Miscellaneous Order

This is a richly researched, elegantly written and important book that everyone interested in early modern manuscript construction, textual composition, information management and knowledge discovery will want to read. * Jonathan Gibson, The Spenser Review *
Miscellaneous Order is an important book that achieves its ambition, which is to help us to understand the habits of collecting and organizing material from diverse sources in early modern England. It persuaded me that miscellany-making lies at the heart of early modern intellectual culture. This book offers a big-picture view of the history of the early modern miscellany. * Jennifer Richards, Modern Language Review *
[a] remarkable contribution to recent scholarship ... 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' * Jason E. Cohen, The Library *
Miscellaneous Order can be used as a reference on particular topics, but because Vine weaves important themes through each of the book's chapters, it rewards linear reading. Of obvious interest to manuscript scholars and book historians, the book also has much to offer intellectual historians, historians of science, and literary critics, making its potential audience as heterogeneous as the books it describes. In short, Miscellaneous Order is an important contribution to our understanding of early modern manuscript miscellanies as complex, diverse, occasionally puzzling, and invariably rich documents. * Erin A. McCarthy, Renaissance Studies *
Miscellaneous Order balances the theoretical and the practical most admirably. This really is an exceptionally good book: a delight to read and full of information and insight. * John Considine, Notes and Queries *
Having read Vine's book...historians might no longer put an odd volume aside, take note of this as a "miscellaneous" item, and move on. Instead, some might seek to understand what these texts tell us about the rich and diverse figures that once produced them. * Tom Tölle, Universität Hamburg, H-Soz-Kult *
It is a valuable study for scholars interested in better understanding miscellanies and early modern manuscript culture more generally. * Simone Hanebaum, The Seventeenth Century *