*Plus a critique of the two 16th- and three 20th-century editions.
Friday, 25 September, 2026
3:00pm-4:30pm
Emmanuel College, Room 119
75 Queen’s Park Cres E
Text is unstable, not only, obviously, between editions, but also within a single edition—as through stop-press revisions. The text of Bude’s 1535 De transitu may also multiply within individual copies—as through offsetting and blind impression. Intimate physical knowledge of a printed book begs a critique of traditional editorial representations and translations of its text. An editor’s first move, to substitute for the text, begs the challenge to be posed repeatedly in this talk, “What part of text is not text?”.
Prof. McLeod retired from the University of Toronto’s Department of English in 2012. After early textual criticism of works by Holinshed, Harington, Shakespeare, Herbert, Donne, Hopkins, and Shaw, he switched to early continental printers, Estienne in Paris and Manuzio in Venice. He devised and marketed the McLeod Portable Collator, which allows for high-speed optical comparison of two copies of the same edition. But why buy one of his contraption$ when you can do the work simply by ¢rossing your eyes?
