Huntington Library Quarterly

The editorial board of the Huntington Library Quarterly is staffed by sixteen eminent scholars of early modern art, literature, history, science, medicine, and material culture. They represent the best of what has made the HLQ a highly valued journal among researchers in the US, Britain, and beyond, with more than 150,000 annual article downloads. They also signal a new direction for the HLQ, which is expanding to embrace broader and more diverse fields of inquiry, including scholarship rooted in continental Europe, the African Diaspora, and the Indigenous Americas, informed by critical approaches to colonialism and power in the early modern world. As advisors and advocates, they will help guide the journal’s new editor, Brett Rushforth, as he leads the HLQ from its headquarters at The Huntington.

For more information about individual board members, click on their names below.

Susan Cogan, Utah State University
Elizabeth Ellis, Princeton University
Lynn Festa, Rutgers University
Douglas Fordham, University of Virginia
Stefan Hanss, University of Manchester
Katherine Ibbett, Oxford University
Peter Mancall, USC and EMSI
Shannon McHugh, University of Massachusetts, Boston
Jennifer L. Morgan, New York University
Jennifer Mori, University of Toronto
Noémie Ndiaye, University of Chicago
Nicholas Popper, William & Mary and Omohundro Institute
Nicholas Radburn, Lancaster University
Andrés Reséndez, University of California, Davis
Ulinka Rublack, Cambridge University
Cristobal Silva, University of California, Los Angeles

Volume 87, Number 4, Winter 2024

Introduction: Reading through Error

Michael Edson, Alice Leonard, Abigail Williams, 501-10

This special issue reimagines textual error not as failure but as a generative force in literary history, textual transmission, and reading practice. Focusing on the period 1500 to 1800, the contributions investigate how mistakes—typographic, interpretive, or conceptual—shaped writing, printing, and reception. Rather than policing the boundaries of “good” reading, these essays embrace errant interpretation, tracing how authors anticipated, exploited, or resisted misreading, and how readers responded. The collection surveys primary manuscript and early printed materials, including errata sheets and personal library collections, sermons, satire, poetry, and marginalia. “Imperfect reading” focuses on two areas: an early modern reader’s encounter with textual error, and what a flawed or faulty reader of a text might look like. The collection argues for a more capacious understanding of “imperfect reading,” demonstrating that error served as a tool of wit, social commentary, and epistemological inquiry. In an era that prized accuracy yet teemed with textual instability, error emerges not only as evidence of disruption but as a strategy of meaning-making. This issue encourages a new vocabulary for understanding error, reframing it as a rich area for scholarly inquiry rather than a deficiency.

Reading Imperfection

Alice Leonard, 511-32

This article investigates early modern engagements with error and their physical embodiment in material texts. It focuses on Thomas Browne’s work that is entirely dedicated to error: Pseudodoxia Epidemica, first published in 1646. Browne demonstrates a curious openness towards error, and in its textual transmission he miswrites certain things that would make imperfect readers of others. “Reading imperfection,” then, applies to three areas: the errors in the world that Browne encountered, his creation of an inherently imperfect printed text in writing about them, and how they were received by contemporary readers. The article focuses on the correction of these mistakes by the extensive manuscript annotations of Christopher Wren (1589–1658), arguing that error was not merely an accusation but a valuable discourse. Wren’s responses demonstrate that searching after error was a fundamental aspect of early modern intellectual activity and textual culture, profoundly shaping knowledge production, transmission, and reception through the material book.

