Few early modern books can present as complex a challenge to referencing as the two sixteenth-century editions of Holinshed's Chronicles. Even setting aside the problems caused by simple misprints, or the graver vagaries of censorship, both the 1577 and 1587 versions are characterized by a number of inconsistencies between the physical composition of the volumes and their paratextual apparatus. Among the confused and confusing practices of those charged with the physical production of the books are the use of internal title pages, different methodologies of pagination, and multiple pagination sequences, halting or continuing within and across volumes according to no reliable, logical pattern. Such inconsistencies have, in their turn, directly affected the two subsequent reproductions of the Chronicles: the 1807 reprint of the 1587 text and the dual-text, online edition at the Holinshed Project (<http://www.english.ox.ac.uk/holinshed>). Each of these, taking cues from the original editions, splits the texts up across a number of volumes—physical for the former, virtual for the latter—which map onto the sixteenth-century editions in ways which can be extremely difficult to follow. Since, for the sake of accuracy and consistency, the practice of the current volume has been to refer directly to the sixteenth-century editions, it has been necessary to construct a reference system taking into account all the material complexities of the books. The brief notes and tables below are designed both to explain the referencing system for those with access to physical copies of the 1577 and 1587 editions, and to mark out the relationships between those editions and their modern counterparts. This should allow the reader to navigate their way back to the source texts with relative ease, either in their original or surrogate forms.
The 1577 edition of the Chronicles was printed in two volumes, the first containing the descriptions of Britain, Scotland, and Ireland, along with the histories of Scotland and Ireland, and the history of England up to 1066; the second containing the chronicles of England from 1066 to 1576. In the first volume, each description and chronicle is given separate pagination, with the minor complication that in the descriptions of Britain and Ireland only the rectos are paginated, without counting the unpaginated versos. The histories of England, Scotland, and Ireland, and the description of Scotland are paginated in the standard fashion. The second volume is also paginated normally, but starts at page 291, as if following on from the history of England in the first volume. Each subsection is referred to as set out in Table A.
References to unnumbered versos in the descriptions of Britain and Ireland are given in relation to the preceding recto page. A certain amount of material—in the form of prefaces and dedicatory epistles—is inserted on unpaginated leaves between the paginated sections; all references to such materials are given by signatures.
The 1587 printing of the expanded Chronicles is in three volumes, the first containing the description of Britain and history of England to 1066, the second the descriptions and histories of Ireland and Scotland, the third the history of England from 1066 to 1586. The sections are separated and paginated as set out in table B.
The Oxford Handbook of Holinshed's Chronicles
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