Sixteenth-Century Readers, Fifteenth-Century Books: Continuities of Reading in the English Reformation by Margaret Connolly (review)

As a work of manuscript studies, Margaret Connolly's Sixteenth-Century Readers, Fifteenth-Century Books takes a somewhat familiar approach, carefully examining a number of late medieval English manuscripts. What is new and important about this study is Connolly's decision to focus on a group of books linked not by shared contents or origins, but by their ownership by the Roberts family of Willesden, Middlesex, during the sixteenth century. Unlike other families or individuals whose post-medieval manuscript holdings have attracted scholarly attention, the Roberts family were not great collectors nor given to antiquarian leanings. Rather, they were prosperous gentry with connections in London, especially the legal profession, whose fortunes waxed and eventually waned from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century. As Connolly demonstrates through a careful examination of their family history and of the eight manuscripts that can be shown to have been in their possession, their old books were not treated as relics or antiques, but rather functioned as a part of the family's everyday professional, domestic, and devotional life well into the sixteenth century. Connolly is rigorous about accounting for uses of all kinds (e.g., memos, records of family history) rather than restricting her enquiries to readerly engagement with the text, and this allows her to tell a wide-ranging story about the significance of these books as objects.

Given the varied materials it considers, Sixteenth-Century Readers, Fifteenth-Century Books has no single overarching thesis, but as the book's subtitle ('Continuities of Reading in the English Reformation') suggests, religious practice is a concern throughout. Connolly writes that 'early Tudor spirituality, as practised by individual gentry through personal devotional reading, was strongly medieval in nature' (p. 78). Thus, the evidence of sixteenth-century reading that Connolly documents in the Roberts manuscripts 'transcends a simple binary divide between orthodox and heterodox, and which supports an emerging understanding that expressions of late medieval dissent were complex and multi-layered' (p. 94). This is not exactly a novel claim, but the detail and comprehensiveness with which Connolly approaches her subject matter makes her arguments particularly compelling. in addition, Connolly's attention to the ways early modern readers interacted with their medieval books puts the lie to the assumption that older books were inevitably and immediately displaced by the arrival of print and functions as an essential complement to more traditional manuscript studies that foreground the book in its moment of production and among its first owners and readers.

At the centre of Connolly's study are the bookish activities of Thomas Roberts (1470–1542) and Edmund Roberts (1520–85), whose lives and careers were inevitably intertwined with the tumultuous political and cultural times in which they lived. Synthesizing bibliographical, literary, and historical evidence, Connolly documents how the Roberts's books served not only as sources of devotional guidance and professional reference, but repositories of family history and spaces for reflection and documentation. Connolly's first chapter offers a careful account of the Roberts family history, setting the context for the more detailed bibliographical studies that follow. A robust sense of the milieu in which these books were owned and read emerges, including familial, professional, and religious networks.

Two of the book's six chapters discuss secular manuscripts. Chapter 2 focuses on Thomas Roberts's copy of the legal textbook Registrum Brevium, now Harley MS 1859 in the British Library. Chapter 5 offers a fascinating look at Bodleian Library MS Rawlinson C.894, and MS Rawlinson C.299, which Connolly describes as 'a book of practical use', including many medical recipes, owned and annotated by Edmund Roberts. in both chapters, Connolly works carefully through the manuscripts' many signs of use, including ownership marks, marginalia, and later additions to the text, while also attending to more ambiguous evidence like underlining. The result is...