Virtual Issue for 2017
Guest Editor James Carley
Throughout the middle ages manuscripts did shift from one religious house to another, primarily for copying, but also accompanying individuals who transferred establishments. One thinks in particular of the friars who were free to move about, but also the sequestered Carthusians, one of whose articulated purposes was the copying and distribution of devotional texts. In the later period young scholars took manuscripts with them to Oxford and Cambridge where some remained permanently. Likewise monarchs sent agents out to gather manuscripts that might be useful to their own political causes: a case in point is the letter Edward I dispatched to the monasteries in 1291 requesting documents supporting his claim to overlordship of Scotland. In spite of these cases, however, there was an underlying stability: the libraries of the religious houses grew over the centuries, often without clear patterns, and although there were deaccessions and recycling of ‘vetus’ and ‘inutilis’ items, especially after the introduction of the printing press, many manuscripts dating back as far as Anglo-Saxon times remained in the very establishments where they had first been copied.
As early as the second half of the 1520s the libraries became seriously threatened. Cardinal Thomas Wolsey was an initiating player in the debacle that ensued. It was he who acted on the insight that libraries might well contain books relevant to the King’s ‘Great Matter’—‘libri de historiis antiquitatum ac diuinitate tractancium in librariis et domibus religiosis’, as the compilers of a list of potentially useful manuscripts in Lincolnshire libraries put it—and oversaw the first movement of pertinent items to the libraries of King Henry VIII.
Beginning in 1533 John Leland (c. 1503–1552), armed with some sort of commission from the king, took it upon himself to visit as many libraries of religious houses as he could and to list significant titles in their collections, both as a means to bolster Henry’s case asserting independence from papal authority and to gather prima materia for the great bio-bibliographical history ‘de uiris illustribus’ he intended to write. Apart from those which he borrowed for his own use he also removed manuscripts to the royal libraries, which he increasingly saw as a kind of ‘national storehouse’ to use N. R. Ker’s phrase. During the actual dissolutions (1536–40) libraries were plundered, and it is at this period that so much was either destroyed or hidden underground by ex-religious or acquired by private collectors. For the most part what survived, what wandered to new homes, depended on who was at the right place at the right time.
More than any other individual Ker was responsible for tracing the earlier provenances of manuscripts that survived the suppressions. One year after the appearance of his Medieval Libraries of Great Britain: A List of Surviving Books in 1941 he published a summary of his findings as ‘The Migration of Manuscripts from the English Medieval Libraries’ [No. 1]. His statement that ‘I have wondered what the king, or whoever was responsible for his library, wanted with four copies of Ralph of Flavigny on Leviticus’ perhaps indicates, as he was the first to admit, how narrowly bibliographical and non-contextualizing his enterprise could be: Ralph’s text was highly useful in the debate over the (il)legitimacy of Henry’s marriage to the widow of his deceased brother. Ker modestly concluded this article by reiterating that the ‘evidence needs collecting and weighing. I do not feel justified in drawing conclusions from it at present’. Ker’s greatly expanded second edition was published in 1964 and A. G. Watson’s Supplement to the second edition in 1987. It is now in the process of being digitized as Medieval Libraries of Great Britain 3. New discoveries are included in this third, electronic edition as well as references to the Corpus of British Medieval Library Catalogues; likewise donor inscriptions are provided and there are both images of these, when they are available, and pressmarks linking books to their earlier homes.
The first volume of the Corpus, whose mandate is to provide annotated editions of all the surviving pre-dissolution library catalogues of medieval British houses, was published in 1990. It was anticipated by the work of other scholars, including M. R. James, who edited several catalogues including that of Dover priory (1903). This latter was examined by C. R Haines in ‘The Library of Dover Priory: its Catalogue and Extant Volumes’ (1927) [No. 2]. Both James’s catalogue and Haines’s article have in many ways been superseded by the Corpus volume, edited by W. P. Stoneman (1999), but Haines’s article still has things to offer, including a translation of the preface to the three parts of the catalogue compiled by the precentor John Whytefelde in 1389. (As fewer and fewer scholars have a background in the classics, translations of this sort have now become the norm.) Haines also gave a detailed description of the placement of the books as well as a good account of the post-dissolution fate of the library and a list of some twenty survivors (to which Ker would add four and Watson one more).
