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3. Manningham's Reliability as a Note-Taker

When a preacher delivers a sermon during a church service, members of the congregation experience an oral phenomenon whose pace and subject matter they do not control. Note-takers in this setting cannot ask the preacher

to slow down, repeat or skip material, discuss a different scriptural passage, or alter his exegetical stance; once they have decided whether to attend a church service, the note-takers' other choices include whether to stay, where to sit, and whether to pay attention, choices that affect listening comprehension and hence the auditors' notes. That certain aspects of a spoken sermon are beyond the auditor's control is evident from one of Manningham's experiences:

Assessing the quality of note-taking abilities is anything but straightforward in the context of a church service because a preacher may speak extempore, using no written text with which we can compare the auditor's notes, he may revise his oral remarks when he later writes them down, or he may preach from a written text and then revise it before circulation or publication.[20] Compared to auditors, readers have more choice in the texts they digest and more influence over the pace at which they receive information and take notes. And if a reader's printed or manuscript sources are extant, we are in a good position to judge the notes' accuracy, a word used here in the sense of reproducing an argument's rhetorical touches, phrasing, and development (organization, use of evidence, logic, and so forth). With different variables surrounding the oral text and the printed or manuscript one, the more controlled reading environment therefore allows us to assess Manningham's accomplishments as a note-taker when he works directly—relying on only the momentary use of memory as he immediately transcribes material from a source into his Diary—from printed texts and manuscripts. Furthermore, we can readily compare some of his entries with the printed texts on which they are based and, when he takes notes on manuscripts or spoken sermons that are later printed, as is occasionally the case, we can also examine the relationship between the source and the notes.[21]

(a) Printed Sources

We can confidently consult the same editions of most of the eight printed books from which Manningham transcribes directly and usually extensively[22]

A comparison of his notes with six of those sources reveals that his transcripts, like his notes on manuscripts range from exact quotations to summaries and loose paraphrases.[23] Manningham clearly works directly from his sources, presenting remarkably accurate passages, some extensive and some in Latin, when he gives excerpts from two of these printed texts. The Diary's excerpts from Samuel Rowlands's Tis Merrie When Gossips Meete (1602) include about twenty lines of witty poetry, most containing the source's exact words:

(fol. 45)[24]

From Thomas Stapleton's Orationes Academicæ, Miscellaneæ Triginta Qvatvor (1600), Manningham confidently reproduces complete passages wordfor-word:

For reasons that are by no means clear—it would be difficult to locate two texts as divergent in theme, form, language, purpose, and audience as Tis Merrie When Gossips Meete and Orationes Academicæ—in these entries Manningham wished to keep a full and precise record of his sources.

When Manningham takes notes from three other printed texts, his apparently different purposes lead to different results, as the need for selective notes about key points calls for abandoning word-for-word transcripts in favor of clear, concise summaries. Outlining what William Watson calls arguments for "tolleration for religion" in A Decacordon of Ten Qvodlibeticall Qvestions (1602), Manningham takes reliable, if selective, notes:

When Manningham turns to John Hayward's An Answer to the First Part of a Certaine Conference Concerning Svccession (1603), his précis mixes close paraphrases and exact quotations:

Taking notes on Thomas Floyd's The Picture of a Perfit Common Wealth (1600), Manningham presents brief excerpts that significantly condense his source and freely deviate from its wording while remaining true to its sense:

Similar to the excerpt from Hayward, this passage's length, compression, and wording suggest that Manningham's goal is to capture not a developed argument but a sententious simile.

Two excerpts from William Warner's Albions England (1602 edition; fols. 54 and 60) give a clear idea of Manningham's different note-taking techniques even when he directly transcribes the same kind of material, rhymed couplets written in fourteeners. In these entries, his purpose is transparent— the Diary becomes a commonplace book for antifeminist themes—but the notes he produces take two different forms. In one entry, Manningham writes a précis, transforming Warner's verse to prose and altering the syntax, yet still capturing the significant word-play:

In another excerpt, he retains this source's poetic form and syntax while introducing three substantive variations (which I have italicized) that suggest not misremembering over a period of time but rather minor carelessness ("doth" for "will" and "runnes" for "fals") and eye-skip that causes "Riuer" in the first line to reappear in place of "Currant" in approximately the same location in the second line:

These examples from Watson, Hayward, Floyd, and Warner contain none of the characteristics of notes that rely on medium- or long-term memory, such as misremembered words or phrases, muddied syntax, sentences or phrases blurred into one another, reorganized material, and ellipses where key information should appear. Instead, the respect that Manningham accords the substance of his printed sources when he paraphrases or summarizes them, as well as the fidelity with which he reproduces the printed words of such authors as Rowlands and Stapleton, indicates that these excerpts from printed sources were probably written while reading and with different purposes in mind.

(b) Manuscript Sources

In a few instances, the transcripts in Manningham's Diary are based on manuscript sources. These notes are significant in part because they sometimes offer tantalizing glimpses of his access to lines of manuscript traditions that are no longer extant. That they have vanished makes it difficult to assess Manningham's handling of them, obliging us to be cautious when judging these particular notes. One text that existed only in manuscript when Manningham copied directly from it in 1602 is Sir John Davies's The Lottery (fol. 95-95b). Because Davies had been at the Middle Temple about a decade before the diarist, Manningham's ability to gain access to this document, like those containing works by Donne, points to a circle of friends associated with the legal profession who shared manuscripts that were indirectly transmitted

from authorial sources. Extant in Francis Davison's 1608 edition of A Poetical Rhapsodie and in a manuscript in the Conway Papers, Davies's Lottery is made up of introductory matter in verse and prose followed by a series of couplets, each of which accompanied one of the "lots," small gifts distributed during an entertainment given by the Lord Keeper, Sir Thomas Egerton, when Queen Elizabeth visited Harefield House in the summer of 1602.[31] Many of the sixteen couplets that Manningham copies reproduce readings found in A Poetical Rhapsodie or the Conway Papers Manuscript or both. When the printed text and that manuscript present different readings, however, Manningham never agrees with A Poetical Rhapsodie; he sides with the Conway Papers Manuscript on about six occasions; on another handful of occasions, the Diary provides independent readings that agree with neither text and probably represent minor errors.[32] One example will suffice to illustrate the relationship among these texts:

Because Manningham reproduces both his source's wording and its iambic pentameter couplet form throughout an extensive excerpt, the transcript avoids the characteristic signs of relying on medium- or long-term memory. Rather, it appears that he was consulting his source when he made an accurate transcript of a lost manuscript that is closely related to the one contained in the Conway Papers rather than the one that Francis Davison used as the source for A Poetical Rhapsodie.

Manningham takes more extensive notes on the manuscript of another text with a murky textual history, The Legend of Mary, Queen of Scots, attributed to Thomas Wenman (fols. 91b-94b). The poem's nineteenth-century editor, Jon Fry, writes that the manuscript is dated 1601 but provides no information

about its location.[34] Since I have been unable to trace this manuscript and I can therefore compare Manningham's notes only with Fry's nineteenth-century edition, it is difficult to measure their accuracy. Not only do the two texts' numerous substantive variants indicate that Manningham's source is a different manuscript but they are also generally unhelpful in determining which, if either, might be accurate and which in error. The following quotations are from the Diary; italics identify the substantive differences with Fry's edition, whose readings appear in brackets. In terms of syntax, diction, and meter, some of Manningham's excerpts are clumsy:

(fol. 91b)

But other excerpts are somewhat superior and may more faithfully represent the source:

(fol. 91b)[35]

While these excerpts from the Diary do not appear to be based on memory, they may suggest either that Manningham smoothed out material that he found awkward (a practice he does not engage in elsewhere) or more likely that he copied directly from his source and followed it with care.

Manningham's Diary contains material from John Donne's Paradoxes, yet another text with a confused history of transmission, beginning when it was written in the 1590s and continuing beyond its first publication in his Juvenilia in 1633. Many manuscripts of the Paradoxes were circulated, particularly in the early seventeenth century,[36] making it difficult to determine where the one that Manningham consulted is located in the various lines of transmission. As a result, we must exercise caution when gauging the accuracy of his transcript. Manningham and Donne had many mutual friends who probably exchanged manuscripts,[37] and most of the readings in Manningham's transcript of Paradoxes 2 and 10 (fol. 101-101b) are supported by their appearance in other manuscripts of these texts, as well as in the 1633 printed edition.[38] In the following entry from the Diary, I have used italics to identify

the substantive variants with Donne's Juvenilia, whose readings appear in brackets:

As Helen Peter's extensive collation indicates, few of these variants are unique to Manningham's Diary; instead, most appear in one or more manuscripts. The close connections among various manuscripts provide corroborating evidence that, without relying on his memory, for no tell-tale signs point to this means of transmission, Manningham's direct copying produces a faithful transcript from a manuscript carrying some contemporary authority because it circulated among mutual friends after being transmitted, however indirectly, from an authorial source (even if some of the manuscript's readings were later judged inferior by printers and editors). This conclusion is reinforced on the same pages that contain Paradoxes 2 and 10 by the appearance of two other Paradoxes that were not included in the Juvenilia—"Hee that weepeth is most wise" and "To keepe sheepe the best lyfe"—but that have received serious consideration as authentic compositions by Donne.[40] Although the uncertain nature of the transmission of these manuscripts means that my conclusions are necessarily tentative, a comparison of the Diary with three manuscript sources that Manningham consults—Davies's Lottery, Wenman's Legend of Mary, Queen of Scots, and Donne's Paradoxes—suggests that he had access to texts that carried some authority and made extensive, generally reliable transcripts by copying directly from them.

Manningham's transcript of another manuscript text by Donne attempts to reproduce its iambic pentameter couplet form. The results, which stand in sharp contrast to the transcript of William Warner's couplet beginning "A Womans love is river-like," do not follow the source with care or present a condensed version that might be termed a précis. Rather, this entry reveals numerous misrememberings and clumsy approximations that point to the use of memory after a lapse of some time. After reading the manuscript of one of Donne's Epigrams, Manningham writes the following title, attribution, and couplet:

(fol. 118)

Besides beginning with an alexandrine, Manningham's version presents other clear differences from anything contained in this epigram's manuscript tradition, whose extant documents include only one substantive variation—the title (other early manuscripts have no title or refer to the poem by such titles as "A beggar," "On a Beggar," or "On a Cripple")—from the 1633 printed text:

Referring to Manningham's entry as "obviously from memory," W. Milgate, the editor of Donne's Satires, Epigrams and Verse Letters, observes that "Those who find epigrams memorable often have faulty memories, and many variations in the manuscripts can be ascribed to this cause."[42] That Manningham's entry begins with a title that weakly attempts to summarize the couplet while merely restating it and identifying a setting ("on the ground") suggests that his memory is at work, providing an approximation to fulfill the expectation that a title should precede the couplet. Further evidence of memorial intervention appears in the misremembering of some key verbs, as "stand" and "move" are transformed into "sitt" and "stand," and switched to the couplet's opening line. This conclusion about the role of Manningham's memory may be strengthened by the fact that the Diary's version is entirely in the third person, so it lacks the dramatic first-person opening and subsequent shift to the third person that appear in the printed text and all other manuscript versions. Yet Manningham's reproducing of the couplet's rhyme and word-play indicates that this manuscript is connected in some way to an authoritative line of transmission. However, the substantive differences between the epigram contained in the Diary and the one contained in all extant manuscripts[43] demonstrate that Manningham, rather than writing a summary or transcribing the complete couplet directly from a manuscript (even an inferior one), uses his memory to attempt to reproduce the poem's form and to convey a loose sense of its contents, focusing on the final word's pun.

(c) Oral Sources

In early modern England, as in our own age, people often display different levels of skill when taking notes from material that they read and material that they hear, but when Manningham transcribes from oral sermon sources the results are analogous to the Diary's entries based on his direct copying of printed texts and manuscripts. At Paul's Cross in 1602, he takes extensive

notes on two sermons that were printed some years later: Robert Wakeman's on Jonah 3:4-5 (20 June 1602) was published as Ionahs Sermon, and Ninivehs Repentance in 1606 (fols. 27b-28), and John Spenser's on Isaiah 5:4 (10 October 1602) appeared as A Learned and Graciovs Sermon Preached at Paules Crosse in 1615 (fols. 40-43). The Diary contains excerpts from only the first half of Wakeman's printed sermon, just as it includes nothing from the final section of Spenser's. Although this gap is difficult to explain—did Manningham leave the church before the sermons ended, find the second half of each sermon less than noteworthy, or suffer homiletic fatigue (Wakeman's sermon extends to some 102 printed pages, Spenser's to 50)?—the entries he wrote lack any sign of relying on memory over a significant amount of time:

