"A List of My Books," from A
Commonplace Book compiled by several people ca., 1588-1636.
This inventory of books is contained in a blank book of variously sized sheets of paper, into which Lady Anne Southwell and her second husband, Captain Henry Sibthorpe, each made entries. Lady Southwell's entries provide copious examples of a poet at work. The list of books illustrated here is of particular interest, as it indicates the possession of a substantial family library. Numbering one hundred ten, the inventory includes those books she left to Captain Sibthorpe on her death in 1636. It mixes works by Calvin (nos. 1 and 2), Spenser's Faerie Queene (no. 13), John Donne's Poems (no. 23), a book by Richard Remnant "touching bees" (no. 47), and Augustine's Confessions (no. 76). The organizing principle of the list is the size of the books. It seems to have been added to in several stages; it also snakes back to the first opening of pages after using up the available space on a second. Lady Anne Southwell could not have written the list herself, as some of the items were published after her death. But this personal library almost certainly is built around the three trunks of books listed in another inventory of her possessions made five years before her death.
The entry on the top of the right-hand page is a receipt of payment to a workman in the 1580s. The juxtaposition of disparate items on the same page indicates the multiple uses and users of the commonplace book over a period of many years.
For more information, see Sister Jean Carmel Cavanaugh, S.L., "The Library of Lady Southwell and Captain Sibthorpe," Studies in Bibliography 20 (1967): 243-254 and Jean Klene, C.S.C., editor, The Southwell-Sibthorpe Commonplace Book, Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, vol. 147 (Tempe, Arizona: 1997).
Folger Call No. V.b. 198. Pages 64v- 65r.
