Abraham Cowley's Sex Libri Plantarum (1668) is one of the most learned texts of the English Restoration. Presented as a guide to a subject 'that lies out of the common Road of Learning', it includes copious notes relating its treatment of plants to sources including classical literature and modern scientific works. In this article, we quantify key aspects of Cowley's annotational practice, identifying both his most frequent citations and some of the more unexpected texts to which he alludes. We compare his use of citation in Plantarum with texts by other contemporary writers, including John Evelyn and John Milton, as well as with his own annotated poetry of the 1650s. We also discuss Cowley's own statements on his annotational practice, and consider how his use of notes enabled him both to justify his poetic and intellectual project in Plantarum and to see a long-form poem through to completion.

Restoration scholarship has often assumed both that Aphra Behn and the Earl of Rochester were personally acquainted and that Rochester was an important influence on Behn’s writing. This article reassesses the evidence for a literary relationship between Behn and Rochester, most of which postdates Rochester’s death in 1680. Focusing in particular on two poems by Behn—‘To Mrs W.’, addressed to Rochester’s niece, Anne Wharton, and her elegy ‘On the Death of the late Earl of Rochester’—it argues that what may look like a literary relationship between Behn and Rochester is often and more importantly a connection between Behn and Wharton. Positing a late (1685) date for ‘On the Death of the late Earl of Rochester’, it reframes its likely role within Behn’s career, and links it with wider efforts led by Wharton to refashion Rochester’s reputation after his death. It also explores the implications of the Behn-Wharton-Rochester relationship for Behn’s self-curation as a poet in the mid-1680s, as well as for Wharton’s own poetic development and literary ambitions.

Abstract Nature was an important concept for Abraham Cowley throughout his career. While his preoccupation with Nature is perhaps most evident in his juvenilia and post-Restoration work, it can also be traced in his poetry of the 1640s and 1650s, as documented in his collected Poems of 1656. References to Nature can be found in all four sections of the volume: ‘Miscellanies’, ‘The Mistress’, the ‘Pindarique Odes’ and the Davideis. While allusions in ‘Miscellanies’ and ‘The Mistress’ are mainly conventional, they show a marked bias towards positive cultural associations. In contrast, references to Nature in the ‘Pindarique Odes’ seem increasingly pessimistic, and may be linked with Cowley’s political misfortunes in the 1650s. Allusions in the Davideis gesture towards two topics that would be of increasing interest to Cowley in the 1660s: beleaguered friendship, and Nature as the object of scientific enquiry.

Abstract This chapter discusses and compares two poets often regarded as representing male and female literary perspectives on late seventeenth-century libertine culture. While Aphra Behn and the Earl of Rochester had much in common, not least their permissive attitudes towards sexuality, they differed in many ways, including their generic preferences, their investment in contemporary politics, their use of print and manuscript, and the degree of control each sought to exercise over their literary works. Famously obscene, Rochester’s poetry is characterised by its use of strong narrative voices, variously and always problematically identifiable with the poet himself. The many innovative aspects of Behn’s poetry include her exploration of diverse forms of female sexual experience and her outspoken engagement in royalist politics.

Abraham Cowley's Latin poem Sex Libri Plantarum, published posthumously in 1668, is arguably his masterpiece, yet it is relatively under-studied. Its rich annotations include scientific - mainly botanical and medical - as well as historical, linguistic, and mythological information, with many classical and early modern quotations. To date, the only published complete English translation remains the 1689 version assembled by Nahum Tate, Six Books of Plants, which features much sparser marginalia. What can these very different patterns of annotation tell us about their creators' priorities, twenty years apart? To investigate, we quantify and systematically compare the Latin and English notes. We find that the two serve different purposes: while those in Plantarum function as a counterpoint to, and corrective dialogue with, the text, those in Six Books are mainly interpretative. The translators who collaborated on Six Books were actively, even idiosyncratically, selective about how they retained Cowley's marginalia in English.

