Book History and Culture examined through Annotated Bibliographies

Milton’s Areopagitica was an exceptionally important work that opposed censorship within printed works and instead advocates for free speech within the press and writing during the English Civil War. Before getting into his main point on civil liberty and freedom of speech, Milton writes a justification for why works like his may even exist in the first place. The main idea in this opening section is for works like his own to voice his grievances so that they may not only be heard but dealt with in a public forum for the sake of exposing the truth for truth’s sake in writing and printed works.

Milton then goes on to examine how the Church’s hold on knowledge and printed works has affected this freedom to spread ideas. This history briefly opens with the romans and early Christians citing how their institutions would investigate and burn any heretical work which went against contemporary ideas of the period at the beginning of page 5. This is the origin of what would later be known as a general licensing system utilised by the Church for the majority of any works that could potentially be circulated around the continent during the Middle Ages. With this, The Church could become the ultimate holder and disseminator of knowledge since it could approve, disapprove, delegitimize or destroy any work that went against the ideas within the Church, thus controlling what knowledge was spread within Europe. Popes like Martin V became tyrants with their ability to license work.

After this section Milton focuses on biblical figures like Moses, David and Paul to show how those in his audience, particularly his Protestant audience, should have a well-rounded knowledge- It takes “...Books of all sorts...” (Milton, 7) in order to be truly enlightened and educated, not just what caters to the audience’s preconceived notions. This reason is why Paul, for example, utilized Greek ideas in writing his own Holy Scripture; because knowledge, no matter its origin, is useful for everyone. The key point here by Milton is that reading for knowledge is important, and that an idea should be rejected not by any licensing authority but rather the individual reader. People must critically examine their own ideas and the ideas of others rather than relying on the judgement of a nebulous licensing authority.

The next section focuses on Milton judging how Parliament’s licensing order will fail. While the purpose of this licensing order is to suppress scandalous or libelous works, this will ultimately fail according to Milton. To Milton, the licensing order “...conduces nothing to the end for which it was fram'd...” (Milton 10) essentially meaning that it was poorly planned because books do not spread corruption or evil in the way this order argues they do, but rather it is society that does this to itself, regardless of literature and the ideas within them. Milton argues that if books must be regulated, “... thereby to rectifie manners, we must regulat all recreations and pastimes, all that is delightful to man.” (Milton, 11) Of course, this is ridiculous, but that is the point Milton is making here; to regulate books is about as effective as trying to regulate an abstract concept of music, or pleasure, or leisure in general; it simply won’t work because these are integral parts of life, and like reading from books, regulating these activities to prevent corruption is a fairly useless measure.

Going more into the failure of the licensing order, Milton continues arguing how subjective judgement of a book will only bring harm. Writers who produce books with genuinely good intentions on their part will only receive punishment from those who deem their works scandalous or any other poor generic quality, " ...to the hasty view of an unleasur'd licencer[...] perhaps far his inferiour in judgement, perhaps one who never knew the labour of book-writing [...] it cannot be but a dishonour and derogation to the author, to the book, to the priviledge and dignity of Learning.” (Milton 14) The order to license books and their author’s ideas would only cause suffering to learning and the ideas of writers, authors, or poets who put great thought and work into their creations. Those who would be in charge of licensing would destroy or prevent these works on a whim of subjective and flimsy judgement according to fairly arbitrary standards set forth by the Licensing Order.

Milton concludes the points he makes in his work later on after addressing the failures and potential harm the Parliament’s licensing order could bring to England by bringing an appeal to the sanctity of knowledge as noone’s right to take away “What would ye doe then, should ye suppresse all this flowry crop of knowledge and new light sprung up and yet springing daily in this City, should ye set an Oligarchy of twenty ingrossers over it, to bring a famin upon our minds again...[?]”(Milton 22). While scandalous works may come forth, they can still be destroyed after printing has been done if it is thought they break any rules. Milton also states that the pre-war era of licensing and publishing would work best, as a way of regulating what works are made and which ones aren’t. It is important to note that Milton isn’t outright advocating for free speech to completely manifest itself in England; he still feels that those works considered scandalous or libel should be regulated and destroyed. It is only that books, and written work in general, should not be so closely regulated as to be under the yoke and tyranny of the Parliament and its book censors.

