The Burley manuscript is one of the English Renaissance's most prized miscellanies. It was compiled in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century and is unique in its size - over six hundred items inscribed on nearly four hundred folios - and its variety: poems and letters, essays and aphorisms, speeches, satires and sententiae, mostly in English but including Latin, Italian, French and Spanish.

This meticulous study makes available, in a readily searchable form, texts, annotations and commentary that will have an impact on a wide range of scholarship. It provides...