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Introduction

Compiling Culture

I Compyle: I make a boke as an auctour doth.

—From the table of verbs in a 1530 translation dictionary

William Thomas’s Historie of Italie is one of the more important surviving documents of the literary and political culture of the Renaissance in Europe.¹ Written by a clerk of England’s Privy Council and published in 1549 by the royal printer, the book offered a pragmatist’s guide to governance through firsthand accounts of Italian social organization. It passed through multiple reissues and remained popular into the 1590s; modern editions of Shakespeare often include excerpts and references that conjure an image of the playwright mining Thomas’s book for characters in The Merchant of Venice, Othello, and The Tempest.² But if you call up the sole copy of the Historie at St. John’s College Library in Cambridge, the text that arrives on your desk will come as some surprise. Instead of one book, you will find three books bound together: a pamphlet entitled Information for pilgrims into the Holy Land (1524), the Historie, and the medieval story collection Gesta Romanorum (1517).³ Also bound in the volume, between printed items, is a manuscript on London churches written by the sixteenth-century physician Myles Blomefylde, who owned this eclectic group of texts and whose handwriting is present throughout the compilation.⁴ For Blomefylde, it seems, The Historie of Italie had little value as a reflection on Italian politics or character. In the margins, he signed his initials to the names of the Venetian tourist sites he had visited (or imagined himself visiting) on a trip to the city. On a blank sheet preceding a section on “The Venetian Astate,” he gave Thomas’s work a new, more appropriate title: Myles Blomefylde in Venice (Fig. 1).

Figure 1. William Thomas’s Historie of Italie, marked up and retitled by Myles Blomefylde. By permission of the Master and Fellows of St. John’s College, Cambridge.

This study is about the desire for books—the collector’s desire for books—in the production and dissemination of Renaissance literature, chiefly in English. Myles Blomefylde may have been flamboyant, but he was not anomalous among readers and writers in the era of early print. Many thousands of collected volumes like the one pictured here survive from this period under various bibliographic designations: Sammelbände (or multibook compilations), personal anthologies, composites of manuscript and print, tract collections, and others. Many still reflect an early owner’s desire to appropriate and interact with the texts, to organize and repurpose them, or to transform existing works into new works. Blomefylde’s Historie of Italie stands as a witness to such processes most likely because the larger compilation and collector are of literary-historical consequence. The adjacent Gesta Romanorum is the only known copy of that translation, and Blomefylde has long been recognized for handing down several unique late medieval play texts, including the only complete edition of Henry Medwall’s Fulgens and Lucres.⁵ Yet the very consequentially that encouraged the preservation of this volume for four centuries could have led to its breakup or loss in a different institutional setting. As William Sherman has shown, libraries and collectors in the modern era privileged “clean books” and routinely had the marks of early readers such as Blomefylde removed from important texts.⁶ A similar desire for “pristine rebinding,” noted by conservators and bookbinding experts including Julia Miller and John Szirmai,⁷ drastically altered compilation structures in modern book collections. If all or part of an early Sammelband was judged to have exceptional value, the likelihood was high that the volume would be separated into its constituent units for individual rebinding or sale, eliminating the traces of early ownership. St. John’s College had neither the onsite binding facilities of a Henry E. Huntington nor the distinguished Enlightenment-era foundation collections of a British Museum.⁸ The Old Library, where the rare books are kept and consulted, remains very much as it was when it was founded in the seventeenth century, a short time before the Blomefylde volume was deposited there.⁹

Indeed, among collectors, major works of Renaissance literature constitute the most valuable, desired category of early printed books. Along with the first and grandest productions from movable type, such works have progressed through modern book markets, fine binderies, auction houses, institutional libraries, and conservation laboratories where less sought-after texts from the period have remained uncirculated and unprocessed. The literary output of the early handpress has, therefore, been disproportionately touched by the modern preference for clean, individually bound books. In some library collections, such as St. John’s, we can find important Renaissance works that look as they did to their earliest readers. But much of the literary rare-book archive—which supplies essential primary texts to editors, critics, and historians—reflects the desires of modern readers: the uniformity of industrialized printing and binding, the order of the systematic catalog, the circumscribed aura of the collectors’ item. In many of today’s most extensive and accessible libraries, a more complicated material history of Renaissance texts lies buried in institutional records.

