Hesperides, of the Muses' Garden: The Story of a 17th-Century Literary Manuscript

Hesperides, or the Muses’ Garden is a seventeenth-century manuscript commonplace book, extant in several manuscripts. Through a comparison of the different versions, much can be established about the production and dating of these texts. The talk will discuss the roles of the royalist publisher Humphrey Moseley, who had initially entered Hesperides in the Stationers’ Register and the Victorian Shakespearean James Orchard Halliwell-Phillipps, who cut a version of Hesperides into pieces, and will reflect on the meaning of archival research.