Miscellany

[3] In contrast to anthologies, whose aim is to give a selective and canonical view of literature, miscellanies were produced for the entertainment of a contemporary audience and so instead emphasise collectiveness and popularity.

In the early modern period miscellanies remained significant in a more restricted literary context, both in manuscript and printed forms, mainly as a vehicle for collections of shorter pieces of poetry, but also other works.

Manuscript miscellanies were carefully compiled by hand, but also circulated, consumed, and sometimes added to in this organic state – they were a prominent feature of 16th and early 17th century literary culture.

The Lacnunga is a 10th or 11th century miscellany in Old English, Latin and Old Irish, with health-related texts taking a wide range of approaches, from herbal medicine and other medical procedures, to prayers and charms.

The lavishly illuminated late 13th century North French Hebrew Miscellany contains mostly biblical and liturgical texts, but also legal material, over 200 poems, and calendars.

The Trevelyon Miscellany of 1608, an oversized illustrated manuscript of 594 pages, depicts a wide range of subjects including herbal cures, biblical stories, a list of the mayors of London, proverbs, calendars, and embroidery patterns.

The earlier tradition of manuscript verse continued to be produced in the 16th century and onwards, and many of these early examples are preserved in national, state, and university libraries, as well as in private collections.

[13] Although fewer medieval verse miscellanies have been preserved, the Auchinleck Manuscript survives as a good example: it was produced in London in the 1330s and offers a rare snapshot of pre-Chaucerian Middle English poetry.

[17] The poetry in these miscellanies varied widely in genre, form, and subject, and would frequently include: love lyrics, pastorals, odes, ballads, songs, sonnets, satires, hymns, fables, panegyrics, parodies, epistles, elegies, epitaphs, and epigrams, as well as translations into English and prologues and epilogues from plays.

The practice of attributing poems in miscellanies was equally varied: sometimes editors would carefully identify authors, but most often the miscellaneous form would allow them to disregard conventions of authorship.

Due to early copyright laws, lesser-known authors would regularly play no part in the printing process, receive no remuneration or royalties, and their works could be freely redistributed (and sometimes even pirated) once in the public domain.

However, they were also marketed with practical purposes in mind: as educative moral guides (Miscellanies, Moral and Instructive, in Prose and Verse, 1787),[ebook 3] as repositories of useful information (A Miscellany of Ingenious Thoughts and Reflections in Verse and Prose, 1721–30), as elocutionary aids (William Enfield’s The Speaker, 1774–1820),[ebook 4] and as guides for poetical composition (Edward Bysshe's The Art of English Poetry, 1702–62).

One-off, occasional miscellanies might prove popular and warrant further volumes or editions, such as political pamphlets (Poems on Affairs of State, 1689–1705),[ebook 8] resort-based works (Tunbrigalia: or the Tunbridge Miscellany, 1712–40), local productions (The Yorkshire Garland, 1788),[ebook 9] and courtly, coterie or collegiate collections (Thomas Warton’s The Oxford Sausage: or select poetical pieces written by the most celebrated wits of the University of Oxford, 1764–80).

Robert Dodsley’s hugely popular Collection of Poems by Several Hands (1748)[ebook 11] was copied entirely by Dublin booksellers in 1751, though it also underwent other, more minor piracies in the English literary market – such as unauthorized continuations, supplements, or companion texts attempting to exploit the reputation of the original.

[22] Although poetry maintained cultural pre-eminence for most of the 18th century, it was at the same time retreating before the advance of prose, and particularly the rise of the novel, as the new dominant form of literary expression in the West.

Barbara M. Benedict argues: As readers and publishers matured in the eighteenth century, however, another form appeared that challenged the dominance of the miscellany: the ‘anthology’, a comprehensive selection of the best fashionable verse.

[32]Miscellanies frequently placed emphasis on variety, novelty and fashionability, providing their readers with a range of different pieces by various writers, but also keeping them abreast of the newest developments in the literary market.

From the beginning of the 18th century, verse miscellanies were gathering together a selection of poetic works by different authors, past and present, and so played a part in the development of the concept of the English canon.

Because of the variety and novelty they emphasise, as well as the anonymity of authorship they could offer, miscellanies often enabled the inclusion and so expression of more submerged voices, such as those of women, and more marginal forms of writing, such as the comic, the curious, and the crude.

[37]Miscellanies also presented themselves as performing an important cultural or curatorial role, by preserving unbound sheets, fragments and ephemera which otherwise would have been lost – and thus offering a unique insight into the vibrant literary life of the 18th century.

Late twentieth-century criticism has drawn attention to the cultural and literary importance of these non-canonical, lesser-known and ephemeral kinds of popular verse – such as the recent discovery of a poem spuriously attributed to John Milton, "An Extempore upon a Faggot".

Roger Lonsdale notes in his influential anthology, The New Oxford Book of Eighteenth-Century Verse (1984): "One of the most interesting poets [from this period] is the ubiquitous ‘Anonymous’, whose voice almost never registers in conventional literary history".

[40]In light of such developments there have arisen projects attempting to make the vast number and array of verse miscellanies more accessible to modern researchers and readers, most prominently through the process of online digitization.