Bound to Read: Compilations, Collections, and the Making of Renaissance Literature

By Jeffrey Todd Knight

Concealed in rows of carefully restored volumes in rare book libraries is a history of the patterns of book collecting and compilation that shaped the literature of the English Renaissance. In this early period of print, before the introduction of commercial binding, most published literary texts did not stand on shelves in discrete, standardized units. They were issued in loose sheets or temporarily stitched—leaving it to the purchaser or retailer to collect, configure, and bind them. In Bound to Read, Jeffrey Todd Knight excavates this culture of compilation—of binding and mixing texts, authors, and genres into single volumes—and sheds light on a practice that not only was pervasive but also defined the period's very ways of writing and thinking.

Through a combination of archival research and literary criticism, Knight shows how Renaissance conceptions of imaginative writing were inextricable from the material assembly of texts. While scholars have long identified an early modern tendency to borrow and redeploy texts, Bound to Read reveals that these strategies of imitation and appropriation were rooted in concrete ways of engaging with books. Knight uncovers surprising juxtapositions such as handwritten sonnets collected with established poetry in print and literary masterpieces bound with liturgical texts and pamphlets. By examining works by Shakespeare, Spenser, Montaigne, and others, he dispels the notion of literary texts as static or closed, and instead demonstrates how the unsettled conventions of early print culture fostered an idea of books as interactive and malleable.

Though firmly rooted in Renaissance culture, Knight's carefully calibrated arguments also push forward to the digital present—engaging with the modern library archives where these works were rebound and remade, and showing how the custodianship of literary artifacts shapes our canons, chronologies, and contemporary interpretative practices.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Release date: Apr 22, 2013
• ISBN: 9780812208160

Book preview

Bound to Read

MATERIAL TEXTS

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

www.upenn.edu/pennpress

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

PART I. READERS

Chapter 1. Special Collections: Book Curatorship and the Idea of Early Print in Libraries

Chapter 2. Making Shakespeare’s Books: Material Intertextuality from the Bindery to the Conservation Lab

PART II. WRITERS

Chapter 3. Transformative Imitation: Composing the Lyric in Liber Lilliati and Watson’s Hekatompathia

Chapter 4. Vernacularity and the Compiling Self in Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender and Montaigne’s Essays

Chapter 5. The Custom-Made Corpus: English Collected Works in Print, 1532–1623

Epilogue: Collated and Perfect

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

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 translation, and Blomefylde has long been recognized for handing down several unique late medieval play texts, including the only complete edition of Henry Medwall’s Fulgens and Lucres.⁵ Yet the very consequentially that encouraged the preservation of this volume for four centuries could have led to its breakup or loss in a different institutional setting. As William Sherman has shown, libraries and collectors in the modern era privileged clean books and routinely had the marks of early readers such as Blomefylde removed from important texts.⁶ A similar desire for pristine rebinding, noted by conservators and bookbinding experts including Julia Miller and John Szirmai,⁷ drastically altered compilation structures in modern book collections. If all or part of an early Sammelband was judged to have exceptional value, the likelihood was high that the volume would be separated into its constituent units for individual rebinding or sale, eliminating the traces of early ownership. St. John’s College had neither the onsite binding facilities of a Henry E. Huntington nor the distinguished Enlightenment-era foundation collections of a British Museum.⁸ The Old Library, where the rare books are kept and consulted, remains very much as it was when it was founded in the seventeenth century, a short time before the Blomefylde volume was deposited there.⁹

Indeed, among collectors, major works of Renaissance literature constitute the most valuable, desired category of early printed books. Along with the first and grandest productions from movable type, such works have progressed through modern book markets, fine binderies, auction houses, institutional libraries, and conservation laboratories where less sought-after texts from the period have remained uncirculated and unprocessed. The literary output of the early handpress has, therefore, been disproportionately touched by the modern preference for clean, individually bound books. In some library collections, such as St. John’s, we can find important Renaissance works that look as they did to their earliest readers. But much of the literary rare-book archive—which supplies essential primary texts to editors, critics, and historians—reflects the desires of modern readers: the uniformity of industrialized printing and binding, the order of the systematic catalog, the circumscribed aura of the collectors’ item. In many of today’s most extensive and accessible libraries, a more complicated material history of Renaissance texts lies buried in institutional records.

