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

The sixteenth century is the new fourteenth century, it seems. Scholars of early modern literature find themselves looking over their shoulders as a number of high-profile medievalists have turned their attention to the putatively "early modern." James Simpson, David Wallace, and Sara Beckwith are just a few of the medievalist scholars who have flouted the venerable partition between medieval and renaissance/ early modern. Of course, that partition has been under siege for some time now; Brian Stock, Lee Patterson, and Margreta de Grazia, among others, have challenged the theoretical and historical assumptions that sustain this fundamental period divide, one that seems constitutive of modernity. A medievalist by training, Jennifer Summit has positioned herself as a major player in the movement to address this elementary division in English literary and cultural history. Summit's first book, Lost Property: The Woman Writer and English Literary History, 1380-1589 (2000), remains a terrific example of scholarship that confidently bridges the gap between these two historical fields. In 2007 she coedited (with David Wallace) a special issue of the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies that asked its contributors to rethink medieval and Renaissance "After Periodization." And, most recently, she has contributed to a new collection of essays edited by James Simpson and Brian Cummings, Cultural Reformations: Medieval and Renaissance in Literary History (2010), which brings together scholars from both fields to think about, across, and beyond this disciplinary divide.

Summit's excellent new monograph, Memory's Library: Medieval Books in Early Modern England (2008), displays all the virtues and rewards of the productive cross-pollination ongoing between medieval and early modern scholarship. The story Summit tells in Memory's Library is deceptively simple: she traces "the history of libraries in England, from 1431 to 1631," from "the initial collecting activities" of Humfrey, Duke of Gloucester, to the foundation of the great modern archives of Thomas Bodley and Robert Cotton (p. 2). Building on the work of historians and theorists of the archive like Elisabeth Leedham-Green, James Raven, and Roger Chartier, Summit reads "a necessarily select number of libraries and materials" in an effort "to trace a specific story about how early modern libraries remade the medieval past, along with the books and textual practices they inherited from it" (p. 5). The crucial event in Summit's history is the Henrician dissolution of the monasteries and, of course, the destruction and dispersal of monastic libraries. Summit reads the very real historical and historiographical rupture of the dissolution of the monasteries as the traumatic event that gives shape to a medieval/ early modern divide, even as she insists on crossing and recrossing that divide. The result is a truly diachronic history in which the historical rupture itself comes into much greater focus even as continuities and connections across that rupture are addressed and explored. And if diachronic history is a feature of Summit's approach, it is also, in some sense, her object, an object that she locates in the material institution of the library. In Summit's argument, libraries "stage material encounters with the textual legacy of the past"; the "unruly legacy" of medieval texts not only shaped an early modern sense of past and present but also shaped early modern readers as readers by bringing them "into contact with medieval modes of reading that they themselves actively disputed, contested, or selectively adapted" (pp. 4, 6). Thus, for Summit, "[i]f libraries reveal that the Middle Ages were a creation of the Renaissance, they also make it possible to see the Renaissance as a creation of the Middle Ages" (p. 4).

Memory's Library is not simply an institutional history of libraries but a social and political history in which the contested authority of the archive takes center stage. The first chapter begins with Duke Humfrey of Gloucester's library and the archive at Bury St. Edmunds; the figure bringing these nascent institutions together in Summit's argument is the poet...