Richard Tottel, Miscellany

Matthias Bauer (Eberhard-Karls Universitat Tübingen); Sarah Briest (Eberhard-Karls Universitat Tübingen); Sara Rogalski (Eberhard-Karls Universitat Tübingen); Angelika Zirker (Eberhard-Karls Universitat Tübingen)

Ed. by J A Roe, University of York
The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 1.2.1.03: English Writing and Culture: Renaissance (Elizabethan and Jacobean periods) , 1485-1625.
Vol. editors: William M. Hamlin (Washington State University), J A Roe (University of York), Virginia Mason Vaughan (Clark University), Ema Vyroubalova (Trinity College Dublin)

Dates

First circulation or publication 1557

Places

England (Country of Origin)

Genres and Modes

Poem collection
Sonnet

Resources

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Recommended Reading

Richard Tottel’s

Miscellany

is an early and extremely influential English poetry anthology, first published in 1557 under the title

Songes and Sonnets

. By 1585 it had gone into seven editions; the imprint then passed from Tottel to John Windet (in 1585), and to Robert Robinson for the ninth and final edition in 1587.

The Miscellany was mainly targeted, as Holton and MacFaul suggest, at “Inns of Court students, who seem to have been as much in need of the flowers of courtly rhetoric and verse embodied therein as they were of legal textbooks” (Holton and MacFaul ix). Tottel supposedly also used the miscellany to “test […] the waters for a larger trade market”, attempting to find out whether or not poetry “would […] sell” (Holton and MacFaul xi-x). In particular, he wanted

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1542 words

Citation: Bauer, Matthias, Sarah Briest, Sara Rogalski, Angelika Zirker. "Miscellany". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 30 August 2020 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=39340, accessed 21 November 2024.]

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Richard Tottel, Miscellany

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