TAYLOR (Rev. Thomas, D.D.), 1576-1632.

Three Treatises: The Pearle of the Gospell, The Pilgrims Profession: and A Glasse for Gentlewomen to dresse themselves by.

WITH A SECTION ON HOW WOMEN SHOULD DRESS

To which is adde a short Introduction to the worthy receiving of the Lords Supper, By Thomas Taylor, Doctor in Divinity, and late Preacher of Aldermanbury Church in London.

London: by I. B[eale] for John Bartlet, 1633.

Second Combined Edition (Second Edition of Part 1, Third Edition of Part 2, First Edition of the Catechism).

12mo. [Binding: 240 x 186 x 12 mm]. [12], 98, [6], 99-159, 162-163, p. 160, 157-228, 149-160pp. Collation: [cross]6, A-K¹² L6. General title (as above) and separate titles to the three principal pieces and the final catechism. In the catechism there are two stubs visible before signature ‘L’ which may signify one or more cancels (the pagination becomes erratic from here to the end “149, 130-131, 152-153, 134-135, 156-157, 138-139, 160”. L1r has been lightly inked. Fore-margin and corners creased at the beginning and end; slight dampstain at the fore-edge of the general title-page; weakness in the paper causing a vertical closed tear in the fore-margin of E12; a couple of small ink-blots in the catechism. Fine copy bound in contemporary limp vellum, the fore-edges slightly turned-in, the covers tooled with a single gilt fillet frame intersecting at the corners with a gilt tool of an angel holding a scroll inscribed “GLO | RI[A]DEO”, the spine divided into four panels by three gilt rules with a seven-petalled gilt flower in each panel (the angel on the front cover rubbed affecting the inscription and almost completely rubbed-away on the lower; front flyleaf largely torn-away, no front pastedown; rear flyleaf and pastedown intact; two pairs of fabric ties missing), 1633.

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STC 23856 (British Library, Congregational Library [2 copies], Dr Williams’s Library (part 2 only) now at John Rylands Library Manchester, Bodley, Cambridge UL, Museum of London; Folger, Toronto UL, Union Theological Seminary NYC (the copy reproduced on EEBO). The Museum of London copy has the signatures of Elizabeth Cromwell (1598-1665), wife of the Protector, Sir Oliver, Elizabeth St John, Frances Bernard and Lucy Bernard.

Before accepting a lectureship and curacy at St Mary Aldermanbury in the City of London in 1625 Thomas Taylor, a native of Yorkshire, had “directed a puritan seminary, 'a little nursery of young Preachers' (Life, sig. B2v)” (ODNB) at Reading in Berkshire where his younger brother Theophilus was a minister. There is a survey of Taylor’s voluminous writings by S. Mutchow Towers, Control of Religious Printing in Early Stuart England (Boydell Press, 2002), chapter 2 “Thomas Jackson and Thomas Taylor.” It includes a bibliography of Taylor’s works and editions.

The Pearle of the Gospell is a distillation of sermons “preached on several Faire daies” (note on p. 96) and ther dedicated to Mrs Elizabeth Backus [Backhouse], wife of Mr Samuel Backus, JP “and to their three vertuous and religious daughters”, Mrs Mary Standen, Mrs Flower Backus [née Henshawe, wife of their elder son Sir John Backhouse, KB], and Mrs Elizabeth Bellingham.

Samuel Backhouse (d. 1626, aged 72), of Swallowfield, Wokingham, near Reading, Berkshire, married Elizabeth (d. 1630), daughter of Sir John Borlace, of Little Marlow, Buckinghamshire. He was High Sheriff of Berkshire in 1598 and 1601. His younger son William (1593-1662), alchemist and antiquary, inherited the Swallowfield estate on the death of his elder brother John, MP for Great Marlow 1625-9 and a Knight of the Bath, in 1649.

The Pilgrims Profession (on the subtitle it is spelt ‘PILRIMS) is a funeral sermon for Mrs Mary Gunter, née Cresswell (1586-1622), a celebrated convert to Protestantism with an ODNB entry by Retha M. Warnicke. It is dedicated by her husband Humphrey Gunter (“H. G.”) to their patroness / employer Lettice (Knollys) Blount (1543-1634), dowager Countess of Essex and of Leicester and widow of Sir Christopher Blount who was executed in 1601 for his part in the fatal revolt of her son Robert, 2nd Earl of Essex, in 1601.

