A medieval specialist in the English department at the University of Otago, she is curating "Faces of Authorship: Constructing the author in medieval and early modern books" in the de Beer Gallery in the University of Otago Central Library, which opens tomorrow.
"It's an interesting comparison with the internet. We talk about the digital age changing the way we understand information, but really it's not that much of a change. There have always been multiple-authored works and contested ideas about what counts as an author. The internet hasn't changed that at all, but perhaps it's reminded us of it," Dr Marshall says.
In this exhibition of items from the library's special collections, she explores some of the forms of authorship, many of which we might not expect.
Chronicles or histories, which have been used as evidence for what happened in the past, often have many different authors, each putting their own spin on ideas. Sometimes they are based on eyewitness accounts and sometimes on fictitious accounts, she says.
Among those on display are Holinshed's Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland, which Shakespeare used as a source for some of his plays.
"It's an interesting one, because there are two editions, but Holinshed only had something to do with the first edition, and it wasn't on his own. He was working under someone else.
"It's actually the second edition that's far more famous and interesting, because a group of other people took over after Holinshed's death and revised it, revamped it and changed it, then it underwent a great deal of censorship, so the censors became part of the whole authorship process because they took bits out and changed them. So what we call Holinshed's chronicles is really the work of a number of people which reflects the social and political concerns of the time," she says.
Editors and translators also change, rewrite and contribute to the meaning of texts.
An uncommon work, because most copies were burnt when imported to Protestant England from France where it was published, is Elizabeth Cary's 1630 translation of a French Catholic work, The Reply of the Most Illustrious Cardinal of Perron.
"She's quite a remarkable woman. She had 10 children and converted to Catholicism. Her husband, in an effort to get her to recant, tried to starve her to death. In defiance, she refused to go along with this and translated this work in response. It's very pro-Catholic and at a time that was very Protestant in England.
"She outlived her husband, but still had to go through an immense battle and ended up having to kidnap her children to get them out of England and into France. It's extraordinary, but translation clearly in her mind had the authority of an author, a way of making a statement."
There are also 17th-century books concerning King Charles II and the popish plot. He was regarded as pro-Catholic and his brother James, who later became king, was a Catholic. Various opponents proposed various types of plot to assassinate him, and others conspired against those conspirators. It was very confused but a response to political change, she says.
When she was looking through one of the books, a picture fell out that turned out to be a satirical cartoon of a two-faced Charles II carrying a show box of Catholics on his back and falling into a mire. The printer was fined 500.
"At first it seems quite obvious that political circumstances might cause someone to write anonymously or conceal their identity, but when you look at it, the reasons for revealing a name or not, or using a pseudonym, or even someone else's name are quite complex," she says.
A couple of medieval works in the exhibition have the author's name hidden in the text. Italian Francesco Colonna's Hypnerotomachia Poliphili: The Strife of Love in a Dream was thought to be anonymous for a long time until someone discovered the first letter of every chapter spelt out his name.
An English work, The Testament of Love, was attributed to Chaucer for many centuries, although written in a different style from Chaucer's, but the first letter of each chapter reveals Thomas Usk's name, she says.
Other books, like books of hours which contained prayers and other religious texts, were commissioned by wealthy people and often beautifully illuminated on vellum, as the 15th-century French book of hours in this exhibition. They appear to have no author, but someone must have written the prayers and other texts originally, she says.
The Bible, whose authors we tend not to think of, has been translated into many languages through the ages, such as the King James version and various modern English versions. Each time the meaning gets changed because the language changes, she says.
This is in contrast to the Koran, the holy book of Islam, which has remained unchanged in Arabic since it was first written down. A loose-leaf copy of the Koran handwritten in the 19th century is on display.
Dr Marshall has found editions of poems such as Sir Gawaine and the Green Knight, and the stories of Robin Hood, and trickster Reynard the Fox, that have been told and retold by many different writers over the centuries.
"It raises the question that when you retell a story, is it your own story?" she says.
Copyright law as we know it didn't exist until the 18th century, but the idea of intellectual property did. John Stow complained about others stealing work from his Chronicle of London, but he took his information from elsewhere.
Later it seemed as if copyright applied to some types of writing, such as poetry, but not to others, such as recipes, she says.
Some writers preferred to use a pseudonym rather than their own names. One such was the writer of The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, published in the late 14th century. He claimed to live in St Albans in England and to have travelled to Jerusalem and then across Asia to China.
It was a popular book in the Middle Ages and contained odd illustrations, strange-looking people and weird and wonderful things he said he encountered.
"The fact is we don't know who wrote this and we think Sir John Mandeville is a pseudonym.
"He took all his information from other people's work and didn't actually travel anywhere," she says.
However, the book remained popular. It was seen as a serious travel book and many explorers and travellers, including Christopher Columbus, owned copies.
SEE IT
"Faces of Authorship" is at the de Beer Gallery in the University of Otago Central Library from tomorrow until March 25, 2011, to coincide with the conference of the Australian and New Zealand Association for Medieval and Early Modern Studies in February.
The idea for the exhibition came out of Dr Marshall's Marsden-funded research project on medieval literary anonymity, which, she says, has never been fully explored although 95% of all medieval literature is anonymous.
