Sir Robert Cotton Research Articles

A Reassessment of the Military Careers and Writings of Sir John Peyton (1579–1635) and Sir Henry Peyton (c.1580–1623)

AbstractThis research note shines new light on previously misinterpreted and incorrectly catalogued key information about the role‐holder of the Lieutenant‐Governor of Brill in 1612. It identifies that a source for this information previously attributed to Sir John Peyton (1579–1635) was actually written by Sir Henry Peyton (c.1580–1623) and discusses the significance and impact of the newly discovered identification. It reveals Henry Peyton to be a prolific letter writer and collector of military maps and shows how he shared his research with Sir Robert Cotton. It also identifies that further research is needed into the military career of Henry Peyton and the significant role he played in early modern military history, with particular attention to be given to his martial reports from Venice and the Low Countries.

Medieval Devotion in a Midwest Collection: Establishing Production and Provenance

Abstract: Without provenance or place of production, isolated manuscripts and orphaned leaves dot library and museum collections around the world. The College of Wooster houses an exquisite and complete book of hours of Sarum use about which almost nothing is known. Using formal analysis and the most limited of documentary sources, this essay proposes London, ca. 1430–1450, as the place of production for this little illuminated codex. Firmly linking this horae to known and researched prayer books such as the British Library's Burney MS 334, Harley MS 210, and especially the Harley MS 2887—also known as the Hours of the Earls of Ormond—this article provides an inlet to existing historiography on the codex's milieu of production. Moreover, this analysis supports the probability that this book survived the notorious fire in Sir Robert Cotton's library at Ashburnham House, with telltale signs of water and smoke damage apparent on the parchment pages. A previously overlooked and unresearched horae , the Wooster Hours now has a provenance and historiography.

Sir Robert Cotton, Manuscript Pamphleteering, and the Making of Jacobean Kingship during the Short Peace, ca. 1609–1613

AbstractThis article concerns two manuscript tracts by Sir Robert Cotton, the Answer to Certain Military Men regarding Foreign War (1609) and Twenty-Four Arguments on the Strict Execution of the Laws against Seminary Priests (1613). To the limited extent that these tracts have been studied at all, historians have read them as artifacts of the Jacobean regime's internal counseling process. Through analysis of the both the structure of the Jacobean regime's knowledge economy and the two tracts and contextualizing them, the author argues that these were, instead, innovative exercises in publicity, designed to defend existing Jacobean policy against so-called country criticism. Designed to circulate widely among the kingdom's social elite—indeed, more than two dozen handwritten copies of each tract survive—the manuscript pamphlets played on Cotton's reputation as an antiquary to legitimize the Jacobean regime's most controversial policies. More broadly, the tracts demonstrate the dilemma of a Jacobean regime caught between the geopolitics of peace and interconfessional diplomacy and the expectations of a domestic political elite nurtured on the values and expectations of confessional war.

Piozzi and Wales

Piozzi and Wales

"The Best Book of Romance": The Gawain Manuscript and Composite Miscellaneity

abstract: British Library MS Cotton Nero A.x contains the unique copies of four important alliterative Middle English poems including Sir Gawain and the Green Knight —the chief source of the book's fame and focus of scholarly attention over the last century. At one point, this composite codex also contained two Latin manuscripts, compiled with the Middle English poems by early modern antiquarian collector Sir Robert Cotton. More than three centuries after Cotton assembled the volume, however, the British Museum extracted the Latin material and bound it separately from Gawain and the other English poems. This essay discusses the unique form of codicological miscellaneity that characterizes composite manuscripts like Nero A.x. The story of its early modern assembly and modern disaggregation illustrates how material histories can determine how we access and interpret medieval texts today.

Artifacts and Allegiances: How Museums Put the Nation and the World on Display. By Peggy Levitt. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015. Pp. x+244. $29.95.

<i>Artifacts and Allegiances: How Museums Put the Nation and the World on Display</i>. By Peggy Levitt. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015. Pp. x+244. $29.95.

