Editing Manuscripts in Print and Digital Forms

Editing Manuscripts in Print and Digital Forms

Arthur F. Marotti*Wayne State University

Abstract

Except for texts from a pre-Gutenberg era, scholarly editions have, for the most part, been basedon print exemplars. A bias against manuscript evidence has, as Margaret Ezell shows, workedagainst the recovery women’s writing that remained in manuscript and was not printed in itsown time or later; it has also pushed much of the work of minor and anonymous authors tothe side. Especially now that manuscript documents are beginning to become accessible to awide scholarly community through digital reproduction, it is time to make more use of manu-script evidence for editions of not only of major, minor, and anonymous authors (both maleand female), but also of culturally symptomatic literary compilations surviving in manuscriptform. In recent years, scholars have produced editions of individual manuscript collections andthere is a growing number of studies of the manuscript literary environment as one differingfrom that of print culture in its treatment of texts, of authorship, and of reader-roles. Microfilmand, more recently, digital (color) reproduction of literary manuscripts from the major archivesin the U.K. and U.S. has facilitated the editing and presentation of manuscript texts. DanielO’Donnell’s edition of Caedmon’s Hymn offers the user supplementary digital images of manu-script material in CD form. Steven May suggests that, despite the problem of technologicalobsolescence, digital presentation of manuscript documents that supplements the hard-copyedition in print form is well suited to the task of crafting useful editions of manuscript compila-tions or anthologies. Margaret Ezell, who delineates a sexist bias in traditional editorial practices,connects archival manuscript research and the editions that result from it to the important projectof recovering women’s writing. All three scholars acknowledge the technical and technologicalchallenges of digital technology, but they see it as an essential tool for 21st-century researchersand editors.

This article is part of a Literature Compass special issue on ‘Scholarly Editing in the Twenty-FirstCentury’.

The special issue is made up of the following pieces:

‘Special Issue: ‘‘Scholarly Editing in the Twenty-First Century’’ – Preface’, Regenia Gagnier,Literature Compass 7.2 (2010): 33–34, doi: 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2009.00672.x.

‘Special Issue: ‘‘Scholarly Editing in the Twenty-First Century’’ – Introduction’, Arthur F.Marotti, Literature Compass 7.2 (2010): 35–36, doi: 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2009.00673.x.

‘Electronic Archives and Critical Editing’, Jerome McGann, Literature Compass 7.2 (2010): 37–42,doi: 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2009.00674.x.

‘Theorizing the Digital Scholarly Edition’, Hans Walter Gabler, Literature Compass 7.2 (2010): 43–56, doi: 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2009.00675.x.

‘Editing Without Walls’, Peter Robinson, Literature Compass 7.2 (2010): 57–61, doi: 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2009.00676.x.

‘Our Affection for Books’, Susan J. Wolfson, Literature Compass 7.2 (2010): 62–71, doi: 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2009.00677.x.

‘His Days Among the Dead Are No Longer Passed: Editing Robert Southey’, Lynda Pratt,Literature Compass 7.2 (2010): 72–81, doi: 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2009.00678.x.

Literature Compass 7/2 (2010): 89–94, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2009.00680.x

ª 2010 The AuthorJournal Compilation ª 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

‘Different Demands, Different Priorities: Electronic and Print Editions’, Stuart Curran, LiteratureCompass 7.2 (2010): 82–88, doi: 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2009.00679.x.

‘Editing Manuscripts in Print and Digital Forms’, Arthur F. Marotti, Literature Compass 7.2 (2010):89–94, doi: 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2009.00680.x.

‘All of the Above: The Importance of Multiple Editions of Renaissance Manuscripts’, Steven W.May, Literature Compass 7.2 (2010): 95–101, doi: 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2009.00681.x.

‘Editing Early Modern Women’s Manuscripts: Theory, Electronic Editions, and the AccidentalCopy-Text’, Margaret J.M. Ezell, Literature Compass 7.2 (2010): 102–109, doi: 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2009.00682.x.

