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CHAPTER 1

Special Collections

Book Curatorship and the Idea of Early Print in Libraries

It is the deepest enchantment of the collector to enclose the particular item within a magic circle, where, as a last shudder runs through it (the shudder of being acquired), it turns to stone.

—Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (1927–1940)

This and the accompanying 11 volumes had been bound together as one, full calf of poor quality over pasteboards…. Book taken down. Pages washed/deacidified in limewater bath and all folios strengthened using Crompton 10 gsm tissue with “lamatec” adhesive. Sewn on 3 tapes, attached to split boards. Bound ¼ Oasis with vellum tops and marbled sides.

—A modern binder’s note in a copy of Shakespeare’s Richard II (1634)

Bookbinding and collecting, like other aspects of the history of reading, are “on the order of the ephemeral.”¹ The acquisition, ordering and shelving, use, and conservation of texts in libraries are activities that leave little evidence behind. Firsthand accounts of text assembly and the organization of knowledge in early print are scarce and most often rooted in the perspective of producers, whether in manuals or as documentary by-products of printinghouse accounting.² In modern rare-book rooms, we might find binders’ tickets or unusually detailed collectors’ notes in the flyleaves of texts showing later curatorial activities. But artifacts in special collections, particularly the highly prized ones, are unforthcoming about their material histories. Only under exceptional circumstances of cataloging or record keeping are we able to learn much about the past lives of the most valuable written works. Two libraries at Cambridge University, however, do give us an exceptional record of the order of books in the handpress era and a surprising look at the reordering of early works in modern archives.

In 1799, a Cambridge cataloger named William Pugh was dismissed from his post for making insufficient progress on a new category of books, the “AB class,” which was to comprise all valuable specimens of early printing then held in the university’s Royal Library.³ Pugh, a respected fellow at Trinity College, had been at the job for nearly ten years, having been hired almost immediately after taking his bachelor’s degree on the strength of his reputation as a voracious reader. He was widely knowledgeable and passionate about working with rare books. But according to contemporary accounts, he was also eccentric, and eventually he became slovenly, obsessive, and antisocial. After his dismissal from the library, Pugh reportedly “dreaded the society of everybody.”⁴ He would lock himself in his room for long periods, emerging suddenly to scandalize the college by throwing all his linens in the River Cam. One evening after a rash of unexplained vandalism in the town, Pugh was spotted outside of his room and followed. On leaving the college grounds, he retrieved a stick from the water’s edge, walked into town, and proceeded to smash street lamps, shrieking and calling them Robespierre, Danton, or St. Just. Tolerance for fellows’ eccentricities was high at the time, but the incident was enough for Pugh to be dismissed from college and declared insane. Years later he was said to have regained some of his former reputation, but he never returned to work. According to contemporaries, “He still had a somewhat insane look.”⁵

Pugh’s undoing has interested scholars of the book because, by all accounts, it began with a near-pathological tendency to read rather than merely catalog the texts in the AB class. To the dismay of the university librarians, Pugh would often become fixated on a single volume when adding it to the shelf list; if it was unfamiliar, “he was not content with looking at the title page, but applied himself to reading the contents.”⁶ This diversion, of course, is the sort of thing the cataloger striving for efficiency is trained to avoid. And indeed, Pugh’s unfinished AB-class catalog, long since superseded, survives today in the Cambridge library archives as a monument to inefficient bibliography.⁷ Its entries are digressive, unsystematic, and sometimes speculative. Pugh recorded not only titles, authors, and imprints, but also formal features, curiosities in the texts, cross-references, and notes to himself and to posterity with relevant thoughts that crossed his mind as he read. With such a taste for detail, Pugh frequently used up to ten folio-sized pages (rather than the customary line or two) to catalog a single book, piece by piece, at a rate that eventually exhausted the patience of his colleagues (Fig. 4). His waywardness, so the story goes, had no place in a modern library on the verge of reform—of blossoming, as it would over the next century, into a national institution.⁸ He simply had to be let go.

But what was William Pugh reading on the job? What was so fascinating about a collection of early printed texts to this modern archivist? This chapter begins by investigating the peculiarities of Pugh’s reading materials, which I suggest can be instructive to a history of the book that is only beginning to account for the practices of selection and reorganization that have shaped the libraries and literatures we know today.⁹ No mere document of bibliographical incompetence, the AB catalog offers something rarely found in the field of textual history: a detailed snapshot of an early printed book collection as it looked to previous generations of readers. As David McKitterick has explained, the Royal Library at Cambridge was acquired in 1715 from Bishop John Moore, who had built his great collection out of the private libraries of English bookmen from as far back as the sixteenth century.¹⁰ The AB class was part of an effort to process those books as they moved from individual to institutional ownership. It was designed specifically to accommodate the valuable specimens of early printing from the collection, including incunabula, early sixteenth-century texts, and select literary works from the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean periods.¹¹

In setting William Pugh to work on such materials, the university librarians did an unexpected service to book history. Scholars of early print culture have long found catalogs and inventories from the period to be unreliable guides to the contents of English literary book collections, as compilers tended to record only the first title in a vernacular multitext volume or to relegate such low-status vernacular works to a summary “et cetera” at the end of the list.¹² Pugh’s AB catalog, in contrast, is thorough, and obsessively so. Its excess of detail—from the texts in each binding, to the material added in by early readers, to notes on where duplicate copies may be found elsewhere in the library—allows for a privileged glimpse into the formation of a modern archive out of numerous rare-book sources. But most important, as I will demonstrate, it allows us to compare these early catalog entries to their referent books, now under different classification at the Cambridge University Library. And the result is surprising. What Pugh saw in the 1790s is not what we see today. The collection was in large part composed of items that seem now to defy bibliographic categories and textual boundaries: multiple books bound together, printed texts mixed with manuscripts, incomplete and supplemented works, one author with another, prestigious literature with ephemera. By modern standards, it would almost be enough (as they say) to drive one mad.

Figure 4. A leaf from the AB catalog, in which Pugh only recorded two books. The second (shelf mark AB.10.53) was a composite volume containing Edmund Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender (1611). In the catalog entry, Pugh has added, “N.B. E.K.’s Preface.” Reproduced by permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library.

The processes of archival selection and reorganization that I open up for discussion in this chapter touched most institutional libraries in Anglo-American modernity; the AB class at the University Library is one prominent example that permits a degree of reconstruction. Outside the literary-historical domain, where “rare book” is perhaps not a guiding category in the same way, we find that reconstruction is in some key instances unnecessary. In the second part of this chapter, I turn briefly to a comparable Renaissance-era collection kept fully intact less than a mile down the road from the University Library in Cambridge, at the Parker Library at Corpus Christi College. Here, in the later part of the sixteenth century, the Archbishop of Canterbury Matthew Parker undertook to generate, as Pugh would in the 1790s, a full inventory of hundreds of early printed texts in varying states of hybridity and compilation, as they were encountered by their earliest readers. But unlike the texts in Pugh’s AB catalog, the books that were recorded in what became known at Cambridge as the Parker Register were not reorganized or reclassified in the modern period.¹³ Because of a series of unusual provisions that Archbishop Parker himself built in to the catalog, the collection remains, we might say, unprocessed. The new mode of book preservation, in which valuable early texts are individually rebound and protected as clean, integral copies, did not supplant the older one. The library, as a consequence, is messier and less accessible by modern standards, baffling at times even to resident Parker librarians. Yet, as I will argue, the collection at Corpus Christi College reflects the largely unacknowledged extent to which books were in the early years of print customizable, always subject to enlargement and rearrangement at the hands of users. Because Matthew Parker himself, whose projects and published works are known to us, was the primary collector of these books, the Parker Library also begins to suggest some of the ways in which the malleability of early printed materials could become intellectually generative for Renaissance writers, a theme I explore in the second part of this study.

