Thomas Traherne (1637–1674) left a substantial body of work, primarily in manuscript form, when he died in 1674 before the age of forty. He published only one work during his lifetime, Roman Forgeries (1673), and prepared for the press Christian Ethicks, which appeared posthumously in 1675. He remained for the most part unknown until Bertram Dobell published his poems and Centuries of Meditations in the early twentieth century. The story of the discovery of Traherne's manuscripts is well known, beginning in 1896–97 when William Brooke chanced upon a group of manuscripts of Traherne's works in both prose and poetry. Included among them were the Centuries and what is now known as the Dobell Folio, which contains Traherne's autograph poems and the Commonplace Book. In 1910 H. I. Bell found and published Philip Traherne's hand-written edition of Thomas's poems, Poems of Felicity. In 1964 James Osborn unexpectedly found the manuscript containing the Select Meditations. This was followed in 1981 by the identification of Traherne's ‘Commentaries of Heaven’ by Elliot Rose. It was not until 1996–97 that other Traherne manuscripts were discovered. ‘The Ceremonial Law’, an eighteen-hundred line poem, was identified as Traherne's by Laetitia Yeandle and Julia Smith. Jeremy Maule found yet another Traherne manuscript in the spring of 1997, which consists of four more works by Traherne, plus a fragment. There are no doubt other missing notebooks and perhaps poems and treatises, as references in some of his works suggest.

There has been no attempt to gather all of Traherne's extant works into a uniform, printed edition, with the purpose of giving a sense of the manuscript or printed originals. The primary purpose of this edition, therefore, is to present a definitive printed text of all of Traherne's extant works, both published and unpublished. It will not include his notebooks, which are primarily extracts from other writers and are not, therefore, Traherne's ‘works’. In his 1903 introduction to Traherne's poems, Dobell wrote that ‘there is a picturesqueness, a beauty, and a life about the manuscripts which is lost in the cold regularity of type’, to which Peter Beal has added that Traherne's texts ‘should be edited according to manuscript, rather than according to individual “work” as defined by modern editors’, since ‘the MS is “the work”’.