The monastic visitors were in the fortunate position of being able to scoop up the spoils if they so desired, and one of those most active in this enterprise was the Welsh scholar and friend of Leland’s, Sir John Prise (d. 1555), on whose collecting activities Ker wrote in 1955 in an article that became a model of its kind and which, perhaps coincidentally, was published four hundred years after Prise’s death [No. 3]. (It was also included by David Pearson in Virtual Issue no. 2 as an example of ‘The Library on Private Libraries’.) Most importantly, Ker included a list of survivors, to which, however, he added a caveat stating that ‘anyone wishing to make a complete list would have to search, knowing [Prise’s] hand, through all the likely books, looking for his marginalia’. Both ‘The Migration of Manuscripts from the English Medieval Libraries’ and ‘Sir John Prise’ were included in Ker’s collected essays, Books, Collectors and Libraries: Studies in the Medieval Heritage (1985), which was edited by Watson, who added brief notes at the end of each essay to update the references.
Like Ker, Watson had an encyclopaedic knowledge of English medieval manuscripts, in part as a result of the two volumes he edited for the Catalogue of Dated and Datable Manuscripts series: those in the British Library (1979) and those in Oxford (1984). His articles on collectors spanned the period immediately after the dissolutions right into the seventeenth century. One of the early collectors was the secular priest Thomas Dackomb, who became a minor canon in Henry’s new foundation of Winchester cathedral, formally established in 1541. In ‘A Sixteenth-Century Collector: Thomas Dackomb, 1496–c. 1572’ (1963) [No. 4] Watson identified nineteen manuscripts that belonged to Dackomb, including the Athelstan Psalter, all apparently obtained by purchase rather than gift and most seemingly from the Winchester area. By the time he compiled his collected essays (Medieval Manuscripts in Post-Medieval England (2004)) Watson had identified four more, two of which almost certainly have Winchester associations. They present a typical pattern of acquisition: books passing from their original houses to relatively obscure individuals, often local, before being acquired by major collectors during the reigns of Elizabeth and James I, men such as Sir Robert Cotton, who had some of Dackomb’s manuscripts, and finally to public institutions.
In a private notebook compiled for the most part between 1548 and 1557 and edited as Index Britanniae scriptorium by R. L. Poole and M. Bateson (1902; repr. by C. Brett and J. P. Carley, 1990), John Bale kept a list of British authors and their writings, providing the sources for his information, institutional and individual. Neither Prise nor Dackomb are found among Bale’s fonts, but one William Carye is given as the source for more than a dozen titles. He also appears in a letter that Bale wrote on 30 July 1560 to Archbishop Matthew Parker with the names of individuals who possessed manuscripts from the dissolved houses, where Dr. Carye and John Carye (appearing in Joscelyn’s list), are also cited. In his ‘Christopher and William Carye, Collectors of Monastic Manuscripts, and “John Carye”‘ (1965) [No. 5] Watson disentangles the identities of the Caryes—in the case of John Carye suggesting that he was a ghost—and lists almost twenty titles of manuscripts, some of them significant, owned by William Carye. Many passed to Parker and thence to Corpus Christi College, Cambridge: this suggests that the mission of archiepiscopal acquisition initiated by Bale’s letter was a success. (In an additional note in his collected essays Watson was able to identify two other manuscripts owned by William Carye, one of which is at Corpus Christi.)
According to his own account Bale built up a large personal collection of medieval manuscripts to be used in his bio-bibliographical writings, although many of these were, so he claimed, left behind in 1553 when he fled from Ireland, where he had been bishop of Ossory. At the end of the thirteenth ‘century’ of his Scriptorum illustrium maioris Brytanniae . . . Catalogus (2 vols; 1557–59) is found a list of nearly four hundred titles of works he owned, likely constituting more than one hundred and fifty individual manuscripts. Based primarily on this list Honor McCusker put together an article on ‘Books and Manuscripts in the Possession of John Bale’ (1935) [No. 6], tracing more than forty survivors. Like so many articles on the wandering of post-dissolution manuscripts, this was a work in progress and it was expanded in her John Bale: Dramatist and Antiquary (1942). As an ex-Carmelite with good connexions, Bale was an important collector, and there have been further discoveries, most notably by William O’Sullivan in his ‘The Irish “remnaunt” of John Bale’s manuscripts’ (in New Science out of Old Books: Studies in Manuscripts and Early Printed Books in Honour of A. I. Doyle(1995), 374–87).