The Modern Collector and the History of the Book

William Pugh is a liminal figure in the transition to modern practices of collection management and conservation, practices that have recently come under study for their reforming effects on books from earlier periods of production.¹⁴ In both individual and institutional collections in modernity, the task of preserving premodern books was often one of reorganizing them into discrete, systematized units—one text per binding, print with print and manuscript with manuscript, in the author-title-date catalog model with which we are most familiar. Modern custodianship rationalized bodies of written information and maximized a particular kind of accessibility while also reducing wear and deterioration, which the handling of books in older, fragile, or multitext bindings is likely to bring about. These efforts also increased returns on investments since clean rare books would fetch more individually on the book market than those bound together.¹⁵ Indeed, the first significant incentives for reorganization were likely book auctions, which debuted in the later seventeenth century in England, along with the rise in trade bookbinding toward the end of that century.¹⁶ But the process reached its apex in the nineteenth century, when the industrialization of binding and book production made the single, ready-bound printed text the standard.¹⁷ The legacy of this period, as Alexandra Gillespie has shown, is on display in our best-known rare-book rooms, where valuable early printed texts are almost always clothed in grand Victorian-era bindings. In her study of Middle English Sammelbände in print, Gillespie relates the story of a nineteenthcentury book buyer who, at an auction of the Duke of Roxburghe’s library in 1812, mused on how “enchanting” a certain early English compilation would be “when divided into parts and encased in dark red morocco surtouts.”¹⁸

This is, for the most part, how we find the former AB-class texts at the Cambridge University Library today: individually bound in calf, sheep, or goat, often with gilded edges or matching protective book boxes. Julia Miller describes this artificial contemporaneity and uniformity: “Our hand binders, including our book conservators, have tended to learn their craft from that relatively recent tradition and have tended to apply its procedures to books that are from much older and much different binding traditions.”¹⁹ Paul Needham explored the potential losses involved in such practices in an early account of English Sammelbände, and Gillespie, Nicholas Pickwoad, and John Szirmai have since nuanced our understanding of the anachronism of modern bookbinding.²⁰ Early binding, we know, was not an absolutely integral part of the production process; over the course of the sixteenth century and into the Renaissance, the work of determining a material assembly fell to retailers and, increasingly, to readers.²¹ Books formed according to the desires of the early consumer—whether sent to the bindery after the purchase or placed on sale ready bound owing to popular demand—could at any point in their life span be broken down and reconfigured as new desires or changes in ownership arose. More important, the cost of binding a book in the period has been estimated at 1s 6d, many times higher than the cost of most printed texts themselves.²² So especially in the case of small formats such as quartos and octavos, which encompass most printed works in the emergent European vernaculars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, single-text volumes in leather bindings were all but impracticable as a mode of storage.²³ The demands of book ownership were such that vernacular works were, as a matter of routine and preservation, compiled into flexible, anthology-like formats that do not easily map on to classification systems in modern libraries. Text producers in this early period, as we might imagine, designed and marketed texts accordingly, as “annexed” or annexable to other texts. Early printed works, as Gillespie has explained, “suggest a remarkable openness on the part of printers and owners to the malleable, multiple forms of books.”²⁴

Occasionally in archives we find traces of these malleable, multiple forms, which give us a glimpse into what Pugh must have seen at Cambridge. Most literary-historical researchers have at one point or another requested a rare book at a special-collections library only to find that it is bound with other rare books; such arrangements often no longer make sense to us, but they did to their earliest owners, who read and preserved them this way. Common, less familiar forms of evidence include binders’ notes, such as the one in my epigraph, and referentless contents lists written in by early readers, which sometimes remain in the flyleaves of books that were rebound into individual units in modernity. These documents tell us what modern catalogs as a rule do not: that the early texts we research once existed in material configurations substantially different from the ones we observe now in rarebook rooms.²⁵ Such traces are difficult to locate because archives have selected against them. As Needham’s pioneering study of the problem made clear, modern collectors, both individual and institutional, had little patience for high-value texts that seemed to exceed the boundaries of a conventionally defined book.²⁶ Focusing on Sammelbände containing early texts printed by William Caxton as a case study, Needham demonstrates that “a curiosity about … potential clues to the original marketing, or to the original purchasers of Caxton’s books was alien to the mentality of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century connoisseur.”²⁷ In acquiring rare books, collectors would most often impose on them—by means of rebinding, cleaning, and filling in or even forging missing text—a modern idea of what a book ought to look like. Needham concludes that collectors wanted books to reflect their possession and their possession alone. “Almost all copies, therefore, as they came into the hands of antiquarian booksellers and clients, were cut out of old covers and put into new ones…. The result was inevitably something smaller, thinner, meaner, and less honest than what had been before.”²⁸

Such modifications, Needham finds, touched more than two-thirds of the early printed books in his sample.²⁹ This dynamic, he argues, represents a “failure of historical imagination” on the part of modern collectors—an almost systematic effacement of evidence for reading in the name of owning clean, individually bound books.³⁰ As we might expect, these archival interventions have disproportionately shaped texts of high literary or cultural significance. The more a rare book was sought after by modern collectors, the likelier it was to be severed from its material history and reconstituted according to modern specifications. Indeed, scholars of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature have noticed, if not explicitly investigated, this archival bias as it shapes our knowledge of how canonical texts were read and circulated. Stephen Orgel, in a study of readers’ marks in an early copy of Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene, has noted that “one of the strangest phenomena of modern bibliophilic and curatorial psychology is the desire for pristine copies of books, books that reveal no history of ownership.”³¹ William Sherman has surveyed the attitudes toward early books in the Renaissance and today, documenting a broad cultural shift from readers who routinely wrote and intervened in published texts to readers who are institutionally prohibited from doing so.³² “Within the book trade,” Sherman explains, “there has been a history of aggressive practices involving bleaching the pages and trimming their margins down to the very edge of the printed text.” The effect is not only to erase signs of earlier use but also to reinforce the boundaries of an “ideal” copy—boundaries that may not have been self-evident before the modern imposition. As Sherman argues, “The ideal copy becomes, in a paradox that is all too familiar to museum curators and art conservators, a historic object with most of the traces of its history removed.”³³

Perhaps the most famous theorist of modern collecting and the historicity of collected objects is Walter Benjamin, whose musings in the Arcades Project form an unlikely preamble to concerns over nineteenth-century archivology among scholars of the book.³⁴ In this, Benjamin’s self-proclaimed masterwork, the collector figure is vital to the task of capturing nineteenthcentury bourgeois society in its complexity. The archetype is often taken to refer to the collector of antique objects or curiosities, but Benjamin is careful to offer as expansive a definition as possible, incorporating and at times highlighting the book as a kind of collector’s item.³⁵ Already in his essay “Unpacking My Library,” Benjamin had used his own books to theorize the collection in general terms as “a disorder to which habit has accommodated itself to such an extent that it can appear as order.”³⁶ Forsaking this artificial order for what he called “the prismatic fringes”³⁷ of the library—the loose paper, the unbound, uncataloged, and as yet unshelved—Benjamin famously meditated on the fetishistic nature of collecting, a notion that becomes the basis of his extended analysis in the Arcades Project. Here, exploring more fully the psychology of the collector, Benjamin affirms that “the most deeply hidden motive of the person who collects can be described this way: he takes up the struggle against dispersion.” The collector sets a world of scattered and incommensurable things into order through a process that Benjamin identifies as abstraction or decontextualization—a salvaging of the object from its own perceived disorganization, irrationality, or dividedness so that it forms a self-bounded talisman of ownership and a metonym for the collection itself. Benjamin summarizes, interrogating this sense of boundedness: “What is decisive in collecting is that the object is detached from all its original functions in order to enter into the closest conceivable relation to things of the same kind. This relation is the diametric opposite of any utility, and falls into the peculiar category of completeness. What is this ‘completeness’? It is a grand attempt to overcome the wholly irrational character of the object’s mere presence at hand through its integration into a new, expressly devised historical system: the collection.”³⁸ For collectors, broadly defined, this desired completeness is “mint” or “original condition”; in collections, it is the complete “set” or “series.” For book collectors, a number of analogous terms orbit around the bibliographic category of “perfection”: a text is understood to be “perfect” (and of its maximized potential value) when it is bounded and self-enclosed, with nothing lacking or added on and with a clear location in a series, such as the Short Title Catalogue, or a class catalog, such as William Pugh’s.

