Marotti 1995

Marotti, Arthur F. Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995.

"In short, the various manuscript and print forms in which texts were recorded and transmitted can be the basis of a socioliterary history that unlike traditional literary history considers texts in their material specificity (rather than their edited 'ideal' forms), attends to their reception and reproduction in a variety of social and historical circumstances (and not just in the context of the print publication process), and emphasizes an inchoate or developing definition of literature and authorship (rather than a stable definition based on alleged authorial 'intentions')." (xi-xii)

"In the older, manuscript system, the modern boundary between the literary and the nonliterary had not yet solidified, and texts were immersed in social worlds whose conditions enabled them to be produced and consumed." (xii)

"Printed texts of lyric verse -- something of an innovation and a matter also of printers' fortuitous access to the literary communications of restricted social groups and coteries -- yield a distorted picture of literary history or of the place of literary texts in the life of the society that produced and consumed them." (xiii)

Lyrics and the Manuscript System

"Single poems as well as sets of poems were written as occasional works. Their authors professed a literary amateurism and claimed to care little about the textual stability or historical durability of their socially contingent productions." (2)

poems on rings, food trenchers, glass windows, paintings, tombstones and monuments, on trees (3) [see footnotes for citations]

prison poetry (4-5)

occasional poetry for specific social occasions (9)

"When social verse passed in the system of manuscript transmission beyond its original environments of production and reception, it was usually recoded and recontextualized, especially when poems were collected or anthologized in a process that converted them into works of 'literature'." (10)