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The poems and translations of John Polwhele ( c.1606–1672) are preserved in a single autograph manuscript, Bodleian MS English poetry f. 16. Some have received intermittent scholarly attention in recent times, often on account of Polwhele's admiration for and emulation of Ben Jonson. As well as other classical translations, Polwhele's manuscript includes eleven poems and passages from Horace, nearly all of them versions of odes and epodes. A handful have been printed or partially printed before. The purpose of this contribution is to provide transcribed texts of the complete set in a uniform way in a single document. As well as the Jonsonian connections of Polwhele's Horatian writings, they are of scholarly interest because they use Horace as a vehicle for comment on the translator's own times, including events of the English civil war period such as the regicide of 1649.

Traditional historico-critical music editions provide scholars and musicians with an edited score based on the interpretation of various sources such as the composer's autograph(s), letters and other materials from copyists or publishers. Their digital counterparts have the potential to offer new and more expanded ways to explore the work. This is based on the possibility to provide large amounts of source materials and to annotate more extensively (since printing costs are irrelevant). Furthermore, audio and video recordings of performances can be integrated. But, similarly important, the user interface makes it much easier to navigate in the complex network of cross-references between various source materials and the editor's annotations. The XML-based Music Encoding Initiative (MEI) format is the standard music representation format for digital music editions. In this article we discuss current MEI-based annotation practices and outline the current challenges for music annotations, including a discussion of anchoring options, the embedding of addressable elements in the local musical context, the annotation of audio, and the categorisation of annotations. This leads to a discussion of open questions such as the ability to secure authorship in open and reusable editions.

While no original autograph letters between the Hon. Miss Emily Lawless and Charles Darwin are known, Darwin was impressed by her observations and encouraged her to submit to Nature a manuscript account of fertilization of plants. This manuscript cannot be traced, nor can her note hypothesizing about the role of the transparent burnet moth in pollination in The Burren, County Clare, which apparently prompted Darwin to make contact with her.

Warren Hastings composed occasional short verse translations and imitations of classical Latin texts over many years, perhaps particularly in later life. Almost all extant examples are recorded in autograph in the multiple volumes of his diaries now in the British Library (in some cases, elsewhere too). They have never been printed nor given scholarly attention, but are of very high quality. This note contextualizes and provides transcriptions of six of these works, viz. translations and imitations of Lucan (two passages), Horace (three odes), and Catullus.

A lady here, whom we never saw, nor ever before heard of, sent her album for Wordsworth and myself to write in, with no other preliminaries than desiring the physician here, Dr. Jaques, to ask leave for her! When the book came, it proved to be full of pious effusions from all the most noted Calvinist preachers and missionaries. As some of these worthies had written in it texts in Hebrew, Chinese, and Arabic, I wrote in Greek, ‘If we say that we have sin,’ &c., and I did not write in it these lines, which the tempting occasion suggested:—

For 250 years, the vernacular spelling of the family name of the polymath Conrad Gessner of Zurich (1516–1565) has been in doubt, owing to an erroneous analogy with the Latin spelling, which does not require a double s. The history of this error is presented, followed by an examination of Gessner's own usage throughout his life, as it appears in autograph documents and works printed under his direction. Posthumous evidence and evidence from other members of the family and the community are also adduced to demonstrate consistency in the vernacular spelling of Gessner's name.