Variorum Edition Research Articles

Teaching & Learning Guide for: The View from the Interior: The New Body Scholarship in Renaissance/Early Modern Studies

Teaching & Learning Guide for: The View from the Interior: The New Body Scholarship in Renaissance/Early Modern Studies

What William Barnes Done: Dilution of the Dialect in Later Versions of the Poems of Rural Life

William Barnes published three collections of dialect poems in the mid-nineteenth century. The First collection went through four editions and the Second and Third collections through two editions each before all three were brought together in one volume as Poems of Rural Life in the Dorset Dialect (1879). There are many changes from edition to edition; in particular, in later editions Barnes abandoned the spelling system and many of the distinctive grammatical features that he had used in the first edition of the First collection (1844), and that he had carefully explained in the Dissertation prefixed to that edition. This essay argues that the language of the 1844 edition gives a much more faithful representation of the dialect than that of later volumes; that a new edition of the 1844 collection is urgently needed; and that Barnes's achievement as a poet cannot be properly understood without the publication of a pronunciation guide to the dialect poems (paying close attention to the language of the 1844 collection) and a Variorum edition of his complete poetic works.

David Hume of Godscroft's The History of the House of Angus (review)

Reviewed by: David Hume of Godscroft's The History of the House of Angus, 2 volumes Arthur Williamson David Hume of Godscroft's The History of the House of Angus, 2 volumes. Edited by David Reid. Pp. xliv, 638 (continuously paginated). IBSN 1 8979 7624 0. Edinburgh: Scottish Text Society, Fifth Series, no. 4. 2005. £30.00. Poet, historian, religious controversialist, political theorist, David Hume of Godscroft (1558-1630?) was one of the leading intellects of Jacobean Scotland. A close associate of Andrew Melville, Godscroft long served as the most articulate apologist for the Presbyterian cause and was recognized by contemporaries as its most formidable mind. After his death, Godscroft's reputation constricted precipitously. He has remained a familiar figure, however, for since the eighteenth century his vernacular writings of have been continuously mined for the documents and descriptions of the events that they contain. Except for his De familia Humia, published without translation in 1839, his extensive Latin writings have been ignored—as, indeed, has his vernacular correspondence. Only within the past thirty years, as the deeply Calvinist Renaissance in Scotland has started to receive serious attention, has Godscroft become less a source than a subject in his own right. Accordingly, Godscroft's works have begun to appear in modern scholarly editions. David Reid led the way with the publication of a variorum edition of The History of the House of Douglas (1996). Paul McGinnis and I subsequently published a Latin-English edition of the De unione insulae Britannicae (2002). Now Reid has followed up with the second part of Godscroft's great history of the Douglas family, The History of the House of Angus. Based on the 1643/46 edition and helpfully keyed to it, Reid has produced another authoritative volume whose replacement is simply impossible to imagine. The history recounts the House of Angus from the first earl in the fourteenth century to the death of the Godcroft's patron, the eighth earl, in 1588. Reid has provided exceedingly close and detailed notes explicating the individuals and events in Godscroft's text. The notes effectively unravel an extraordinary range of tangled kin relations, political manoeuvring, and ideological commitment. If they mainly offer a narrative rather than an analytical focus, that surely must be the first concern. Nevertheless, Reid also notes the revisions subsequently made by the eleventh earl, preserved in manuscript at Hamilton House—and whose entire purpose was to subvert Godscroft's Presbyterian and radical reading of the Douglas (and Scottish) past. In addition Reid has also included two appendices from the Hamilton MS revision describing the lives of the ninth and tenth earls. The result is an edition of exceptional richness. As Reid has indicated, Godscroft's Douglas-Angus narrative had a tortured history. At least from the early 1580s Godscroft had served as the amanuensis, adviser, and teacher to Archibald Douglas, the eighth earl of Angus, the most powerful and most committed of the Presbyterian lords. Angus' untimely death in 1588 was a major setback for Presbyterian cause. For Godscroft it was disaster. He would long search in vain for another such patron. Godscroft's magnificent Latin poem to the chancellor, John Maitland of Thirlestane, written between 1588 and 1592, must be one of the most elegant job applications on record. It is [End Page 143] in this context that he undertook what would become his great Douglas history. But, most unfortunately, the Douglases of Glenbenie who succeeded the childless eighth earl were Catholic or crypto-Catholic reactionaries—less than ideal patrons, to say the least. Still, the history forms part of Godscroft's larger struggle for Presbyterianism and the civic ideals he saw as inherent within it. Towards the end of his life he apparently became ever more concerned to publish the history and promote values he saw as in decline. In the event, his daughter Anna succeeded in having a truncated and bowdlerized version published in 1633. Only a decade later at the height of the covenanting movement would she finally get the full work to press, and even then the eleventh earl managed to delay its publication. As Reid observes, Godscroft self-consciously wrote the history in Scots rather than English...