Not Knowing How-To: Reading Advertisements in Early Modern English Print

Grace Murray, 533-49

The early modern “how-to” genre promised readers opportunities to learn practical skills like gardening, surveying, or arithmetic from the printed page. Though the title pages of how-to books usually touted the clarity of the text within, recent reconstructive projects and broader studies of the genre have suggested that learning from a book was rarely straightforward. This article focuses on printed advertisements in early how-to books as textual interventions that sought to offer support to “imperfect” readers. It first surveys the range of readers addressed in the how-to book, from error-prone beginners to specialists in their field. Building on past studies of medical and mathematical advertising, the article then turns to the small but growing number of advertisements printed in how-to texts from the mid-sixteenth to mid-seventeenth centuries. In-book advertisements offered comprehensive directions to confused and curious readers to visit a person or place in pursuit of answers to lingering questions, whether basic or advanced. Hastily inserted additions and reader annotations indicate that these personal invitations could leave their readers even more uncertain than before. These imperfect advertisements and their unpredictable readers shed new light on the care with which how-to literature imagines and negotiates the book’s failures alongside its successes.

Erroneous Donne: The Author, His Scribe, Their Text, and Its First Readers

Mary Morrissey, Emma Rhatigan, 551-65

This essay considers error in the print and manuscript copies of John Donne’s sermons: mistaken citations, misquotations, and mis-transcriptions. Some of these errors may be authorial; others are the result of careless or ill-comprehending scribes. Editors have usually seen the correction of error as an important part of their work: identifying mistakes made by authors, copyists, or compositors. Errors are usually “corrected” in the text, so that they are visible only to readers who work their way through footnotes and textual commentary. In this essay we want to ask what we might learn from attending to error when working as editors and literary critics. Rather than simply treating it as something to be eradicated, error can be a valuable tool in understanding how texts were composed and how they then circulate. This essay argues that paying careful attention to error—following the trail of erroneous citations and transcriptions through different sermons and different copies—provides new and important evidence about Donne’s methods of composition, the connections between his reading and his writing, the relationship between a sermon in performance and as a written text, and the scholarly networks within which Donne worked.

Errant Marks: Misreading, Marginalia, and Early Modern Women’s Book Use

Rosalind Smith, 567-84

This article examines early modern women’s marginalia that take the form of scribble, doodles, pen trials, smudges, and stains, often found on the pastedowns and endpapers of books. It argues that these pages of “errant marks” are examples of early modern women’s authorship, correcting misreadings of this commonly encountered material that have either ignored such marks or dismissed them as examples of private inattention, disconnected from the textual and material worlds of their subject and book. By positioning these marginalia as simultaneously generic, formally diverse, and specific to particular authorial contexts, more expansive models can be developed of the forms that constitute marginalia and the agents who are considered to be marginalists, including the semi-literate or “letterate” and those educated outside the humanist schoolroom. These marks move beyond the marginalia widely recognized as humanist practice to encompass new kinds and contexts of textual marking that include practice, trial, and error as well as purposeful, public, and goal-oriented annotations performed by new kinds of authors including women, children, and the nonelite.

Reading by the Book: Ben Browne and the Reader as Improver

Abigail Williams, 585-600

This article focuses on the evidence of reading in a sizeable rural book collection, assembled in the first four decades of the eighteenth century in Cumbria by a father and son, Old and Young Ben Browne. Their collection, perhaps the only one of its kind to survive, offers a remarkable insight into the intellectual habits of a middling farming family very far from the metropolitan elites who have dominated the history of reading. The library, containing a wide range of literary, historical, and religious works, provides a test case for the ways we think and talk about amateur readers and the marks they leave behind. The Brownes’s books show some readerly habits of their time, traditions of textual improvement, and commonplacing. They also contain evidence of the indexing of works by theme, often in ways that might seem reductive or utilitarian. The article uses the material evidence of marginalia and inscription to interrogate the distinction between reading and misreading and asks what such a library might tell us about amateur domestic culture and the mixed literacies within a remote rural community.

