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.
Figure 7. Lambeth Palace Library MS 959, title page. Matthew Parker’s personal copy of De antiquitate Britannicae ecclesiae, showing manuscript notes in the hands of Parker and his collaborators. By permission of Lambeth Palace Library.
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.
