Folger Shakespeare Library Copy [sic] of Lanyer's Salve Deus Rex Judeorum (1610/11)

        Scholars trying to understand a poet's work long labored under New Criticism's insistence that they look first, and almost solely, at "the text, itself," a term taken to mean the best modern scholarly edition of the work.  Early manuscript and print editions were suspected of inaccuracy.  Scribes and printers make mistakes.  It was the job of the modern editor to tease out the "best text" from among the available "witnesses" or available early copies, and to "amend" the text by making educated guesses to repair apparent errors.  This process is far from transparent, and the emphasis on modern scholarly editions has led to scholarly ignorance about the nature of the text that would have been read by the author's contemporaries, or by other important generations of readers.  For instance, when Shakespeare was adapting Chaucer's Troilus to make the play, Troilus and Cressida, the most recent edition would have been the 1598 Speght, which Goucher's Library owns and which you could read as Shakespeare did. 

        In the case of Amelia Lanyer's Salve Deus Rex Judeorum, we have a puzzling "text" published by an unusual author, a non-noble woman, writing specifically about women's reputations and rights to public speech in a mode that is unmistakably feminist.  Was this a private or public work of literature?  First, it was published, as in set in cold type for the early modern printing press, by one Valentine Simmes and intended for public sale in a shop in the famous booksellers' district at St. Paul's Cathedral.  That is the Renaissance English version of posting it to YouTube.  Second, it was published in quarto (), so each leaf of the book took up a quarter of a full sheet of the printer's paper.  Quartos are not as fancy-huge as folios (2 leaves per sheet), but twice as big as octavo (8 per sheet), and nowhere near as cheap to produce as duodecimo (12) or sextodecimo (16).  This suggests there was money in the process--printers do not work for free.  The noble dedicatees (all or some) may have underwritten Lanyer's publication, or Valentine Simmes and Richard Bonian, the bookseller, may have expected to make money selling the books directly to customers.  To determine whether enough copies were printed to make it a commercial, rather than a "vanity" or private press, publication, knowing how many copies survived and who might have owned them could tell us a lot about Lanyer's readers.

        If you go to the English Short Title Catalogue and do an "advanced search" on the author "Lanyer" and set the years of publication at "1610->1611" you will be told there are eight surviving copies.  Closer inspection of the Folger's own online catalog reveals that they have only one copy of the printed book, but even so it's a precious source of evidence about how Lanyer viewed the work she wrote.  The other entry in the Folger catalog is a "ghost" copy, a microfilm of the first.  The record was mistakenly recorded in the ESTC either by automated transfer of the Folger records or by inattentive human catalogers.  In any event, Folger "Copy 1" already tells us some interesting things about one of Amelia Lanyer's readers. In this case, the wonderfully named Narcissus Luttrell (1657-1732) turns out to have been a book collector and a collector of records about the actual deliberations of Parliament during an era in which the institution did not keep track of its own deliberations.  His book collection was sold while he was still alive due to financial difficulties, and his copy of Lanyer's book came into the possession of James Bindley, who collected books when not working at the government Stamp Office.  The auction sale catalogue of his library is available almost in its entirety through Google, and lot number 82, "An Apologie for Women, 1609," has a familiar ring if not the right publication date.  It probably would not have been tossed into one of the lots of "tracts" or "pamphlets"--a 112 page quarto probably would not be called either, especially if it already was hard-bound. 

This is the Folger's online catalog (Hamnet!) entry for copy 1--note that "Copy 2" is a bibliographic "ghost," actually a negative microfilm photo-facsimile of Copy 1: