Archive of irreverent miscellanies put online

Arts 23 Sep 10 The world's largest collection of miscellanies is being collected and put online by researchers from the Faculty of English Language and Literature with the support of the Bodleian Libraries curators. Dr Abigail Williams, who is leading the project, has received a three-year Leverhulme Research Grant to set up the Digital Miscellanies Index. The Index will create an online database of the contents of 1000 poetic collections, or miscellanies, which are part of the Harding Collection owned by the Bodleian Libraries. The collection has turned up a number of interesting items, including a crude poem which is attributed to John Milton but unlikely to have been written by him, called An Extempore upon a Faggot. This was rediscovered by Dr Jennifer Batt in the Oxford and Cambridge Miscellany of 1708, part of the Harding Collection, and reopens the debate concerning authorship and Milton's reputation among his contemporaries which was initially rehearsed in Notes and Queries , an Oxford journal, in 1869. Previously the verse has also been attributed to Rochester (in a Chetham manuscript and in Familiar Letters (Of Rochester), 1705) and to other authors including John Dryden and Sir John Suckling. Revisiting the poem opens scope for further scholarly research.