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Devotion Bound A Social History 0/"The Temple KATHLEEN LYNCH Bookbinding is the final stage in a mechanical process of reproduction, but in early modern Europe it must also be understood as the first act of reception. For a customer had a say,at least potentially, about severalimportant aspectsof the binding, including the materials and methods of decoration and the limits and order of the contents within. In other words, any given binding could be custom work and therefore speak of a customer's tastes. With that idea in mind, this essay probes the role of binding as an act of reclamation, one that highlights the convergences of slippage and fixity—in texts and lives alike. As much as it promises stability, binding—like the process of publication as a whole—is also a means of extension that allows for destabilization, adaptation, and appropriation. The possibilities for reclamation have a particular resonance for a text as teasingly autobiographical as is The Temple by George Herbert. For the intimate portrayalof a spiritual life invites areader to imagine the struggle described as one's own. The boundaries of identity are elided as the written representation of one's experience is reanimated in the reading of another. This investigation assumesthat customer is a categorywhich includes but is not limited to readers: the author, the publisher, and a bookseller are among those who might function as the customer's proxy. The customer and reader may be identical or distinct; they may or may not be identifiable.Nevertheless, choices about a book's binding frame a reader's interests, strategies, and expectations . My own study is framed, too: by the resonant effect of bookbinding's marginalization, first in the Stationers' Company and now in contemporary academic disciplines, by the already well-mapped historical context in which this investigation fits, and by The Temple's own liminal nature—determinedly devout and widely read. In England, at least in the early modern period, bookbinding had a marginalized position in the book trade. The oldest of the crafts that were consolidated in the Stationers' Company, bookbinding rapidly lost both status and financialground to printing and bookselling in the ageof movable type. Bookbinders could compete for the retail trade, but their copies were liable to be 8 more expensive: at the wholesale stage becausethey could not leverage afavorable exchange with their own stock, and at the retail stage because they could not match the prices of readily available unbound copies. Additionally, bookbinders were lessprotected by the company's statutes against competition from aliens and those in other guilds.1 Similarly, the study of bookbinding skirts the uncertain boundaries of academic disciplines today. The history of bookbinding remains an important part of connoisseurship. Books on bookbinding serve an audience of bibliophiles with lavish illustrations of fine craftsmanship well preserved. But the illustrations also provide the necessary evidence for the bibliographer's comparative study. Insofar as certain materials, methods, and tools may be localized , the study of bookbinding does the core work of identifying copies and schools. As David Pearson writes, that study remains a "distressingly inexact science when we are talking about such small tools of standard designs, which existed in multiple variant versions, all close copies of one another."2 An investigation of those details is by definition bibliographical. But bibliographers by and large have concentrated on textual questions, perhaps (as Graham Pollard speculated almost a half century ago) because bibliography owes somuch to students of the drama of the period, "aclassofbook which has been more extensivelydisbound than anyother."3 Even Randall McLeod, who has done the painstakingwork of "an exacting textual criticism of authoritative documents" in the publication history of The Temple, mentions the practice of binding Herbert's Temple together with another work, but does not integrate that into his assessment of the unacknowledged changes and appropriations that generally mark the history of editing.4 Scholars often depend on cataloguers to analyze the salient material conditions of a rare book in copy-specific entries. The catalogues of rare-book archives arefilledwith detailed information about the nature and history of the bindings of their collections. Electronic databases have made it easier for scholars to search for this information with the introduction of notes fields. But scholars arelessfamiliar with the critical mass of studies ofbookbinding in this period. Many of these studies address texts and institutions with long histories supported by large archives and substantial paper trails. Collectively, they constitute an exciting conversation about the role of the history...

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