This radically revisionist edition, as Michael Rudick himself admits, would scarcely have been possible without the pioneering work of Arthur F. Marotti, whose Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric (1995) first made the case for the importance of “scribal publication” to the textual bibliographer. Marotti showed that medieval practices of manuscript circulation had continued unbroken long after printed books became widely available—indeed, well into the Restoration period—and argued that the surviving compilations, whether in private notebooks or more formal anthologies with a coterie readership, were neglected witnesses to the sociohistorical context and reception history of an extensive body of lyric poetry. Before Marotti’s work, editors had largely neglected scribal publication because, as they saw it, the texts involved were unreliable both in terms of readings and in attribution, furnishing evidence...

 

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