In setting forms of completeness like these in diametric opposition to utility, Benjamin alerts us to the paradox in modern collecting practices that strip away objects’ “original functions” in restoring them, as Sherman affirms, to their so-called “original conditions.” But books and other collected objects are in this respect not so much removed from history (Benjamin points out that history matters very much to the collector). Rather, they are removed from their particular, discontinuous histories of use. Any semblance of their circulation or ownership outside the present collection is erased as they are put into what Benjamin calls “magic circles” on shelves and on display. The collected object becomes an icon in a neater, more synthetic history, such as literary history.³⁹ The collector functions in this way as a maker of meaning—an “allegorist,” in Benjamin’s account, who writes and reinforces a new synthetic history in each of the objects he collects.⁴⁰

The AB Catalog and the Cambridge University Library

Ultimately, Benjamin concedes that the status of books in modern collecting practice is problematic and in need of investigation because the book collector is “the only type of collector who has not completely withdrawn his treasures from their functional context.”⁴¹ For this reason—the insuperable functionality of texts—William Pugh’s eighteenth-century catalog survives, permitting a glimpse into what lies behind the synthetic order of a modern collection. During Pugh’s tenure, the books in the AB class were not collectors’ items in the modern sense—they were not, as a rule, clean, individually bound, or perfect—and they would not begin to seem so until some sixty years after Pugh’s dismissal. In 1859, as J. C. T. Oates has shown, the librarian Henry Bradshaw set out to rearrange the early printed books at the University Library according to the somewhat undiplomatic assumption “that there was a right place for every book and that every book should occupy it.” Any volume that seemed to exceed its boundaries “could only be made to conform if it were cut up into its constituent item.” “This,” Oates explains, “Bradshaw did with horrifying ruthlessness,”⁴² extracting books from their bound contexts with little sense of the information being eliminated in the process. But as the texts in the AB class were being reshaped and placed into magic circles, they could not be fully withdrawn from their archival functionality. Part of an active collection, they had to be available for reading, whether or not they were bound individually and set out in triumphant order on the display shelves. Pugh’s catalog therefore remained in use until late in the nineteenth century, when Bradshaw’s reforms finally made the AB class of books obsolete.

Because the catalog remained in use for so long, it had to be kept up to date during all subsequent modernization campaigns undertaken at the University Library. In this updating, we find the present catalog’s most striking asset: it was annotated by successive Cambridge librarians each time an early printed book in the AB class was reshaped or reorganized.⁴³ Pugh’s original entries, in other words, constitute only the bottom-most layer of bibliographical records, corresponding to the appearance of the books as they originally came into the university’s possession from the library of Bishop Moore. Whenever those books changed shape, the entries in the AB catalog were changed in turn to facilitate access, usually with a set of brackets and shelf marks written in pencil over the old ones (Fig. 5). If, for example, an early volume originally containing multiple printed texts was split into smaller individually bound books during Bradshaw’s tenure, Pugh’s AB catalog would be marked up to reflect the new grouping and the location in the library where the texts were now to be found. Thus, the present document, annotated in layers, allows us to do more than generate a rough reconstruction of a set of early printed books before modern interventions, valuable as that reconstruction is. It also allows us to track the subsequent interventions as they were carried out by a determined institutional collector. Each textual mutation, from each item’s acquisition to its current shelf mark at the University Library, is visible.

The wide-ranging entries in the AB catalog offer a concrete introduction to the ways in which taxonomies of reading and book ownership vary over time and to the curatorial procedures through which traces of this variability have been submerged in modern collections.⁴⁴ From Pugh’s records, we ascertain that at least half of the books originally placed in the AB class transgressed in some way the bibliographic categories that were institutionalized in modernity, prompting (we assume) Bradshaw’s tenacious desire to reform them.⁴⁵ From the web of later annotations that now surround Pugh’s records, we find that all but a few of these books were brought into line with modern standards during the reform campaigns undertaken in the nineteenth century. Throughout, a clear pattern emerges in which premodern and early modern books with relatively flexible—at times uncertain—boundaries are transformed into modern, individual, self-enclosed texts. When these selfenclosed texts are reassembled according to the information in the catalog and thus restored to how Pugh first saw them, lines of affiliation open up that help us begin perceiving histories of reading, book storage, and situated interpretation that have been systematically obscured.

Figure 5. A leaf from the AB catalog, showing the hands of many later librarians. Each set of brackets represents a new mutation of the books originally in the AB class. This page shows the original contents of seven books, AB.8.46 to AB.8.52, containing twenty-seven early texts between them. Reproduced by permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library.

Many former AB-class volumes appear to have been assembled into early anthologies out of the exigencies of bookselling and bookbinding in the handpress era; their constituent items shared a printer or publisher as their organizing criterion before they were rearranged by Cambridge librarians so that they now stand in single textual units. Shelf mark AB.1.28, for example, once comprised a multitext volume of incunabula—works by Cicero, Martial, and Ovid in folio—that, Pugh notes in his entry, likely issued from the same press.⁴⁶ When brought together today, the books contain marginalia from the same early reader, including manicules (or pointing fingers) and underlining in the same ink, revealing valuable traces of how they were used early on in intellectual alignment with one another as a collection. According to a binder’s stamp on the inside cover, the titles were separated into independent leather-bound books and given independent shelf marks in or around 1890. A similar example in the vernacular is former shelf mark AB.10.27, which comprised five books printed by Caxton, including Virgil’s Boke of Eneydos and Chaucer’s Boke of Fame.⁴⁷ Beneath each of the printer’s colophons, a fastidious early reader named “R. Johnson” recorded that he bought the books at the same time in 1510. We might assume that Johnson had them bound together in a single volume to save money or that a later sixteenth- or seventeenth-century collector, who perhaps came into possession of Johnson’s books, did so for similar reasons. The texts are now bound and cataloged separately.

