Past into Present into Future

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Abstract Richard Tottel’s collection Songes and Sonettes (1557), later renamed Tottel’s Miscellany, is the first extant anthology of English lyrics. The collection is, on the one hand, an important beginning for the English national lyric tradition, but it is also, centrally, a document of transition. This article will sketch the position of the Miscellany as simultaneously looking back to medieval models of poetry and looking forward to the New Poetry of the Elizabethan period and as staging the transition from the manuscript publication to print publication of poetry, thus interweaving the national with specific media affordances of the new print medium. The collection does much more than establish a starting point for an emerging national canon of lyric poetry though. Centrally, it performs the merge between the personal and the national which became foundational for the anthology format long-term. And finally, the varying treatment of Tottel’s Miscellany in literary criticism positions the collection as a site that negotiates critical practice and aesthetic preferences of and for the different ages of its reception.