This book excavates a culture of compiling and text collection that prevailed after the emergence of print but before the ascendancy of the modern, ready-bound printed book. It focuses on the organization and physical assembly of early printed literary texts, both at the hands of their first owners and collectors in the Renaissance and also, necessarily, at the hands of the modern collectors—individual and institutional—who have reorganized them, classified them, and made them available to us in libraries. Its premise is the observation, shared by bibliographers and recent historians of the material text, that books have not always existed in discrete, self-enclosed units. In the early handpress era, the printed work was relatively malleable and experimental—a thing to actively shape, expand, and resituate as one desired. Copies of Shakespeare’s quarto plays and poems were bound into custom anthologies; literary masterworks were mixed with pamphlets and other printed ephemera to form topical Sammelbände; texts of all kinds were enlarged by writing, binding, and even sewing in additional material. These compiled volumes were not the sealed-off textual artifacts—organized by author, genre, subject heading, and short title—that are found on shelves in most rare-book archives today. (It would take careful curatorial work, we will see, to forge this normative disposition of texts.) Rather, these were fluid, adaptable objects, always prone to intervention and change.

For readers in the Renaissance, compiling was born of the everyday demands of book ownership. As Paul Needham and David Pearson have argued, in the handpress era, “there was no such thing as a ready-bound edition, corresponding to the clothbound books with which we (in Englishspeaking countries) are familiar today.”¹⁰ The commonplace notion that early printed texts—particularly the small formats used for vernacular literature—were sold unbound or merely stitched has been refined and extended by Mirjam Foot, Nicholas Pickwoad, and other scholars of bookbinding.¹¹ Often the task of having sheets turned into books fell to the owner at the time of purchase. Other times “certain kinds of popular books, such as religious texts, law books, school books, and classical texts, would sell sufficiently well for the publisher or bookseller to have a quantity ready-bound in stock” (Fig. 2).¹² In both cases—user-initiated bindings and partial-edition retail bindings—we observe the tremendous agency of the consumer in determining the physicality of texts, whether through active assembly or perceived measures of popularity. More important, because these handmade bindings were vastly more expensive than the printed sheets of the texts themselves, it was financially necessary to gather multiple works of normal length into single bound volumes to ensure their preservation.¹³ Thus, with each purchase, the consumer played a role not only in the physical appearance of texts but also in the internal organization of texts in bindings—a central aspect of literate culture that in later centuries would become the province solely of producers. Every bound volume was a unique, customized assemblage, formed outside of an absolute prescription issuing from an author or publishing house. The book, in this respect, had a morphology that it would lose in the era of industrially produced texts and the classification systems based on them. Methods of collecting such books into libraries were correspondingly tentative and exploratory; wills, inventories, and catalogs from the period show a striking variation in shelving habits and methods of text preservation.¹⁴ Advances in technology had made it newly possible for an individual to own more books than he or she could possibly read,¹⁵ and without established practices for assembling and codifying the mass of texts that one could acquire in this age of cheaper print, readers and book owners experimented with the possibilities.

Figure 2. A seventeenth-century bookshop from Johann Comenius’s Orbis sensualium pictus (London, 1685), sig. N8v, showing books unbound, in stacks of sheets, and bound, fore-edge out, on shelves. By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

For writers in the Renaissance, compiling was fundamentally entwined with textual production. This is a crucial theme in the chapters that follow—and a crucial bridge, I contend, between bibliography and the literary scholarship that tacitly, inescapably depends on it. Poets, playwrights, and essayists are by necessity also readers. In any period of written culture, they are subject to historically specific norms and conceptions of the text, embodied in reading and collecting routines, which render the world of words intelligible. The “order of books,” to use Roger Chartier’s influential phrase,¹⁶ limits certain modes of writing and enables others in sustaining an accepted range of categories or codes within (and sometimes against) which literary producers work. Bibliographic organization in this elemental sense defines writers’ potential relationship with texts. And in early print culture, this relationship was particularly changeable and dynamic. Jennifer Summit has written of a “formative chapter in their history” in which early modern libraries “actively processed, shaped, and imposed meaning on the very materials they contained.”¹⁷ The history of bookmaking in the period is one of rapid “diversification of the product” as binders, wholesalers, and retailers struggled to keep up with the increase in production brought on by the handpress.¹⁸ The literary figures of the Renaissance, well into this shift, came to writing at a moment of irresolution about the boundaries and order of books—a moment in which, unlike today, there were few standard practices for assembling, preserving, and facilitating access to published works in collections. Their intellectual products were accordingly marked by contingency and the potential for change, visible at the level of presentation. As any student of early printed material knows, one of the most common ways for a publisher to market a work in the period was to claim on its title page that it had been “enlarged” or “augmented,” “annexed” to another text, or otherwise reconfigured. In contrast to modern conceptions of the book, a lack of fixity was normal and desirable.

