Bacon’s Filing

This chapter examines Francis Bacon’s interest in the management of knowledge, arguing that this was the key to his programme for the reform and advancement of learning. Focusing on his interest in filing as a practice, a process, and a metaphor, and drawing on both his archival and material habits and the discussions of the organization of knowledge in his philosophical works, the chapter uncovers a series of previously unheralded influences on his epistemology. The chapter offers new readings of Bacon’s two most significant manuscript miscellanies, the Promus of Formularies and Elegancies and the Commentarius solutus, before concluding with his equally miscellaneous final work, the Sylva sylvarum. Bacon emerges from this chapter as the crucial figure for Miscellaneous Order as a whole, with many of the book’s key ideas and themes (knowledge as a storehouse, the transfer of information, the mercantile model of waste book and ledger) revisited and re-examined in light of both his practice and his philosophy.

Sir Hugh Plat’s Network of Notebooks

This chapter discusses the notebooks of the inventor, writer on agriculture, brewer, and businessman, Sir Hugh Plat. Building on the discussion of knowledge transfer in Chapter 4, this chapter shows how Plat’s surviving manuscripts constitute a ‘network of notebooks’. Focusing on the copying and circulation of information across these volumes, the chapter reveals how Plat developed a system of annotation, which progressed from hodgepodge miscellanies, organized only by date of entry, to topically rigorous manuscripts arranged by subject. This system was essential to Plat’s lifelong project to improve recipes, information, and ultimately knowledge itself. Drawing on his printed commonplace books as well, the chapter reveals that Plat’s ‘network’ was grounded in humanist methods of reading, but that he also transformed those precepts and practices by extending them from textual examples to incorporate observed particulars and much more miscellaneous material as well.

Chorography and Antiquarian Compilation

This chapter examines the miscellany’s links with antiquarian compilation and chorography (the branch of geography concerned with the particulars of a specific region or place). Its primary interest is with textual production in the two fields, and with the practices of annotation and organization that allowed antiquaries and chorographers to turn their heterogeneous notes into orderly narratives. The manuscript miscellany, it argues, was essential to the kind of assemblage scholars carried out here. Compilers discussed in the chapter include William Lambarde, Edmund Tilney, George Owen of Henllys, Abraham Ortelius, and most extensively William Camden. The chapter shows that this kind of antiquarian assemblage was most commonly conceived as a kind of stitching or tailoring, in keeping with one of the more frequent early modern metaphors for textual and miscellaneous production.

Coda

This concluding chapter explores the geographical scope and extent of the textual culture described in previous chapters. Revisiting a number of the individuals discussed earlier in the book (including Hill, Oxinden, and Owen of Henllys), it shows that miscellany culture flourished in the provinces and regions as well as in the more familiar sites of literary and scholarly production. In fact, it is shown that it emerged in some of its most striking and innovative ways in places that were a considerable distance geographically (as well as often intellectually) from more typical literary locations such as Oxford, Cambridge, and the Inns of Court in London. In parallel, the chapter also shows that this kind of textual culture had an unexpected longevity, extending well into the eighteenth century, as examples including John Locke and Thomas Gray show.

Merchants and Miscellany Making

This chapter examines mercantile miscellanies. Although the connections between merchants, writing-masters, and scriveners have long been known, surprisingly little attention has been paid to merchants as owners or compilers of manuscript miscellanies. This chapter fills that gap by examining a number of mercantile manuscripts that possess a distinct generic miscellaneity, including those compiled by Robert Williams (who traded in Livorno), William Hill, and the Leche family of Chester. In discussing these manuscripts, it adds to current conversations about the influence on English manuscript culture of the Italian zibaldone and Luca Pacioli’s double-entry system, as well as revealing hitherto unknown continuities between humanist and mercantile culture. Central to the chapter is a discussion of early modern ‘knowledge transfer’, which is illustrated through a series of account books belonging to the scrivener Robert Glover and then by reference to Nicolas Maes’s painting The Account Keeper.

The Early Modern Omnigatherum

This chapter turns to explicitly miscellaneous volumes and, in particular, to manuscripts which sought to encompass ‘everything’ within encyclopaedic collections. Placing these volumes within the larger context of early modern encyclopaedism, the chapter reveals a vibrant, but previously unheralded, encyclopaedic manuscript tradition. While scholarship on the encyclopaedia has tended to focus on print projects, this chapter uncovers a series of volumes which remind us that the manuscript tradition was similarly significant. Furthermore, these manuscripts constitute an essential link between the lists of words and commonplaces, which were produced in the sixteenth century, and the histories of knowledge that started to emerge in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Compilers discussed here include Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc, William Rawley, and Henry Oxinden. Appropriating a term used by the sixteenth-century compiler, John Fitzjames, the chapter classifies such manuscripts as examples of the ‘early modern omnigatherum’.

Commonplace Failure

This chapter addresses the genre most associated with (but also more often confused with) the miscellany: the commonplace book. Starting from the frequently made observation that commonplace books are strikingly underused, this chapter argues that we should not see this failure as a rejection of the culture of annotation and transcription, but as a reflection of the increasing move towards miscellaneity. Exploring the metaphors used by humanist pedagogues to describe the practice, and examining the mise-en-page of a number of manuscripts, it shows that the spatial disposition of knowledge persisted in miscellaneous manuscripts long after the commonplace book itself faded from use. Both metaphor and mise-en-page, moreover, show that the spatial organization of knowledge was intimately connected with the memorial function of miscellanies, and so also with the vexed questions of search and retrieval and future use. Central to the chapter are John Foxe’s successive attempts to produce printed commonplace books and their use by various owners and readers.

Introduction

This chapter defines miscellaneity and the miscellany. It traces their material manifestations in early modern culture and establishes key pedagogical precepts and practices in relation to both, as well as examining their literary discussions and depictions. It also surveys the essential models of miscellaneity available at the time, identifying Aulus Gellius’ Noctes Atticae as the most important literary antecedent for the early modern works that are discussed in subsequent chapters of the book. It begins with a discussion of the satirized miscellanist Sir Politic Would-Be (in Ben Jonson’s Volpone), using Jonson’s play to provide an overview of the book’s aims and intentions, before reviewing the relevant scholarship in adjacent fields. Finally, through a series of case studies, it demonstrates that ‘miscellaneous order’ was essential to the habits of annotation and transcription and the organization of knowledge in early modern Britain—thus laying the foundations for the remainder of the book.