This book excavates a culture of compiling and text collection that prevailed after the emergence of print but before the ascendancy of the modern, ready-bound printed book. It focuses on the organization and physical assembly of early printed literary texts, both at the hands of their first owners and collectors in the Renaissance and also, necessarily, at the hands of the modern collectors—individual and institutional—who have reorganized them, classified them, and made them available to us in libraries. Its premise is the observation, shared by bibliographers and recent historians of the material text, that books have not always existed in discrete, self-enclosed units. In the early handpress era, the printed work was relatively malleable and experimental—a thing to actively shape, expand, and resituate as one desired. Copies of Shakespeare’s quarto plays and poems were bound into custom anthologies; literary masterworks were mixed with pamphlets and other printed ephemera to form topical Sammelbände; texts of all kinds were enlarged by writing, binding, and even sewing in additional material. These compiled volumes were not the sealed-off textual artifacts—organized by author, genre, subject heading, and short title—that are found on shelves in most rare-book archives today. (It would take careful curatorial work, we will see, to forge this normative disposition of texts.) Rather, these were fluid, adaptable objects, always prone to intervention and change.

For readers in the Renaissance, compiling was born of the everyday demands of book ownership. As Paul Needham and David Pearson have argued, in the handpress era, there was no such thing as a ready-bound edition, corresponding to the clothbound books with which we (in Englishspeaking countries) are familiar today.¹⁰ The commonplace notion that early printed texts—particularly the small formats used for vernacular literature—were sold unbound or merely stitched has been refined and extended by Mirjam Foot, Nicholas Pickwoad, and other scholars of bookbinding.¹¹ Often the task of having sheets turned into books fell to the owner at the time of purchase. Other times certain kinds of popular books, such as religious texts, law books, school books, and classical texts, would sell sufficiently well for the publisher or bookseller to have a quantity ready-bound in stock (Fig. 2).¹² In both cases—user-initiated bindings and partial-edition retail bindings—we observe the tremendous agency of the consumer in determining the physicality of texts, whether through active assembly or perceived measures of popularity. More important, because these handmade bindings were vastly more expensive than the printed sheets of the texts themselves, it was financially necessary to gather multiple works of normal length into single bound volumes to ensure their preservation.¹³ Thus, with each purchase, the consumer played a role not only in the physical appearance of texts but also in the internal organization of texts in bindings—a central aspect of literate culture that in later centuries would become the province solely of producers. Every bound volume was a unique, customized assemblage, formed outside of an absolute prescription issuing from an author or publishing house. The book, in this respect, had a morphology that it would lose in the era of industrially produced texts and the classification systems based on them. Methods of collecting such books into libraries were correspondingly tentative and exploratory; wills, inventories, and catalogs from the period show a striking variation in shelving habits and methods of text preservation.¹⁴ Advances in technology had made it newly possible for an individual to own more books than he or she could possibly read,¹⁵ and without established practices for assembling and codifying the mass of texts that one could acquire in this age of cheaper print, readers and book owners experimented with the possibilities.

Figure 2. A seventeenth-century bookshop from Johann Comenius’s Orbis sensualium pictus (London, 1685), sig. N8v, showing books unbound, in stacks of sheets, and bound, fore-edge out, on shelves. By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

For writers in the Renaissance, compiling was fundamentally entwined with textual production. This is a crucial theme in the chapters that follow—and a crucial bridge, I contend, between bibliography and the literary scholarship that tacitly, inescapably depends on it. Poets, playwrights, and essayists are by necessity also readers. In any period of written culture, they are subject to historically specific norms and conceptions of the text, embodied in reading and collecting routines, which render the world of words intelligible. The order of books, to use Roger Chartier’s influential phrase,¹⁶ limits certain modes of writing and enables others in sustaining an accepted range of categories or codes within (and sometimes against) which literary producers work. Bibliographic organization in this elemental sense defines writers’ potential relationship with texts. And in early print culture, this relationship was particularly changeable and dynamic. Jennifer Summit has written of a formative chapter in their history in which early modern libraries actively processed, shaped, and imposed meaning on the very materials they contained.¹⁷ The history of bookmaking in the period is one of rapid diversification of the product as binders, wholesalers, and retailers struggled to keep up with the increase in production brought on by the handpress.¹⁸ The literary figures of the Renaissance, well into this shift, came to writing at a moment of irresolution about the boundaries and order of books—a moment in which, unlike today, there were few standard practices for assembling, preserving, and facilitating access to published works in collections. Their intellectual products were accordingly marked by contingency and the potential for change, visible at the level of presentation. As any student of early printed material knows, one of the most common ways for a publisher to market a work in the period was to claim on its title page that it had been enlarged or augmented, annexed to another text, or otherwise reconfigured. In contrast to modern conceptions of the book, a lack of fixity was normal and desirable.

