Germaine Warkentin - Böcker

For two centuries (1540-1740) the Sidney family of Penshurt Place, Kent, produced poets, courtiers, collectors, and at least one revolutionary. Increasingly aware of the cultural ideal of the learned nobleman and of libraries as representations of that ideal, the Sidneys amassed one of the largest gentry libraries in England of their period. This edition of their library catalogue provides a vivid portrait of the birth, growth, and eventual demise of the distinguished family’s library collection.Comprised of nearly 5000 entries, the catalogue is presented with a full introduction describing the Sidneys’ intellectual world and life, their reading and collecting, the women collectors of the family, and the dispersal of the library in 1743. The editors employ all the resources of contemporary bibliography, print and digital, to identify the titles in the catalogue, and where possible to locate the Sidneys’ own copies still extant, as well as architectural analysis to identify and describe the library room at Penshurst, now lost to nineteenth-century renovations.

The papers in this collection deal with a cultural problem central to the study of the history of exploration: the editing and transmission of the texts in which explorers relate their experiences. The papers chart the transformation of the study of exploration writing from the genres of national epic and scientific reportage to the genre of cultural analysis. As well, they reflect ongoing changes in our ideas about editorial procedures, literary genres, and cultural appropriation.This volume begins with a paper by David Henige, who confronts the classic editorial problems associated with the writings of Christopher Columbus. Luciano Formisano, studying Amerigo Vespucci, illustrates the technical problems associated with transmission. David and Alison Quinn examine Richard Hakluyt’s Discourse on Western Planting (1584). I.S. MacLaren investigates the publication, in the nineteenth century, of field notes by Canadian artist Paul Kane. Helen Wallis’s paper looks at the institutionalization of ‘exploration writing’ in the activities of the great publication societies. Finally, in a paper that throws into question assumptions about textuality that would have seemed unassailable three decades ago, James Lockhart examines the textual editing of Nahuatl versions of the conquest of Meso-America.