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| Perdita woman: Ann Bowyer |
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Biography Ann, the principal compiler of Bodleian Ashmole MS 51, became the mother of Elias Ashmole (1617-1692) , the antiquarian whose collections are preserved in the Bodleian Library and the Ashmolean Museum. She was a daughter of Anthony Bowyer, a draper from Coventry, and of his wife Bridget, the only daughter of Robert Fitch , gentleman, of Ansley in Warwickshire (see H.Sydney Grazebrook, "The Heraldic Visitations of Staffordshire...", Collections for a History of Staffordshire 5.2 (1884) 13-15 and C.H. Josten, ed., Elias Ashmole (Oxford: Clarendon, 1966) vol. 1, pedigree following p. 306). Ann had two brothers, John, the vicar of Napton in Warwickshire , and Anthony , who followed his father's trade in London . She also had two sisters, an unamed older sister who married John Person, a physician in Coventry, and Bridget who died in 1618, marrying first John Moyse , citizen and grocer of London (by whom she had three sons), and second James Pagit, esquire, Controller of the Pipe in the Court of Exchequer. The date of Ann's marriage to Simon Ashmole (1589-1634) of Lichfield , a saddler, is uncertain, but it must predate the birth of Elias in 1617. Most of the information available about Ann comes from her son's manuscripts (particularly the notes he intended to turn into an autobiography, Ashmole MS 1136, printed in 1717 by Charles Burman as Memoirs of the Life of that Learned Antiquary, Elias Ashmole, Esq.). In his mention of her death in 1646 of the plague in Lichfield , Elias Ashmole describes her character in the perhaps inflated terms of exemplary biography: she had been given good breeding by her parents, she was excellent with her needle ""wch (my father being improvident) stood her in great stead,"" she was well read in divinity, history and poetry, ""and was continually instilling into my Eares, such Religious & Morall Precepts, as my younger years were capable of" "(a practice carried over from her days with her commonplace book?) In the horoscope cast by William Lilley (Ashmole MS 421) we learn again that Ann's marriage to Simon was not a happy one, and that they were not able to have more children; Ann's prudence and wisdome are contrasted with Simon's melancholy and his violent temper. Ann Bowyer was of the middling classes. She was the daughter of an urban craftsman, though she had distant links with the gentry (her mother was the daughter of a gentleman, and her grandfather on her father's side was a younger son of a gentleman or an esquire). Her family must have been quite well-off given that the paper, writing material, and printed books required for Ann's and probably her siblings' education were expensive. She may also have known Greek, given the presence of the word anagrams in Greek on fol. 4r, above an anagram refuting that women are the woe of men. |
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Bodleian Library: MS Ashmole 51 Bodleian Library: MS Ashmole 51 |