Abraham Cowley's Sex Libri Plantarum and the "J. O." conundrum Kathleen Taylor and Gillian Wright In 1689, the bookseller Charles Harper published The Third Part of the Works of Mr Abraham Cowley, being his Six Books of Plants. Described on its title page as "Never before Printed in English," Six Books was the first – and is still, to date, the only – complete English translation of Cowley's late neo-Latin masterpiece, the Sex Libri Plantarum, to reach print. Closely following the publication of the Second Part of Cowley's works in 1681, as well as a partial translation of Book VI of the Plantarum a year earlier, the arrival of Six Books would have contributed to Cowley's high posthumous reputation, which was reaching its peak in the 1680s.1 Six Books is also described on its title page as "Now made English by several Hands." Collaborative translation was fashionable in the 1680s; the landmark Ovid's Epistles (1680), co-produced by John Dryden and Jacob Tonson, had been reissued in 1681, 1683 and 1688, and helped to inspire "several Hands" translations of works such as Cornelius Nepos's The Lives of Illustrious Men (1684) and Suetonius's The Lives of the Twelve Caesars (1688), as well as two further Dryden-Tonson ventures, Virgil's Eclogues (1685) and Plutarch's Lives (1683-88). While the "several Hands" format had, by 1689, extended to genres other than translation (e.g., songs, miscellaneous poetry), Six Books is an early, and rare, example of its application to a modern literary work. Six Books of Plants has received relatively little attention within recent literary scholarship, and much about the circumstances of its production in 1689 remains unclear.2 In this article, we reassess one of the work's many puzzles: the identity of "J. O.," who [End Page 3] translated Books I and II. We set the scene for this reassessment by, initially, sketching out the contents, origins, and early publication history of Cowley's Sex Libri Plantarum, a work which, despite generating a recent and impressive array of scholarship from neo-Latin scholars, is still largely unfamiliar to early modern English literary specialists. We subsequently explore what qualities a translator of Plantarum Books I and II is likely to have possessed, before evaluating the claims of several contemporary candidates to be the J. O. of Six Books. Before Six Books: Cowley's Sex Libri Plantarum In 1662, Abraham Cowley published Plantarum libri duo, the first two books of one of the most unusual poems ever written.3 The complete work, Sex Libri Plantarum, was published posthumously in 1668.4 Neither an herbal nor a botanical textbook, Plantarum is a dazzlingly allusive six-book masterpiece about plants. Penned in virtuosic Latin, it is "a witty, surprising and often beautiful version of the language of Virgil, Horace and Ovid," as Victoria Moul describes it.5As well as including plant lore, medicine, and what would now be called pharmacology, it ranges from classical mythology to politics and recent history (Book VI includes revised material from Cowley's unfinished epic about the English civil war). The six books form three distinct pairs, of which Books III and IV are the most tightly linked, being two halves of a single long narrative about plants that flower in winter and spring (Book III) and summer and autumn (Book IV). All six are steeped in their author's deep knowledge of Latin literature. As Nahum Tate, who wrote the preface to the 1689 Six Books, explained: The two first Books treat of Herbs, in a Style resembling the Elegies of Ovid and Tibullus, in the sweetness and freedom of the Verse; but excelling them in the strength of the Fancy, and vigour of the Sence. The third and fourth discourse of Flowers in all the variety of Catullus and Horace's Numbers; for the last of which Authors he had a peculiar Reverence, and imitated him, not only in the stately and numerous pace of his Odes and Epodes, but in the familiar easiness of his Epistles and Speeches. The two last speak of Trees, in the way of Virgil's Georgicks: Of these the sixth Book...

‘Poetical Plants and Leafy Landscapes’ counters perceptions of Restoration poetry as being overwhelmingly preoccupied with the urban environment. It begins by evaluating the importance attached to trees and plants in the political ideologies of the early Restoration, as exemplified in Edmund Waller’s A Poem on St. James’s Park (1661) and John Evelyn’s Sylva (1664). Sponsored by the Royal Society, and now recognised as a pioneering work in the fields of arboriculture and conservation, Sylva crucially relied on select quotations from Latin and English poets to achieve its principal aim: encouraging Evelyn’s gentlemanly readers to grow more trees. Later sections of the chapter explore the treatment of trees and plants by poets such as Abraham Cowley, John Milton, Mary Roper, Lucy Hutchinson, the earl of Rochester and Aphra Behn. Cowley’s treatment of trees and plants in his original English poems and translations are compared both with John Milton’s near-contemporary use of plant-life in Paradise Lost and also with his own Latin masterpiece, the Sex Libri Plantarum, while the Plantarum is considered as a work both of the 1660s (when it was mostly written) and of the 1680s (when it was controversially translated into English).