That the writers of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries wrote for and within this model of a comparatively malleable, mutable book is evident in the surface structure of works by many canonical figures. Michel de Montaigne famously enlarged his Essais by writing new material—and copying borrowed quotations—directly in the blank spaces of his printed book; the title pages of each successive edition promised a text "augmentée, or reveu & augmentée" [revised and augmented], a project that continued after the author’s death.¹⁹ Thomas Middleton and George Chapman are two of the many Renaissance poets in England who enlarged the writings of others to form works of continuation: Middleton added episodes to Shakespeare’s Lucrece in his complaint poem The Ghost of Lucrece (1600); and Chapman brought to conclusion Christopher Marlowe’s unfinished long poem, Hero and Leander (1598), with the expanded Hero and Leander: begun by Christopher Marloe; and finished by George Chapman (1600) and, later, the further expanded (and now composite) Hero and Leander: begunne by Christopher Marloe … whereunto Is added the first booke of Lucan translated line for line by the same author, also issued in 1600.²⁰ Philip Sidney’s works provide many well-known examples of continuation and composite annexation. The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia, his popular prose romance, ended in mid-sentence, as if inviting other writers to append, and was expanded four times in print and countless times in manuscript over the course of the next century.²¹ Sidney’s sonnet sequence, Astrophel and Stella, was first printed in 1591, and then again that same year in an expanded quarto to the end of which are added, sundry other rare Sonnets of diuers Noble men and Gentlemen, the title page advertised. In 1599, these two already composite books were combined, Astrophel and Stella added to the end of the Arcadia. And by 1629, the contents of this volume had become too heterogeneous and collaborative to list fully in the encumbered title: The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia, Written by Sir Philip Sidney Knight. Now the seuenth time published, with some new Additions. With the supplement of a Defect in the third part of this History, by Sir W. A. Knight. Whereunto is now added a sixth Booke, by R. B. of Lincolnes Inne.

Augmentations, continuations, additions, supplements. Like the bound volumes that accommodated them, printed works of literature in early handpress culture were frequently the outward products of some order of compiling. But beneath these surface indicators on title pages, we know too that text collecting and assembly were important catalysts for discursive production and even creativity. The malleability of books—figurative rather than physical—lies at the heart of what literary scholars have long identified as the essentially imitative nature of Renaissance writing: the appropriation and manipulation of existing models, primarily from antiquity, and the assertion of writerly roles through or against one’s source.²² Notions deriving from antiquity of imitatio and copia dominated ideas about literary production from the earliest moments of writing instruction in humanist schools. As Mary Thomas Crane has shown in a now-classic study, students in Renaissance classrooms were encouraged to view all literature as a system of interchangeable fragments and to view the process of composition as centered on intertextuality.²³ Pedagogical tools, such as commonplace books, trained poets to collect sayings and sententiae from others’ works to be assembled again into new works.²⁴ This technique of textual reconfiguration, which Crane termed gathering and framing,²⁵ is most observable in the aphoristic verse of the mid-sixteenth century, but has been shown in diverse ways to have shaped later narrative works as well. Linda Woodbridge, writing on the ubiquity of plot borrowing and rearrangement in Renaissance drama, has described the period’s default compositional processes with a quilting metaphor: patchwork. Shakespeare’s England, she explains, was an aggregator’s world, where literary producers depended on a ready supply of prefabricated parts of stories or verse in circulation. Collecting and redeploying material from others’ texts to compose their own, Renaissance writers typically do not just retell a tale … they join several tales together to form a novella, an epic, or a play.²⁶

