Among the Clark Center’s collections is a charming commonplace book (MS.1986.003) that seems oddly self-aware of its charm: its spine reads Negotiolum Bellae, which we could translate as something like “a pretty little thing.” It abounds in doodles that wouldn’t be terribly out of place in a modern-day middle schooler’s notebook, but what’s perhaps more remarkable is that the doodlers and doodle-readers span three generations. Catherine Springett and her friends started the endeavor in the 1740s, but the book was passed along to her daughter, Mary Boys, who then passed it along to her own daughter, Mary Sankey. Sankey likely inscribed what we could call the book’s mission statement near its opening: “Now thou art a white Book (=Album): through the keen application of a virgin, though with many stains, stainless thou wilt be.” 
The poems in the book run the gamut from lover’s alphabets to riddles to a snarky piece on far-fetched similes. Midway through the collection, we stumble on an unassuming poem by the seventeenth-century poet Katherine Philips that isn’t really any of those three things. Titled “The Virgin” in printed editions of Philips’s work, this piece seems innocuously moralistic, presenting a departure from the erotically charged poems to female friends that Philips is now best known for. It gives us a laundry list of desirable qualities in a chaste young woman, echoing the testament to virginity that opens the book. The ink stains up in the corner of the page—where the scribe, probably Elizabeth Harvey, one of Springett’s relatives, likely rested her hand—give very material credence to the paradox of blotted stainlessness in the opening inscription.
One of the most rewarding aspects of working with archival materials is finding traces—no matter how fleeting—of intimate connections between writers and readers. Exploring Negotiolum Bellae as part of my time as a graduate research fellow at the Clark Center allowed me to do precisely that. Philips clearly held a valued place in the literary canon for the women reading, constructing, and reconstructing this volume: her work invited an understated sense of identification that accounts for the parallels between this poem’s take on virginity and Sankey’s inscription. When the eighteenth-century scribes of Negotiolum Bellae turned to Philips and officiously appropriated her verse for their own—Elizabeth Harvey signed the poem with her initials rather than crediting “K. P.”—they also reanimated the intimacies that structure her own poems, resuscitating the poet as part of a different vision of feminine camaraderie and routing their affection through the “pretty little” medium of this bygone piece of verse.
Studying the Clark Center’s holdings for similar signs of readerly identification has been eye-opening and has helped me finetune the major claims of my dissertation. My project, titled “Small Officiousness”: Minorness and Intimacy in Early Modern English Literature, tracks how small details index and create closeness in the poetry, drama, and correspondence of the English Renaissance. Through readings of writers as different as Dorothy Osborne and John Milton, I examine how affection and interpretation intertwine in the literature of the period, arguing that authors self-consciously refract intimacy through textual features ranging from similes to parentheses and stichomythia. The Karmiole Fellowship gave me the opportunity to present and hear feedback on part of my chapter on Katherine Philips—I delivered a lecture via Zoom that wove together details about Philips’s position in Negotiolum Bellae with a study of her own intimate reception of earlier literary precedents. The lead-up and follow-ups to the lecture allowed me to get in touch with other Philips scholars, inspired me to think more about the commonplace book as an intimate form, and reinvigorated my interest in reception history. Building on my work at the Center, I am now planning an additional section of the chapter that turns to eighteenth-century printed materials’ takes on Philips’s authorial persona, several of which constellate her among lists of female worthies.
Many thanks to Kenneth Karmiole and the Clark Center staff for funding and supporting this incredibly generative fellowship.
-Arya Sureshbabu, Kenneth Karmiole Graduate Fellow