A funeral sermon for Katherine Brettergh (1617)
The printed funeral sermon was a genre of commemorative writing which became popular in England in the seventeenth century. One bestseller, first published in 1602, was Deaths Advantage Little Regarded, a small volume of two funeral sermons originally preached by William Harrison (d. 1625), rector of Eccleston, Cheshire, and William Leigh (1550–1639), rector of Standish, Cheshire. Annexed to the sermons was a ‘life’ of Katherine Brettergh (1579–1601), Lancashire gentlewoman, exemplar of godly piety, and the subject of the two sermons.
The John Rylands Research Institute and Library holds a copy of the fifth edition, published in 1617. The first edition of 1602 was published with a frontispiece woodcut portrait of Brettergh by an anonymous artist. However, while the 1617 edition did not originally feature this portrait, this particular copy features a tipped-in pencil portrait of Brettergh, based on an anonymous line engraving originally published in Samuel Clarke’s The Second Part of the Marrow of Ecclesiastical History, Book II (1650).
Unknown artist, line engraving of Katherine Brettergh, likely taken from Samuel Clarke, The Second Part of the Marrow of Ecclesiastical History (London, 1650). National Portrait Gallery, D25596. © National Portrait Gallery, London
Measurements: 102 mm x 92 mm.
William Harrison and William Leigh, Deaths Advantage Little Regarded, 5th edn (London, 1617). Tipped-in portrait: graphite. John Rylands Research Institute and Library, R198829.
Measurements: 110 mm x 85 mm.
In the Rylands’ copy, the portrait is accompanied with the following inscription in ink: ‘Added from Clarkes Marrow of Eccles. History’. A note signed by ‘H. J. F.’ (a later owner) on the recto of the front flyleaf attributes this inscription to the historian George Ormerod (1785–1873), remembered today for his classic antiquarian history of Cheshire, entitled The History of the County Palatine and City of Chester (3 vols, 1816–1819). It is notable that Deaths Advantage Little Regarded is mentioned in a footnote to Ormerod’s biographical sketch of Katherine Brettergh’s elder brother, John Bruen (1560–1625), within the second volume of his history of Cheshire.
The Rylands’ copy was purchased directly from Bernard Quaritch Ltd. It had been previously sold at Bonhams (19 February 2013; Lot 327, Printed Books and Maps) for £100.
Further Reading
Hindle, Steve, ‘Brettergh [née Bruen], Katherine (1579–1601)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004), https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/3351
Stewart, Alan, ‘The Christian Life and Godly Death of Katherine Brettergh’, in Alan Stewart, The Oxford History of Life-Writing, Volume 2: Early Modern (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), pp. 147–164
This viewer displays the calf binding in addition to the front matter preceding the title page.