# 1705 in literature

This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 1705.

## Events

* April/May – Richard Steele, having left the army, marries a wealthy widow, Margaret Stretch.
* July 29 – Richard Challoner enters the English College, Douai.
* October 7 – William Somervile inherits his father's estate, where field sports will inspire much of his poetry.
* October 30 – John Vanbrugh's play The Confederacy, adapted from the French, is first performed at his new London playhouse, The Queen's Theatre in the Haymarket.
* December 27 – John Vanbrugh's play The Mistake is likewise adapted from the French and first performed at The Queen's Theatre.
* unknown dates
** George Hickes' Linguarum veterum septentrionalium thesaurus grammatico-criticus et archæologicus vol. 2 (published in Oxford) includes the first published reference to Beowulf and the single surviving transcript of the Finnesburg Fragment.
** Chikamatsu Monzaemon (近松門左衛門) almost abandons writing kabuki plays and becomes a staff writer to the bunraku theatre in Osaka.
** Claude Pierre Goujet, religious historian and Jansenist, enters holy orders.
** William Walsh begins a correspondence with Alexander Pope.
** Work begins on Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire, England, designed by the playwright John Vanbrugh for the Duke of Marlborough.

## New books
### Prose

* Joseph Addison – Remarks on Several Parts of Italy
* Mary Astell – The Christian Religion as Profess'd by a Daughter of the Church
* Dimitrie Cantemir – Historia Hieroglyphica (the first novel to use the Romanian language)
* George Cheyne – Philosophical Principles of Natural Religion (deist)
* Samuel Clarke – A Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God
* Mary Davys – The Fugitive
* Daniel Defoe
** The Consolidator; or, Memoirs of Sundry Transactions from the World in the Moon
** A Second Volume of the Writings of the Author of the True-Born Englishman
* John Dunton – The Life and Errors of John Dunton Late Citizen of London (humor)
* Edmund Gibson – Family-Devotion
* Charles Gildon – The Deist's Manual
* Marie-Jeanne L'Héritier – La Tour ténébreuse, et les jours lumineux: contes anglois
* Bernard de Mandeville – The Grumbling Hive (pirated edition)
* Delarivière Manley – The Secret History, of Queen Zarah, and the Zarazians (roman à clef)
* John Philips
** Blenheim
** The Splendid Shilling
* Katherine Philips – Letters of Orinda to Poliarchus
* John Toland – Primitive Constitution of the Christian Church

### Drama

* Thomas Baker – Hampstead Heath
* Susannah Centlivre
** The Gamester (anonymously)
** The Basset-Table
* Colley Cibber – The Careless Husband
* Prosper Jolyot de Crébillon – Idoménée
* John Dennis – Gibraltar, or the Spanish Adventure
* George Granville – The British Enchanters
* William Grimston, 1st Viscount Grimston – The Lawyer’s Fortune or Love in a Hollow Tree
* Peter Anthony Motteux
** The Amorous Miser, or the Younger the Wiser
** Arsinoe, Queen of Cyprus (opera)
* William Mountfort – Zelmane
* Mary Pix (attributed) – The Conquest of Spain (adapted from William Rowley's All's Lost by Lust)
* Nicholas Rowe – Ulysses
* Richard Steele – The Tender Husband
* John Vanbrugh –
** The Confederacy
** The Mistake

### Poetry

* Richard Blackmore – Eliza
* Daniel Defoe
** The Double Welcome
** The Dyet of Poland
* Complete Tang Poems
* Charles Johnson – The Queen; a Pindaric Ode
* Matthew Prior – An English Padlock
* Ned Ward – Hudibras Redidivus
* Isaac Watts – Horae Lyricae
See also 1705 in poetry

## Births

* January 21 – Isaac Hawkins Browne, English poet (died 1760)
* February 13 – Franciszka Urszula Radziwillowa, Polish dramatist (died 1753)
* May – Ambrosius Stub, Danish poet (died 1758)
* June 21 – David Hartley, English philosopher (died 1757)
* September 2 – Abraham Tucker (Edward Search), English philosopher (died 1774)
* October 29 – Gerhardt Friedrich Müller, German historian (died 1783)
* November 23 – Thomas Birch, English historian (died 1766)
* probable – Stephen Duck, English poet (died 1756)

## Deaths

* January 4 – Madame d'Aulnoy, French author of fairy tales (born c. 1650)
* January 10 – Étienne Pavillon, French lawyer and poet (born 1632)
* February 5 – Philipp Jakob Spener, German theologian (born 1635)
* April 2 – John Howe, English theologian (born 1630)
* May 5 – Johann Ernst Glück, German writer and translator (born 1654)
* June 10 – Michael Wigglesworth, English poet (born 1631)
* October 17 – Ninon de l'Enclos, French courtesan and salonnière (born 1620)
* November 10 – Justine Siegemund, German writer on midwifery (born 1636)