Theatre of State: Parliament and Political Culture in Early Stuart England, by Chris R. Kyle

This is an important addition to our knowledge and understanding of early modern parliaments. The author, Chris Kyle, entitles it austerely as ‘early Stuart’, but in truth he ranges freely backwards across the sixteenth century and a little more constrainedly forwards. It is a book about communication and it has a thoroughly modern agenda, examining language and non-verbal communication; print and manuscript, including the physicality of the texts discussed; and both physical spaces and mental worlds. But it has a thoroughly traditional approach to researching these subjects: no reliance here on EEBO and online databases. The bibliography takes up more than ten per cent of the book, and lists manuscripts in thirty-six repositories. Kyle has got his hands dirty in some very remote archives. The book is in three parts: ‘inside the chamber’, ‘writing parliament’ (how much more of-the-moment can you be than with such a title?) and ‘permeable boundaries’—this third part being the longest. The opening chapters are illuminating on the de-emphasis on rhetoric (except for set-piece events such as the Speakers’ ‘disabling speeches’) and the emphasis on logic. But it is much more startling and illuminating on the ‘noise’ of politics—silence as a weapon and device, hissing, laughter, even timely farting (which is, however, and emphatically I suppose, a rhetorical not a logical gesture). The second part is perhaps the most familiar, except that it explores in depth the world of quills and ink, writing boxes and reading desks, the invention of the pencil, and the non-use of shorthand. Here Kyle could have interrogated more thoroughly the forms of note-taking: some diarists clearly set out to summarise what they heard; others to note only things they found useful or offensive or simply striking; others clearly integrated what they heard with the thoughts triggered in them. But Kyle’s major point is that something very interesting was happening by the 1620s, that note-taking was no longer a private act, pour mémoire, but was increasingly a public act linked to letting others know what had happened and why. Kyle’s section on the dissemination of information about what was said in debate is especially wide-ranging and nuanced. Thus he has impressive evidence of what a Cambridge don got to know in order to tell gentry in East Anglia what was happening in Parliament; and he has one example of what MPs were willing to pay for printed separates hot from the press (premium rates: 4 shillings and 6 pence for the Lord Keeper’s speech in 1628; 2 shillings for quite a short speech by Sir Robert Cotton).

Memory's Library: Medieval Books in Early Modern England by Jennifer Summit (review)

Reviewed by: Memory's Library: Medieval Books in Early Modern England by Jennifer Summit Toby Burrows Summit, Jennifer , Memory's Library: Medieval Books in Early Modern England, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2008; cloth; pp. x, 343; 8 b/w illustrations; R.R.P. US$35.00; ISBN 9780226781716. The Act against Superstitious Books and Images (1550) ordered the public destruction of all medieval service books that had survived the dissolution of the English monasteries during the previous decade. Though a majority of medieval manuscripts were indeed destroyed, some still managed to survive into the post-Reformation period. Jennifer Summit is interested in the fate of these medieval books in early modern England, seen especially in the context of the history of libraries. She focuses on the period between 1431 and 1631, stretching from the collecting activities of Humfrey, Duke of Gloucester, to the equally influential work of Sir Robert Cotton. Disclaiming 'a general history of libraries' as her goal, she proceeds through close readings of texts written by a number of important figures of this period: John Lydgate, Thomas More, Thomas Starkey, Thomas Elyot, [End Page 312] Matthew Parker, Edmund Spenser, Robert Cotton, William Camden, John Weever, Francis Bacon, and Thomas James. These readings draw out the authors' views about the medieval past, the nature of libraries, the organization of knowledge, and much more. The result is a rich and sophisticated study that deals with a wide range of topics and ideas. It is exhaustively documented, with the notes making up more than a quarter of the text. This is a challenging book, which addresses a number of significant questions. Ultimately, though, the results are unsatisfactory, in several important ways. To start with the title: though the book begins and ends with the statement that 'memory is a library', and the 'Coda' contains some brief allusions to concepts of memory in cognitive science and computer science, the substance of the book is not really about memory. Where the concept of 'memory' does occur, it is used loosely to refer to a whole series of different types of 'remembering'. 'Memory as a library' tends to be used interchangeably with 'library as memory' - whereas, in reality, they are two very different things that ought to be carefully distinguished. In her Introduction, Summit draws a contrast between monastic libraries which upheld the authority of the Church of Rome and the major post-Reformation libraries which became 'centers of national memory' (p. 3). This is a surprisingly simplistic statement from an author who, on several occasions, emphasizes her commitment to a more 'nuanced' view of the relationship between the pre- and post-Reformation eras. It begs a whole series of questions about the nature and purposes of medieval libraries, let alone the nature of 'national memory' and the role of libraries in the modern world. At the very least, the statement needs to be explained and discussed more fully. Summit's assumptions about the nature and history of libraries tend to be over-simplified in other ways too. Medieval libraries and monastic libraries are referred to as if they were one and the same - even though cathedral, college, and school libraries (and even personal libraries) are referred to several times in passing. The extent and contents of post-Reformation libraries are never fully discussed, and the fact that they contained many more printed books than medieval manuscripts is largely glossed over. But this has significant implications for the survival of 'medieval books'. How did the manuscripts fit into the larger context of the post-Reformation library as a whole? Should the survival of medieval manuscripts be distinguished from the survival of medieval texts in printed form? Libraries were only one aspect of the various collecting activities of men like Cotton, as Summit acknowledges. How did their collections of 'curiosities' affect their approach to medieval manuscripts and their understanding of the meaning and significance of those manuscripts? [End Page 313] The methodology adopted for this book produces a series of admirably close and sensitive readings of specific texts. But this is achieved at some cost to the coherence of the overall argument. The themes in More's Utopia, Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Camden...

