John Donne is the most striking instance of a major Tudor-Stuart poet who flourished in the context of a manuscript culture. Donne's own attitude to their circulation was one of considerable ambivalence, and sometimes outright concern. The situation as regards Donne's prose works is slightly more complicated in that Donne had specific reasons for publishing in print, before his ordination, two substantial anti-Catholic polemics-his very longest work, Pseudo-martyr and Conclave Ignati or Ignatius his conclave. The survival of so many contemporary or near-contemporary manuscript texts of Donne's poems offers scholars special opportunities for the study of manuscript literary culture in this period. At the same time, it provides complex textual problems for modern editors who would seek to establish authentic texts where, without Donne's original autograph manuscripts to help them, none would seem to exist, and where the very history of manuscript transmission would seem to militate against the notion of authority.