That the writers of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries wrote for and within this model of a comparatively malleable, mutable book is evident in the surface structure of works by many canonical figures. Michel de Montaigne famously enlarged his Essais by writing new material—and copying borrowed quotations—directly in the blank spaces of his printed book; the title pages of each successive edition promised a text “augmentée,” or “reveu & augmentée” [revised and augmented], a project that continued after the author’s death.¹⁹ Thomas Middleton and George Chapman are two of the many Renaissance poets in England who enlarged the writings of others to form works of “continuation”: Middleton added episodes to Shakespeare’s Lucrece in his complaint poem The Ghost of Lucrece (1600); and Chapman brought to conclusion Christopher Marlowe’s unfinished long poem, Hero and Leander (1598), with the expanded Hero and Leander: begun by Christopher Marloe; and finished by George Chapman (1600) and, later, the further expanded (and now composite) Hero and Leander: begunne by Christopher Marloe … whereunto Is added the first booke of Lucan translated line for line by the same author, also issued in 1600.²⁰ Philip Sidney’s works provide many well-known examples of continuation and composite annexation. The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia, his popular prose romance, ended in mid-sentence, as if inviting other writers to append, and was expanded four times in print and countless times in manuscript over the course of the next century.²¹ Sidney’s sonnet sequence, Astrophel and Stella, was first printed in 1591, and then again that same year in an expanded quarto “to the end of which are added, sundry other rare Sonnets of diuers Noble men and Gentlemen,” the title page advertised. In 1599, these two already composite books were combined, Astrophel and Stella added to the end of the Arcadia. And by 1629, the contents of this volume had become too heterogeneous and collaborative to list fully in the encumbered title: The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia, Written by Sir Philip Sidney Knight. Now the seuenth time published, with some new Additions. With the supplement of a Defect in the third part of this History, by Sir W. A. Knight. Whereunto is now added a sixth Booke, by R. B. of Lincolnes Inne.

Augmentations, continuations, additions, supplements. Like the bound volumes that accommodated them, printed works of literature in early handpress culture were frequently the outward products of some order of compiling. But beneath these surface indicators on title pages, we know too that text collecting and assembly were important catalysts for discursive production and even creativity. The malleability of books—figurative rather than physical—lies at the heart of what literary scholars have long identified as the essentially imitative nature of Renaissance writing: the appropriation and manipulation of existing models, primarily from antiquity, and the assertion of writerly roles through or against one’s source.²² Notions deriving from antiquity of imitatio and copia dominated ideas about literary production from the earliest moments of writing instruction in humanist schools. As Mary Thomas Crane has shown in a now-classic study, students in Renaissance classrooms “were encouraged to view all literature as a system of interchangeable fragments and to view the process of composition as centered on intertextuality.”²³ Pedagogical tools, such as commonplace books, trained poets to collect sayings and sententiae from others’ works to be assembled again into new works.²⁴ This technique of textual reconfiguration, which Crane termed “gathering and framing,”²⁵ is most observable in the aphoristic verse of the mid-sixteenth century, but has been shown in diverse ways to have shaped later narrative works as well. Linda Woodbridge, writing on the ubiquity of plot borrowing and rearrangement in Renaissance drama, has described the period’s default compositional processes with a quilting metaphor: patchwork. Shakespeare’s England, she explains, was “an aggregator’s world,” where literary producers depended on a ready supply of prefabricated parts of stories or verse in circulation. Collecting and redeploying material from others’ texts to compose their own, “Renaissance writers typically do not just retell a tale … they join several tales together to form a novella, an epic, or a play.”²⁶