Areopagitica is incredibly important for its support for freedom of the press and its publications apart from Government tyranny. Though the work itself does not actually support outright freedom of speech for anybody and Milton even admits that he has his limits for any works that produce scandalous material, it is still incredibly important. It advocates for liberty and knowledge over surveillance of ideas and the work of writers. This is a pivotal document because it champions the right of the individual against institutional power. The document itself is an embodiment of this ideal, and while Milton’s work was unsuccessful in convincing Parliament, his ideas were adopted in written works and enlightenment ideals over the next century.

Between the third and twelfth pages in Levy’s book, W.W. Greg’s “What is a Bibliography?” explores what it means to have a bibliography, how it used, and what exactly constitutes a ‘bibliography’ in the first place. On categorizing information for example, Greg argues that it is the way you catalog information that shapes a document; “In a sense every science is descriptive... You may name and classify the colors of your sweet peas and produce nothing but a florist’s catalogue... grouping them according to their genetic origin that you will arrive at Mendel’s formula.” (Levy, 4.) and therefore a bibliography makes all the difference to how not just a document is formed, but the core ideas that the document is made up of.

After this point the article explores the definition of what a descriptive bibliography is by discussing elementary properties within it. Greg makes it clear to the reader that there is too much emphasis taught on what the point of view for a cataloguer or descriptive bibliographer, and little towards the experience of the actual principles involved in the process of bibliography. Among them are several as the subject begins to branch off into different disciplines depending on what is required. Greg makes note of this by detailing how “...the elements of bibliography are what every bibliographer will have more or less to master. He will probably not cover the whole field […] The expert in typography is unlikely to be also a skilled paleographer...” (Levy, 7). So, while all these disciplines do contend and rely on each other within the same field, they are altogether highly specialized and particular in their method of operation. Though Greg makes this apparent it is also noted in the same passage that each discipline should still have some understanding of the other fields’ knowledge in order to further their own.

Further on Greg tries to define bibliography apart from Dr Copinger’s definition as “...the grammar of literary investigation,” (Levy, 9.) instead stating Bibliography has tried to become a dictionary. By this, Greg is referring to the fact that bibliography does everything from criticized to chronicling but does not actually concern its area of study with the way in which these books study literature. In that sense it is more like a tool that, when left alone, does little, and is only useful when in the right hands or used for the purpose in which it was designed. An equivalent metaphor would be the use of a tool. Left alone this tool is inanimate and rather useless, only providing a function when applied properly to a problem.

The ending paragraphs take up Greg’s remaining allocated hour with discussion on his own dreams for the Bibliographical Society as well as the study of Bibliography as a whole in the realm of English Literature. Greg envisions a future where all study of English and Saxon writing and language from the early to mid-medieval era will be systematically catalogued and formulated in a manner adhering to his previous ideas, such as discussing how textual transmission takes place, including early forms with scribes as well as focus on corruption of early documents as one such example. Next will come a focus on printing and how that affected textual transmission and distribution. The article concludes with Greg noting this method and dream of his are no doubt complex but worth it in the effort of achieving this goal in the stead of his speech.

Pages 125-136 in Levy contain Greg’s other article, “The Rationale of Copy-Text" wherein Greg attempts to discuss the subject of editorial text duties. This subject focuses mainly on editing an original text into a new form and what significance this would have. Greg makes a point to provide a distinction between the substantive and accidental aspects of a text and what these mean.

Accidental aspects of the texts are things like mistakes from writing or modernizing the vocabulary of the text to match the modern form of the editor’s time. Greg states that this “is the common practice for fairly obvious reasons, to normalize the spellig, so that […] the function of an editor is limited to choosing between those manuscript readings that offer significant variants.” (Levy 127.). Accidental aspects of the text do affect matters but have “not been generally recognized, and has never […] been explicitly drawn.” (Levy, 128.). Although the relationship between a book series is heirarchical in nature as, in Greg’s words, the original claims authority, this is not the case with manuscripts which take on a very different way of evolution as the different copies co-evolve along side eachother from the original. Think of this as akin to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle where several different copies held the same events but where there were slightly different variations within each copy. Individually it is insignificant but over time the differences can lead to a great deviation in content for manuscripts. This creates a dilemma for editorial work on which version to copy from.

We are then shown an example where one editor change Oncaymaeon to Oeconomy from a manuscript, changing the meaning of the text from a word based in Greek to an English word that made for an awkward phrase as one example. Greg later begins to close his conversation on copy text by restating his thesis by reminding that the meaning of different texts should ultimately be taken into account when editing as there are “...intrinsic claims of individual readings to originality, in other words their intrinsic merit […] being what the author wrote rather than their appeal to the individual taste of the editor.” (Levy 133.)

