A Book Historiography of the English Poetry Miscellany

Abstract

abstract: Whereas book history focuses on original sources, book historiography zooms out to bring book histories themselves into view. Like other forms of historiography, it analyzes the writing of history and therefore the labor of historians—in this case, the work of the literary and book historians who have written of the poetry miscellanies of fourteenth-to seventeenth-century England. The article traces scholars' retrospective application of the word "miscellany" to these books of poems. It surveys them in the order in which historians have called them miscellanies. This order might seem backward, because scholars generally imposed the word on printed books before manuscripts, and on early modern manuscripts before medieval manuscripts. At the beginning and the center of this renaming process was Tottel's so-called miscellany, Songes and Sonettes .