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The article investigates the production of anonymous texts in early modern England, focusing on the period when the printing industry has been emerging. It explores the characteristics and functions of anonymity in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, particularly in relation to street literature. It further includes analyzing broadsheets, pamphlets, and other ephemeral printed materials.

From a brief description of the trajectory of studies on cordel literature (street/popular literature) and on the formation of the collection of chapbooks at Fundação Casa de Rui Barbosa (FCRB), this article reports the development of the research in its first year, having delimited the sample with a focus on production of the poet Leandro Gomes de Barros from considerations raised during the reading of works on literature and copyright legislation. The analysis was made in the investigation of authors' biographical data, in an attempt to discover the original authorship of the selected titles. The searches were made in authority databases, in the authority catalogs of the American Library of Congress, the Brazilian National Library and the Virtual International Authority File (VIAF). The results presented some determining points in the characterization of a future policy of public access to the cordel literature collection of the FCRB, especially the difference in the legal nature between the chapbooks in public domain and the ones reissued by contemporary publishers, which are protected by copyright. In this sense, it was found out that the collection of works by Leandro Gomes Barros were published with indication of other authors and not only attributed to João Martins de Athayde. Therefore, the article highlights the complexity of cordel literature in relation to copyright and points out to the need for greater depth in the investigation, with a view to developing correct criteria to identification and register of authorship in the most correct possible way. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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