Crafting Poetry Anthologies in Renaissance England Early Modern Cultures of Recreation

The printed poetry anthologies first produced in sixteenth-century England have long been understood as instrumental in shaping the history of English poetry. This book offers a fresh approach to this history by turning attention to the recreative properties of these books, both in the sense of making again, of crafting and recrafting, and of poetry as a pleasurable pastime. The model of materiality employed extends from books-as-artefacts to their embodiedness - their crafted, performative, and expressive capacities. Publishers invariably advertised the recreational uses of anthologies, locating these books in early modern performance cultures in which poetry was read, silently and in company, sometimes set to music, and re-crafted into other forms. Engaging with studies of material cultures, including work on craft, households, and soundscapes, Crafting Poetry Anthologies argues for a domestic Renaissance in which anthologies travelled across social classes, shaping recreational cultures that incorporated men and women in literary culture.

Introduction; 1. Books in process: Songes and Sonettes and Paradyse of Daynty devises; 2. Household books: Richard Jones, Isabella Whitney and anthology-making; 3. 'To the Gentleman Reader': recreating Sidney in the 1590s; 4. 'Impos'd designe': Englands Helicon and re-creative craft; 5. A Poetical Rapsody: Francis Davison, the 'Printer', and the craft of compilation; Conclusion.

Michelle O'Callaghan is Professor of Early Modern Literature and Culture and director of the Early Modern Research Centre at the University of Reading. Her books include The Shepheards Nation: Jacobean Spenserians and Early Stuart Political Culture, 1612-1625 (2000), The English Wits: Literature and Sociability in Early Modern England (2007) and Thomas Middleton, Renaissance Dramatist (2009).