‘Different Strokes, Same Folk: Designing the Multi-form Digital Edition’, Daniel Paul O’Donnell,Literature Compass 7.2 (2010): 110–119, doi: 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2009.00683.x.

‘Special Issue: ‘‘Scholarly Editing in the Twenty-First Century’’ – A Conclusion’, Laura Mandell,Literature Compass 7.2 (2010): 120–133, doi: 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2009.00684.x.

‘Special Issue: ‘‘Scholarly Editing in the Twenty-First Century’’ – Combined Bibliography’,Marotti et al., Literature Compass 7.2 (2010): 134–144, doi: 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2009.00685.x.

For a long-time scholars editing texts from a post-Gutenberg era had a preference forbasing critical editions on early print exemplars of particular works, using manuscriptdocuments only when they demonstrably had superior, ideally authorial, versions ofworks or had readings that would ‘correct’ those found in printed volumes. Since canoni-cal literary texts received first priority in editing projects – usually those that were printedin their own time or shortly after – the writings of minor or anonymous authors receivedonly delayed attention or were largely ignored. This was particularly the case forwomen’s writing, especially neglected texts it has been the ongoing project of modernfeminist scholars to recover. In the case of writing by both men and women that hascome down to us mainly in manuscript form, such as the poems of the 17th-centuryEnglish authors William Strode and Thomas Traherne (the latter of whose worksremained generally unknown until the modern era), textual scholars have been slow toproduce adequate editions.

For texts written in a pre-Gutenberg era, of course, manuscripts have been the essentialsource for modern editions. In the case of the body of Anglo-Saxon literature, OldEnglish works such as Beowulf and the anthology of texts contained in the Exeter Bookhave not only received modern editorial attention, but also have been digitally repro-duced from manuscript documents in forms that are accessible to broad range of scholarsand students. Medieval drama has been recovered from manuscript sources, as has a largebody of both narrative and lyrical poetry.

If we look at the rich manuscript remains of the medieval and early modern period,we discover, however, in addition to documents containing mainly the work of specificcanonical authors, many compilations of texts by various known and anonymous authors,both commonplace-book miscellanies containing many different kinds of literaryand non-literary texts (such as medical receipts, household accounts, autobiographicalwriting, etc.), and also literary compilations of pieces by multiple authors, including, insome cases, those of the compilers themselves, who, in the manuscript system of literarytransmission, felt free not only to alter, conflate, and re-title the texts they received andreproduced, but also to answer them and ⁄or to include their own compositions in thecollections they assembled. In this textual environment, the author-centered focus of printculture was not the norm: rather, an historically evolving social textuality removed texts

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ª 2010 The Author Literature Compass 7/2 (2010): 89–94, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2009.00680.xJournal Compilation ª 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

from authorial control to repurpose them for new contexts and the lines between literaryproducers and consumers blurred. Those who obtained texts were free to participate intextual creation, rather than simply serve as passive recipients of the work of others.

