While the connections between commonplace books, miscellanies, and essays have long been recognised, and the significance of the commonplace methodology for early essayists noted, we still lack a comprehensive account of the genres’ enmeshing. Drawing on the work of prominent early essayists (Michel de Montaigne, John Florio, William Cornwallis), as well as the collections of Joshua Baildon and Francis Osborne, this chapter fills that gap. It shows how the commonplace method helped to generate the early essay by providing essayists with their raw materials, and also demonstrates how commonplace books and miscellanies modelled the practices of notation, citation, and imitation that made the form possible. Early essays were made from citations, but they also transformed those citations. Thus, early essays were grounded in both the humanist imitative tradition, from which the culture of commonplacing emerged, and a longer tradition of miscellaneous writing, reaching back to late antiquity.

Informal borrowings can be divided into three main thematic types: core, culture-specific, and miscellaneous. The core themes, shared with those in general informal language, make up the majority of borrowings and include such themes as evaluative categorization, the human body, sex, and intoxication. The culture-specific themes, inherent to immigrants and minorities, include borrowings connected with minority experiences but also racial discrimination and geography viewed from their perspective. The miscellaneous themes, constituting an all-inclusive collection, include as many as 150 themes grouped under several superordinate divisions. Their diversity and size illustrates the thematic scope of informal borrowings and demonstrates that they are not a marginal part of lexicon but can be used to refer to numerous aspects of human experience.

The eighteenth century is the richest period of georgic writing in English literary history. No era before or since exhibits a like range of experimentation with the georgic form, from translations and formal imitations of the Virgilian original to prose essays, pamphlets, treatises, periodicals and technical manuals. Though various in form and purpose, these texts declare their georgic affiliation by the tropes and themes they employ and by the structure of feeling they evoke. This chapter explores four of these distinguishing features: persistent authorial reflection on the style appropriate to georgic writing (elaborate or plain, poetic or technical?), the labour of the farmer and that of the writer, variety and miscellaneity in the georgic and traditional farming practices versus experimentation. These characteristic concerns are taken up by writers with a wide range of thematic preoccupations: agriculture, labour, sport, human health, mining, manufacturing, empire, nationhood, political economy and slavery.

‘Miscellany’ is not an ancient genre name. When scholars use the term, they are often vague about the definition and boundaries of the genre, and rely on well-known ‘examples’ that are treated as paradigmatic. Two scholars have sought to define the ‘miscellany’ more closely: Teresa Morgan gave a broad, inclusive definition grounded in the history of educational praxis; William Fitzgerald gave a narrower definition, focusing on the rhetorical characteristics of an elite, literary strand of miscellany-making. Fitzgerald's approach shall be our starting point as we investigate how and why Clement artfully deployed rhetorical tropes, imagery and metatextual observations to thematise his intentional participation in a wider discourse of learned literary miscellanism. But we must also situate his work in relation to particular examples of early imperial prose miscellanies, otherwise we risk lapsing into generalities about an irreducibly diverse group of texts. Plutarch’s Table Talk; Pliny’s Natural History; Gellius’ Attic Nights and Athenaeus’ Deipnosophists are introduced alongside Clement’s Stromateis,as appropriate for comparative study.

Clement of Alexandria’s Stromateis have long been recognised as a Christian version of the Greco-Roman genre of the miscellany. But how Clement shaped the Classical literary form for Christian formation deserves closer attention. In general, Classicists have studied miscellanies but not Clement, while Theologians have studied Clement but not miscellanies. By situating Clement's literary project in relation to Roman miscellanies, this book argues that Clement consistently reinterprets topoi and tropes of the Classical form through a Christian theological vision. His Christianisation of the genre is deeper and more interesting than has been recognised, as he seeks to enable his readers at once to delight in the variegated beauty of God and to become ever more focused on the contemplation of the one, hidden and transcendent Teacher, into whose likeness they are growing.

Despite the rapid growth of interest in Classical miscellanies since the 1990s, Clement of Alexandria's miscellanistic form has been consistently sidelined on account of his alleged ‘Christian difference’. But every miscellany is different from every other, and a Christian miscellany is not more thoroughly different just for being Christian. By casting an eye over the history of scholarship, we discover that the trope of ‘Christian difference’ marks the fracturing of relations between Theology and other intellectual disciplines since the nineteenth century. It resonates with anti-Christian stereotypes, which portray Christians as boring and authoritarian users of texts, by contrast with open-minded and playful pagans. In revisiting the nature and extent of Clement’s Christian ‘difference’, we should strive to achieve the Classicist’s eye for literary wit but the Theologian’s sensitivity to theological debate and to integrate the two in studying Clement's experiment with the Classical genre.