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 includes the first published reference to Beowulf and the single surviving transcript of the Finnesburg Fragment.
*Chikamatsu Monzaemon 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.

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
George Cheyne – Philosophical Principles of Natural Religion
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
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
Delarivière Manley – The Secret History, of Queen Zarah, and the Zarazians
John Philips
*Blenheim
*The Splendid Shilling
Katherine Philips – Letters of Orinda to Poliarchus
John Toland – ''Primitive Constitution of the Christian Church''