Introduction: Do Manuscript Studies in the Early Modern Period Have a Future?

IN JANUARY 1974, when I began work on the Index of English Literary Manuscripts, this question would have had no meaning. Insofar as there was a discipline of studies at all it was devoted purely to medieval manuscripts: i.e., in the academic fields of medieval studies, Paleography, and art history. It was not that literary scholars were totally oblivious of the existence of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century manuscript texts. Editors of Donne, Jonson, Wyatt, and others could hardly ignore them altogether; and certainly there were scholars who wrote the occasional important and perceptive article about documentary records (Mark Eccles and Hilton Kelliher, for example). But manuscripts were for the most part considered of peripheral interest--exciting up to a point if it were a newly discovered literary manuscript in a major author's own hand (such as the Donne verse epistle to Lady Carey that surfaced in 1970), but otherwise of interest only to textual editors--and even then only if it helped to establish copy text for an edition of that author. In a world still totally dominated by print culture, where even textual editors would tend to treat manuscripts gingerly--as if dubious, second-best sources to fall back on only when no adequate early printed texts were available--and where the New Bibliography of Greg and Bowers still dominated, with its enshrined marginalization of the manuscript vis-a-vis the printed text in Shakespeare taken as the model for editing theories in general--the notion that, in the post-Gutenberg era, manuscripts might still continue for centuries to play every bit as important a role in literary culture as printed books was utterly alien. As research on my Index progressed, this alien, unorthodox concept began to emerge only when I started to realize, somewhat to my astonishment, just how many manuscript texts did still exist, and were unknown to scholars--especially for those very authors whom I assumed had been fully covered by previous editors--this, and the sheer magnitude of the general holdings for this period, so much of it totally ignored, which I discovered in so many archives, record offices and other collections throughout Britain and eventually in the United States and even farther afield. This process was accelerated two or three years later when I met Mary Hobbs, who lent me her pioneering doctoral dissertation An Edition of the Stoughton Manuscript ... connected with Henry King (1973). In this brilliant study--which struck me as in part exciting new revelation, in part (no less exciting) confirmation of much that I had been finding myself--Hobbs had enthusiastically tracked down and identified a host of linked but now widely dispersed verse miscellanies to establish a web of distribution networks, thereby effectively opening up a whole world of manuscript poetical activity and circulation in the 1620s-1640s centered principally on Oxford. Not the least of the many implications of this dissertation was the new focus it brought to bear on contemporary manuscript copies of poems and their relevance to the understanding of texts: it was not only autograph manuscripts that deserved to be taken seriously. (1) With the publication in 1980 of the first volume (in two parts) of my Index of English Literary Manuscripts for the period 1450-1625 (two further parts, for 1625-1700, appearing in 1987 and 1993)--the authors covered including Shakespeare--some basic scholarly ground plan or survey had been laid for coming to terms with literary manuscripts of this period. It was no Short Title Catalogue--how could it be, since it covered only, eventually, a select 128 major authors and could never claim comprehensiveness?--but it changed the literary map. Apart from an immediately enthusiastic review by Nicolas Barker in The Book Collector, such reviewers as the Index managed to attract were either at a loss what to say about it at all or else gave patronizing voice to some vague sense of its usefulness--no doubt in some arcane field of pedantry far removed from the serious business of mainstream literary criticism or bibliographical (i. …