Attributing and Dating the Manuscript Miscellany of Elizabeth Newell: Sir Matthew Hale and Beinecke Library Osborn MS

摘要

The late seventeenth-century manuscript miscellany of devotional verse and psalm transcriptions signed by Elizabeth Newell and held in the Osborn collection at Yale University's Beinecke Library is a tantalizing document. It offers the promise of a collection of hitherto unpublished poetry written by an early modern woman, yet the manuscript's only evidence of attribution is the name, 'Elizabeth Newell' repeatedly signed on two pages. The manuscript was purchased from H. T. Jantzen Antiquarian Books (Toll Gate, Lewes Road, East Grinstead, Sussex) and listed in Jant-zen's catalogue of June 1968. At the time of its acquisition, it was described by the Osborn collection's curator, Stephen Parks as consisting 'of original devotional poems not without literary merit'. Its thirty-six pages of text in a stitched binding are written in a single, neat italic hand and contain a series of eighteen poems, including a sequence of poems commemorating Christmas Day that are variously dated from 1655-1668, as well as related devotional verse and a paraphrase of lines from Seneca's tragedy, Thyestes. The manuscript concludes with a transcription of several Psalms. Despite what is a circumstantial attribution in a manuscript whose remarkably clean hand and relative lack of errors clearly point to its status as transcription, it has garnered some notice in recent years as an instance of the female poetic voice in early modern England. For example, one of the poems it contains, a verse dialogue between Christ, Justice, and a Sinner, is included under Newell's name in Jane Stevenson and Peter Davidson's anthology, Early Modern Women Poets. Following the Beinecke Library's own attribution of the poems to Newell, they suggest that virtually all of this work is of Newell's own creation, allowing that only one, which is described in the manuscript as being written by one 'J. C, is attributable to another writer. Furthermore, they surmise that 'the paraphrase on Seneca suggests that Elizabeth Newell was a woman of some learning, though not necessarily that she read Latin'. Likewise, Kate Chedgzoy takes note of 'the Christmas poems of Elizabeth Newell, presented in MS in an annual sequence dating from 1655-1668'. However intriguing this manuscript may be, its attribution has nevertheless been regarded with some hesitation. Notably, the editors of another recent anthology remark that it was rejected from their collection because they 'could not prove that the verse in the manuscript signed by Elizabeth Newell was composed by her rather than merely transcribed by her'.