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This book examines one of the most pervasive, but also perplexing, textual phenomena of the early modern world: the manuscript miscellany. Faced with multiple problems of definition, categorization, and (often conflicting) terminology, modern scholars have tended to dismiss the miscellany as disorganized and chaotic. Miscellaneous Order radically challenges that view by uncovering the various forms of organization and order previously hidden in early modern
manuscript books. Drawing on original literary and historical research, and examining both the materiality of early modern manuscripts and their contents, this book sheds new light on the transcriptive and archival practices of early modern Britain, as well as on the broader intellectual context of manuscript
culture and its scholarly afterlives.
Based on extensive archival research, and interdisciplinary in both subject and matter, Miscellaneous Order focuses on the myriad kinds of manuscript compiled and produced in the early modern era. Showing that the miscellany was essential to the organization of knowledge across a range of genres and disciplines, from poetry to science, and from recipe books to accounts, it proposes a new model for understanding the proliferation of manuscript material in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries. By restoring attention to 'miscellaneous order' in this way, it shows that we have fundamentally misunderstood how early modern men and women read, wrote, and thought. Rather than a textual form characterized by an absence of order, the miscellany, it argues, operated as an epistemically and
aesthetically productive system throughout the early modern period.
List of contents
- Introduction: Defining the Miscellany
- 1: Commonplace Failure
- 2: The Early Modern Omnigatherum
- 3: Chorography and Antiquarian Compilation
- 4: Merchants and Miscellany Making
- 5: Sir Hugh Plat's Network of Notebooks
- 6: Bacon's Filing
- Coda: Whither Miscellany Culture?
- Appendix: John Ramsey's 'Catalogus Authorum'
- Glossary
- Bibliography
About the author
Angus Vine is Lecturer in Early Modern Literature at the University of Stirling. His research focuses on the literary and intellectual history of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. His interests include manuscript culture, book history, textual scholarship, epistemology, antiquarianism, and editing. He is the author of In Defiance of Time: Antiquarian Writing in Early Modern England (2010, with Abigail Shinn), The Copious Text: Encyclopaedic Books in Early Modern England (2014), and (with Katie Halsey) Shakespeare and Authority: Citations, Conceptions, and Constructions (2018). He is currently editing Volume 3 of The Oxford Francis Bacon (with Richard Serjeantson) and Volume 4 of The Oxford Traherne (with Ann Moss).
Summary
Explores the connection between miscellaneity and the organization of knowledge in the early modern period and the sophisticated organizational strategies that lay behind early modern miscellanies and notebooks to offer a re-evaluation of the early modern understanding of transcription itself.
Additional text
It is a valuable study for scholars interested in better understanding miscellanies and early modern manuscript culture more generally.
Report
Having read Vine's book...historians might no longer put an odd volume aside, take note of this as a "miscellaneous" item, and move on. Instead, some might seek to understand what these texts tell us about the rich and diverse figures that once produced them. Tom Tölle, Universität Hamburg, H-Soz-Kult
