Earlier this spring, I worked with Aaron T. Pratt and Jason Scott-Warren to authenticate an annotated copy of Holinshed’s Chronicles (1587) at the Phoenix Public Library as the copy once owned and marked up by the poet and polemicist John Milton. Our preliminary account of Milton’s annotations was published in the TLS in May.
Aaron returned to Phoenix last month to systematically collate and photograph the Holinshed and, while doing so, noticed an astonishing inky intervention (illustrated above, left) that we had not registered in our first couple of passes through the two massive bound volumes. Illustrated on the right is the same initial without the blot from a copy of the same edition at the Harry Ransom Center (HRC -q- DA 130 H732 1587 Copy 2 v. 3).
Jason has just published a blog post on the Cambridge Centre for Material Texts site about this iconoclastic moment. Read it to learn more about what may be going on here and whether Milton is the one responsible.