ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book explores the development continued well beyond, however, as eighteenth-century stationers marketed hundreds of new books as miscellanies, as nineteenth-century editors reprinted early modern books under the name, and as twentieth-century scholars broadened their focus from the discrete contents to the entirety of these now-renamed early modern miscellanies. Manuscript Miscellanies in Early Modern England demonstrates and encourages the appropriately diverse range of material readings that these complex books facilitate and reward. It surveys the development of popular and academic understandings of miscellanies, especially over the seventeenth century, and comes to focus on the shift in scholarly attention from the texts to the whole of a miscellany. This intellectual development, encouraged by a number of academic trends and subfields, has rather recently made the miscellanies of early modern England objects of great scholarly interest.
