At the outset, some decisions were made to prepare this anthology in accordance with a few basic guidelines:

Each of these choices has significant implications, and thus calls for a brief defence. Modernizing is of course a standard practice with editions intended for classroom use. Thanks to the growing accessibility of Renaissance books in digital format, the need for original spelling is no longer so pressing. Readability seems paramount. Moreover, modernizing should, if only on a subliminal level, help drive home the message that Elizabethan writers, while not exactly our contemporaries, were tussling with and can speak to problems not unfamiliar to twenty-first-century readers. As for punctuation, the plain fact is that in many early modern books it is not authorial but was often left to the whims of the compositors or printers. Sniffing at a modernized text thus seems as obstinate as refusing to attend a production of Shakespeare in modern dress or pronunciation.

Nevertheless, during the painstaking process of editing this anthology I became increasingly aware of the pitfalls of strict modernization. Due to the scope of the contents, implementing a rigid one-size-fits-all policy seemed far too constrictive. The verse of Skelton and the prose of Aubrey call for very different editorial interventions in both degree and kind. As its critics have observed, modernized spelling can blunt or efface the polysemous complexity of certain words. For instance, early modern readers encountering a “for rest” are subtly alerted to its status as a game preserve, a shelter where beasts go “for rest.” When a tract by Winstanley spells mankind as “Manking” and oppression as “oppresin,” can one be confident that these are mere typos and silently emend them? Similarly, it seems almost collusive to ignore that a royal hunt and bear-baiting took place at “Killingworth” (instead of Kenilworth) Castle.