Tanselle’s article deals with the particular dilemma that comes from an editor having to decide what changes should be made to a written document in order for it to maintain the original intent the author had for it in the first place, a task that is easier said than done as it is shown later on in his writing. The first major key point brought up within the article is creating a definition for an ‘author’s intention’ as this should be, ideally, the basis in which an editor will choose how to edit the work of a writer. Making a reference to Greg, who had been by this point the authority on the subject, Tanselle noted that “...it is clear from such a summary that he considered the goal of an edition […] to be the reconstruction of a text representing the author’s final wishes about the version of his work to be presented to the public” (Levy & Mole, 140). Therefore, the major dilemma that occurs when it comes to editing a document is attempting to keep the edited version as close to the author’s intentions as possible.

The types of methods used in editing as explained by Tanselle are as follows; there are different forms of intetions that are used to describe what the author means for his writing. As said in the article when discussing ideas set out by Michael Hancher, “... (1)‘Programmatic intention’- ‘the author’s intention to make something or other’; (2) ‘active intention’- ‘the author’s intention to be (understood as) acting in some way or other’; and (3) ‘final intention’- ‘the author’s intention to cause something or other to happen’” (Levy & Mole 142). So in short, the author of any particular work has ideas for writing that come into stages before any writing is actually done, and these intentions that the author aims to fulfill must be fully understood by any editor in order to accurately analyze and edit the writer’s work while still keeping their intentions intact. However, later on Tanselle warns that even if an author made a stated intention, or left no intention at all, it is still difficult to determine the accuracy of their statements (Levy & Mole 143). This is because an author may not have recognized the accuracy of his statements or was not able to reconcile his intentions with his actual aims when writing.

It is perfectly possible for an author’s intentions to be unintentionally or intentionally achieved by the editors as shown by Tanselle’s examples. One concerns the work of Sherwood Anderson and his work A Story Teller’s Story (1924). Despite their being only non-original prints left, the author’s intention can still be achieved by an editor through different means. Concerns variants between printed editions, an author’s intentions can sometimes be achieved by others. Tanselle notes that events of happenstance, such as “...erroneous words [being] plausible in their contexts, they may never be recognized by anyone as erroneous” (Levy & Mole 146).

The last major point in Tanselle’s article involves Vertical and Horizontal revisions. These revisions are said to occurr only when the author “...at a later stage in his career, extensively revises a work completed years before- not because he is compelled to, nor because he wants to condense it, expand it, or adjust it to a different audience, but because he feels he can improve it artistically” (Levy & Mole, 149). These revisions are an important step to the process as it gives the author the opportunity to work his craft as a visionary in the sense that he can, in the purest sense of the word, achieve what his intentions were for his work originally in the years that he first set out to make them, or to achieve a new vision he has only just begun to set out for.

Whilst Horizontal revisions are somewhat less intrusive on a work, Vertical revisions can spell drastic change for a work and the original intentions that an author had initially when writing and publishing his work. The changes that come from the Vertical revisions could affect core tenets of what the author had to say with his work in the first place, making it quite a different version of his work from what came out previously. Tanselle highlights this idea by stating how “One author might make 3000 changes in his selection of adjectives and adverbs for instance- and perhaps improve his book stylistically without altering his original conception of his work at all; another might make only ten revisions in key passages and change the whole direction of the book.” (Levy & Mole 150). In terms of Book culture and what it relates to, this is an interesting concept as it can highight how an author’s thoughts or intentions can change over time and provide a sort of timeline into the mind of the author and what their ideals were. From an editing standpoint it can also seem interesting in light of comparison and contrast in what an author had to say from one point in time to another when two separate works come out. It also gives editors a slightly easier time in trying to understand the author’s intentions as there is more work to go on when trying to edit an old work in accordance with the refined values the author had later on.

McGann’s article ‘The Rationale of Hypertext’ addresses what was, at the time of publishing, the emergence of a new media and information method, which we now view as online or computerized information. At the point when McGann had written his article, the notion of storing information in an electronic medium had been thought of and used in a limited manner but it was still a very new method of information storage, whereas the traditional codex form of information storage was still very much the majority method for people to not only store, but record and disseminate information as well. In his article, McGann highlights the benefits of electronic storage compared to traditional codex storage and lays out the different methods used in electronic storage as well. Regarding book history and culture, it is a very interesting read in that the article itself represents a major step in the evolution of how we as a culture transfer our main source for recording and spreading knowledge from one medium, the physical book, to an entirely new and still relatively modern, ever growing and extremely complex method found in electronic and online information technology.