In calling up one of these texts today, one would have no way of knowing that it was once packaged in a composite book or anthology. When we become aware that such configurations were normal in the period—that very few works, particularly literary works, stood alone as they do today—important questions about the interpretation of early printed texts and literatures arise. What readings were enabled or disabled by putting Ovid into material proximity with Cicero, or Chaucer with Virgil, in a single binding? What species of taste or sensibility motivated these assemblages of texts, which we now experience only separately in modern editions? Certainly, many of the volumes in the AB class exhibit thematic connections that allow us to reconstruct their earliest uses and recover information about readers’ desires. In a study unrelated to the AB catalog, Seth Lerer has reassembled thirteen early printed books from the Cambridge University Library that, according to Pugh’s catalog, once made up a single volume (shelf mark AB.5.37) and that can be linked to a particular recusant family from the late sixteenth century. The volume was made of incunabular and nonincunabular texts, literary and nonliterary texts, including a play by John Heywood, works by John Lydate and Stephen Hawes, books on manners and hunting, and a fragment apparently drawn from a larger book and bound in. For the modern collectors who took it apart, this mass of text was disorderly. But as Lerer determines from the continuous threads of marginalia and subject matter that emerge in the reconstruction, the volume functioned for its sixteenthcentury users as a thematic anthology: a “collection of largely instructional works, calibrated to the education of young boys in late medieval and early modern England.”⁴⁸

A similar example from the opposite side of the political spectrum can be found in AB.5.58, which once comprised eighteen books printed in the mid-sixteenth century, recorded in Pugh’s catalog as a compilation. Each of these is numbered and marked in the same early hand, allowing the contemporary arrangement to be reconstructed. The volume begins with three astronomical treatises and a political pamphlet on enclosure, followed by a number of small Protestant booklets—a sermon on the education of children, a “history of popishness,” a copy of Robert Crowley’s epigrams, and nine explicitly theological texts—ending with treatises on the art of memory and swearing.⁴⁹ Like the anthology that Lerer reconstructed, the volume has a clear thematic current—reformist in nature—that is made obscure by its having been rebound and repackaged in discrete textual units in modernity. AB.4.58 is another, larger example, formerly comprising twenty-six books of medieval fiction and nonfiction printed in the early to mid-sixteenth century. The volume included works of popular verse by John Lydgate and others; saints’ lives; treatises on husbandry, household carving, and sewing; and a medical recipe book.⁵⁰ Each text is numbered consecutively and annotated by the same two named owners, Edward Powell and Andrew Holman, whose habits of reading and circulation become visible to history again only when the volume was reassembled. Powell and Holman annotate the text and also record exchanges in ownership: the first text contains Powell’s signature; on item 12, Holman wrote in his ownership mark, “This is andrew holmans book”; a note on item 14, Robert the Devyll, notes, “This is Anderie Holmans booke till Edwarde Powell come a gaine.”⁵¹

Incidences of thematic cohesiveness, named owners or families, or such annotations as these are rare in AB-class books, however. Pugh’s catalog, we find, is much more forthcoming about archival loss. The material and intellectual contexts of early reading and anthologizing frequently remain obscure, but the curatorial practices that obscured them become clearer. AB.4.61, for example, once contained sixteen texts that exhibit few affinities from the perspective of knowledge organization in modernity. The included books span over 150 years and range from how-to manuals on carpentry, surveying, and weaponry to a masque by Samuel Daniel.⁵² The only evidence that unifies the disparate material is a handwritten table of contents preserved in the flyleaf of the first item that clarifies the arrangement of texts in the later seventeenth century. But what we lack in information about the volume’s earliest uses, we gain in information about its modernization at the University Library. In both the manuscript contents list and the AB catalog, a later hand records that the volume’s second item, a Latin lexicon called Promptorium parvulorum clericorum, printed by Wynkyn de Worde in 1516, was removed because of its particular value relative to the other, later books adjacent to it.⁵³ Here, the status of an early printed text as the product of a known printer whose work was highly sought after prevails over its status as part of a compilation that might shed light on its meaning. These valuations are now encoded in their bindings: Promptorium parvulorum clericorum was rebound individually and given its own shelf mark, while the remaining contents of the book, likely deemed too miscellaneous or too common, were reclassified as a “tract volume”—a category of text that did not exist until the eighteenth century.⁵⁴

The question of apparently random organizing criteria in Sammelbände is a persistent and important one. Joseph Dane, in a recent chapter on early printed “Books in Books,” draws a distinction between multitext volumes formed arbitrarily and those formed with regard to printed content⁵⁵—between merely practical motivations for book assembly, in other words, and assembly according to an intellectual principle that we moderns can interpret. The distinction relies on modern measures of coherence and a problematic model of reading as the retrieval of content undisturbed by the organization of knowledge, an argument to which I will return in the next chapter. But the point reinforced by the present material is that handpress-era readers had the option of thinking about the connections between texts in a Sammelbände or to dismiss those connections as an accident of binding. This option is foreclosed by conservational initiatives such as Bradshaw’s in which the diversity of earlier book structures and the range of rationales for compilation are forced through the needle’s eye of modern textual categories. That most arbitrary line separating incunabula from early printed books, for example, seems to have been a primary motivating factor in the reform of the Cambridge collection, which leaned heavily toward the earliest products of the handpress. AB.10.53, according to Pugh’s entry, once comprised a copy of Caxton’s medieval encyclopedia, The Myrrour of the World (1490), bound with a 1611 copy of The Shepheardes Calender, the book of pastoral eclogues by Edmund Spenser. The two texts, printed over a century apart, show evidence of underlining and annotation in the same red crayon, a marking tool common in the early period. We imagine the early reader engaging the texts in a collection, if not in the bound book that Pugh read and recorded. But in the nineteenth century, they were stripped of their common context and separated into discrete units: the Caxtonian text in lavish black leather (under a new “Inc.” shelf designation) and the Spenser in cheaper half calf.⁵⁶

AB.8.46 is a related example, formerly containing two Caxtonian saints’ lives bound with sixteenth-century literary works by John Skelton, John Rastell, and Henry Medwall.⁵⁷ Pugh’s entry and its supplementary annotations indicate that the volume was reshaped twice by modern librarians: once to extract the incunabula and a second time to separate out the remaining early printed books to make them borrowable.⁵⁸ Another volume, AB.4.59, once comprised eleven texts bound together, all issuing from Wynkyn de Worde’s press. But because the volume’s final item, The Meditacyouns of Saynt Barnard, was printed in the earliest part of de Worde’s career, in 1496, all of the items had to be disbanded and set into proper order in Bradshaw’s modern library. The first ten texts now form individual books in Bradshaw’s “Sel.” class, while the final item was rebound and reclassed as an incunabulum.⁵⁹ Numerous early compilations in the AB catalog straddle this 1500 divide; their reorganization highlights its centrality in determining the shape of archives, separating print (and modernity) from what came before. AB.4.54, for example, was a compilation of four books, two literary and two nonliterary, printed between 1499 and 1503: Petrarch’s Bucolicum carmen (1502), Maximianus’s Elegiae (1503), the incunabulum Orationes Philippi Beroaldi (1499) on the topic of Cicero, and Solinus’s geography De memorabilibus mundi (1503).⁶⁰ The texts were numbered in their former position by a sixteeenth-century owner—“primus,” “secondus,” and so on—who also used the blank spaces in the volume to record fragments of other texts that interested him, as one might use a notebook or a commonplace book.⁶¹ Despite the fact that these books were printed within a few years of one another and evidently used in close intellectual or physical proximity, the volume was split into individual units, its parts decontextualized and set into the correct categories: “book” or “incunable,” but never both.

