I always enjoy browsing the rare book sections at libraries. Even knowing the books cannot be checked out adds to the intrigue. Most libraries - public, private and educational - contain a collection of rare books that they have either been donated or purchased. And, for obvious reasons, those books are locked away under glass.
In 2018, Vanessa Braganza was holding the ladder for a librarian in Harvard University’s Widener Library when her eye caught a flash of scarlet. There, among the towering shelves of rare books and manuscripts, sat a leather-bound volume that supposedly belonged to Mary Sidney Herbert, a leading author in Elizabethan England.
Braganza, a doctoral candidate in Renaissance literature and a self-described “book detective,” could scarcely believe it.
“What?” she exclaimed out loud in the library. “That exists?”
It does, the librarian told her - but that copy of The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia was a famous forgery.
Braganza, 28, decided to dig more deeply into it. And what she discovered would change Harvard’s understanding of its collection: a case of a book being judged, literally, by its cover.
Sidney, born in 1561, became one of the first women in England to gain fame for her poetry and translations of foreign works. She took the title of Countess of Pembroke when she married Henry Herbert in 1577, and her name was often mentioned in the same breath as other literary giants of the day: her brother Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser and a fellow named William Shakespeare. Some historians believe that one of her translations, The Tragedie of Antonie, inspired Shakespeare’s Antony & Cleopatra.
“Sidney and Shakespeare undoubtedly knew of each other,” Braganza said, though there is no known record of whether the two met.
Sidney’s brother penned Arcadia as a collection of witty and amusing stories in poetry and prose for his beloved sister. She published the book in 1593, seven years after Philip’s death. The volume in Harvard’s collection was purported to be a third edition, printed in 1613, belonging to her.
According to accepted provenance, Sidney’s copy changed hands after her death in 1621, landing in the collection of Sir Robert Kerr, First Earl of Ancram. The title page included the inscription, “This was the Countess of pembrokes owne booke giuen me by the Countess of Montgomery her daughter. 1625.” It was signed “Ancram.” The book, Braganza found, had numerous owners in the centuries thereafter.
In 1912, when the wealthy businessman and bibliophile Harry Elkins Widener died on the Titanic, his mother donated his books - many of them rare and firsts of a kind - to Harvard in his memory. His cherished copy of Arcadia was among them.
At first, Harvard believed it had gained an extremely valuable book. But the institution’s first rare books librarian, William A. Jackson, began studying the copy and spotted what he considered to be inconsistencies for a book published in the 16th century, including an instance of “remboitage,” or re-covering it with a binding from another period.
In addition, Jackson observed that Ancram’s signature did not match examples he had seen. He concluded that the book was a forgery and unveiled his suspicions at a meeting of American Society of Arts and Sciences in 1946.
A “dangerous example” of remboitage, he wrote in the paper he presented, “is that of an edition of Sidney’s Arcadia in Harvard Library, a copy of which purports to have belonged to Sidney’s sister, Mary Herbert, and which is now in a binding bearing appropriate symbolic stamps.”
Nearly 80 years later, Braganza was skeptical. The graduate student loves a good mystery, and she already had made a name for herself unraveling riddles of the past, including decoding a secret cipher used by Queen Catherine, the first wife of Henry VIII.
To Braganza, Jackson’s doubts about Arcadia because of its rebinding were misguided. Yes, the book no longer included its original cover. But it was not uncommon in later eras for book lovers to re-cover older volumes so they looked “pretty,” she noted.
“It was common practice in the 18th and 19th centuries,” Braganza said. “Owners sometimes rebind old books in covers that they felt were more decorative, appealing or appropriate - many liked them to be gaudy, especially the Victorians.”
Braganza also examined Ancram’s inscription on the book’s title page. To her, the signature looked very much like the earl’s writing. Except for a bent capital “A,” it was identical to samples she found in other historic manuscripts.
“The signature in Arcadia does, in fact, match multiple samples of Kerr’s handwriting,” she said. “I think Jackson confused the first earl’s signature with those of his successors. The handwriting of the signatures Jackson cited is clearly from a much later period.”
With that evidence in hand, Braganza began to take a closer look at the interior pages, which Jackson had overlooked. There, she noticed intriguing marginal notes and what appeared to be edits for future editions. When she compared that writing to examples of Sidney’s, Braganza let out a whoop.
“They were done by the same hand,” she said. “There were so many matches with Mary Sidney’s handwriting. Many letters lined up perfectly. There were a lot of edits in the manuscript, where she appeared to be correcting the text so it read better.”
Convinced she had proven the Arcadia copy to be authentic, Braganza presented her findings in March to an academic conference just like Jackson did, now with the opposite conclusion. Rosalind Smith, chair of English at Australian National University, called it a “stunning literary discovery.” Peter X. Accardo, curator of Harvard’s Harry Elkins Widener Collection, said he was pleased the book had been “restored to its former place.”
Braganza also shared her discovery with the namesake of the countess’s brother, Philip Sidney. Sidney, son of the current Viscount De L’Isle - the earldom name was changed in the 19th century - told The Washington Post he was excited to see his great aunt and uncle 11 times over getting their due.
“Vanessa’s scholarly sleuthing sheds new light on Mary Sidney Herbert’s life and work,” he noted in an email. “In particular, it provides touching evidence of Mary's continued remembrance of, and literary collaboration with, her brother decades after his untimely death. It enriches the family’s history as well as its literary heritage.”
Braganza hopes it does something larger, too.
“Mary Sidney was a very important poet and author for her time, yet she’s not remembered like her male contemporaries,” she said. “When I get old and have a daughter, I want history to look very different. I want it to look the way it should look, which is that we bring back the stories that have been neglected and ignored. Here’s a person that needs to be written back into the historical record.”
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