Jennifer Summit, Memory’s Library: Medieval Books in Early Modern EnglandMemory’s Library: Medieval Books in Early Modern England. Jennifer Summit. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. Pp. x+343.

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Previous articleNext article FreeJennifer Summit, Memory’s Library: Medieval Books in Early Modern England Memory’s Library: Medieval Books in Early Modern England. Jennifer Summit. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. Pp. x+343.Maura NolanMaura NolanUniversity of California, Berkeley Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreThis superb account of the invention of the library in England leads the reader on a journey from the late Middle Ages to the seventeenth century, not only describing early libraries and their makers in exquisite detail but also convincingly demonstrating Jennifer Summit’s claim that early modern literary history cannot be written without understanding the “phenomenon of the library” (Foucault’s phrase) that shaped and formed it (37).1 Summit’s range and depth of reference are both intently focused and impressively capacious throughout as she explores the library as a place, an idea, and a set of methods. She brilliantly narrates the transition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance by describing the fate of books as they were first cataloged in the fifteenth century, displaced and sometimes destroyed or disarticulated as the monasteries were taken over during the Reformation, and finally reassembled into the libraries of the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Summit has an equal facility with medieval and early modern texts, making her uniquely capable of rethinking the import of the Reformation, mapping out its origins, and considering its effects. This book is a groundbreaking volume that will have enormous significance for literary scholars, historians of the book, bibliographical scholars, and many others; Summit’s revisions of received wisdom about books and libraries pre- and post-Reformation are compelling, forceful, and undeniably convincing.The book is divided into five chapters, each of which discusses specific libraries and librarians as part of a narrative of what might be called “knowledge management” from John Lydgate to Francis Bacon, 1431–1631. Summit begins in the fifteenth century with a chapter on humanism, Humphrey of Gloucester, and Lydgate’s Fall of Princes. In chapter 2, she describes the “Lost Libraries of English Humanism,” focusing on Thomas More, Thomas Starkey, and Thomas Elyot. Chapter 3 focuses on the libraries of Matthew Parker and Edmund Spenser, while chapter 4 explores the Cotton Library and its influence. The final chapter concentrates on Bacon and the Bodleian Library. These topics are framed by the introduction and the coda, which describe the larger implications of Summit’s research, not only for our understanding of the early modern period but also in relation to the profound changes in knowledge management that have accompanied the digital revolution of the past half century. As she writes, “libraries bear a privileged relation to our past, safeguarding our collective identity as communities, peoples, and nations by documenting our histories” (1–2). During the period under discussion, libraries became potent symbols of England’s break from the medieval past as well as of its reconstituted national identity. At the same time, the technologies of the library—modes of reading like allegoresis or compilatio, forms of ordering like cataloging and indexing, as well as the literal remaking of books (taking apart medieval manuscripts and reconstituting them in new forms)—were adapted from medieval libraries and textual practices and placed in the service of creating new relationships to knowledge. Summit’s argument that the library simultaneously broke with and appropriated the medieval past forms the foundation of her narrative and enables her to describe the changing institution of the library with an acute sensitivity to nuance and detail. In her hands, the history of the library becomes a kind of variable melody to which she listens with perfect pitch. Preconceptions about the early modern library are set aside in favor of an intensive reading practice that takes account of both what medieval and Renaissance writers said about libraries and what they did when they constructed their own libraries. A fundamental paradox emerges from this investigation: not only were the Middle Ages constructed by the Renaissance, as scholars have recognized, but the Renaissance was also “a creation of the Middle Ages” (4). Intent on a program of demystification and desacralization, reformers converted medieval practices of knowledge management and textual interpretation into new objects of study and new practices of reading. In so doing, they brought the Middle Ages into the very center of Renaissance thought and identity formation; far from rejecting the past as benighted and worthless, they rewrote it using its own tools. As Summit points out, without the libraries of Matthew Parker, Robert Cotton, and Thomas Bodley, medievalists would have almost no English Middle Ages to study—and