Because Manningham records sentences that do not appear when Spenser's sermon is printed posthumously more than a decade after it was delivered, it is clear that someone—probably the preacher, given the substantive nature of the changes—revised the sermon during that interval.[45] When writing a summary of Spenser's sermon, Manningham reveals "a keen grasp" of the sermon's "fundamental points,"[46] in the view of his modern editor, as he sometimes reproduces the preacher's wording and sometimes alters it:

Grasping Spenser's main response to objections to the reformed faith and conveying it in his horticultural terms, Manningham reveals what Sorlien calls "an ear for the preacher's imagery" as he presents this "remarkably accurate paraphrase and précis."[48] Although the notes on both Wakeman's and Spenser's sermons are selective and compressed, they provide closer paraphrases than one would expect to find if Manningham used his memory after some time passed.

To cite a representative example of radical compression of an oral source until little more than its essence remains, when Manningham writes about a sermon in March 1603 he does not identify the date, the preacher, or the text he chose to preach on, but he does provide the location—"AT A SPITTLE SERMON"—and a concise summary of the main point, while capturing its play on words: "Yf our synnes come out with a newe addicion, Godes punishmentes will come out with a newe edition" (fol. 109). Similarly, he presents a reliable one-sentence summary of a sermon on 31 October 1602: "At Paules Dr. Dove made a sermon against the excessive pride and vanitie of women in apparraile, &c., which vice he said was in their husbandes power to correct" (fol. 54b).[49] The nature of Manningham's single sentences from these sermons—short excerpts that summarize key observations while reproducing only a little of the sources' exact wording—points to his purposeful recording of a pun and rhyme as rhetorical flourishes or of a concise moral lesson, all written down while the preachers spoke.

With its focus on John Manningham's techniques and reliability as a note-taker, this examination of his various entries from printed texts, manuscripts, and oral sermon sources allows us to be somewhat more confident when considering the nature and significance of the Diary's entry on Lancelot Andrewes's 1602 Whit-Sunday sermon. Drawn to another preacher of some stature, just as he was drawn to John Spenser and John King, and willing to devote many pages of his Diary to Andrewes's sermon, Manningham took notes directly—that is, while the preacher spoke. As in all other entries in the Diary, there are no signs of his recopying shorthand notes, and as in all other entries except the one on John Donne's epigram "Of a beggar that lay on the ground," there are no signs of his relying on medium- or longterm memory. Manningham captures Andrewes's characteristic rhetorical flourishes, such as his alliteration ("The Holy Ghost is not given to all in the same measure, nor the same manner" [fol. 24]), and especially his imagery,

balanced syntax, and repetition ("Wee knowe that bread is the strength of mans hart, yet sometymes it may be expedient to fast: our bloud is the treasury of our lyfe, yet sometymes it is expedient to loose it; our eyesight is deare and precious unto us, yet sometymes it is expedient to sitt in a darke roome" [fol. 23]). The evidence I have gathered from oral sermon sources as well as printed and manuscript texts further indicates that Manningham's notes on Andrewes's sermon do not constitute a word-for-word or complete record. Rather, while Manningham captures some of his sources' exact wording, as in his notes on Samuel Rowlands's Tis Merrie When Gossips Meete and Thomas Stapleton's Orationes Academicæ, he also freely shifts his notetaking technique and writes paraphrases and summaries, as in many of his entries on printed prose tracts, such as those by William Watson, John Hayward, and Thomas Floyd, and on many manuscripts, though his notes on Andrewes's sermon do not appear to contain any instances of radical compression. We are fortunate not only that Manningham and his little book were present when Andrewes preached on Whit-Sunday in 1602, but also that Andrewes consulted his own sermons and lectures so often. A number of printed and manuscript texts that have been identified as possibly being by him might find their attributions strengthened because his echoes and repetitions make apparent the connections with canonical texts, as is the case with the Orphan Lectures and various manuscripts. Just as only one source— John Manningham's Diary—contains evidence about two of Donne's Paradoxes that are not extant, so only the Diary provides the necessary information to connect the 1602 sermon to a later Whit-Sunday sermon by Andrewes. In each instance, the diarist's intervention is a fluke of history. The evidence is overwhelming that Manningham, precisely as he did when taking notes as Wakeman and Spenser preached, leaves a fairly full, reasonably reliable, and in this instance unique account of the event.