Martha Moulsworth

Verse

The Memorandum of Martha Moulsworth Widowe
('The tenth day of the winter month Nouember')

An autobiographical poem, comprising 55 couplets (corresponding to the author's age), dated 10 November 1632. First published in My Name Was Martha: A Renaissance Woman's Autobiographical Poem by Martha Moulsworth, ed. Robert C. Evans and Barbara Wiedemann (West Cornwall, CT, 1993).

MhM 1

Copy, in a cursive mixed hand, superscribed Nouember the 10th 1632, on three pages.

In: A folio miscellany of verse and prose, in several hands, 131 pages (plus numerous blanks), in contemporary calf gilt.

Inscribed on a flyleaf Capton Roydome: i.e. owned and possibly compiled in part by Sir Marmaduke Rawdon (1583-1646), merchant, and one of his servants, perhaps Richard Swinarton, whose name appears elsewhere.

c.1629-32.

Sotheby's, 16 May 1972, lot 448.

Edited from this MS, and discussed, in Evans and Wiedemann (1993). Also edited (and extensively discussed by various contributors), with a complete facsimile, in the collection of essays on the poem The Muses Females Are: Martha Moulsworth and Other Women Writers of the English Renaissance, ed. Robert C. Evans and Anne C. Little (West Cornwall, CT, 1995) (esp. pp. 203-20). Facsimile of the first page, with transcription, also in Reading Early Modern Women, ed. Helen Ostovich and Elizabeth Sauer (New York & London, 2004), pp. 258-9.

Documents

Will
MhM 2
A registered copy of Martha Moulsworth's last will and testament, 19 July 1646. 1646.

Edited in The Muses Females Are: Martha Moulsworth and Other Women Writers of the English Renaissance, ed. Robert C. Evans and Anne C. Little (West Cornwall, CT, 1995), pp. 221-4.