Although, largely thanks to the efforts of Hyder Rollins, printed English poeticalmiscellanies of the late sixteenth century have been appeared in good modern editions,similar collections of poems surviving only in manuscript, not printed forms, have beenslow to appear. Ruth Hughey worked for about thirty years on the Arundel HaringtonManuscript before she published her edition with Ohio State University Press in 1960;Steven May brought out his edition of Henry Stanford’s poetical anthology, CambridgeUniversity Library MS Dd.5.75, in 1988, having done the work originally as a disserta-tion under the direction of William Ringler, who also directed Laurence Cummings’sdissertation project, an edition of the valuable Elizabethan manuscript poetical collectionassociated with John Finet, Bodleian Rawlinson Poetry MS 85 – which, unfortunately,was never published nor were some of the editions of Rosenbach Library manuscriptsdone as dissertations under the direction of M. A. Shaaber at the University of Pennsylva-nia. Peter Seng’s edition of the Tudor songs and ballads found in British Library CottonVespasian MS A-25, Ernest Sullivan, Jr.’s edition of the two Dalhousie (now Texas Tech)Manuscripts, and Edward Doughtie’s edition of John Lilliat’s poetical collection (BodleianRawlinson Poetry MS 148) have made available other manuscript collections. TheRenaissance English Text Society has been publishing editions of manuscripts: The South-well-Sipthorpe Commonplace Book (Folger Library MS V.b.198), edited by Jean Klene; TheVerse Miscellany of Constance Aston Fowler [Huntington MS HM 904], edited by DeborahAldrich-Watson; and The Commonplace Book of Sir John Strangeways (1645–1666),edited by Thomas Olsen. Michael Denbo’s edition of the Morgan Library’s Holgate MSand John Gouws’s edition of Nicholas Oldisworth’s manuscript (Bodleian Library MSDonation c.24) should appear shortly. For years, the Malone Society has published latemedieval and early modern English drama from manuscript as well as printed sources.The Early English Text Society has published editions of medieval texts.

Many works important for an understanding of the literary and cultural history ofmedieval and early modern England were unedited and available only through visits tomajor research libraries such as the Huntington, the Folger, the British Library, and theBodleian Library, Oxford. Early English Books Online, however, based on the UniversityMicrofilms reproductions of Short Title Catalog items from the period 1475–1700, hasbeen putting the resources of major research libraries on the desktop computer of scholarsin the field, allowing them to print out facsimiles of texts from the period, to comparemultiple editions of individual works, to engage in some searches in that portion ofthe archive that has been made searchable. The availability of this resource may be onereason why Scolar Press’s new facsimile series in the 1990s, which issued some importanteditions of 17th-century poetical miscellanies, was an abortive one.

The debates among textual scholars about editing and ‘unediting’ texts, about idealisticvs. cultural-materialist conceptions of textuality, about author-centered or more socio-centric conceptions of editing projects, and about old-spelling vs. modernized texts allhad their impact – both on textual editors and on scholars from a range of fields ofspecialization.

We are running out of major or very important print texts to edit, at least those writtenby authors with a significant profile in literary history. There are, of course, some excep-tions. The journal English Literary Renaissance continues to reserve space for newly editedtexts. An edition of John Donne’s letters, the contract for which I. A. Shapiro held sincethe 1930s until his death at the age of 99, has yet to appear. The task, which still needs a

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lot of work to bring it to completion, has been passed on to scholars involved in theDonne Variorum project: they have announced and described the aspects of this inLiterature Compass 6.1 (2009). Margaret Forey (2005), whose 1966 Oxford BA Thesisedition of the poetry of William Strode is far better than Dobell’s skimpy edition of thatneglected poet’s work, announces that she is currently preparing a print edition of Strodebased on the authorial manuscript of his work, Oxford Corpus Christi College MS 325.There are other projects in the works, such as Roger Sell’s edition of Sir John Beau-mont’s poetry, and the rest of the new edition of the works of Sir Francis Bacon (weespecially need a new edition of the letters, perhaps the least used of the valuable Bacontexts). And we await a modern edition of that important poetical anthology marketed in1660 under the title, Poems Written by the Right Honorable William Earl of Pembroke, LordSteward of his Majesties Household, Whereof Many of which are answered by way of Repartee, bySr Benjamin Ruddier, Knight. With several Distinct Poems Written by them Occasionally, andApart.

