Reading Henry Maundrell’s Sacred Geography in Eighteenth-Century England and Germany

This chapter explains the remarkable popularity of Henry Maundrell’s A Journey from Aleppo to Jerusalem at Easter AD 1697 (1703). It argues that Maundrell’s eye-witness reportage of his travels in the Holy Land provided the book’s readers with a storehouse of geographical observations and descriptions of eastern customs with which they could recreate imaginatively the world of the Scriptures. Tracing the book’s use by editors, commentators, translators, and paraphrasts, it argues that Maundrell was most often put to work in defence of the Bible against attacks on its claims to truth. Yet in the hands of Maundrell’s late eighteenth-century German translator, the naturalist and historicist tendencies inherent in his account were brought into sharper focus; ‘sacred geography’ was transformed into a history of biblical culture.

Editing Shadows

Since its first publication in 1806, Lucy Hutchinson’s Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson has been praised for its sensitive political analysis and its literary excellence. However, both these features are editorial constructions which conceal aspects of the text’s revolutionary energy and smooth over its syntactical rough edges. The beginnings of this process may be viewed in the manuscript annotations of Hutchinson’s nephew, the text’s early custodian, whose response to the growing tide of anti-regicide literature was to conceal his aunt’s republican writings from public view. The main responsibility for reshaping Hutchinson’s prose and injecting a Whiggish flavour into the text was Julius Hutchinson the younger, the text’s first editor. His work formed the basis of all nineteenth-century editions, but eventually led to a bifurcation in Hutchinson scholarship between those who emphasized the text’s feminine literary qualities, and those who questioned its authority as a historical record.

Authorship and Materiality in Eighteenth-Century Collected Works

A collected works is a manifestation of the various commercial, legal, social, and aesthetic structures through which authorship as we know it was brought into being in the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. This chapter looks in detail at the material forms of John Tillotson’s collected works, beginning with the Sermons on Several Occasions published during his lifetime (in the 1670s and 1680s) and ending with the folio Works of 1752. It argues that the features of these books—including design, typography, illustrations, and other paratexts—helped to construct a series of different ‘Tillotsons’, from the authoritative preacher in print to the exemplary literary author. Through this case study, it also suggests how strategies for publishing sermons interacted more broadly with the material construction of authorship in print.

Friendship and Eighteenth-Century Nonconformist Memorial Publication

This chapter investigates the role of friendship in the composition, publication, and circulation of biographical accounts and collected works of religious poets in the first half of the eighteenth century. Funeral sermons and elegaic poems published to mark the death of Isaac Watts in 1748 were typical of collective memory making within his reformed Protestant tradition that reinforced the primacy of religious ministers in the world of dissent. The examples of Elizabeth Rowe (in England) and Jane Turell (in America) complicate our picture of the role of memorial in sustaining a tradition of lay piety and authorship within a transatlantic religious community. The emotional and practical circumstances of friendship (as compared to family ties) contributed significantly to shaping the printed texts that were produced as memorials to Watts, Rowe, and Turell, to the reception of those texts, and to the reputations of those authors.

In Good Company

Throughout the eighteenth century, the business of reprinting books was associated with abridging texts. However unusual it may seem today, the copyholder’s property right in a ‘thoughtful abridgment’ of another’s text was commonly protected by law. This chapter examines the abridging activities of John Wesley, and of a variety of other actors in such areas as law and history, medicine and science, philosophy and theology, biography and fiction. Publishing ‘epitomes’ of proven sellers posed less financial risk than publishing new titles. Considering the extracts and abridgements that characterized so much of eighteenth-century newspapers and periodicals helps us understand how such practices were a routine part of the circulation and consumption of print. Abridgments of provincial publishers can be particularly instructive, as these are commonly adjusted in length and format to suit the productive capacity of the local printer and/or the buying power of consumers in the local market.

Manuscript in the House of Print

In his classic account of seventeenth-century scribal publication, Harold Love points briefly to three authors—Swift, Richardson, Sterne—whose careers indicate the ongoing vitality of manuscript culture in later generations. Taking a cue from Love, this chapter explores Richardson’s self-consciousness as a novelist about manuscript production and transmission, his real-world cultivation of epistolary sociability, and the ways in which his published output was shaped by practices arising from scribal tradition. For all his centrality in the history of print, Richardson was also at the centre of a thriving culture of manuscript exchange that bypassed or transcended print and also informed its products at every stage from creation to reception. There emerges a story of enduring interaction between coexisting media systems, not simple supersession of one by another, with creative consequences as much for the novel as for the lyric, epistolary, and other forms most often associated with manuscript exchange.

Transforming the Eighteenth-Century Book Trade

This chapter explores the fifty-year career of the eighteenth-century London bookseller John Nourse to establish that not only did he become the principal bookseller in the capital but that, through his publication list and through his national and international networks, his business became a focus, and a motor, of the Enlightenment, contributing more to European scientific, philosophical, and literary knowledge than any other English stationer. The key to Nourse’s success lay in the location of his bookshops in the Strand in the immediate neighbourhood of other booksellers and associated professionals. Drawing on new archival evidence, this chapter gives the fullest account available of the development of Nourse’s business, his movement between shops, his publications, and his professional associations, networks, and contacts.

Introduction

Early modern books were not stable or settled outputs of the press but dynamic shape changers, subject to reworking, re-presentation, revision, and reinterpretation. Their history is that of multiple agencies as their texts were transformed in ways that their original authors might hardly recognize. Processes of editing, revision, redaction, selection, abridgement, glossing, disputation, translation, and posthumous publication resulted in a textual elasticity and mobility that could dissolve distinctions between text and paratexts, textuality and intertextuality, manuscript and print, author and reader or editor. Taking the period between the lapse of the Licensing Act and the dawn of industrial press production, this introduction, focusing on Richard Baxter and Samuel Taylor Coleridge as the ’bookends’ of the collection, reviews the varieties of transformation to which printed texts were subject, and the kinds of transformation they sought to effect, with reference to each of the ensuing essays.

‘Generous men will spare the memory of the dead’

This chapter considers the reaction to Thomas Burnet’s Archæologiæ philosophicæ (1692) and its implications for the posthumous reputation of that author, in the process discussing the impact of radical criticism of the Church on clerical careers and the importance of scandal in the formation of a market for pirated publications in the book trade. It concentrates on the fate of Burnet’s works at the hands of pirates, particularly Edmund Curll, in the wake of an apparently definitive case in Chancery (1721) regarding posthumous copyright in unpublished materials. Questions of orthodoxy, reputation, censorship, and the meaning of copyright are therefore raised, alongside the difficulties of establishing the bibliography of Burnet’s publications.

Rewriting the Public Narrative

Unable to accept the conditions for ministry in the established church laid down by the 1662 Act of Uniformity the Puritan divine Richard Baxter, author of best-selling works of homiletic, practical, and devotional theology, set himself henceforth to ‘do what Service [he]could for Posterity’ through such publications. However, finding the prejudicial and partisan attacks on, and accounts of, the nonconformists that issued from the official press increasingly galling, with the temporary lapse of the Licensing Act in 1679 he embarked on a sustained series of defences of the nonconformist position. This chapter examines the nature of these controversial works, and some of the ironies and tensions involved in Baxter seeking to speak for the body of nonconformity from his distinctive position of moderate ‘Catholic’ Christianity, to argue that these amounted to a sustained press campaign to influence public opinion that transformed the role of the press.