But despite this shared emphasis on compiling and text assembly in the rhetoric of literary production, scholars of the period think about and interpret writing as if it takes place only in the world of ideas, not in embodied practice.²⁷ While our metaphors are insistently material, in other words, we imagine this particular, habitual intertextuality in Renaissance letters unfolding discursively. The literary producers and archival products examined in the chapters that follow demonstrate that, on the contrary, the Renaissance inclination to “gather” and “patch” was a more physical, ingrained thing than our assumptions about practice have allowed. The readers and writers of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries did not simply think of their books as aggregations of text; they physically aggregated, resituated, and customized them. Out of necessity and desire, they assembled volumes into unique configurations and built new works out of old ones. Models of literary production in the period were to a perhaps surprising degree predicated on the possibility that a text could be taken up and joined to something else. The bifurcation between ideas and material practice—between making works and making books—is, like the modern collectors’ binding, a later imposition.

“Compiling,” in fact, was production, strictly speaking, in the semantics of Renaissance literary activities. In early usage, the verb “to compile” could mean “to compose,” to produce an “original work.”²⁸ It was in this nowlimited sense synonymous with writing. John Palsgrave’s 1530 translation dictionary defines “compiling” explicitly as authorship: “[to] make a boke as an auctor dothe.”²⁹ Another early dictionary, John Bullokar’s An English Expositor, which passed through twenty editions between 1616 and 1775, lists the definition, “Compile. To make, frame or set together,” where “frame,” as recent scholarship has shown, also has a potentially structural meaning.³⁰ The term was applied in this way to many varieties of text in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Here are a few examples: William Caxton in his 1490 Aeneid lists Virgil as the text’s compiler;³¹ “E.K.” introduces Edmund Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender by explaining that Spenser “compiled these xii. Aeglogues;”³² the Latin textbook A short introduction of grammar (1567) describes itself as being “compiled and set forth” by its author, William Lily;³³ the title page to the 1561 Works of Chaucer advertises the attached “The Siege of Thebes” as “compiled by Ihon Lidgate”; Thomas Lupton’s morality play All for Money appears in a 1578 quarto “Compiled by T. Lupton”;³⁴ John Skelton, the sixteenth-century laureate, was named as compiler in nine books of verse printed and reprinted between 1554 and 1563;³⁵ Thomas Watson refers to his compositional practice as “compiling” twice in the running commentary to his 1582 book of sonnets, The Hekatompathia;³⁶ and the cover of Gervase Markham’s domestic manual The English Husbandman (1613) makes the (only now) seemingly paradoxical announcement that it is “A worke neuer written before by any author: and now newly compiled.”³⁷ To compile, according to this vocabulary, was to create.

The field-specific claim of this study then is twofold. It will argue first that books in early print culture were relatively open-ended and to a great extent bound (in both senses) by the desires of readers, and second that the attendant practices of compiling and collecting came to have an important structural impact on the production of Renaissance literature. In analyses of selected works by William Shakespeare, Thomas Watson, Michel de Montaigne, Edmund Spenser, and others in the chapters that follow, I contend that the unsettled conventions of book assembly in the period helped foster an idea of the literary work as flexible and contingent, and a pervasive, underlying idea of writing as something closer to what we would call repurposing or recontextualization. Scholars have long characterized Renaissance writers by their habit of redeploying gathered text to form their own productions, but Bound to Read demonstrates that such discursive strategies were rooted in concrete, everyday ways of engaging with books, many of which have been concealed by modern routines of curatorship and rebinding. Using littleknown primary sources, such as library shelf lists and intact collections from the earlier period of the handpress, I uncover surprising juxtapositions of texts, like Blomefylde’s, that provide a material basis for reading across traditional genres and literary categories—according to the classification systems of early book owners instead of those of modern book culture, which shape our archives. Bringing this more fluid idea of the text to bear on the discourse and practice of writing in the Renaissance, this investigation recasts traditional concepts of intertextuality, allusion, and imitation as habits of the book, profoundly connected to the material organization of knowledge.³⁸

