After Print: Eighteenth-Century Manuscript Cultures ed. by Rachael Scarborough King

Reviewed by: After Print: Eighteenth-Century Manuscript Cultures ed. by Rachael Scarborough King Wendy Raphael Roberts (bio) After Print: Eighteenth-Century Manuscript Cultures edited by rachael scarborough king University of Virginia Press, 2020 340 pp. Scholars now recognize the eighteenth century as a multimodal environment. In John Guillory's often-cited words, "The concept of a medium of communication was absent but wanted for the several centuries prior to its appearance" (qtd. in King 11). Given the "media turn" in eighteenth-century literary studies, which includes a number of influential works within the last decade on various forms of mediation and their interrelations, it is surprising to learn that Rachael Scarborough King's edited volume, After Print: Eighteenth-Century Manuscript Cultures, is the first book to survey the manuscript cultures of the eighteenth century. After [End Page 950] Print is a long overdue and rich collection filled with archival gems deftly assembled to illuminate a world of manuscript strikingly different than the one incessantly reproduced by the stubborn teleology of print. King enjoins readers to see the printed page not as opaque but as lucent and, in doing so, not only to examine the layered quality of media in eighteenth-century print culture but also to recalibrate their perspective from that of print's primacy to that of multimodality. Through sustained engagement with media studies, the collection dilates manuscript studies and the array of manuscript forms that flourished after print. Growing out of double panels at the 2014 Canadian Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies in Montreal and the stand-alone conference "After Print: Manuscripts in the Eighteenth Century" at the University at California, Santa Barbara, in 2015, King's collection extends manuscript cultures beyond the Renaissance and makes the strong case for their diversity and centrality through the Restoration and into the Romantic period. King divides the collection into three sections—(1) manuscript publication, (2) the print-manuscript interface, and (3) new methodologies—each equally balanced with four essays, and she bookends the collection with her own introduction and an epilogue by one of the foremost scholars of manuscript studies, Margaret J. M. Ezell. King introduces the collection as an extension of the foundational work of Harold Love and Margaret J. M. Ezell. Together these two scholars have transformed conceptions of seventeenth-century manuscript circulation and "publication," a word now understood to include forms of manuscript authorship, such as scribal publication, which were often preferred over print publication because they were amendable and adaptable. While Love and Ezell's scholarship has begun to change approaches to the study of eighteenth-century manuscripts, King points out that much of the work that has been done with manuscript in the eighteenth century still privileges print or implies a "special connection between manuscript and femininity" that Ezell's work sought to undo (5). King explains that her volume is different because it "takes as its subject manuscripts that came into existence after the rise of print while also looking beyond print to understand manuscript in its own context" (6). The first section—manuscript publication—dives into scribal publication and social authorship in order to "question the association of manuscript with amateur, domestic, and apolitical production" (12). Like the [End Page 951] other essays in this collection, Andrew O. Winckles's essay serves as a paragon for close detailed reading of a large and underutilized manuscript archive—in this case the extensive manuscripts of women Methodists at the Rylands Library. Rather than associate women with domestic manuscript, Winckles discloses how women preachers participated in a widespread Methodist manuscript culture and how they transformed the meaning and uses of these manuscripts over time as second-generation male Methodist leaders increasingly disapproved of their ministries. Beth Fowkes Tobin contributes the first of two outstanding essays in the collection focused primarily on a writer on the American side of the Atlantic. Tobin turns to John Abbot, a successful naturalist artist who preceded both John James Audubon and Alexander Wilson, and whose manuscripts professional naturalists prized even as the majority of his drawings were never printed. Through scrupulous attention to Abbot's drawings and notes and their wide circulation, Tobin shows that "natural history's manuscript culture was...

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