A critical edition of Jeremy Taylor’s Holy living (1650)

This dissertation presents a critical, old spelling edition of Jeremy Taylor's The Rule and Exercises of Holy Living (1650). As no manuscript is extant, the text has been prepared from a collation of the first eight editions of the book that had appeared by 1668, a year after Taylor's death. The collation has shown that only the first edition of the book was set from manuscript and that Taylor made some revisions and corrections in four of the later editions. The second, fourth, sixth, and seventh editions contain alterations that range from the addition of paragraph-length passages to the correction of a few words. The text presented here has been prepared according to the principles formulated by Sir Walter Greg and Fredson Bowers. The first edition has been chosen as the copy-text and all authorial alterations in later editions have been incorporated into the text. Autograph revisions and annotations that appear in presentation copies of the first and fifth editions (now in the Libraries of the University of Northern Illinois and King's College, Cambridge) have also been included. The text is accompanied by an introduction and a commentary. The introduction includes a short life of the author and a discussion of the tradition of devotional literature and of Holy Living. The commentary provides glosses, identifies sources, and gives translations of Taylor's Latin, Greek and Italian marginal notes. The textual apparatus consists of an introduction and two schedules. The introduction deals with the printing history and the transmission of the text. Textual notes appear in the first schedule and emendations of accidentals in the second.Arts, Faculty ofEnglish, Department ofGraduat