Holly Riach: ‘Early modern books are less chaotic than previously thought’
In the early modern period, it was perfectly normal to find recipes, legal documents or medical writings in a book of poems. PhD candidate Holly Riach studied the underlying principles of these ‘miscellanies’.
Riach's research is part of the Feathers project, which aims to shed new light on the relationship between authors, copyists and secretaries between 1558 and 1642. ‘Other researchers have looked at how legal documents came into being or how the letters of Queen Elizabeth I were written, for example,' says Riach. 'The miscellanies form the literary branch of the project.'
Randomly collected?
The texts in the book binding were sometimes collected and supplemented over a period of more than a hundred years. It was therefore not unusual for several copyists to work on the same miscellany. Sometimes they added a new text, other times they scratched out something from a previous contributor or filled in an empty space on a page.
‘The miscellanies have therefore long been regarded as random collections,’ says Riach. ‘My goal was to find out whether the composition was indeed as haphazard as had long been thought, or whether there were indeed underlying principles of organisation. If you can figure that out, you gain insight into the processes that play a role in literary creativity and who had control over the text.’
Archaeological method
Riach used an archeological method, in which a manuscript is divided into “age layers”. 'When you read the miscellanies from front to back, there is indeed little consistency,' she explains. ‘If, on the other hand, you divide them according to age, you can see more clearly what choices the creators made and how they responded to each other. When a manuscript already contained one type of text, later creators sometimes added similar texts in a different place in the volume. At first glance, this makes the whole thing seem more chaotic, but it is in fact a response to earlier choices.’
Creative approach
This tension between chaos and order is characteristic of miscellanies, Riach concludes. ‘By not reading this genre linearly, but approaching it in a slightly different way, you can see that the compilers often dealt with their material in a very interesting and creative way.’