Megan Heffernan’s Making the Miscellany argues for a recalibration of the critical approach to early modern compilations, the multiauthor catchall collections ubiquitous in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. She examines what miscellany meant and might continue to mean in relation to a genre often read as an expression of individual subjectivity. Both “a history and a historiography of the early printed poetry book” (10), this volume persuasively challenges the assumptions that a lyric poem is a self-bounded artifact and that it is shaped by the presence (or absence) of authorial agency. Compilations are an unusually porous and open medium for poetic craft, and Heffernan examines how readers from the late sixteenth century to the present have used the miscellany to define their relationship to vernacular lyric poetry. When these poetry collections were first published, “compilers, poets, and readers were alert to a poetics of organization that exceeded the...

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