Bound to Read: Compilations, Collections, and the Making of Renaissance Literature by Jeffrey T. Knight (review)

This book focuses on a wide range of textual practices (compilation, collecting, arranging, and book-binding), showing how these had a defining and lasting influence not only in book production and reception, but also in writing itself, in literary reading, and in hermeneutics. Through its pages, we are reminded that bibliographical description has never been opposed to interpretation in the history of printed books, but rather that critics have chosen to see it as such. Drawing on a long and fruitful tradition of scholarship in book history, Jeffrey T. Knight demonstrates with great focus and an extraordinary wealth of examples the embodied nature of textual production. He also shows convincingly how reading and writing are decisively shaped and determined by the material and historical conditions (individuals, institutions, and structures) where they take place.

The archival material presented is priceless, starting with the first quotation and the first plate included in Knight’s book. The quote, taken from a table of verbs c.1530, states the functional equivalence of editorial compiling and literary composition: ‘I Compyle: I make a boke as an auctour doth’. Knight goes on to provide ample and varied examples to illustrate the many ways in which this concomitance was explored in both directions, with authors acting as compilers or curators, and editors or collectors taking on different authorial roles. The above-mentioned plate is an etching, taken from Johann Comenius’s Orbis sensualium pictus(London, 1685), which shows in great detail the quasi-geometrical layout of a seventeenth-century bookshop, with books being kept in horizontal stacks of unbound sheets, for readers to bind themselves in their preferred configuration, and with only about a third of the stock kept in ready-bound form, sitting vertically on the shelf, fore-edge out. Two points are thus made clear from the outset. First, that compiling was, in fact, a compositional activity – a fact often obliterated or made invisible by sanitised modern editions, or by institutional librarianship. Secondly, that binding was often left to the reader of the text, and linked to other practices such as compilation, commentary, selection, cropping, and miscellaneous assembly.

Knight’s book is divided into two large sections that articulate cohesively a truly cornucopian array of textual practices, techniques, and procedures. First, the author presents different instances of textual setting and arranging from the point of view of the reader. The case of William Pugh’s AB catalogue at the University of Cambridge and that of the Parker Register (Corpus Christi College, Cambridge) provide fascinating insights into the transition of books from private collections to institutional ownership. A fascinating chapter on Shakespeare follows, where the concept of ‘material intertextuality’ is applied in detail to more than a dozen documents that include manuscript copies, early printed materials, and different combinations of both. The examples are varied, always relevant, and arranged logically in a neat way that clearly explains the different processes of textual assembly and interpretation in hand. From that exhuberant silva textualis, a clear idea emerges with ever more convincing and nuanced evidence: the reception and interpretation of Shakespeare was often established by the people who, in a very literal sense, madethe books; by readers that lived in a precise historical context and that, by virtue of their reading activity, were also collectors, compilers, conservators, and curators actively engaged in the process of textual production.

A second large section entitled ‘Writers’, focuses on the role played by these material practices in the generation of new text through three successive chapters, dealing with the notions of transformative imitation, of the compiling self, and of a custom-made corpus. The examples chosen include verse and prose composition, and a range of genres and texts by Spenser, Watson, John Lilliat, Sidney, Montaigne, and Chaucer. This section will be of particular interest not only to the...