Folger Shakespeare Library
CELM

Elizabeth Jocelin

1596–1622

Introduction

Elizabeth Jocelin (née Brooke) is recognized for her notable contribution to the mother's legacy genre, an unfinished work written for her first child, her daughter Theodora, whose birth cost Jocelin her life nine days later. The work was edited and steered through the press in 1624 by the Calvinist minister Dr Thomas Goad (1576-1638). It is possible that one of the two recorded surviving manuscripts of The mother's legacie (JoE 2) was prepared by Goad for that edition, although it bears no markings to indicate any actual use in the printing shop itself. What is, however, almost certainly Jocelin's autograph manuscript of the work also survives (*JoE 1). This has enabled editors to establish a reasonably authoritative text, whereby the alterations and additions made by Goad in his printed edition may be properly distinguished.

One other item recorded here (JoE 3) is a printed exemplum of her legacy containing a reader's manuscript verse and prose, giving advice to children, etc., which may in part have been inspired by Jocelin's work.

Prose

The mother's legacie, to her unborne childe

First published, edited by Thomas Goad, London, 1624.

*JoE 1
Autograph

An apparently autograph MS of Jocelin's unfinished legacy, in a neat roman hand, with her occasional deletions and revisions in different inks, including a dedicatory epistle to her husband Taurell Jocelin, 44 duodecimo leaves (plus sixteen blanks), in 19th-century dark blue velvet.

1622

Acquired in 1866.

This MS discussed, with facsimiles of ff. 1r, 3v, 8v, and 44r-v, in Sylvia Brown, The Approbation of Elizabeth Jocelin, EMS, 9 (2000), pp. 129-64, and the MS is edited by her in her Women's Writing in Stuart England (Stroud, 1999), pp. 106-31 (notes pp. 131-9), with a facsimile of ff. 5v-6r, on pp. 94-5. The MS is also transcribed diplomatically, with a facsimile example, in parallel to the 1624 printed text, in the edition by Jean LeDrew Metcalfe (Toronto, Buffalo and London, 2000). A facsimile of the first page, with transcription, also in Reading Early Modern Women, ed. Helen Ostovich and Elizabeth Sauer (New York & London, 2004), pp. 112-13. A full list of contents of the MS is in the online Perdita Project.

JoE 2

Copy, in a single hand, including the author's dedicatory epistle to her husband Taurell Jocelin and Goad's prefatory Approbation, with what is possibly Goad's signature on f. 5r, 51 octavo leaves, in modern red morocco gilt.

Possibly in Thomas Goad's hand as an edited transcript of Jocelin's original MS (JoE 1), perhaps intended to be used as copy-text for his printed edition (1624), or alternatively a transcript of that edition.

c.1624

A facsimile of the first page is in the edition of the work by Jean LeDrew Metcalfe (Toronto, Buffalo and London, 2000). A full list of contents of the MS is in the online Perdita Project.

JoE 3

An exemplum of the printed edition of 1684 with a series of sixteen MS poems by one Joseph Sparrow, with other didactic material giving advice to children, etc., on four flyleaves and sig. Q4v.

1705-6

Other inscribed names of John Story, Durant, John Cready, Jo Hendy, and Ann Richards. Christie's, 24 August 1973.

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