The Scale of Early Modern Studies

Abstract

I am delighted to be part of this fiftieth anniversary edition of English Literary Renaissance. I have published two essays in ELR, both of which went on to form the core of later books: “Almanacs, Annotators, and LifeWriting in Early Modern England,” in 2008, which became the opening chapter of Autobiographical Writing in Early Modern England (2010); and “‘Shreds of holinesse’: George Herbert, Little Gidding, and Cutting Up Texts in Early Modern England,” in 2012, which I revised into a chapter forMaterial Texts in Early Modern England (2018). I am grateful to Arthur F. Kinney and his colleagues for supporting my work in this way. I also had an essay on the poet William Strode rejected by the journal in 2003, but we won’t linger on that, except to say that it was the right decision, conveyed to me in the signature form of an Arthur letter: gracious, and written on an old typewriter. It’s not often that we are granted the opportunity to pause and think in print about the state of play of our discipline, such is the pressure—particularly in the UK—for research to be quickly converted into published outcome. I’d like to use this welcome pause in an academic culture of haste to reflect a little on scale and early modern studies. Scale has been on my mind for the last couple of years while I’ve been working on early modern printed waste: the fragments of older printed books found in the bindings, paste-boards, and end-leaves of other books. Waste of this kind—like the sheets fromHugh Plat’sGarden of Eden used as paste downs in a copy of John Taylor’sWorkes (1630)—is suggestive and challenging in all kinds of ways, but I’d like to use waste here to track through some of the different scales we might deploy to organize our research. By scale I