Richard Tottel’s collection Songes and Sonettes (1557), later renamed Tottel’s Miscellany, is the first extant anthology of English lyrics. The collection is, on the one hand, an important beginning for the English national lyric tradition, but it is also, centrally, a document of transition. This article will sketch the position of the Miscellany as simultaneously looking back to medieval models of poetry and looking forward to the New Poetry of the Elizabethan period and as staging the transition from the manuscript publication to print publication of poetry, thus interweaving the national with specific media affordances of the new print medium. The collection does much more than establish a starting point for an emerging national canon of lyric poetry though. Centrally, it performs the merge between the personal and the national which became foundational for the anthology format long-term. And finally, the varying treatment of Tottel’s Miscellany in literary criticism positions the collection as a site that negotiates critical practice and aesthetic preferences of and for the different ages of its reception.
Purchase
Buy instant access (PDF download and unlimited online access):
Institutional Login
Log in with Open Athens, Shibboleth, or your institutional credentials
Personal login
Log in with your brill.com account
Alexander, Gavin. “Rhetoric.” In A New Companion to English Renaissance Literature and Culture, ed. Michael Hattaway (Chichester: John Wiley, 2010), 38–54.
Beal, Peter, ed. Index of English Literary Manuscripts (London: Mansell, 1980).
Brooks-Davies, Douglas, ed. Silver Poets of the Sixteenth Century, updated ed. (London: Dent, 1992).
Cooper, Elizabeth, ed. The Muses Library; or, a Series of English Poetry, 2nd ed. (London: James Hodges, 1741).
Crane, Mary Thomas. Framing Authority: Sayings, Self, and Society in Sixteenth-century England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993).
Ellis, George. “Preface.” In Specimens of the Early English Poets, ed. G. Ellis. (London: Edwards, 1790), i–v.
Escobedo, Andrew. Nationalism and Historical Loss in Renaissance England: Foxe, Dee, Spenser, Milton (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004).
Haldane, Michael. “‘The Soote Season’: Surrey and the Amatory Elegy.” English Studies 87 (4) (2006), 402–414.
Hamrick, Stephen, ed. Tottel’s Songes and Sonettes in Context (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013a).
Hamrick, Stephen. “Introduction: Songes and Sonettes Reconsidered.” In Tottel’s Songes and Sonettes in Context, ed. Stephen Hamrick (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013b), 1–11.
Hatzfeld, Helmut. “Einige Stilwesenszüge der altfranzösischen religiösen Reimdichtung.” Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie 52 (1932), 693–727.
Heffernan, Megan. Making the Miscellany: Poetry, Print, and the History of the Book in Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021).
Heninger Jr, S.K. “Sequences, Systems, Models: Sidney and the Secularisation of Sonnets.” In Poems in Their Place: The Intertextuality and Order of Poetic Collections, ed. Neil Freistat (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1986), 66–94.
Herrnstein Smith, Barbara. “Contingencies of Value.” In Canons, ed. Robert von Hallberg (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1984), 5–39.
Holton, Amanda. “Chaucer’s Presence in Songes and Sonettes.” In Tottel’s Songes and Sonettes in Context, ed. Stephen Hamrick (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), 87–109.
Holton, Amanda, and Tom MacFaul, eds. Tottel’s Miscellany: Songs and Sonettes of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, Sir Thomas Wyatt and Others (London: Penguin, 2011).
Johnson, Christopher D. “N+2, or a Late Renaissance Poetics of Enumeration.” Modern Language Notes 127 (5) (2012), 1096–1143.
Lethbridge, J.B. “Spenser, Donne, I.A. Richards and the Limitations of Practical Criticism.” In Recherches Anglaises et Nord Américaines 49. Special Issue: Contacts, Fictions, Clashes: Modes of Construction of Anglophone Culture, ed. Anne Bandry-Scubbi (2016), 29–42.
Lethbridge, J.B. “The Bondage of Rhyme: Moderate ‘this Ornament of Rhyme’.” In A Concordance to the Rhymes of The Faerie Queene: With Two Studies of Spenser’s Rhymes, eds. Richard Danson Brown and J.B. Lethbridge (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2013), 76–180.
Lethbridge, Stefanie. “From Miscellany to Cultural Memory. The Long-Term Transmission of Poems from Sixteenth-Century Poetry Anthologies.” In Recherches Anglaises et Nord Américaines 56. Special issue: Transmission, Transposition, Transformation dans l’Angleterre de la Première Modernité: Essais en l’honneur de Jean-Jacques Chardin, eds. Anne Bandry-Scubbi, Laurent Curelly and Rémi Vuillemin (2022), 169–186.
Lethbridge, Stefanie. Lyrik in Gebrauch: Gedichtanthologien in der englischen Druckkultur 1557–2007 (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2014).
Lerer, Seth. “Cultivation and Inhumation: Some Thoughts on the Cultural Impact of Tottel’s Songes and Sonettes.” In Tottel’s Songes and Sonettes in Context, ed. Stephen Hamrick (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), 147–161.
