Loose Fantasies

[England], 1665. Contemporary blind-paneled English reversed calf (top and base of the front hinge cracked), narrow foliage roll decoration at the base of spine, edges sprinkled red and brown. A NEW THING IN THE WRITING OF NARRATIVE ENGLISH" - Bligh.
"A SIGNIFICANT EXAMPLE OF ENGLISH PROSE IN A SEMINAL STAGE OF ITS DEVELOPMENT" - Gabrieli.
          HITHERTO UNKNOWN TO SCHOLARS, THIS IS THE SECOND EXTANT COPY of the diplomat, scientist, sea captain and bibliophile's autobiographical romance.
            Son of an executed regicide, suspect for his Catholic faith and secretly wed to a woman of sullied reputation, Digby sought to dramatically advance his career and fortune in 1627-28 through piracy in the eastern Mediterranean. He commanded two armed vessels and some three hundred crew. Disease reduced the latter by nearly half as they coasted North Africa, the Adriatic and Greece in search of prizes. His famous assault on the Ottoman port of Iskenderun yielded only booty seized from an ally, Venice, triggering the imprisonment of the resident English merchant community, forcing their ransom and angering a critical regional partner.

            HIS VOYAGE WAS A LITERARY ENTERPRISE. This highly episodic oriental tale sprang from his own life, particularly the courting and passionate love of his wife and the adventures he was in the midst of creating. Intertwining literary tropes and autobiography, he finished this roman à clef on Milos in late August 1628. "Begun only for my own pleasure" (Digby) and never shown even to his closest friends, the narrative is transparently framed by contemporary persons and politics and unabashed sexual encounters.
            Late in life he canceled the most delicate passages in the only other known example of the text (BL ms. Harley 6758) - the fifty-year-old Marie de' Medici's supposed attempt to seduce him, the ugly characterizations of court rivals, and his own unbridled pursuit through boudoir and bedchamber of the great beauty Venetia Stanley, who became his wife. With the Harley manuscript before him shortly after Digby's death, the scribe of that offered here respected these self-censorings, leaving blank spaces, where they occur in the original. He also suppressed some additional sensitive bits.
            THIS COPY REPRESENTS A SECOND, METICULOUS PHASE OF REVISION OF THE TEXT that changes the scholarly perception of its destination and early transmission. In good condition, from the library of physician James Tait Goodrich (1946-2020).
¶Digby, Loose Fantasies ed. Gabrieli (1968); Bligh, Sir Kenelm Digby and his Venetia 20-23, 121 & 162; Andrews, Ships, Money and Politics: Seafaring and Naval Enterprise in the Reign of Charles I 106-127; Sotheby's, English Literature and History (13.XII.1990) 9 "hitherto unrecorded manuscript"; see Moshenska's "Sir Kenelm Digby's Interruptions: Piracy and Lived Romance in the 1620s" in Studies in Philology 113 (2016) 424-83.