ABOUT THIS BOOK

This is an essential volume, and there’s no scholar better equipped to edit it than Elizabeth Heale, whose expertise on early women’s writing in manuscript is unsurpassed. The Devonshire Manuscript is a vital source of Tudor literary history, illustrating the circulation of lyrics by Tudor poets such as Sir Thomas Wyatt, and offering evidence of collaborative forms of production and circulation that challenge prior assumptions about early forms of authorship, readership, and literary culture more broadly. Yet despite its importance, the Devonshire Manuscript has been all but inaccessible until now. With its extensive notes, thoughtful introduction, and carefully edited text, Heale’s edition will be a valuable reference work for scholars as well as an important textbook for students encountering the Devonshire Manuscript for the first time.
—Jennifer Summit
Professor of English, Stanford University

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Elizabeth Heale was Senior Lecturer in the Department of English Literature at the University of Reading until she retired in 2008. She is currently an Honorary Research Fellow in the Early Modern Research Centre at the University of Reading. She has published a number of books and articles on early modern women’s writing, on sixteenth-century autobiographical writing, and on early Tudor and Elizabethan poetry. Books include Wyatt, Surrey, and Early Tudor Poetry (1998) and Autobiography and Authorship in Renaissance Verse: Chronicles of the Self (2003). Her current research involves further work on Lady Margaret Douglas and participation in the Early Modern Research Centre’s project on early printed miscellanies.

REVIEWS

"This is an essential volume, and there’s no scholar better equipped to edit it than Elizabeth Heale, whose expertise on early women’s writing in manuscript is unsurpassed. The Devonshire Manuscript is a vital source of Tudor literary history, illustrating the circulation of lyrics by Tudor poets such as Sir Thomas Wyatt, and offering evidence of collaborative forms of production and circulation that challenge prior assumptions about early forms of authorship, readership, and literary culture more broadly. Yet despite its importance, the Devonshire Manuscript has been all but inaccessible until now. With its extensive notes, thoughtful introduction, and carefully edited text, Heale’s edition will be a valuable reference work for scholars as well as an important textbook for students encountering the Devonshire Manuscript for the first time."

— Jennifer Summit, Stanford University

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgments xi
List of Illustrations xiii
Introduction 1
Illustrations 38
Table of Hands in the Devonshire Manuscript 45
Abbreviations Used in Footnotes to the Text 49
The Devonshire Manuscript: British Library, Additional MS 17492 51
Bibliography 255
Index of First Lines 261
Index 267