Editing, I have argued in another place, is not merely a function determined by social or political or economic conditions, but should be seen also as a discipline possessed of its own principles, procedures and purposes. The editorial discipline nevertheless is not ideal but historical. Its methods, however characterizable and coherent, and yet more tellingly its objects, are and have been shaped in relation to changing circumstances, political, national, religious, cultural, social, institutional. Aldus Manutius set up his press in Venice, was joined by such scholars as Erasmus, and financed by Pico della Mirandola, not because of an abstracted and disinterested desire to restore the past to light, but out of an ideological, cultural and nationalist understanding of the value of classical writing. History does not repeat itself, but editing in the long eighteenth century – my task here is to survey the editing in Britain of patristic texts, classical texts and the writings of Shakespeare – similarly pursued its ideological purposes, was connected with the creation of its own mechanisms of production, and sponsored its own communities of scholarship.

The editing of patristic texts

The implication of editing in its ideological and material contexts is most broadly and consequentially manifest in this period, no doubt, in the case of the Bible, and particularly in the development in continental Europe and in Britain of a rational textual criticism, hermeneutic methodology and historical scholarship. The leading figures of this Enlightenment project – as it was commonly understood at the time and may be seen in retrospect – included Richard Simon in France; Richard Bentley, Henry Hammond, Matthew Poole, John Locke, Robert Lowth and Benjamin Kennicott in England; Alexander Geddes in Scotland; and Johann David Michaelis, Johann Gottfried Herder and Johann Gottfried Eichhorn in Germany. The editing of patristic texts in England at the beginning of our period is a more restricted though methodologically and ideologically parallel case, displaying evident relations between editing and political, religious and social contexts. Patristic scholarship had of course been pursued and patristic texts had been edited long before the eighteenth century, both in England and, more extensively, in continental Europe.