Trevelyon 1608

Trevelyon, Thomas. The Trevelyon Miscellany of 1608: A Facsimile of Folger Shakespeare Library MS V.b.232. Edited by Heather Wolfe. Washington, DC: Folger Shakespeare Library, 2007.

Thomas Tusser, Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry (London, 1573) -- "Posies for thine own bedchamber"; "that is, sententious statements that could be painted or carved directly onto walls, ceiling beams, or furniture or embroidered onto pillow covers, bed hanging, or wall hangings and contemplated before falling asleep and upon awaking" (7)

• 16c wall painting at Pirton Grange and interior wall of farmhouse at Ansells End, Kimpton draw on Tusser
• "Such a posy exemplifies both the multimedia quality of Trevelyon's texts and images and the impetus for creating his masterpiece. While Trevelyon gathered his material from print sources, transforming black-and-white woodcuts, engravings, and texts into colorful oversized hand-illustrated manuscript, his devout contemporaries were converting these same sources into embroidered and painted works of art." (7)

Trevelyon's miscellany; 654 pages, 298 folio leaves/596 pages (31 missing leaves, 18 small fragments), finished in 1608 at age 60

"While he reveals little biographical information about himself in his miscellany, Trevelyon's selection and adaptation of textual and visual material for his miscellany provides rich insight into tthe avaailability and malleability of different kinds of media in London in early Jacobean England, which was awkwardly transitioning into a new era." (7)

"unites much of the familiar religious and allegorical visual and textual imagery of the period, as well as a good deal of ancient proverbial wisdom into a single source" (7) -- "part of a common vocabulary"

"It was not just for reading, however. It could be plundered as a source book for embroidery and exterior and interior home design." (7)

"As one component of a well-developed multimedia edification and memory system that encompassed oral, print, and manuscript cultures, the miscellany reinforced virtuous thought and behavior by its similarity to images and texts found and heard elsewhere." (7)

part 1 -- historical/practical information

part 2 -- biblical and monarchical chronologies

part 3 -- edifying and cautionary verses

part 4 -- 200 pages of patterns, "most of them without text: mazes, marquetry, knotwork, strapwork lettering, floral and abstract borders and motifs, repeating patterns, and allphabets suitable for embroidery and other applied arts, plasterwork, woodwork, painting, and garden design" (8)

part 5 -- list of sheriffs and mayors of London, 1190-1601

Nicolas Barker, evidence of tracing on oiled sheets in the great book (n5; see 574-8 in Barker's facsimile of the great book); several images have been pricked for copying in the miscellany

8 years after completing 1608 Folger miscellany, made a longer book now at Wormsley Library, Buckinghamshire -- the "great book"

primary purposes of both miscellany and great book are "didactic and mnemonic" (8)

miscellany could have been copied out from a commonplace; some evidence of copying errors, such as eye-skip (8, n9)

"The strength of the images lay not in their originality but in their familiarity, through their diffusion in a range of media -- books, broadsides, canvases, walls, ceilings, tapestries, clothing, tableware, and furniture -- spurring viewers to good works and thoughts by prompting their memories." (8)

Trevelyon miscellany is unique in its color and size; "unlike any other manuscript or printed book from this period, or from any period before or after, for that matter" (8-9)

"Densely packed with illustrations, patterns, secular verse, and scripture (he includes verses from fifty-nine of the eighty books in the Geneva Bible), the subject matter leaps from the practical to the mythical, connecting the compiler and his readers to spatial and cyclical patterns and to broader religious and national continuities. All are united by similar borders and decorative space fillers. The miscellany is a series of series, beginning with chronologies (calendricl, religious, and historical) and ending with patterns (for alphabets, caps, walls, furniture, and clothing) -- a library of edification, entertainment and design." (9)

miscellany copies print sources not surviving

"Since printmaking was still in its infancy in England, most of the biblical and allegorical images that Trevelyon copied had their beginnings as loose sets of copperplate prints from Antwerp, which could be collected, bound, or dispersed as the purchaser saw fit." (9) -- derived from later versions of prints originally made by Cornelis Anthonisz, Adriaen Collaert, Hans Collaert the Elder, Philip Galle, Jacques de Gheyn II, Jacob Matham, Cripijn de Passe I, Jan Sadeler I, Maarten de Vos, and Hieronymus Wierix

"The miscellany and the great book give us a sense of the extensive range of graphic imagery that was available in London bookshops in the early seventeenth century. They also give us a sense of the ircular and transformative relationship between print and manuscript in the century after the invention of the printing presss, showing how readers consumed printed images and texts, not just by reading and note taking, but by actually tracing and copying images and texts into new format that amplifies their meanings through color, mise-en-page, and context. The miscellany and the great book reinforce the now-foreign concept of printed text as public property that could be appropriated into a limitless array of formats." (9)

inclusion of patterns "suggests that he was a raftsman of some sort, perhaps a professional drawer of patterns" (9)

relies on engravings by Bernard Salomon to illustrate Genesis

stock images used without respect to their original sources (11)

seems the same as the great book at first glance, but no pages are exact matches

great book possibly made for commission (12)

11 patterns and motifs pricked for reproduction (13, n44)