Bound to Read thus sets out to recover a history of reading and book ownership that is also a history of literary production—one in which the parameters of writing and written discourse are set in part by the shifting ways in which texts are ordered, assembled, and made available in collections. The relationship is vividly evoked in our own moment of cultural change, in which new technologies of the book have fractured old ways of thinking about and producing works in print.³⁹ Recently, scholars of the early handpress era have also begun to rethink long-held conceptions of the book and its physical boundaries. Sherman and others working in the history of reading have carried out inquiries into “book use” (and abuse) in the Renaissance, revealing that early readers intervened in the content and structure of printed volumes by annotating and even cutting and pasting.⁴⁰ Simon Palfrey and Tiffany Stern, in their survey of actors’ parts, have shown that the material conditions of meaning-making in Renaissance drama challenge “Romantic-cum-Victorian notions of … an organically whole text,”⁴¹ which only anachronistically apply to Shakespeare’s plays. Bound to Read contributes to these emerging conversations on both the consumption and production ends of Renaissance culture, and to the ongoing revisionism in the history of printing itself. The last two decades have witnessed a decisive turn in scholars’ understanding of the Gutenberg press and its historical effects, from earlier assessments of a print revolution that stabilized or “fixed” texts in the Renaissance to a more nuanced account of deliberate, uneven change and uncertainty in the period.⁴² In literary criticism, new perspectives on print history have gone hand in hand with a renewed evaluation of manuscript culture and its persistence—indeed, growth—in the early handpress era.⁴³ Scholars have come to consider a variety of literary activities, including reading itself, as instrumental forms of production.⁴⁴ But only very recently, and in part because of today’s digital tools and database technologies,⁴⁵ have we gained exposure to the complicated range of literary materials that were available to Renaissance readers and writers. As Andrew Pettegree has observed in the field’s most recent major contribution, histories of print and the book have “tended to concentrate on the most eye-catching achievements of the new art,”⁴⁶ neglecting the unbound and uncollected texts, the uncataloged or unexhibited items in archives, the imperfect and composite volumes like Blomefylde’s that tell a different story of literate culture in the Renaissance.

This issue of access points to the broader methodological claim of this study: that book-collecting practices—from early modern compiling to modern library curatorship and conservation—have deep and largely unacknowledged interpretative effects, both in literary criticism and in perceptions of literary history and periodization. Shakespeare’s Hamlet, in its well-studied early printed form, is emblematic of this point. In every known instance in rare-book collections today, the quarto copies of Hamlet that survive from Shakespeare’s lifetime are preserved and accessed individually in hardcover bindings. But during Shakespeare’s lifetime, these arrangements would have been impossible luxuries—virtually impracticable by ordinary convention. Hamlet quartos were by all accounts cheap booklets; they were bound into collections with similarly sized cheap booklets (if they were bound at all) and kept out of serious institutional libraries such as the Bodleian at Oxford University.⁴⁷ The gravity and aura of an individually bound, read, and interpreted Hamlet today is thus to a great extent a function of modern bookcollecting practices. Each preserved copy is at base a relatively undistinguished early printed book that was transformed—through conservational rebinding, cataloging, and revaluation according to the economics of the book trade—into a distinguished Renaissance masterwork. The material contexts and organizing categories that for early readers informed the text’s status and range of potential meanings have been replaced by a modern, circumscribed idea of what Hamlet should be. This contrast exemplifies what is meant by the indeterminate third term of my subtitle, “the Making of Renaissance Literature.” Bound to Read examines both literary production—writers and printers making meaning—in the period customarily referred to as the Renaissance and, crucially, the production of a category of Renaissance literature in library and collecting procedures customarily considered outside the domain of literary-critical interpretation.

