Overview

This book examines one of the most pervasive, but also perplexing, textual phenomena of the early modern world: the manuscript miscellany. Faced with 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, it focuses on the practice of manuscript materials and traverses the myriad kinds of miscellaneous 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 many 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.

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9780191847134

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Angus Vine, Lecturer in Early Modern Literature, University of Stirling Angus Vine is Lecturer in Early Modern Literature at the University of Stirling. His research focuses on the literature and intellectual history of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. His interests include manuscript culture, book history, textual studies, Shakespeare, the works of Francis Bacon, epistemology, the organization of knowledge, antiquarianism, and history writing, and he has published on all these subjects. In parallel, he maintains an active research interest in the history, theory, and practice of education. He holds a postgraduate degree in Higher Education from the University of Sussex, in which he focused on curriculum design, and in 2017 won an award for outstanding teaching at Stirling.

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