Paleographical Challenge #65

April 28, 2020

By Kathryn James

Today’s guest manuscript arrives courtesy of Mike Webb, Curator of Early Modern Archives and Manuscripts at the Weston Library of the Bodleian.  Visit the Paleographical Challenge tomorrow to discover its identity and a suggested transcription.

A suggested transcription for yesterday’s manscript is given below:

Upon my Lord of Dunsmore who dyed in
at Acte Venereo
Here six foot deep, in a sound sleep
My Lord of Dunsmore lyes
who with his spade, his own graue made
Betwixt his Mistrisse thighes
If through that Hole, to Heaven he stole
then I dare safely say
He was the last that that way past
And the first that found the way.

Anonymous, in a quarto miscellany of poems and speeches in English and Latin.  England, late 17th c.  Bodleian, MS Top. Oxon e. 202, f.104