On May the 30th and 31st I attended the School of English, Media and Creative Arts’ Third Annual Postgraduate Research Symposium at the University of Galway. The central theme for the two days’ papers, panels and workshops was creativity and how it relates to our research. Contributions were varied and interesting. There were workshops on literature and empathy, panels on gaslighting, gatekeeping and girlbossing and papers on a vast array of topics including true crime narratives, fifteenth-century woodcuts, autobiographical theatre, Spenserian influences, and dis/narrative frameworks in young adult novels.

By all accounts the symposium was a great success. It was a wonderful opportunity to hear about what researchers in the school had been working on this year and to share some of the most entertaining material I had seen in manuscripts at the Bodleian Libraries and British Library over the last few months.

My paper ‘Using Late Seventeenth-Century Readers as a Model for Creativity’ explored how we can use manuscript miscellanies from the period as a precedent for engaging with poetry in a wider range of contexts, ignoring authorial intentionality and taking greater liberties with texts. I focused particularly on two types of mischievous reader, the amateur literary critic and the rakish reader.

One example I discussed was the anonymous compiler of Bodleian MS. Eng. misc. c. 34 who wrote amateur literary criticism attacking some of the most successful writers of the early modern period, including Shakespeare. They quoted extensively from plays and poems they couldn’t stand in a manner that makes me suspicious that they rather liked condemning texts and fancied themselves the next Dryden.

Another reader I spoke about was George Sacheverell, the compiler of British Library Add. MS 28758, whose collection of verses by the likes of Katherine Philips and William Davenant was interspersed with copies of a series of increasingly pathetic love letters to a woman who clearly did not reciprocate his affections. I argued that an important lesson to learn from late seventeenth-century readers is that poems, lyrics and extracts from plays can be very useful when it comes to flirting. I then considered the similarities between the structure of this manuscript miscellany and the popular printed miscellany The New Academy of Complements with its ‘Complemental Expressions Towards Men, Leading to the Art of Courtship’, ‘Complements towards Ladies, Gentlewomen, Maids’, ‘Letters for all Occasions’ and ‘Songs ala mode, Composed by the most Refined Wits of this Age’.

Miscellanies like these show that if we want to recover what was important to readers in the period, we need to acknowledge their more emotional responses to texts, whether pleasure or repulsion, and the much broader range of texts that provided the context of reception of verse than is usually assumed.

Since creative readers are at the centre of my PhD thesis, I was particularly pleased that creativity was the theme for this year’s event and look forward to seeing what next year’s symposium has in store.