Emboldened Readers

I guess I will make the inaugural post! I hung around a bit after class last week to ask Dahlia about this really neat experience I had doing research in the rare books library at Oxford, and she suggested that I post about it since it's a good example of the kinds of things we'll be talking about in class.

While at Wash U, I was a research assistant for Joe Lowenstein, who is heading up an intercollegiate initiative to edit and publish the complete works of Edmund Spenser by 2014. Since Renaissance printing practices were a bit iffy for some of the reasons we mentioned last class, editing Spenser's works involves the comparison of many copies of the same text against one another to identify variants and determine "authorial intent." I spent my junior year abroad at Oxford, and Professor Lowenstein decided to employ me while there in going through some of the Bodleian library's copies of The Faerie Queene from 1590 and 1596. He was anxious to have me look at one copy in particular, of which he had only seen scans, with some really unusual variants. When the volume in question was fetched for me, I was amazed on turning to the first page of remark to find that the strange "variants" weren't really variants at all. Rather, at some point some enterprising reader had actually pasted his or her edits to Spenser's verse on top of the "immortal poet's" words. The font in the pasted bits and even the color of the paper matched the original so perfectly that the edits had been impossible to detect in the scans.

When I excitedly told my professor of my "discovery," he wasn't as surprised as I imagined he might be, indicating that this kind of readerly practice was fairly common in the late 18th and 19th centuries. Dahlia agreed with his surmise. I find this stunning. To blithely paste one's own words over those of an author -- and not just any author but a literary authority like Spenser! -- seems to me bold, brazen, maybe even sacrilegious. This reader had felt him/herself to be endowed with the agency and authority to interact with the text in a way of which I would never have dreamt. I wonder: when and how did the text become sacrosanct? Though our course will primarily be interested in the kinds of print culture questions that swirl around the figure of the author, to me it was fascinating to realize that, just as authorial practices have undergone an evolution over the centuries, so too have readerly practices.