Textual Transmission, Reception and the Editing of Early Modern Texts 1 (original) (raw)
Related papers
The Appearance of the Text in Early Modern England
TEXT, 11, 1998
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Royalist Print and Textual Space, 1643-1646
In recent years there has been a surge of interest in both royalism and print culture during the middle of the seventeenth century. Royalist print and its subversive nature during the 1650s have been of particular interest. Much research has been conducted on the production, circulation, readership, politics and messages of royalist newsbooks and pamphlets printed in the years following Charles I’s execution. This paper aims to build on these interests by focusing on the key royalist newsbooks of the first civil war, such as Mercurius Aulicus. The underpinning concept of this paper is that royalist newsbooks between 1643 and 1646 offer a different view of the royalist cause which needs to be considered. An exploration of the physicality, characteristics and themes of royalist newsbooks forms the basis of this work, with the intention of developing new insights into the nature and identity of royalism. The suggestion is that royalist newsbooks relied on their physical features to assert their authority, and that they attempted to control meaning in order to align the king’s cause with an English identity.
HARGRAVE, Jocelyn. 2019. The Evolution of Editorial Style in Early Modern England
Textual Cultures
Many years ago, as an English department graduate student looking for part-time employment, I took on some copy editing for a local publishing house. I had received no directions, just as I had not received any directions for another job, tracking down all the bibliographical information missing from a famous European scholar's monograph. It was just presumed I would have the requisite skills. Work in the library went well, but the copy editing proved more problematic. Dutifully I crossed out errors and wrote little notes in the margin to I didn't quite know who-some imaginary editor or printer, perhaps, who would clean up the mess by following my directions. Needless to say, the person to whom I returned my marked-up sheets was annoyed. Why didn't I use the to-her-familiar corrector's marks? The answer, of course, was that I had never heard of them, and by now I can't remember who sat me down and taught me all the symbols used for deletions, insertions, changes of font, restoration of material, etc., a full and efficient communication system between a corrector reading a proof sheet for errors and the person called upon to make the required changes to the proofs, whether a sixteenth-century compositor rearranging lead types or someone today on a computer entering keystrokes. But where did this system come from? It is this question that Jocelyn Hargrave attempts to answer in The Evolution of Editorial Style in Early Modern England. More specifically, Hargrave looks at the development of style guides used over the centuries by editors and printers and their contribution to what book historians following Robert Darnton call the "communications circuit". The book is unfortunately mistitled, as it extends well beyond any normal understanding of "early modern", tracing the guides from Hieronymus Hornschuch's Orthotypographia of 1608 to Philip Luckombe's Concise History of the Origin and Progress of Printing in 1770 and to later guides in nineteenth-century editing, including Caleb Stower's The Printer's Grammar in 1808. The final chapters analyze the editing of Piers Plowman in 1813 and of Coleridge's Poems in 1796. The confusing title,
The preface to the reader in The Chronicle of John Hardyng (1543) states that “None haue behynde theim, left so greate treasure…As thei whiche haue taken peines to write Chronicles and actes” so that “By Chronicles we knowe, in eche countree / What menne have been” since “Chronicles dooe recorde and testifie…dooe kepe in continuall memorie…that Englishe men might haue understanding / Of all affaires, touchyng their owne countree.” While this refers to chronicles as created in manuscript form by “thei which haue taken peines to write”—which Hardyng’s chronicle originally was—this particular work was printed in London in the sixteenth century. However, there are many medieval manuscript chronicles, with some of the more famous and long-lasting English examples being the Chronicles of London, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles, the Croyland Chronicle, Jean Froissart’s Chronicle, Thomas Walsingham’s Historia Anglicana, the St. Alban’s Chronicle, The Chronicle of John Hardyng, and The Brut chronicle. Quite a few of these and other late medieval manuscript chronicles were continued into the print era by later chroniclers and printers such as William Caxton, Richard Grafton, and John Stow who saw the genre’s popularity as a worthwhile investment. For my paper, I will draw upon the The Brut manuscript chronicle printed later as The Chronicles of England by William Caxton, Fabyan’s New Chronicles of England and France (a manuscript printed posthumously), The Chronicle of John Hardyng later continued by Richard Grafton, the Thomas Lanquet and Thomas Cooper hybrid known as Cooper’s Chronicle, Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland; and John Stow’s Annales, Summarie, and Chronicles. My research will examine the intertextuality of the chronicles, particularly the influences and dynamism between chronicles first circulated in manuscript and later in print. First, a largely neglected element of chronicles is the paratextual elements, particularly the development of headings, regnal and chronological year markings, page numbers, and marginal annotations. All of these elements can be found in both the manuscript and print versions of chronicles, yet, they were initially employed irregularly in both manuscript and print. Who pioneered the format regularly employed by printed chronicles in the mid to late sixteenth century? My research will show how not only did scribes’ and printers’ preferences play a part, but also the readers’ desires, evidenced by the markings they made. Lastly, manuscript and print continued to coexist with lengthy annotations, manuscript documents, and other drawings written or pasted into chronicles, showing owners’ engagement with the text. Moreover, while the cultural importance and popularity of chronicles can be further illustrated given Shakespeare’s use and the sheer number and editions of chronicles printed in the sixteenth and early seventeenth century, chronicles’ place in Englishman’s “continuall memorie” is more thoroughly illustrated by the multiple generations of Englishmen who engaged with both manuscript and print versions of these texts, sometimes simultaneously. Indeed, it would appear readers had a significant part in developing the chronicle format and focus through their annotations. Furthermore, they used the works to better understand current crises and investigate their cultural roots, fulfilling Hardyng’s desire that “Englishe men might haue understanding / Of all affaires, touchyng their owne countree.”