In finding meaning in practices of text assembly and organization, the analyses in this study stretch across field lines to embrace and build on scholarly convictions about collecting as cultural production. Such convictions form the basis of library and bookbinding history, two fields of knowledge that until recently have remained underutilized by scholars of Renaissance literature.⁴⁸ The importance of collecting has also informed recent literary scholarship of the Middle Ages, a field too easily cordoned off by our default categories of “Renaissance” and “early modern.”⁴⁹ Alexandra Gillespie, writing on late medieval quartos of Chaucer’s and Lydgate’s works, has called attention to the fact that the earliest printed texts in today’s rare-book archives are “for the most part, slim, bound in morocco or Russian leather …, washed and cropped and generally presented as the ideal thing for a nineteenth-century gentleman.”⁵⁰ Underneath this artificially modernized surface, Gillespie and Seth Lerer have independently shown, lies a robust culture of anthology building in which the compiling habits and fluid canons familiar to us from the medieval manuscript miscellany continued to guide the production of Middle English literature in early print.⁵¹ The continuity of compiling and collecting practices is a theme that emerges decisively in this study, helping to fill a conspicuous gap in existing literary-historical research. Scholarship on anthologies and print Sammelbände stops with the Middle English texts from the 1520s examined in Gillespie’s and Lerer’s studies, and resumes only in the allied but fundamentally different realm of collected literary anthologies from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.⁵² Bound to Read demonstrates that this gap in chronology originates in the long processes of archival selection that give us gilt-edged, luxury quarto copies of Hamlet: the rebinding, cataloging, and other curatorial routines that seem objective and peripheral to literary-historical scholarship but which enforce the perception of a historical break—an English Renaissance—at the level of the rare book.

What Lerer calls the medieval “anthologistic impulse”⁵³ is very much in evidence in sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England, where book owners continued to compile in a system of production and distribution that effectively required it. As Gillespie has noted, the press may have wrested books from a slower, more careful system of medieval compilation, “but it supplied them to the same sort of readers.” “After printing, as other choices—about script, size and decoration of a book—were completely or increasingly circumscribed, the patrons of bookshops might still buy a book unbound and decide what to do with it next.”⁵⁴ It could be said that instead of “fixing” or stabilizing once-malleable texts as was previously thought, printing multiplied the possibilities for text assembly, accelerating and diversifying habits of the book that nourished a more continuous, developing early vernacular textual culture. In fact, we find that the movement from the latemedieval printers to established Renaissance Stationers’ Company is one of more control to less control over binding structures: from publisherwholesalers, such as Caxton and Richard Pynson, who issued part-editions ready bound, to the increasingly specialized tradesmen of the 1580s and 1590s, who focused on printing and financing while ceding even more of the work of assembly to retailers and consumers.⁵⁵ What Lerer calls an “impulse” had by the time of Spenser and Shakespeare become praxis. A writer or publisher in the Renaissance released their work into a culture of bibliographic contingency, where the reader had seemingly infinite choices for supplying context and meaning—for giving that work material form in a book.

And yet for much of modern textual history—especially after the industrialization of bookbinding in the nineteenth century (a genuine discontinuity, if not a Renaissance)⁵⁶—a cultural preference for individual, modernlooking copies of major literary works has resulted in early printed artifacts being stripped of these material contexts. The objective is almost always bibliophilic preservation, necessary and noble in its way, but the effect has been to make Spenser and Shakespeare into our contemporaries, to separate them from their contemporaries in premodern reading and compiling culture. At its most extreme, these interventions can prevent us from accessing the history of a given text’s use or formation beyond that of the modern collector. Figure 3 displays a copy of King Lear from 1619 that was most likely extracted from an early multitext anthology.⁵⁷ Each page has been cropped individually down to the margin and then inlayed or mounted in fresh, modern paper. No collation of the text can be taken, and no previous reader (or reading) can be perceived. Such a radical discrepancy in modes of text preservation and reading reflects an untold history of desired books and desired meaning. Poststructuralist theorists and historiographers from the later twentieth century have argued forcefully that archiving does not merely store what is written and said; it interprets, differentiates, and codifies discourse, and ultimately defines the limts of comprehensibility in the production of new discourse.⁵⁸ The curatorial substructure of books in archives determines what we can say about them. In many cases, it conceals what has been said in and about the literatures of the past.

Renaissance books in today’s libraries are fundamentally divorced from their earliest readerly contexts, which established parameters for interpretation and regulated the textual field within which writers produced works. The first part of this study, “Readers,” begins to reconstruct these lost contexts in the compilations and collections that once populated library shelves. The second part, “Writers,” explores the ways in which these normative assemblages of text helped define compositional practices, and also the literary roles and subjectivities that were marketed to an emerging readership in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Because the available evidence in archives is unrepresentative (if it ever could have been representative), I cannot hope to provide a comprehensive or chronological account of compiling and collecting practices. Rather, Bound to Read examines the assembly and disassembly of early handpress-era texts at key cultural sites, showing how material arrangements and classification systems shaped Renaissance literature and how the organization of knowledge more generally exerts a farreaching influence over the making of literary texts.

