Ink, Stink Bait, Revenge, and Queen Elizabeth - by Steven W May & Arthur F Marotti (Paperback)

About the Book

Steven W. May and Arthur F. Marotti present the text and comment upon a recently discovered "household book" from sixteenth-century England.

Book Synopsis

In Ink, Stink Bait, Revenge, and Queen Elizabeth, Steven W. May and Arthur F. Marotti present a recently discovered "household book" from sixteenth-century England. Its main scribe, John Hanson, was a yeoman who worked as a legal agent in rural Yorkshire. His book, a miscellaneous collection of documents that he found useful or interesting, is a rare example of a middle-class provincial anthology that contains, in addition to works from the country's cultural center, items of local interest seldom or never disseminated nationally.

Among the literary highlights of the household book are unique copies of two ballads, whose original print versions have been lost, describing Queen Elizabeth's procession through London after the victory over the Spanish Armada; two poems attributed to Elizabeth herself; and other verse by courtly writers copied from manuscript and print sources. Of local interest is the earliest-known copy of a 126-stanza ballad about a mid-fourteenth-century West Yorkshire feud between the Eland and Beaumont families. The manuscript's utilitarian items include a verse calendar and poetic Decalogue, model legal documents, real estate records, recipes for inks and fish baits, and instructions for catching rabbits and birds. Hanson combined both professional and recreational interests in his manuscript, including material related to his legal work with wills and real estate transactions.

As May and Marotti argue in their cultural and historical interpretation of the text, Hanson's household book is especially valuable not only for the unusual texts it preserves but also for the ways in which it demonstrates the intersection of the local and national and of popular and elite cultures in early modern England.

Review Quotes

Ink, Stink Bait, Revenge, and Queen Elizabeth is a marvelous example of history from below, a highly readable study that demonstrates the value of close, detailed attention to particular manuscripts.

Each section of Ink, Stink Bait begins with analysis and commentary and then moves to the carefully edited and transcribed texts, many of which are followed by textual notes on the history of the text and its relation to other extant sources. The introductions provide fascinating contextual readings of the texts... the juxtaposition of texts and critical approaches recreates the experience of being immersed in a late sixteenth-century provincial community of readers at a time when the idea of the book was still forming in the cultural conscience. Ultimately, Ink, Stink Bait asks us to reconsider what a book is, at least in an historical sense, and likewise serves to expand our assumptions to what a critical text can aspire.

In sum, they have made a valuable and thought-provoking contribution to what we know of Elizabethan scribal culture, rendered even more important because so very much of that activity can no longer be recalled or interpreted. Their work is equally valuable for recognizing the potential of that culture in a more balanced view of Early Modern English society in general, and for encouraging the further exploration of contemporary cultural themes and variations.

Their rich and fascinating account both analyzes and contextualizes the private archive of a Yorkshireman born in the reign of Henry VIII and alive until the very end of the sixteenth century... The authors explore all these complexities with skill and learning in an absorbing study that has much to offer manuscript scholars of all periods.

About the Author

Steven W. May is Adjunct Professor of English at Emory University and Senior Research Fellow, School of English, University of Sheffield. He is the author of The Elizabethan Courtier Poets: The Poems and their Contexts, editor of books including Queen Elizabeth I: Selected Works, and coeditor of Elizabethan Poetry: A Bibliography and First-Line Index of English Verse, 1559-1603. Arthur F. Marotti is Distinguished Professor of English Emeritus at Wayne State University. He is the author of Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric, also from Cornell, and of John Donne, Coterie Poet and Religious Ideology and Cultural Fantasy: Catholic and Anti-Catholic Discourses in Early Modern England.