Supporting Annotation as a Scholarly Tool--Experiences From the Online Chopin Variorum Edition

In a meeting at King's College London in May 2000, John Unsworth proposed a list of seven 'scholarly primitives' which he claimed were 'self-understood' functions forming the basis for 'higher-level scholarly projects, arguments, statements [and] interpretations' (Unsworth, 2000). He claimed that his list summarized activities that were 'basic to scholarship across eras and across media', and went on to say that an analysis of these scholarly primitives might result in a clearer sense of how computing tools could support the scholarly endeavour. Here we focus on the primitive that was second on Unsworth's list, after 'Discovering': 'Annotation'. Our work on annotation arises out of a developing awareness that established Humanities Computing (HC) areas of interest, do not seem always to connect with the actual process of the research work being carried out by most humanists. We claimed in Bradley (2005) that a fundamentally different usage paradigm than those in operation in established HC was necessary to even notice, and then follow-up on, the potential of scholarly annotation as a computer-supported activity. This article presents our experiences, and the eventual outcomes, of the process of developing annotations tools for the Online Chopin Variorum Edition project (OCVE). 1 Beginning with a brief overview of activities related to annotation in Humanities Computing and Computing Science, we introduce the visible parts of the OCVE project, and address some discussion to the structures behind the scenes that support what it does, reporting what worked and what did not. We conclude by analysing the significance of our findings and describing the direction we think our annotation tool will take.

Geoffrey Chaucer's Treatise on the Astrolabe

AbstractGeoffrey Chaucer's Treatise on the Astrolabe has occasioned varied responses from readers and scholars. John Lydgate's reference, in the Fall of Princes, identified what became the critical terms for reading Chaucer's translation of an instruction manual for using an astrolabe addressed to his “sone” Lowys. Astrolabe survives in more manuscripts than any other Chaucer text with the exception of The Canterbury Tales; the Variorum edition of the text was published in 2002 and in the last five years critical attention has increasingly refocused on the text. Scholars have considered patterns of readership from extant manuscripts and details, such as the subheading “Brede and Milke for Children,” have reshaped critical analyses. Astrolabe's language and pedagogical strategies have also been reconceptualized in recent readings. The nature of “science” in the late fourteenth century has always been part of Astrolabe's critical frame but the cultural valency of astrology has moved into sharper focus producing a more sophisticated analysis of the vernacular context of Chaucer's only scientific prose text.

The End of Reading: The Practice of Possibility of Reading Foxe's Actes and Monuments

online variorum edition in 2004 undoubtedly render the text more accessible and come as a welcome corrective to abridged nineteenthcentury editions.' Simultaneously though, the CD-ROM and electronic variorum raise fundamental questions about how we read Foxe's book and, naturally, how these new media-searchable, hypertextual media, after all--will alter our approaches to and interventions in the text. Yet before embarking on such an examination-a self-examination really, which this essay will only be able to sketch-we might wonder whether we know how we read it now, or have read it to this point. After all, how does one read a text whose sheer iconic force may well question the value, usefulness, nay, even possibility of reading? What are we, as critical readers, to make of a text that co-opts critical response and puts it, against our will, in the service of a specific polemic aim? What if all of our critical accounts inevitably reproduce the basic structure of Protestant propaganda? I suspect that these opening questions will be met with skeptical disbelief or, at the very least, the charge that such questions attribute too much power and prescience to Foxe's sixteenth-century martyrology. It is the primary task of this paper, however, to demonstrate that the Actes and Monuments is precisely such a text, a text that enlists the very practice of reading in its polemic project. To maintain that criticism reproduces Foxe's own polemic aims is not, for all that, to critique it for doing so. Nor is it to suggest that has somehow outwitted contemporary critics. Rather, it is to suggest that critical work on is not extraneous to or outside of this entity that we call Foxe or the Actes and Monuments. In addition, the structural and sympathetic parallels between Foxe's martyrological project and critical readings of his text force us to do

A Variorum Edition of The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, Volume VI, The Prose Treatises, Part One: A Treatise on the Astrolabe (review)

A Variorum Edition of The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, Volume VI, The Prose Treatises, Part One: A Treatise on the Astrolabe (review)

