Manuscripts and their Makers in the English Renaissance (review)

In his contribution to this impressive collection of essays, Steven W. May imagines 'a palaeographer's paradise, a world that may be only a few decades away'. His vision is a manuscript version of Early English Books Online: an 'electronic Eden' in which anybody may access full facsimile texts of manuscripts from major archives across the world. The implications of such a shift, however, are far from obvious. While it would mean fewer scholarly road-trips, May argues that it would not spell the end of 'high-quality manuscript editing'; indeed, given the easier availability of manuscript material, it may even have an opposite effect, placing new demands on palaeographers, to interpret and contextualize what would strike many as a whole new world of Early Modern texts (pp. 214-15). At present, though, as this volume attests, the study of manuscripts continues to occupy a somewhat awkward, liminal position within the broader field of literary studies. Its practitioners uphold rigorous and exacting standards of scholarship, and consistently contribute to knowledge of the material contexts of writing and reading in the past. At times, though, one is left with a sense that they are rather struggling to make themselves heard.

This volume contains essays by some of the world's leading experts on English Renaissance manuscripts. Contributors include Peter Beal, H. R. Woudhuysen, Arthur F. Marotti, Katherine Duncan-Jones and Harold Love, some of whom have devoted entire careers not only to the study of manuscripts, but also to the tricky project of convincing others that manuscripts matter. Their approaches, over the years, have ranged from raising editorial standards in the light of evidence drawn from manuscript sources (in the case, say, of Duncan-Jones), through the preparation of invaluable research aids for manuscript-centred research (in the case of Beal), to problematizing print-centred preconceptions of authorship and publication (in the case, perhaps most notably, of Love). Appropriately, this volume also demonstrates a considerable range of approaches across its eleven essays. Woudhuysen, for example, focuses his attention on a single-page manuscript fragment of Sir Philip Sidney's Old Arcadia, which the professional scribe appears to have set aside when he realised that he had made an error in his transcription. It leads Woudhuysen, after a characteristically scholarly investigation, to argue that The Old Arcadia may have enjoyed a wider transmission than has previously been acknowledged, and that this may have been precisely the author's intention. Hilton Kelliher engages, somewhat more traditionally, in the game of authorial identification, proposing an obscure Essex gentleman, John Mott, as the writer of the sprawling curiosity The Newe Metamorphosis. In perhaps the most ambitious contribution, meanwhile, Grace Ioppolo, working from the archive of the theatrical entrepreneur Philip Henslowe, challenges existing assumptions about the transition of play-texts from 'foul' to 'fair' copies, placing the author in a central position throughout the process.

Some of the contributors are more determined than others to make claims that will be heard beyond the covers of this volume. Ioppolo pushes an analysis of a handful of documents about as far as it will stretch, proposing an argument that surely warrants development in a monograph; Kelliher, on the other hand, seems rather too content with the fruits of his biographical searches, and leaves his reader thinking that he might well have done more to reflect upon the culture in which the remarkable Mott almost managed to flourish. Marotti did something like this for one of Mott's contemporaries in John Donne: Coterie Poet (1986); Mott, though a less accomplished poet, in many respects offers a more interesting subject, given his position on the margins of Renaissance learning and power. Surely I am not the only reader who would like to know more about this.

And then there are pieces that are so wonderful that one is left regretting that this volume is so determinedly oriented towards such...