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Andrew Pinnock, Editorial, Early Music, Volume 43, Issue 2, May 2015, Page 197, https://doi.org/10.1093/em/cav021
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Generosity towards research competitors can be hard to summon up, but the acknowledgements pages in scholarly books and scholarly editions heap unfeigned praise on university and other librarians: work would not be possible without them, let alone as pleasant as it often is. Librarians involved in research themselves are a recognizable and, frankly, an intimidating breed—ferociously organized, unswervingly attentive to detail, in total command of their sources and, if really lucky, in a position to spend serious money on new acquisitions, building collections from which the whole research community profits.
The first four of the articles in this issue of Early Music mark the 80th birthday of Margaret Laurie, former Music Librarian of the University of Reading, and Purcellian extraordinaire. She has been at the forefront of the Purcell research field for over 50 years and is still a very active Purcell Society editor, trustee and committee member.
Margaret’s 1962 Cambridge PhD dissertation, ‘Purcell’s stage works’, laid bibliographical and methodological foundations strong enough to support half a century of rampantly expansive building on top of them. Her 1964 article ‘Did Purcell set The Tempest?’ (answer: no) removed a famous spoiler from the canon, facilitating far less fanciful stylistic analysis from then on and correcting the biographical record. Her 1995 paper ‘The “Cambury” Purcell manuscript’, read at the first international musicological conference in Maynooth, Ireland (published in 1996), reunited two long-estranged halves of an important theatre music manuscript, one now housed in Cambridge and the other in Oxford. Though most of her published scholarship appears in the introductions and commentaries to Purcell Society volumes, her occasional forays into other forms of print have been highly influential.
