The focus of the most recent catalogue to be published in EMLO — theologian Johannes Coccejus — may be best known for the conflict into which he was drawn by the Utrecht-based theologian Gisbertus Voetius and his followers, but I’d like to highlight today how Coccejus’s afterlife contains an extraordinary episode entirely in keeping with his peace-loving character.

Coloured engraving of the monument to Johannes Coccejus in the Pieterskerk, taken from K. J. F. C. Kneppelhout van Sterkenburg, ‘De gedenkteekenen van de Pieterskerk te Leyden’ (Leiden, 1864), p. 113. (Source of image: Wikimedia Commons)

Although Coccejus (or Cocceius) was German by birth — he was born and raised in Bremen — he spent most of his adult life in the low countries. An eminent scholar, he become professor of Hebrew and oriental languages at Franeker from 1636, and from 1650 until his death in 1669 was professor of theology at Leiden. The late Willem van Asselt (who was professor of Reformed Protestantism at the university of Utrecht and professor of historical theology at the Evangelical Theological Faculty in Leuven) portrays Coccejus as: ‘a man of a deep personal faith and piety. His students observed this and one of them wrote: “His hearers noted that his eyes would fill with tears when, in giving an exposition of Scripture, he praised the richness of God’s grace”.’ It seems Coccejus was an unwilling (this noted by van Asselt) combatant in the Voetian dispute, which centred around the interpretation of the Sabbath and the Fourth Commandment, and on interpretations of salvation in the Old and New Testaments. This debate, which arose and took hold in the middle of the seventeenth century in the United Provinces, continued far beyond Dutch national borders and long after the deaths of the major protagonists.

Coccejus fell victim to plague in Leiden. He was buried in the Pieterskerk. And it was here, where the memorial erected to him still stands, that he provided from the grave scholarly refuge and shelter in a way he could never have foreseen. In 1940, as Nazi troops entered the city, the curators of the University of Leiden took the symbolic treasures of the institution — the keys, the seals, and the sceptres — and hid them in Coccejus’s tomb. Even the register of students used in graduation ceremonies was tucked in for safe-keeping with the theologian’s remains. There’s something gloriously apt about Coccejus proving himself — again in van Asselt’s words — a ‘defender of academic freedom and the Reformed tradition’ almost three centuries after his death.

Postcard of the Pieterskerk, Leiden. (source of image: Wikimedia Commons)

The calendar of correspondence you’ll find now in EMLO spans Coccejus’s scholarly life and is based on the metadata of his letters printed in epistolaries that have been collated by Monika Estermann in her invaluable inventory of German correspondence. This is another catalogue we are incorporating into EMLO in the expectation that scholars will find it of use and will be tempted to contribute additional metadata. If you’d like to add to the calendar, please be in touch.

‘Wherefore, in the honour of God, let me not be forgotten, but with diligence tender my pains, as I shall be ever your beadwoman, and surely deserve your goodness, if God make me able, whom I beseech to preserve you ever in much worship.’ Thus wrote the English nun Margaret Vernon in a letter of 1528 to Thomas Cromwell. Twenty-one letters, dating between 1522 and 1538, from this remarkable abbess to her increasingly powerful patron are known to have survived, and now a catalogue with a calendar compiled by Professor Mary J. Erler during the course of research for her publication Reading and Writing During the Dissolution: Monks, Friars, and Nuns 1530–1558 (Cambridge University Press, 2013) is available in EMLO.

