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 Sigeuulfi presbyteri flanked by fragments of the Exameron anglice and a homily by Ælfric. Moreover, perhaps more glaringly, because he was primarily interested in the Interrogationes, Parker had the latter two texts covered over with contemporary scraps of vellum that he had taken from a manuscript legal document.84
Page, during his tenure as Parker librarian, recorded similar instances of the archbishop removing leaves from one book in order to adorn another. Parker’s MS 419 and 452 comprise an eleventh-century homily book and a twelfth-century text of Eadmer, respectively, both of which were given illuminated cover pages removed from thirteenth-century psalters which, Page observes, “have no connection to the text.”85 MS 163 is an eleventhcentury service book with a sixteenth-century cover page that Parker had taken from a printed French missal.86 The archbishop also had a bindery on site, which allowed him to reorganize the texts within such volumes as they came into his hands. Graham notes that here “in the process of rebinding, Parker not infrequently interfered with the structure of the manuscripts, making repairs and restorations, supplying missing text, combining together two or more originally separate manuscripts, or effecting other transformations.”87 The most notorious instance of Parker’s textual manipulation is MS 197, a fragment of an eighth-century gospel. When the manuscript came into his possession, Parker reversed the canonical order of the gospels—placing John before Luke—because, it is said, he found the cover illumination of the former more visually appealing.88 He then seemingly inexplicably bound the rare early medieval manuscript into a collection of late medieval historical treatises from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century with which the early gospel texts had nothing in common. Personal preference or need in this case trumped the prescribed textual organization.
Graham concludes from his numerous bibliographical investigations that “Parker’s treatment of his manuscripts provides a remarkable insight into the extent to which early modern collectors were prepared to restore and reshape their books.”89 Such habits were not anomalous among Renaissance antiquaries, he explains; Parker’s manuscripts, because they are preserved intact, only provide the most visible evidence of something widespread. But Parker’s printed books—which are also preserved intact and which, as another Parker librarian, Bruce Dickins, once noted, would “themselves have brought fame to a library”90 in the period—are not factored in to generalizable assessments of book collecting in the scholarship on Parker’s library. The reason, we might suspect, is the inclination of modern textual culture to comprehend manuscripts as malleable things and printed books as fixed or naturally selfbounded. Page channels this bias in his critique of Parker’s conservation habits: “We who have been brought up in a printed book culture find it natural to regard a book as a complete and discrete object, a finished work. It requires something of a shift of thinking to see it as a collection of quires that could be added to or subtracted from.”91
Yet the printed books in the Parker Library, which have never been submitted to sustained study and have only recently been recataloged,92 were very much subject to the archbishop’s brand of conservation. As some of my examples of hybrid miscellanies have already suggested, Parker seems not to have drawn as rigorous a distinction between manuscript and print; he mixed together leaves drawn from both kinds of text and handled them more or less continuously in a way that Page, operating within the constraints of modern librarianship, perhaps could not.93 In a recent examination of the sixteenthcentury Parkerian holdings that remain at the collections at the Cambridge University Library, Elisabeth Leedham-Green and David McKitterick found that Parker combined and recombined his printed books in much the same way he did with his Anglo-Saxon and late medieval manuscripts. The surviving printed books with Parkerian provenances in the University Library, they explain, are strikingly untidy and unfixed, reflecting the archbishop’s “continuing wish to re-order …, binding up different authors so that, for example, commentators on books of the Bible should be bound by their subject matter.”94 Such intertextual combinations, they note, were helpful for certain readers, “just as (no doubt) there were advantages in reducing the cost of binding; but the resulting fragments of books tucked into volumes with otherwise complete books have disconcerted those who have used the books in the University Library ever since.”95 Because of their provenance—their connection to a figure of historical importance at Cambridge—the texts were not disbound during modern conservation campaigns.
The vast collection of early printed books at the Parker Library offers many similar witnesses of Parkerian combination and compilation. Even a superficial glance at the entries in the Parker Register (which, as with any inventory from the period, will inevitably underrepresent the number of multi-item volumes actually in the collection) reveals that over a third of Parker’s printed books were listed as composite in the original document in the mid-1570s. These volumes, unlike the Parker Library’s cherished Anglo-Saxon and late medieval manuscripts, were not submitted to conservation in modernity and are therefore preserved with few exceptions in their original bindings. The organization of the collection has also been preserved. Parker’s large-format volumes, according to the register, were organized into a Maiore Bibliotheca with smaller or more common volumes kept in a Minore Bibliotheca, both of which contain a high proportion of compiled books. All texts listed under “Poetica” in Parker’s Maiore Bibliotheca, for example, are composite volumes.96 Here, some “collected works” volumes, comprising the poetry and plays of major literary figures from Greek and Roman antiquity, can be found attached to works by other authors, even works by nonliterary authors. Parker’s 1573 Opera of Seneca, for example, is bound with a 1544 Opera of Calcagnini.97 Similarly, his 1513 Opera of Poggio is bound with a partial 1531 commentary on Pliny.98 Parker also seems to have assembled or purchased ad hoc collected-works volumes, which resemble those few compilations organized by author that were left in their early states in the Cambridge University Library’s AB class. Shelf mark EP.S.2, paginated continuously with Parker’s red crayon, brings together four divergent early printed volumes: Sebastian Brant’s Shyp of folys of the worlde (1509), Mancinus’s conduct verse
