The Burley Manuscript

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The Burley manuscript is one of the English Renaissance's most prized miscellanies. It was compiled in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century and is unique in its size - over six hundred items inscribed on nearly four hundred folios - and its variety: poems and letters, essays and aphorisms, speeches, satires and sententiae, mostly in English but including Latin, Italian, French and Spanish. This meticulous study makes available, in a readily searchable form, texts, annotations and commentary that will have an impact on a wide range of scholarship. It provides annotated transcriptions of all of the private letters in English, including those that are translations from those of the fourth-century Roman patrician Q. Aurelius Symmachus and all the English verse. Incipit transcriptions and identification are provided for each of the other items, including those in foreign languages. The history and provenance of the collection are described in detail, with lengthy notes on memorial transcription of verse and prose and the clandestine interception of letters. The book will not only act as a guide to this highly significant early modern manuscript but will be useful in a wide range of studies, illuminating such diverse subjects as, for example, the circulation of verse, the correspondence of John Donne (particularly with Sir Henry Wotton and Henry Goodere), the self-fashioning of English gentlemen after the classical Romans of their class and the government's paranoiac spying on its own citizens. Literary scholars, editors and social historians may here draw on a deep well of previously unavailable contemporary writing.