Less arbitrary perhaps, the line separating print from manuscript was another important factor in the reform of the AB collection. As Harold Love, Arthur Marotti, Henry Woudhuysen, and others have demonstrated, the distinction between the two categories of text was never as absolute in the early modern era as it is in modern culture.⁶² The transition from one medium to another as the dominant mode of textual and literary circulation was gradual, and in production, especially in the Renaissance, they often overlapped. Indeed, Pugh’s catalog lists several examples of composite books that contained both printed and manuscript material, specimens later deemed hybrid or composite as the categories came into use and finally disbanded by the university librarians. AB.10.54 formerly contained three printed books—a history of Jason, a poetic work on the subject of death, and a later production of The Myrrour of the World—along with a manuscript copy of Sallust’s monograph on the Cataline conspiracy written in a neat sixteenth-century hand.⁶³ The works contain matching ownership inscriptions and marginalia, but the handwritten portion was extracted, rebound, and transported to the manuscripts department at Cambridge in the nineteenth century.⁶⁴ Moreover, because two of the three printed texts were incunabula, the remains of the composite volume were themselves disbanded and reorganized into individual units in their proper categories. Another example is AB.10.57, which once contained seven books now separate—four manuscripts and three early printed texts, all related philosophical works.⁶⁵ According to a note in the AB catalog dated 1799, the manuscript material was extracted and given its own binding during Pugh’s tenure. And later, in the nineteenth century, the volume was reconfigured yet again to make its printed contents into individually bound modern books.

Finally, authorship seems to have been a guiding category in the modernization of rare books at Cambridge. Like the composite volumes of material that exhibited what we see as thematic or chronological incoherence, the ABclass books that contained works by more than one author were likely candidates for reform in the nineteenth century. Pugh’s entries seem to indicate that where early compilations of printed material happened to be wholly or primarily focused on a single author, they would more often be left in their contemporary bindings or bundled arrangements. AB.3.23, for example, is a composite volume of five sixteenth-century medical and proto-scientific books, four of which were written by the same author, William Turner.⁶⁶ It is one of the few whose internal text arrangements were left intact. AB.5.29 is a compilation of medical and proto-scientific books comprising three works whose appearance in print was attributed to Richard Banckes (though they were produced from medieval manuscripts of unknown authorship); and this book was left in its original binding, retaining its original parchment tabs, marginal annotations, and other signs of sixteenth-century use and circulation.⁶⁷ Most of the composite volumes in the AB catalog were not as fortunate from the standpoint of the history of reading. The evidence from Pugh’s entries and subsequent annotations consistently suggest that the only books unlikely to be subjected to reform in a modernizing institutional library were those perceived as authorial, nonvaluable, chronologically or thematically consistent, and purely one bibliographical type or another. With few exceptions, we now know such books as tract volumes.

Archival Selection, Reader Agency, and the Parker Register

“If there is a counterpart to the confusion of a library, it is the order of its catalog,” Walter Benjamin remarked while unpacking his book collection in the early twentieth century, a period of relative stability in the material organization of books in history.⁶⁸ This dichotomy would not have described the state of things a century earlier with the AB-class catalog at Cambridge, a fact that no doubt contributed to the dismissal of William Pugh. In cataloging the AB-class books, Pugh not only recorded but became preoccupied with the confusion of a prominent library of premodern books. Comparing Pugh’s original entries with their later annotations and the AB-class volumes in their present, modernized states, we reacquaint ourselves with this confusion and excess most often only in its absence—in what is no longer there in the individually bound books that we consult in the University Library’s reading rooms. One of Pugh’s entries records an incunabular volume of works by Ovid with the note “Some things at beg. & end,” which have apparently been discarded.⁶⁹ Another entry lists “something added” to the popular medieval poem The Chastysing of goddes Chyldern; that “something” is also now lost.⁷⁰ His record for AB.5.65—a compilation consisting of a grammar, a dietary, and an invective against swearing, all from the mid- to late sixteenth century—has had a section torn out that corresponds to what the old class catalog at the University Library refers to as “other imperfect tracts” formerly in the volume.⁷¹ The ordering and tidying up of collections are crucial measures in the development of accessible, protected libraries of historical materials. Without them, readers would be disoriented. But order does not just preserve; it selects.

Documents such as the AB catalog⁷² encourage us to consider how our understanding of literary and textual history has been shaped by the archival practices of collecting, codifying, and making books available on shelves and in reading rooms—practices commonly assumed to be objective. Scholarship in Renaissance literature in particular has for two decades now sought to nuance accounts of meaning-making by expanding the range of literary agents under our consideration.⁷³ But while compositors, printers, and editors have been shown to shape rather than merely facilitate our readings and interpretations, the collectors and archivists whose activities set the terms for our interactions with texts have gone largely unstudied in Renaissance English literary criticism. To what extent, we might ask, has the privileging of certain kinds of text and the relegation of others to tract books (or worse, garbage bins) informed our notions of canon formation or the preferences and habits of readers from earlier periods? Have our default bibliographic distinctions—between incunabula and printed books, or printed texts and manuscripts—trained us to see disruption in the past where there was continuity? The force of this line of inquiry is not to condemn the biases of modern collecting or to roll back the work of the collector in the hope of finding something originary. Rather, like Benjamin, it is to take up forms of collecting as expressions of historically specific desires and material or economic imperatives—behaviors that can teach us about the cultures from which they emerge. It is to bear in mind that literary-historical objects and documents do not come down to us ready at hand but through processes of selection that are far from value free.

Large institutional collections, such as the Cambridge University Library, perform an indispensable service of cultural and historical preservation. For much of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this mission went hand in hand with sweeping conservation initiatives that have transformed what we must imagine is the bulk of extant canonical or otherwise valuable literary-historical artifacts.⁷⁴ Until recently, as curatorial policies on rebinding have shifted and as collectors have begun to value rather than avoid or erase earlier signs of use, it has been difficult to recover information about historical forms of compiling and the organization of knowledge. Beyond the fact that a given text was once in the company of others, it is often impossible to know more. That configuration could have issued from an early retailer; it could have been formed at the request of an early reader or brought together by an antiquarian collector who purchased the first reader’s library at auction later on. The text likely passed through the hands of many owners before finding its home in an institutional library. There are no clear agents here, only a wider sphere of potential agents relative to the more circumscribed roles of modern book culture. And as we have seen, the custodians of large modern libraries, where texts of note and value would most frequently land, were more liable to discard traces of former ownership than to record them, making earlier books contemporary with our books. Work has been done on individual collections that are richer in contextual information, such as those of the great Renaissance antiquarians,⁷⁵ but because those libraries have been dispersed or handed over to institutions over the centuries, they have been subject to the same changes as Cambridge’s AB class—only without the benefit of a similar paper trail that might allow us to track the morphologies of their texts.

The Elizabethan Archbishop of Canterbury Matthew Parker took pains to ensure that his vast Renaissance library would remain untouched at Corpus Christi College, just down the road from the University Library in Cambridge. His example offers us a rare compiling (and indeed reading) agent from early English book culture, a counterbalance to the uncertainty raised by the AB catalog and documents like it. Parker was a foremost book collector in his time, and his collecting habits were inextricably linked to his writing, as he produced a body of printed work, primarily ecclesiastical in nature, based on close study in his library. This connection between Parker’s reading and writing has been particularly illuminating for historians of the book. As Timothy Graham and R. I. Page have shown, Parker and his assistants left “such ample traces of their work that the modern scholar can reconstruct with precision both the method by which they proceeded and the purposes that guided them.”⁷⁶ Parker owned or cared for over 500 manuscripts and 850 printed books, and was a meticulous organizer of these materials: he arranged his books into sections, created thorough contents lists for many of his composite volumes, and more often than not paginated them continuously with his trademark red crayon, leaving a record of their structure and any changes made to them later under his supervision. A typical Parkerian contents list shows how frequently his books changed shape: in shelf mark MS 100, for example, the archbishop recorded, “hic liber continet pag 363 404 342,” having revised the total number of pages twice. In another representative contents list, MS 114a, he left blank spaces between each entry so that the table could accommodate later changes.

