The Making of Percy's Reliques

Abstract

Thomas Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765) is one of the founding texts of English literature, an epoch-making collection of historical and lyrical ballads that defined the canon of popular poetry. It dramatically influenced Romanticism and the writing of Wordsworth and Coleridge, Walter Scott, and even Lewis Carroll. This book is devoted to Percy's seminal work. The book reconstructs pioneering antiquarianism and its processes of collecting, transcribing, and collating. It unravels Percy's working methods, examining his correspondence, library, and papers, as well as his friendships with scholars like Samuel Johnson. This micro-bibliographical analysis takes literary history and critical theory in significant new directions. As the book shows, the creation of historical sources and the origins of Englishness, and the practices of 18th-century editing were intertwined with themes as diverse as gardening, nightingales, forgery, and cannibalism.

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