‘By your poetique fire they are refin’d’: Reading for form and forms of reading in Constance Aston Fowler's verse miscellany, HM904

This thesis takes Constance Aston Fowler’s verse miscellany, HM904, as a case study to explore what verse miscellanies can tell us about how and why early modern readers valued poetry. I attend to several central elements of reading by considering the materiality, poetics, community engagement, and embodied experience of the text. I argue that miscellanies are evidence of close engagement with poetic form by compilers and readers. By reading the early modern verse miscellany in this way, this thesis recovers an appreciation for poetry that has been overlooked in the literary canon, but which was prevalent in the seventeenth century. It proposes that there is value in reading these texts as traces of varied reading lives that are guided by poetic form and presents a new method for reading diverse literary manuscripts from the period, specifically as evidence for how early modern readers engaged closely with poetry as part of their cultural, social, and devotional lives.