ABSTRACT
Set as a title on the first folio of Folger Shakespeare Library MS E.a.l is the following Latin sentence: 'Sum Annae Denton & amicorum.' 1 (Figure 4.1). The manuscript announces itself as 'I am Anne Denton's and friends'.' This title, in what is probably Denton's hand, suggests that it was intended as a repository for words a woman thought worthy of recording, and also those deemed so by her friends. The epigraph to the Denton manuscript suggests that 'friends' are contemporaries who had a hand in a companion's manuscript. Denton's positioning of herself as part of a circle is not something commonly seen on title pages of women's manuscripts; inscriptions declaring ownership are more typical. Denton has explicitly chosen the masculine genitive plural for 'friends'; had she wished to designate her group of friends as solely female she could have used the feminine genitive plural, 'amicarum'. But Denton's circle is at least one of mixed genders, if not one composed solely of men, and one that includes friends in the present and the future, as we shall see.