:John Foxe at Home and Abroad

Preface for Patrick Collinson Introduction, D. Loades. At Home: Spital Hospital: A saga of the Reformation in John Foxe's Lincolnshire, David Marcombe Protestant Evangelism in Boston on the accession of Elizabeth: the Ministry of Melchior Smith, Claire Cross Evangelicalism at Boston, Oxford and Windsor under Henry VIII: John Foxe's narratives recontextualized, Magnus Williamson The Martyr Tallies: Robert Persons and his anonymous respondent, Victor Houliston Essex Evangelicals under Edward VI: Richard, Lord Rich, Richard Alvey and their circle, Brett Usher The fleeing Dutchmen? The influence of Dutch immigrants upon the Print Shop of John Day, Elizabeth Evenden 'Most wicked superstition and idolatry': John Foxe, his predecessors, and the development of an anti-Catholic polemic in the 16th-century accounts of the reign of Mary I, Ramona Garcia. Abroad: Feeding the flock with wind: Protestant uses of a Dantean trope, from Foxe to Milton, Nicholas Havely Foxe in the wilderness: the Book of Martyrs in 17th-century New England, Francis J. Bremer A Nicodemite in England and Italy: Edward Courtenay, 1548-1556, Anne Overell John Foxe in the Low Countries, 1566-1914, Paul Arblater Was Haemstede a direct source for Foxe? On le Blas's Pijnbanck and other borrowings, Guido Latre Thanksgiving from Germany in 1559: an analysis of the content, sources and style of John Foxe's Germaniae ad Angliam Gratulatio, John Wade. Message and Methodology: Stowe's vision of martyrdom in Uncle Tom's Cabin, Margaret Dean 'Foxe' as a methodological response to epistemic challenges: The Book of Martyrs transported, Devorah Greenberg 'Twenty-first-Century Foxe': The online Variorum edition of Foxe's Actes and Monuments, Mark Greengrass, Joy Lloyd and Sue Smith Appendix: The Internet Connection: Claiming John Foxe as their Own. Foxe's Book of Martyrs on the World Wide Web, Janice Devereux Index.

A Variorum Edition of the Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, 6: The Prose Treatises, 1: A Treatise on the Astrolabe. Geoffrey Chaucer , Sigmund Eisner Time and the Astrolabe in "The Canterbury Tales". Marijane Osborn

Previous articleNext article No AccessReviews. Geoffrey Chaucer , Sigmund Eisner A Variorum Edition of the Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, 6: The Prose Treatises, 1: A Treatise on the Astrolabe. Geoffrey Chaucer , Sigmund Eisner Time and the Astrolabe in "The Canterbury Tales". Marijane Osborn Chauncey WoodChauncey Wood Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Speculum Volume 80, Number 2Apr., 2005 The journal of the Medieval Academy of America Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1017/S0038713400000270 Views: 5Total views on this site Copyright 2005 The Medieval Academy of AmericaPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Paradise lost, 1668-1968: three centuries of commentary

The Commentary, the first full version on Paradise Lost since the Richardsons' in 1734, combines numerous resources with features used for the first time. It includes the best commentary from Annotations like Patrick Hume's (1695), to the variorum editions of Newton (1749) and Todd (1801-42), and the modern professional editions culminating in Alastair Fowler's (1968). Other elements include an essay on the early pre-annotative criticism from 1668, including Marvell, Dryden, Dennis, and others; copious use of the OED; numerous cross-references to Milton's other works and passages in Paradise Lost; fourteen excurses and other contributions by the present editors. This Commentary is itself a research library for Paradise Lost. It uniquely presents biblical, classical, and vernacular citations: the ultimate rather than a more recent source is cited, so dating the comment; every cited passage is quoted, and every question is in English. Only a text of the poem is required. Earl Miner is Townsend Martin, Class of 1917, Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Princeton University, William Moeck teaches English at Nassau Community College. Steven Jablonski is a public librarian in Skokie, Illinois.

Patronage in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century France (review)