When Ignorance Is a Virtue: Misreadings in the Unigenitus Controversies

Drew Starling, 601-15

While scholars have long appreciated the political, religious, social impacts and of the controversies surrounding the 1713 papal bull Unigenitusin France, they have paid less attention to their place in the history of reading. The controversies surrounding Pasquier Quesnel’s popular seventeenth- century French-language Bible commentary and the papal bull Unigenitus, which condemned it, were fundamentally disputes over reading, in which the accusations of misreading were central to both sides. This article examines how Jansenist polemicists—who opposed Unigenitus—and their antagonists, especially bishops and Jesuits, described and prescribed different ways of reading and characterized different sorts of readers. It shows how previously unstudied readers read, and how they understood their own acts of reading. Above all, it documents how Jansenist polemicists and their readers framed ignorance as a desirable trait that protected readers from error while accusing their powerful, educated interlocutors of willfully misreading texts for their own worldly interests. In raising this challenge to authorities and authoritative readings, these polemicists, their model readers, and their actual readers, especially laymen and women, contributed to the formulation of public opinion and, significantly, the formation of an actual critical, judging reading public in early eighteenth-century France.

Reading “Rotenness”: Jonathan Swift and Textual Error

Katie Lanning, 617-34

This essay argues that textual error is central to Jonathan Swift’s satirical and epistemological strategies in A Tale of a Tub. Attending to both obvious typographical mistakes and less perceptible “clean errors,” the essay demonstrates how Swift stages corruption as inherent to modern print culture, and, in doing so, invites readers to engage critically with imperfection. Rather than presenting error as an obstacle to understanding, Swift mobilizes it as a means of testing interpretive agility. Drawing on early editions, errata lists, and the history of eighteenth-century print correction, this essay explores how Swift’s satire depends on readers’ ability to navigate corrupted texts. In its final section, the essay turns to machine reading with tools such as optical character recognition (OCR) transcriptions and generative artificial intelligence (AI) to show how Swift’s concerns resonate with contemporary text technologies. Machine-generated errors reveal the ongoing entanglement of meaning and mistake. By tracing critical and technological dimensions of textual corruption, the essay offers a new framework for understanding Swift’s satire.

Robert Burns, Name Suppression, and the Sociable Uses of Ignorance

Michael Edson, 635-53

Conjuring up potential or “virtual” error or ignorance was central to Robert Burns’s handling of names in poetry. He replaces many names in his 1786 and 1787 Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialectwith dashes, initials, or asterisks, extending habits from his letters and scribal verse, where he also omits names, anticipates non-recognition, and makes a show of identifying the missing referents for his recipients. While obscuring names is often understood as helping authors in print avoid libel charges, for Burns occluded names instead facilitated the social rituals traditionally associated with scribal or coterie circulation. Omitting names gave Burns opportunities to do added kindnesses of explication in poems already meant as gifts. To document the social dimensions of name suppression, this essay analyzes gift copies of his 1787 Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, in which Burns supplies by hand some of the omitted names. When Burns raises the possibility of not knowing in his letters, he seeks to compliment knowing readers as much as he assists unknowing ones. To frame his identifications and explanations as friendly favors and polite gestures, Burns needed readers to imagine uninformed others excluded from his circle.

Queer Failure and Early Modern Books

Adam Smyth, 655-69

This article brings together bibliography and queer theory to consider the significance of errors in early modern printed books. Particular attention is paid to the errata narratives that appear in many early modern books, explaining the presence of mistakes and often requesting that the reader correct the errors before proceeding. If bibliography has tended to be norm- setting, queer theory provides a corrective, and a more patient critical mode for considering how historians of the book and literary critics might respond to the various kinds of mistakes that were central to early print. The article builds, in particular, from recent critical work on queer bibliography by Malcolm Noble and Sarah Pyke.

Past issues can be accessed via Project Muse.

HLQ Call for Submissions:

The Huntington Library Quarterly (HLQ) is a peer-reviewed journal featuring original research and new perspectives on the early modern period, broadly defined (c. 1400–1800). Its content reflects an early modern world that was connected and cosmopolitan, with diverse communities and cultures increasingly linked by the circulation of people, ideas, social practices, and material objects in ways that transcend disciplinary and geographic boundaries. We invite submissions that draw on the sources, methods, and theoretical frameworks of literature, art, history, science, medicine, material culture, music, performance, and critical cultural studies, with a preference for scholarship that is broadly legible across disciplines.

