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Nicholas McDowell, Thomas N. Corns, Ann Hughes, and David Loewenstein (eds), The Complete Works of Gerrard Winstanley, Notes and Queries, Volume 60, Issue 4, December 2013, Pages 605–607, https://doi.org/10.1093/notesj/gjt167
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Extract
WHAT would Winstanley have made of it? It is hard not to wonder how he would have reacted to seeing his pamphlets and broadsides encased in the creamy blue covers of this handsome Oxford English Texts edition of his complete writings. It is a pity that the Oxford English Texts series no longer carries the Clarendon Press imprint, for these volumes would then be known as the ‘Clarendon Winstanley’—something that Edward Hyde could surely never have envisaged even in his worst nightmares of a world turned upside down. The point is not entirely facetious. Is the urgency of Winstanley’s radical message—and it truly is a radical message at some points—lost in the memorializing (or embalming) of his prose in such a scholarly edition? It is difficult, perhaps inevitably so, to get any sense of the material form that these works took when they were first published from looking at the texts as they are uniformly and cleanly presented in this edition. Might the student and scholar not catch a better sense of what makes Winstanley exciting by looking at the original print formats on Early English Books On-Line, which convey with more immediacy the moment of unprecedented political and religious turbulence that enabled a small business man from Wigan without more than a grammar-school education (and perhaps not even that) to participate in public debate about the social and economic organization of English society? The case for a full-scale edition such as this could be more easily made if there were particularly complex bibliographical and textual issues involved in Winstanley’s works. But in fact the texts are reasonably straightforward, bar a high number of minor printer errors. It does appear, however, that Winstanley himself oversaw light revisions to five of his tracts when they were reissued in 1649 as Several Pieces Gathered into one Volume, so there is some basis for the argument that Winstanley himself was interested in the presentation and preservation of his writing and was not simply writing to the moment.