Parker was an avid and lifelong reader, as his profession required. But in 1568, the Privy Council issued a request that he personally take into his care all “ancient records and monuments”⁷⁷ that had been dispersed with the dissolution of the monasteries—that is, all the extant fragments of medieval and Anglo-Saxon manuscripts in England at the time. With this mandate, Parker became what Page has called “a one-man Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts” in Elizabethan England.⁷⁸ His library grew to form the most important store of English rare books in the period, rich in manuscripts and specimens of early print from the eighth century to the Renaissance. Before his death, sensing the sustained challenge of preserving such delicate materials, Parker devised an elaborate system of custodianship. His books would be given to Corpus Christi College and a thorough inventory would be taken at the time of the bequest. The document, now called the Parker Register, would be copied according to the archbishop’s wishes and distributed to two other Cambridge colleges—Trinity Hall and Gonville and Caius—whose librarians were then required to check the books in the Parker Library annually. Should anything be found missing or out of place, heavy penalties were to be levied, multiple infractions leading to the forfeiture of the collection to the libraries of the other colleges.

Parker’s wishes were carried out, and his Renaissance Library remains intact at Corpus Christi.⁷⁹ Ironically, however, the archbishop has aroused as much ire among scholars for mistreating books as he has praise for preserving them. His unparalleled collection of Anglo-Saxon and late medieval manuscripts has been the primary focus of attention in this respect. Historians of the book continue to be dismayed at how readily Parker would take apart, rearrange, and fuse together into diverse configurations texts that are now considered priceless treasures. “Viewing the manuscripts as his private possessions,” Graham has explained, the archbishop “allowed himself significant liberties in the ways he handled them. Almost every manuscript that passed into his hands has undergone some transformation as a result of his ownership.”⁸⁰ Parker frequently removed leaves, erased text, or inserted the parts of one manuscript into another, sometimes gluing or stitching them in custom arrangements that do not yield easily to modern conservation efforts or cataloging.⁸¹ For scholars, Graham notes, “it is sometimes difficult to see the reasons for such actions.”⁸² One famous example is Parker’s apparent removal of eleven leaves from an Anglo-Saxon homily manuscript, which he inserted into a different composite manuscript of thematically unrelated material.⁸³ The Anglo-Saxon extract contained Ælfric’s translation of the Interrogationes Sigeuulfi presbyteri flanked by fragments of the Exameron anglice and a homily by Ælfric. Moreover, perhaps more glaringly, because he was primarily interested in the Interrogationes, Parker had the latter two texts covered over with contemporary scraps of vellum that he had taken from a manuscript legal document.⁸⁴

Page, during his tenure as Parker librarian, recorded similar instances of the archbishop removing leaves from one book in order to adorn another. Parker’s MS 419 and 452 comprise an eleventh-century homily book and a twelfth-century text of Eadmer, respectively, both of which were given illuminated cover pages removed from thirteenth-century psalters which, Page observes, “have no connection to the text.”⁸⁵ MS 163 is an eleventhcentury service book with a sixteenth-century cover page that Parker had taken from a printed French missal.⁸⁶ The archbishop also had a bindery on site, which allowed him to reorganize the texts within such volumes as they came into his hands. Graham notes that here “in the process of rebinding, Parker not infrequently interfered with the structure of the manuscripts, making repairs and restorations, supplying missing text, combining together two or more originally separate manuscripts, or effecting other transformations.”⁸⁷ The most notorious instance of Parker’s textual manipulation is MS 197, a fragment of an eighth-century gospel. When the manuscript came into his possession, Parker reversed the canonical order of the gospels—placing John before Luke—because, it is said, he found the cover illumination of the former more visually appealing.⁸⁸ He then seemingly inexplicably bound the rare early medieval manuscript into a collection of late medieval historical treatises from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century with which the early gospel texts had nothing in common. Personal preference or need in this case trumped the prescribed textual organization.

Graham concludes from his numerous bibliographical investigations that “Parker’s treatment of his manuscripts provides a remarkable insight into the extent to which early modern collectors were prepared to restore and reshape their books.”⁸⁹ Such habits were not anomalous among Renaissance antiquaries, he explains; Parker’s manuscripts, because they are preserved intact, only provide the most visible evidence of something widespread. But Parker’s printed books—which are also preserved intact and which, as another Parker librarian, Bruce Dickins, once noted, would “themselves have brought fame to a library”⁹⁰ in the period—are not factored in to generalizable assessments of book collecting in the scholarship on Parker’s library. The reason, we might suspect, is the inclination of modern textual culture to comprehend manuscripts as malleable things and printed books as fixed or naturally selfbounded. Page channels this bias in his critique of Parker’s conservation habits: “We who have been brought up in a printed book culture find it natural to regard a book as a complete and discrete object, a finished work. It requires something of a shift of thinking to see it as a collection of quires that could be added to or subtracted from.”⁹¹

Yet the printed books in the Parker Library, which have never been submitted to sustained study and have only recently been recataloged,⁹² were very much subject to the archbishop’s brand of conservation. As some of my examples of hybrid miscellanies have already suggested, Parker seems not to have drawn as rigorous a distinction between manuscript and print; he mixed together leaves drawn from both kinds of text and handled them more or less continuously in a way that Page, operating within the constraints of modern librarianship, perhaps could not.⁹³ In a recent examination of the sixteenthcentury Parkerian holdings that remain at the collections at the Cambridge University Library, Elisabeth Leedham-Green and David McKitterick found that Parker combined and recombined his printed books in much the same way he did with his Anglo-Saxon and late medieval manuscripts. The surviving printed books with Parkerian provenances in the University Library, they explain, are strikingly untidy and unfixed, reflecting the archbishop’s “continuing wish to re-order …, binding up different authors so that, for example, commentators on books of the Bible should be bound by their subject matter.”⁹⁴ Such intertextual combinations, they note, were helpful for certain readers, “just as (no doubt) there were advantages in reducing the cost of binding; but the resulting fragments of books tucked into volumes with otherwise complete books have disconcerted those who have used the books in the University Library ever since.”⁹⁵ Because of their provenance—their connection to a figure of historical importance at Cambridge—the texts were not disbound during modern conservation campaigns.

The vast collection of early printed books at the Parker Library offers many similar witnesses of Parkerian combination and compilation. Even a superficial glance at the entries in the Parker Register (which, as with any inventory from the period, will inevitably underrepresent the number of multi-item volumes actually in the collection) reveals that over a third of Parker’s printed books were listed as composite in the original document in the mid-1570s. These volumes, unlike the Parker Library’s cherished Anglo-Saxon and late medieval manuscripts, were not submitted to conservation in modernity and are therefore preserved with few exceptions in their original bindings. The organization of the collection has also been preserved. Parker’s large-format volumes, according to the register, were organized into a Maiore Bibliotheca with smaller or more common volumes kept in a Minore Bibliotheca, both of which contain a high proportion of compiled books. All texts listed under “Poetica” in Parker’s Maiore Bibliotheca, for example, are composite volumes.⁹⁶ Here, some “collected works” volumes, comprising the poetry and plays of major literary figures from Greek and Roman antiquity, can be found attached to works by other authors, even works by nonliterary authors. Parker’s 1573 Opera of Seneca, for example, is bound with a 1544 Opera of Calcagnini.⁹⁷ Similarly, his 1513 Opera of Poggio is bound with a partial 1531 commentary on Pliny.⁹⁸ Parker also seems to have assembled or purchased ad hoc collected-works volumes, which resemble those few compilations organized by author that were left in their early states in the Cambridge University Library’s AB class. Shelf mark EP.S.2, paginated continuously with Parker’s red crayon, brings together four divergent early printed volumes: Sebastian Brant’s Shyp of folys of the worlde (1509), Mancinus’s conduct verse The myrrour of good maners (1518?), Sallust’s famous cronycle of the warre, which the romayns had agaynst lugurth (1525?), and The introductory to wryte, and to pronounce frenche (1521).⁹⁹ The books share a common bibliographical detail in Alexander Barclay, who translated the first three and compiled the French language textbook.