But despite this shared emphasis on compiling and text assembly in the rhetoric of literary production, scholars of the period think about and interpret writing as if it takes place only in the world of ideas, not in embodied practice.²⁷ While our metaphors are insistently material, in other words, we imagine this particular, habitual intertextuality in Renaissance letters unfolding discursively. The literary producers and archival products examined in the chapters that follow demonstrate that, on the contrary, the Renaissance inclination to gather and patch was a more physical, ingrained thing than our assumptions about practice have allowed. The readers and writers of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries did not simply think of their books as aggregations of text; they physically aggregated, resituated, and customized them. Out of necessity and desire, they assembled volumes into unique configurations and built new works out of old ones. Models of literary production in the period were to a perhaps surprising degree predicated on the possibility that a text could be taken up and joined to something else. The bifurcation between ideas and material practice—between making works and making books—is, like the modern collectors’ binding, a later imposition.

Compiling, in fact, was production, strictly speaking, in the semantics of Renaissance literary activities. In early usage, the verb to compile could mean to compose, to produce an original work.²⁸ It was in this nowlimited sense synonymous with writing. John Palsgrave’s 1530 translation dictionary defines compiling explicitly as authorship: [to] make a boke as an auctor dothe.²⁹ Another early dictionary, John Bullokar’s An English Expositor, which passed through twenty editions between 1616 and 1775, lists the definition, Compile. To make, frame or set together, where frame, as recent scholarship has shown, also has a potentially structural meaning.³⁰ The term was applied in this way to many varieties of text in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Here are a few examples: William Caxton in his 1490 Aeneid lists Virgil as the text’s compiler;³¹ E.K. introduces Edmund Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender by explaining that Spenser compiled these xii. Aeglogues;³² the Latin textbook A short introduction of grammar (1567) describes itself as being compiled and set forth by its author, William Lily;³³ the title page to the 1561 Works of Chaucer advertises the attached The Siege of Thebes as compiled by Ihon Lidgate; Thomas Lupton’s morality play All for Money appears in a 1578 quarto Compiled by T. Lupton;³⁴ John Skelton, the sixteenth-century laureate, was named as compiler in nine books of verse printed and reprinted between 1554 and 1563;³⁵ Thomas Watson refers to his compositional practice as compiling twice in the running commentary to his 1582 book of sonnets, The Hekatompathia;³⁶ and the cover of Gervase Markham’s domestic manual The English Husbandman (1613) makes the (only now) seemingly paradoxical announcement that it is A worke neuer written before by any author: and now newly compiled.³⁷ To compile, according to this vocabulary, was to create.

The field-specific claim of this study then is twofold. It will argue first that books in early print culture were relatively open-ended and to a great extent bound (in both senses) by the desires of readers, and second that the attendant practices of compiling and collecting came to have an important structural impact on the production of Renaissance literature. In analyses of selected works by William Shakespeare, Thomas Watson, Michel de Montaigne, Edmund Spenser, and others in the chapters that follow, I contend that the unsettled conventions of book assembly in the period helped foster an idea of the literary work as flexible and contingent, and a pervasive, underlying idea of writing as something closer to what we would call repurposing or recontextualization. Scholars have long characterized Renaissance writers by their habit of redeploying gathered text to form their own productions, but Bound to Read demonstrates that such discursive strategies were rooted in concrete, everyday ways of engaging with books, many of which have been concealed by modern routines of curatorship and rebinding. Using littleknown primary sources, such as library shelf lists and intact collections from the earlier period of the handpress, I uncover surprising juxtapositions of texts, like Blomefylde’s, that provide a material basis for reading across traditional genres and literary categories—according to the classification systems of early book owners instead of those of modern book culture, which shape our archives. Bringing this more fluid idea of the text to bear on the discourse and practice of writing in the Renaissance, this investigation recasts traditional concepts of intertextuality, allusion, and imitation as habits of the book, profoundly connected to the material organization of knowledge.³⁸

