The series English Manuscript Studies has quietly established itself at the cutting edge of not just the technical stuff of bibliographic or codicological study, but our whole way of thinking about literature and our study of the culture and cultures which produce it. In particular, Mary Hobbs' article on Henry King's Manuscripts in the first volume of this series seemed to underline the feeling throughout the volume that here was a scholarly gauntlet flung down with the minimum of fuss, but nonetheless challenging preconceptions of texts and their transmission. This latest set of essays continues the good work with solid and stimulating discussions on topics as various as Manuscript Illumination or the analogues of I Henry IV . Much of the best work on manuscript culture seems to be concentrated on the later period covered by these studies, and accordingly the volume has three very strong essays based on seventeenth-century texts, including Harold Love's latest report from his journey toward the ultimate Rochester text. Love's point overall is that Rochester's poem went through several profound changes whilst being circulated, and that few of these were authorial.
Love discusses distinct modes of circulation, tracing the several phases of a text's life.
Thence comes the movement toward textual stasis, the limbo-like state of a text that no longer engages with the political moment. Whilst Love has a tendency to hyperbole, his work points out intriguing and important avenues for consideration, not least in relation to electronic and hypertext editions. Gouws warns against such a schematic view of textual construction, concluding by insisting that we can resist these theories by emphasizing the instability of text and our own lack of physical evidence. Elsewhere William Schipper considers in depth two manuscript copies of Rabanus Maurus's encyclopedia De rerum naturis , demonstrating that it was both copied and used, and thence claiming that Maurus's influence was wider than is generally thought. Similarly, Michael Brennan's work on the Badminton Manuscript of Barckley's A Discourse of the Felicitie of Man is given room to breathe and to infer extensively from the source text.