Variorum Edition Research Articles

James L. W. West on F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Review Article

ABSTRACT: Over a twenty-five-year period, James L. W. West III was the general editor of the Cambridge Edition of the Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald, an eighteen-volume series that was completed with the Variorum Edition of The Great Gatsby in 2019. His new collection of essays provides important insights into Fitzgerald’s professional writing career, the complexities of scholarly textual editing, and especially the creation and legacy of The Great Gatsby as we approach the 2025 centennial of its original publication.

The Dickinson Wars

The Dickinson Wars David Wyatt (bio) Emily Dickinson's poems are surrounded by the sound of axes being ground. When alive, her gaze may have been toward Eternity, but her afterlife remains mired in an endless elaboration of worldly intrigues. The question of who Dickinson loved—if it were not God himself—continues to provoke heated debate. Scholars disagree as to why Dickinson chose not to see her poems into print. As editions of the poems do appear, they are met by counter-editions. The Dickinson manuscripts rescued from the households where they had been disseminated are now held by two institutions that cannot agree as to who should hold copyright. And while the two variorum editions of Dickinson's poems were produced by men, such projects were only made possible by the exertions of and the competitions between three decades of extraordinary women. "Then Vinnie came to me:" the sentence appears in a journal entry dated November 30, 1890, although the moment being remembered occurred some three years earlier. Vinnie is Lavinia, Emily Dickinson's younger sister. The author of the sentence is Mabel Loomis Todd, the mistress of Austin Dickinson, the poet's older brother. Vinnie has come to Mabel to ask her to take up a dropped stitch. After Emily's death in 1886, her sister-in-law Susan Gilbert Dickinson had volunteered to edit poems found by Vinnie in a drawer. But, according to Todd, Susan had recently concluded that the poems "would never sell—there was not money enough to get them out—the public would not care for them, & so on—in short, she gave it up." What Vinnie had found after her sister's death were some 250 unbound poems along with 40 fascicles, small booklets of poems tied together with string. When all the poems left behind by Dickinson were eventually located, the count had risen to 1,789. Only 10 of these poems were published during Dickinson's lifetime. In poem number 709 (Dickinson did not title her poems), Dickinson had openly expressed her ambivalence about bringing her work to market: "Publication-is the Auction / Of the Mind of Man." Mabel Todd began copying Dickinson's poems in the fall of 1887. As she began transcribing Dickinson's handwriting, a task described by Richard B. Sewall as one of "cryptographic proportions," Mabel found that "the poems [End Page 159] were having a wonderful effect on me, mentally and spiritually. They seemed to open the door to a wider universe than the little sphere surrounding me which so often hurt and compressed me." It is "safe to say," Sewall concludes, "that without the spiritual kinship she felt with the poet and with the poems we might have had no poems (or letters) at all." After some 300 poems had been typed—Todd was working with two early versions of the typewriter—she decided to hire an assistant, but "some of her mistakes in Emily's mad words were so ludicrous as to be pathetic." Todd turned to copying with a pen, and the work went more quickly. By the summer of 1889 she had transcribed 700 poems. The copies made were not and could not be exact, both because of the oddities in Dickinson's handwriting and because of the alternate wordings she had provided for a number of her poems. Todd sometimes registered these variants. But in transcribing she also changed Dickinson's spelling, omitted capital letters, and altered spacing and punctuation. During the winter of 1889-90 Todd submitted her findings to writer and editor Thomas Higginson, Dickinson's longtime friend and supporter. Higginson chose about 200 poems from the selection offered him and arranged them under topical headings: Life, Love, Nature, Time & Eternity. He also insisted on making changes of his own, the most famous involving his insistence on altering "I wish I were a Hay" to "I wish I were the hay." The proposed edition was then submitted to Roberts Brothers. One of the publisher's clients, a poet named Arlo Bates, acted as a reader for the press. He cut the number of poems in half and insisted on some changes of his own. Todd and Higginson...

Revisiting the number of self-incompatibility alleles in finite populations: From old models to new results.

