Richard Tottel, Miscellany

Matthias Bauer (Eberhard-Karls Universitat Tubingen); Sarah Briest (Eberhard-Karls Universitat Tubingen); Sara Rogalski (Eberhard-Karls Universitat Tubingen); Angelika Zirker (Eberhard-Karls Universitat Tubingen)
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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”, …

1542 words

Citation: Bauer, Matthias, Sarah Briest, Sara Rogalski, Angelika Zirker. "Miscellany". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 30 August 2020 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=39340, accessed 28 March 2024.]

39340 Miscellany 3 Historical context notes are intended to give basic and preliminary information on a topic. In some cases they will be expanded into longer entries as the Literary Encyclopedia evolves.

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