Of late, there has been a noticeable increase in critical interest in the period traditionally divided by the oblique in medieval/Renaissance, as Eamon Duffy, James Simpson, David Wallace, and others, rethinking periodicity, have foregrounded continuity over change in the wake of the Reformation. Jennifer Summit's Memory's Library sets off from the premise that it is right and proper to take as her period of interest the two hundred years from the mid-fifteenth to the mid-seventeenth centuries, and she does this with considerable aplomb, underlining her status as one of the very best scholars working in the “med/Ren” field. She finds in the history of the pre- and post-Reformation English library evidence both for the force of rupture—there is, after all, no gainsaying the impact of Reformation biblioclasm on English history—and, at the same time, for the persistence of certain continuities even after a caesura of such magnitude. Memory's Library is a huge achievement, a tour de force convincing the reader of its argument right from the start. And, along the way, it is almost as a bonus that we find original readings of texts by John Lydgate, Thomas More, Edmund Spenser, and Francis Bacon.
Summit's exploration of medieval and early modern libraries began, she tells us, in reflections not on the library's past but on its digital future. And what she finds as she assesses the history of the library in and after the Reformation resonates powerfully with contemporary preoccupations. Her meditations, she notes, were prompted by the standard treatment in contemporary discourse of the premodern library as the polar opposite of the digital archive—closed, static, and exclusive, as opposed to the open, dynamic, and democratic role claimed for the virtual library—a cliché that she vehemently rejects, showing that pre- and early modern libraries alike “were theorized and experienced by their contemporaries not as mere repositories but as dynamic and creative spaces dedicated to the production of knowledge” (238). “The library,” she insists, “is central” not only “to who we were” but also to “who we are” (1), the one shaping the other through the books we read, select, collect, and catalog and also, as Summit reminds us throughout, through those that we deaccession and sometimes even destroy.
Her main achievement in the book is to demonstrate the premodern library's active role in textual culture, ensuring that it will be understood from now on as not simply a space in which books were stored and protected but one in which history was created. She takes us on a tour of collections that begins with the establishment of Duke Humfrey's library in 1431 and concludes with the death of Sir Robert Cotton in 1631. In between, we visit the libraries—some lost, some extant—of More, Matthew Parker, Thomas Bodley, and others, and we observe the construction of national history through these collectors’ practices. In the process, it becomes clear not only that the Renaissance library, far from representing a clean break with its monastic predecessor, was in several ways the product of the Middle Ages but also that it was in the Renaissance library that the Middle Ages were created—in other words that “the English Middle Ages … we now study is the product of … Renaissance libraries” (2).
The extent of this early modern invention of the “medieval” is at its clearest in Summit's third chapter, in which she notes that “individual books owed their very survival to active choices that were made on the basis of the collector's sense of what was worth preserving and, more broadly, of what national or historical roles the library should fulfill” (105). Citing N. R. Ker's estimations of the scale of loss from monastic libraries to show that “what currently remains of England's medieval textual heritage represents a small fraction of the medieval books that existed before 1536” (102), she argues that “a significant body of what now survives as the textual heritage of the English Middle Ages reflects the shaping interests of … post-Reformation collectors” (105) and is in fact the product of the choices made by those collectors in the aftermath of the destruction or dispersal of monastic libraries. “Reformation library making,” she concludes wryly, is “aligned with, and even contingent upon, the act of library breaking” (110).
Although Summit's terminus ad quem is the death of Cotton, whose disassembly and reshaping of the books he acquired is paradigmatic, for Summit, of the role of the post-Reformation collector in “impos[ing] a new … horizon of interpretation on the materials of British history” (196), she in fact concludes with a chapter on Francis Bacon—a slightly mischievous move, this, in that Bacon is known for his critique of libraries: “there is,” he wrote in Novum organum, “no end to their repetitions” (204). But what she shows is that Bacon—although he would not necessarily have cared to admit it—fits neatly into the line of writers she has examined, from More to William Camden, “for whom writing about libraries was a way of theorizing and imagining the objects, shapes, and limitations of human knowledge” (201). Bacon's advancement of learning, she concludes, thus “comes about not by abandoning the modes of knowledge embodied in libraries” but “by actively adapting libraries’ critical, active, and truth-seeking practices to new objects” (233).
By this stage we are in no doubt at all either that the libraries Summit discusses, far from being static or passive, were the active agents of historical change or that close attention to the threads Summit follows across two centuries demonstrates that change—even a change as immense as the Reformation—takes place in a productive negotiation with forms of continuity. Summit's memorable book on the role of the library in the creation of national memory should be on the shelves of not only historians of the medieval and early modern book but everyone fascinated by the way the past both shapes and is shaped by the present.