Bound to Read thus sets out to recover a history of reading and book ownership that is also a history of literary production—one in which the parameters of writing and written discourse are set in part by the shifting ways in which texts are ordered, assembled, and made available in collections. The relationship is vividly evoked in our own moment of cultural change, in which new technologies of the book have fractured old ways of thinking about and producing works in print.³⁹ Recently, scholars of the early handpress era have also begun to rethink long-held conceptions of the book and its physical boundaries. Sherman and others working in the history of reading have carried out inquiries into book use (and abuse) in the Renaissance, revealing that early readers intervened in the content and structure of printed volumes by annotating and even cutting and pasting.⁴⁰ Simon Palfrey and Tiffany Stern, in their survey of actors’ parts, have shown that the material conditions of meaning-making in Renaissance drama challenge Romantic-cum-Victorian notions of … an organically whole text,⁴¹ which only anachronistically apply to Shakespeare’s plays. Bound to Read contributes to these emerging conversations on both the consumption and production ends of Renaissance culture, and to the ongoing revisionism in the history of printing itself. The last two decades have witnessed a decisive turn in scholars’ understanding of the Gutenberg press and its historical effects, from earlier assessments of a print revolution that stabilized or fixed texts in the Renaissance to a more nuanced account of deliberate, uneven change and uncertainty in the period.⁴² In literary criticism, new perspectives on print history have gone hand in hand with a renewed evaluation of manuscript culture and its persistence—indeed, growth—in the early handpress era.⁴³ Scholars have come to consider a variety of literary activities, including reading itself, as instrumental forms of production.⁴⁴ But only very recently, and in part because of today’s digital tools and database technologies,⁴⁵ have we gained exposure to the complicated range of literary materials that were available to Renaissance readers and writers. As Andrew Pettegree has observed in the field’s most recent major contribution, histories of print and the book have tended to concentrate on the most eye-catching achievements of the new art,⁴⁶ neglecting the unbound and uncollected texts, the uncataloged or unexhibited items in archives, the imperfect and composite volumes like Blomefylde’s that tell a different story of literate culture in the Renaissance.

This issue of access points to the broader methodological claim of this study: that book-collecting practices—from early modern compiling to modern library curatorship and conservation—have deep and largely unacknowledged interpretative effects, both in literary criticism and in perceptions of literary history and periodization. Shakespeare’s Hamlet, in its well-studied early printed form, is emblematic of this point. In every known instance in rare-book collections today, the quarto copies of Hamlet that survive from Shakespeare’s lifetime are preserved and accessed individually in hardcover bindings. But during Shakespeare’s lifetime, these arrangements would have been impossible luxuries—virtually impracticable by ordinary convention. Hamlet quartos were by all accounts cheap booklets; they were bound into collections with similarly sized cheap booklets (if they were bound at all) and kept out of serious institutional libraries such as the Bodleian at Oxford University.⁴⁷ The gravity and aura of an individually bound, read, and interpreted Hamlet today is thus to a great extent a function of modern bookcollecting practices. Each preserved copy is at base a relatively undistinguished early printed book that was transformed—through conservational rebinding, cataloging, and revaluation according to the economics of the book trade—into a distinguished Renaissance masterwork. The material contexts and organizing categories that for early readers informed the text’s status and range of potential meanings have been replaced by a modern, circumscribed idea of what Hamlet should be. This contrast exemplifies what is meant by the indeterminate third term of my subtitle, the Making of Renaissance Literature. Bound to Read examines both literary production—writers and printers making meaning—in the period customarily referred to as the Renaissance and, crucially, the production of a category of Renaissance literature in library and collecting procedures customarily considered outside the domain of literary-critical interpretation.

In finding meaning in practices of text assembly and organization, the analyses in this study stretch across field lines to embrace and build on scholarly convictions about collecting as cultural production. Such convictions form the basis of library and bookbinding history, two fields of knowledge that until recently have remained underutilized by scholars of Renaissance literature.⁴⁸ The importance of collecting has also informed recent literary scholarship of the Middle Ages, a field too easily cordoned off by our default categories of Renaissance and early modern.⁴⁹ Alexandra Gillespie, writing on late medieval quartos of Chaucer’s and Lydgate’s works, has called attention to the fact that the earliest printed texts in today’s rare-book archives are for the most part, slim, bound in morocco or Russian leather …, washed and cropped and generally presented as the ideal thing for a nineteenth-century gentleman.⁵⁰ Underneath this artificially modernized surface, Gillespie and Seth Lerer have independently shown, lies a robust culture of anthology building in which the compiling habits and fluid canons familiar to us from the medieval manuscript miscellany continued to guide the production of Middle English literature in early print.⁵¹ The continuity of compiling and collecting practices is a theme that emerges decisively in this study, helping to fill a conspicuous gap in existing literary-historical research. Scholarship on anthologies and print Sammelbände stops with the Middle English texts from the 1520s examined in Gillespie’s and Lerer’s studies, and resumes only in the allied but fundamentally different realm of collected literary anthologies from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.⁵² Bound to Read demonstrates that this gap in chronology originates in the long processes of archival selection that give us gilt-edged, luxury quarto copies of Hamlet: the rebinding, cataloging, and other curatorial routines that seem objective and peripheral to literary-historical scholarship but which enforce the perception of a historical break—an English Renaissance—at the level of the rare book.

