“[A]ltered that a litle which before I had written”: how Margaret Hoby wrote and rewrote her manuscript

Abstract

AbstractThis essay conducts a paleographic study of Egerton Manuscript 2614, more commonly known as the “diary” of Margaret Hoby. To date, all scholarly studies of this document have been based on one of two print editions of the text. Unfortunately, these editions regularly mistranscribe and misrepresent the early modern manuscript and reduce its palimpsestic complexity. This is the first systematic study of this manuscript as a manuscript and what this textual artefact with all of its scratches, blots, strikethroughs, rewrites, and unfamiliar layout can tell us about how and why Hoby wrote it, and how and why she spent considerable time returning to and amending it. I argue that by looking at never before considered manuscriptal evidence we can conclude that Margaret Hoby produced her manuscript via a multistep process of rereading and revision, and that by approaching her revisionary marks as a form of tattoo, that is, as a form of writing over the self, we can better understand these marks as evidence of an iterative early modern form of self‐making through self‐writing and rewriting.