Echo Chambers and Paper Memorials: Mid and Late-Seventeenth-Century Book-bindings and the Practices of Early Modern Reading

D'Addario, Christopher

doi:10.2979/textcult.7.2.73

Cited by 4 publications

References 14 publications

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Literary Legacies: Children’s Reading and Writing in the Montagu Archive

Phillippy

2019

Literary Cultures and Medieval and Early Modern Childhoods

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On her death in 1618, Elizabeth Harington Montagu, bequeathed "to my sonne Sir Henry Capell the Book of goulde which I [meante] to my daughter his wife, prayinge him to bestowe it uppon his daughter Besse" 1 Lady Montagu's gift was a deeply personal artifact: a book of devotions mounted in gold which she wore on a gold chain from her girdle. The book had been intended for her youngest daughter, Theodosia, it but passed instead to Lady Montagu's namesake after Theodosia's death at the age of 37. Bess was six years old when her mother died, and no more than ten when she received her grandmother's girdle book. The token thus memorialized Bess's mother and grandmother in a textual artifact that conveyed personal, literary, and religious legacies across generations of Montagu women.This book is one of many that passed from Elizabeth Montagu's hands to those of her descendants, volumes inflected by the same complex blend of personal, commemorative, sacred, and secular discourses. Elizabeth Harington was the daughter of James Harington of Exton and Lucy Sidney, and the Montagus were actively engaged in the exchange of manuscripts with these literary families (Lamb, 194-226; Hughey, 1934/5 and Woodhuysen, 356-65). These exchanges were one means by which closely imbricated social and religious identities were forged: their purpose, in part, was pedagogical. While the Montagu manuscripts are invaluable sources of literary works by Sidney, Wyatt, Surrey, and others, they also form part of a body of texts and practices through which the moderate 1 TNA PROB 11/131/760, fol. 426r; hereafter cited parenthetically by folio.

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