Figure 3. Shakespeare’s King Lear, part of a 1619 series of plays, detached, cut out, and inlaid, page by page, while in possession of a modern collector. Courtesy of the Rare Book and Manuscript Library of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

The first chapter, “Special Collections: Book Curatorship and the Idea of Early Print in Libraries,” provides a historically elaborated counterpart to the set of issues raised in this introduction. Beginning with medieval compiling practices and their persistence into print, I chart the shift from a malleable early print textuality to the self-enclosed book of modernity through case studies drawn from two key archives: the eighteenth-century Cambridge University Library and the Renaissance library of Archbishop Matthew Parker, now at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. The University Library preserves striking evidence of the modern development of curatorial processes in a superseded shelf list of special-collections materials called the AB catalog. The catalog, long forgotten in the library records, reveals that most of the early printed books in the designated AB class at Cambridge were formerly in composite arrangements but have since been disbound into single, modern units. The pattern, as I’ve been describing it, was common in institutional libraries, but rarely do traces survive that allow us to reconstruct a collection as it looked to its early users and to actually read early assemblages of text, as we can here. My second case study offers a candid look at a Renaissance library of similar proportions whose books remain in their original composite states. Matthew Parker’s habit of aggregating and patching together manuscripts recovered from the dissolution of the monasteries is well known to scholars of the Elizabethan period, but his vast collection of printed books has not been examined for evidence of the same curatorial activities. In his collection at Corpus Christi, I uncover configurations of text similar to those listed in the AB catalog, but ones that remain intact, with traceable provenances. I go on to demonstrate that Matthew Parker used these seemingly unwieldy assemblages of material in order to generate his own text, mining his anthologies for ideas for projects on theology and ecclesiastical history, which would eventually materialize in his printed works.

The second chapter of this study, “Making Shakespeare’s Books: Material Intertextuality from the Bindery to the Conservation Lab,” develops the historical account set out in Chapter 1 by examining early assemblages of high-prestige literary texts that are now encountered primarily in discrete and self-enclosed books. Scholars have long been interested in the apparent mutability of Shakespeare’s works in early print culture: how parts of Love’s Labour’s Lost were mixed with texts by other poets in William Jaggard’s printed anthology The Passionate Pilgrim (1599), or how John Benson’s 1640 Poems volume changed the order of the Sonnets (and at times, the gender of Shakespeare’s addressee), mixing his work with that of others. This chapter demonstrates that early readers also compiled Shakespearean works, creating multitext volumes to suit their tastes and uses. Surveying extant compilations—and focusing particularly on the changing contexts of Henry IV Part 1 and Lucrece—I show that the combinatory activities of publishers like Jaggard and Benson reflected a more general readerly desire for flexible, adaptable works in print. These works with each new assembly gave rise to different juxtapositions and different forms of canonicity, many of which are surprising to us today, a counterpoint to the organization of Shakespearean texts in modern editions. But as I go on to demonstrate, in modern archives most of these early compilations were disassembled, their texts rebound separately, eliminating the evidence of previous uses in favor of a Shakespearean text that looks modern. This chapter argues that such assembly practices play a role in generating meaning—that the frameworks for reading and interpreting Shakespeare emerge out of the productions of collectors and conservators who make Shakespeare’s books.

