University of Virginia Library

Sears Jayne, Library Catalogues of the English Renaissance (1956), p. 46. Mr. Jayne continues: "The tradition of the scholarly woman in Elizabethan England is certainly borne out by what is known of their books, but so far as I know no actual catalogues have survived."

The manuscript contains, for example, notes on "predicables" (fol.5v), a paraphrase of Seneca's "booke of Prouidence" (fol. 8), an abstract of the lives of the Roman emperors taken from Pliny and Suetonius (fol.30v. See entry 7 below) notes from St. Augustine and others (fol.66v-67), notes on animal lore (fol.68-68v), and a collection of "Apothegmes" (fol.69-69v). These, like her poems, give evidence of Lady Southwell's reading and studies.

An inventory of Lady Southwell's personal possessions at the time she was changing her residence from Clerkenwell to Acton in 1631 (12 and 14 May), mentions four trunks, three of which contained books (Folger MS.v.b.198, fol. 60v).

A number of memoranda relating to the Sibthorpe family and dating back to 1587 are found in the manuscript (fol. 5-6v).

The first folio of the manuscript is headed: "The workes of the Lady Ann Sothwell: Decemb. 2° 1626." Apparently this is the year of Lady Southwell's marriage to Captain Sibthorpe, for he writes at the time of her death, 1636, that she had been "tenne years" his wife (fol.74).

However, in his 1834 catalogue of Southwell manuscripts Thorpe remarks that Captain Sibthorpe "died in London, very old, in or about 1664." The evidence for this assertion has not been discovered.

The word was written Poulton's then the apostrophe and s were deleted and the comma added.