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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.

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