Perhaps more than any other kind of book, manuscript miscellanies require a complex and ’material’ reading strategy. This collection of essays engages the renewed and expanding interest in early modern English miscellanies, anthologies, and other compilations. Manuscript Miscellanies in Early Modern England models and refines the study of these complicated collections. Several of its contributors question and redefine the terms we use to describe miscellanies and anthologies. Two senior scholars correct the misidentification of a scribe and, in so doing, uncover evidence of a Catholic, probably Jesuit, priest and community in a trio of manuscripts. Additional contributors show compilers interpreting, attributing, and arranging texts, as well as passively accepting others’ editorial decisions. While manuscript verse miscellanies remain appropriately central to the collection, several essays also involve print and prose, ranging from letters to sermons and even political prophesies. Using extensive textual and bibliographical evidence, the collection offers stimulating new readings of literature, politics, and religion in the early modern period, and promises to make important interventions in academic studies of the history of the book.

Fiddled out of Reason is a study of several poems spanning the life and career of Joseph Addison, who, along with John Dryden, Alexander Pope, Ambrose Philips, Isaac Watts, and many British poets of the turn of the eighteenth century, helped to cultivate a broad new current of nonliturgical "hymnic" verse that became immensely popular across that century, though it has eluded critical notice until now. The texts the book examines—Addison's St. Cecilia's Day odes (1692, 1699), his libretto for the opera Rosamond (1707), and a sequence of five hymnic works in The Spectator (1712)—precede by twenty-five years John Wesley's publication of the first hymnal for use in the Church of England. The book argues that "secular" hymnic works such as Addison's emerged alongside religio-political controversies and anxieties about British national identity, morality, and expressions of "enthusiastic" passions. Church and Tory interests largely rejected hymnic verse, claiming it would only "fiddle" unwitting readers "out of their reason" and reignite the dangerous fervor of Revolution-era Nonconformity and Dissent. As is evident from his poetry, Addison, a moderate Whig, ardently opposed this view, arguing that the hymnic could in fact be a portal to national and individual amelioration. After an introductory chapter exploring period conceptions of hymnic poetry and the highly contested term "hymn" itself, the argument proceeds through three sections to trace the hymnic's upward trajectory through Addison's early, mid-period, and mature verse. The book devotes the lion's share of its attention to the last of these three, which includes the five-poem Spectator sequence (a poem from the sequence, "The Spacious Firmament on High," will be familiar to many readers). Indeed, in addition to offering new readings of hymnic works by Dryden and Pope, Fiddled out of Reason provides the first extended critical treatment of these five important poems. Publication of the book coincides with the 300th anniversary of Addison's death and with the appearance of a new Oxford edition of Addison's nonperiodical writings.

Sarah Prescott discusses the careers of a number of key women writers of the period from 1690 to 1740, exploring the role played by geographical location, literary circles, patronage, the literary marketplace, and subscription publication in shaping patterns of female authorship. The volume also provides a wealth of detail about the circumstances which affected the careers of individual women as well as investigating the marketing, reception, and self-representation of women writers in general.