Mixed methods: making the manuscript miscellany in early modern England

Abstract

In early modern England, one of the most prevalent mediums in which texts were stored and transmitted was the manuscript miscellany. These volumes were often produced over long periods of time, in a non-linear manner, and by the hands of numerous scribes. They thus survive today as seemingly impenetrable cacophonies of hands. This thesis presents a new method through which we might better account for the polyvocality and structural complexity of such volumes, and the principles through which they were organized. It teases out the challenges faced by scribes and the opportunities afforded to them as they worked at the intersection between collaborative, communal miscellany-making and individual organizational practices.

Heretofore, the agency and creativity that often underpin such unwieldy manuscript miscellanies has been largely obscured. By unravelling the material and textual histories of these volumes, however, this thesis uncovers the various tools with which their makers lent new literary coherence to the texts they compiled. It therefore concludes that such volumes should no longer be viewed as inherently haphazard but as generative sites from which complex and intersecting modes of collaboration, knowledge production, and scribal agency can be recovered, ones from which new and often-overlooked textual actors can be unearthed.