University of Virginia Library

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

range in subject matter from notable historical events to scandalous gossip 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

the length, style, and specificity of these notes is the result of using different transcribing techniques when the various preachers spoke:

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:

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.