An autograph presentation manuscript composed in English, intended as a New Year’s gift for Queen Anne of Denmark (see f. 5r).
Small quarto. Black velvet binding, upon which the royal coat of arms has been stamped.
The armorial bookplate of Horace Walpole has been pasted onto f. 1r. On f. 1v, the following has been written, in a seventeenth-century italic hand: ‘Elizabeth Wilbraham \her/ booke giuen her by her deerest frind, now, he being gone she keeps this as a pretious Jewell’.
Acquisition information is indicated on f. 2r: ‘Purchased of I. Kerslake, Bristol, 14 Oct. 1843. (From the Strawberry Hill sale, Lot 61).’
British Library catalogue; Suzanne Trill, ‘The First Sermon in English by a Woman Writer?’, Notes and Queries, 47.4 (2000), pp. 470–73; Suzanne Trill, ‘A Feminist Critic in the Archives: reading Anna Walker’s A Sweete Savor for Woman (c. 1606)’, Women’s Writing, 9.2 (2002), pp. 199–214; Christina Luckyj, '"A Womans Logicke": Puritan women writers and the rejection of education', in The Routledge Companion to Women, Sex, and Gender in the Early British Colonial World, ed. by Kimberly Anne Coles and Eve Keller (Abingdon and New York, NY: Routledge, 2019), pp. 154-169 (pp. 156-159); Hannah Yip.
In 2000, Suzanne Trill argued that this volume contains ‘the first (and only?) attempt by a woman writer to construct a sermon in English in the early seventeenth century’ (p. 471). The present cataloguer follows Trill’s dating rather than that in the British Library catalogue.
A SWEETE SAVOR, FOR WOMAN -- ff. 28v–66v