The Pilsgate Manor of the Sacrist of Peterborough Abbey, ed. and tr. Margaret E. Briston and Timothy M. Halliday

This volume is the latest in a series of medieval Peterborough abbey manuscripts that have been edited for the Northamptonshire Record Society, of which the best known is C.N.L. Brooke and M.M. Postan's edition of the Carte Nativorum (1960; rev. ante, lxxvii [1962], 323–6). The present volume similarly includes a large collection of charters, some of them describing the transfer of land between the abbey's unfree tenants, which was the distinguishing and highly unusual characteristic of Brooke and Postan's edition. The Pilsgate register, however, is largely conventional, and similar to many other medieval cartularies which record the acquisition and exploitation of property by religious houses. Compiled in the early fifteenth century for George Fraunceys, sacrist of Peterborough abbey, the manuscript was acquired after the Dissolution by Sir Robert Cotton and is now kept at the British Library (Cotton MS Faustina B.iii). The focus of the sacrist's endowment was the manor of Pilsgate in Barnack parish, on the edge of the Northamptonshire fens, about 2½ miles south-east of Stamford and 9 miles north-west of Peterborough. Pilsgate had belonged to the abbey since pre-Conquest times and was appropriated to the office of sacrist in the mid-twelfth century. The register includes copies of nearly 300 charters, most dating from the thirteenth century, which describe the transfer of property in Pilsgate and several neighbouring villages. The charters reveal a predominantly open-field landscape in which tenants held arable strips interspersed with those of their neighbours. Numerous roads and tracks crossed the fields, many having names ending in ‘gate’, an Old Norse word for street. Also scattered across the landscape were several windmills, watercourses, and standing crosses, and the ragstone quarries for which medieval Barnack was renowned.

Migrations of Manuscripts 2010

1511. ‘The Etimologie, Antiquitye and Office of the Lord High Steward, Constable and Marshall of England’, c.1625, 208 fos. A collection of tracts by Sir Robert Cotton, William Camden and others, w...

Sir Robert Cotton, James VI and I and an English cenotaph for two Scottish princes

For Sir Robert Cotton (1571–1631), collector, bibliophile and benefactor of the British Library’sCotton Collections, dynastic prestige was paramount. Through his ancestors, the Bruces ofConington, he claimed descent from the ancient Scottish royal line and therefore kinship with hisnew sovereign, King James VI and I. A distinguished antiquarian, his extensive engagement with hisown family history was coupled with a degree of self-interest and shrewd self-promotion. This articleexamines how Cotton publicly displayed his links with the royal Stuarts as a means of securinghis own advancement and of increasing his influence within the royal household. In particular,it considers how a cenotaph, which he erected in the parish church of All Saints in Conington,Huntingdonshire, to his distant forbear, Prince Henry of Scotland (c 1115–52), may also representan oblique response to the politically destabilising death in 1612 of his own contemporary, HenryFrederick, Prince of Wales.

