Link: https://mpese.ac.uk/

Introduction:

Manuscript Pamphleteering in Early Stuart England brings together bibliographical data, texts (transcriptions) and manuscript images to help students and scholars access the rich world of early Stuart handwritten political discourse. This introductory essay is intended: to explain what we mean by 'manuscript pamphleteering' and 'manuscript pamphlet'; to give some context to the production, circulation and reception of these works; and to explain how the resources here relate to the historical phenomenon – that is, what has been included and what has been left out.

In our usage, a manuscript pamphlet is a handwritten text, usually from a particular set of genres – speeches, letters, petitions, briefs, treatises, dialogues – that circulated through the particular matrix of scribal practices that prevailed in early Stuart England. Thomas Alured's Letter to the Marquess of Buckingham (1620), for example, was originally composed as an intervention in the marriage-treaty negotiations that Britain was conducting with Habsburg Spain in 1620, and briefly landed the author in prison; it was also copied by hand and sold commercially by professional scribes and manuscript dealers. Handwritten copies circulated throughout the kingdom, and contemporary transcripts survive in the notebooks of clergymen and gentlemen from Norfolk to Shropshire and from Kent to Cornwall. The goal of this resource is to give students and scholars better access to the sorts of texts that belonged to the world of Alured's Letter.