without understanding the continuity of medieval forms and practices, Renaissance and Reformation scholars cannot understand the foundations of their own objects of investigation.Memory’s Library contains so many significant accounts and analyses of libraries and their makers that it is impossible to do the book justice in a short review. I would like to highlight two aspects of Summit’s argument, one from its beginning and one from its end, in the hope of adequately representing the scope of the project and its revisionary force. First, in her discussion of Lydgate’s Fall of Princes, Summit sets the stage for her exploration of the Renaissance institution of the library and the reading practices that distinguish it. She argues that Lydgate rewrites the monastic notion of the library and of the practice of reading, creating a secular vision of rulership and of the kinds of textual activity proper to rulers. Because the poet is writing to please Humphrey of Gloucester, whose library he is instructed to use, he must “breke and renewe” (42) his classical sources in order that they yield the proper moral lesson demanded by his patron. This lesson emphasizes the importance of subjection to rulers and the necessity of a ruling elite, strongly associating literacy with rulership as part of Humphrey’s effort to articulate sovereign authority. Lydgate’s Fall of Princes actively works to create an image of secular rule and to display techniques of reading and writing designed to promote that image. It too is a library, a collection of texts from a wide variety of sources, and Lydgate shows Humphrey and his readers precisely how a library should be governed: by breaking and remaking its texts to fulfill its ideological purpose. As Summit shows in the next several chapters, these practices of breaking and remaking are appropriated during the Reformation to support the destruction and reconstruction of monastic libraries and medieval knowledge. Figures like Cotton, who repeatedly unbound manuscripts in order to rebind them with other material, behaved exactly like Lydgate as he compiled his largest work.This formal continuity between the medieval past and the post-Reformation future is critically important to our understanding of the Renaissance as a material and textual phenomenon, and it enables a serious rethinking of the notion of periodization. When Summit turns to the work of Francis Bacon at the end of her book, the significance of such rethinking becomes even more evident, as she uses what she has learned about medieval and Renaissance libraries to revise our understanding of Bacon’s science. In his own references to the institution of the library, Bacon creates an opposition between his definition of the library as a place of repose—a shrine in which the past is preserved—and new experimental spaces of knowledge production like the “still-house,” “workshop,” and “engine-house.” What Summit is able to show, however, is that Bacon’s division between old and new is a false division; his new science in fact depends upon technologies and techniques developed in the institution of the library as scholars grappled with the chaotic remnants of the medieval past left behind by the Reformation. The massive body of knowledge and evidence that emerged from the Middle Ages posed challenging problems of ordering, cataloging, indexing, and data manipulation for Renaissance librarians, and Bacon’s scientific approach to evidence “owes its outlines and basic forms” (199) to the technologies of cataloging and indexing developed in the library.The narrative of Memory’s Library ends with the Baconian figure of Thomas James, an early seventeeth-century librarian at the Bodleian who struggled to maintain the library’s function as a place for knowledge production. Ironically, he failed in part because of Bacon’s dismissal of libraries as mere repositories of knowledge, which gradually became the standard notion of the library in the seventeeth century. The librarian was transformed from being an active maker into the guardian of a static collection. This conclusion might be a pessimistic one, but Summit’s coda to the book reminds us that the library is still a living and active institution, despite the dramatic changes it is now undergoing. The library contains and organizes our cultural memory, and even if we define it as static or oriented to the past, it inevitably changes as history changes, making new knowledge and making itself essential again and again. In describing the history of this institution, and in revealing how its technologies and practices of ordering and reading have persisted over time, Summit has written a remarkable book, one that will be read eagerly by all those who spend their lives, online or in person, in the library. Notes 1.See Michel Foucault, “Fantasia of the Library,” in Language, Counter-memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. and trans. Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), 91. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 110, Number 2November 2012 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/667866 Views: 109Total views on this site © 2012 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.