Normally the Elizabethan magus John Dee (1527¬–1609) is not the focus of bibliographical studies, but he was deeply concerned about the preservation of medieval learning and wrote a ‘Supplication’ to Queen Mary in 1556 lamenting the destruction of the medieval houses and pleading for the establishment of a royal library to contain the spoils or copies thereof. He also built up a remarkable library at Mortlake, including a significant number of ex-monastic manuscripts, some from Leland’s collection, much of it ransacked when he was abroad. Two pieces by Watson in The Library anticipate the 1990 facsimile of the 1583 catalogue of Dee’s collection, which he co-edited with Julian Roberts. As early as 1958 Watson edited a list, with identifications, of twelve manuscripts from Dee’s library that were later purchased by Sir Simonds D’Ewes (1602–50) [No. 7], on whose library he would publish a monograph in 1966. (This was the first article he ever published.) In 1971 there is a letter to the Editor of The Library appealing to readers to send him and his co-editor P. J. French references to volumes, printed or manuscript, containing Dee’s signature, his annotations, or characteristic symbols. French, who was studying with Frances Yates and whose John Dee: the World of an Elizabethan Magus would be published in 1972, seemed the ideal person to deal with the printed books, but he had to be replaced after he was arrested in 1973 for book theft at Claremont College in California. It was a saga worthy of Dee himself.
Certain of Dee’s printed books derived from ex-religious. Beginning in the late fifteenth century scholars were turning more and more to this ‘agent of change’ (in Elizabeth Eisenstein’s words) as they replaced manuscripts to build up and diversify their collections. Ian Doyle, another pioneer in the study of the fate of monastic books, published in 1988 an article on ‘The Printed Books of the Last Monks of Durham’ [No. 8]. Using less rigid criteria for determining provenance than Ker had done in Medieval Libraries of Great Britain, Doyle examined in particular the collection of Thomas Swalwell, warden of Durham College in Oxford. Apart from the ex-monastic books that survive in the cathedral library—after all, many of the monks became canons of the new cathedral chapter or local priests¬—a number came into the possession of the Tempest family of Holmside, Lanchester, and Stanley (Co. Durham). In spite of his discoveries, nevertheless, Doyle modestly concluded (as had Ker before him) that ‘there is scope for far more searching study of these books than I have had time to devote to them’.
Sir Robert Cotton (1570/71–1631), on the formation of whose library Colin Tite devoted many years of research, was perhaps the greatest private collector of his generation, but he also had a tendency to separate manuscripts into component parts and recombine these into new entities, a point that not all scholars recognize. In a short piece on ‘Sir Robert Cotton as Collector of Manuscripts and the Question of Dismemberment: British Library MSS Royal 13 D. I and Cotton Otho D. VIII’ [No. 9] Tite and I examine a manuscript that was removed from St Peter’s Cornhill to the royal library at Westminster during the 1530s and from which Cotton later excised material and incorporated it into a newly assembled manuscript, now Cotton Otho D. VIII, fols. 174r–233v. As we have seen elsewhere, this case-study was a basis for more substantial efforts, in my case The Libraries of King Henry VIII (2000), and in Tite’s, his magisterial The Early Records of Sir Robert Cotton’s Library (2003). A major resource for our subject is Edward Bernard’s Catalogi manuscriptorum Angliae et Hiberniae (1697). One of the contributors to this enterprise was Thomas Tanner (1674–1735), whose own alphabetical Bibliotheca Britannica, completed after his death by David Wilkins and published in 1748, draws together Leland’s De uiris illustribus, Bale’s Illustrium maioris Britanniae scriptorum . . . Summarium (1548), his Scriptorum illustrium maioris Brytanniae . . . Catalogus (1557–9), and John Pits’s De illustribus Angliae scriptoribus (1619), and reads them against surviving manuscripts and other materials. In his detailed study of Tanner [No. 10], Richard Sharpe shows just how important Tanner’s efforts are to modern researchers, who ‘generally go straight back to those pioneers who saw texts at a time when monastic libraries were first dispersed or lost. To authenticate what they saw would require much more effort now if one had not Tanner’s researches to turn to’. Tanner is ultimately crucial to a study of the wanderings of pre-dissolution manuscripts and Sharpe is perhaps the first to make this completely clear.
