Scholar Bishop: The Recollections and Diary of Narcissus Marsh, 1638-1696

• Published in: Seventeenth-century news 2004-04, Vol.62 (1/2), p.71
• Main Author: Mulvihill, Maureen E
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: British & Irish literature; Hutton, Richard; Irish literature; Louis XIV, King of France (1638-1715); Swift, Jonathan (1667-1745)
• ISSN: 0037-3028

While most historians associate Marsh with the great Dublin library which he founded in 1701, and whose tercentenary was celebrated in 2001, Gillespie's edition of Marsh's memoir offers a view of the private man, a man of frightening dreams, a man for whom political and social affairs were but an annoying distraction from his chief interests: reading and scholarship. While Gillespie's treatment of this important seventeenth-century text will be appreciated by nonspecialists, it is not likely to elicit praise by students of Book History and textual studies, who may wish that Gillespie and his publisher would have arrived at a more responsible editorial decision with regard to the memoir's presentation: namely, facing page facsimiles, a format which would not have been prohibitively expensive and one which would have given readers of all preparations and backgrounds a tremendously important, if essential, view of the character and "look" of Gillespie's eighteenth-century copy text in its original script and formatting. [...]the credit on the volume's back cover for the edition's handsome cover image is incomplete as it fails to identify Marsh's portraitist.