Eckhardt and Smith 2014
Eckhardt, Joshua and Daniel Starza Smith, eds. Manuscript Miscellanies in Early Modern England. Burlington: Ashgate, 2014.
“Early modern books carried miscellaneous contents as regularly as bags and boxes did. Yet books have done a better job of keeping their diverse contents intact than have most other containers. Their producers clearly designed many of them to hold an array of texts: extracts from several authors; complete works in multiple genres; writing in a number of languages; even multimedia combinations of text, illustration, manuscript, and print. Later owners and users could turn originally uniform books into miscellanies as well, by inscribing additional texts in them or binding them with other books. Amending and combining books must have made people quite familiar with volumes that contained a range of texts and served more than one purpose. Indeed, the act of acquiring an early modern text regularly involved deciding whether or not to include it, or part of it, in a commonplace book, anthology, composite manuscript, sammelband , stack of papers, or other collection. Thus in early modern England, the books that scholars have come to call miscellanies must have seemed ubiquitous and, therefore, rather unremarkable.” (1)
often not called miscellanies but miscellanea, from miscere, to mix
challenges to reading them:
development of “miscellany” to describe mixed collection, not organized under headings, in 1610s, 1620s — most printed avoided term “miscellany,” preferring to list poetic genres, following Tottel — connections to anthologies, garlands, nosegays
1656 anthology by Abraham Wright, combines “poetick miscellany” with older idea of slips of flowers — start of wider use of “miscellanies” as name for multi-author compilations
Tottel had emphasized “songs and sonnets,” not called “Tottel’s miscellany” until 19c, when miscellanies referred to printed collections
mid 20c, scholars tended not to refer to manuscript collections as “miscellanies” — in 90s, word became very common