Miscellaneous Order: Manuscript Culture and the Early Modern Organization of Knowledge by Angus Vine (review)

Angus Vine's remarkable contribution to recent scholarship focuses on early modern manuscript culture. Miscellaneous Order attends to the epistemological patterns, rules, and deviations that shaped the intentionally heterogeneous works collected under the genre of 'miscellany'. The book responds to the question of how to define the ordering principles embedded in the art and practice of assembling the miscellaneous; thus, Miscellaneous Order contends, the emergence in later print of tools like indexes and page layouts find their origins not just in manuscript practices, but specifically in those that gave rise to the miscellany. Vine's formalist approach to the analysis of his source materials offers an innovative contribution to the field because of its resistance to an exclusive interest in particular subjects, personalities, or contents that have defined other major contributions to the fields of textual scholarship, critical bibliography, and manuscript studies in recent years. Vine argues effectively that the early modern material forms and practices embedded in manuscript miscellanies reflect how early modern community developed in the 'broader intellectual context of manuscript culture' (pp. 6–7). Intent on describing how form generates knowledge, his principal strand of argument threaded across the chapters of Miscellaneous Order demonstrates that manuscript miscellanies 'were essential to the early modern organization of knowledge' (p. 12).

Chapter 1, 'Commonplace Failure', begins with a recognition of the practical limits of the 'commonplace mindset' and subsequently argues that rising alongside the volume and mobility of the information that washed into early modern literate culture, annotative processes in miscellanies became increasingly self-reflective. Particularly in the application of commonplace habits like headers and spatial allowances for future entries (p. 56), Vine demonstrates that manuscript authors became increasingly conscious of their own needs for future retrieval and flexible organizing principles. The mimetic appropriation by authors and compilers of miscellanies of spatial and organizational practices championed for commonplace books left behind rigid commonplace pedagogy, and ultimately, revealed how emergent and dynamic systems of organization and transcription reflected authorial drives to develop epistemic systems that fit their eclectic needs (p. 23). Vine's chapter also persuasively develops an argument regarding authorial purposes underlying the genre's heterogeneity, including mixed and hybrid forms of material print culture, as he traces the nuances of how page space related to its contents (pp. 49–52).

The second chapter focuses on the encyclopaedic drive represented not only in any one 'Early Modern Omnigatherum', following the chapter's title, but more broadly an effect of the early modern textual disposition toward what Vine calls a 'fantasy of inclusiveness' (p. 66). Drawing on a wide range of sources, and including a consideration of the parallel emergence of museum culture and material collections in cabinets of curiosity, Vine finds that miscellanies work in their encyclopaedic mode as storehouses, thesauruses, and wellsprings from which printed works flow. Showing how the miscellany worked encyclopaedically both as a 'preliminary collection as well as a formal compilation', this chapter emphasizes the role the miscellany played in the 'production of knowledge and discourse' at every stage (pp. 81–82).

'Chorography and Antiquarian Compilation', the third chapter, contends that the varied methods of assemblage available through miscellanies—alphabetical, chronological, geo- or chorographic, or genealogical, among others—reflect the ways in which loose textual and material connections nevertheless resisted devolving into disorder. Because of the very flexibility and dynamism underlying the organization of miscellanies, the chapter's interest in the layering and accretion of knowledge over time, whether in subsequent marks and annotations, tipped-in leaves, serial transcriptions, or manuscript artefacts of the translation into print, also demonstrate the multiple ways in which the miscellany served materially as a practice of aide-mémoire, as well as its formal representation. This chapter adds to the canonical status of William Camden's Britannia by examining the myriad connections it generates with other contemporary authors of miscellanies, as well as by...