William Clark

On textual criticism, critical bibliography, antiquarian scholarship, forgery, and the administration of archives and institutional libraries.

History is not a pure object standing apart from our observation of it. It is the result of scholarly practice, and the shape of that practice shapes what comes down to us. History rests on documents, and documents are not unblemished. They do not simply exist, unproblematically. Somebody found them, kept them, read them, copied them, edited them, and decided which of them could be trusted.

This site is about the people who did that work: the antiquaries, editors, bibliographers, librarians and forgers who have exercised control over the textual record, and the institutions—the College of Arms, the Public Record Office, the British Museum Library—through which they exercised it.

I am at work on a book, Our Temple Was Made Without Hands, a meta-historical novel presented as a critical-variorum edition of a document that never existed. Alongside it I write essays, and build tools for the bibliographical problems the research keeps running into.

The most recent essay is Defenders of the Text, on what textual criticism and large language models have in common—both being, in their different ways, machines for generating text that was never there.