A Handbook of Editing Early Modern Texts by Claire Loffman Harriet Phillips

Abstract

MLR, .,   differing approaches and cover a wide range of languages, but also stresses the importance of the variable ‘genre’ for (historical) corpus research. E-U F J N H A Handbook of Editing Early Modern Texts. Ed. by C L and H P. (Material Readings in Early Modern Culture) London: Routledge. . xv+ pp. £. ISBN ––––. Reading this book is like sitting in on an immensely lively, informed, and provocative seminar; more than fiy highly experienced voices, cogently expressing their struggles with the material—early modern printed and manuscript texts of all kinds, literary, scientific, epistolary—and oen taking issue with each other’s positions. e book is divided into three how-to sections—‘Before Editing’; ‘Editing: Principles and Practice’; ‘Digital Editing’—each of which is subdivided into broad topics or problems, addressed in short position statements of perhaps two thousand words each by between two and seven contributors. e final section—‘Case Studies’—provides a selection of editors with slightly more space to explore how each of them worked through the issues described earlier in order to come to their own particular solutions. e volume makes it abundantly clear that editing was never a straightforward process, and that our digital age offers new solutions, perspectives, and opportunities that can in themselves present new problems. Running through these contributions is the question of whether or not to modernize spelling and punctuation, and (particularly important in manuscripts) whether to record the use of white space or ‘mise en page’, marginalia, underlinings, insertions, doodles, and crossings out, as well as the presence within one text of different scribal hands. e contributors agree that the editor should produce a text that is readable and ‘makes sense’, and should not be ‘seduced by the possibilities of hypertext into producing editions which are not only unreadable but unusable’ (Neil Rhodes, p. ). But sometimes, as Kate Bennett demonstrates in her case study of editing John Aubrey’s Brief Lives, the ‘mess’ is the message. Layout of manuscripts (as we must all know if we reflect on our own notes) is partly exigency—the amount and nature of available paper—but partly a reflection of the way the writer thinks. Sometimes in the case of letters, where that thinking is meant to be imparted to someone else, it can be a rhetorical act, as Joe Moshenska demonstrates from his edition of the correspondence of Kenelm Digby. Digby ‘presents himself as one who writes spontaneously and in a hurry, modestly reducing his learning to a “superficial besprinkling”’ (p. ). As a facsimile illustration shows better than any neat transcript—modernized or not—having reached the end of the page, Digby turns the paper; his words first fill the margin and then ‘charge onto the verso and down towards [his] cramped signature’ (pp. –), flouting the conventions that demanded the use of deferential space when writing to superiors. Describing, of course, is one thing and interpreting is another; can  Reviews one really describe adequately without interpreting? Perhaps the most important thing is to be aware that any editing (including editing that purports to edit lightly) is an intervention; readers as well as editors need to be aware of the effects. A short review cannot hope to do justice to the insights offered by each contributor to this volume. Anyone dealing with early material, whether a student approaching these problems for the first time or an experienced editor or reader of early texts, will benefit from reading it. e book’s own editors suggest that the experienced might want to skip the introductory essays on approaching archives, but it is as well to be reminded by Michael Riordan not only about the need to understand an archive’s ‘hierarchy’, since the reason it was assembled can tell one something about the individual items it includes, but also that archivists are human too, and you want them to ‘be your friend’: ‘though I’m not suggesting any sort of special treatment (though gis of wine and chocolate rarely go amiss!) a courteous and friendly attitude is essential’ (p. ). We have been (genially) warned! U  S R K e Music of Dada: A Lesson...