202 Reviews Parergon 21.2 (2004) alimentary or any other fashion, appears dangerous in this collection of poems where ‘experience as possession … seems under assault’ (p. 206), particularly in the earlier version of ‘The Holy Communion’in the W. Manuscript. Rather than a decorous Anglican ‘middle way’, Netzley discerns a struggle between sensuality and pragmatism being played out in the poems. All primary texts are translated, the Index is comprehensive and the few typographical errors are minor ones. Mary Scrafton Adelaide, South Australia Kettering, Sharon, Patronage in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century France (Variorum Collected Studies Series CS738), Aldershot, Ashgate, 2002; cloth; pp. xvi, 286; £55; ISBN 0860788814. This Variorum edition brings together eleven of Sharon Kettering’s articles on patronage. Originally published between 1989 and 1993, these essays follow upon Kettering’s seminal Patrons, Brokers and Clients in Seventeenth-Century France of 1986. Covering patronage from its apogee in the sixteenth and early to mid- seventeenth centuries through its decline during the reign of Louis XIV, the collection forms an exceptionally coherent whole with minimal repetition (one exception is that Kettering twice challenges Kristen Neuschel’s thesis that clientage is anachronistic applied to sixteenth-century warrior culture, put forward in her Word of Honor: Interpreting Noble Culture in Sixteenth-Century France, in I and again in IV). The first set of four essays provides an overview of the topic, laying out and considering the categories modern historians use for understanding patronage. In ‘Patronage in Early Modern France,’ Kettering critiques some of the prominent recent positions on the language of patronage, re-affirming that the patron/client relationship was a material one motivated by self-interest and justifying her historical method of taking into account both the social scientific approach, which is necessary to ‘distinguishing long-term trends and causal explanations often imperceptible to contemporaries’ (I, p. 856) and the cultural historical approach, which seeks to determine how contemporaries experienced their situations.The distinction between the system as it actually existed and the system as it was perceived by those who lived within it is an important one, and it should be maintained, Kettering argues in relation to historical models that understand patronage as a primarily linguistic phenomenon. In her second essay, ‘Gift-Giving in early modern France’, she Reviews 203 Parergon 21.2 (2004) proposes a model of patronage based upon the obligatory reciprocity of gift-giving as analyzed by Mauss. She puts the overlapping categories of kin and friendship into the context of patronage in ‘Patronage and Kinship in Early Modern France’ and ‘Friendship and Clientage in Early Modern France’, examining in particular the wide semantic field of the word ami. The second set of two essays investigates female patronage. ‘The Patronage Power of Early Modern French Noblewomen’suggests that because ‘members of all-male political clienteles were often initially connected by kinship or marriage ties to women,’women ‘affected the formation and dissolution of political alliances’ (V, p. 819). They exercised considerable power as brokers throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The careers of several women in noble households are traced in ‘The Household Service of Early Modern French Noblewomen’. The role of brokers is the subject of the third set of two essays, ‘The Historical Development of Political Clientelism’and ‘Brokerage at the Court of Louis XIV’. Here Kettering proposes a ‘broker model of political integration’ (VII, p. 432) in states undergoing centralization.As the central government develops and expands, local brokers, individuals in a position to negotiate patron/client relationships between third parties, are crucial in mediating governmental integration into the different regions.The stronger the central government, the less necessary brokerage becomes; the chain from the royal court to the provinces becomes increasingly less significant during the reign of Louis XIV. Royal patronage became ever more important to noble fortunes, which had the effect of attenuating nobles’ties to their former clients and strengthening noble dependence upon the king. The final set of three essays, ‘Clientage During the French Wars of Religion’, ‘Patronage and Politics During the Fronde’ and ‘The Decline of Great Noble Clientage During the Reign of Louis XIV’ map the decline of noble patronage from the Wars of Religion...

A Variorum Edition of the Works of Geoffrey Chaucer. Vol. 6. The Prose Treatises. Part One: A Treatise on the Astrolabe ed. by Sigmund Eisner

A Variorum Edition of the Works of Geoffrey Chaucer. Vol. 6. The Prose Treatises. Part One: A Treatise on the Astrolabe ed. by Sigmund Eisner

'It is not so, nor 'twas not so'

This paper examines one of Benedick's remarks in the play: "Like the old tale, my lord: 'It is not so, nor 'twas not so: but indeed, God forbid it should be so!' " This quotation is from "an old tale," first identified in 1821 by a certain Mr Blakeway for the old Variorum edition of Much Ado. Drawing especially on the Oxford English Dictionary, I first examine the semantic and the grammatical nature of "It is not so, nor 'twas not so"; then, relying on Paul Ricoeur's The Rule of Metaphor and Stanley Cavell's The Claim of Reason, I argue that reality, just like fiction, is always created in an attitude, in a mode of approaching what is before us; we are only given the so, never the is. Thus, whether what we, within the so, are encountering is 'real' or 'imaginary' will not depend on the amount of certainty we have with respect to the approached object; the object will always be in the mode of is and is not at the same time. Within so, we construct both reality and the imaginary rather through 'it is not not so' than through either just 'is,' or just 'is not.' The difference in our respective attitudes might be that with respect to the imaginary we have a greater awareness of the ever-presence of not in is, or rather of the not not: we do not have a greater or lesser amount of certainty of, but a greater amount of intimacy with, the not not.