Lewis, C.S. English Literature in the Sixteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954).
MacFaul, Tom. “Miscellany.” In The Oxford History of Poetry in English: Volume 4. Sixteenth-Century Poetry, eds. Catherine Bates and Patrick Cheney (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022), 177–190.
Marotti, Arthur F. Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 1995).
Marquis, Paul A. “Introduction: Richard Tottel’s Songes and Sonettes: The Elizabethan Version.” In Richard Tottel’s Songes and Sonettes: The Elizabethan Version, ed. Paul A. Marquis (Tempe, AZ: Renaissance English Text Society, 2007), xv–lxii.
May, Steven W. “Popularizing Courtly Poetry: Tottel’s Miscellany and Its Progeny.” In The Oxford Handbook of Tudor Literature, 1485–1603, eds. Mike Pincombe and Cathy Shrank (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 418–433.
McCarthy, Erin. Doubtful Readers: Print, Poetry, and the Reading Public in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020).
Niefanger, Dirk, and Dirk Rose. “Einleitung.” In ‘Gesammlet und ans Licht gestellet’: Poesie, Theologie und Musik in Anthologien des frühen 18. Jahrhunderts, eds. Dirk Niefanger and Dirk Rose (Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 2019), 7–24.
Nolan, Maura. “Style.” In Cultural Reformations: Medieval and Renaissance in Literary History, Oxford Handbooks Online, eds. James Simpson and Brian Cummings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022). DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199212484.013.0022.
O’Callaghan, Michelle. Crafting Poetry Anthologies in Renaissance England: Early Modern Cultures of Recreation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020).
Pomeroy, Elizabeth W. The Elizabethan Miscellanies: Their Development and Conventions (Berkeley CA: University of California Press, 1973).
Quiller-Couch, Arthur. The Oxford Book of English Verse [1900] (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985).
Rollins, Hyder Edward, ed. Tottel’s Miscellany, 1557–1587. 2 vols. (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1965).
Scattergood, John. John Skelton: The Complete English Poems (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1983).
Sessions, William A. Henry Howard, the Poet Earl of Surrey: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).
Shakespeare, William. The Merry Wives of Windsor, ed. Giorgio Melchiori (London: Bloomsbury, 2017).
Shrank, Cathy, and Mike Pincombe. “Prologue: The Travails of Tudor Literature.” In The Oxford Handbook of Tudor Literature: 1485–1603, eds. Michael Pincombe and Cathy Shrank. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 1–18. doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199205882.013.0001.
Smyth, Adam. Profit and Delight: Printed Miscellanies in England, 1640–1682 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2004).
Vuillemin, Rémi. “Tottel’s Miscellany ou Songes and Sonettes (1557) et la ‘naissance’ de l’anthologie lyrique imprimée anglaise.” In Fleurs et jardins de poésie: Les anthologies poétiques au xvie siècle (domaine français, incursions européennes), eds. Adeline Lionetto and Jean-Charles Monferran (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2021), 311–328.
Wall, Wendy. The Imprint of Gender: Authorship and Publication in the English Renaissance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993).
Warner, J. Christopher. The Making and Marketing of Tottel’s Miscellany, 1557: Songs and Sonnets in the Summer of the Martyrs’ Fires (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013).
Warton, Thomas. A History of English Poetry: From the Close of the Eleventh to the Commencement of the Eighteenth Century. 4 vols. [1774–81] (London: Thomas Tegg, 1824).
Whigham, Frank, and Wayne A. Rebhorn. “Introduction.” In The Art of English Poesy (1589) by George Puttenham, ed. Frank Whigham (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007), 1–72.
Zarnowiecki, Matthew. Fair Copies: Reproducing the English Lyric from Tottel to Shakespeare (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014).
All Time | Past 365 days | Past 30 Days | |
---|---|---|---|
Abstract Views | 4090 | 4090 | 226 |
Full Text Views | 37 | 37 | 4 |
PDF Views & Downloads | 21 | 21 | 1 |
Richard Tottel’s collection Songes and Sonettes (1557), later renamed Tottel’s Miscellany, is the first extant anthology of English lyrics. The collection is, on the one hand, an important beginning for the English national lyric tradition, but it is also, centrally, a document of transition. This article will sketch the position of the Miscellany as simultaneously looking back to medieval models of poetry and looking forward to the New Poetry of the Elizabethan period and as staging the transition from the manuscript publication to print publication of poetry, thus interweaving the national with specific media affordances of the new print medium. The collection does much more than establish a starting point for an emerging national canon of lyric poetry though. Centrally, it performs the merge between the personal and the national which became foundational for the anthology format long-term. And finally, the varying treatment of Tottel’s Miscellany in literary criticism positions the collection as a site that negotiates critical practice and aesthetic preferences of and for the different ages of its reception.
All Time | Past 365 days | Past 30 Days | |
---|---|---|---|
Abstract Views | 4090 | 4090 | 226 |
Full Text Views | 37 | 37 | 4 |
PDF Views & Downloads | 21 | 21 | 1 |