ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the second of Leslie Howsam's components by examining the materiality of Cosmo Innes's source editions. This is an important element of the analysis, especially since it has so far treated the source volumes that Innes and his contemporaries produced as purely textual representations of the sources they contained. The Register of the Monastery of Paisley, preserved in the Library of Advocates at Edinburgh, from which the present work is printed, is a manuscript on paper of a small folio size, consisting of 274 leaves. The habit of describing manuscripts is one symptom of this and seems to have been a particular feature of editions on the medieval church. The use of manuscript facsimiles in published editions was by no means confined to those that Innes edited. Innes's desire to construct a narrative of national progress and distinctiveness within the Union was a major influence on the NMS.