Online publication as a primary route offers some good models and promising possibil-ities. The Brown Women Writers Project (for recovering the texts of women before theVictorian period) has put electronic editions online, as has also the manuscript-basedPERDITA project for recovering texts by women. The online journal Early Modern Liter-ary Studies published, as the first number of its ‘Text Series,’ Alastair Bellany’s andAndrew McRae’s ‘Early Stuart Libels: An Edition of Poetry from Manuscript Sources’.Bellany and McRae have produced, relatively quickly by traditional publishing standards,an annotated, and carefully contextualized, edition of some 350 poems, 200 of whichhave never been published before – a kind of Early Stuart Poems on Affairs of State. Thisedition is a free download and one can easily search it on one’s PC or, with only a fewglitches caused by italicization, print out all 1150 pages. Bellany and McRae have minedvarious archives for the manuscript poetry they include in their edition. No doubt, theydid some of this work the old-fashioned way, by visiting the British Library, the BodleianLibrary, the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Beinecke Library of Yale, and other sucharchives, but they probably also used microfilm versions of various manuscripts – eitherordered from archives or found in collected form in the enormously valuable series of300 microfilms issued by Harvester as ‘Britain’s Literary Heritage,’ a collection of filmversions of over 1300 literary manuscripts from the early modern era. Only selectedresearch libraries purchased this series when it was issued in the late 1980s – thus scholarscan get some (albeit inadequate) views of primary documents they would have to spendlarge amounts of travel money to see in situ. Now, of course, with digital microfilmscanners, which should exist in any good research library, one can save to a CD thesemicrofilm images of manuscripts and, thus, be able to enhance, magnify, and manipulatethem onscreen in one’s own office, printing out individual images or copies of wholemanuscripts on a laser printer. Some libraries, such as the Beinecke at Yale University,have begun to digitize documents, as the Bodleian Library has done in the case of broad-side ballads, but we have a real opportunity in the future, with the already-availabletechnology, to digitize archival materials and even put them online. The Public RecordOffice now offers to email digital versions of its manuscript documents.

Digital color images of manuscripts are starting to appear as supplements to conven-tional print editions of works, but also the hypertextual environment of the Internet hasopened up new opportunities for text-presentation and the uses of visual material – espe-cially for the presentation of whole multiple versions of texts toward which print editionsonly gesture by way of textual notes. Digital technology has also enabled editors of indi-vidual manuscripts and of texts with multiple manuscript witnesses to reveal some of the



features of the original documents so that readers can judge what has been done withthem in the editing process. In the case of editing a particular manuscript or a manuscriptcollection of texts, it is possible in an online or CD-ROM edition to do what iseconomically impractical in print – to include a complete facsimile of a document alongwith an edited version that has an introduction, textual notes, commentary and othertraditional features of a print edition.

The resources of print and digital technology are combined in Daniel O’Donnell’sedition of Caedmon’s Hymn (2005), which, as he explains in his paper, was partly designedas an illustration of what might be done editorially in a project that uses print and digitalmedia. What he argues in relation to medieval (necessarily) manuscript texts also appliesto texts from other periods. Editors can use both old and new technologies to presentmultiple versions of texts and color facsimiles of original documents along with all theother traditional interpretive and editorial features of the standard critical edition. Themanuscripts about which both Steven May and Margaret Ezell write in their papers invitesome of the editorial treatment O’Donnell describes.

Steven May’s paper focuses, in the long history of textual production and transmissionfrom the Greeks to the present, on the questions of preservation and access. He arguesthe need for digital photographic recording of deteriorating manuscript documents, evenas he is aware of the ways changing software and hardware can orphan digital projectswithin a few years. Nonetheless, it is imperative for scholars to have visual access to colorimages of manuscripts that, in a few decades, might be unreadable. With such imagesavailable, they could produce both digital and print editions of manuscripts – includingboth facsimiles and edited versions of the texts.

In her focus on manuscript documents, Margaret Ezell relates the discomfort of sometraditional textual editors with the messy character of such writing with all its idiosyncra-sies to an aversion to editing women’s manuscript writing that is partly responsible for itsneglect. Although she sees the benefit digital technology offers for bring to light this bodyof work, she points out that the preference of the online environment for bodies of workinvolving multiple texts and related visual materials still relegates the single manuscript byan individual, less-prominent woman unattractive to those undertaking large-scale collab-orative editorial projects. This, of course, makes a project such as PERDITA all the morevaluable.

