Memory’s Library

“The early fifteenth century is not a great age of English literature: yet it inaugurates, Jennifer Summit argues, a process of great English library building that flourishes for two hundred years. It is a joy to encounter a book that restores the presence of medieval books as active agents within Renaissance culture through their power to disturb and provoke. And to learn how our own reading habits, as English-speaking moderns, have been decisively shaped by this singular history of collection, ruination, and reassembly. Memory’s Library is a brilliant, lucid, and generous book that deserves the widest possible audience.”

“Memory’s Library is not (just) a history of important books and the powerful people who collected them. In Jennifer Summit’s erudite and elegant account, English libraries emerge as theaters of memory and agents of change, sites of conflict and commemoration that play a major role in the construction of the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and modernity itself. It deserves a place on every scholar’s bookshelves.”

“Jennifer Summit offers persuasive—and original—views of the role played by Renaissance librarians in seeking and defining scientific knowledge. With deft strokes, she paints a picture of how collecting medieval manuscripts helped humanist scholars create the concept of textuality we still live with. Without the librarians, Summit shows, literature, and knowledge generally, would look very different.”