'Our Learned Primate' and that 'Rare Treasurie': James Ussher's Use of Sir Robert Cotton's Manuscript Library, c. 1603–1655

The historical significance of Sir Robert Cotton's famous library of manuscripts is considered through the activities of James Ussher, Archbishop of Armagh, who used the library extensively in his work as Protestant theologian and historian. Cotton's library is singled out for particular praise on more than one occasion in Ussher's published works, and it is revealed that Ussher used nearly one hundred Cottonian manuscripts. This use is attested to in his notebooks and correspondence, the surviving records of loans made from the Cottonian Library, and from some of the Cottonian manuscripts themselves. Ussher's manuscript use is analysed with reference to his antiquarian interests as well as to his politico-theological aims for the furtherance of the reformed, established Church in Ireland.

Tomb Destruction and Scholarship: Medieval Monuments in Early Modern England (review)

Reviewed by: Tomb Destruction and Scholarship: Medieval Monuments in Early Modern England Stefanie Knöll Tomb Destruction and Scholarship: Medieval Monuments in Early Modern England. By Phillip Lindley. (Donington, UK: Shaun Tyas Publishing. 2007. Pp. x, 257. £35.00. ISBN 978-1-900-28987-0.) In Tomb Destruction and Scholarship, Phillip Lindley, reader in the history of art department of the University of Leicester, deals with the destruction of medieval tomb monuments in England during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The study, which resulted from Lindley’s 2007 Leverhulme Research Fellowship, offers new insight into the mechanisms of earlymodern iconoclasm in England. At the same time, Lindley points to the side effects of destruction—that is, the increasing number of cultural tourists visiting tomb monuments as well as the growing historical scholarship. In his first chapter, Lindley recounts the fate of funerary monuments during the sixteenth century. Often parts of tombs were sold for the sake of the material. However, Lindley is able to show that tomb defacement was nothing more than “collateral damage” under King Henry VIII and that active defacement of tombs started only under King Edward VI. Now, images of saints as well as phrases requesting prayers for the dead or—for the most zealous reformers—representations of clergy in their traditional vestments were regarded as offensive. These attacks also influenced the design of new monuments. We might think of the ensuing concentration on the virtues of the deceased and the celebration of his bloodline through the display of heraldry. Lindley is convinced that it was the sixteenth-century experience of the fragility of material heritage that created a particularly strong desire to study and document tomb monuments. Chapter 2 thus analyzes the genesis and development of Tudor antiquarianism, which differs from late-medieval antiquarian attempts in various aspects: the introduction of formalized networks (Society of Antiquaries), a more critical evaluation of historical sources, and the wider dissemination through printed records. Many quotations from the works of authors such as John Leland, Sampson Erdeswick, or Ralph Brooke give a sense of the discussed antiquarian writings and point to the scholarly debates going on at the time. A good example of such debates is the argument between Camden and Brooke, which demonstrated that the knowledge of heraldry had to be supplemented by a knowledge of the stylistic development of tomb monuments as well as by archival research. Consequently, the preservation of medieval texts and the inclusion of illustrations in antiquarian works was afforded more and more importance. Significant examples such as Sir Robert Cotton’s library and John Weever’s Ancient Funerall Monuments (1631) are discussed in chapter 3.Weever’s publication was the first nationwide collection of epitaphs. The inclusion of illustrations in this work shows an awareness of the fact that images possess an authority distinct from that of texts. Chapter 3 further deals with the fate of tomb monuments during the Civil War, when Parliament actively encouraged iconoclasm. The Puritan iconoclast William Dowsing even kept a journal of the destructions he carried out in various churches between 1643 and 1644. [End Page 613] The first three chapters, which offer a broad overview of the attacks from the time of Henry VIII to the 1640s, are followed by three chapters with detailed case studies: Lindley employs antiquarian accounts to reconstruct the appearance of King Arthur’s tomb at Glastonbury (chapter 4), to draw conclusions about the original functions of the Percy tomb in Beverley Minster (chapter 5), and to analyze the attacks and reconstructions of the Herbert monuments at Abergavenny (chapter 6). However, considering that this is a book dealing with the development of research into tomb monuments, it is disappointing that the book does not include an overall bibliography of the large number of primary and secondary sources consulted. In his conclusion, Lindley concedes that he might have exaggerated the extent of tomb destruction in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Indeed, many scholars have already shown that a lot of damage was inflicted only in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Still, Lindley has achieved his aim—namely, to show that early-modern attacks were endorsed by national authorities on a scale unprecedented in Western Europe...

