Rodney Dennis, the Curator of Manuscripts in the Harvard College Library for many years, has solicited 37 brief essays from a group of international scholars to illustrate the evidentiary usefulness of manuscripts as well as their complexities. Early and recent manuscripts from the collections of the Houghton Library illuminate the subject according to a four-fold arrangement: the establishment of text, the creation of text, the history of the manuscript, and the physical nature of the manuscript in relation to its contents.