Folger Shakespeare Library
CELM

Martha Moulsworth

1577–1646

Introduction

Martha Moulsworth (née Dorset) is known as a writer from a single autobiographical poem, one of the earliest of its kind by a woman. This was effectively discovered in a manuscript commonplace book (MhM 1) and brought to public attention in the 1990s. It has since prompted a flurry of scholarly articles and discussions.

Robert C. Evans, 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. 263-5, speculates whether other poems by Moulsworth survive, such as in British Library, Add. MS 18044, which includes poems and writings by members of her circle, but as he admits, it may be an impossible task to determine authorship. She may, he suggests, also be responsible for the verses on the gravestone of her third husband and final son: six lines beginning Now seaunty seaun yeares past (myne only Sonne).

The only other known document by Martha Moulsworth is her will, a registered copy of which survives (MhM 2).

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.

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.

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.

Yale, Osborn, others (Osborn MS fb 150 item 6)

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.

National Archives, Kew (PROB 11/197)

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