"Thy bankes with pioned, and twilled brims": A Solution to a Double Crux

The first line in this passage presents two familiar problems, the discussion of which occupies six pages in the 1892 Variorum edition of the play.2 First, the sense of the word pioned is uncertain: some editors prefer to emend to pionied, which they explain as an otherwise-unrecorded formation from piony (i.e., peony). Others prefer to take the word as formed from pioning, which means excavating.3 Second, the sense of twilled is also difficult. It can mean woven with a pattern of slanting lines, but it is difficult to see why any bank should be so described. Editors have sometimes

The Culture of Christina Rossetti: Female Poetics and Victorian Contexts (review)

In 1988 Antony H. Harrison wrote: "Since the early 1930s, only one major critical book has been devoted to the work of Christina Rossetti. This astonishing fact has its roots deep in the history of modern critical tradition, which was until the 1970s dominated largely by the 'new critics' in the academy" (Christina Rossetti in Context ix). Harrison added that the expanding "range of critical methodologies" (ix) available to students of literary history meant that it was now possible to reevaluate figures such as Rossetti whose extensive writings had for the most part seemed unworthy of scholarly attention in previous decades. Even in 1972, at the time when feminist reassessments of the canon were burgeoning, Lionel Stevenson showed no hesitation in asserting that the poet's writing failed to evince "intellectual substance" (The Pre-Raphaelite Poets [1972]: 88). Harrison would produce what counts among the finest scholarly inquiries into the demanding oeuvre of a writer whose absorption in expressive forms—ballad, hymn, and lyric—can lead unsuspecting readers to believe that no depth lies beneath their seemingly unsophisticated surfaces. As Harrison acknowledges, the appearance in 1979 of R. W. Crump's variorum edition of Rossetti's complete poems assisted enormously in advancing our understanding of a somewhat idiosyncratic figure whose religious faith and sexual predilections have become central in classroom discussions of Victorian poetry. A very distinguished group of scholars—including Cora Kaplan and Jerome J. McGann—has provided teachers with historically informed ways of comprehending how Rossetti's poetry and prose engaged nineteenth-century debates about female sexuality, the Anglican liturgy, and Dante. The Culture of Christina Rossetti—a substantial collection of twelve significant essays that Harrison helped to edit—reveals that research on this poet's remarkable body of work has reached full maturity.

Geoffrey Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess: A Hypertext Edition ed. by Murray McGillivray

REVIEWS technical terms (such as "copy text" and "variorum edition") or specific well-known editorial "cases-studies" (such as the debate over the relative merits of the "Hengwrt" and "Ellesmere" manuscripts of The Canterbury Tales) are introduced or alluded to early on in the book, but are not actually explained until much later. While a few essays append reference and source lists, their inclusion seems to have been at the discretion of the individual author, and their presence is not signaled in the list of contents. More significantly, there is no general bibliography whatso­ ever, far less a sectioned and annotated guide to further reading. A glos­ sary of technical terms is an equally inexplicable omission, especially given Moffats's own observations about the irritation the reader feels on turning to the back of a work and not finding one (p. 237). This over­ sight is particularly unforgivable given the risible attempt at an index, which is only two pages long and omits far more key names and editorial terms than it includes. In summary, one of the volume's main failings is that it is not user­ friendly. Another is that the project seems to have been inadequately planned and unevenly executed. No work of editing will ever be un­ problematic. As Greetham's postduction explains-inintrospective and unnecessary detail-the editors of this volume encountered more prob­ lems than most. A well-edited text will explain the practical and theo­ retical difficulties that have been faced and hopefully overcome in the course of its production. It will be reflective and self-conscious. But at the end of the day, the reader will want to have finished text, not one in which the seams show. A Guide to Editing Middle English is, then, some­ thing ofa patchwork: made of fine fabric but sewn together roughly and frayed around the edges. DIANE WATT University of Wales, Aberystwyth MURRAY MCGILLIVRAY, ed. Geoffrey Chaucer's Book of the Duchess: A Hypertext Edition. Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 1997. 1 CD-ROM. $25.00 Murray McGillivray's hypertext edition of The Book ofthe Duchess takes on the ambitious task of presenting not only a new critical edition of 513 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER the poem but also all the textual material McGillivray used in creating his edition, so that readers can evaluate the evidence for themselves and form their own judgments about his editorial decisions. In fact, McGil­ livray invites users to suggest corrections or improvements to the proj­ ect, making it (in the long run, one can imagine) rather like The Book of the Duchess itself-not a single fixed text but a series of revised versions unfolding over time. It explores the possibilities offered by modern technology to associate electronic texts and images in ways not easily accomplished with their printed counterparts and in the process creates a collection of resources that has something to offer to both undergrad­ uates and advanced scholars. The CD-ROM brings together a variety of texts and images useful for studying the poem's relations to its sources and its preservation in manuscript and early print versions. It contains a critical edition of The Book ofthe Duchess with textual notes; a reading edition with links to a glossary, explanatory notes, and sound files of the poem recited in Middle English; complete transcriptions of all the witnesses to the text (Bodleian Library manuscripts Tanner 346, Fairfax 16, and Bodley 638, plus William Thynne's 1532 edition); electronic images of every page of the poem in each of the witnesses (full-color photographs of the manuscript pages in small and enlarged versions, scanned images of Thynne); plus several works thought to have influenced Chaucer's com­ position of The Book of the Duchess, each provided in the original Old French or Latin with selected passages translated by McGillivray into modern English. Full texts are provided of Guillaume de Machaut's Jugement dou roy de Behaingne, the Fonteinne amoreuse, selected Machaut lyrics, and Froissart's Paradis d'amour. Excerpts are included ofthe Roman de la rose, Machaut's Remede de Fortune, the eleventh book of Ovid's Meta­ morphoses, the Ovide moralise, and Statius's Thebaid...