The first part of this study thus introduces a concept of “material intertextuality”—an intertextuality based on physical rather than purely discursive proximity—into Renaissance reading and reception history, excavating early compilations and assessing the interpretive implications of their varying logics of assembly. The second part investigates these methods of assembly from the standpoint of literary production, arguing that habits of compiling and customization were integral to Renaissance writing as well. Chapter 3, “Transformative Imitation: Composing the Lyric in Liber Lilliati and Watson’s Hekatompathia,” examines the work of a little-known Elizabethan choral musician named John Lilliat and a related—in fact, materially connected—printed sonnet collection from the 1580s. Lilliat, like many of his contemporaries in the Renaissance, channeled his social aspirations into poems of unrequited love using Petrarch and other writers as models. But Lilliat’s manuscript book, preserved at Oxford, physically incorporates his primary model into his text. Liber Lilliati, as he titled it, consists of fair-copy manuscript poetry written on leaves that had been added to a printed book, Thomas Watson’s sonnet sequence, The Hekatompathia. This assemblage of manuscript and print gives us a privileged look at the Renaissance compileras-writer at work: not only does Lilliat model his text after Watson’s; he makes use of decontextualized lines and stanzas from the Hekatompathia to form his own poetry, assembling verse in much the same way that he assembles his book. This chapter examines both texts side by side to argue that the injunction to compile and imitate in this way was already present in Watson’s sequence, giving us a new way to think about the demands printed verse collections made on readers and the poems that such curatorial routines ultimately helped produce.

The fourth chapter, “Vernacularity and the Compiling Self in Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender and Montaigne’s Essays,” explores the work of assembly in two key texts whose authors forged what we would see as hybrid compilations, much like Lilliat’s. Beginning with a well-known manuscript in Spenser’s hand now at the Folger (itself formerly part of a compilation once in Spenser’s possession) and the famous “Bordeaux copy” of Montaigne’s Essays, I investigate how these two Renaissance authors represented the writing self as a maker or augmenter of books, encoding what they themselves did. Spenser, I argue, marshaled the material features of the early printed text—glosses, woodcuts, typography, the apparatus—in order to announce the arrival of the New Poet in his debut, The Shepheardes Calender. The text, I suggest, is not only appropriative in the sense of deriving models from classical exempla but also in the sense that Lilliat’s is: it inhabits and transforms an existing printed work, The Kalender of Sheepehards, a humble almanac. Montaigne too, I argue, styled himself as an assembler of texts—what he calls a “craftsman”—in his Essays, which are marked by his own practice of inhabiting and expanding printed books and those of his interlocutor, Etienne de la Boétie. Even as Montaigne’s work inaugurates a new, more spontaneous genre of prose, I argue, it develops an older conception of books as fluid and subject to redefinition. “Of Books,” in particular, dramatizes the process of writing in and on books, as The Shepheardes Calender also did, to announce a new role for the writing self in the Renaissance. Both writers, I go on to demonstrate, were themselves generative sources for early readers, who combined and interacted with their printed texts in compilations.

Bound to Read concludes by reassessing the Renaissance “collected works” volume and the authorial corpora they marketed to readers as products of material assembly. Chapter 5, “The Custom-Made Corpus: English Collected Works in Print, 1532–1623,” traces the development of the monumental writer-organized literary volume from the later medieval period to the more well-studied productions of Jonson and Shakespeare. Beginning with The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer (1532)—the earliest of such literary collections in the vernacular—I demonstrate that bodies of writers’ poetry and drama were recombinant, often functioning as topical compilations or marketing venues for other, related writers’ work, recalling and sustaining the protocols of Middle English book culture in the print period. Moving to the larger Works of Spenser, Samuel Daniel, and others in the early seventeenth century, I show how such collected volumes were produced and used in detachable formats, to be combined with other things; their unified appearance today reflects the familiar curatorial values of author-title-date classification and bibliographical integrity, which only began to systematically guide text assembly after the transition to industrial book production in the modern era.

At our own moment of technological transition, in which ways of using and assigning value to texts once are again in flux, historically grounded understandings of text production are becoming newly important. The extent to which patterns of assembly inform reading and writing is everywhere in evidence today: word processing blurs the once-stable boundary between composition and revision; eBooks and iPods break up the perceived wholeness of cultural products like books and albums; digital textuality and new literary genres such as fan fiction reinstate notions of writing as enlargement and compilation. The surviving archive of early printed texts has again been reassembled and re-presented in digitization projects, which often rewrite the “organically whole text” back into literary history in following bibliographic protocols established in the modern era. Bound to Read calls attention to the limits of the self-enclosed book as a model in a period of new and exciting capabilities, shedding light on a form of textuality that prevailed before modern notions of the book were in place. It urges us to revise accounts of literary production across periods in view of a different type of creative agency—the agency of compilers, curators, readers, programmers, and others who make books, as authors do.