Under gametophytic self-incompatibility (GSI), plants are heterozygous at the self-incompatibility locus (S-locus) and can only be fertilized by pollen with a different allele at that locus. The last century has seen a heated debate about the correct way of modelling the allele diversity in a GSI population that was never formally resolved. Starting from an individual-based model, we derive the deterministic dynamics as proposed by Fisher (The genetical theory of natural selection - A complete, Variorum edition, Oxford University Press, 1958) and compute the stationary S-allele frequency distribution. We find that the stationary distribution proposed by Wright (Evolution, 18, 609, 1964) is close to our theoretical prediction, in line with earlier numerical confirmation. Additionally, we approximate the invasion probability of a new S-allele, which scales inversely with the number of resident S-alleles. Lastly, we use the stationary allele frequency distribution to estimate the population size of a plant population from an empirically obtained allele frequency spectrum, which complements the existing estimator of the number of S-alleles. Our expression of the stationary distribution resolves the long-standing debate about the correct approximation of the number of S-alleles and paves the way for new statistical developments for the estimation of the plant population size based on S-allele frequencies.

Eric Schliesser. Adam Smith: Systematic Philosopher and Public Thinker.

Eric Schliesser. Adam Smith: Systematic Philosopher and Public Thinker.

The Text and Stemma of ‘To Sr H: W: Going into Venice:’

Abstract The text of Donne’s verse letter to Sir Henry Wotton on his appointment as ambassador to Venice, beginning ‘After those reverent papers’, published in the Variorum edition of the verse letters (2018) is based on Trinity College, Dublin Ms. 877 (Variorum siglum DT1). While the Variorum text resembles most of the printed versions of the poem, I argue that it differs considerably from what Donne likely presented to Wotton as he left England for his embassy in 1604. I base my argument principally upon bibliographic evidence found in the Burley Ms. (Variorum siglum LR1), which was compiled mainly during Wotton’s first embassy (1604–1610). Below the copy of HWVenice (Variorum short form) in this manuscript, the scribe recorded a prose postscript that in all likelihood was taken from the now lost original holograph among Wotton’s personal papers in Venice. No other copy of HWVenice includes this postscript, a fact leaving little doubt that the LR1 text of the poem and its postscript stand closer to Donne’s own hand than any other surviving witness. After analysing the stemma published in the Variorum, I propose a more likely stemma and a more authoritative text for HWVenice.

Modern Judeo-Provençal as Known from Its Sole Textual Testimony: Harcanot et Barcanot (Critical Edition and Linguistic Analysis)

Abstract This study offers a linguistic description of the idiom of the Jews of the Comtat Venaissin (“Judeo-Provençal”) at the end of the 18th century, based on a critical edition of the only relevant document illustrating this language, a theatrical play in verse entitled Harcanot et Barcanot. The introduction provides a philological inventory of all known sources of “Judeo-Provençal.” The critical and variorum edition of the text, accompanied by linear glosses in English, is followed by a commentary comprising a glossary and analysis of all relevant linguistic features. It reveals, inter alia, that this language possessed words pertaining to the linguistic repertoire of French Jews since the Middle Ages; as for the phonetic features of the Jewish dialect of Provençal, their etiology is to be found in the history of the communities. The study concludes with a reassessment of the nature of linguistic variation in the dialect of the Jews of Provence.

Translating the plural text: Samuel Beckett in Persian

ABSTRACT The process by which a literary text comes to be is among the understudied domains of translation studies. This article draws on my experience of translating Samuel Beckett’s late prose works into Persian to explore how a convergence of translation studies and genetic criticism can affect and broaden the literary translator’s choices. I outline a new way for literary translation to approach unstable source texts which consist of a set of drafts. I demonstrate how my translation of Beckett's late prose works into Persian consists of translating the differential space between the English and the French versions of Beckett’s work, on the one hand, and between the variants of each version according to the variorum editions of his works, on the other.

David George with Thomas Clayton, Niels Herold, Megan-Marie Johnson and Ashley Spriggs (eds.). 2019. Coriolanus: A New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare. 2 vols. Morrisville, NC: Lulu Press, 654 pp. and 532 pp., $ 60.00 each.

