Constance Aston Fowler

Constance Aston Fowler was a seventeenth-century English manuscript author and anthologist. Born "Constance Aston" about 1621,^[1] she was the youngest child of Sir Walter Aston.^[2] Her home was The Priory at St. Thomas, near the family home of Tixal Hall in Lincolnshire and Staffordshire.^[3]

Her Verse Miscellany of Constance Aston Fowler is studied as an example of "how manuscript texts were produced, disseminated, and preserved in provincial areas." ^[2] "Constance Aston Fowler constructed her own private anthology, in which she mingled the poems of her family with ones by Ben Jonson, Henry King, and John Donne.^[2] Her father, her brother Herbert, her sister Gertrude, and their friend Lady Dorothy Shirley contributed poetry.^[2]

References

1. authorities.loc.gov
2. Ezell, Margaret (1999). Social Authorship and the Advent of Print. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. p. 27. ISBN 978-0-8018-6139-0.
3. Ezell, Margaret (1999). Social Authorship and the Advent of Print. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. p. 26. ISBN 978-0-8018-6139-0.

Primary sources

• Fowler, Constance Aston (2000). The Verse Miscellany of Constance Aston Fowler: A Diplomatic Edition. Tempe, Ariz: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies in conjunction with Renaissance English Text Society. p. 206. ISBN 0-86698-252-3.

• Clifford, Arthur (1813). Tixall poetry with notes and illustrations. Edinburgh: Printed by James Ballantyne.

Secondary sources

• Burke, Victoria Elizabeth (1996). "Women and Seventeenth-Century Manuscript Culture: Miscellanies, Commonplace Books, and Song Books Compiled by English and Scottish Women, 1600-1660". University of Oxford. (Ph.D. dissertation)

• Burke, Victoria Elizabeth (1997). "Women and Early Seventeenth-Century Manuscript Culture: Four Miscellanies". The Seventeenth Century 12: 135–150. ISSN 0268-117X.

• LaBelle, Jenijoy (1980). "Huntington Aston Manuscript: First-Line index of the MS". The Book Collector 29: 549–67.

• LaBelle, Jenijoy (1980). "A True Love's Knot: The Letters of Constance Fowler and the Poems of Herbert Aston". Journal of English and Germanic Philology 79: 13–31.