O’Donnell, May, and Ezell all remind us that, at what is still the beginning of theapplication of digital technological resources to editing of manuscript materials, there arestill theoretical issues to consider, economic realities that govern what it possible, andgoals of preservation and durability to achieve both for original documents and foreditions by scholars hoping for a long shelf-life for what they produce.

Short Biography

Arthur F. Marotti is Distinguished Professor of English at Wayne State University inDetroit. He is a specialist in English 16th- and 17th-century literature and culture, andhas published three scholarly monographs in this field: John Donne, Coterie Poet (Univer-sity of Wisconsin Press, 1986); Manuscript, Print and the English Renaissance Lyric (CornellUniversity Press, 1995); and Religious Ideology and Cultural Fantasy: Catholic and Anti-Catholic Discourses in Early Modern England (University of Notre Dame Press, 2005). Inaddition, he has edited or co-edited eight collections of scholarly essays and has writtennumerous book chapters and articles in his field. His current ongoing research is in twoareas: English manuscript poetry collections of the early modern era and early modern

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English Catholic literature and culture. He edited the journal Criticism for 11 years andserves now on its Advisory Board. He currently serves on the editorial boards of thefollowing journals and annuals: Renaissance Quarterly, Studies in English Literature:1500–1700, Literature Compass, English Manuscript Studies 1100–1700, and JNL: Journal ofthe Northern Renaissance.

Note

* Correspondence: English Department, Wayne State University, 5057 Woodward Suite 9408, Detroit, MI 48202,USA. E-mail: [email protected]

Works Cited

Aldrich-Watson, Deborah. Ed. The Verse Miscellany of Constance Aston Fowler: A Diplomatic Edition. Tempe, Arizona:Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies and The Renaissance English Text Society, 2000.

Bellany, Alastair and Andrew McRae, eds. Early Stuart Libels: An Edition of Poetry from Manuscript Sources. EarlyModern Literary Studies, Text Series I. 2005. <http://www.earlystuartlibels.net/htdocs/index/html>.

Doughtie, Edward. Ed. Liber Lilliati: Elizabethan Verse and Song (Bodleian MS Rawlinson Poetry 148). Newark:University of Delaware Press and London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1985.

Forey, Margaret. Manuscript Evidence and the Author of ‘Ask me no more’: William Strode, not Thomas Carew.English Manuscript Studies 1100-1700 12 (2005): 190–200.

Hughey, Ruth. Ed. The Arundel Harington Manuscript of Tudor Poetry. 2 vols. Columbus: Ohio State University Press,1960.

Klene, Jean C. S. C. Ed. The Southwell-Sipthorpe Commonplace Book. Tempe, Arizona: Medieval & RenaissanceTexts and Studies and the Renaissance English Text Society, 1997.

May, Steven W. Ed. Henry Stanford’s Anthology: An Edition of Cambridge University Library Manuscript Dd.5.75. NewYork and London: Garland Publishing, 1988.

Olsen, Thomas. Ed. The Commonplace Books of Sir John Strangeways (1645-1666). Arizona: Medieval & RenaissanceTexts and Studies and the Renaissance English Text Society, 2004.

Rudick, Michael. The Poems of Sir Walter Ralegh: A Historical Edition. Tempe, Arizona: Arizona Center for Medievaland Renaissance Studies and the Renaissance English Text Society, 1999.

Seng, Peter. Tudor Songs and Ballads from MS Cotton Vespasian A-25. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,1978.

Sullivan, II, Ernest W. The First and Second Dalhousie Manuscripts: Poems and Prose by John Donne and Others,A Facsimile Edition. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1988.



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Editing Manuscripts in Print and Digital Forms