Dr Patricia Pender, University of Melbourne, S. Ernest Sprott Fellowship Address

University of Melbourne: S. Ernest Sprott Fellowship Address
“A veray patronesse”: Margaret Beaufort and the Early English Printers, Dr Patricia Pender (University of Newcastle)

Date: Wed. 27 May, 2015
Time: 12:00pm
Venue: 4th Floor Linkway, John Medley Building
Enquiries: Clara Tuite, English and Theatre Studies: clarat@unimelb.edu.au

Margaret Beaufort’s patronage of arts and learning was extensive, concentrated, and in certain respects unique in late medieval England, and her promotion of textual production provided a model of royal patronage from which later Tudor women, from both sides of the Reformation religious divide, could draw inspiration and authority. My primary purpose in this talk is to consider Margaret Beaufort’s role as patron to the early English printers, focusing on her relationship with arguably the first and foremost of these, William Caxton. In doing so, I want to present Beaufort’s patronage program as an important if hitherto neglected precedent in the history of early modern women’s textual production. While she has long been a prominent figure in late medieval literary studies and book history, Beaufort’s significance for early modern scholarship in these fields has been largely overlooked. In the larger project from which this talk stems, I plan to feed back Beaufort’s recognised activities in the production of early English books into our emerging awareness of her position in the women’s literary tradition of the long early modern period. While several recent studies have begun to consider Beaufort’s translations as part of this canon, my aim here is to show how the terrain of women’s cultural production in the period expands dramatically when we consider their contributions to literary culture beyond single authorship outputs – what I call “extra-authorial literary labour.”


Dr Patricia Pender is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Newcastle. She has published Early Modern Women’s Writing and the Rhetoric of Modesty (Palgrave 2012) and coedited, with Rosalind Smith, Material Cultures of Early Modern Women’s Writing (Palgrave 2014). She is currently the sole investigator on an ARC Discovery Project, Early Modern Women’s Writing and the Institutions of Authorship.

The S. Ernest Sprott Fellowship, administered by the Faculty of Arts, enables promising young scholars of early modern literature to travel outside of Australia to undertake research towards a book-length work. As a condition of the Fellowship, the successful applicant makes a public presentation of their work. The late Samuel Ernest Sprott, born in Hobart, Tasmania, was a member of the department of English at Dalhousie University, Canada, from 1958 to 1985. He was best known for his work on John Milton, notably Milton’s Art of Prosody, his first book, which appeared in nine editions between 1953 and 1978, and John Milton, A Maske: the Earlier Versions. His book Suicide: The English Debate from Donne to Hume was published in 1961. He also published a collection of poems in 1955.