Thomas Cromwell, by Hans Holbein the younger. 1532-33. Oil on panel, 78.4 by 64.5cm. (Frick Collection, New York; source of image: Wikimedia Commons)

Margaret Vernon held the position of superior in four religious houses in the south of England: Sopwell Priory; St Mary de Pré (these were both in St Albans, Hertfordshire); and, consecutively, Little Marlow (Buckinghamshire) and Malling Abbey (Kent). Her letters, the manuscript originals of which may be found in either the State Papers at The National Archives, or MS Cotton at the British Library, span the career of a woman forced to navigate times of unprecedented religious turmoil and upheaval. They reveal a lengthy relationship forged with Cromwell, beginning in the early 1520s before his meteoric rise while he was in the service of Cardinal Wolsey. During these years, Cromwell seems to have acted as financial adviser to Vernon, who was at that point head of Little Marlow. Some of the letters chart Vernon’s unsuccessful negotiations to become prioress of St Helen’s Bishopsgate, London, the position she had been promised by Wolsey. Other letters cover the period during which Cromwell entrusted his only son Gregory to Vernon for his early schooling. And a number of the letters convey the desperation of the abbess at the imminent closure of both Little Marlow and, subsequently, Malling. Remarkably, in 1538, when the dissolution of the latter seemed unavoidable, Vernon requested permission to sell one of the manor houses associated with the priory, thereby to secure a pension for herself and her nuns. This was not to be, however. Vernon and her community were duly laicized, and the pension she received — less than requested — may be traced until 1546, six years after the execution of her once all-powerful patron.

Those who have followed EMLO over the past summer will know that, following the exciting launch of WEMLO, the resource and discussion forum for all early modern women’s correspondence, they will be able to search this abbess’s letters alongside the growing body of women’s correspondence within EMLO. For those who missed the launch, or who are visiting the union catalogue for the first time, we urge you to explore! Meanwhile, behind the scenes, metadata for increasing numbers of new correspondences are in preparation at EMLO and we’re truly delighted to reveal that the imminent addition of catalogues for a selection of key significant and powerful sixteenth-century women will allow Margaret Vernon to be viewed in a richer context still.

The catalogue published in EMLO this week, that of the diplomat Robert Beale, takes us straight to the heart of Elizabethan political and administrative circles. As Clerk to the Privy Council — a position which he held for almost three decades — Beale was witness to a succession of extraordinary events in turbulent times: he played a significant role in the misfortunes and fate of Mary, Queen of Scots, and he conducted a series of high-level diplomatic missions to the Low Countries and to Germany.

Detail of a letter from David Chytraeus to Daniel Rogers. This letter did not reach its addressee, who was a fellow Clerk of the Privy Council, but came instead to Beale, who annotated it: ‘Mr Rog was dead er these‘. (Special Collections Centre, University of Aberdeen, MS1009/2/13)

This calendar of Beale’s correspondence is made up of one-hundred-and-one items in the care of the University of Aberdeen. Spanning the entire second half of the sixteenth century, many of the letters relate to international and domestic affairs of state; others bear testament, however, to Beale’s own personal connections and to his scholarly bent: he corresponded with, for example, David Chytraeus, the Lutheran Professor of Greek at the University of Rostock, and with André Wechel, the reforming printer who was based first in Paris and then — following the Massacre of St Bartholemew in 1572 — in Frankfurt.

At EMLO we are truly delighted to be working with Dr Andrew Gordon, the scholar heading the Robert Beale project, and with the Special Collections Centre at the University of Aberdeen. The Library has generously made available digital images of the manuscripts, and users will find links to these from each letter record in EMLO. Dr Gordon has included metadata from the earlier researches of James D. George (1906–1977), a former secretary of Marischal College, who prepared a handlist of items in the Beale papers and made partial transcriptions and notes on the majority of these. The Beale papers were recorded initially at King’s College in an inventory of 1771. Although it is not known how they entered the collections, it seems likely they formed part of a donation from Dr James Fraser (1645–1731) a book dealer and supplier to the libraries of the later Stuarts, who made significant benefactions to King’s College in the decades preceding his death. Work on the Robert Beale project is ongoing and to facilitate research the calendar created during this initial stage is being released sooner rather than later. Significant additions, together with revisions, made in subsequent phases will be uploaded as they become available.

