The Maitland and the Sinclair Families: The Chronicles of Scotland and its Early Modern Readers

The Maitlands and the Sinclairs, two eminent early-modern literary families, are known for their collection of manuscripts and printed books. They had much in common in their treatment of their collections. Their approaches to their books were, however, fundamentally different. While the Sinclairs were concerned about the texts of their books, the Maitlands were more concerned about the physical value of the books. In order to illuminate this point, I compare the ways in which members of these families treated their copies of the same work, namely John Bellenden's Chronicles of Scotland. Their approaches to their copies are remarkably contrastive; Henry Sinclair glossed his copy thoroughly and left many text-related annotations, while the Duke of Lauderdale, who owned the Chronicles in duplicate, left no textual annotations, but made his ownership apparent. By examining this evidence, this essay seeks to consider the variety of ways in which early modern book collectors enjoyed and utilized their books, and how the trend of book collecting changed in course of time.