Using Digital Finding Aids to Define Manuscript Miscellanies of English Verse, 1575–1675: A Broad Picture of a Material Genre and Its Conventions

North’s essay utilizes data derived from electronically searchable finding aids and first-line indexes to help us understand broad trends in the production of early modern manuscript verse miscellanies. Her primary sources are the online Catalogue of English Literary Manuscripts compiled by Peter Beal and the Folger Shakespeare Library’s Union First Line Index. She also consults manuscripts themselves to check the reliability of the data. North then uses this broad sketch of miscellany characteristics to highlight some of the relationships between material form, production method, and miscellany content. The focus is on early seventeenth-century English verse miscellanies, because there are enough extant manuscripts in this category to make generalizations very fruitful. Within the limits of this data, which provide information about formats, hands, construction, ownership, organization, and content, North is particularly interested in the divisions of labor, the contributions of professional or practiced hands, the balance of well-known authors and noncanonical work, the clustering of similar items, and the way in which miscellaneity emerges in this data as both an aesthetic and a practical goal for early manuscript compilers.