What Lerer calls the medieval anthologistic impulse⁵³ is very much in evidence in sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England, where book owners continued to compile in a system of production and distribution that effectively required it. As Gillespie has noted, the press may have wrested books from a slower, more careful system of medieval compilation, but it supplied them to the same sort of readers. After printing, as other choices—about script, size and decoration of a book—were completely or increasingly circumscribed, the patrons of bookshops might still buy a book unbound and decide what to do with it next.⁵⁴ It could be said that instead of fixing or stabilizing once-malleable texts as was previously thought, printing multiplied the possibilities for text assembly, accelerating and diversifying habits of the book that nourished a more continuous, developing early vernacular textual culture. In fact, we find that the movement from the latemedieval printers to established Renaissance Stationers’ Company is one of more control to less control over binding structures: from publisherwholesalers, such as Caxton and Richard Pynson, who issued part-editions ready bound, to the increasingly specialized tradesmen of the 1580s and 1590s, who focused on printing and financing while ceding even more of the work of assembly to retailers and consumers.⁵⁵ What Lerer calls an impulse had by the time of Spenser and Shakespeare become praxis. A writer or publisher in the Renaissance released their work into a culture of bibliographic contingency, where the reader had seemingly infinite choices for supplying context and meaning—for giving that work material form in a book.

And yet for much of modern textual history—especially after the industrialization of bookbinding in the nineteenth century (a genuine discontinuity, if not a Renaissance)⁵⁶—a cultural preference for individual, modernlooking copies of major literary works has resulted in early printed artifacts being stripped of these material contexts. The objective is almost always bibliophilic preservation, necessary and noble in its way, but the effect has been to make Spenser and Shakespeare into our contemporaries, to separate them from their contemporaries in premodern reading and compiling culture. At its most extreme, these interventions can prevent us from accessing the history of a given text’s use or formation beyond that of the modern collector. Figure 3 displays a copy of King Lear from 1619 that was most likely extracted from an early multitext anthology.⁵⁷ Each page has been cropped individually down to the margin and then inlayed or mounted in fresh, modern paper. No collation of the text can be taken, and no previous reader (or reading) can be perceived. Such a radical discrepancy in modes of text preservation and reading reflects an untold history of desired books and desired meaning. Poststructuralist theorists and historiographers from the later twentieth century have argued forcefully that archiving does not merely store what is written and said; it interprets, differentiates, and codifies discourse, and ultimately defines the limts of comprehensibility in the production of new discourse.⁵⁸ The curatorial substructure of books in archives determines what we can say about them. In many cases, it conceals what has been said in and about the literatures of the past.

Renaissance books in today’s libraries are fundamentally divorced from their earliest readerly contexts, which established parameters for interpretation and regulated the textual field within which writers produced works. The first part of this study, Readers, begins to reconstruct these lost contexts in the compilations and collections that once populated library shelves. The second part, Writers, explores the ways in which these normative assemblages of text helped define compositional practices, and also the literary roles and subjectivities that were marketed to an emerging readership in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Because the available evidence in archives is unrepresentative (if it ever could have been representative), I cannot hope to provide a comprehensive or chronological account of compiling and collecting practices. Rather, Bound to Read examines the assembly and disassembly of early handpress-era texts at key cultural sites, showing how material arrangements and classification systems shaped Renaissance literature and how the organization of knowledge more generally exerts a farreaching influence over the making of literary texts.

Figure 3. Shakespeare’s King Lear, part