Defining Rochester's Canon in the Eighteenth Century: The Role of Bragge and Curll.

This article examines the eighteenth-century poetry collections titled *The Miscellaneous Works of the Right Honourable the late Earls of Rochester and Roscommon*, initially published by Benjamin Bragge in 1706 and subsequently reissued and expanded by Edmund Curll and others. Despite their popularity and numerous editions—at least 25 iterations until around 1798—these collections are marked by significant inaccuracies, including misleading titles, extensive misattributions, and the exclusion of many poems now considered genuinely by John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester. The miscellanies predominantly featured libertine and satiric verse, often including works by other authors such as the Earls of Roscommon, Dorset, and contemporaries like Aphra Behn and Etherege, which contributed to a distorted public perception of Rochester's poetic canon throughout the eighteenth century. Although twentieth-century scholarship, notably David Vieth's 1968 edition, established a more accurate Rochester canon based on manuscript evidence, the Bragge-Curll editions shaped popular and literary understanding of Rochester's work for over a century, blending author-centric and miscellaneous collections in a commercially successful but critically problematic form.