Between the late seventeenth and the early eighteenth centuries, fable—already a well-established didactic mode, often directed towards children—came increasingly to be used for satirical purposes. The work of three important writers—Aphra Behn, John Dryden, and Anne Finch—illustrates both the range and the particularity of fables during this period. While, collectively, these poets’ work differs greatly in terms of form, style, and appropriative methods, all three were strong royalists (later Jacobites) whose fables were devised to serve broadly pro-Stuart ends. This chapter investigates why fable rose to prominence during the fraught years before and after the 1688 Revolution, and how its literary properties were differentially exploited by Behn, Dryden, and Finch (given the varying political and publishing circumstances in which each was working). It also considers the reasons for the decline of the satirical fable in the mid-eighteenth century.

This interview provides a view of the work in progress for the Cambridge University Press edition of the Complete Works of Aphra Behn. Gillian Wright serves as a general editor (with Elaine Hobby, Claire Bowditch, and Mel Evans) as well as the volume editor for Behn’s poetry. Alan Hogarth is the Postdoctoral Research Associate working with Mel Evans on the computational stylistics and author attribution testing. The discussion focuses on the scope and principles of editing the poetry of Aphra Behn, the role of stylometry in establishing the corpus, the status of work, a few particular poems, and some surprises.

Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewThe Noble Flame of Katherine Philips: A Poetics of Culture, Politics, and Friendship. Edited by David L. Orvis and Ryan Singh Paul. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2015. Pp. ix+454.Gillian WrightGillian WrightUniversity of Birmingham Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreGiven the eminence of Katherine Philips in the emerging canon of early modern women English poets, it is astonishing that David Orvis and Ryan Paul’s edited volume of essays is “the first scholarly collection devoted to the poetry of Katherine Philips” (7). As this carefully worded formulation suggests, the focus of Orvis and Paul’s important volume is very much on Philips’s poetry, with her letters and translations adduced only as and when they shed light on her verse. This restriction understood, The Noble Flame of Katherine Philips is a rich and stimulating addition to the secondary literature on this versatile writer. Identifying and contextualizing some of the most important recent scholarship on her poetry, it also opens up promising new areas for future research.The Noble Flame of Katherine Philips comprises an introduction by the editors, ten full-length essays, and an afterword by Philips’s prospective Oxford editor, Elizabeth Hageman. Instructively, the epigraph to the introduction is taken from Philo-Philippa’s poem “To the Excellent Orinda,” first published with Philips’s posthumous Poems in 1667 and often read as an early protofeminist response to her work. This choice of epigraph is fitting in a collection that, overall, emphasizes the public over the private Philips and is especially interested in her role within English women’s literary history. The introduction itself, however, is notably wide-ranging, offering an excellent short account of Philips’s life (1–7) and those aspects of her verse that have most exercised critics: friendship (7–15), politics and archipelagism (16–24), form and literary tradition (25–29), and textuality and dissemination (30–35). Each of the critical sections, furthermore, carefully places Philips scholarship in historical context. Thus the section on friendship, for instance, traces developments in the field since the 1980s, when Philips was boldly claimed as a homoerotic or even lesbian poet, through to the more problematized accounts of Lorna Hutson and Harriette Andreadis, both of whom are represented in this collection. The editors also identify areas of Philips’s work that have been subject to surprising neglect, such as music (29).Of the ten articles in the main body of the volume, five—by Catharine Gray, Paula Loscocco, Elizabeth Hodgson, Valerie Traub, and Lorna Hutson—are reissued versions of existing material, while the remaining five—by Christopher Orchard, David Orvis, Amy Scott-Douglass, Linda Austern, and Harriette Andreadis—have been newly written for this collection. All five of the reissued articles are well chosen and would count among any Philips scholar’s list of the most important article-length publications on her work since 2000. Of the topics in Philips scholarship outlined above, those that feature most obviously in this reproduced material are friendship and homoeroticism (Traub, Hutson, and, to a degree, Loscocco) and form and tradition (Loscocco and Hodgson). Politics and textuality are, however, admirably addressed in Catharine Gray’s “Katherine