Erroneous Donne: the author, his scribe, their text and its first readers

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.