piety: The Universities and their Reformation Past

The universities played a pivotal role in the shaping of English religious consciousness during the seventeenth century. Their own religious identity was, however, subject to considerable flux and factiousness. As some scholars have recently observed, the theological debates' emotional charge was increased by attempts within them to create and manipulate a national Reformation 'past'. This was, however, also the period in which the universities began intensely to investigate and reflect on their own history. This essay will explore how the early investigators of the universities' medieval relgious life and part in the Reformation were effected by the crises of the Jacobean and Caroline Church. The exploration is focused on the contrasting approaches of Thomas Fuller's History of the University of Cambridge (1655) and Anthony Wood's History and Antiquities of the University of Oxford (1675). The piece also explores how influential on these contrasting writers was John Foxe's 'authoritative' depiction of the universities' religious past in Acts and Monuments.