Christ Church, Oxford, and Beyond: Folger MS V.a.345 and Its Manuscript and Print Sources

Abstract

Folger MS V.a.345 is an early seventeenth-century English manuscript of about 500 poems, with some additional prose pieces. It is one of the largest surviving manuscript anthologies from the period, drawing its contents from both manuscript and print sources, pointing to the two-way traffic between the two systems of literary transmission. Compiled by someone with Oxford (probably Christ Church) connections, it has not only an unusual number of pieces from printed volumes from the period, especially from books of epigrams, but also a very large number of apparently unique copies of poems that do not appear in any other surviving manuscript or print documents. Reflecting the collecting habits of well-educated gentlemen, who carried over from their university years into their later (typically metropolitan) careers a taste for witty verse and prose that were marks of social distinction as well as of political interests, this collection, like some other contemporary large anthologies which incorporate texts from a field of writing larger than that defined by traditional literary history, engaged in anthologizing practices that were imitated in print culture from the 1640s through the Restoration period.