Editing Early Modern Texts

What was a book in early modern England? By combining book history, bibliography and literary criticism, Material Texts in Early Modern England explores how sixteenth- and seventeenth-century books were stranger, richer things than scholars have imagined. Adam Smyth examines important aspects of bibliographical culture which have been under-examined by critics: the cutting up of books as a form of careful reading; book destruction and its relation to canon formation; the prevalence of printed errors and the literary richness of mistakes; and the recycling of older texts in the bodies of new books, as printed waste. How did authors, including Herbert, Jonson, Milton, Nashe and Cavendish, respond to this sense of the book as patched, transient, flawed, and palimpsestic? Material Texts in Early Modern England recovers these traits and practices, and so crucially revises our sense of what a book was, and what a book might be.

What was a book in early modern England? By combining book history, bibliography and literary criticism, Material Texts in Early Modern England explores how sixteenth- and seventeenth-century books were stranger, richer things than scholars have imagined. Adam Smyth examines important aspects of bibliographical culture which have been under-examined by critics: the cutting up of books as a form of careful reading; book destruction and its relation to canon formation; the prevalence of printed errors and the literary richness of mistakes; and the recycling of older texts in the bodies of new books, as printed waste. How did authors, including Herbert, Jonson, Milton, Nashe and Cavendish, respond to this sense of the book as patched, transient, flawed, and palimpsestic? Material Texts in Early Modern England recovers these traits and practices, and so crucially revises our sense of what a book was, and what a book might be.

This collection of new essays is a comprehensive exploration of the theoretical and practical issues surrounding the editing of texts by early modern women. The chapters consider the latest developments in the field and address a wide range of topics, including the 'ideologies' of editing, genre and gender, feminism, editing for student or general readers, print publishing, and new and possible future developments in editing early modern writing, including digital publishing. The works of writers such as Queen Elizabeth I, Mary Wroth, Anne Halkett, Katherine Philips and Katherine Austen are examined, and the issues discussed are related to the ways editing in general has evolved in recent years. This book offers readers an original overview of the central issues in this growing field and will interest students and scholars of early modern literature and drama, textual studies, the history of editing, gender studies and book history.

The critical work of editing performance texts poses particular challenges for historians and scholars of the early periods of English literature, not least of which is the ephemerality of performance

This book explores the textual and semiotic construction of early modern English identities. To this end, the contributors – scholars from various European universities – address a diversity of litera

This book provides an approachable exposition of the rationale of textual editing with special reference to texts from between 1550-1800. The volume explains how manuscript and printed texts were prod

Editing Music in Early Modern Germany argues that editors played a critical role in the transmission and reception of Italian music outside Italy. Like their counterparts in the world of classical le

This collection offers a cross-disciplinary exploration of the ways in which multilingual practices were embedded in early modern European literary culture, opening up a dynamic dialogue between contemporary multilingual practices and scholarly work on early modern history and literature.The eleven chapters draw on translation studies, literary history, transnational literatures, and contemporary sociolinguistic research to explore how multilingual practices manifested themselves across different social, cultural and institutional spaces. The exploration of a diverse range of contexts allows for the opportunity to engage with questions around how individual practices shape national and transnational language practices and literatures, the impact of multilingual practices on identity formation, and their implications for creative innovations in bilingual and multilingual texts. Taken as a whole, the collection paves the way for future conversations on what early modern literary studies

Editing Music in Early Modern Germany argues that editors played a critical role in the transmission and reception of Italian music outside Italy. Like their counterparts in the world of classical lea

This book studies the uses of orality in Italian society, across all classes, from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century, with an emphasis on the interrelationships between oral communication and t

Early Modern Playhouse Manuscripts and the Editing of Shakespeare argues for editing Shakespeare's plays in a new way, without pretending to distinguish authorial from theatrical versions. Drawing on the work of the influential scholars A. W. Pollard and W. W. Greg, Werstine tackles the difficult issues surrounding 'foul papers' and 'promptbooks' to redefine these fundamental categories of current Shakespeare editing. In an extensive and detailed analysis, this book offers insight into the methods of theatrical personnel and a reconstruction of backstage practices in playhouses of Shakespeare's time. The book also includes a detailed analysis of nineteen manuscripts and three quartos marked up for performance - documents that together provide precious insight into how plays were put into production. Using these surviving manuscripts as a framework, Werstine goes on to explore editorial choices about what to give today's readers as 'Shakespeare'.

