Two Day Course: 11-12 June 2025
This course will offer participants an opportunity to practise transcribing a variety of literary manuscripts written in English in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. These texts will include examples of both poetry and prose, and we will in addition look at a selection of marginalia appended to both manuscript and printed works. Each of the passages analysed contains intriguing puzzles and exciting scribal practices. In the second half of the day, we will turn our attention to some of the theoretical, and practical, challenges involved in editing such documents. We will discuss the fascinating ways in which transcription, editing, and literary criticism are all entwined in these case studies. In addition, we will explore variant copies of a given poem and in the final hour we will consider some computer-based methods for mapping out relations between variant manuscripts of a given text. An ability to read early modern hands (secretary, italic, mixed) is not essential but would be useful, since much of the course will involve close scrutiny of early modern manuscript texts.
Student Comments
Coverage was great. I liked the mix of letters, diary entries, diplomatic materials and account books.
We worked through a lot for one day.... The speed was not too rapid or too slow, but the perfect Goldilocks combination.
Additional Information
Bibliography
Early modern English manuscript culture
Beal, Peter, In Praise of Scribes: Manuscripts and their Makers in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998)
Beal, Peter, A Dictionary of English Manuscript Terminology, 1450–2000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press)
Love, Harold, Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993)
Marotti, Arthur F., Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995)
Woudhuysen, H.R., Sir Philip Sidney and the Circulation of Manuscripts, 1558-1640 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), of which concentrate on Part I, ‘The Circulation of Manuscripts, 1558-1640’
How to read early modern handwriting
Dawson, Giles E. and Laetitia Kennedy-Skipton, Elizabethan Handwriting 1500–1650: A Guide to the Reading of Documents and Manuscripts (London, Faber, 1968)
English Handwriting, 1500–1700: an online course: www.english.cam.ac.uk/ceres/ehoc
The National Archives, Palaeography: www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/palaeography
Editing early modern manuscripts
Hunter, Michael, ‘How to Edit a Seventeenth-Century Manuscript: Principles and Practice’, The Seventeenth Century10 (1995): 277–310
Hunter, Michael, Editing Early Modern Texts: An Introduction to Principles and Practice (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007; repr. 2009)
Tanselle, G. Thomas, ‘The Editing of Historical Documents’, Studies in Bibliography 31 (1978): 1–56
Early modern spelling and punctuation
Lass, Roger, ed., The Cambridge History of the English Language, Volume III: 1476-1776 (Cambridge: C.U.P., 1999): see esp. Vivian Salmon, ‘Orthography and Punctuation’
Salmon, Vivian, ‘The Spelling and Punctuation of Shakespeare’s Time’, in Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, eds., William Shakespeare: The Complete Works. Original Spelling Edition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986)
