Memory’s Library: Medieval Books in Early Modern England (review)

At the end of her learned and lucid new book, Jennifer Summit draws readers’ attention to a 1993 article from Wired magazine in which the dark age of the library is fast receding. “Books once hoarded in subterranean stacks will be scanned . . . and made available to anyone.” “Instead of fortresses of knowledge,” there will be “information”; instead of “guardians of tradition,” there will be “change” (234). The vision, Summit argues, is a medievalized one: our digital future has the imaginative shape of our bookish past. The idea of library as fortress, as a too-well-guarded cave, hoarding knowledge from the light of understanding is, in the case of England, as old as the institutionalized library itself. In the fifteenth century, English monasteries and university colleges began to set aside special spaces for collections of books previously held in choirs, cloisters, and refectories, and these new rooms quickly became witness to a vigorous contest for the control and use of texts. Bury St. Edmunds consolidated its collection in the early 1400s in the wake of fourteenth-century attacks on the monastery by townsfolk, to whose ire over the foundation’s privileged control of the town old records and books fell victim. And Duke Humfrey and John Lydgate together made the duke’s library a place where learned tomes and clerkly reading of them guarded against the “comounte” (40), notably Wycliffites, who—like digital futurists—saw the libraries of their day as “closed” places, where books “waxe rotyn” (from “How Religious men should keep certain Articles,” 18).

These particular histories of English libraries are the subject of the first chapter of Summit’s study, but they suggest the contours of her project. Summit does not set out to correct an impression of libraries as fortresses for rotting books. By writing of English libraries over two centuries—amid changes wrought by humanism, printing, dissolution, reformation, and the rise of experimental science—she argues instead for the dynamic historicity of this and every way of conceiving of the library. In this book, libraries are not static spaces for reading but “readable space” (5)—generative of the multiple meanings of the texts they contain and of the reading practices associated with those texts. It is in this sense that Summit is writing of Memory’s Library. Cognitive science teaches us that memory involves not the passive collection, but the active and creative selection and so invention of experience. By such processes, which are akin to those that occur as libraries are formed and used, cultural identities are forged.

Such is the book’s broad approach; Summit’s specific line of argument is that in the famous libraries she describes—including those of Duke Humfrey, Thomas More, Henry VIII, Matthew Parker, Thomas Bodley, and Robert Cotton—medieval books and bookish practices were appropriated to serve competing ideological concerns. Summit’s history of the early English library thus seems a history of irreconcilable differences: of new uses found for compilatio, lectio divina, allegoresis, and manuscripts themselves that invent and then police divisions—between past and present, between people of different faith or social status, between science and the humanities, and even between an individual’s own impulses. Thus Lydgate’s clerkly envoys in his Fall of Princes give his book a semblance of his patron Humfrey’s library not only in their deference to monastic and humanist learning, but in their effort to guard against the opinions of the rebellious commons. Thus the libraries that More describes (Pico’s collection or the cargo of that purveyor of nonsense to Utopia, Hythloday) and those he inhabited—the Carthusian cell in the London Charterhouse that inspired his New Building and ironically anticipated his prison cell—cast doubt on his capacity to “reconcile humanism’s active virtues with the aims of the Christian life” (63). In the 1560s–80s, men associated with the Parker library turned Augustinian allegoresis into a “lectio of suspicion” (121). In their writings, the metaphor...