The Pilgrims Profession was first published in 1622 (STC 23843, British Library only). It was reprinted as the second part of Two Treatises, 1624-25 (STC 23854, title dated 1624, Bodley only; STC 23855, variant with the title dated 1625, British Library [2 imperfect], Birmingham Central Library [King’s Norton parish library formed by Thomas Hall, B.D. (1610-65)]; Folger).

Appended to Taylor’s sermon, which contains no personal eulogy on its subject whom he may not have known, is “A Profitable Memoriall of the Conversion, Life, and Death of Mistris Marie Gunter, set up as a Monument to be looked upon both by Protestants and Papists.” (pp. 157-91). Most unusually, it was written by her husband Humphrey Gunter and is the only source for her life and religious struggles which included, in a time of desperation, doubt in the existence of God (a rare reference to atheism).

Mary Cresswell, an orphan since infancy was brought up as a Catholic by “an Old Lady, honourable for her place, but a strong Papist, who nousled and mis-led this Orphan in Popery” until, at the age of 14 in 1599, she entered the household of Sir Christopher Blount, a kinsman of her mother. After his execution in 1601 she remained in the countess’s household at Drayton Basset, Staffordshire, until her marriage to Humphrey Gunter, another member of her household.

“Upon discovering that Mary was planning to join a Catholic nunnery abroad the countess confiscated her rosary and devotional books and, with the assistance of her chaplain, John Wilson, converted her ward to protestantism. Subsequently, according to her husband's later account of her spiritual pilgrimage, Mary overcame a period of temptation when she doubted her conversion's validity and even God's existence. From 1607, besides attending public and private religious services, she read the scriptures daily and fasted six days a year. In 1617 she began to keep a catalogue of her sins and, recalling that some of the old lady's servants had bribed her to steal money from their mistress, Mary gave part of the marriage portion bestowed upon her by the countess to the old lady's heir. ... [This] volume is significant because it was one of only about two dozen commemorative sermons for women that were published between 1601 and 1630; in addition only one similar publication in this period, that honouring Katherine Brettergh in 1601, contained so lengthy an appended statement. Although it proved less popular than that of Brettergh it still appealed to purchasers who longed to know about the trials of an extremely religious woman who had been snatched from Catholicism. Reprinted three times by 1633, it was included by Samuel Clarke in The Lives of Sundry Eminent Persons in this Later Age (1683).” (ODNB).

Mary Gunter’s story has been cited by Retha M. Warnicke in her essay “Eulogies for Women: Public Testimony of Their Godly Example and Leadership” in Betty S. Travitsky & Adele F. Seeff, eds, Attending to Women in Early Modern England (University of Delaware, Press, 1994), pp. 176-78; by Robert N. Watson in The Rest is Silence: Death as Annihilation in the English Renaissance (University of California Press, 1994), “Epilogue: The Deaths of Two Women” pp. 316-21; and by Femke Molkamp in her essay “Seventeenth-Century Funeral Sermons and Exemplary Female Devotion: Gendered Spaces and Histories” in Renaissance and Reformation / Renaissance et Réforme, Vol. 35/1 (Winter 2012), pp. 43-63.

Humphrey Gunter’s account is notable for its description of Mary’s reading habits, and it is cited as an example of female reading in Patrick Collinson, Arnold Hunt and Alexandra Walsham’s essay “Religious Publishing in England 1557-1640" in The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, Vol. IV:

“Thomas Taylor’s funeral sermon for Mrs Mary Gunter, for example, declared that every year ‘for the space of fifteene yeares together’, she read through the whole Bible ‘beginning her taske upon her birthday, and reading every day so many Chapters as to bring it about just with the year.’.” (p. 53)

“Mrs Mary Gunter committed to memory ‘many select Chapters, and speciall Psalmes’, which she repeated to herself every week, because ‘she knew not what daies of tryall or persecution might come, wherein she might be deprived of her Bible, and other good books and helpes’.” (p. 63)

“Some religious books were specifically designed for women readers. The three works comprising Thomas Taylor’s Three treatises consist of a group of sermons dedicated to a godly gentlewoman Elizabeth backhouse, and her daughters, a funeral sermon for our friend Mary Gunter, and a treatise entitled ‘A glasse for gentlewomen to dresse themselves by’, its subject, female apparell.” (p. 64).