Material Texts in Early Modern England (uncorrected proofs of 2018 CUP monograph)
What was a book in early modern England? By combining book history, bibliography and literary criticism, Material Texts in Early Modern England explores how sixteenth-and seventeenth-century books were stranger, richer things than scholars have imagined. Adam Smyth examines important aspects of bibliographical culture which have been under-examined by critics: the cutting up of books as a form of careful reading; book destruction and its relation to canon formation; the prevalence of printed errors and the literary richness of mistakes; and the recycling of older texts in the bodies of new books, as printed waste. How did authors, including Herbert, Jonson, Milton, Nashe and Cavendish, respond to this sense of the book as patched, transient, flawed and palimpsestic? Material Texts in Early Modern England recovers these traits and practices, and so crucially revises our sense of what a book was, and what a book might be.
Censorship and Interpretation: The Conditions of Writing and Reading in Early Modern England
1984
204 / Renaissance and Reformation remains disappointingly out of focus. This is also a point at which the policy of translating extracts other than the French is frustratingly inconsistent. The final chapter, "Peace and the Animal Kingdom," is a kind of appendix, on the topos of the animals not killing their own species in quantity the way humans do, and in that respect being less 'bestial' and more rational. There is a fluency of reference in this essay, from Pliny and Gregory Nazianzen on one page to Calvin and Milton (the only English poet who rates more than a mention), before, in a kind of recapitulation and conclusion to the whole book, he links Ronsard and Erasmus. There is a very useful appendix in which Hutton analyses twenty-five major topoi in poetry on peace of the period. It would be idle to criticise Hutton for ignoring the magisterial work of Silver on Ronsard, for example; the transformation of Renaissance French studies that has occurred since the book was effectively finished has not rendered the book obsolete, because its ambitions are so different. It remains an example of an admirable kind of old-fashioned scholarship. The kind of searching for sources and topics that Hutton does so effectively is, in a way, something that Renaissance writers themselves would have recognised, indeed been trained for, although for different ends. The book functions best as a kind of reference work, a quarry, rather than a work of criticism. And could not Cornell have put French' somewhere in the title, just for clarity's sake? ROGER POOLEY, University ofKeele Annabel Patterson. Censorship and Interpretation: The Conditions of Writing and Reading in Early Modem England. Madison, Wisconsin: The University ofWisconsin Press, 1984. Pp. ix, 283, illus. In Chapter One of Censorship and Interpretation, Annabel Patterson summarizes Edwin Greenlaw's 1913 political and historical reading of Sidney's Arcadia, and then surveys subsequent textual and generic approaches to the workapproaches designed to shake the clay of history from their critical boots. The example illustrates very effectively how the new critics and their descendants have closed the door on history and historicist readings of literature. It also shows succinctly and tactfully how fundamentally close poststructuralist methods are to their newcritical antecedents, despite rhetorical protestations to the contrary, and. finally, how current antihistorical critical modes are, in the original sense of the word, reactionary and impose restraints on themselves that limit the fullness of their critical analysis.
English Manuscripts 1060 to 1220 and the Making of a Re-source1
Literature Compass, 2006
Eleventh-, twelfth-and thirteenth-century England is a complex multilingual jigsaw, and a much underestimated period of literary production. This article surveys and explores the close relationship between English, Latin and French book production, offering valuable insights into English manuscript culture in this period and re-contextualising texts and their manuscripts, calling for each to be studied in its own right and understood as part of a pattern of wider manuscript production. The article also introduces the reader to key and crucial issues in literary production in this period, and to new research in the field.