This book sets out to mediate from a literary perspective between the impressive computer-based work on attribution studies which has been done over the last four decades and a much older tradition of such studies, which, considered as an organised scholarly enterprise, reaches back as far as the great library of Alexandria and embraces the formation of the Jewish and Christian biblical canons. It is not the work of a specialist in attribution but of a scholar for whom the determination of authorship has repeatedly been a crucial element in other kinds of investigation. In reviewing the existing literature I soon realised that fundamental questions concerning criteria of proof in establishing attributions remained unexamined: these are addressed in my concluding chapter. It was also a surprise to find that a discipline whose subject matter was individual authorship had given very little attention to what it meant by individualness – a matter that I also try to remedy. The book is directed equally at those who need to orientate themselves in the field in order to investigate particular cases and those whose primary interest is in wider issues of argument and methodology.

My first practical involvement with questions of attribution arose during many years of work on the thousands of political and libertine satires that circulated in early-modern and Enlightenment Britain, for the most part anonymously and in manuscript.