Article David George with Thomas Clayton, Niels Herold, Megan-Marie Johnson and Ashley Spriggs (eds.). 2019. Coriolanus: A New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare. 2 vols. Morrisville, NC: Lulu Press, 654 pp. and 532 pp., $ 60.00 each. was published on June 1, 2021 in the journal Anglia (volume 139, issue 2).

The Authorship of Donne’s Verse Letters to the Countess of Huntingdon

Abstract Donne’s verse letter to the Countess of Huntingdon beginning ‘That unripe side of earth’ was first printed in the second edition of Donne’s Poems (1635), and was reprinted as his in subsequent editions until 1912, when H. J. C. Grierson demoted it to a merely ‘attributed’ poem. Donne’s authorship, fully supported by the seventeenth-century printed editions, was contradicted by three manuscript copies of the poem that unanimously attributed it to the courtier and diplomat Sir Walter Aston. Scholars and editors since Grierson have wavered on their acceptance of this verse letter as reliably Donne’s work. The Donne Variorum edition of the verse letters (2018) classifies it as a ‘Poem of Disputed Canonicity’. I argue in this essay that textual, stylistic, and biographical evidence establish beyond reasonable doubt that Donne wrote this verse letter to Lady Huntingdon, and that Aston’s name became attached to it through an understandable error in scribal transmission of the poem.

Johnson on Demand: Reviews, Prefaces, and Ghost-Writings ed. by O M Brack, Jr., and Robert DeMaria, Jr.

Reviewed by: Johnson on Demand: Reviews, Prefaces, and Ghost-Writings ed. by O M Brack, Jr., and Robert DeMaria, Jr. Robert G. Walker Johnson on Demand: Reviews, Prefaces, and Ghost-Writings, ed. O M Brack Jr., and Robert DeMaria Jr. New Haven: Yale, 2018. Pp. xl + 632. $125. One of the most famous opening lines in all of literature initiates Johnson's letter to James Macpherson: "I received your foolish and impudent note." To read this "heterogeneous volume," which completes in most ways the Yale edition of Johnson's works that began in 1958, is to notice, among many other things, Johnson's talent in beginning. Here are just a few of my favorites: "It is with a mixture of compassion and indignation, that we condescend to continue the dispute with the authors and publishers of the London Magazine: to be engaged in a contest with such antagonists as it is no honour to overcome, is very disgusting; and what honour can be gained by writing against those who cannot read?" "It is now more than half a century since the Paradise Lost, having broke through the cloud with which the unpopularity of its author for a time obscured it, has attracted the general admiration of mankind, who have endeavoured to compensate the error of their first neglect by lavish praises, and boundless veneration." "Such is the power of interest over almost every mind, that no one is long without arguments to prove any position which is ardently wished to be true, or to justify any measures which are dictated by inclination." And one particularly applicable to contributors and readers of the Scriblerian, "That a certain Degree of reputation is acquired merely by approving the works of genius, and testifying a regard to the memory of the Authors, is a truth too evident to be denied." This publication, volume twenty of the twenty-three volumes of the Yale Johnson but the last to appear, allows well-deserved praise to be given to DeMaria, who took over as general editor of the project with the death of John H. Middendorf in 2007 and, in addition, served as coeditor of several later volumes when it became necessary, including this one. DeMaria's generosity in crediting his deceased coeditor, O M Brack, and other scholars in his notes and introduction is conspicuous but not unusual among Johnsonians, who are notoriously magnanimous. But his industriousness is unparalleled. I was not alone, surely, in thinking that the Yale Johnson would not be completed in my lifetime, and it now has been, at least officially. The editors explain, "we have restricted Johnson's writings for others in the Yale Edition to those works that are wholly or almost wholly by him. A separate volume, apart from the Yale Edition, called Contributions to the Works of Others, is planned." Subsequent references to Contributions throughout this volume suggest that it will contain much of interest. "The protocols of the Yale Edition" keep the text from being a typical scholarly edition, if one could have been fashioned from materials so heterogeneous and multisourced. DeMaria carefully explains each time he deviates from the protocols, always applying common sense, and he leaves little doubt that we have here the best text likely ever to be produced of this largely journalistic material. Moreover, his explanatory notes expand [End Page 195] considerably Yale's original annotation for the general reader—a largely mythical creature often spoken of but rarely seen. This is not a variorum edition but quite close. The pieces are arranged chronologically, not generically, with exceptions made on occasion to allow the tranching of related material that extends over time; for example, "Occasional Writing for Charlotte Lennox," "Writings for Giuseppe Baretti," and "Writings for Charles Burney." Rarely does one get the sense that material is included merely for the sake of inclusiveness, although few will find compelling his "Political Writing for Henry Thrale." One value of this edition is its ability to give all parts of a topic. For example, there are three Johnsonian reactions to Hanway's Journal of Eight Days Journey … [and] an essay on tea (1756), all published in the Literary Magazine: first, a short notice of a...

