New Ways of Looking at Old Texts, IV: Papers of the Renaissance English Text Society, 2002-2006 (review)

Unlike previous volumes organized by RETS panels, this latest is organized (less well) by theme: 'John Foxe: The Acts and Monuments'; 'Manuscript Studies'; 'Print Studies'; and 'Editing the Renaissance Text'. There are illustrations, a list at the back of the RETS panels and papers printed in this volume, and an adequate index.

Of the five papers in section one, on Foxe and The Acts, Susan Wabuda's 'From Manuscript to Codex to E-Book: The Interactive Foxe' calls attention to the discoveries to be made from side-by-side online access to Foxe editions. Margaret Aston's 'Saints, Martyrs, Murderers: Text and Context of Foxe's Images' shows how the single-column woodcuts in the second edition were also used as illustrations to popular ballads on the punishment of female murderers. Aston asks whether 'the printers who used this imagery [were] deliberately exploiting a pool of Protestant image-associations for their own commercial ends' (p. 37), or whether these two uses of the illustrations were unlinked in the minds of contemporary viewers. John N. King explores the use of banderoles and 'drop-in typesettings' in the illustrations in the four large editions in his 'Text and Image in Foxe's Book of Martyrs', his results both fine-tuning and questioning earlier thinking on the intended audience level (literate and/or illiterate) of the work. In 'Watching Women in The Acts and Monuments' Deborah G. Burks thought-provokingly examines how conventional depictions of women are manipulated in support of the Protestant agenda.

Section two, 'Manuscript Studies', with thirteen papers, includes several on miscellanies and commonplace books and several on the roles of women - as owners, authors or subjects of literary works. Arthur G. Marotti's is a masterly study of the late-Elizabethan compilation, BL MS Harley 7392 (2), and Raymond G. Siemens' a useful discussion of his two projects: the early Tudor songbook, BL Add. MS 31922, edited by traditional methods, and the Devonshire manuscript, BL Add. MS 17492, by electronic means. Michael Denbo's study of three seventeenth-century manuscript verse miscellanies underlines their individual physical differences (unlike the stability imposed by printing); Victoria E. Burke's study (through the Perdita project) of ten women's verse miscellany manuscripts expands this topic. Two contributions on Mary Wroth, Margaret J. Arnold's on a newly-discovered holograph letter (University of Kansas, Kenneth Spencer Research Library, MS Crawford 177) and Susan Lauffer O'Hara's on the 'stage rubrics' in Wroth's Folger manuscript of Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, advance knowledge of this writer. Kristen L. Olsen's textual history study of the poetic miscellany, Le tombeau de Marguerite de Valois, reveals the link between the literary and political communities therein created; Jane Couchman's essay on Louise de Coligny's little-known album in the Koninklijke Biblioteek offers a perceptive glimpse of the shifts in poetic taste during the compilation period, 1570s to early 1600s. Sharon Cadman Seelig looks attentively at three women's diaries, discussing how best to describe their contents and how editors have treated them; Erin A. Sadlack investigates carefully the understudied area of women's petitionary letters, their purposes and styles, during Elizabeth's reign.

The five papers grouped under 'Print Studies' include Susan Felch's on the publication history (late 1540s to 1582) of Elizabeth Tyrwhit's Morning and Evening Prayers, which provides insights into the history of devotional reform in sixteenth-century England. Rebecca Laroche looks at women's signatures in 'medical texts' (p. 270), but herbals dominate, most interestingly in the gift of a herbal by Lady Franklin, head of a large household, to her unmarried sister, Anne Purefoy. Zachary Letter examines the meanings carried by...