The chapter examines Vaughan Williams’s relationship with the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). It focusses on the policy pressures and dynamics shaping BBC music broadcasting, and interrelationships between those and the creation, promotion, dissemination, consumption, and reception of Vaughan Williams’s music, reflecting on the ways in which a range of public and quasi-public bodies dedicated to the production and promotion of ‘national’ culture created a distinct political dynamic to the ‘field of cultural production’ in Britain in the period from the foundation of the BBC in 1922 through the interwar, war, and postwar years. It argues that this context and relationship is foundational for understanding his work, style, and reception, and invites (re)consideration of the role of authorial agency and authorial voice in reception history.

Classical scholars have often singled out the miscellany as a very open-ended genre that requires active participation from the reader, who is called to miscellanise, to select what is beneficial to his or her situation in the moment. Clement, meanwhile, has been cast either as a mere conduit of the divine logos delivering a fixed message, or as a sophist seeking to legitimise his wares in the marketplace of competing philosophies. Implicit in these portrayals of Clement’s authorial voice is a theological question of the relation between author, reader, text and God. By juxtaposition and comparison with imperial miscellanies, we see that Clement reinterpreted this relationship in light of his Christian spirituality and theology. He attributes his vocation to ‘the Saviour himself’ and portrays the reading and writing of notes as a spiritual and ascetic practice, shaped in light of eucharistic devotion and a psalmic prayer. He situates it within the life-generating tradition of the apostles and depicts his own, exemplary journey of discovery culminating in miscellany-making in chaste love, imaged as rest with the bee that anthologises the scriptural meadow in Egypt.