Memory's Library: Medieval Books in Early Modern England

Description: Investigating the period between 1431 and 1631, Summit argues that libraries--particularly the Parker, the Cotton, and the Bodleian--enabled early modern projects of historical and cultural redefinition concurrent with Reformation ideology and encouraged perceptions of the alterity of the Middle Ages. Methods of acquisition, cataloguing, and textual scholarship directly supported this self-fashioning. Manuscript-based texts such as Thomas Speght's edition of Chaucer's "Works" suggest the simultaneous inclusion and defamiliarization of the past embedded in the libraries' reinvention of communal memory.