HLQ’s historical focus on Britain and its American colonies has been dramatically expanded to embrace broader and more diverse fields of inquiry, including scholarship rooted in continental Europe, the African Diaspora, and the Indigenous Americas, as well as their intersections with Mediterranean, Pacific, and Indian Ocean worlds.

HLQ publishes four types of essays:

1. Research Articles: Standard essays based on original research and interpretation in conversation with current scholarship. (8,000–15,000 words, including notes.)
2. Sources: Short critical editions of previously unpublished textual or visual sources, translated into English when applicable, with a full critical apparatus and interpretive intervention.
3. Assessments and Approaches: State-of-the-field, methodological, and theoretical essays that assess recent scholarship, reimagine older works from new perspectives, or suggest new directions for research. (3,000 to 10,000 words, including notes.)
4. Early/Modern Connections:  Essays presenting original early modern research that has enabled, supported, or shaped a specific public humanities or public interest project. (2,000 to 10,000 words, including notes.)

We also publish special issues—similar to edited book volumes—in which a group of essays connected by a common theme, topic, or approach is submitted collectively, with an introduction, by an editor or editors. If the issue is accepted for publication, the submitting editors become guest co-editors of the issue.

HLQ is published by The Huntington, a world-leading research center with vast early modern holdings in its Library, Art, and Botanical divisions. Although the journal welcomes submissions that draw directly on these resources, the location of research or source material has no influence on publication decisions.

Call for Submissions: Early/Modern Connections

The Huntington Library Quarterly (HLQ) invites submissions for a new section of the journal called Early/Modern Connections. This section will feature peer-reviewed essays that link early modern research to public humanities and the public interest. Although examples will vary widely, all successful submissions will illustrate how previously unpublished research in early modern sources has informed, or continues to inform, a public-facing project. Work benefiting historically underserved or marginalized communities is of particular interest. Essay length will vary significantly by project but will generally not exceed 5,000 words.

We anticipate submissions highlighting smaller-scale individual work as well as collaborations between scholars and performers, educators, activists, writers, artists, and public-serving institutions. We also anticipate the unanticipated and encourage anyone interested in submitting an Early/Modern Connections piece to contact the journal’s editor, Brett Rushforth.

The Huntington Library Quarterly announces a new editor in chief and editorial board

Two Distinguished Scholars Join Huntington’s Research Division

Michael Edson, Alice Leonard, Abigail Williams, 501-10

This special issue reimagines textual error not as failure but as a generative force in literary history, textual transmission, and reading practice. Focusing on the period 1500 to 1800, the contributions investigate how mistakes—typographic, interpretive, or conceptual—shaped writing, printing, and reception. Rather than policing the boundaries of “good” reading, these essays embrace errant interpretation, tracing how authors anticipated, exploited, or resisted misreading, and how readers responded. The collection surveys primary manuscript and early printed materials, including errata sheets and personal library collections, sermons, satire, poetry, and marginalia. “Imperfect reading” focuses on two areas: an early modern reader’s encounter with textual error, and what a flawed or faulty reader of a text might look like. The collection argues for a more capacious understanding of “imperfect reading,” demonstrating that error served as a tool of wit, social commentary, and epistemological inquiry. In an era that prized accuracy yet teemed with textual instability, error emerges not only as evidence of disruption but as a strategy of meaning-making. This issue encourages a new vocabulary for understanding error, reframing it as a rich area for scholarly inquiry rather than a deficiency.

