with three astronomical treatises and a political pamphlet on enclosure, followed by a number of small Protestant booklets—a sermon on the education of children, a “history of popishness,” a copy of Robert Crowley’s epigrams, and nine explicitly theological texts—ending with treatises on the art of memory and swearing.49 Like the anthology that Lerer reconstructed, the volume has a clear thematic current—reformist in nature—that is made obscure by its having been rebound and repackaged in discrete textual units in modernity. AB.4.58 is another, larger example, formerly comprising twenty-six books of medieval fiction and nonfiction printed in the early to mid-sixteenth century. The volume included works of popular verse by John Lydgate and others; saints’ lives; treatises on husbandry, household carving, and sewing; and a medical recipe book.50 Each text is numbered consecutively and annotated by the same two named owners, Edward Powell and Andrew Holman, whose habits of reading and circulation become visible to history again only when the volume was reassembled. Powell and Holman annotate the text and also record exchanges in ownership: the first text contains Powell’s signature; on item 12, Holman wrote in his ownership mark, “This is andrew holmans book”; a note on item 14, Robert the Devyll, notes, “This is Anderie Holmans booke till Edwarde Powell come a gaine.”51
Incidences of thematic cohesiveness, named owners or families, or such annotations as these are rare in AB-class books, however. Pugh’s catalog, we find, is much more forthcoming about archival loss. The material and intellectual contexts of early reading and anthologizing frequently remain obscure, but the curatorial practices that obscured them become clearer. AB.4.61, for example, once contained sixteen texts that exhibit few affinities from the perspective of knowledge organization in modernity. The included books span over 150 years and range from how-to manuals on carpentry, surveying, and weaponry to a masque by Samuel Daniel.52 The only evidence that unifies the disparate material is a handwritten table of contents preserved in the flyleaf of the first item that clarifies the arrangement of texts in the later seventeenth century. But what we lack in information about the volume’s earliest uses, we gain in information about its modernization at the University Library. In both the manuscript contents list and the AB catalog, a later hand records that the volume’s second item, a Latin lexicon called Promptorium parvulorum clericorum, printed by Wynkyn de Worde in 1516, was removed because of its particular value relative to the other, later books adjacent to it.53 Here, the status of an early printed text as the product of a known printer whose work was highly sought after prevails over its status as part of a compilation that might shed light on its meaning. These valuations are now encoded in their bindings: Promptorium parvulorum clericorum was rebound individually and given its own shelf mark, while the remaining contents of the book, likely deemed too miscellaneous or too common, were reclassified as a “tract volume”—a category of text that did not exist until the eighteenth century.54
The question of apparently random organizing criteria in Sammelbände is a persistent and important one. Joseph Dane, in a recent chapter on early printed “Books in Books,” draws a distinction between multitext volumes formed arbitrarily and those formed with regard to printed content55—between merely practical motivations for book assembly, in other words, and assembly according to an intellectual principle that we moderns can interpret. The distinction relies on modern measures of coherence and a problematic model of reading as the retrieval of content undisturbed by the organization of knowledge, an argument to which I will return in the next chapter. But the point reinforced by the present material is that handpress-era readers had the option of thinking about the connections between texts in a Sammelbände or to dismiss those connections as an accident of binding. This option is foreclosed by conservational initiatives such as Bradshaw’s in which the diversity of earlier book structures and the range of rationales for compilation are forced through the needle’s eye of modern textual categories. That most arbitrary line separating incunabula from early printed books, for example, seems to have been a primary motivating factor in the reform of the Cambridge collection, which leaned heavily toward the earliest products of the handpress. AB.10.53, according to Pugh’s entry, once comprised a copy of Caxton’s medieval encyclopedia, The Myrrour of the World (1490), bound with a 1611 copy of The Shepheardes Calender, the book of pastoral eclogues by Edmund Spenser. The two texts, printed over a century apart, show evidence of underlining and annotation in the same red crayon, a marking tool common in the early period. We imagine the early reader engaging the texts in a collection, if not in the bound book that Pugh read and recorded. But in the nineteenth century, they were stripped of their common context and separated into discrete units: the Caxtonian text in lavish black leather (under a new “Inc.” shelf designation) and the Spenser in cheaper half calf.56
AB.8.46 is a related example, formerly containing two Caxtonian saints’ lives bound with sixteenth-century literary works by John Skelton, John Rastell, and Henry Medwall.57 Pugh’s entry and its supplementary annotations indicate that the volume was reshaped twice by modern librarians: once to extract the incunabula and a second time to separate out the remaining early printed books to make them borrowable.58 Another volume, AB.4.59, once comprised eleven texts bound together, all issuing from Wynkyn de Worde’s press. But because the volume’s final item, The Meditacyouns of Saynt Barnard, was printed in the earliest part of de Worde’s career, in 1496, all of the items had to be disbanded and set into proper order in Bradshaw’s modern library. The first ten texts now form individual books in Bradshaw’s “Sel.” class, while the final item was rebound and reclassed as an incunabulum.59 Numerous early compilations in the AB catalog straddle this 1500 divide; their reorganization highlights its centrality in determining the shape of archives, separating print (and modernity) from what came before. AB.4.54, for example, was a compilation of four books, two literary and two nonliterary, printed between 1499 and 1503: Petrarch’s Bucolicum carmen (1502), Maximianus’s Elegiae (1503), the incunabulum Orationes Philippi Beroaldi (1499) on the topic of Cicero, and Solinus’s geography De memorabilibus mundi (1503).60 The texts were numbered in their former position by a sixteeenth-century owner—“primus,” “secondus,” and so on—who also used the blank spaces in the volume to record fragments of other texts that interested him, as one might use a notebook or a commonplace book.61 Despite the fact that these books were printed within a few years of one another and evidently used in close intellectual or physical proximity, the volume was split into individual units, its parts decontextualized and set into the correct categories: “book” or “incunable,” but never both.
Less arbitrary perhaps, the line separating print from manuscript was another important factor in the reform of the AB collection. As Harold Love, Arthur Marotti, Henry Woudhuysen, and others have demonstrated, the distinction between the two categories of text was never as absolute in the early modern era as it is in modern culture.62 The transition from one medium to another as the dominant mode of textual and literary circulation was gradual, and in production, especially in the Renaissance, they often overlapped. Indeed, Pugh’s catalog lists several examples of composite books that contained both printed and manuscript material, specimens later deemed hybrid or composite as the categories came into use and finally disbanded by the university librarians. AB.10.54 formerly contained three printed books—a history of Jason, a poetic work on the subject of death, and a later production of The Myrrour of the World—along with a manuscript copy of Sallust’s monograph on the Cataline conspiracy written in a neat sixteenth-century hand.63 The works contain matching ownership inscriptions and marginalia, but the handwritten portion was extracted, rebound, and transported to the manuscripts department at Cambridge in the nineteenth century.64 Moreover, because two of the three printed texts were incunabula, the remains of the composite volume were themselves disbanded and reorganized into individual units in their proper categories. Another example is AB.10.57, which once contained seven books now separate—four manuscripts and three early printed texts, all related philosophical works.65 According to a note in the AB catalog dated 1799, the manuscript material was extracted and given its own binding during Pugh’s tenure. And later, in the nineteenth century, the volume was reconfigured yet again to make its printed contents into individually bound modern books.
Finally,
