Sue
You have provoked some interesting discussions and appear to be coming from a different angle. As far as I'm concerned this surely must be welcomed. I think you are absolutely correct in your second sentence (The others are pretty good too he added hastily). I do think that Harker has something sensible to say on this. The early collectors are a perfect example. They assembled this body of selective material and then 50 years later their followers decided to justify this with a 'definition'. There was definitely an English lead on this and a lot of the objections from other countries' scholars were based on this selectivity.

However, the descriptors do largely work for this body of selective material. Unfortunately for them some of the descriptors also work on some of the material they rejected.