Interpreting Manuscript Contexts

Chapter 1 introduces and explores the book’s central thesis through considering practices by Donne’s early readers, placing this study into recent critical conversations on Donne and manuscript culture, and establishing its contribution to such conversations. In addition to adding several discrete examples of manuscript investigations that suggest early interpretive responses to Donne’s texts, this chapter advances a methodological approach for examining literary works within original artifacts: it delineates manuscript elements to investigate in order to uncover clues regarding early modern literary interpretations. These components include provenance, papers and how they were constructed into books, scribes, marginalia, titles, ascriptions, paratexts, and contents and their sequences. Because one cannot anticipate which elements will prove most informative for any given manuscript, all components require attention. This pragmatic approach to manuscript study encourages scholars to embark on explorations traditionally relegated to bibliography and textual studies that actually prove essential to literary criticism.