Michael Hunter: Editing Early Modern Texts. An Introduction to Principles and Practice

• Andrew Murphy

Michael Hunter sets out as his objective in this short book: ‘to induce thought about
how meaning is best conveyed and how an edition can be made as intelligible and helpful
to its readers as possible, while retaining fidelity to the original on which it is based’
(p. 2). His imagined audience is not so much editors as users of texts and he wishes to
indicate to these users ‘the problems that editors face, and the advantages of different
approaches to these’ (p. 2). He hopes thereby to encourage ‘a greater sensitivity to such
matters which, it is hoped, will ultimately feed back into editorial practice itself’ (p. 3).
Hunter can certainly be said to have succeeded in these aims. His short book, which runs
to just 108 pages (the appendices add a further 24 pages), is compactly conceived, well
written, informative and thought-provoking. He draws on his experience of serving as
the principal editor of The Works of Robert Boyle and The Correspondence of Robert
Boyle and he shows an engaged familiarity with a wide range of other large-scale editing
projects. The book conveys a very great deal of information in a small compass – from
the basics of early modern handwriting, to how paper is made and on to the complex
problems involved in drawing up a good index. This is a book I would certainly recommend
to students (including advanced postgraduate students) to provide them with a
quick overview of a broad range of textual issues pertaining to early modern (and, indeed
many modern) books.

Seiten 170 - 172

Zitierfähig mit Smartlink: http://www.Archivdigital.info/ARCHIV.01.2009.170

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