This landmark collection of newly commissioned essays by leading international scholars, offers expert close reading of Shakespeare and other early modern authors. A major contribution to the current

Joyce Green MacDonald discusses the links between women's racial, sexual, and civic identities in early modern texts. She examines the scarcity of African women in English plays of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the racial identity of the women in the drama and also that of the women who watched and sometimes wrote the plays. The coverage also includes texts from the late fourteenth to the early eighteenth centuries, by, among others, Shakespeare, Jonson, Davenant, the Countess of Pembroke, and Aphra Behn. MacDonald articulates many of her discussions of early modern women's races through a comparative method, using insights drawn from critical race theory, women's history, and contemporary disputes over canonicity, multiculturalism, and Afrocentrism. Seeing women as identified by their race and social standing as well as by their sex, this book will add depth and dimension to discussions of women's writing and of gender in Renaissance literature.

Early Modern Russian Letters: Texts and Contexts brings together twenty essays by Marcus C. Levitt, a leading scholar of eighteenth-century Russian literature. The essays address a spectrum of works

Literary scholars explore the significant yet largely ignored field of textual and editorial scholarship in the work of modern authors

To describe a language, it is necessary to get as close to the sources as possible -- this textbook takes manuscript images, explains the various scripts used, and provides a word-by-word account of t

To describe a language, it is necessary to get as close to the sources as possible -- this textbook takes manuscript images, explains the various scripts used, and provides a word-by-word account of t

The first book to put contemporary affect theory into conversation with early modern studies, Affect Theory and Early Modern Texts: Politics, Ecologies, and Form demonstrates how questions of affect

In recent years, the rise of fundamentalism and a related turn to religion in the humanities have led to a powerful resurgence of interest in the problem of political theology. In a critique of this c

In recent years, the rise of fundamentalism and a related turn to religion in the humanities have led to a powerful resurgence of interest in the problem of political theology. In a critique of this c

Focusing on team translation and the production of multilingual editions, and on the difficulties these techniques created for Renaissance translation theory, this book offers a study of textual pract

During the early modern period in England, social expectations for men came under extreme pressure - the armed knight went into decline and humanism appeared. Here, original essays analyze a wide-rang

This volume consists of original papers first read at King's College, Cambridge, in 1979 at an international conference on medieval and Renaissance music. The contributors are distinguished in a wide variety of musicological interests but all are concerned in one way or another with pursuing the most urgent and promising directions for research in early music history. The result, far from being merely a further collection of essays applying well-tried approaches to familiar material, constantly seeks to expand the scope of musicology itself, and many of the contributions arc inter-disciplinary in method. The four main topics of the conference were carefully chosen, with some editorial control exercised for each session. This is reflected in four sections of closely related papers in the book. Two of these are concerned with the patronage of music: by the Church in fifteenth-century England, Italy and France, and in a broader context in Italy from 1450 to 1550. A group of essays on sixt

Acknowledging that no narrative can now be verifiably identified as virgin oral free of literate taint, scholars of English literature assert that nevertheless there were oral practices in the early m

Rewriting Early Chinese Texts examines the problems of reconstructing and editing ancient manuscripts that will revise - indeed "rewrite" - Chinese history. It is now generally recognized that the ext

Eleven essays from American academics and one Spanish scholar explore the relationship between text and gender in the early modern Spanish world. The contributors examine a variety of texts, including