The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection: A Complete Variorum Edition

The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection A Complete Variorum Edition Ronald Aylmer Fisher (Edited by Henry Bennett) Oxford University Press, 1999 318pp; $45.00 One of the more influential monographs in the history of evolutionary biology is available in a newly revised edition four decades after its last printing. Earlier this year Oxford University Press published the definitive version of Sir Ronald Fisher's The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection. As 'a complete variorum edition', the text of this monumental classic in population genetics incorporates changes and corrections from Fisher's amended personal copy of the first edition. It also contains a new forward by Henry Bennett, Professor of Genetics at the University of Adelaide, South Australia, and editor of Fisher's collected papers. In three appendices, Bennett lists the changes in the 1958 edition, includes a selection of editorial notes from exchanges in correspondence between Fisher and distinguished scholars that highlight points of agreement and dissent over particular points in the text, and presents an annotated list of related papers published by Fisher. Originally published in 1930, Fisher's landmark monograph put forth a major theoretical interpretation of how natural selection via heredity affects variation. In the new forward, Bennett describes Fisher's book in the historical context of early 20" century scholarship on Darwinian evolutionary studies. The genetical theory of natural selection is celebrated as the first major work to provide a synthesis of Darwinian selection and Mendelian genetics. Its publication in 1930 marked a turning point in the development of evolutionary thought, contributing fundamentally to the renaissance of Darwinism following a long period of neglect. It is a work remarkable for what it reveals of Fisher's creative genius and his insight into many of the problems facing evolutionary biologists today. Bennett recounts a fascinating revelation that Joan Fisher Box (Fisher's daughter) describes in her 1978 biography R A. Fisher: The Life of a Scientist. Fisher dictated the original manuscript to his wife over a nine-month period, between October 1928 and June 1929 and, except for two mathematical sections in different chapters, the text appeared as initially dictated with little if any changes to the hand-written draft of the original manuscript. Bennett reminds the reader of Fisher's genius most of this dictation exemplifies the level of Fisher's ability to formulate such a detailed quantitative analysis from memory. Most of the text was composed during evenings given Fisher's daytime supervisory work in the Statistics Department at Rothamsted Experimental Station. Fisher sent the completed text, chapter by chapter, to his good friend Leonard Darwin, the son of Charles Darwin and, like Fisher, an enthusiastic proponent of eugenics. Bennett, who edited a collection of Fisher and Darwin's correspondence from this period in an earlier monograph, notes that Fisher dedicated the book to Major Leonard Darwin. This dedication is "in gratitude for the encouragement, given to the author, during the last fifteen years, by discussing many of the problems dealt with in this book". The variorum edition reprints the complete text of the first edition, published by Oxford University's Clarendon Press in 1930. One third of the 1500 copies printed were sold within the first year of its publication and sales of the book tapered off until the last copies were sold in 1947. In the mid-1950s, Dover publications approached Fisher about reprinting his book and in fact published what Dover promoted as an `unabridged, second revised edition'. As Bennett explains, the 1958 Dover edition contains some corrections that Fisher recorded over the years in his own copy of the original edition. Portions of the original text were omitted in this revision, namely two detailed sections from different chapters, and the second edition failed to include several paragraphs that Fisher submitted for Dover's 'revised' version. …

