Introduction

This isn't a ‘source book’ in the sense that it aims to elaborate the sources that, say, a great work of art might have drawn upon. A source book of Shakespeare's The Tempest, for example, gives us reports of a Bermudan shipwreck, or an account of the celebrity magician John Dee, inspiration for the mighty Prospero. Such source books uncover the origins of ideas. This is a source book in a different sense. It doesn't come at the end of a piece of work — a study after the fact. Instead, it aims to be a source from which new things might flow — the source in the sense that a river has a source — the bubbling spot of origin from where journeys begin.