Shaftesbury's 'Letter Concerning Enthusiasm' revisited

A. Owen Aldridge's Anglia article, 'Variants in Shaftesbury's Letter Concerning Enthusiasm' illustrates a divide between literary criticism and textual scholarship resulting from the specialized technical knowledge fundamental to the latter. His argument for a single 1708 typesetting of the Third Earl of Shaftesbury's Letter Concerning Enthusiasm (and his consequent rejection of my case for two 1708 editions, the second combining reset and reimpressed pages) is weakened by misconceptions regarding both eighteenth-century printing practices and my discussion of the 1708 Letter. Aldridge greatly underrepresents spacing variants that provide important evidence of line-by-line resetting, confuses modern with eighteenth-century definitions of edition, and misrepresents my logic in establishing a chronology of printing for the editions that I have identified.