Philips and the Post-Courtly Coterie,” which is (deservedly) one of the most cited articles in modern Philips scholarship. All five of the reissued articles have furthermore been brought up to date, albeit by different means. Gray and Loscocco valuably contextualize their own work through authors’ notes, while editors’ prefaces provide similar services for Traub and Hutson. Hodgson has substantially rewritten her own previous work on Philips’s epithalamia for the purposes of this collection.Each of the six new studies (including Hageman’s afterword), while appropriately cognizant of existing criticism, does important work in advancing Philips scholarship in new directions. Orchard’s study, focusing on a single poem (“On the 3. of September, 1651”), follows critics such as Andrew Shifflett (Stoicism, Politics, and Literature in the Age of Milton: War and Peace Reconciled [Cambridge University Press, 1998], 75–106), in seeking to complicate received accounts of Philips’s poetry as straightforwardly royalist. Where Orchard is innovative, however, is in linking Philips’s politics with contemporary literary history: he argues that “On the 3. of September” opposes the empty bravado of William Davenant’s Gondibert (1651) while endorsing Roger Boyle’s celebration of heroic virtue in Parthenissa (also 1651). Linda Austern, meanwhile, explores another aspect of Philips’s poetry often identified as royalist, namely, her poems on and set by the Chapel Royal composer, Henry Lawes. Austern’s emphasis in her study, however, is on the musical significance of the Philips-Lawes relationship and of Philips’s use of musical allusions elsewhere in her poetry. She also argues for the centrality of performance to Philips’s understanding of and regard for music.Orvis and Scott-Douglass both address another neglected aspect of Philips’s writing: religion. Orvis’s careful reading of a wide selection of poems from across Philips’s career shows not only how numerous biblical allusions are in her poetry but also how skillfully she uses tropes frequently associated with millenarians to her own ends. Scott-Douglass examines bodily and, especially, facial metaphors both in the prefatory material to Philips’s Poems (1667) and in the poems themselves. She links notions of defacement to the iconoclasm practiced within Philips’s own family, while noting the poet’s own evident preoccupation with sacred fabric in her own work. The sharp divergence thus visible between Philips’s early life and mature poetry must, Scott-Douglass argues, represent “one of the most significant shifts” (152) in the poet’s life.Andreadis and Hageman are both, in different ways, concerned with the reception of Philips’s poetry. Andreadis’s focus is on the creative scope offered to later woman-focused female poets—Anne Killigrew, Christina Rossetti, H.D., Olga Broumas—by Philips’s pastoral poetry. She sees these later poets as, consciously or not, standing in a tradition of “female queer pastoral” (309) initiated by Philips. Hageman examines material evidence such as surviving early copies of Philips’s poetry and the inscription of poems by Philips on windows at Haddon Hall, Derbyshire. Both, as she shows, testify to women’s continuing interest in, and creative involvement with, Philips’s poetry until well into the eighteenth century.“When Philips shows up at a wedding,” writes Hodgson, “she becomes a very complicated poet indeed” (187). On the evidence assembled in this engaging collection, similar levels of complication could be found in nearly every genre attempted by this remarkably inventive writer. The Noble Flame of Katherine Philips will be an essential resource for both new and existing readers of Philips’s poetry and is wholeheartedly recommended. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 114, Number 3February 2017 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/688020HistoryPublished online December 09, 2016 For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

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William Browne's relevance to the subject of nationalism and the construction of national identity is evident, however, from the title of his most ambitious poem, Britannia's Pastorals. His avowed aim in writing the Pastorals is to sing the unsung lays of 'dear Britannia', thus enabling his Muse 'To reach the sacred Helicon'. One question rarely asked by commentators on Britannia's Pastorals is what Browne means by 'Britannia'. Part of what is at issue in Browne's depiction of Britannia is a problem of genre. Critics of Britannia's Pastorals have hesitated over the question of its generic status. Annabel Patterson's self-consciously eclectic description of the poem as 'a generic blend of pastoral, georgic, epic, and allegorical romance' in fact does not exhaust the possibilities, since it says nothing of chorography. Browne's chorographic method appears at its most successful in the marginal note to the first line of Britannia's Pastorals.