Increasingly EMLO is working in partnership with libraries and special collections. Indeed, this week sees the inaugural session of an exciting pilot scheme being run with Oxford’s Bodleian Libraries to bring together students, curators, digital experts, and original manuscripts. The aim is to produce student-curated catalogues of hitherto unpublished letters. Undergraduates and postgraduates are invited to attend standalone sessions in a series of workshops at the Weston Library. Over the course of a day, students will work in pairs to collate the metadata, and produce transcriptions, which will be published in EMLO under the collective title ‘Bodleian Student Editions’. Students will be credited in full for their work and each session, which will take place in the Weston’s Centre for Digital Scholarship, will focus on a selection of early modern letters from Special Collections and will include guidance on such issues as handling manuscripts; paleography; drafting a transcript; proofreading; collating metadata; and preparing a catalogue in EMLO. We hope very much these workshops will prove productive and helpful for students and staff alike. Students from any discipline may apply by emailing Mike Webb, the Curator of Early Modern Manuscripts [mike.webb@bodleian.ox.ac.uk].

In these troubled times of trenches, walls, and drawbridges, we could not be more delighted to announce the arrival in EMLO of Pierre Bayle, one of the foremost citizens of early modern Europe’s Republic of Letters. Bayle resides at the very heart of this early modern community that corresponded and networked irrespective of political border or scholarly allegiance, and today we — together with our own international network of twenty-first century historians — remain firmly committed to its reassembly.

‘Nouvelles de la République des Lettres’, no. 1 (Amsterdam: 1684; source of image: Wikimedia Commons).

A Huguenot refugee who moved to Rotterdam shortly before the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, Bayle published one of the first literary periodicals, the Nouvelles de la république des lettres (1684–1687); he compiled the vast and remarkable Dictionnaire Historique et Critique in two editions of 1697 and 1702; and in his Commentaire philosophique (1686–1688) he issued a plea for religious tolerance based on moral rationalism. A critical edition of his extensive correspondence is being published in print and online. The Voltaire Foundation, our esteemed partner here at the University of Oxford, is publisher of the multi-volumed hard-copy edition (under the direction of Antony McKenna and the late Elisabeth Labrousse), and publication of the impressive thirteenth volume (containing the correspondence from the years 1703 to 1706) has just been celebrated. The digital edition of the correspondence — overseen also by Professor McKenna — is hosted at the Université Jean Monnet Saint-Etienne, and it is on this interface that the letters may be consulted together with images of the manuscripts. In EMLO you will find at present a calendar of the metadata of the first seven volumes of Bayle’s letters, each record of which provides a detailed reference to the hard-copy edition and offers a link to the digital copy mounted at Saint-Étienne. Two incremental extensions to the calendar will be added over the coming months until the total of 1,791 letters is in place.

But of course, these letters are the ones that that have survived. As Professor McKenna explains in his thorough and informative introduction to the catalogue, Bayle’s ‘surviving letters bear witness to a great number of letters that have not’. For example, the two hundred extant letters dated prior to October 1681 refer to more than 400 others that have been lost. Consideration of these missing letters leads to Bayle’s network becoming ‘much more complex and significantly more dense’, Professor McKenna oberves. We will be working together in the coming months to explore this shadow archive and the extent of the networks that held Bayle at their heart. Keep watching: this drawbridge is firmly down and there is a great deal more to come!

‘View of Sta Maria della Salute, Venice’, by Jan van Call. Before 1699, pencil and water-colour on paper, 12.3 by 23 cm. (Image courtesy of Rijksmueum, Amsterdam, object no. RP-T-1921-54)

For those wishing to play their part on a diplomatic or networking stage there is much to be learnt from the life and death of John Dodington. For two years from 1670 this English agent was based in Venice, where he became an invaluable intermediary between Henry Oldenburg and a number of notable Italian scientists, including Marcello Malpighi and Tommaso Cornelio.