Parker also kept his books in order in ways unanticipated in the example of the AB catalog. Page, while serving at Corpus Christi, once joked, “I am sometimes asked how many printed books Parker left to the College, and I usually give an evasive answer: ‘That depends on what you mean by a book.’ ”¹⁰⁰ The library indeed preserves a range of unexpected amalgams and fragmentary volumes, especially among Parker’s smaller-format works in print. The majority of the archbishop’s early printed texts are listed in a section of the register tellingly called “Bookes in parchement closures as the[y] lye on heapes”—books in limp vellum, that is, reflecting tentative configurations of text that could be more easily taken down and reshaped than could leather-bound books (Fig. 6). Many of the items in these “closures” show evidence of having been paginated differently—sometimes doubly or triply—in red crayon, indicating they were arranged in different ways at different times, sometimes thematically, sometimes chronologically or by author, compiler, or translator.¹⁰¹ Parker seems to have shifted his texts around in units as small as individual leaves. SP 17, for example, is a collection of sermon fragments with folio sheets from other texts bound into the front and back covers as foldouts.¹⁰² Several of his miscellanies—MS 106, 113, and 121—incorporate single-page printed extracts, including ballads, religious and political proclamations, and tables taken from larger works.¹⁰³

Figure 6. An example of a book “in parchement closures” in the Parker Library. This volume includes seven printed texts, mostly political, and on the left is a handwritten cure for toothache. By permission of the Master and Fellows of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.

Because Matthew Parker produced so much printed material himself, and because his book-collecting practices have been thoroughly documented in his time and ours, we have evidence that helps us contextualize these malleable volumes.¹⁰⁴ In many cases, the assemblages in the Parker Library can be shown to have been put together and used according to some goal related to Parker’s intellectual work. It is well known, for example, that the archbishop’s collection increased and diversified in the interest of English nation building.¹⁰⁵ His political and religious agenda as an officer of the church are also manifest in the texts he acquired from the dissolved monasteries. But more local, particular motivations can be found in the flexibly bound anthologies like the one pictured in Figure 6. Several of his composite bindings form case studies of important historical figures or current events, for example, providing us with material records of Parker’s own reading. Shelf mark SP 348 brings together three books on the visitations of Edward VI—who was so pivotal in Parker’s political advancement—including injunctions, sermons, and homilies related to the events.¹⁰⁶ SP 193 contains three books on Mary Magdalene that were printed in Paris, perhaps bundled together, in 1519, forming a topical religious collection.¹⁰⁷ SP 445 contains seven early printed texts that all relate to England’s foreign relations during the clerical reform efforts of the middle part of the sixteenth century.¹⁰⁸

Other of Parker’s multitext volumes can be linked to the projects he was working on at the time of compilation, projects that eventually materialized in printed works. One of the archbishop’s primary preoccupations in the service of Elizabethan nation building was language, particularly the languages of early Christianity in England. SP 281, a volume containing two printed texts and a manuscript, seems to have been compiled as a kind of reference in Parker’s linguistic and antiquarian research: listed as “Homilie Saxone” in the register, the volume brings together Ælfric’s Testimone of antiquitie (1566?), Gildas’s history De excitio & conquestu Britanniae (1568),¹⁰⁹ and an Armenian alphabet and lexicon that one of the archbishop’s assistants had produced by hand. Another of Parker’s lifelong theological preoccupations was clerical marriage, an interest that followed naturally from his own, to Margaret Harelston in 1547, two years before marriages among the clergy were made legal. Parker’s official contribution to the debate was a treatise printed as a continuation of John Ponet’s unfinished manuscript on the subject.¹¹⁰ But many of the composite volumes in his library survive to reveal ways in which the archbishop as a textual consumer kept reference anthologies on clerical marriage to aid in his authorial project. In vellum bindings, the archbishop placed selected theological, historical, and practical texts into conversation with each other. A vivid example is SP 447: a collection of fourteen books, including religious orations, political treatises, epistles on marriage, and two manuals of domestic conduct and cooking, A Treatise for Householders (1574) and Of Cokery and Seruing of Meates (1558).¹¹¹ To a modern collector, this combination of texts would perhaps have seemed in need of disbinding and reclassification. Had it been part of the AB class at Bradshaw’s University Library, it would have been separated into individual units. But for Parker it was instrumental, and for us it is a record of his intellectual work.

Compilation and Composition: Lambeth Palace Library MS 959

Matthew Parker’s life’s work was his ecclesiastical history of Britain, De antiquitate Britannicae ecclesiae, printed in 1574 at his own press in London. Many of the printed books in the Parker Library on subjects related to this project survive in composite volumes as personal resource anthologies. By midcentury, Parker was already actively involved in the translation and publication of other writers’ ecclesiastical histories; his parallel roles of book collector and propagandist for the church and nation led him to patronize the works of protestant martyrologist John Foxe and antiquarian John Stowe, for example, and to sponsor the newly published works of Matthew Paris.¹¹² In building his library, Parker would often buy or anthologize printed histories in topical arrangements that might serve him in his historiographical research. SP 11 is emblematic of this practice, comprising two prominent ecclesiastical histories, one by the medieval historian Geoffrey of Monmouth and another by the sixteenth-century historian John Mair (or Major), linked together in Parker’s library likely because they shared theological concerns.¹¹³

For Parker the writer, these multitext arrangements were tools for compiling and producing text, a process that can be traced with unusual clarity in De antiquitate Britannicae ecclesiae. The version of Parker’s masterwork that was printed in 1574 was itself a compilation of historical material drawn from many sources, and the text as a printed artifact was malleable in much the same way as the volumes “in parchement closures” in his library. Written collaboratively with his secretaries John Jocelyn and George Acworth, De antiquitate is composed of five printed books produced at different times: a historical introduction, the life of Augustine, the lives of English archbishops to Cardinal Pole, Parker’s own life, and a set of miscellaneous documents relating to Cambridge. The folio-sized booklets had to be assembled by the reader to tell a continuous history of the English church. This built-in malleability prompted the Short Title Catalogue, in its modern bibliographical entry for De antiquitate, to suggest that Parker continually “added to and rearranged the contents” of his book, as all copies now extant vary widely. But Parker seems to have designed his text with this feature firmly in mind. As revealed by his correspondence and the presentation copies that survive in modern archives such as the British Library, the archbishop wanted his ecclesiastical history to be able to accommodate itself to individual recipients and occasions. Parker even included a sheet of woodcuts that could be painted, cut out, and pasted in over the blank initials originally printed to begin each section of the text.¹¹⁴ Sensing perhaps that some of his more iconoclastic post-Reformation readers would take offense at being charged with the task of illuminating their own books, Parker explained in a letter to Lord Burleigh that this aspect of the volume can be customized: for the reader, he writes, “may relinquish the leaf and cast it into the fire, as I have joined it but loose in the book for that purpose.”¹¹⁵

In De antiquitate, then, we have a printed work from the early modern period that reflects at the level of physical structure the practices of compilation, reading, and collecting that we observe in its producer. Matthew Parker’s unusually well-documented tendency to combine and recombine text explicitly informs the book he eventually wrote. The project of an ecclesiastical history is, of course, inherently compilatory. But this particular book, which draws a clear line of descent from Augustine through all the English bishops down to the date of its printing, was the culmination of Matthew Parker’s lifelong interest in collecting and arranging primary materials from the Anglo-Saxon and late medieval periods. De antiquitate would register the archbishop’s politically urgent interest in transforming those primary materials into printed texts—translations, language references, commentaries, and allied works of theology and ecclesiastical history—that would offer proof that the native Christianity in England was the most authentic form.