Early Medieval Texts and Interpretations: Studies Presented to Donald G. Scragg by Elaine Treharne , Susan Rosser (review)

762 Reviews to correct 'Lounpe' (p. 205) in the bibliography to 'Lampe', the name of Geoffrey Lampe, sometime professor of divinity at Cambridge University. University of Navarre, Pamplona Andrew Breeze Early Medieval Texts and Interpretations: Studies Presented to Donald G. Scragg. Ed. by Elaine Treharne and Susan Rosser. (Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 252) Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. 2003. xx + 39ipp. $40; ?36. ISBN 0-86698-295-7. In the firstsection of this Festschrift, 'Influences and Interpretations', Roberta Frank notes the apparent influence of ON poetic techniques on Andreas; Malcolm Godden meticulously examines ^lfric's grammatical revisions to the Catholic Homilies; Mechtild Gretsch suggests influence fromthe Benedictional ofi^Ethelwold on ^Elfric's Sanctorale; Joyce Hill incisively investigates i^lfric's use of Latin homiliaries as intermediate sources of patristic material; Patrizia Lendinari traces the origins of the OE homiletic topos 'no aid from kin' (at the Last Judgement) and its links with the ubi sunt motif; Gale Owen-Crocker links the elements of horror in Beowulf to its broader literary and social context; Alexander Rumble examines twelfth-century attempts to maintain the accessibilityof OE charters by translation into Latin, linguistic moderni? zation, and transliteration; and Carole Weinberg explores the semantic range oihende in La3amon's Brut. In the second, 'The Editing and Transmission of Texts', Paul Szarmach complains of the current shortage of 'benchmark or full-service' (p. 136) editions of Alfredian works, and the continuing reluctance of Anglo-Saxonists to ad? dress the implications of modern critical theory fortheir editing practice; Janet Bately demonstrates that book-divisions and chapter-headings in Alfredian translations are not necessarily a guide to their original structure but are 'of varying quality and au? thority' (p. 166); Phillip Pulsiano edits the Passion of St Christopher in the Beowulf manuscript; Jane Roberts reconsiders two of Scragg's emendations to Vercelli Homily XXIII; Loredana Teresi edits the anonymous homily Be heofonwarum7 be helwarum; Charles Wright explores the intermediate territorybetween poetry and prose in OE homiletic writing, with particular reference to the 'verse-like outcroppings' (p. 250) in Vercelli Homily XXI; Mary Clayton edits and translates i^lfric's Letter to Brother Edward', Jonathan Wilcox investigates the textual history of ^Elfric's Letter to Sigefyrth ,a polemic against clerical marriage; Michael Lapidge suggests that iElfric may have been taught by the Welshman Iorwerth at Winchester; Andy Orchard discusses the problems of editing Wulfstan, with a sample re-edition of Bethurum XXI; Joana Proud gives an account of the late eleventh-century copy of the Cotton-Corpus le? gendary in Salisbury Cathedral Library MSS 211 and 212; and Timothy Graham edits seven letters from William L'Isle to Sir Robert Cotton. Although most of the contributions are quite narrowly focused, between them they offer an interesting overview of the current state of Anglo-Saxon studies. On the one hand, they reflect (and sometimes explicitly comment on) recent shifts of academic fashion: the dynamic growth of i^lfric studies, the passing of the Formalist emphasis on shorter lyrics, the marginalization of Alfredian works. On the other hand, they give the impression of a continuing reluctance to engage with recent developments in the broader academic community, in particular continental critical theory and what D. C. Greetham has called 'theories of the text' (Theories of the Text (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999)). This is perhaps unexpected, given the relatively radical approaches included in the excellent Scragg-Szarmach anthology, The Editing of Old English: Papers from the1990 Manchester Conference (Cambridge: Brewer, 1994). The only contribution to follow through on Szarmach's points is MLR, 100.3, 2005 763 Andy Orchard's sample edition of Wulfstan, which combines user-friendliness (in itself a radical departure from the practice of many editors of Old English) with a recognition of the 'practical and theoretical difficulty' (p. 314) of editing Wulfstan's work, accepting its characteristic variance and offeringa workable editorial solution to the problems raised by ongoing textual modification. The more traditional virtues of Anglo-Saxon scholarship, however, are well re? presented in this Festschrift: first-hand research, well-informed close argument, and meticulous editorial technique. It is thematically unified (unlike many Festschriften), the editing is scrupulous throughout, and an...

