Q is for…

Powerful Queens

Opening of The principal navigations, voyages, traffiqves and discoveries of the English nation (1600),

 

Queen Elizabeth I hampered the printing in its entirety of Bolton Library M.3.16, a volume lauding English ‘traffiques’ in 1599: no mention is made on the title page of the “victorie atchieued at the citie of Cadiz, 1598”. The account of the voyage to Cadiz was suppressed by order of the queen after the disgrace of her erstwhile favourite Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex. The section is here supplied in manuscript in a neat hand, copied over a century later from the 1720 edition.

 

Don Quixote

 

Fiction makes a poor showing in the Bolton Library, but the collection does include two copies of this seminal work, often regarded as the first modern novel: one in Spanish and one of the first translations made into English.