‘The progress of thy glorious book’: material reading and the play of paratext in C oryats C rudities (1611)

• Published in: Renaissance studies Vol. 28; no. 3; pp. 336 - 355
• Main Author: Palmer, Philip S.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: 01.06.2014
• ISSN: 0269-1213; 1477-4658
• DOI: 10.1111/rest.12013

C oryats C rudities (1611), a 939‐page narrative of its author's five‐month journey through W estern E urope, is well known as a strange amalgam of euphuistic prose travel writing and a substantial body of ‘ P anegyricke V erses’, comprising over eighty mock encomiastic poems written by the likes of B en J onson, J ohn D onne, I nigo J ones, and S ir J ohn H arington (among others). Described by T homas C oryate as a prose and verse ‘miscellany’, the volume enables a variety of readerly strategies for interpreting its mixed‐mode form, employing printed marginalia in particular to lend its miscellaneity a playfully referential structure. Material evidence left by seventeenth‐century readers, moreover, reveals a complex and imitative paratextual dialogue between the printed marginalia and manuscript additions to the volume. My case study of the extensively annotated copy surviving as P ierpont M organ L ibrary W 02 B , owned by the poet and writing master J ohn D avies of H ereford and at least three, perhaps four additional seventeenth‐century readers, not only recovers valuable early approaches to reading C oryats C rudities , but investigates how those readers responded to various textual stimuli in the volume – from the author's incessant measurements to the satirical mode of the mock panegyrists – to construct the C rudities as both innovative travel book and site of elaborate literary play.