Manuscript sidenotes8/6/2023 ![]() ![]() ![]() They were evidently created to complete an imperfect copy of the 1557 Workes, a book that, following the death of the Catholic Queen Mary in 1558 and the change of religious regime under elizabeth, was very unlikely to be reprinted. The origin of these manuscript leaves then suddenly became clear. They do not exactly mimic the printed pages in the 1557 edition, as they replace double column with single column, meaning it would take two leaves of manuscript to replicate one missing printed leaf. The leaves are the same size as the folios in the 1557 edition of the Workes. so the text has to be from 1557 or later. There are no side notes in the 1533 edition: these were evidently added by Rastell, More's son-in-law, and printer of the Workes, in 1557. There are letters down the side of the text in this version too, but they only go A, B, C on each page, and they don't correspond at all to where the letters are against the manuscript text. Meanwhile a similar collation confirmed that neither the marginal letters nor the side notes in the manuscript match the 1533 edition, where this text appears on page cccxlviii. Both the letters in the margin (A, B, C, d, e, F), and also the side notes exactly match those printed in the 1557 edition on page 697, and the manuscript text starts at exactly the right word for page 697. The leaves in question are clearly copied from the 1557 edition. 1 i soon realised that the leaves definitely post-dated the publication of More's Works in 1557, and were very unlikely ever to have been part of a complete manuscript. However, when i received the leaves on approval, i collated them against my copies of More's Confutation of Tyndale's Answer from 1533 and the version of the same text printed as part of his Workes in 1557. The dealer subsequently informed me that they had been acquired at one of the auctions at Mullock's in Ludlow that were listed by edwards and Fraas in their note. 4pp of contemporary manuscript, possibly written in the hand of Thomas More'. The leaves were described to me in good faith by a trusted independent dealer as, 'More Agaynst Tyndall 2 leaves i.e. I am a collector of early-modern english books and manuscripts, and i was immediately intrigued when, back in september 2013, i was offered two of the manuscript leaves that edwards and Fraas list in their article. sadly i believe that the evidence they have compiled is not of a 'document of some importance', but rather of an astute twenty-first-century bookseller making the best returns he or she can from an imperfect Tudor book. edwards and Mitch Fraas, 'A new Manuscript of More's english Works' ( The Library, vii, 20 (2019), 89–93), that the discovery of such a manuscript would be a matter, 'of obvious scholarly interest'. There is no denying the force of the statement that opens the recent bibliographical note by A. ![]()
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