Literary Research and the British Renaissance and Early Modern Period: Strategies and Sources (review)

There are three and a half rules of research. The first is GIGO (garbage in, garbage out): garbage research produces garbage. The second is the Serendipity rule (with a nod to Horace Walpole): in this case exactly what you need to know at exactly the time you need to know it falls off the library shelf at your feet. The third rule is Murphy’s Law: nothing is as simple as it seems, everything takes longer than planned, and if anything can go wrong, it will and at the worst possible moment. We all know Murphy haunts libraries and the Internet. The half law, O’Shea’s Law, should never be ignored: Murphy is an optimist.

Serendipity will be the happy result of working with Literary Research. Anyone doing research in the literature of England, Scotland, Ireland, or Wales from 1500 to 1700 should make sure that this falls open at the beginning of a project. Ms. Bowers and Ms. Keeran have surveyed research sources, starting with a commonsensical approach to online investigating as well as the standard library catalogues, print and electronic bibliographies, scholarly journals, web resources, and so much more. With wit, clarity, and style, they guide the reader, novice or pro, through the best print, microform, and web materials for the two centuries roughly covered by the terms renaissance and early modern as delineated by Leah Marcus in her influential 1992 essay “Renaissance/Early Modern Studies.” In addition, the authors provide concrete research problems that illustrate how to get the most from their sources, and then tie it all together with an extended project on Cavendish.

Each reader will find a different chapter to relish. For me it was the one on seventeenth-century periodicals—not just a research survey but a tutorial on what these publications involved, how they developed, and what their influence was. I pride myself on knowing my way around manuscripts and archives and Web sites, yet this book taught me much. In addition, it presents ways of using research materials that perhaps authors did not imagine. For instance, Ms. Bowers and Ms. Keeran illustrate how to use my Behn bibliography to study her contemporary reception. While I chronologically ordered as many references to Behn in her lifetime and shortly thereafter as possible, it never occurred to me that my presentation could be used as a reception study.

I wish the authors had discussed the problems of misidentification of editions and issues in the ESTC or of the complicated and the not-always-standard cataloguing in WorldCat. When one is aware of the potential for error in these two databases, one can use them wisely. I can offer only four updates. First, the Aphra Behn Society now has an online journal that covers a broad range of women writers of this period. Second, after CBEL3 published only one volume—volume 4, covering 1800–1900—the entire project was canceled, so scholars in our period might still want to use the first and second editions as described by Ms. Bowers and Ms. Keeran. In the chapter on manuscripts, I wish the online Leeds Verse Database, rightly included in the section on Web Resources, was also included in first-line databases for identifying and locating poetry. And finally, the Union First Line Index of English Verse, which includes first lines from the Leeds Brotherton collection, is now online and a magnificent resource for anonymous or pseudonymous or improperly attributed poetry. But the authors highlight James Woolley’s invaluable online checklist of first-line indexes, so this recent addition would be found.

If you get this book, read it straight through, and then consult it often, you will avoid GIGO and outwit Murphy and O’Shea. If the forthcoming volume in this series on British Literature of the Long Eighteenth Century by the same authors comes even close to the quality of this volume, scholars in...