Editing Early Modern Texts: An Introduction to Principles and Practice (review)

Written throughout with something of the benevolent —if sometimes magisterial —courtesy of a visiting external examiner, Michael Hunter's Editing Early Modern Texts is a functional and practical primer to what has become one of the growth areas of early modern studies. Founded on his own wide editorial experience, and on a stringent survey of editorial projects in his own and related disciplines, Hunter's study offers both a survey of the field as it is currently constituted and a series of suggestions as to how, going forward, it might best (or, at least, better) be practised. One of the strengths of the book is its placement of different kinds of texts and their editorial cultures in dialogue with one another. Moving beyond the once-dismaying distinction between 'documentary' and 'literary' editing (firmly sketched in at pp. 4–6), Hunter ranges across scientific, domestic, philosophical, political, epistolary, and literary texts in the course of his discussion. He offers valuable brief accounts of how texts in manuscript and print were made, a fascinating chapter on 'the role of print' and the impact of its 'mechanised' but not standardized letter forms (p. 30), and then a linked series of instrumentally driven chapters beginning with 'types of edition' and ending (as all good editions ought) with 'Indexing / Searching'. This sequence of chapters, pragmatically picking their way through the presentation of texts from print and manuscript, the difficulties of modernization, and the various components of an editorial apparatus, offers much capable advice on the making of the kind of 'prudent' editions of which Hunter clearly approves (p. 28). His is not a book given to schisms, experiments, and the margins; rather it recognizes that all editions must be a kind of 'ideal compromise' (p. 80), a phrase he applies in situ to the presentation of variant texts from manuscript but which has a wider application to his project as a whole.

Hunter's book is aware of its historical situation (and of its implications). His interests in the 'interconnection between different media' (p. 67) range from manuscript to print, through microfilm and on into the ever-expanding horizons of electronic publication, always though with a wry and wise recognition that today's new possibility is the next decade's obsolete technology. This is particularly clear in his quotation from a November 1989 newsletter distributed by the Hartlib Papers Project, fresh with the excitement and the promise of publication '"on-line" through national and international computer networks, and in the form of an interactive optical disc for use with microcomputers' (p. 53). But what is obsolete does not necessarily disappear, and Hunter, as well as commenting on the parallels between the advent of microfilm and the advent of electronic facsimiles ('it is interesting that editors once hailed microfilm as the source of a revolution in editing in a manner somewhat comparable to the more recent claims concerning digitisation', he notes, neutrally, pp. 54–55), is careful to remember that hybridization is more often the result of a new technology than dis- or replacement. This mixing of media, interconnection of a kind that cannot be disconnected, affects even Early English Books Online, whose digital facsimiles 'are sometimes reproduced from rather ancient microfilms and their quality often leaves something to be desired' (p. 64). This does not prevent him from writing compellingly about the possibilities of XML or SGML encoding, an endorsement given further weight (for this sceptical reader at least) by Hunter's recognition that electronic editing might need to have as much to do with what is left out as what is included. SGML encoding can appear, Hunter writes, to let 'the editor have his or her cake and eat it', recording even if not necessarily displaying all the minutiae of (say) a manuscript's way with matters such as abbreviation. 'I am neutral about this', he begins his survey of the pros and cons, before concluding, as it might...