Binding: Hardcover
Description: 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.
Title: Miscellaneous Order Manuscript Culture And The Early Modern Organization Of Knowledge
Author(s): Vine Angus (Lecturer In Early Modern Literature University Of Stirling)
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Barcode: 9780198809708
Pages: 302 Pages, 22 Halftones
Publication Date: 3/17/2019
Category: Literary Studies: C 1500 To C 1800