To think of the canon of English literature, as we have grown accustomed to do, in terms of a collection of significant “books” produced by “authors,” is to beg many questions. What is a book, to start with, when it is so often clearly not the same thing as a distinct work? Why do we persist in relating books (or even works) to single authors, when so many of these things derive from collaborative activity or translation or forms of compilation and bricolage? In Bound to Read, Jeffrey Todd Knight unravels the implications of such questions by returning to the material forms in which Renaissance writings became books and by charting some of the ways in which the archiving and historical preservation of these books has shaped what we think of as Renaissance literature. Constructed as a series of case studies, Bound to Read illustrates in compelling detail how forms of collecting, often partly determined by practical or economic imperatives, are meaningfully expressive.

One point of reference to which Knight returns is the ongoing digital revolution: the changes to compositional and communicative practices occasioned by recent technological innovations. He reflects at various points in his study on the similarities between these changes and the new possibilities opened up for the Renaissance by the introduction of printing, and throughout the book he keeps in view the complex relationships between old and new technologies—in Renaissance terms, between manuscript and printed book production—describing some of the striking forms in which they continued to intersect from the late fifteenth century onward. His generous interpretation of the boundaries of the Renaissance means that he is able to range usefully over aspects of late medieval authorial and compilational practice and to explore the dynamic role of compilation in forming an English literary canon starting with Chaucer.

The book is divided into sections that survey the dynamics and significance of compiling habits, first in relation to readers and then to writers. Knight looks at Renaissance readers like Matthew Parker, who pursued a striking range of compilational activities, whether pasting and sewing fragments into existing volumes or constructing hybrid books from assortments of manuscript and printed material. His survey also takes in early readers of Shakespeare's verse and plays, some of whose Shakespearian collocations suggest very particular sorts of interest that have been submerged by later centuries of bardolatry. The activities of post-Renaissance readers also feature in these chapters: of the actor-collector David Garrick, for example; and the late eighteenth-century librarian William Pugh, whose obsessively detailed accounts of the early printed materials in Cambridge University Library contain valuable details of what was bound together, and conversely illuminate what has been taken apart over the centuries.

The second part of Bound to Read turns to writers, and to characteristics of Renaissance literary composition that may somehow reflect the compilational tendencies so formative a part of reading practice and book collecting. Developing influential arguments by scholars like Terence Cave and Ann Moss about the collection of commonplaces and the use of florilegia, Knight presents a number of models of composition to which compiling, of one sort or another, was central. An especially absorbing chapter in this section pursues the activities of John Lilliat, a vicar choral at Wells and Chichester who grafted an extensive series of his own lyrics into a printed sonnet sequence (Thomas Watson's The Hekatompathia; or, Passionate Centurie of Love), having evidently customized his copy by binding in a number of blank pages. Another chapter here explores the processes by which Edmund Spenser's Shepheardes Calender took shape and the creative practices that can be detected in Montaigne's Essais. Knight describes Spenser and Montaigne as exponents of “modes of writership rooted in the vernacular past” (149), and a number of the arguments advanced in this book look back to medieval precedents, whether to specific works, like editions of the early printed Kalender of Sheepehards (translated from French), which Spenser must have known, or to habits and processes of composition. This admirable concern with the roots of Renaissance practice is made most explicit in the final chapter, which surveys sixteenth-century editions of Chaucer's works alongside other instances of the “custom-made corpus”: some from the sixteenth century (Lupset, More, and Gascoigne), others from the seventeenth (Jonson and Shakespeare, including the problematic Pavier quartos).

Bound to Read is a persuasive book, intelligently constructed and supporting lucid argument and analysis with engaging detail and illustration. In taking account of the larger history of book collecting and use, and in drawing together both compositional and reading practices, Knight offers new ways into the study of Renaissance literature and a salutary reminder of the variety of processes at play in the construction of a literary canon.