A poetry reader can develop the kind of intimacy with authors that brings a sense of confidence and purpose, by adopting a smallish personal 'stable' of writers whose work is followed in the long-term way. This seems to be the best way of maturing and gaining pleasure as a poetry reader, or acquiring the necessary depth as a scholar or critic, if that is their aspiration or their on-going enterprise. A second way of achieving this goal is to keep a log-book or diary (or their electronic equivalents) of their reading in which they 'talk back' to the poets whose work they have adopted. Thirdly, an additional layer should be added to their 'stable', consisting of a couple of the best-known contemporary or historical poets, on whom there is a large or growing body of critical writing.

For the poet who had risen to prominence as the major panegyrist of restored Stuart power, King Charles II's death inevitably prompted reflections on the origins of the dynasty and on its future. The longest verse panegyric written by John Dryden, Threnodia Augustalis, dwells mostly on Charles's death and legacy. King James II held his first meeting with the Privy Council, one day after Charles's death. He addressed all the members, assuring them that, contrary to popular opinion, he would protect the Church of England. In 1685 two poems by Quaker leader William Penn, were printed, one on the death of Charles II and the other on the coronation of James and Mary of Modena. In 1685 Aphra Behn wrote poems on Charles II's death and James's coronation.

This chapter examines contemporary novels featuring white orphans that engage intertextually with the Euro-American canon, claiming a type of literary kinship, at the same time as they draw upon a feminist counter-tradition as a form of recovered cultural memory: Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping (1981), Michael Cunningham’s Specimen Days (2005), and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005). The chapter scrutinizes the particular processes that white orphan characters are involved in – processes of inclusion, exclusion, recentering, and critique – and argues that contemporary orphan stories renegotiate conventional gender divides in the American quest or picaresque, the bildungsroman, and domestic or sentimental fiction, for in these novels the trajectories of boy and girl orphans entail a repositioning in terms of gender and genre. In claiming literary kinship with earlier genres, they draw on cultural memory but also challenge central American myths.

Allegoresis is interpreting a text written with straightforward literal intent as if it were an allegory. In typology, a literal person or object is treated as an anticipatory example of someone or something to come. The Bible was the most important text subject to this kind of reading, including by New Testament writers. A sampling of commentaries on the parable of the sower (Matthew 13) and the rivalry between Mary and Martha (Luke 10) demonstrates the stability of allegorical readings from the patristic to the early modern era. Although the extent to which the Bible was properly read allegorically was hotly debated in the sixteenth century, even William Tyndale’s practice had much in common with traditional four-fold interpretation. Marginal glosses from the Geneva Bible indicate the general acceptance (and by extension, the transparency) of allegorical reading. Spenser’s use of words like "type," "shadow," "image," and "figure" refer to traditional biblical exegesis, adapting a method familiar to Elizabethans from religious sources.

This brief chapter attempts to recall to the reader what has gone before, and to convey the ‘excitement, surprise and enjoyment’ that is to be found in the study of the Burley manuscript. At the outset, the author had three tasks whose successful accomplishment was then problematic: an historical and analytical description of the manuscript, an annotated edition of the English private letters, and another of the English verse. The detective work on the collection itself, on the compiler, William Parkhurst, and his fellow-scribes, and on the individual letters and poems has revealed some things that were generally unknown. Among the English verse, although some of the identifiable poems have been found to contribute something to our understanding of the poem, the poet, or the scribe, a great source of joy is the quality of some of the anonymous verse. Similarly with the letters: much excitement lies in what seem to be first-hand copies of the correspondence of Donne, Wotton and Goodere, but much delight, too, from the anonymous or guessed-at authors of the other letters.

Drawing on the work of Woudhuysen, Love, Marotti and others, shows how and why manuscripts, and their care, copying and collection, were so important to Renaissance culture. Illustrates these matters with quotations and anecdotes from writers of Burley’s period. Distinguishes this manuscript collection from other miscellanies by its size and variety. Proposes in later chapters to bring to light its vastness, complexity and undiscovered riches, and to show how its study may reward students of literature and social history.