The Cambridge Fitzgerald Edition: Some Final Observations

Abstract The Cambridge Fitzgerald Edition has been finished. The final volume, a variorum edition of The Great Gatsby, appeared in April 2019. This article recapitulates the history of the series, mentions the evidence on which the texts were based, and reviews some of the problems encountered along the way. These include Fitzgerald's frequent misspellings, his collaborations with Zelda Fitzgerald, and occasional factual errors in his texts. The writings from the middle of Fitzgerald's career, including The Great Gatsby, are beginning to enter the public domain. New editions of his novels and stories will appear. Editors of these editions are encouraged to make use of the texts and annotations in The Cambridge Edition. That is one of the ground rules of scholarly editing: later editors should make use of the work of those editors who preceded them. The Cambridge series is available to all, not only in clothbound editions but in paperbacks and e-books. The next collected edition of the author's works will likely be wholly digital, but for now we have Fitzgerald in printed form, complete in eighteen volumes.

The Variorum Edition of the Poetry of John Donne, Volume 4.1. The Songs and Sonets, Part 1: General and Topical Commentary. John Donne. Ed. Albert C. Labriola, Jeffrey S. Johnson, and Paul A. Parrish, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017. lxxii + 418 pp. $80.

The Variorum Edition of the Poetry of John Donne, Volume 4.1. The Songs and Sonets, Part 1: General and Topical Commentary. John Donne. Ed. Albert C. Labriola, Jeffrey S. Johnson, and Paul A. Parrish, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017. lxxii + 418 pp. $80. - Volume 72 Issue 2

The Life of the Mind: George Herbert, Early Modern Meditation, and Materialist Cognition