There has been a proliferation of catalogues of medieval manuscripts in English college libraries during the years that The Library has been in existence, the pioneer in the field being M. R. James, who concentrated for the most part on Cambridge. More recently Ker and Watson as well as R. A. B. Mynors, one of the forces behind Ker’s Medieval Libraries of Great Britain, and Malcolm Parkes followed in the master’s footsteps. They have been succeeded by a new generation, chief among whom are Rodney Thomson and Ralph Hanna. My last choice is the latter’s ‘Manuscript Catalogues and Book History’ (2017) [No. 11]. In this theorizing study Hanna challenges the formulaic model used in earlier catalogues—in part codified by Ker in the sixteen points he outlined for descriptions in his Medieval Manuscripts in British Libraries—and argues in particular ‘for greater attentiveness to the fluidity of medieval book-making procedures’. Rather than being viewed as ‘inert’ conveyors of texts manuscripts need to be examined in the contexts of where they were produced, for what reasons, and how they were used by later readers. Marginalia in this view become crucial, as do original scriptoria and later provenances. For the new discipline of book history ‘presentist’ models of catalogues do not, in Hanna’s view, suffice; rather the ‘dynamic development of books and their history ought to be recorded’.
At the end of his essay Hanna points out that traditional print catalogues will inevitably be replaced by digital files capable of storing large amounts of information as well as being readily searchable, that in this way the ‘unusually high bar’ he has set for cataloguers can be achieved. As more and more manuscripts become available online, moreover, scholars will be able to read catalogue entries against images from the manuscripts themselves and make their own judgements. Ker, Watson, and Doyle all emphasized that their essays were provisional and that more evidence needed to be collected and sifted (as well as recorded). The field is by nature one of accretion rather than of reformulation. The digital world will facilitate the process for future researchers. Methodologies may not be changing radically—the trained eye and sharp memory of the scholar remain the cornerstone of the enterprise—but resources are proliferating.
Contents
- The Migration of Manuscripts from the English Medieval Libraries
by N. R. Ker
The Library (1942) s4-XXIII, 1–1 - The Library of Dover Priory: Its Catalogue and Extant Volumes
by C. R. Haines
The Library (1927) s4-VIII, 73–118 - Sir John Prise
by N. R. Ker
The Library (1955) s5-X, 1–24 - A Sixteenth-Century Collector: Thomas Dackomb, 1496–c. 1572
by A. G. Watson
The Library (1963) s5-XVIII, 204–217 - Christopher and William Carye, Collectors of Monastic Manuscripts, and ‘John Carye’
by A. G. Watson
The Library (1965) s5-XX, 135–142 - Books and Manuscripts Formerly in the Possession of John Bale
by H. McCusker
The Library (1935), s4-XVI, 144–165 - An Identification of Some Manuscripts Owned by Dr. John Dee and Sir Simonds D’Ewes
by A. G. Watson
The Library (1958) s5-XIII 194–198 - The Printed Books of the Last Monks of Durham
by A. I. Doyle
The Library ( ) s6-X, 203–219 - Sir Robert Cotton as Collector of Manuscripts and the Question of Dismemberment: British Library MSS Royal 13 D. I and Cotton Otho D. VIII
by J. P. Carley and C. G. C. Tite
The Library (1992) s6-14, 94–99 - Thomas Tanner (1674–1735), the 1697 Catalogue, and Bibliotheca Britannica
by R. Sharpe
The Library (2005) 6/4, 381–421 - Manuscript Catalogues and Book History
by R. Hanna
The Library (2017) 18/1, 45–61