Until recently, Dodington has remained a little-known figure. He was described by A. Rupert and Marie Boas Hall in their edition of Oldenburg’s correspondence as a ‘useful correspondent in Italy . . . to him Oldenburg could dispatch letters for Malpighi and others via official channels.’ But the Halls conceded also, ‘It is not quite certain who Dodington was — though his name figures often enough in the official records — but he was by no means uninterested in the tasks that Oldenburg asked him to perform on the Society’s behalf.’ [A. R. and M. B. Hall, The Correspondence of Henry Oldenburg, vol. VI (1969), pp. xxi–xxii] Indeed it was thanks in no small measure to Dodington that a gulf was breached between Royal Society members in England and their scientific counterparts in Italy, a country which (again in the words of the Halls) may have seemed to Oldenburg ‘almost as remote in an epistolary sense as Bermuda … or Connecticut.’ [A, R, and M. B. Hall, vol. III (1969), p. xxv] The role Dodington performed for Oldenburg has been charted by Oxford’s professor of the History of Science, Robert Iliffe [see ‘Making Correspondents Network. Henry Oldenburg, Philosophical Commerce, and Italian Science, 1660–72′, in Marco Beretta, Antonio Clericuzio, and Lawrence M. Principe, eds, The Accademia del Cimento and its European Context (Sagamore Beach, MA, 2009), pp. 211–28], and given the relationship and exchange of letters between the two men — fourteen letters from Oldenburg to Dodington are calendared in EMLO, and fifteen from Dodington to Oldenburg — it is fitting that this calendar of Dodington’s correspondence should be published at the same time as the release of metadata for a further two volumes of the Halls’ edition of Oldenburg’s letters.

The French scholar Alexandre J. Tessier worked on Dodington’s correspondence in connection with his doctoral studies on Sir Joseph Williamson and has contributed this calendar to EMLO. At present, Dr Tessier is focussing on the European postal system of the late-seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, and, revisiting Dodington’s letters, he has collated and noted additional information such as dates of receipt. Here at EMLO we are in the process of investigating how best to capture and display such detailed information, together with a number of other postal-related fields (for example: location stamps; notes on a letter’s routes; reasons for non-delivery; or postage costs). Our partners in this work include both Dr Tessier and the invaluable Signed, Sealed, and Undelivered project based at the Museum voor Communicatie in The Hague.

Dodington seems to have been more successful in his scientific networking activities than he proved in his diplomatic roles. As an individual, he gives the impression of having been touchy, tactless, and irascible — not, as Dr Tessier points out in his introductory summary of Dodington’s life, characteristics that sit well in a diplomat or are suited to ambassadorial activity. Dodington fell out with his (admittedly difficult) father; he spent a spell in the Tower (following his insult of a Bencher of Lincoln’s Inn with ‘opprobrious and misbecominge language’); he was recalled from his post as resident in Venice after an accumulation of complaints (including an incident that involved his slander of Louis XIV in a Savoyard inn); and he met his end as the result of a drinking session in a London tavern: ‘With two other gentlemen he consumed five quarts of wine at the Bear, in Leadenhall Street, and as the King’s letter-carrier, Thomas Derham, wrote to Williamson, they “fell immediately after drinking it into high fevers and deliriums, of which Mr. Dodington and another died”’. [Lloyd Charles Sanders, Patron and place-hunter, a study of George Bubb Dodington, Lord Melcombe (London and New York: The Bodley Head and John Lane, 1919), p. 8.]

We hope very much you enjoy exploring Dodington’s correspondence alongside that of an expanded Oldenburg catalogue. Should you have access via a subscribing institution, you will be able to consult (through State papers Online 1509–1714) the manuscripts of Dodington’s letters now in the care of the National Archives. This little tip comes with a final ‘health warning’, however: avoid downing a gallon and a quarter of wine as you read!

This afternoon, at the Royal Palace [Koninklijk Paleis] in Amsterdam, a reception is being held to mark the publication in EMLO of the catalogues of correspondence of six wives of the seventeenth-century Dutch and Frisian stadtholders. These catalogues — which contain at present a combined total of circa three-and-a-half-thousand letter records — have been compiled by Dr Ineke Huysman of the Huygens ING, and their publication coincides with a glorious exhibition at the Royal Palace, Portraits of the House of Orange-Nassau.