The Life of the Mind:George Herbert, Early Modern Meditation, and Materialist Cognition Brent Dawson In at least one moment of meditation, George Herbert longed to become a tree. Such is the evidence, at least, of "Affliction (1)," a poem "generally taken to be one of H[erbert]'s most autobiographical" according to the editor Helen Wilcox.1 The poem, like many of Herbert's, examines the inner life of its speaker, recollecting and recreating the turns of thought and feeling as he seeks the purpose God means him to serve. But this introspective process takes a sudden twist in the poem's climax toward the material world. Realizing he will find no resolution to his inquiry, the speaker enviously compares his anxiety to the tranquil growth of trees: I reade, and sigh, and wish I were a tree; For sure then I should growTo fruit or shade: at least some bird would trustHer houshold to me, and I should be just.2 Herbert is drawn to a life that can dwell in silence, growing yet still, a space for other beings to roost. If the speaker could make peace with God's ways, accept a plan divinely set but never revealed for his own life, he might have something like the life of a tree, just existing. Natural life is something to which human inner life might be favorably compared: trees exhibit an ability to be content with uncertainty, to grow to "fruit or shade," unlike the fretful speaker's need to know his path. It is also life that makes space for others, housing shade for birds, while the speaker is still learning to make his soul God's dwelling. The poem's comparison assumes that the life of the mind and material life share some basic qualities—uncertain change and entanglement with others—and suggests that one task of meditation is to realize and accept these conditions. Herbert's poetry has merited praise for its focused attention to the life of the spiritual mind. It's worth asking, though, what kind of life is it that the mind has? What does that life share with other, [End Page 895] allegedly lower forms of life? How are we to make sense of Herbert's understanding that one of the traditionally lowest forms of existence, vegetal growth, and one of the highest, the soul's spiritual quest for union with God, are related? This passage from "Affliction (1)" has attracted less critical attention than its surprising arboreal wish leads one to expect. Wilcox's variorum edition details the debate over the poem's overall psychological tone, the degree to which its statements can be mapped onto events in Herbert's life, and the meaning of its final cryptic tautology. In contrast, the scant commentary collected on this passage translates its fantasy into soteriological terms: the tree is the man of faith, the bird the holy spirit.3 Attention to the passage has, in other words, erased the literal from a wish not phrased as simile. That foreclosure adheres to a broader trend in Herbert's reception, which has often placed his rich attention to inner life at odds with an interest in the life of the world. As far back as 1681, Richard Baxter set a precedent in claiming that "Heart-work and Heaven-work make up his Books," as though there were no attention to the realm between those poles.4 The influential readings of Barbara Lewalski and Richard Strier, in their attention to the importance of the heart in both Herbert and Calvinist devotion, downplay his curiosity toward the natural world as ironic or straightforwardly metaphorical.5 Stanley Fish argues that the experience of Herbert's poetry is one where the speaker learns to "let[] go" of the world and self in a violent process of total erasure into the Godhead.6 While recent critics like Cristina Malcolmson and Michael Schoenfeldt have given more weight to Herbert's interest in the material world, they have relatively deemphasized inner experience in his work, providing more space to his investment in social advancement and bodily health, respectively.7 The guiding assumption in Herbert criticism largely remains that...

Cove

Cove Hannah Comer (bio) COVE, the Central Online Victorian Educator, originally constituted in 2016, is a scholar-driven, open-access platform, maintained and supported by the North American Victorian Studies Association (NAVSA), the British Association for Victorian Studies (BAVS), and the Australasian Victorian Studies Association (AVSA), as well as by a number of independent institutions including Purdue, Texas Christian University, the University of Delaware, Ryerson University, Carleton University, the University of Alberta–Birkbeck, the University of Exeter, Queen Mary University of London, and the University of Birmingham. COVE is designed to support and publish all Victorian materials that are considered important for the understanding of the period and to support teaching through innovative tools and the publication of material that can be used creatively. COVE publishes peer-reviewed material, provides tools to guide Victorian research and pedagogy, and advocates interest in the humanities. The platform cultivates and explores the possibilities of digital technologies, opening up new ways of understanding the period through editions of various Victorian works (see https://editions.covecollective.org/content/about-cove). Current COVE poetry editions, among others, include Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market” (1862), Oscar Wilde’s “The Harlot’s House” (1885 Wilde’s “The Harlot’s House” (1904), Elizabeth Barratt Browning’s “On a Portrait of Wordsworth by B. R. Haydon” (1842) and Rossetti’s “In An Artist’s Studio” (1856 “In An Artist’s Studio” (1896). The digital edition of Rossetti’s “Goblin Market” (https://editions.covecollective.org/edition/goblin-market) is the work of a team of eight current Rossetti scholars: Antony Harrison, Lorraine Janzen Kooistra, Mary Arseneau, Alison Chapman, Margaret Linley, Emma Mason, and Richard Menke. This edition aims to provide an authoritative text with critical commentary that explores the linguistic, textual, historical, cultural, and interpretative aspects of the poem. It features both a biographical introduction to Rossetti and an editorial introduction to the text. The biographical introduction outlines Rossetti’s life and work, her involvement within the Pre-Raphaelite circle, and the formative influences on her visual and poetic imagination. Both introductions trace the reception of Rossetti’s work, from after her death to current critical interest and research, acknowledging her position as an important Victorian poet. The editorial introduction lists the other important editions of the poem printed since 1862. It features editions such as the volume with accompanying illustrations by her [End Page 455] brother Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Rebecca Crump’s three-volume variorum edition, The Complete Poems of Christina Rossetti (1979–1990). This edition also incorporates the notes supplied by Christina Rossetti’s brother William Michael Rossetti and thus reconsiders his role as the editor of both her and D. G. Rossetti’s poetical works. The annotations and commentary for the poem encompass the various approaches to “Goblin Market,” using categorical (such as linguistic, textual, historical) and color-coded tags to show the variants in the text and provide biographical and cultural information about Rossetti and the Victorian era. The interpretive tag displays further information about Rossetti’s poetic techniques or influences, visual and musical responses to the poem, and the critical reception of Rossetti’s poem. Each color-coded tag shows the annotator’s name and the category or categories under which he or she falls. Wilde’s “The Harlot’s House” (https://editions.covecollective.org/edition/harlots-house), edited and annotated by Dennis Denisoff, Regenia Gagnier, Natalie Houston, Jamil Mustafa, Diana Maltz, Stefano Evangelista, and Dominique Gracia, is an edition that reconsiders “The Harlot’s House” as an example of a theater poem. The introduction to the text gives a brief overview of Wilde’s formative years and his involvement in the Aesthetic Movement and primarily focuses on his work as a poet as well as his theatrical work and interests. In the introduction, Denisoff and Gagnier explore the social issues and contexts, particularly prostitution, that inform Wilde’s poem. It features a list of primary, critical, and visual works cited. This edition establishes the poem’s editorial history from its original publication in the 1885 Dramatic Review and two privately printed versions of the text in 1904 and 1905 and fosters a virtual and scholarly community through which the poem can be kept on...

