While the connections between commonplace books, miscellanies, and essays have long been recognised, and the significance of the commonplace methodology for early essayists noted, we still lack a comprehensive account of the genres’ enmeshing. Drawing on the work of prominent early essayists (Michel de Montaigne, John Florio, William Cornwallis), as well as the collections of Joshua Baildon and Francis Osborne, this chapter fills that gap. It shows how the commonplace method helped to generate the early essay by providing essayists with their raw materials, and also demonstrates how commonplace books and miscellanies modelled the practices of notation, citation, and imitation that made the form possible. Early essays were made from citations, but they also transformed those citations. Thus, early essays were grounded in both the humanist imitative tradition, from which the culture of commonplacing emerged, and a longer tradition of miscellaneous writing, reaching back to late antiquity.

This chapter demonstrates the influential role of printed books in defining Chaucer’s canon and the implications of that newly formed canon for older books. It considers a series of texts which early modern readers added to manuscripts (and some early printed books) to update and improve them: short poems including Prophecy, Words to Adam, and Bon counsail; Robert Henryson’s Testament of Cresseid; various Plowman-themed texts; the Tale of Gamelyn; and the Retraction. The chapter argues that print made available an array of genuine and apocryphal works which readers could extract, assemble, and reconfigure in line with their own tastes and understanding of the Chaucer canon. The evidence collected in the chapter shows the persistence of particular narratives about Chaucer’s works which were promoted in print: that he was a poet of fin amour, that he condemned Criseyde to a wretched death, that he assigned his Plowman an anticlerical tale, and that the Retraction was a later monkish forgery. The changeability of the manuscript books chronicled in this chapter reflects a concurrent reshaping of Chaucer’s reputation in the period and the variability of his literary canon itself.

This chapter brings print and manuscript commonplace books into dialogue with anti-theatrical diatribes and defences of poetry in order to establish that literary taste, usually dated to the eighteenth century, emerges much earlier in the humanist trope of the reader as bee, using the sense of taste to discriminate between rhetorical ‘flowers’. Through a reading of Anne Southwell's commonplace book, I claim that in the context of humoral psychology, this trope possessed a literal dimension: contemporary sensitivity to the flavour of gall ink corresponds to the suggestion that literary judgement is exercised through actual acts of tasting. Focusing on Ben Jonson’s paratexts, I submit that this has implications for how we understand the politics of taste: locating judgement at the bottom of the sensory hierarchy, ‘taste’ democratises critical authority.