Paul Salzman

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by Paul Salzman

I am at the early stages of a large project on almanacs. I’m investigating the readership and use through time of a large sample of what was the most popular printed item in the seventeenth century. Almanacs were like a combination of calendar, diary, and encyclopaedia. The standard format for an early modern almanac began with a monthly calendar, which was usually set out at one month to a page, divided up into days, often with a small space left to note down appointments. Astronomical information on phases of the moon and lengths of days was often provided, as were feast days and other kinds of holidays, and sometimes information on best times for planting, or harvesting, or administering medicine. Useful information in tables often included distances of towns from London, market days, tide tables, and medical information. Most almanacs included a considerable amount of astrological information, with positions of the planets at set times of the year and the effect they would have. And finally, most almanacs contained predictions for the year ahead; at times these were simply about weather events, but often they were politically oriented, an aspect of almanacs which became much more significant during the civil war, when there were almanacs promoting the cause of parliament, and counter almanacs promoting the case of the royalists and the king.

Almanacs were often heavily annotated, with many of them being printed with blank interleaves, or buyers added interleaves when having them bound. While not much studied, Adam Smyth, in his influential book on early modern autobiography, showed how a set of almanacs could be read (cautiously) as a kind of life writing. While not all almanacs contained marginal or interleaved writing by users over time, about one in six did offer some form of readership marking (this estimated percentage may change as my study proceeds). As someone who has spent my whole career working on early modern women, I was of course keen to trace women’s engagement with almanacs. It is still early days, but I have traced women’s engagement with almanacs through examples in the Emmerson Collection in the State Library of Victoria (Australia), and hope to find more when I explore almanacs in the Bodleian later this year. But I was especially hopeful to follow up the almanacs produced by the first (known) woman to write them: Sarah Jinner.

Copies of four of Jinner’s almanacs are extant: 1658,1659, 1660, and 1664. While they contain the standard monthly diary format, and include astronomical and  astrological information, 1658 and 1659 have feisty prefaces, and a large range of medical information addressing female sexual and reproductive health, and to a lesser extent male sexual health. In 1658’s preface, Jinner says ‘You may wonder to see one of our sex in print especially in the Celestial sciences. I might urge much in my defence; yea, more than the volume of this book can contain’. Jinner continues with a polemical attack on a society that supresses female learning: ‘many other rare benefits the world reapeth by women, although it is the policy of men, to keep us from education and schooling . . . we have as good judgement and memory, and I am sure as good fancy as men, if not better’. She also offers a very early appreciation of the literary skills of Margaret Cavendish and Katherine Phillips: ‘What rare poets of our sex were of old, and now of late the Countess of Newcastle. And I pray you, what a rare poem hath one Mistress Katherine Phillips near Cardigan writ…who, if her modesty would permit, her wit would put down many men’s in a masculine strain’.

So as you can imagine, I was keen to see how readers responded to Jinner. There are an extremely small number of Jinner’s almanacs that have survived. This is most likely an indication that they were popular and, being small black-letter volumes that average about 35 pages, which would most often have been bought unbound and stab-stitched, were read into oblivion or repurposed as waste-paper. I would have expected, with the useful medical information provided, that more might have been bound and kept for future use. There are only five copies of 1658, four of 1659, two of 1660 and one of 1664. Or at least, that is what ESTC says; in fact, the Wellcome Institute’s copy of 1658 is a ghost, and so is the Yale Sterling Memorial Library copy of 1660; so there are copies of 1658 at the British Library, the Guildhall Library, a partial copy in the Bodleian Library, and at the Bibliotheksverbund Bayern Munich; of 1659 at the British Library, the Bodleian Library, Balliol College Oxford, and the Huntington Library; of 1660 at the British Library; and of 1664 at Edinburgh University Library. Of the ten known (and actual) copies surviving, I have examined or had examined all but one (the Munich 1658), and they bear no trace whatsoever of reader engagement: not a scribble, not an underline, not a mark.

What does an absence of marginalia mean in this case? (Apart from heartburn on the researcher’s part.) At the most obvious level it could mean that Jinner’s almanacs weren’t popular, were bought but not used. But the tiny number of survivals, combined with the preface to 1659 in which Jinner declares the first to be a great success, indicates rather that they were all read/used out of existence, with those that remain preserved for various purposes. This is indicated by the fact that, for example, the British Library copies are bound together, and the Balliol College copy is bound with eight other almanacs. Individual copies like the Huntington Library’s 1659 don’t have any provenance data, but it is most likely that they originated with a collector who wanted to preserve a copy. That this occurred frequently with almanacs is evident from a large number that exist in bound collections, many of them similarly pristine.

I should also note that nearly all these copies that are held by libraries (and of course I have no idea how many, if any, are in private hands) have what we might call possessive institutional marginalia, either a written in call number, as we see on the last page of Huntington 1659, or a library stamp, such as that on sig. Av of Bodleian’s 1658, or on the final page of British Library’s 1660. These marks seem perhaps slightly admonitory, given the absence of any early marks: they indicate possession and of course also a warning that modern readers can’t add anything of their own to the item or think that they might spirit it away. So any reading/usage history of Jinner has to be projected back or deduced, but that in a way is as valuable an exercise in book history as using marginalia to intuit reader activity, though it is considerably less exciting.