LITMIR.BIZ

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.

      CHAPTER 2

      Making Shakespeare’s Books

      Material Intertextuality from the Bindery to the Conservation Lab

      Among the most highly valued items in special collections at Oxford’s Bodleian Library is a volume of Shakespeare’s poetry containing quartos of Venus and Adonis, The Rape of Lucrece, and the Sonnets gathered together by an eighteenth-century owner named Thomas Caldecott.¹ So highly valued is the book that it cannot be consulted according to the usual procedures. One must first appeal for special permission at Duke Humfrey’s Library, then trudge across Broad Street to the New Library to read it under close supervision in the Modern Papers Room—and for good reason. The volume brings together rare early editions of its three constituent works: Venus and Adonis and Lucrece from a 1594 printing and the Sonnets from 1609. The texts themselves are, in the language of cataloging, “perfect,” with no major defects or latter-day adulterations;² their pages have been cropped, washed, and rebound in stately tooled leather with crisp marbled endpapers. Only a few scant traces of the books’ four centuries of use and circulation remain, most of which are annotations written in by modern archivists

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