Lanhydrock’s autobiographical instillation: books, reputation, and habitat in early modern England

Abstract

The library at Lanhydrock in Cornwall contains many books annotated by its seventeenth-century owners. The complex meanings these books carried depended on their physical location in the Cornish landscape, and the meaning of that landscape was in turn shaped by the presence of the marked books. Early moderns were adept at creating and interpreting such context-specific assemblages of books which projected autobiographical personae. These habits were a means by which book-users could simultaneously fit themselves to their environments (or “habitats”) and reshape those environments in a reciprocal process of fashioning. Public reputation was an important consideration guiding these practices. This model of the interaction of books, reputation, and habitat can be extended beyond physical locations like Lanhydrock to help understand how early moderns inhabited their economic culture. Customizing books shaped users as agents equipped with the kind of habitus demanded by the “credit economy” and reproduced its moral codes.