Alice Leonard, 511-32

This article investigates early modern engagements with error and their physical embodiment in material texts. It focuses on Thomas Browne’s work that is entirely dedicated to error: Pseudodoxia Epidemica, first published in 1646. Browne demonstrates a curious openness towards error, and in its textual transmission he miswrites certain things that would make imperfect readers of others. “Reading imperfection,” then, applies to three areas: the errors in the world that Browne encountered, his creation of an inherently imperfect printed text in writing about them, and how they were received by contemporary readers. The article focuses on the correction of these mistakes by the extensive manuscript annotations of Christopher Wren (1589–1658), arguing that error was not merely an accusation but a valuable discourse. Wren’s responses demonstrate that searching after error was a fundamental aspect of early modern intellectual activity and textual culture, profoundly shaping knowledge production, transmission, and reception through the material book.

Grace Murray, 533-49

The early modern “how-to” genre promised readers opportunities to learn practical skills like gardening, surveying, or arithmetic from the printed page. Though the title pages of how-to books usually touted the clarity of the text within, recent reconstructive projects and broader studies of the genre have suggested that learning from a book was rarely straightforward. This article focuses on printed advertisements in early how-to books as textual interventions that sought to offer support to “imperfect” readers. It first surveys the range of readers addressed in the how-to book, from error-prone beginners to specialists in their field. Building on past studies of medical and mathematical advertising, the article then turns to the small but growing number of advertisements printed in how-to texts from the mid-sixteenth to mid-seventeenth centuries. In-book advertisements offered comprehensive directions to confused and curious readers to visit a person or place in pursuit of answers to lingering questions, whether basic or advanced. Hastily inserted additions and reader annotations indicate that these personal invitations could leave their readers even more uncertain than before. These imperfect advertisements and their unpredictable readers shed new light on the care with which how-to literature imagines and negotiates the book’s failures alongside its successes.

Mary Morrissey, Emma Rhatigan, 551-65

This essay considers error in the print and manuscript copies of John Donne’s sermons: mistaken citations, misquotations, and mis-transcriptions. Some of these errors may be authorial; others are the result of careless or ill-comprehending scribes. Editors have usually seen the correction of error as an important part of their work: identifying mistakes made by authors, copyists, or compositors. Errors are usually “corrected” in the text, so that they are visible only to readers who work their way through footnotes and textual commentary. In this essay we want to ask what we might learn from attending to error when working as editors and literary critics. Rather than simply treating it as something to be eradicated, error can be a valuable tool in understanding how texts were composed and how they then circulate. This essay argues that paying careful attention to error—following the trail of erroneous citations and transcriptions through different sermons and different copies—provides new and important evidence about Donne’s methods of composition, the connections between his reading and his writing, the relationship between a sermon in performance and as a written text, and the scholarly networks within which Donne worked.

Rosalind Smith, 567-84

This article examines early modern women’s marginalia that take the form of scribble, doodles, pen trials, smudges, and stains, often found on the pastedowns and endpapers of books. It argues that these pages of “errant marks” are examples of early modern women’s authorship, correcting misreadings of this commonly encountered material that have either ignored such marks or dismissed them as examples of private inattention, disconnected from the textual and material worlds of their subject and book. By positioning these marginalia as simultaneously generic, formally diverse, and specific to particular authorial contexts, more expansive models can be developed of the forms that constitute marginalia and the agents who are considered to be marginalists, including the semi-literate or “letterate” and those educated outside the humanist schoolroom. These marks move beyond the marginalia widely recognized as humanist practice to encompass new kinds and contexts of textual marking that include practice, trial, and error as well as purposeful, public, and goal-oriented annotations performed by new kinds of authors including women, children, and the nonelite.

Abigail Williams, 585-600

This article focuses on the evidence of reading in a sizeable rural book collection, assembled in the first four decades of the eighteenth century in Cumbria by a father and son, Old and Young Ben Browne. Their collection, perhaps the only one of its kind to survive, offers a remarkable insight into the intellectual habits of a middling farming family very far from the metropolitan elites who have dominated the history of reading. The library, containing a wide range of literary, historical, and religious works, provides a test case for the ways we think and talk about amateur readers and the marks they leave behind. The Brownes’s books show some readerly habits of their time, traditions of textual improvement, and commonplacing. They also contain evidence of the indexing of works by theme, often in ways that might seem reductive or utilitarian. The article uses the material evidence of marginalia and inscription to interrogate the distinction between reading and misreading and asks what such a library might tell us about amateur domestic culture and the mixed literacies within a remote rural community.

