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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

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