Last Kiss The Great Gatsby The Great Gatsby: An Edition of the Manuscript

Last Kiss The Great Gatsby The Great Gatsby: An Edition of the Manuscript

John Donne and Early Modern Legal Culture: The End of Equity in the Satyres. Gregory Kneidel. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2015. Pp. vii+245.

<i>John Donne and Early Modern Legal Culture: The End of Equity in the Satyres</i>. Gregory Kneidel. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2015. Pp. vii+245.

The Variorum Edition of the Poetry of John Donne, Vol. 3: The Satyres. Ed. by Gary A. Stringer and others

‘On a high hill’, Donne wrote in Satyre3, ‘Ragged and steepe Truthe dwells; and he that will | Reach it, about must, and about go | And what th’hillls sodainnes resists, win so.’ Or, as this third and latest volume of The Variorum Edition of the Poetry of John Donne argues, so he first wrote—for following the ‘original version’ of the poem which I have just quoted it prints a ‘revised version’, which here reads rather differently: ‘on a huge hill | Cragged, and steepe truth stands, and hee that will | Reach hir, about must, and about goe; | And what the hills suddenness resists, winn soe.’ Copy-text for the ‘original version’ is here the manuscript to which the Variorum project gives the siglum NY3, more familiarly known as the Westmoreland manuscript, now in the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library, W in the system of sigla first proposed for Donne by his first serious editor, H. J. C. Grierson, and Δ19 in Peter Beal’s otherwise standard Index- and CELM-accustomed listing; copy-text for the ‘revised version’ is the Variorum’s DT1, now MS 877 in the Library of Trinity College Dublin (where formerly it was classified as G.2.21), TCD to Grierson and those who followed him, and Δ14 to Beal. The two manuscripts here providing copy-text are traced back in the edition’s stemma, ‘respectively, to the lost original holograph (LOH) and a single revised holograph (LRH)’ (p. 97); they are collated historically, too, against forty other texts, that include twenty-eight manuscripts, fifty-four lines of a once full but now incomplete twenty-ninth, all seven seventeenth-century editions/issues of Donne’s collected Poems, and four further witnesses in which ‘brief snippets of the poem appear’ (p.97).

