‘Hokclyff’ and the Will of William Hoton

There are two surviving copies of La Male Regle by Thomas Hoccleve, a lively account of his dissolute life as a clerk of the Privy Seal. One is part of an autograph manuscript of Hoccleve’s works in the Huntington Library, the other an incomplete version in Canterbury Cathedral Archives. Reference to a third copy survives in the will of William Hoton, proved in 1447. As well as La Male Regle, Hoton bequeathed a letter of Pharaoh, a chronicle and statutes, together with a mazer and pious donations. This information, coupled with records of Hoton’s family members, his burial place and associates, produces a profile of William Hoton linking him with the law and the book trade, and possibly with Neville’s Inn, the London town house used by a noble family to whose members Hoccleve addressed some of his poems. Hoton’s will also leads to a second individual who owned La Male Regle—the person who received it as a bequest, the common attorney and citizen, John Mordon. Neither Hoton nor Mordon has hitherto featured in discussions of the reception of the poem, which enjoyed a wider circulation than previously thought.

Extra-Illustration and Ephemera

In “A Friendly Gathering: The Social Politics of Presentation Books and their Extra-Illustration in Horace Walpole’s Circle,” Lucy Peltz plays with the technical and metaphorical senses of “gathering” to reflect on the materiality and sociability of altered books in the Strawberry Hill set. The practice of extra-illustration consisted in unbinding the book, cutting loose the gatherings of leaves that make up its quires, in order to interleave them with additional pages, or to inlay each page into windows cut through larger sized paper. The process is captured in Walpole’s correspondence: “Mr Bull is honouring me, at least my Anecdotes of Painting, exceedingly. He has let every page into a pompous sheet, and is adding every print of portrait, building, etc., that I mention and that he can get, and specimens of all our engravers. It will make eight magnificent folios, and be a most valuable body of our arts.” Specimens collected and collated with the text anchor, document, and illustrate the words on the page. As a result, an identical multiple in a print run was turned into a unique object. Through the art of extraillustration, the extra-illustrator Richard Bull “erected for himself a monument of taste.” In its monumentalizing aims and dimensions, extra-illustration could be considered an antidote against ephemera, yet transience is inherent in its attempt to document the text with reproductions that might be dispersed. The concept runs the gamut, from Walpole’s paratexts—his title Fugitive Pieces in Verse and Prose (1758), which he presents as “trifles” and “idlenesses”—to his supposedly “diminutive” house, which he called “a paper Fabric and an assemblage of curious Trifles, made by an insignificant Man.” In this essay, I will read the practice of extra-illustration against the grain to recuperate the ephemeral side of “the pompous sheet,” the composite object unbound from its gatherings, and alternative forms of the page as a detached piece, a scrap, a caption appended to objects in the house. I will focus my discussion on two complementary book collections produced by Richard Bull: his extra-illustrated copy of Walpole’s Description of Strawberry Hill, now at the Lewis Walpole Library, and his curious compilation of occasional publications bound with the title-page A Collection of the Loose Pieces printed at Strawberry-Hill, and the alternative title Detached Pieces Printed at Strawberry Hill, now at the Huntington Library.

The Fortunes of Raymundus

This chapter examines Newton's take on the substantial alchemical corpus ascribed to the high medieval Mallorcan philosopher Ramon Lull. It begins with a brief consideration of the Epistola ad Theodorum Mundanum and Newton's synopsis of it. It then examines the cycle of Opera in their several complementary drafts, which will reveal the heavy influence exercised by Dickinson, pseudo-Lull, Snyders, and other authors. The Opera may be dated conservatively to the period between the publication of Dickinson's Epistola in 1686 and a later stage in Newton's alchemy, namely, his intense collaboration with Nicolas Fatio de Duillier in the early 1690s. The work with Fatio also contributed to Newton's production of a text that has received notice from other Newtonian scholars as in some sense the culmination of his alchemical endeavor, Huntington Library, Babson MS 420, otherwise known as Praxis.