Manuscripts

Abstract

There is something almost visceral about handling a manuscript dating from the early modern period. Such documents arguably bring us as close as we can ever get to the early modern authors and scribes who created and transmitted the texts that have come down to us, their hesitations, errors and second thoughts. Indeed, until the invention of, first, the typewriter and then the word-processor, all texts were invariably initially written by hand: only after that might they be set in type and printed. Of course, they might have had a now lost prehistory in oral forms, which might continue in parallel with written ones; ideas might also initially have been inscribed in temporary form on ‘writing-tables’, in which various scholars have recently become interested.¹ Insofar as texts have come down to us, however, they almost always existed in manuscript before they were printed (works set straight in type with no manuscript prehistory are rare, virtually the only exceptions, then as more recently, being in the world of journalism). Moreover, many texts survive in manuscript, including many that have never been printed as well as some that subsequently were.