Imaging and amanuenses: understanding the Manuscript of De Doctrina Christiana, attributed to John Milton

Imaging and amanuenses: understanding the Manuscript of
De Doctrina Christiana, attributed to John Milton

Thomas
Corns

University of Wales, Bangor
els009@bangor.ac.uk

Gordon
Campbell

Leicester University
leb@le.ac.uk

John
Hale

University of Otago
patch@earthlight.co.nz

Fiona
Tweedie

University of Edinburgh
fiona@maths.ed.ac.uk

2002

University of Tübingen

Tübingen

ALLC/ACH 2002

editor

Harald
Fuchs

encoder

Sara
A.
Schmidt

The Research Context of the Problems
In 1823, in the Public Record Office in London, a Latin document was
discovered and catalogued as SP 9/61. It was identified as De Doctrina Christiana, Milton’s lost theological treatise
mentioned by some of his early biographers. The evident heterodoxy of its
arguments challenged Milton’s current status as the iconic poet of English
Protestantism, and ever since the document has posed interpretative
possibilities and problems for critics of Milton’s poetry, and especially of
Paradise Lost. While some critics have treated
the manuscript as a gloss on his other works, others have been perplexed by
the apparent discrepancies between the treatise and his undisputed canonical
works. Those discrepancies have usually been accounted for in terms of genre
differences, but since 1991 a body of opinion within the Miltonist scholarly
community has argued instead that SP 9/61 is not of a Miltonic provenance.
In the mid-1990s an interdisciplinary group (all the current group plus
David Holmes, who was then supervising Fiona Tweedie’s doctoral work)
attempted to extract the key questions to resolve the problem. After several
interim reports at conferences, the group issued its final report as a paper
to the British Milton Seminar, as a web-document (still available as ), and as
a major article (The Provenance of De
Doctrina Christiana, Milton
Quarterly 31.3 (1997): 67-117).
The report unequivocally tied the document to a Miltonic provenance, while
indicating its unfinished status and its stylometric inconsistency. It
argued that the work was primarily produced in the 1650s; that Milton in
part was incorporating and revising material from other Protestant exegetes;
and that the manuscript has two principal strata, an ur-text and a
transformation of that text effected by a process of revision which
primarily consisted of the accretion of material by Milton.
As a quick resolution of the status and pertinence of the manuscript in the
interpretation of Milton’s later poems, the group had found some answers:
indeed, the manuscript has been worked on by Milton, but that work was
suspended and incomplete and probably belonged to a period significantly
earlier than the publication of Paradise Lost.
However, we did not contextualise it closely in the Protestant exegetical
tradition; we did not disclose the lower layers of the postulated
palimpsest; we did not systematically engage with its Latinity, and -- most
significantly for this paper -- we did not address the important issue of
its multiple scribal hands.
The group has been awarded a major grant (£74k) by the Arts and Humanities
Research Board to return to these concerns and to widen the investigation to
a larger consideration of the place of the document in radical theology of
the early-modern period (MRG-AN1763/APN11001). The debate about SP 9/61 is
probably the hottest current controversy in Milton studies, and on its
outcome depend not only the determination of the Milton canon but also the
validity of interpretative strategies that have been and continue to be used
in approaches to his major poetry.

Computer-Assisted Research from Multiple Perspectives
Much of the award has been committed to the preparation of electronic texts.
We had already an electronic version of the current transcription of the
manuscript. To this we are adding electronic versions of the major
early-modern Protestant exegetical tracts. (All are in Latin.) These will
allow a much more fine-grained reexamination of the stylometry, using much
larger samples of situationally analogous controls; they will allow a
careful searching for borrowing and analogues in Milton’s text; and they
will support the ready comparison of Milton’s use of biblical citations with
the practice of significant precursors.
The complex relationship between the many variables relating to the diverse
physical appearance of the individual pages of the manuscript -- line
density, scribes, corrections, page size, watermarks, etc. -- is being
investigated using SPSS Data analysis software.
Very helpfully, the Public Record Office reprographic department prepared for
us a high-resolution imaged version of the document. Most straightforwardly,
it allows a research group spread from Edinburgh and Bangor to Dunedin to
work on a document lodged in a remote suburb of west London, with for most
purposes as much facility as if the document were immediately present. But
it also allows the highly vexed question of Milton’s use of amanuenses to be
engaged with a new and innovative precision.

Blind Milton and his Scribes
Milton was totally blind by about 1651, and for subsequent work he relied
wholly on the assistance of amanuenses. SP 9/61, the most considerable
extant manuscript of Miltonic provenance, consists primarily of a
transcription by the scribe Jeremy Picard of an early draft that is no
longer extant. The opening section of that document was copied again by
Daniel Skinner, who prepared the manuscript for the press after Milton’s
death. The Picard section is evidently a working manuscript, in that
sections have been recopied and substituted by Picard, and there are
numerous marginal and interlinear additions. These for the most part are in
Picard’s hand, though the most thorough account to date has identified
another seven amanuenses responsible for multiple changes, and several other
hands -- perhaps as many as eleven further scribes.
Here our project has several aspects. First, we want to identify how many
scribes were actually involved. Second, we want to determine the order of
their contribution to the developing document. Finally, we want to associate
the hands we have distinguished with hands found in other Miltonic documents
and elsewhere, and we should like to identify the scribes wherever possible.
The imaged version of the text is immensely useful. Earlier researchers have
worked -- necessarily in a somewhat inhibited manner, given its uniqueness
and its fragility -- on the document itself or on photographic reproductions
of the document. Using advanced image-editing software (Adobe Photoshop) we
can freely cut and paste letter forms and word forms closely to compare
diverse examples and to form a composite repertoire of each hand. We can
with facility juxtapose examples from SP 9/61 with imaged versions of other
pertinent manuscripts. Using the electronic transcription of the document,
we can identify throughout the manuscript other occurrences of the word and
letter forms found in the scribal additions and form judgments about their
similarities and differences.
This paper will present a number of investigations that are components in
this whole process, from a comparison of a single marginal addition with
another late manuscript of Miltonic provenance to more complex accounts of
the variety of forms to be found within the practice of Picard and the
implications of that for understanding the development of the manuscript
into its present form.