In The Making of Percy's Reliques, Nick Groom vividly reconstructs pioneering antiquarianism and its processes of collecting, transcribing, and collating. With meticulous scholarship, he unravels Percy's working methods, examining his correspondence, library, and papers - as well as his friendships with scholars like Samuel Johnson. This microbibliographical analysis takes literary history and critical theory in significant new directions. As Groom shows, the creation of literary authorship and the canon developed amid larger debates about historical sources and the origins of Englishness, and the practices of eighteenth-century editing were intertwined with themes as diverse as gardening, nightingales, forgery, and cannibalism.
Thomas Percy's Reliques (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 and dramatically influenced Romanticism. This is the first monograph devoted to Percy's seminal work. It unravels Percy's working methods and examines his correspondence, library, and papers.
