Before the seventeenth-century rise of published volumes by single authors, literary works tended to be circulated in manuscript collections, miscellanies copied, compiled, and collected by readers. Over the past couple of decades, a number of critical projects have encouraged scholars to attend to the material manuscript contexts of literary works—including marginalia, textual variants, ascriptions, other texts in the compilation, and other manuscript features—to begin to appreciate how a text was read by its contemporaries. Lara Crowley's useful study models an approach to evaluating manuscript texts that fuses book-history methodologies to reception studies in order to demonstrate how the compilation of early manuscript artifacts was itself an interpretive activity. Building upon foundational accountings of John Donne's appearances in early manuscript miscellanies (in projects that include the ongoing, multivolume Donne Variorum), Crowley focuses on manuscripts that contain works by Donne among many other texts to show how the whole artifact produces a conversation among its sundry contents. This approach results in provocative, and often transformative, reconsiderations of how Donne's works were understood by his seventeenth-century readers.
Following a strong introductory chapter in which she lays out the methods and terminology attendant upon the study of early manuscripts and encourages scholars to overcome whatever “archival shyness” (27) may prevent an enthusiastic engagement with manuscript collections, Crowley examines four representative artifacts, one per chapter. Chapter 2 explores the inclusion of one of the few manuscript copies of Donne's notoriously resistant Metempsychosis within the pages of a volume owned by Edmund Gosse. Though the poem has been understood by critics as a keen if puzzling social satire, the subject of its barbs has remained obscure. Crowley reads Donne's poem within the context of the Gosse manuscript, alongside the other texts there compiled, and she identifies in that collective's common concerns a strong contender for the courtly figure Donne aimed to satirize, which goes some way toward unperplexing readers’ long-standing perplexity. Chapter 3 does similar clarifying work on another piece of topical satire by examining one of Donne's ambiguous prose problems among its companions in the Gell manuscript, outlining how at least one early modern reader understood Donne to be commenting on the scandals of court flattery.
Crowley's approach yields not just interpretive but also recuperative benefit. Chapter 4 looks closely at an English translation of Psalm 137, long excluded from Donne's canon by his modern editors because of conflicting early attributions. Crowley surveys all artifacts containing the translation, with special focus on patterns of ascription, to establish by a preponderance of seventeenth-century attestation that the poem's author was indeed Donne. Crowley is then able to read Donne's “Psalm 137” alongside the poet's other works and to identify shared concerns between Donne's established canon and what amounts to an overlooked but newly salvaged work by a major seventeenth-century author.
The potential limitations of Crowley's methodology become clear in her final chapter, which focuses on the wildly variant versions of familiar Donne love lyrics that appear in a volume apparently owned and possibly also compiled by (or for) Margaret Bellasis. The author details the alterations and adaptations of Donne's poems to argue that the Bellasis manuscript's revisions may collectively display “a turning away from bitterness in favor of sincere love” (204), but even Crowley's thoroughness in documenting this volume's variants offers only suggestions of patterns without revealing intent: “we can only speculate” (208), she admits of the logic behind the miscellany's many changes. And, indeed, once Crowley's project turns from illuminating a poem's historical moment through manuscript evidence to the more timeless arguments of lyric, her own argumentation and textual interpretation becomes more conjectural and uncertain.
Still, this monograph skillfully shows both the benefits and the appeal of manuscript study. Crowley challenges readers of early texts to consider how those texts resonated with their immediate audience by reflecting on the interpretive labor of compiling manuscript volumes. This study's meticulous detailing of material artifacts, its clear explanations of textual features, and its valuable appendixes and image reproductions demystify manuscript research and suggest excitingly all that dusty old volumes might have to tell us.
