Manuscript Inscriptions in Early English Printed Music by David Greer (review)

Recent years have witnessed an increased scholarly interest in early English musical print culture with studies focused on questions of authorship, the role of editors, publishers, compositors or monopoly holders, and the entrepreneurship of particular printers or publishers. Consumers of printed music in Tudor and early Stuart England have elicited far less attention, however, and there has been but a handful of source studies of English printed music from the perspective of ownership and use.

David Greer’s Manuscript Inscriptions in Early English Printed Music therefore makes a welcome contribution to the field, with its focus on manuscript markings on printed music added occasionally during the print process but more often by early owners after the music had left the print house. The book developed out of Greer’s ‘habit’ of recording handwritten inscriptions in the sixteenth- and early seventeenth century copies of music he consulted over the course of his career. His haphazard noting of manuscript additions over many years (since the early 1960s) is combined with more recent systematic research to gather an extensive (though by no means exhaustive) list of inscriptions in English printed music ranging from John Rastell’s A New Interlude and a Mery of the Nature of the iiii Elements (c.1520) to William Child’s First Set of Psalmes (1639).

As would be expected for a published catalogue of this scale, Greer sets some clear parameters. The copies of music included in this project are all listed in the second edition of the Short-Title Catalogue (itself not an exhaustive list), and to this Greer adds surviving copies of music that have come to his attention through their listing in the online English Short-Title Catalogue and Répertoire international des sources musicales or that have come to light through chance discovery. Publications of music by English composers printed abroad and editions of Continental music known to have been in the possession of early English owners are not included, nor are liturgical books for the Sarum rite or the vast majority of psalm book editions, although both contain music; only those psalm editions deemed ‘significant musically’ are included. Essentially, Greer’s catalogue is concerned with surviving copies of polyphonic music printed in England between c.1520 and 1640.

By ‘manuscript inscription’ Greer refers to handwritten additions to the printed page contemporaneous with the book’s early life, including added notation, words, letters, numbers, and drawings. Reference to illegible handwriting is included, but random marks, such as pen trials, are not, though, as Greer points out, even these may be of use should they be matched with similar ones in other books indicating that at some point they shared a common owner. More recent inscriptions are likewise not recorded except where they provide information about a book’s provenance. In addition to manuscript inscriptions, Greer records other indicators of ownership and provenance such as bookplates, embossed names, initials, and armorial bearings on the books’ covers.

Manuscript Inscriptions is divided into two parts, supported by an index and selected bibliography: the first (pp. 3–60) is an extended introductory essay, the second (pp. 63–189) a catalogue of manuscript inscriptions organized alphabetically by country, city, institution, composer, and edition. Part I, intended as a ‘preliminary survey’, introduces the four most common types of inscription encountered during the course of Greer’s research, and draws illustrative examples of the kinds of information these types of inscription might yield from the materials catalogued in Part II. The essay thus considers: (1) ownership markings and the identification, where possible, of early owners; (2) manuscript number additions either with reference to the value of a publication during its early life or to added page numbering systems—as Greer deftly demonstrates, these can reveal editions that, now scattered across the world’s research institutions, were once bound together as ‘tract volumes’; (3) altered or added music and/or text indicative of printing-house corrections...