Drew Starling, 601-15

While scholars have long appreciated the political, religious, social impacts and of the controversies surrounding the 1713 papal bull Unigenitusin France, they have paid less attention to their place in the history of reading. The controversies surrounding Pasquier Quesnel’s popular seventeenth- century French-language Bible commentary and the papal bull Unigenitus, which condemned it, were fundamentally disputes over reading, in which the accusations of misreading were central to both sides. This article examines how Jansenist polemicists—who opposed Unigenitus—and their antagonists, especially bishops and Jesuits, described and prescribed different ways of reading and characterized different sorts of readers. It shows how previously unstudied readers read, and how they understood their own acts of reading. Above all, it documents how Jansenist polemicists and their readers framed ignorance as a desirable trait that protected readers from error while accusing their powerful, educated interlocutors of willfully misreading texts for their own worldly interests. In raising this challenge to authorities and authoritative readings, these polemicists, their model readers, and their actual readers, especially laymen and women, contributed to the formulation of public opinion and, significantly, the formation of an actual critical, judging reading public in early eighteenth-century France.

Katie Lanning, 617-34

This essay argues that textual error is central to Jonathan Swift’s satirical and epistemological strategies in A Tale of a Tub. Attending to both obvious typographical mistakes and less perceptible “clean errors,” the essay demonstrates how Swift stages corruption as inherent to modern print culture, and, in doing so, invites readers to engage critically with imperfection. Rather than presenting error as an obstacle to understanding, Swift mobilizes it as a means of testing interpretive agility. Drawing on early editions, errata lists, and the history of eighteenth-century print correction, this essay explores how Swift’s satire depends on readers’ ability to navigate corrupted texts. In its final section, the essay turns to machine reading with tools such as optical character recognition (OCR) transcriptions and generative artificial intelligence (AI) to show how Swift’s concerns resonate with contemporary text technologies. Machine-generated errors reveal the ongoing entanglement of meaning and mistake. By tracing critical and technological dimensions of textual corruption, the essay offers a new framework for understanding Swift’s satire.

Michael Edson, 635-53

Conjuring up potential or “virtual” error or ignorance was central to Robert Burns’s handling of names in poetry. He replaces many names in his 1786 and 1787 Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialectwith dashes, initials, or asterisks, extending habits from his letters and scribal verse, where he also omits names, anticipates non-recognition, and makes a show of identifying the missing referents for his recipients. While obscuring names is often understood as helping authors in print avoid libel charges, for Burns occluded names instead facilitated the social rituals traditionally associated with scribal or coterie circulation. Omitting names gave Burns opportunities to do added kindnesses of explication in poems already meant as gifts. To document the social dimensions of name suppression, this essay analyzes gift copies of his 1787 Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, in which Burns supplies by hand some of the omitted names. When Burns raises the possibility of not knowing in his letters, he seeks to compliment knowing readers as much as he assists unknowing ones. To frame his identifications and explanations as friendly favors and polite gestures, Burns needed readers to imagine uninformed others excluded from his circle.

Adam Smythe, 655-69

This article brings together bibliography and queer theory to consider the significance of errors in early modern printed books. Particular attention is paid to the errata narratives that appear in many early modern books, explaining the presence of mistakes and often requesting that the reader correct the errors before proceeding. If bibliography has tended to be norm- setting, queer theory provides a corrective, and a more patient critical mode for considering how historians of the book and literary critics might respond to the various kinds of mistakes that were central to early print. The article builds, in particular, from recent critical work on queer bibliography by Malcolm Noble and Sarah Pyke.