The starting sections of the text deal mainly with the advantages that computer storage has over traditional codex form. McGann notes in the start that “At this point most scholars know about the increased speed and analytic power that computerization gives and about the ’information highway’ and its scholarly possibilities” (Levy &Mole, 461). While the codex was, at the time of writing the most prominent form of information storage, McGann notes the book is limited in ways that electronic storage is not. “The difference between the codex and the electronic Oxford English Dictionary provides a simple but eloquent illustration of this... It [OED] is a research tool with greater powers of consciousness” (Levy & Mole, 462), indicating that the electronic form, as a research form at least has a high potential for being a useful tool. However, in contrast, the codex form is, to say the least, limited in its capacity to display a truly immersive way of conveying information to its audience. McGann makes specific mention of this twice on page 463, wherein he first states that “...when one wants to hear the performance of a song or ballad, see a play, or look at the physical features of texts... once again the book form provides a stumbling block...” and again, in regards to storage compared to electronic forms, books lead to “The archives... sinking in a white sea of paper” (463). Books cannot record sounds, or display video from a movie or a play, whereas electronic methods of storage are quite capable of doing this. Meanwhile an online version of this can, or at least has the potential to do so. Drawing upon personal experience this is up to whether the code has been optimally written to include such mediums on a webpage, for example.

On Hyperediting and Hypermedia, McGann displays the virtues of an electronic storage source which can be navigated quickly, efficiently, as well as being able to go through constant and consistent updates as information on a subject changes over time, unlike a book, which, while able to change itself through new copies, authoritative versions of itself, or other forms, cannot quite match the same rate or efficiency that an online storage source could. Providing a summary on the matter in a single sentence, the method of ‘hyperediting’ is shown as efficient comparative to the book form; “To function in a ‘hyper’ mode, an editing project must use computerization as a means to secure freedom from the analytic limits of hardcopy text” (464). Hyperediting and hypertext, often used in code such as HTML for, say, a webpage on Annotated Bibliographies are an extremely flexible and useful way of achieving a project’s goals, as McGann puts it; “...the design [is] structured in the most modular and flexible way, so that inevitable and fast-breaking changes in hardware and software will have a minimal effect on the work as it is being built” (465.)

The third section essentially deals with how Hypermedia and hyperediting is a necessary tool for representing the full works of many authors who present their works in a multitude of different mediums. William Blake, for example, the famous early Romantic poet and writer who produced several paintings in addition to his works in the realm of poetry. Hypermedia, like the inventing of “...breakthroughs like lithography and engraving” (467) are more than responsible for helping to push this process forward, now faster than ever. Due to this mass archives of authors that dabbled in multimedia approaches to their work such as William Blake or Dante Gabriel Rossetti are able to have their works represented and accessed as fully as possible; with all forms of their media being readily stored and available at ease through hypermedia, not set to the constraints of things such as the traditional codex; “Hypermedia structures for the first time make this kind of archival possible; indeed, work toward the development of such a Blake archive is now underway” (467).

The closing points made in McGann’s work is that hyperediting is most likely here to stay, as it not only establishes itself in the realm of scholarly information storage and recording, but proves to be an exceptionally efficient method that improves over flaws that the codex form of informational retrieval and storage possess. However, there are still issues that need to be addressed. Copyright problems, such as the addition of computerized imagery into hyperediting occurred during McGann’s work as a result of the computational nature of electronic storage, leading to new solutions having to be created for the new nature of electronic storage; “Those of us who were involved with the Rosetti Archive from the beginning spent virtually a the entire first year working on this problem,” (469). However, other aspects, such as the decentralized nature of electronic hypertext is “...designed to facilitate navigation through the archived materials irrespective of the purposes of the navigation” (472).

Overall the main points are that electronic storage presents an exciting possibility for the storage and dissemination of knowledge that was previously held within books. For while the traditional codex was and still is a vastly important and exceptionally useful means of information storgae and retrieval, the several drawbacks of working with a physical copy include the fact that it cannot display multimedia works like those form the like of William Blake or others. This is where hypermedia and hyperditing can come in to fill in these gaps. While issues of copyright remain a thorn in the side of this new method of information retrieval and information sharing, it is nonetheless an exciting and at the time of writing, new form of information technology that is set to grow into a vast network of informational archival material.