Manuscript Miscellanies in Early Modern England

Joshua Eckhardt is Associate Professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University. Daniel Starza Smith is British Academy Post-Doctoral Fellow at Lincoln College, Oxford.

• Before (and after) the miscellany: reconstructing Donne's Satyres in the Conway Papers. Donne, rhapsody and textual order. Early modern letter-books, miscellanies and the reading and reception of scribally copied letters. The rector of Santon Downham and the hieroglyphical watch of Prague. Unlocking the mysteries of Constance Aston Fowler's verse miscellany (Huntington Library MS HM 904): the Hand B scribe identified. Attribution and anonymity: Donne, Ralegh, and Fletcher in British Library, Stowe MS 962. Copying epigrams in manuscript miscellanies. Camden's Remaines and a pair of epideictic poetry anthologies. 'The disagreeable figure of a common-place' in Katherine Butler's late 17th-century verse miscellany.

'... a wide ranging collection of essays which explore the significant and sometimes subaltern manuscript culture of sixteenth- and especially seventeenth-century England.' Journal of Jesuit Studies 'The book poses numerous helpful questions about how we read miscellanies that did not conceive of themselves as miscellaneous, and how they might prompt us to rethink our own habits of reading.' Times Literary Supplement 'This fine study ... deserves to occupy a prominent place in the literature. Featuring a range of established and emerging scholars, it displays a potent blend of panoptic perspective - the theoretical issues raised by miscellany production and reception, such as material and social textuality - and forensic textual anaylsis.' Review of English Studies