Editing Early Modern Texts An Introduction to Principles and Practice

This book provides an approachable exposition of the rationale of textual editing with special reference to texts from between 1550-1800. The volume explains how manuscript and printed texts were produced, indicating the implications of this for their editorial treatment and giving practical advice on how texts should be prepared and presented.

Introduction Manuscripts The Role of Print Types of Edition Works Correspondence and Papers Archives Presenting Texts (1) Printed Presenting Texts (2) Manuscripts Modernized Texts The Apparatus Front Matter End Matter/Appendices Annotation Translations Indexing/Searching Appendices Alternative Methods of Transcribing a Seventeenth-century Manuscript A Confusion of Brackets Separate and Combined Versions of a Revised Text: the 1597, 1612 and 1625 Versions of Francis Bacon's Essay 'Of Regiment of Health' Unmodernized and Modernized Versions of the last section of Chapter 47 of Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan Peter Nidditch's Explanation of the Evolution of his Editorial Method Notes Glossary Bibliography Index

MICHAEL HUNTER is Professor of History at Birkbeck, University of London, UK. He has written or edited numerous books on the history of ideas and their context in late seventeenth-century Britain, and is the principal editor of The Works of Robert Boyle (14 volumes, 1999-2000) and The Correspondence of Robert Boyle (6 volumes, 2001).