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
