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Are These Songs Forgeries Started in 1720 and Completed in 1982? Jan M. Ziolkowski, Editor, Translator, The Cambridge Songs (Carmina Cantabrigiensia) (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2020). Hardcover. 410pp, 6X9". Illustrations. ISBN: 978-0-674-25846-4.
I am nearing the point when the first section of my British Renaissance Re-Attribution series will be released to the public. While I have dated this project as one that re-assigns texts from the "Renaissance", when I have used my computational-linguistics attribution method to test texts that were initially undated or that include sections that echo works that were ghostwritten by the Workshop, I have discovered that there are texts currently claimed to have been first-published across the first seven decades of the sixteenth century that were actually first-published significantly later. Examples include Verstegan and Harvey's Meditation of a Penitent Sinner currently claimed to have been first-published in 1560 and Percy's Like Will to Like interlude that appears to have been back-dated to 1568. If some of these early texts and the Workshop's output are set aside, I have been interested in learning what remaining texts currently claimed to have been first-published in Britain actually pre-date the Workshop. It would have been far more difficult for any group of writers and publishers to monopolize British publishing if there had really been institutions and scholars in place before them who were practiced in writing and publishing. On this search for genuine original British-made compositions, Cambridge Songs is clearly exactly what I have been searching for, as: the handwritten manuscripts are indeed in an original handwriting style, the structure of these pieces are very different from the Workshop's output, and they are written in Latin (confirming my suspicion that the Workshop gained a monopoly on English-language publishing because very few people in Britain could read and write in this relatively new language when they started). During my research into the Workshop, I have not come across any citations of these "songs"; this means this text was probably locked away and inaccessible to scholars during the Renaissance; otherwise, the Workshop would have probably imitated and borrowed from it along with translating it and alluding to it. Thus, modern scholars should really be more excited about this particular publication than they have been. Then, again some of...