Chema, Alexis, and Betty A. Schellenberg, eds. <i>The Manuscript Book in the Long Eighteenth Century</i>

This special issue volume of Eighteenth-Century Life addresses the viability and agency of manuscript in an age of expanded, elevated print culture. The case in point here is the long eighteenth century. The eleven essays and an afterword are authored by a wide variety of primarily female scholars, most well-established, some less so, all drawn from the US, the UK, and Canada. The manuscripts are all anglophone writings, many of them created and/or received in the context of the anglophone Atlantic world. The essays attend to what the volume editors label “manuscript books,” which, in the final analysis, may not be the best label for the manuscripts studied here. We find a more convincing descriptor in Margaret J. M. Ezell’s afterword, in her term “invisible books.” This more accurately conveys the marginality of many manuscript texts and their creators, both generally and specifically demonstrated by those showcased here. Ezell’s presence looms large throughout here, which is more than fitting the scholar who issued one of the earliest calls for a wider and deeper understanding of the manuscript in the face of a substantial scholarship obsessed with print.At a fundamental level, this volume presents eleven microhistories of particular manuscript texts or groups of texts that are fascinating in and of themselves. A massive text such as Robert Forbes’s The Lyon in Mourning, consisting of 2,140 pages in ten volumes, arguably necessary to provide the complete history of a wide network of people and events he set out to create, is difficult to conceptualize as invisible or marginal. The substantial 700-page “personal history” of John Martin falls into the same category. Other works here are more easily classifiable as ephemeral, and, indeed, some nonexistent. See the edition of poems and letters written by Phillis Wheatley Peters, intended to be published but never achieving print in the long eighteenth century; this apocryphal manuscript copy can be found in any archive.Manuscripts studied here span a wide variety of genres—among them poetry, correspondence, sermon notes, music, penmanship, and commonplace books—covering a variety of topics, including autobiography, methods of courtship, how-to books, creating and maintaining kinship networks, and the textual output of marginalized religious communities and groups. However, given the very personal origins and reception of manuscript works, the topic/genre of the journal might be expected to be explored here, but interestingly is only addressed as part of large compilations. The authors and creators of these manuscripts span the margins of early modern Anglo-Saxon society, where they existed, as might be expected of a marginal media illuminating different genders, different races, different socioeconomic and legal statuses, political rebels, religious dissenters, emigres, exiles, craftsmen, and amateurs.What figures most importantly in this volume is the more than remarkable contributions it makes to a significant number of over-arching ideas generally applied to print and its evolution over time, as well as to the somewhat disparate existing scholarship on manuscripts. This work confirms the findings of pioneering research in both mediums. Foremost is the complementarity of manuscript and print in a relationship that is symbiotic rather than adversarial and at the same time circuitous rather than linear. These studies show definitively that the fluidity of manuscripts is more versatile than yet imparts just as much authority as print. Lack of fixity is no impediment. As a matter of fact, many of these invisible books successfully adopt and deploy the conventions of print—title pages, indexes, illustrations, legibility, typefaces, for example. Additionally, these manuscripts show the emergence of new conventions, such as tables and grids, and digital databases that make many manuscript works just as or even more navigable than those in print. It should be noted that a number of these manuscripts are not only copied from printed books but in fact physically incorporate actual printed books and other printed elements in their compilation. These amalgams are yet something else that merit a new, unique label that better serves to describe them than the term concordance applied to the books created through the “new form of printing,” integrating print and manuscript elements as practiced by the Little Gidding religious community in seventeenth-century Essex.The relationship between materiality and meaning and reception is clearly visible here as well. Format determines use, creation, and content. An illuminating example is the oblong book and books with blank leaves, originally created by individuals for not only their personal use but also to accommodate particular information that demanded a more flexible format than the standardized codex sizes such as quarto, octavo, etc. Notably, music required a wider page than that provided by standard sizes. But rotate an oblong book and it presents a vertical format attuned to other uses and information someone desired to record such as keeping accounts, taking notes of sermons at church services, and copying original documents. Further, some of these manuscripts employ an attribute most closely associated with the works of seventeenth-century poet George Herbert where words and lines of text are arranged in the shape of objects that graphically illustrate and thus reinforce meaning and interpretation. Forbes in his monumental work took materiality to yet a higher level with his inclusion of every medium available to the creators of manuscript texts including wood from the boat that spirited Bonnie Prince Charlie away after Culloden and cloth from the prince’s garter.The current ECL volume also shows that discontinuous reading, first facilitated by the transition from scrolls to the codex treated by Peter Stallybrass, among others, advanced practices of reading in manuscript as well as printed books. This function is true of common-placing generally, as an example, and as demonstrated by several essays in this volume, Lockean common-placing specifically. Arguably it is also in operation in another example, namely, private manuscript prayerbooks as it is in printed prayerbooks and bibles. Discontinuous reading of manuscripts also features in consideration of the effects of printing on the intended meaning of manuscript texts, linking manuscript solidly to the debate over who creates meaning in printed texts—author, compositor, publisher, reader, illustrator, all of the above. Finally, it is disruptive reading at play in reconstruction of invisible books such as the scattered collection of Peter’s poems as well as the reconstruction of communication networks and geographically diverse communities in digitized archives and databases such as the Ballitore Collection of Quaker correspondence and the sources that enabled the amazing detective work on display in a number of these essays.The modelling of anonymity in manuscript texts and collections provided by this volume asserts that manuscript imparts a sense of self and constructs identity as much as does signing or attributing poems, signing the pages of a book, creating prayerbooks to be used exclusively within a religious community.Perhaps the weightiest contribution here is the call for a redefinition of modern notions of authorship and the author, as well as readers and writers.The editors here quite correctly point out that although recent studies of manuscripts have shed light on a variety of recently popular topics, the study of manuscripts has taken a back seat to that of printed books for far too long. Certainly, due to its vital place in the history of reading and reception, history of the book, and the history of print culture generally, the volume’s topic deserves scholarly attention. Moreover, perhaps all of these labels should be revised or replaced in light of this volume of work.

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