A Glasse for Gentlewomen to dresse themselves by (pp. [193]-221) was first printed in Two Treatises (1624-25). It conforms with other polemical puritan attacks on female make-up, adornment and luxurious clothing of the second and third decades of the 17th Century of which the best-know is probably Thomas Tuke’s A Treatise Against Painting and Tincturing of Men and Women (1616). A Glasse for Gentlewomen was quoted by Patricia Phillippy in Painting Women: Cosmetics, Canvases, and Early Modern Culture (Baltimore, 2006, pp. 136-7, 162) but has otherwise apparently received no notice.

The final part, A Short Introduction to the worthy receiving of the Sacrament of the Lords Supper, printed here for the first and only time, is a short catechistical text dealing only with the Sacrament of Communion. that escaped the notice of Ian Green’s The Christian’s ABC: Catechisms and Catechizing in England c. 1530-1740 (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1996). In the folio volume of Taylor’s previously unpublished Workes (1653), “Certain Catechistical Exercises Treating on the Grounds of Religion” written for his parishioners at Aldermanbury occupy pp. 1-168.

The Pearle of the Gospell and The Pilgrims Profession and A Glasse for Gentlewomen to dresse by were advertised to appear in a third and last volume of Taylor’s Works (1659) as "in the press" but this volume was never published.

The binding: The simple gilt-ruled limp vellum binding is adorned with a small stamp of an angel holding a scroll that should read “GLORIA DEO” but actually reads “GLO | RIDEO”. It is a crudely recut version of at least two other similar stamps in use on 12mo and smaller vellum bindings from the second and third decades of the century.

Most notably they are found on the original bindings contained in the contents of three of the four Jacobean travelling libraries commissioned by William Hakewill and now at the British Library (made for Sir Julius Caesar; an angel appears on the theology and philosophy volumes on the top shelf), Brotherton Library Leeds (made for a member of the Madden family; all the volumes have angel) and Toledo Museum of Art (made for a son of Sir Nicholas Bacon; the original volumes all have the same angel tool as the others; the replacement volumes have two other versions). The bindings in the Huntington Library travelling library (made for Sir Thomas Egerton) have “twenty-one volumes with the royal arms and eighteen with a figure who appears to be a wise virgin” (Nixon & Foot). The surviving books from these travelling libraries are almost all in Latin, with a couple in French but none in English. See: Howard M. Nixon & William A. Jackson, “English Seventeenth century Travelling Libraries”, Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society, Vol. 7/3 (1979), pp. 294-32. Howard M. Nixon & Mirjam M. Foot, The History of Decorated Bookbinding in England (Oxford, 1992), pp. 48-50 & pl. 41.

More widely, angels can be found on a variety of small vellum bindings on English books. These are a few examples we have noticed:

Edward Topsell, Two Soliloquies (1610). UCLA Clark Library (Chrzanowski 1610t *)

Sir Hugh Plat, Delights for Ladies (1617) and A Closet for Ladies and Gentlewomen (1618). Yale University, Beinecke Library (BEIN 2005 970). This has the inscriptions of four contemporary female owners. See Rachel Wilson’s blog: earlymodernfemalebookownership.wordpress.com/tag/rachel-wilson/

John Donne, Devotions (1622). Robert S Pirie collection, Sotheby, New York, I, 2/12/2015, lot 267 (present location unknown)

Sir Hugh Plat, Delights for Ladies (1624) and A Closet for Ladies and Gentlewomen (1624). Sale, Swann Galleries, New York, 22/3/1990, lot 170 (present location unknown).

John Gee, Steps of Ascension unto God, or, a Ladder to Heaven (1625). British Library (C.111.b.1 - ex Egerton-Bridgewater library)

John Donne, Devotions (1627). John Lawson, sale, Dominic Winter, 11/12/2019, lot 232 (present location unknown).

Joseph Hall, Occasional Meditations (1630). Sale, Christie, 22/10/1992 part of lot 161 (present location unknown).

Robert Powell, The Life of Alfred, or, Alvred (1634). Prof. E. G. Stanley, sale, Forum, 28/1/2021, lot 50 (present location unknown).

One must presume that they were just trade rather than bespoke bindings but their restriction to small vellum bindings on theological and recipe books (except for the Powell) may suggest that they designed to attract a female audience.

Provenance: A very few short marginal ink notes and a few sidenotes neatly underlined. Ol pencil name “W Thomas” repeated on the rear flyleaf. Old ink shelfmark at the head of the general title of what must have been a large library: “I. 2. 23.”

Stock No.
259752
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