Edward Jones
A Concise Companion to Manuscripts, Printed Books, and the Production of Early Modern Texts complements two other Wiley publications (Donna Hamilton’s Concise Companion to English Renaissance Literature from 2006 and Mark Bland’s A Guide to Early Printed Books and Manuscripts from 2010) while expanding the scope beyond England of the study of the relationship between unpublished and published writing in the aftermath of the invention of the printing press found in last year’s A Companion to the Early Printed Book in Britain 1476–1558, edited by Vincent Gillespie and Susan Powell. Over time attitudes about writing and publishing have undoubtedly changed, but it would be oversimple to conclude that such change has been wholesale. The existence of present-day journals, diaries, and handwritten lists and catalogues of personal libraries reminds us that a preference for unprinted materials remains despite the multiple options modern technology offers writers of any kind to see their work in print. Subjects from the sixteenth and seventeenth century found in this Companion call attention to the special challenges the production of books introduced to scribes and authors whose orientation was accustomed if not predisposed to record thoughts and mathematical sums on vellum. For scholars and students interested in such subjects, this volume, in the words of one of its contributors, relies upon 'worked examples' to illuminate how manuscripts and published books reflect concerns with literacy, social class, the world of scholarship and scholars, theatrical performances, economic success, and perhaps most of all, literary art. Its tripartite division into studies of manuscripts, printed books, and production, the last of which includes both a work’s immediate dissemination and its appropriation in later centuries, features essays on a wide range of subjects: from Shakespeare, Milton, Baxter, and Jonson to biography, painting, and seventeenth-century printing and reading practices; from reception history and the compiling of parish records and book lists to royal visits to universities and Latin letter writing among friends. The contributors to this Companion illustrate general tendencies by focusing on a specific example or case study.
Distinctive about this volume is its original impetus: a collection of essays and one poem designed as a tribute to Gordon Campbell – a scholar whose work has influenced all contributors in different ways. His scholarship insists upon a familiarity with historical details, an ability to read and write in at least a half dozen languages (preferably more), and a willingness to explore how discrete disciplines (music, sculpture, architecture, literature, and painting) unite rather than remain apart. Synthesis runs through Campbell’s work not as some grand gesture but instead as a hard-won conviction borne from voracious reading, study, correspondence, and conversation with established experts, academic stars, and (probably his favourite) obscure men and women in charge of archives, museums, and exhibits in out-of-the-way places. That he has found much to quench his thirst for knowledge is apparent. Multi-volume reference works on art and architecture, editions of poetry and plays, dictionaries on Renaissance Art, monographs on Milton’s De Doctrina Christiana, the King James Bible, and the figure of the garden Hermit capture his interests in the colossal figures of an age and the minutiae of everyday and scholarly life. It has all inspired this group of scholar friends to express their appreciation through the very medium to which he has contributed so much to present-day and future Renaissance studies.