Milton's Holinshed: An Update

July 3, 2024 Claire M. L. Bourne

HRC -q- DA 130 H732 1587 Copy 2 - v. 3 GOD CAPITAL.jpg

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.

John Milton's Copy of Holinshed's CHRONICLES (1587)

May 15, 2024 Claire M. L. Bourne

One of several references to John Stow’s *Annales* in the copy of Holinshed’s *Chronicles* (1587) from the Alfred Knight Collection (REF 942 H717c 1586). Image by permission of the Phoenix Public Library.

On March 1, 2024, during a research forum at the Phoenix Public Library sponsored by the newly formed Arizona Book History Group, Aaron T. Pratt noticed two distinctive things about the marginal notes in the library’s copy of Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles (1587): an instantly recognizable two-stroke italic ‘e’ and unusually dark ink. The annotations in the Holinshed were reminiscent of handwritten notes in a copy of the Shakespeare First Folio now at the Free Library of Philadelphia—marginalia that Jason Scott-Warren and I have argued were inscribed by the poet and author of Paradise Lost John Milton.

PREMIERE: "Making Shakespeare: The First Folio" on PBS Great Performances

November 7, 2023 Claire M. L. Bourne

The story of how we came to know that the copy of the Shakespeare First Folio now in the Rare Book Department at the Free Library of Philadelphia was once owned and annotated by John Milton, author of Paradise Lost, is featured in this new documentary to mark the quatercentenary of the First Folio’s publication. Jason Scott-Warren and I discuss the “discovery” from our respective sides of the Atlantic: he in Cambridge, where Milton was a student almost four hundred years ago, and me in Philadelphia, where his copy of Shakespeare now resides.

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