Alfred Marshall on the Growth of Population

Classical views of population, as expounded in the works of Smith, Malthus, and Mill, retained their influence through the nineteenth century and into the twentieth—until sidelined, many would argue, by the marginalist revolution in economics. Oddly, Alfred Marshall (1842–1924), the major figure in that revolution, was, when it came to population, himself firmly in the classical tradition. He diverged from it in two main respects. Writing in the late nineteenth century he had of course to take account of Darwinian theory, with the potential implications it suggested for differential fertility. And, deriving from his interests in industrial organization and efficiency and in biological analogies in economics, he gave greater attention than his forebears to the possibility that returns to labor could routinely be increasing as well as diminishing.Marshall, the preeminent economist of his time, was for most of his career professor of political economy at the University of Cambridge. His major work, Principles of Economics, was first published in 1890, and then in a series of revised editions over the rest of his life. The final—8th—edition appeared in 1920. (A “ninth” variorum edition was issued in 1961.) The Principles has been described, by G. J. Stigler, as the second greatest work in the history of economics. The contributions to theory and method warranting such praise, however, are chiefly in the later parts of the volume. Up to and including Book IV (The Agents of Production: Land, Labour, Capital and Organization), the reader is given the impression, according to Keynes, of “perusing a clear, apt and humane exposition of fairly obvious matters.” Certainly in comparison to the rest, these early sections were left fairly intact in their 1890 form over subsequent editions. But Keynes also remarks, in his lengthy obituary of Marshall, how deceptive that surface smoothness could be—and notes that Marshall “had a characteristic habit in all his writings of reserving for footnotes what was most novel or important in what he had to say.”The excerpts below are taken from Book IV, Chapters IV (§§1–2, 4–5) and XIII (§3), of the 1890 edition of the Principles. In the first, Marshall presents a brief, selective history of population doctrines up to Malthus, and then the doctrine “in its modern form”; in the second, from the concluding chapter of Book IV, he explores the applicability of the law of increasing returns—stated, earlier in the chapter, as: “An increase of labour and capital leads generally to improved organization, which increases the efficiency of the work of labour and capital.”

From the Editor

From the Editor Suzanne Juhasz It is my great pleasure to introduce this Special Issue of The Emily Dickinson Journal, on R. W. Franklin’s The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Variorum Edition. The purpose of the issue is two-fold. First, we wish to recognize the significance of Franklin’s new variorum edition of Dickinson’s poems, published in 1998, thirty years after T. H. Johnson’s path-breaking edition, The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Including variant readings critically compared with all known manuscripts (1955). Franklin’s impeccable scholarship has resulted in a work that will now become the primary edition of Dickinson’s poems. Recipient of the Emily Dickinson International Society Distinguished Scholarship Award in 1999, Franklin has long been heralded as a premier editor of Dickinson. The first to print manuscript editions of her poems — notably the Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson (1981) and The Master Letters of Emily Dickinson (1986) — he has been a student of her work for forty years. He has brought his expertise and devotion to bear on a comprehensive, meticulous, and complex edition that thoughtfully represents the wealth of information about Emily Dickinson’s writing available at the end of the twentieth century. The eight essays that comprise this issue all do honor from varying perspectives to the achievement of Ralph Franklin and his new edition of Dickinson’s poems. At the same time, contributors were asked to discuss how this new edition might contribute to their own scholarship and teaching on Emily Dickinson in the new century. The result is a range of responses to Franklin’s Variorum that not only suggests what we know about Dickinson at this moment in history but raises what some of the most compelling issues and questions in Dickinson studies might be, as we continue our work in the years to follow. In the way that these essays both corroborate and challenge one another, I think that we see something more: the vitality and richness of contemporary Dickinson studies. Indeed, the essays as a congregate engage in a lively and salient intellectual discussion of Dickinson and her writing that offers readers a guide to what the future might hold. Additionally, the review essay on another new edition of Dickinson’s writings, Open Me Carefully: Emily Dickinson’s Intimate Letters to Susan Huntington Dickinson, edited by Ellen Louise Hart and Martha Nell Smith, contributes further to the interchange of ideas. Here I want to suggest what some of these concerns are so that the reader can track them in their various incarnations throughout the essays. [End Page vii] The first group of essays are most directly involved with issues of editing per se. They explore the editorial choices made by Franklin and the implications of these choices. The most significant are, to these writers, the decision to print the poems in typographical form rather than presenting them in manuscript facsimile, to lineate the poems according to conventional poetic structure rather than replicating manuscript lineation, to use a hyphen rather than a dash, and to create titles for the poems out of first lines. Also of importance are the ways in which the Franklin Variorum differs from the Johnson edition: by including all the known versions of a poem on the page rather than printing one version and describing the rest and by recording additional information about the poem, what Franklin terms the “apparatus,” afterwards, such as its fascicle placement, manuscript lineation, and so forth. Opinions vary vehemently regarding the significance of these decisions, as issues of authenticity, intentionality (Dickinson’s and Franklin’s), and ideology are raised and explored. Those scholars most interested in the poetics and ethics of editing as an organizing, interpretative, and governing enterprise present varied and suggestive arguments regarding the power of this edition over or on behalf of readers. Other authors raise questions about the relationship between what Franklin terms the literary work and the artifact. Franklin maintains that a literary work is separable from its artifact and that there can be many manifestations of a literary work. How do we understand this relationship? Is it a matter of separate but (and) equal, or is there a hegemonics of separation, or are...

