Northamptonshire Central Library

Northamptonshire Studies Collection, Accession No. 7839

Autograph autobiographical journal of Grace Mildmay, in her neat italic hand with various corrections, deletions and revisions in her secretary hand, a family tree added in another hand, iii + 85 pages (plus blanks), in half-leather. Written to cover ‘a great part of the pilgrimage of my Whole life’ (p. 59), a section cited by her (p. 30) as ‘This book of my Meditation’ including (p. 32 et seq.) her ‘obseruation’ of her father-in-law Sir Walter Mildmay, Chancellor of the Exchequer (‘having been with him almost twenty Yeares’), and (p. 67) declaring ‘My deare childe Mildmay Fane, I your louing & old grandmother exhort you in the name of the Lorde, receiue my wordes acceptably...’. c.1617-20.

*MiG 1: Grace, Lady Mildmay, Journal

Later in the library of Sir Thomas Phillipps, Bt (1792-1872), manuscript and book collector: Phillipps MS 2569.

A CD of this MS is in the British Library, EC.2008.x.721. Extensive extracts are published in Randall Martin, ‘The Autobiography of Grace, Lady Mildmay’, Renaissance and Reformation, NS 18/1 (Winter, 1994), 33-81, and in Linda Pollock, With Faith and Physic: The Life of a Tudor Gentlewoman, Lady Grace Mildmay, 1552-1620 (London, 1993), passim. Facsimile of p. 11, with transcription, in Reading Early Modern Women, ed. Helen Ostovich and Elizabeth Sauer (New York & London, 2004), pp. 254-5.

Unpublished in full.