ABSTRACT
The author suggests that the anonymous compiler of the pair of Folger and Nottingham miscellanies qualifies as an actual individual who read libels precisely as Colclough suggests. Moreover, he was not content to confine his epideictic reception of libels to reading alone. He think that this pair of manuscript miscellanies offers such remarkable examples of epideictic rhetoric in part because they come not from an orator or author or stationer, but from an anonymous scribe yet also because this scribe appropriated within the epideictic structure of his miscellanies some of the most apparently radical, seditious, and slanderous poems that we still have from early modern England. Nevertheless, by assigning them places in his epideictic anthologies, he imposed on them a classical, edifying, even conservative or ethical role. He chastened them, put them to good purpose. In other words, he put libels in their place a place where they serve to praise virtue.