What could be more fitting, as speeches are made, glasses raised, and the ribbon is cut, than for proceedings to unfold beneath the watchful painted eyes of Sophia Hedwig von Braunschweig-Wolffenbüttel (1592–1642); Amalia von Solms-Braunfels (1602–1675); Mary Stuart, Princess Royal and Princess of Orange (1631–1661); Albertine Agnes van Oranje-Nassau (1634–1696); Mary II Stuart, Princess of Orange and later Queen of England, Scotland, and Ireland (1662–1694); and Henriette Amalia von Anhalt-Dessau (1666–1726)? These talented and influential women fulfilled a range of high-profile roles in the course of their respective lives: spouse, mother, regent, and — as the correspondence reveals — diplomat. That their voices may be heard again today is due to the extraordinary dedication of Dr Huysman, who has worked tirelessly to reassemble their letters and to provide EMLO’s users with access for the very first time, via the portal of the Royal Collections The Netherlands, to images of many of the manuscripts themselves.

As the correspondences move into the union catalogue, thanks to collaboration with our colleagues Professor James Daybell and Dr Kim McLean-Fiander who created the WEMLO resource, users may choose to consult these letters in a number of different ways: by individual correspondence (as listed above); together as a combined catalogue; within the context of other correspondence from, to, or mentioning women; or alongside the correspondence of their male counterparts. We are delighted also to be showcasing this cluster of royal correspondences in a virtual exhibition, for it is here, as the curator Dr Huysman continues her painstaking work, that she will query, visualize, and discuss the shape and patterns within and across both the correspondences and the networks of correspondents as they emerge. Over the course of the next weeks and months, as Dr Huysman adds further letters, these six catalogues will swell, and we’re thrilled that work will commence also to collate the correspondences of of the sixteenth- and the eighteenth-century stadtholders’s wives. In addition, a number of closely related catalogues due for release in EMLO later this year will provide interesting perspectives and intersections, and as the threads that bind this group of correspondences thicken and tighten, we’d advise you — along with the six princesses who gaze down from the walls of the palace today — to keep an eye on developments.

The early modern individual whose calendar of correspondence is the latest to be published in EMLO may have been described as ‘invaluable’ by Alfred Rupert and Marie Boas Hall in their edition of Oldenburg’s correspondence, but one or two additional adjectives come to mind when considering his life: elusive, intriguing, curious, adventurous, and tragic — any one of these could be applied to Francis Vernon.

A memorial of Francis Vernon’s visit to Athens in 1675: his name carved on a marble wall inside the Temple of Hephaestus, on the Agora. (source of image: Alexandre J. Tessier)

Vernon, who was born in 1637, was the only Fellow of the early Royal Society to have had the misfortune to have been captured by Barbary pirates and held thereafter for a number of months as a slave. Between 1669 and 1672 he was based in Paris, where he worked as a diplomatic agent, but Vernon was also an adventurer who travelled across Europe as well as the length and breadth of the Mediterranean. He was well educated, eager for knowledge, and he spoke multiple languages. Vernon visited and made notes on ancient Greek sites that are still of relevance to archaeologists three-and-a-half centuries later, although perhaps we should not be admitting that he indulged in early modern graffiti and could have been charged today with criminal damage: his name is to be found carved into a marble wall of the temple of Hephaestus. In the course of his final journey, Vernon survived a second attack by pirates but was killed in a fight, most likely early in 1677 and somewhere near Isfahan, seemingly in a dispute over the theft of his knife. Few details of the events surrounding his untimely death are certain. What we do know, however, is that his was no ordinary life and his was no ordinary talent.

The French scholar, Alexandre J. Tessier, who has worked in detail on Sir Joseph Williamson (1633–1701) and his correspondents, collated the calendar of correspondence sent from Vernon, who was based in Paris, to Williamson, who was located at the English court. Dr Tessier has extensive knowledge of the postal system of this period and has conducted significant research in the field, a consequence of which is that users will find, for these letters, the recorded dates of receipt. Dr Tessier’s calendar may be viewed alongside that of the letters exchanged between Vernon and Oldenburg which were published by the Halls in their indispensible edition of Oldenburg’s correspondence. We hope this arrangement of parallel calendars within EMLO will prove useful, and we have set up in addition a search whereby users may view letters from all the correspondences in the union catalogue that are from, to, or mention Vernon.

