The circulation and use of humanist ‘miscellanies’ in England

England may have been physically remote from the acknowledged centres of production of humanist texts but that did not make it peripheral to the humanist enterprise. This article highlights both the speed with which texts could travel and the vitality of English interest in these works through detailed discussion of a cluster of what are often called ‘miscellanies’. It begins with one owned by Pietro del Monte (d. 1457) which was copied for William Gray, future bishop of Ely (d. 1478), and considers the influence of that copy on collections constructed in mid-fifteenth-century Oxford. In so doing, it argues that the term ‘miscellany’ drains these compilations of their significance as constructions providing insight into how these readers and scribes construed humanism from afar.