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.

‘Erudite, meticulously researched, and still inviting to readers, this book elegantly threads the needle posed by both a new historicist interest in texts in context and material cultural studies of textual production and use … In its attention to a powerful craft that encompasses multiple kinds of poetic making in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, it challenges our inherited sense of what the Renaissance was and how we ought to read it now.’

Megan Heffernan Source: Modern Philology

'… a recognisable type of early modern book.'

Megan Heffernan Source: Modern Philology

'offer[s] a new vision of the poetic miscellanies of this period.'

Elizabeth Scott-Baumann Source: Times Literary Supplement

‘This illuminating volume will be valuable for many readers with interests in this period.’

Sheila T. Cavanagh Source: Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal