FABS Handpress Era Zoom: Collecting John Speed, London Antiquary and Cartographer

Sponsored by FABS

Join us for “Collecting John Speed, London Antiquary and Cartographer” with Martha Driver! Contact Jennifer Larson at info@fabsocieties.org

John Speed (d. 1629) was a prolific illustrator, cartographer, genealogist, historian and antiquary. Born into the middle class, Speed worked as a tailor, being admitted to the Merchant Taylor’s Company in 1580. He was then befriended by Sir Fulke Greville, the first Lord Brooke, and became a member of the influential Society of Antiquaries, where he met scholars like William Camden, Robert Cotton, and William Smith. Speed is best known to Chaucer scholars for the Chaucer portrait he supplied as the frontispiece to Thomas Speght’s edition of Chaucer’s Workes, which I discussed in a 2002 essay in The Chaucer Review, but he also published The History of Great Britain, The Theatre of the Empire of Great Britain, and The Genealogies Recorded in Sacred Scriptures, among other works, all of which drew on Speed’s contacts with wealthy London antiquarian collectors.

In my own modest collection are Speed’s map of Middlesex, untimely ripped, I fear (not by me), from Speed’s Theatre of the Empire of Great Britaine, which has some interesting (if not precisely factual) illustrations and inscriptions relating to London, and a copy of Speed’s England Wales Scotland and Ireland … Described and Abridged (1656), which originally included Middlesex (though in my copy, that map is missing). I also have a copy of Speght’s Workes of Our Ancient and Lerned English Poet, Geffrey Chaucer, with the Chaucer portrait, and Speed’s genealogies bound into a Geneva Bible published in Scotland by Andro Hart (1610), along with a copy of Speed’s History of Great Britain. In his work, Speed is shown in his roles not only as artist and cartographer but as historian and synthesizer of a variety of sources. He is an informed copyist, his maps serving as historical documentsthat present contemporary pictures of Elizabethan and Jacobean Britain, along with earlier historical artifacts.

Martha W. Driver, PhD, FSA

Nb This talk is in preparation for a conference in Cambridge on the medieval city – Speed of course is not medieval but records medieval tombs, objects, buildings and towns in his maps (I would be happy to have any feedback).

Martha Westcott Driver, FSA, is Distinguished Professor of English and Women’s and Gender Studies (emerita) at Pace University in New York City. A co-founder of the Early Book Society for the study of manuscripts and printing history, Dr. Driver writes about illustration from manuscript to print and manuscript and book production. She is a prolific author and editor (Among many publications I will mention only The Image in Print: Book Illustration in Late Medieval England, The British Library, 2001). She serves on the executive boards of the American Trust for the British Library and the Patrons of the National Library and Galleries of Scotland, among other advisory roles, and is a member of multiple bibliographic and bibliophilic societies including The Grolier Club.