This book is a collection of essays by current scholars spanning a range of topics and time periods that reflect the interests of Henry Woudhuysen. Topics cluster around textual production and the labour required to turn 'raw' literary materials into consumable books, whether for original audiences or, through editing, for a modern readership.

René Weis: Foreword Daniel Starza Smith and Hazel Wilkinson: Introduction 1: Ardis Butterfield: 'Cum magna solicitudine': Passion, exegesis, and verse in John Grimestone's notebook 2: Susan Brigden: Reading and rhyming in Black Friars 3: Helen Hackett: Hermits and their meanings: performing retirement at the Elizabethan court 4: Andrew Hadfield: Porcupine or pig? Sidney's role in the Nashe-Harvey quarrel 5: Emma Smith: 'Now am I in Arden: the more fool I': Love's Labour's Won and the Arden 3 Series 6: Lukas Erne: Mediating Shakespeare: thirteen ways of looking at editorial agency 7: Heather Wolfe: Sir John Spilman and the London rag gatherers 8: Michael F. Suarez, SJ: Foxe's Acts and Monuments as Pocket Devotional: Clement Cotton's Mirror of Martyrs (1613), a Seventeenth-Century Bestseller 9: Kate Bennett: Pope's worms 10: Stephen Clarke: The assiduous reader: Thomas Green of Ipswich (1769-1825) 11: Daniel Karlin: 'How I would alter things!' The manuscript of The Ring and the Book 12: Rosemary Ashton: Editing Boswell's Life of Johnson: a nineteenth-century case study

Daniel Starza Smith is Senior Lecturer in Early Modern English Literature (1500-1700) at King's College London, having previously held roles at University College London, the University of Reading, and Lincoln College, Oxford, where he was British Academy Post-Doctoral Fellow. His books include John Donne and the Conway Papers (based on a PhD supervised by Henry Woudhuysen), Manuscript Miscellanies in Early Modern England (edited with Joshua Eckhardt), and contributions to the Verse Letters volume of the landmark Donne Variorum. He is General Editor of the Oxford edition of Donne's prose letters and co-director of the Unlocking History research group. Hazel Wilkinson is Associate Professor (Senior Lecturer) in English Literature at the University of Birmingham, where she teaches early modern and eighteenth-century literature. Her monograph, Edmund Spenser and the Eighteenth-Century Book (2017), based on a PhD supervised by Henry Woudhuysen at UCL, won the 2020 Isabel MacCaffrey Award from the International Spenser Society. She is a member of the editorial team of the Oxford Edition of the Writings of Alexander Pope, and the founder of the database of ornamental typography Compositor. She was awarded fellowship of the Alan Turing Centre in 2020-22 for her work on applying computer vision to the study of typography.

Collects essays spanning a wide range of topics and time periods by leading scholars in their disciplines Reflects the interests of Henry Woudhuysen, one of the most senior and influential early modernists, book historians, and scholarly editors of his day Provides novel and innovative contributions that are both readable and engaging