A SOCIAL EDITION OF THE DEVONSHIRE MANUSCRIPT. (BL MS Add 17,492).

First edition, first printing. Hardcover. Publisher's original blue cloth with gilt titles to the spine and upper board. A near fine copy, the binding square and firm, with just a little rubbing to the extremities, bright and fresh. The contents are clean throughout, and without inscriptions or stamps.

Summarised thus in a short synopsis on the publisher's website: 'Described by Colin Burrow as 'the richest surviving record of early Tudor poetry and of the literary activities of 16th-century women', the Devonshire Manuscript (BL MS Add. 17492) is a verse miscellany belonging to the 1530s and early 1540s, including some 194 items including complete poems, verse fragments and excerpts from longer works, anagrams, and other ephemeral jottings attributed to Thomas Wyatt, Henry Howard Earl of Surrey, Lady Margaret Douglas, Richard Hattfield, Mary Fitzroy (née Howard), Thomas Howard, Edmund Knyvett, Anthony Lee, and Henry Stewart, as well [as] transcriptions of the work of others or original works by prominent court figures such as Mary Shelton, Lady Margaret Douglas, Mary (Howard) Fitzroy, Lord Thomas Howard, and, possibly, Anne Boleyn. This edition publishes the contents of the manuscript in their entirety, documenting well the manuscript's place as the earliest sustained example in English of men and women writing together in a community'.