Centuries of Meditations

Notes on Sources

How this edition was made. The copy-text, the correction of the electronic transcription against the 1908 printing, and the collation of the whole text with Traherne’s manuscript are described in the Note on the Text, and the corrections are listed in the Textual Notes. The facts of the life, the manuscripts and the reception were gathered from primary texts and standard reference works, chiefly the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, the Catalogue of English Literary Manuscripts and the early reviews themselves. Critics are quoted only where their words were read at the source or in a named secondary source. Unconfirmed claims were left out.

The notes. There are some 350 notes, about one to every two hundred and thirty words of text. They identify Traherne’s quotations and echoes of Scripture, the Prayer Book and the Articles, name the persons, places and stories he mentions, gloss older words and senses, and translate every Latin and Greek phrase. They trace his philosophy to its sources, Plato and Aristotle in the Greek, Pico, Seneca and Augustine in the Latin, and Plutarch, Gregory of Nazianzus, Aquinas and the Hermetic books in standard translations. Where the text is interrupted or revised, they say what the manuscript shows. Scripture is given in the words of the King James Bible. Dobell’s own notes are not reproduced, but most of what they establish is carried into the notes here. No note has been taken from a modern annotated edition of Traherne, and the notes reveal nothing about the book before the reader reaches it.

Open questions. Several questions remain open. The friend for whom the book was written is unnamed, and the tradition that she was Susanna Hopton is plausible but undocumented. The date of composition is uncertain, though the years around 1670 to 1674 are the usual estimate. A small number of doubtful places in the manuscript keep Dobell’s reading. Several of Traherne’s sources have not been found. They include the Latin sentence he gives to Seneca (I.15), the couplet on the bounded sea (II.11) and the Platonic maxim on the citadel of reason (III.60). Luther’s saying on covetousness (IV.34), the maxim ascribed to Eusebius (IV.79) and Gregory of Nazianzus’s praise of right reason (IV.81) are also untraced. Some reviews of 1908, in the Times Literary Supplement, the Church Times and other papers, could not be consulted. It is not known who wrote the title on the flyleaf or lettered the spine with Vaughan’s name, how the manuscripts left Traherne’s family, or why the book stops where it does.