Tristan Corbière’s Amours jaunes in Allen Ginsberg’s Early Poetry

From the 1950s to the 1980s, Allen Ginsberg inscribed Tristan Corbiere’s poetry in his own, in ways that concealed as much as they revealed. Working backwards from Ginsberg’s long cryptic allusion to Corbiere in the 1986 variorum edition of “Howl,” this article offers the first intertextual reading of their poetry. Comparatively analyzing the two translations of Corbiere’s Amours Jaunes that Ginsberg acquired in 1947 and 1955, it uncovers how Corbiere’s prosody and meta-irony informed Ginsberg’s “Howl” and “The Lion for Real,” and shows the extent to which the French poet’s aesthetics shaped the American’s in the crucial period that preceded and followed his breakthrough with “Howl.”

I. Bernard Cohen

1 MARCH 1914 * 20 JUNE 2003 PROUD OF being the first American to receive a doctorate expressly in the history of science (as opposed to writing a thesis for a history department), I Bernard Cohen went on to lead the professionalization of the discipline and to establish a flagship history of science department at Harvard. With a booming voice, a familiar checked sport jacket, and a distinctive articulated fish watch fob, he exuded a memorable presence that inevitably attracted both admirers and detractors. An acknowledged authority on the science of Benjamin Franklin, he was a natural candidate for membership in the American Philosophical Society, yet his election came comparatively late in his career. Born in Far Rockaway, Long Island, Cohen entered New York University at the precocious age of fifteen, only to drop out after a semester; following a brief study of veterinary medicine at the Farmington Agricultural Institute, he attended the Valley Forge Military Academy before entering Harvard as a freshman in 1933 to concentrate in mathematics. Then, continuing as a graduate student in 1937 in the newly founded Program in History of Science and Learning, he became an assistant to George Sarton, the man considered the father of modern history of science and the founding editor of Isis (in 1912), which in the meantime had become the journal of the History of Science Society. Cohen's original dissertation proposal, on Franklin's work on electricity as an example of Newtonian experimental science, grew ever longer, and at the suggestion of Crane Brinton (and with the unenthusiastic approval of Sarton), Cohen's first book, published in 1941, a fully annotated edition of Franklin's Experiments and Observations on Electricity, became his thesis for a Ph.D. granted in 1947. Cohen's six-hundred-page Franklin and Newton was published in 1956. During the same period he researched and wrote Some Early Tools of American Science (1950), which documented an exhibition of the university's eighteenth-century instruments and helped to establish Harvard's Collection of Historic Scientific Instruments, in which he continued to maintain a strong interest. From 1946 on (and until his mandatory retirement in 1984) Cohen taught undergraduate and graduate courses at Harvard. Working with president James Bryant Conant on Harvard's newly installed General Education program, he helped introduce the case study method with his popular course, Natural Science 3, The Nature and Growth of the Physical Sciences. A consummate showman in the classroom, he taught an extended series of graduate teaching fellows (including this writer) how to keep undergraduates awake with a host of memorable demonstrations. For two decades he chaired Harvard's program in history of science and guided its transformation into a full-fledged department in the mid-1960s. In 1947 Cohen became managing editor of his, and in 1953 succeeded Sarton in the editorship. As his colleague Erwin Hiebert noted in 1974 when Cohen received the Sarton Medal, the History of Science Society's lifetime achievement award, Cohen shepherded Isis through a gentle metamorphosis that gave it a structure that it still essentially maintains in its current form. Cohen's research in the history of science covered a wide range of topics over the course of his more than six decades of publications. Nevertheless, he was best known for his work on Isaac Newton. In 1957 Cohen joined with Alexandre Koyre, then at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, on the monumental project of preparing a variorum edition of Newton's Principia. This endeavor covered not only its three published editions, but also the original manuscript and the voluminous corrections and annotations that Newton had made in his personal copies. …

The Summoner’s Tale. A Variorum Edition of the Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, Vol. 2 ed. by John F. Plummer III

The Summoner’s Tale. A Variorum Edition of the Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, Vol. 2 ed. by John F. Plummer III