One mystery concerning Vernon that might be possible to resolve involves his portrait, which was recorded last in a sale at Sotheby’s, London, on 25 April 1934. The painting, which had been in the possession of C. E. Dashwood, of Wherstead Park, near Ipswich, was described as ‘Venetian School’ and dated to circa 1660. It was a half-length portrait, inscribed on the back as follows: ‘Portrait of Mr. Vernon . . . a man of distinguished learning and ingenuity, who disliking ye measures of King Charles Government refused considerable employment and travelled into the East, where he made many valuable collections, most of which were lost by his untimely death[.] he was taken prisoner by the Algerines and returning to Venice, where he was ransomed, was painted in ye slaves dress at ye request of an eminent painter…’ A second version of the portrait, a copy, was sold as the subsequent lot. Dr Tessier has attempted to track down these portraits, thus far without success. Should anyone happen upon an image of Francis Vernon dressed his slave outfit, please be in touch …

Blaise Pascal’s ‘Pascaline’. 1652. (Musée des Arts et Métiers, Paris; source of image: Wikimedia Commons)

The latest calendar to be added to the growing set of mathematical correspondences in EMLO is centred around the letters of a prodigy. Blaise Pascal was introduced to Mersenne’s circle of Parisian savants when only in his mid-teens, at which point he was furthering significantly Girard Desargues’s work on conic sections. Educated by his father Etienne Pascal, himself a lawyer and amateur mathematician of exceptional talent, this young lad invented a calculating machine — the Pascaline — primarily to assist his father with tax calculations. He progressed to work on what became known as Pascal’s triangle, and and focused also on questions relating to the pressure of air, attempting to replicate Evangelista Torricelli’s experiments, as a result of which found himself in opposition to Descartes, Pascal’s life was altered irrevocably in 1646 following an accident on ice that left his father with a broken leg. The temporary installment of two bonesetters, the Deschamp brothers, within the Pascal family home in Rouen set in motion the family’s involvement with the Jansenist movement and resulted in one of Blaise’s siblings, Jacqueline, joining the Abbaye de Port-Royal des Champs. From 1654, three years after his father’s death, Pascal turned his attention to religion. Les Lettres provinciales were written and published in defence of Antoine Arnauld, an opponent of the Jesuits and a defender of Jansenism. Upon Blaise Pascal’s death in 1662, the philosophical work for which he became best known remained unfinished and was published subsequently as Pensées.

This calendar of correspondence, based on metadata from an edition of letters that was published in 1922, lists letters that span Pascal’s adult life from 1943 until shortly before his death. Each letter record in EMLO provides a link to the printed copy and we hope very much you set aside your summer-beach reading and dip into the world of Pascal. Should you find yourself with time to explore further, you might be interested to know that our developer, Mat Wilcoxson, has been working to refine how we search and retrieve thematic clusters of correspondences in the union catalogue and, as proof of concept, I’m thrilled to be able to demonstrate that we are able now to summon up together all the calendars of correspondence of the mathematicians listed currently in EMLO. Quite the formula for beach combing indeed!

Could you resist investigating the letters of a shoemaker whose life was transformed by his observation of light on a pewter vessel? If not, you’re in luck because this week in EMLO we welcome into the union catalogue Jakob Böhme (1575–1624), who in 1600 underwent just such an experience in the town of Görlitz .

The publication of this calendar of Böhme’s correspondence presents us with an opportunity to witness the virtual reunification between the shoemaker and his friend and supporter Abraham von Franckenberg, whose own correspondence calendar was published in the union catalogue last year. Von Franckenberg, a Silesian nobleman, took up Böhme’s cause and wrote the biography that provides the details of this particular enlightening experience. The calendar of Böhme’s correspondence in EMLO will be supplemented further — with existing records updated and new letters added — over the next few months. What you find in place at present has been taken from the letters collected in an epistolary of 1730, the metadata for which are to be found also in the inestimable inventory compiled by Monika Estermann and published in Wiesbaden in 1993. We hope very much what you encounter in EMLO is useful and enlightening (although perhaps not in the pewter bowl sense) and that you’ll keep an eye on Jakob Böhme from this point forward as his catalogue expands.

