John Donne and the Conway Papers

Patronage and Manuscript Circulation in the Early Seventeenth Century

Daniel Starza Smith

The first book to enquire explicitly into Donne's very first readers, asking how they acquired his verses, and what they did with them once they owned them
Fills a hugely important gap in current scholarship on Donne, exposing the mechanics of his early textual circulation
The fullest biography to date of the Conway family between c.1550 and c.1650
Provides the most detailed account to date of the Conway Papers
Original bibliographical analysis of manuscripts by John Donne and Ben Jonson, including the important Westmoreland and Leconfield manuscripts, and copies of Donne's iBiathanatos

John Donne and the Conway Papers

Patronage and Manuscript Circulation in the Early Seventeenth Century

Daniel Starza Smith

Description

How and why did men and women send handwritten poetry, drama, and literary prose to their friends and social superiors in the seventeenth century-and what were the consequences of these communications? Within this culture of manuscript publication, why did John Donne (1572-1631), an author who attempted to limit the circulation of his works, become the most transcribed writer of his age? John Donne and the Conway Papers examines these questions in great detail. Daniel Starza Smith investigates a seventeenth-century archive, the Conway Papers, in order to explain the relationship between Donne and the archive's owners, the Conway family. Drawing on an enormous amount of primary material, he situates Donne's writings within the broader workings of manuscript circulation, from the moment a scribe identified a source text, through the process of transcription and onwards to the social ramifications of this literary circulation.

John Donne and the Conway Papers offers the first full-length analysis of three generations of the Conway family between Elizabeth's succession and the end of the Civil War, explaining what the Conway Papers are and how they were amassed, how the archive came to contain a concentration of manuscript poetry by Donne, and what the significance of this fact is, in terms of seventeenth-century politics, patronage, and culture. Answers to these questions cast new light on the early transmission of Donne's verse and prose. Throughout, John Donne and the Conway Papers emphasizes the importance of Donne's closest friends and earliest readers--such as George Garrard, Rowland Woodward, and Sir Henry Goodere--in the dissemination of his poetry. Goodere in particular emerges as a key agent in the early circulation of Donne's verse, and this book offers the first sustained account of his literary activities.

John Donne and the Conway Papers

Patronage and Manuscript Circulation in the Early Seventeenth Century

Daniel Starza Smith

Introduction
Part I: The Conway Family and the Conway Papers
1. 'At length I fell in to Imagination': Sir John Conway
2. 'An honest man, who knows more about the sword than the pen': Edward, First Viscount Conway and Killultagh
3. The Knight's Move: Conway and A Game at Chess
4. Fide et Amore: the First Viscount Conway's Legacies
5. 'What is a Gentleman but his pleasure?' Edward, Second Viscount Conway and Killultagh
6. Booklets, Books, Ballads, and Birds: the Second Viscount Conway as Collector
7. The Curious History of the Conway Papers
8. Conceptualizing the Conway Papers
Part II: John Donne, Sir Henry Goodere, and Manuscript Circulation
9. Donne's Verse Letters
10. Sir Henry Goodere, Poet and Scribe
11. Problematum miscellaneorum: the Problems and Biathanatos, 1603-10
12. The Intelligence that Moves: Donne, Goodere, and Conway, 1610-1615
13. Textual Transmission and Court Patronage in the 1620s
14. Conflicts of Interest: Donne, Goodere, Conway, and Seventeenth-Century Patronage
Conclusion: Patronage and Manuscript Circulation
Appendix 1: Conway and Goodere Family Trees
Appendix 2: Literary Manuscripts in the Conway Papers

John Donne and the Conway Papers

Patronage and Manuscript Circulation in the Early Seventeenth Century

Daniel Starza Smith

Author Information

Daniel Starza Smith is British Academy Post-Doctoral Fellow at Lincoln College, Oxford. He works on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literary history, with a particular focus on John Donne and Ben Jonson, the circulation of texts in manuscript, and the literary patronage of early modern women. He has published on John Donne Junior, the history of libraries, and early modern letters, and has edited the poetry of Sir Henry Goodere for the John Donne Journal. He previously lectured at University College London and the University of Reading, and with Joshua Eckhardt has co-edited Manuscript Miscellanies in Early Modern England (Ashgate, 2014).

John Donne and the Conway Papers

Patronage and Manuscript Circulation in the Early Seventeenth Century

Daniel Starza Smith

Reviews and Awards

Winner of the 2016 University English Book Prize

"...the information Smith provides about these papers will enable further inquiry into its literary treasures, especially with regard to piecing together our understanding of scribal culture...The Conway papers have much more to reveal about the workings of the scribal networks that crisscrossed England during these years. The biographical and bibliographic information assembled here will greatly facilitate all future work on this important collection." --Steven W. May, Renaissance Quarterly

"This is a book designed for weathered manuscript scholars. Its undisputed champions are...the unruly archive that lies at the heart of the book...is a very valuable addition to Donne scholarship, but its greater achievement, to my mind, is that it demonstrates the validity of a book historical methodology that awards the material text pride of place...the book is dedicated to a host of minor writers, and so reveals a system of manuscript exchange that is decidedly more true to literary history as it messily shot up from the ground, rather than to a single author-focused literary history...successfully arguing that literary meaning is (in part) enshrined in transmission history, and that our editorship and literary criticism relies ever more on the type of intelligent, persistent, and expansive archival research that is so evidently on display here." --Sebastiaan Verweij, Notes and Queries

"...a determined genealogical hunting back through the transmission history of an archive that conceptually and practically must always to some extent have resisted clear categorisation or boundaries...which the sparky scholarly deference of Starza Smith's prose, and his admirable privileges of access, bring up to, and engage with, the present moment....Starza Smith follows through this project brilliantly for the smaller but still unruly Conway papers, tracking them sensitively through the three generations and the very full century of "political and cultural activities" over which they first came together (19), and the later centuries during which they were dispersed and variously rehoused. Thanks to this painstaking and detailed work, these papers and their archive may now very well be as close as they are ever likely to come to being (in Starza Smith's happy phrase) "reconstituted to their messiest state" (169)." --Tom Lockwood, The Seventeenth Century

"This is a work of hugely impressive scholarship which opens up new resources for future scholars: a ground-breaking book which redefines its field." --Judges' citation, University English Book Prize

"Where other scholars have surveyed trends across a range of poets, Smith grounds his study on the materiality of the surviving artefacts in one extraordinary archive to show how authoritative copies of Donne's works were collected by the Conways. At the heart of Smith's important work is an examination of the very idea of literary patronage: how and why literary works and familiar letters were exchanged among clients and patrons." --The Review of English Studies