On Franklin's Gifts & Ghosts

On Franklin’s Gifts & Ghosts Martha Nell Smith (bio) and Ellen Louise Hart (bio) Variorum” was not a word we expected to see attached to R.W. Franklin’s long awaited The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Variorum Edition (1998), since Franklin himself was not using that word for his production as recently as 1997. Yet Franklin’s splendid achievement deepens, broadens, and redirects conversations about how her texts should be arranged to make Poems of Emily Dickinson and uses notes by different persons (i.e., synthesizes much of the prior editorial knowledge, as responsible textual studies should) as it strives to render every known variant embodiment of Dickinson’s texts. So “variorum” is appropriate, as long as readers do not receive the term as synonymous with “comprehensive,” for though overflowing with information, this new edition is not quite all-inclusive. “The aim of this edition is a comprehensive account, not a selection for a specific end. Within individual entries, the texts are presented without priority, sequenced chronologically. When sequence is not clear, as when manuscripts are missing and the text incomplete, convenience of presentation may be followed instead” (FP, p. 29). Though Franklin’s emphatic tone and declarative sentence structure suggest that there indeed are specific ends or goals in mind (and indeed there are), his actual presentations of texts and their histories are not so much contests for as they are contesting any claims to definitude that may attach to any goal, even his of organizing the poems chronologically. Nevertheless, that the volumes are exquisitely dressed and bear the imprimatur of Harvard University Press, an especially powerful lineage in Dickinson studies, and are coming out after years and then more years of fastidious preparation, will make some treat his performance of The Poems of Emily Dickinson as definitive. The publisher’s choice of the term “variorum” is an attempt to authorize these volumes as such a standard, and if we are to regard them critically we must analytically contend with that authorization which ultimately lays claims to “most authentic,” whatever Franklin’s renderings reveal. His renderings are most [End Page 24] aptly celebrated not as the standard to which all proper representation of Dickinson’s texts must conform, but as the presentation of thoroughly researched documents that raise astute, generative questions first about what counts as a poem by Emily Dickinson and then as a poem of Emily Dickinson, what counts as a significant textual detail and what not (placement of epistolary and poetic writings in relationship to one another, different signatures to different correspondents, for example), what count as relevant paratexts and what do not. Though Franklin’s edition will disappoint our colleagues who want to fix the boundaries and identity of a “poem by Emily Dickinson,” the effects of this edition on study of writings by Emily Dickinson will at the very least be to confound those who casually refer to her poems by the numbers assigned by editors. Anyone referring to #214 now has to specify whether she means “Poor little Heart!” (FP214, identified by Franklin) or “I taste a liquor never brewed -“ (JP214, identified by his forebear, Thomas H. Johnson). This alone will prove to be quite a shift for some Dickinson readers and will, these reviewers hope, finally usher in an era of referring to her poems by their words instead of by the numbers assigned to them by editors and their publishers. If The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Variorum Edition sets a standard (and indeed, we believe it does), the nature of that standard is not in that the account is all inclusive or absolutely correct but is in the fact that Franklin’s critical attention to textual details is an exemplary heuristic for any study of Emily Dickinson’s manuscripts designed to learn about her compositional and distribution practices. Framed by most of the important questions necessary to analyze the many telling characteristics of the manuscripts and of subsequent editing practices, Franklin’s edition records features such as line breaks, page breaks, stanza breaks, and word divisions, the dating and transmission of each document, its subsequent handlings, and publishing history. All of these elements have proved and will continue to prove crucial...