:The Early Records of Sir Robert Cotton's Library: Formation, Cataloguing and Use

:<i>The Early Records of Sir Robert Cotton's Library: Formation, Cataloguing and Use</i>

&lt;i&gt;The Early Records of Sir Robert Cotton's Library: Formation, Cataloguing, Use&lt;/i&gt;, by Colin G.C. Tite

&lt;i&gt;The Early Records of Sir Robert Cotton's Library: Formation, Cataloguing, Use&lt;/i&gt;, by Colin G.C. Tite

Review: The Early Records of Sir Robert Cotton's Library: Formation, Cataloguing, Use

The Early Records of Sir Robert Cotton's Library: Formation, Cataloguing, Use By Colin C. G. Tite

Debates in the House of Commons, 1604–1607

Although the authors of the journals and speeches reproduced below all came from the East Midlands and were loosely related to each other, they offer three widely differing viewpoints of the proceedings of the House of Commons during the parliamentary sessions of 1604 and 1606–7. The Rutland manuscript concentrates on the privilege dispute over election returns which dominated the opening weeks of the 1604 session, while Sir Robert Cotton was chiefly concerned to record procedural precedents for use in subsequent Parliaments, and Sir Edward Mountagu focussed on the House's legislative activity.

Remapping early modern England: the culture of seventeenth-century politics

Preface Directions: 1. Remapping early modern England: from revisionism to the culture of politics 2. A commonwealth of meanings: languages, analogues, ideas and politics Texts and Power: 3. The king's writ: royal authors and royal authority in early modern England 4. Private conscience and public duty in the writings of James VI and I 5. Private conscience and public duty in the writings of Charles I Visions and Politics: 6. Stuart monarchy and political culture 7. 'An image doting rabble': the failure of republicanism culture in seventeenth-century England Rewritings: 8. Rewriting the history of Parliament in seventeenth-century England 9. Rewriting Sir Robert Cotton: politics and history in early Stuart England Re-Viewings: 10. Religion, rhetoric and revolution in seventeenth-century England 11. Celebrating a cultural turn: political culture and cultural politics in early modern England 12. Representations and negotiations: images, texts and authority in early modern England.

Nicholas Orme. Education in Early Tudor England: Magdalen College Oxford and Its School, 1480-1540. (Magdalen College Occasional Paper, 4.) Oxford: Magdalen College, 1998. xii + 84 pp. £8. ISBN: 0-9513747-4-5. - Jonathan Woolfson. Padua and the Tudors: English Students in Italy, 1485-1603. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998. xii + 322 pp. $60. ISBN: 0-8020-0946-8. - C. J. Wright, ed.

Nicholas Orme. Education in Early Tudor England: Magdalen College Oxford and Its School, 1480-1540. (Magdalen College Occasional Paper, 4.) Oxford: Magdalen College, 1998. xii + 84 pp. £8. ISBN: 0-9513747-4-5. - Jonathan Woolfson. Padua and the Tudors: English Students in Italy, 1485-1603. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998. xii + 322 pp. $60. ISBN: 0-8020-0946-8. - C. J. Wright, ed. Sir Robert Cotton as Collector: Essays on an Early Stuart Courtier and his Legacy. London: The British Library, 1997. viii + 470 pp. £60. ISBN: 0-7123-0358-8. - Volume 53 Issue 1