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 http://www.bangor.ac.uk/english/publicat/ddc/ddc.htm), 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.