Abstract

This article considers the manuscript commonplace book of Lucy Hutchinson. The article analyzes her practices of collection and transcription, locating them within wider contexts of midcentury manuscript compilation and transmission. It is clear that the manuscript is the creation of more than one hand, suggesting that Hutchinson was working within a family or intellectual coterie. Furthermore, by considering codicological, dating, stylistic, and poetic issues relating to the largest text in the commonplace book—John Denham's translation of Virgil's Aeneid, printed in various forms during the 1650s—I demonstrate that the manuscript suggests new, complex, and striking relationships during the mid-seventeenth century that challenge our assumptions about poetic, political, and cultural identities.

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