Editing William Camden (section)

==''Remaines Concerning Britain''==
Camden's ''Remaines of a Greater Worke, Concerning Britaine'' was a collection of themed historical essays, conceived as a more popular companion to ''Britannia''. This was the only book Camden wrote in English, and, contrary to his own misleading description of it in the first edition (1605) as being merely the "rude rubble and out-cast rubbish" of a greater and more serious work (i.e. ''Britannia''), manuscript evidence clearly indicates that he planned this book early on and as a quite separate project. ''Remaines'' subsequently ran into many editions. The standard modern edition, edited by R. D. Dunn, is based on the surviving manuscript material and the three editions published in Camden's lifetime (1605, 1614, and 1623).<ref>{{cite book |first=William |last=Camden |editor-first=R. D. |editor-last=Dunn |title=Remains Concerning Britain |url=https://archive.org/details/remainsconcerni02camdgoog |publisher=University of Toronto Press |place=Toronto |year=1984 |isbn=0-8020-2457-2}}</ref> Editions published after 1623 are unreliable and contain unauthentic material, especially the [[bowdlerized]] edition of 1636 by [[John Philipot]]. [[Thomas Moule]]'s edition of 1870, of which many copies survive, is based on Philipot's 1674 edition.

Camden's ''Remaines'' is often the earliest or sole usage cited for a word in the ''[[Oxford English Dictionary]]''; and further significant early usages (including new words and antedatings) have since been identified.<ref>{{cite journal |first=R. D. |last=Dunn |title=Additions to ''OED'' from William Camden's ''Remains'' 1605, 1614, 1623 |journal=[[Notes and Queries]] |volume=231 |issue=4 |year=1986 |pages=451–460 }}</ref> ''Remaines'' also contains the first-ever alphabetical list of [[English proverbs]], since heavily exploited by the editors of the principal modern dictionaries of proverbs (including those of [[Burton Egbert Stevenson|Burton Stevenson]] (1949), M. P. Tilley (1950) and the third edition of the ''Oxford Dictionary of English Proverbs'', edited by [[F. P. Wilson]] (1970)). Scattered through the book are a number of additional proverbs not recorded elsewhere.<ref>{{cite journal |first=R. D. |last=Dunn |title=English Proverbs from William Camden's ''Remains Concerning Britain'' |journal=[[Huntington Library Quarterly]] |volume=49 |issue=3 |year=1986 |pages=271–275 |doi=10.2307/3817125 |jstor=3817125 }}</ref>