Indeed, Parker’s personal copy of De antiquitate, preserved in the archives at Lambeth Palace Library in London, shows us the remarkable extent to which notions of the malleable, recombinant text were central to this intellectual project. Of this copy of the book Parker once wrote in a letter to Lord Burleigh: “To keep it by me I yet purpose while I live, to aid and to amend as occasion shall serve me, or utterly to suppress it and to bren it.”¹¹⁶ Lambeth shelf mark MS 959 is consequently much more process than product—a text that seems very clearly to resist the kind of stasis commonly attributed to printed texts in modernity. Nearly every page of MS 959 is annotated by hand (Fig. 7), the annotations sometimes adding material to the entries as they were originally printed and other times correcting those entries in light of new information obtained. Blank manuscript pages were interleaved at some point for additional space, reflecting the openness to the expansion or enlargement of existing texts that I observed in Parker’s manuscript miscellanies. Segments of the volume seem also to have served as a kind of filing system for scraps of relevant documents—print and manuscript—that are tipped in at appropriate moments. Despite the book’s monumental size and import—it had been printed and distributed to the likes of Arundel, Lord Burleigh, and Queen Elizabeth—Parker treated this volume as a working text, to be “aided and amended” when a new piece of evidence came into his hands.

Figure 7. Lambeth Palace Library MS 959, title page. Matthew Parker’s personal copy of De antiquitate Britannicae ecclesiae, showing manuscript notes in the hands of Parker and his collaborators. By permission of Lambeth Palace Library.

Figure 8. Lambeth Palace Library MS 959, fol. 176r, showing a thirteenth-century document once sewn to the page. By permission of Lambeth Palace Library.

The most striking of the amendments made to LPL 959 are a series of Anglo-Saxon and later medieval manuscripts that were literally stitched to the volume. Parker and his collaborators seem to have used needle and thread as well as their pens to preserve historical material and revise the printed text. Figure 8 displays a representative example: a thirteenth-century manuscript deed formerly sewn to the top of a printed page in De antiquitate.¹¹⁷ The position of the stitched-in document here is strategic. The page comes midway through the life of Boniface of Savoy, Archbishop of Canterbury from 1244 to 1268, and the sewn-in manuscript records a deed of gift to Boniface from King Henry III. Much in the same way that medieval readers in religious communities stitched woodcuts, pilgrim’s badges, and other gathered materials into their service books,¹¹⁸ Parker seems to have had his volume ornamented with auratic primary documents, transforming a printed text into a curatorial space or guardbook for the material digested in the history itself. The content of the supplemental document, moreover, seems to be incorporated into the text in this case. The right-hand margin of folio 176r, pictured here, has been used to record in Latin the expenditures of the inthronizatione (enthronement) that was the occasion of the deed of gift. The marginal annotations in ink expand the account of Archbishop Boniface’s enthronement originally printed in De antiquitate with details taken from the sewn-in deed, down to the serving trays (discos) and the fifty pounds of wax used for lights (50 lib. Cere ad luminaria[m]) at the event.¹¹⁹

This page and several others in MS 959, which once contained stitchedin supplements,¹²⁰ demonstrate a process of revision and transmission through which Parker’s collecting and compiling habits became methods of composing text. The archbishop’s longtime commitment to gathering, organizing, translating, and making accessible the surviving documents of early Christian England comes to structure in this instance the never-completed, always-expanding printed work, De antiquitate Britannicae ecclesilae, which continued to be revised, amended, and altered in this way even after Parker’s death in 1575, when John Jocelyn and John Parker, the archbishop’s son, took it into their charge.¹²¹ Like many of the AB-class books at Cambridge, however, Lambeth Palace Library MS 959 was reorganized later when the original medieval documents became important primary sources in need of special preservation in modernity. Today at Lambeth Palace Library, the volume is separated into two smaller, more manageable sections and rebound in calf; the sewn-in primary texts have been taken out and are mounted in plastic on the facing pages, as shown in Figure 8. The custodial interventions were necessary to preserve the integrity of the aging paper and the manuscript evidence on vellum. But evidence of another kind—traces of Parker’s compiling and composing activities—are obscured in the preservation measures. We have to use our imagination to reconstruct the text as the archbishop and his collaborators assembled it.

This chapter has argued through two case studies at Cambridge libraries that curatorial decisions normally taken to be objective or incidental to reading and interpretation can have major interpretative implications. In the superseded AB-class catalog at the University Library, we found that reclassification and conservation initiatives in the nineteenth century had transformed the institution’s early printed literary and intellectual materials, many of them in Sammelband, into single-text, modern-looking books. The changes introduced order and accessibility but also modern bibliographical categories into the largely premodern collection, overwriting the earlier norms of order and access that had organized the materials for two centuries or more. In the Parker Register at Corpus Christi College, we saw the full extent to which these earlier norms governed reading and book use in the era of the handpress. Archbishop Parker’s own publishing projects, drawn from his engagement with the malleable books in flexible bindings in his collection, foreshadow the argument of the second half of this study: that habits of mind grounded in this compiling and Sammelband culture gave form to Renaissance writing as well.

The case studies in this chapter also introduce a tension that runs throughout this book between particular and generalizable evidence. Both documents of early library formation at Cambridge were the products of individuals who might be seen as historical outliers: the eccentric cataloger William Pugh and the sometimes imprudent reader, Matthew Parker, whose directive in book collecting came from the queen. Both documents too, I have been careful to note, were unlikely survivals: Pugh’s AB catalog, rendered obsolete long ago, was kept in library records to accumulate data where most outdated classification tools (we can think of card catalogs) simply fall into disuse; and the Parker Register, with its elaborate system of checks and balances across three institutional libraries, preserved each item in a Renaissance collection down to their material, bound arrangements where comparable historical artifacts experience inevitable change or decay. How can such cases, which seem so extraordinary, represent the ordinary habits and routines of early English book culture more generally?

In one sense, this question underscores the very centrality of curatorial activities to literary-historical interpretation that constitutes the argument of this chapter. For in the extant archive of early printed materials, the fullest traces we have of early reading and writing practices are often the remarkable survivals that escaped conservation and reclassification in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries. So much primary evidence was lost as modern book owners systematically remade the archive in their own modern image. Perceptions of what was normal and what was anomalous in earlier cultures of the text—perceptions of literary history itself, embodied in library shelves—are shaped to a great degree by the largely silent work of the book collector.

On the other hand, as I will argue, Pugh and Parker were not outliers in early book culture; the relatively flexible, open-ended, recombinant texts that they engaged and maintained were the raw materials of the intellectual products of the handpress era. It will be the burden of the chapters that follow to develop the particular into the general—to trace early compiling and collecting practices in diverse readers, canonical writers, and ambitious amateurs from the Renaissance. The next chapter begins by pressing the issue of curatorial impact beyond the case study and into a field of collected artifacts from a range of institutions and individuals under the organizing category of a single author, Shakespeare.