Jakob Boehme: Representation of his Cosmogony in ‘Vierzig Fragen von der Seele’ or Forty Questions of the Soul (1620). (Source of image: Wikimedia Commons)

Have you spotted the women looking out from the niches on the home page in EMLO? Today’s array of new catalogues marks the launch of Women’s Early Modern Letters Online [WEMLO], a resource and discussion forum for all early modern women’s correspondence held within EMLO.

Woman writing a letter, by Gerard Terborch. c.1655. (Mauritshuis, The Hague; source of image: Wikimedia Commons)

In 2012, Professor James Daybell and Dr Kim McLean-Fiander (the latter a former colleague from Cultures of Knowledge during its first phase), received British Academy/Leverhulme funding to bring together a community of scholars working on early modern women. Their research interests focussed on a number of key correspondences of late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth century women, the metadata for which had been collated previously over several years by James Daybell. The WEMLO project organized a series of workshops, at which scholars identified the need for a epistolary union catalogue tailored to allow searches by female correspondents, filters for letters written or received only by women, and the ability to interrogate both women’s name records and their correspondences against those of their male counterparts. Our lead developer, Mat Wilcoxson, took thse desiderata into his ‘alchemical laboratory’, and his success in this work is the cause for the first part of our celebrations today.

We are delighted also to announce the WEMLO Network and Resources hub, a bespoke area (similar to the virtual exhibition space launched in November last year to mark the Quatercentary of the dissenter Richard Baxter) that in the future will be a forum for scholars to explore, discuss, and showcase early modern women’s epistolary culture. Our third cause for celebration today is the publication of five new catalogues — those of Lady Anne Bacon; Margaret Clifford, countess of Cumberland; Anne Dudley, countess of Warwick; Lady Penelope Rich; and Lady Arbella Stuart — all of which are taken from or are based on James Daybell’s metadata. Within the next few months, a number of additional catalogues from James’s accumulated wealth of curated metadata will be published, including those for Elizabeth Bourne, a Tudor poet and prolific letter writer; Sabine Johnson, a Tudor merchant’s wife; Lady Elizabeth Russell (née Cooke and the sister of Lady Anne Bacon) — as well as several more catalogues compiled by members of the WEMLO community. Scholars may be interested to know that catalogues for Elizabeth of Bohemia, Bess of Hardwick, and a collection of the correspondences of six wives of the Dutch and Frisian stadholders are all in preparation at present and will be released in EMLO this autumn.

Over the past few weeks, as the Digital Fellows and I have worked to prepare for upload the metadata of the five WEMLO catalogues, numerous letters caught our collective eye, some on account of a beautiful hand or a distinctive voice, others because of the content. Indeed, we found ourselves in the office reading many aloud. Were we to vote, I suspect our favourite might be that of Lady Anne Bacon writing to one of her sons — Anthony (brother of Francis) — as she did so often to offer advice regarding his gout and urging him to use his ‘leggs betymes for fear of loosing in disuse’. This just a week after she had sent him ‘a hogshead of November bere . . . and a barrell also of the same bruing’. Irrespective of gout, you are all most welcome to join us tonight as we raise a glass in celebration of this vibrant scholarly community that is WEMLO (from 6pm in Oxford’s Faculty of History on George Street). We hope you enjoy these new correspondences and will take advantage of the links that have been provided, where these were available, to manuscript images, transcripts, and printed copies of the letters. The early modern women you find on EMLO’s home page today are just the beginning: in the coming months and years you will encounter many more daughters, wives, mothers, widows, spinsters, nuns, and dowagers in our online resources. Many are strong, formidable, and talented women — from political rulers in their own right, to literary and scholarly figures. John Knox might not be happy, but most certainly we are!