Jennifer Summit . Memory's Library: Medieval Books in Early Modern England. Chicago : University of Chicago Press . 2008 . Pp. x, 343. $35.00.

Abstract

This intriguing and massively researched book traces the idea of the library from the late Middle Ages well into the early modern period. The first chapter deals with the libraries used by John Lydgate: those of Duke Humfry and of the abbey of Bury St Edmunds; the second with the “lost libraries of English humanism,” focusing on Thomas More, Thomas Stanley, and Sir Thomas Elyot. From here Jennifer Summit moves on to postmonastic Reformation libraries, notably that of Matthew Parker, where her dominant argument is that “Reformation library making is .… aligned with and even contingent upon the act of library breaking”; thence she proceeds to the Cotton Library and its use as a source of evidence, with the rather extravagant claim that Robert Cotton “invented the idea of the archival source.” Finally, she investigates Francis Bacon's attitude toward libraries. He deplored them as the antithesis to the laboratories of observation for the advancement of learning, even as he deployed the classifications of knowledge that library catalogues had defined.