William Alabaster’s Notebooks

Abstract

This essay announces the identification of five large seventeenth-century notebooks in the Cambridge University Library as the work of English theologian and poet William Alabaster (1567–1640) and provides a general physical description of the volumes favoring their English-language contents. It provides an overview of the current critical landscape of Alabaster’s biography and writing, describes his unique linguistic and kabbalistic Christian projects, and discusses how the “nonsense” visible in his notebooks led to their miscataloging in the nineteenth century. The essay itself is followed by transcriptions of six previously unknown poems from the notebooks, the longest of which, “The Office of the Blessed Virgin,” is a masterwork of linguistic and liturgical transformation.