This chapter comprises an introduction to Elizabeth Clinton, Countess of Lincoln (c.1574-c.1630) and seventeenth-century attitudes to breastfeeding, and the edited text of The Countesse of Lincolnes Nurserie (1622). In the early seventeenth century, it was fashionable for aristocratic families to employ a wet-nurse to breastfeed their children rather than for mothers to do this themselves, but there was a consensus among medical treatises that it was better for a child to be nursed by its own mother. Clinton expresses regret at not nursing her own babies and uses this text as a form of atonement, teaching younger women as the Bible instructs older women to do. She uses other examples from the Bible in order to support maternal nursing, and dedicates the work to her daughter-in-law, Bridget, Countess of Lincoln, who apparently nursed her own baby.

Drawing on the material of chapter 3, evidence is presented for the dating and provenance of the manuscript’s first part, which is all in Parkhurst’s hand, and includes items relating to his time in Venice, letters apparently clandestinely copied, and translations of letters by the 4th-century Roman patrician, Q. Aurelius Symmachus. The second part, containing very little in Parkhurst’s hand, is conjectured to have been collected by him, and perhaps his brother Robert, over much the same period as part 1. Part 3 was probably assembled by Parkhurst and an anonymous scribe known as D1, who seems to have been Parkhurst’s assistant in the matter of covert copying, and includes not only letters but poems, epigrams, and a copy of a letter from John Donne together with his Paradoxes. Before part 4 comes a single folio containing only a Latin epigram by Katherine Killigrew, and a series of folios in a hand unique to this section with 28 extracts from Spenser’s ‘Complaints’. The concluding part 4 is nearly all in Parkhurst’s hand, and is a collection of the ‘commonplace book’ kind, dating from Parkhurst’s English career between 1616 and the Civil War.

This chapter comprises an introduction to the autobiographical meditations and prayers written by Lady Elizabeth Delaval (1649-1717), selected reading, and extracts from these manuscript writings. Written between 1663 and 1672, her meditations explored the relationship between her inconsistent religious obedience and her physical condition. Delaval was a Royalist and as such a staunch Anglican, but remained convinced she was led from a pious path by those around her, including her Presbyterian lady's maid and companion. She wrote about her toothache (and experiencing the unpleasant sensation of tooth worms); her cure at the hands of an itinerant woman healer whom she thought was providentially supplied by God; her experience of being tempted by the Devil to eat too much fruit and other ‘dainties’ which led to illnesses which she ascribed to a humoral imbalance; and also reflected on large-scale epidemics including outbreaks of plague in the 1660s.

The installation of Oliver Cromwell as Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England, Scotland and Ireland was a key event amid one of the most unpredictable periods in British political history. Mercurius Politicus began in June 1650 and continued until 1660. This account of Oliver's inauguration as Protector offers a wealth of detail about the ceremonial proceedings. In An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland, Andrew Marvell had depicted Cromwell as an active, almost elemental force. Oliver Cromwell died on 3 September 1658, probably from a chest infection and pneumonia. John Dryden worked for the protectoral government from at least 1657, and he walked in Cromwell's funeral procession with his colleagues Andrew Marvell and John Milton. Heroic Stanzas appeared in early 1659, somewhat late in the day even by Dryden's admission, by which time Richard Cromwell's own rule was slowly beginning to unravel.

This chapter comprises an introduction to the conversion narrative of Hannah Allen, A Narrative of God's Gracious Dealings (1683), selected reading, and several edited extracts from the work itself. The introduction includes contextual information about believed causes and cures for spiritual melancholy. This distemper led Allen to believe she was damned for eternity, and therefore experiencing temptations of the Devil, and experiment with a number of different methods to commit suicide (including opening her veins, hiding under floorboards, and smoking spiders, then believed poisonous). She visited a number of ministers and physicians, a combination of faith and physic, in order to find a cure, but then recovered from the illness on her remarriage.