 | Studies in bibliography |  |
2. Manningham's Note-Taking Techniques
John Manningham's Diary, preserved as British Library MS Harleian
5353, covers the period from January 1602 to April 1603, its entries usually,
but not always, appearing in chronological order.[13]
Just as their contents
and in source material from passages in printed texts and manuscripts Manningham
read to transcripts, paraphrases, and summaries of parts of over
fifty sermons he heard, so there is also a wide range in the quantity of notes
he took when reading and listening. He copies a few sentences from Jacques
Cappel's De Etymologiis Juris Civilis (1576; fol. 75), for example, but he
uses hundreds of words to paraphrase "Some Partes out of" John Hayward's
An Answer to the First Part of a Certaine Conference Concerning Svccession
(1603; fols. 128b-132b). Similarly, he gives widely varying amounts of attention
to different preachers, some of whom appear in brief but revealing
sketches of their physical appearance, and their sermons, a few even receiving
concise rhetorical analyses.[14] Although Manningham rarely inserts editorial
comments about the sermons' doctrines or themes—he pauses once to remark
that he heard "a strong continued invective against the Papistes and Jesuites"
(fol. 79b)—his summaries, paraphrases, and sometimes extensive transcripts
of various sermons' words allow us to experience what Robert Parker Sorlien,
the Diary's modern editor, calls their "oral quality: the distinctive tones
and idiom of the preacher, together with something of the flavor of his
personality."[15]
In his study of English Pulpit Oratory, W. Fraser Mitchell offers one
hypothesis about how Manningham compiled these notes in the Diary: "Its
records of sermons are clearly written from memory day by day, and probably
owe nothing to note-taking at the moment. . . ."[16]
However, Manningham's
purposes for making entries on sermons that he heard (insofar as we can infer
those purposes), the extreme variations in their length, and the various kinds
of fidelity to their sources—some are one sentence long, while others extend
to many hundreds of words; some faithfully represent a preacher's thoughts
while significantly deviating from his wording, and some follow both thoughts
and words more closely—cast doubt on Mitchell's explanation. If we take
into account the full range of notes contained in Manningham's Diary (taken
from printed, manuscript, and oral sources, including not just sermons but
also court gossip), Manningham seems to regard his manuscript both as a
commonplace book that stores sententious phrases and brief summaries and
as a notebook that records extensive statements and historical events.
Accounting more carefully for the wide variety of notes contained in the
Diary, Sorlien also rejects Mitchell's idea that these transcripts of sermons
typically rely on Manningham's memory. Sorlien believes that the range in
transcribing techniques when the various preachers spoke:
Manningham's note-taking methods seem to have varied. His full and detailed notes
of Dr. John King's sermon at Paul's Cross in October 1602, for instance, suggest that
he may have had his little book with him while listening; that is, he wrote in longhand
on the spot; or if not, he took notes in some form of shorthand and later transcribed
them.[17]
Although Manningham's means of and purpose for taking notes affect the
accuracy of the Diary's records of sermons—and what we mean by accuracy—
there is no evidence to suggest that he complicated matters by introducing the
intermediate step of writing in shorthand.[18]
Sorlien makes a far more convincing
case when he argues that the diverse kinds of notes may be the result
of another variable that is unrelated to writing in shorthand, the stature of a
given preacher:
Although ordinarily he [Manningham] was content merely to list the main heads of
a sermon, on occasions when a star attraction like Dr. King or Dr. Spenser preached,
he paraphrased and quoted extensively, writing down nearly everything he heard.[19]
I will argue that almost all of Manningham's note-taking from printed books,
manuscript texts, and spoken sermons occurs while he reads or hears a
source. These notes may be long, his words roughly corresponding to the
source's phrasing, imagery, citations, rhetorical flourishes, and so forth, or
short, offering compressed yet remarkably precise and perceptive assertions of
the source's main points. However, on one occasion when Manningham attempts
to capture not just some of the phrasing or central ideas but also
the poetic form of an epigram by John Donne, the nature of the deviations
from the source—indeed, from the entire history of the text's transmission—
strongly suggests that he is relying on his memory. An examination of the
transcripts he makes from printed books and manuscripts that are directly
before him provides a foundation for understanding the notes he takes in
church when a preacher delivers an oral text.
All dates are new style. I have examined the manuscript, which measures 4″ x 6″ and
contains 133 leaves; brief descriptions of it appear in Sorlien, 2, and John Bruce, ed., Diary
of John Manningham (London: Camden Society, 1868), i. For more on the Diary's organization,
see n. 17 below.
For Manningham's descriptions of preachers, see Diary, fols. 79 and 80; for his brief
analyses of sermons, see fols. 54b, 68b, and 99b.
Sorlien, 13. Mitchell misrepresents the Diary by stating that it contains the sermons'
"main doctrines often fairly fully noted down" and that "a large portion" is devoted to
"analyses of the various sermons" (English Pulpit Oratory, 35-36).
Sorlien, 13. Sorlien's explanation also accounts for the Diary's breaks in chronology
(see fols. 103b-104 and 106-106b)—more satisfactorily, I think, than his theory that "the
writer seems at times to have entered his notes and impressions wherever he had vacant
space" (2), a hypothesis advanced earlier by Bruce, x.
| Studies in bibliography | |