Bound to Read
MATERIAL TEXTS
| Series Editors | |
| Roger Chartier | Leah Price |
| Joseph Farrell | Peter Stallybrass |
| Anthony Grafton | Michael F. Suarez, S.J. |
A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.
BOUND TO READ
Compilations, Collections, and the Making of Renaissance Literature
Jeffrey Todd Knight
UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS
PHILADELPHIA
Copyright © 2013 University of Pennsylvania Press
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.
Published by
University of Pennsylvania Press
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Knight, Jeffrey Todd.
Bound to read : compilations, collections, and the making of Renaissance literature / Jeffrey Todd Knight.—1st ed.
p. cm.— (Material texts)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8122-4507-3 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Books and reading—Great Britain—History. 2. Book collecting—Great Britain—History. 3. Literature publishing—Great Britain—History. 4. English literature—Early modern, 1500-1700—History and criticism. I. Title. II. Series: Material texts.
Z1003.5.G7 K58 2013
070.5—dc23
2012045109
For Jan and Kipp Knight
CONTENTS
Introduction: Compiling Culture
Chapter 1. Special Collections: Book Curatorship and the Idea of Early Print in Libraries
Chapter 5. The Custom-Made Corpus: English Collected Works in Print, 1532–1623
Epilogue: “Collated and Perfect”
Introduction
Compiling Culture
I Compyle: I make a boke as an auctour doth.
—From the table of verbs in a 1530 translation dictionary
William Thomas’s Historie of Italie is one of the more important surviving documents of the literary and political culture of the Renaissance in Europe.1 Written by a clerk of England’s Privy Council and published in 1549 by the royal printer, the book offered a pragmatist’s guide to governance through firsthand accounts of Italian social organization. It passed through multiple reissues and remained popular into the 1590s; modern editions of Shakespeare often include excerpts and references that conjure an image of the playwright mining Thomas’s book for characters in The Merchant of Venice, Othello, and The Tempest.2 But if you call up the sole copy of the Historie at St. John’s College Library in Cambridge, the text that arrives on your desk will come as some surprise. Instead of one book, you will find three books bound together: a pamphlet entitled Information for pilgrims into the Holy Land (1524), the Historie, and the medieval story collection Gesta Romanorum (1517).3 Also bound in the volume, between printed items, is a manuscript on London churches written by the sixteenth-century physician Myles Blomefylde, who owned this eclectic group of texts and whose handwriting is present throughout the compilation.4 For Blomefylde, it seems, The Historie of Italie had little value as a reflection on Italian politics or character. In the margins, he signed his initials to the names of the Venetian tourist sites he had visited (or imagined himself visiting) on a trip to the city. On a blank sheet preceding a section on “The Venetian Astate,” he gave Thomas’s work a new, more appropriate title: Myles Blomefylde in Venice (Fig. 1).
Figure 1. William Thomas’s Historie of Italie, marked up and retitled by Myles Blomefylde. By permission of the Master and Fellows of St. John’s College, Cambridge.
This study is about the desire for books—the collector’s desire for books—in the production and dissemination of Renaissance literature, chiefly in English. Myles Blomefylde may have been flamboyant, but he was not anomalous among readers and writers in the era of early print. Many thousands of collected volumes like the one pictured here survive from this period under various bibliographic designations: Sammelbände (or multibook compilations), personal anthologies, composites of manuscript and print, tract collections, and others. Many still reflect an early owner’s desire to appropriate and interact with the texts, to organize and repurpose them, or to transform existing works into new works. Blomefylde’s Historie of Italie stands as a witness to such processes most likely because the larger compilation and collector are of literary-historical consequence. The adjacent Gesta Romanorum is the only known copy of that