A Handbook of Editing Early Modern Texts (Material Readings in Early Modern Culture)

Description

A Handbook of Editing Early Modern Texts provides a series of answers written by more than forty editors of diverse texts addressing the 'how-to's' of completing an excellent scholarly edition. The Handbook is primarily a practical guide rather than a theoretical forum; it airs common problems and offers a number of solutions to help a range of interested readers, from the lone editor of an unedited document, through to the established academic planning a team-enterprise, multi-volume re-editing of a canonical author. Explicitly, this Handbook does not aim to produce a linear treatise telling its readers how they 'should' edit. Instead, it provides them with a thematically ordered collection of insights drawn from the practical experiences of a symposium of editors. Many implicit areas of consensus on good practice in editing are recorded here, but there are also areas of legitimate disagreement to be charted. The Handbook draws together a diverse range of first person narratives detailing the approaches taken by different editors, with their accompanying rationales, and evaluations of the benefits and problems of their chosen methods. The collection's aim is to help readers to read modern editions more sensitively, and to make better-informed decisions in their own editorial projects. Cover Half Title Title Page Copyright Page Table of Contents List of figures Notes on contributors Acknowledgements Introduction 1 Before editing 1.1 Introducing archives 1.1.1 Approaching the archives 1.1.2 Catalogues and other finding aids 1.1.3 Primum non nocere: handling special collections material 1.1.4 Accessing hidden collections 1.2 Planning and proposing an edition 1.2.1 The uses of serendipity 1.2.2 The evolutionary edition 1.2.3 Getting started on proposing an edition 1.2.4 A publisher’s perspective 1.3 Edition management and protocols 1.3.1 Organising a large edition An early modern addendum 1.3.2 The form of a documentary edition 1.3.3 Edition management and protocols 2 Editing: principles and practice 2.1 Apparatus 2.1.1 Introductions 2.1.2 Annotations 2.1.3 Images 2.1.4 Textual apparatus and reader engagement 2.1.5 Appendices 2.1.6 Indexes 2.2 Text: collation 2.2.1 Collating copies of Renaissance texts 2.2.2 Print collation 2.3 Text: modernisation and translation 2.3.1 To modernise or not to modernise? 2.3.2 The problems with old-spelling editions 2.3.3 In defence of old-spelling editions 2.3.4 Modernisation versus old-spelling for early modern printed prose 2.3.5 Translations 2.4 Text: arrangement and presentation 2.4.1 Transcription 2.4.2 The materiality of early modern letters 2.4.3 Mise-en-page: editing early modern letters 2.4.4 Mise-en-page: editing lyric poetry from manuscripts 2.4.5 Variety in copy-text 2.4.6 Edition defined by venue 2.4.7 Ordering the epistolary: letters or correspondence? 2.5 Unedited and oft-edited texts 2.5.1 Whether and how to edit manuscript miscellanies 2.5.2 The single-author edition and manuscript miscellanies 2.5.3 Editing oft-edited texts: annotating Shakespeare 3 Digital editing 3.1 Theory and practice 3.1.1 Parting with ‘much wee know’: digital editing and the early modern text 3.1.2 XML and the ‘Archaeology of Reading’ 3.2 Online editions 3.2.1 Digital XML-based editing: the case of Bess of Hardwick’s letters 3.2.2 Scriptorium: when to build a digital archive rather than a digital edition 3.3 Social editing 3.3.1 Social editing and the Devonshire Manuscript 3.3.2 Annotation and the social edition 4 Case studies 4.1 On error 4.2 On mess 4.3 On ordering chronologically 4.4 On media 4.5 On annotation as conversation Bibliography Index