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Winthrop's Journal in Manuscript and Print: The Temporalities of Early-Nineteenth-Century Transmedial Reproduction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Patricia Jane Roylance
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Abstract

In the early nineteenth century, the antiquarian James Savage produced a print edition of John Winthrop's seventeenth-century manuscript journal. This transmedial reproduction illustrates the differing affordances of print and manuscript as vehicles for connecting to the past. Manuscripts offer a tangible link to long-dead people, but manuscripts' rarity encourages their sequestration in archives. In contrast, print editions make historical content more broadly accessible but provide a less direct material link to earlier eras. Print facsimiles of manuscript, such as the reproduction of Winthrop's handwriting included in Savage's edition, seek to embody the best of both media. But print facsimiles' promise of access to manuscript materiality elides their nature as temporal hybrids and their tendency to distort and damage their originals. The way that nineteenth-century antiquarians negotiated manuscript's and print's temporal affordances and juggled the competing prerogatives of past, present, and future makes those antiquarians useful models for understanding the stakes of digitization projects today.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 133 , Issue 1 , January 2018 , pp. 88 - 106
Copyright
Copyright © 2017 The Modern Language Association of America

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