Marvels and Commonplaces in the Elizabethan Anthologies

In a brief essay on Cato the Younger, Montaigne draws together five excerpts from Latin verse in Cato's honour; by the time he returned to the essay in his final years, those excerpts elicited some of the author's richest remarks on poetry and the poetic sublime. This essay argues that the anthology, in its various shapes and forms, offered early modern readers a way of doing literary criticism. Taking its cue from Montaigne's essay, it focuses on a number of English anthologies, associated with John Bodenham, and often known as the ‘Wits’ series, printed at around the turn of the seventeenth century. It argues that the commonplace-book structure of these volumes acted as a spur to detailed stylistic analysis. Anthologies encouraged their readers to compare poets with one another, working out what they had in common, and what made each one distinct; in this, they fostered the sort of critical scrutiny discussed in Scaliger's Poetics, and put into practice in the theatrical exchanges of the ‘Poets' War’. But as in Montaigne's case, they could also spark reflections about those verses that lay beyond criticism's reach, in the numinous realm of the sublime.