This radically revisionist edition, as Michael Rudick himself admits, would scarcely have been possible without the pioneering work of Arthur F. Marotti, whose Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric (1995) first made the case for the importance of “scribal publication” to the textual bibliographer. Marotti showed that medieval practices of manuscript circulation had continued unbroken long after printed books became widely available—indeed, well into the Restoration period—and argued that the surviving compilations, whether in private notebooks or more formal anthologies with a coterie readership, were neglected witnesses to the sociohistorical context and reception history of an extensive body of lyric poetry. Before Marotti’s work, editors had largely neglected scribal publication because, as they saw it, the texts involved were unreliable both in terms of readings and in attribution, furnishing evidence more of the construction of a poet’s image, and the interests of readers, than of what the poet might actually have written and intended. Michael Rudick argues not just that such evidence is important to our understanding of Sir Walter Ralegh’s poetry, but that, with a few exceptions, it is the only kind of evidence we have.

Sir Walter Ralegh is a prime example of the poet as gentleman amateur.

Ralegh (1554–1618) is a prime example of the poet as gentleman amateur. After a conventional education at Oxford and the Inns of Court, he began his maritime adventures at the age of twenty-four, captaining a ship in an unsuccessful expedition to discover the Northwest Passage. Thereafter