Exploring Humanist Networks of Knowledge and Reading in Queens' College Old Library,

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This project, which is funded by the AHRC Open-Oxford-Cambridge Doctoral TrainingPartnership, will explore networks of humanist learning at Queens' College Old Library,Cambridge, in collaboration with the University of Oxford. I will aim to illuminate the wider,continental network of printer-publishers that furnished the sixteenth-century Old Library andQueens' Fellows with their books. The College's most significant Tudor English book collector wasThomas Smith (1513-1577), whose failed attempts to colonise Ireland can be linked to his "activereading" of classical texts. This term was coined by Lisa Jardine and Anthony Grafton (1990),whose work is now continued by the Centre for Editing Lives and Letters (CELL) at UCL. Theirmethodology, which involves the close study of humanist reading and annotations in books, willbe used as part of a wider "archaeological" methodology suggested by Clare Sargent (2001)specifically with Queens' Old Library in mind. Treating books as artefacts within the "site" of theLibrary will require close study of their physical characteristics, including bindings - the booksbeing formerly chained to the lecterns - along with inscriptions and annotations. The study of thebooks will be carried out in conjunction with a recently completed catalogue of the Library, twosixteenth-century book lists from the Library and the Queens' Donors' Roll. I will show whichbooks were collected and purchased for the sixteenth-century Library, from the "stationers" ofCambridge' as well as from abroad, and how the Library's collections developed within thebroader context of continental humanism and its trade in books.Research questions posed by this project will include: Why and how did Thomas Smith use andannotate his books? Can we use signs of ownership in Queens' books of the sixteenth centurymore generally to construct and explore intellectual networks spreading from Cambridge acrossEurope? How can we use both printed books and manuscript archives to reconstruct the practicaland intellectual life of a sixteenth-century corporate library? How can we apply the study of aspecific corporate library and its dynamics over a given period to pose and answer the widerhistoriographical questions about early English humanism?Queens' Old Library remains an understudied resource; the majority of the books' annotationsand inscriptions are yet to be translated. Broader elements of Thomas Smith's life and studiesremain understudied, such as his interest in numismatics: Andrew Burnett, Richard Simpson andDeborah Thorpe (2017) have revealed a "virtually unknown" and apparently unpublished work bySmith on Roman coinage, which indicates the wider scholarly activities of the "Cambridge Circle"beyond its book collecting. Smith's activities in Ireland will form a useful comparison to the betterknowncareer of Sir Philip Sidney, whose father Henry was governor of Ireland. Smith's use ofclassical texts will further illustrate humanist reading practices, already described by Jardine andGrafton in the readings of Livy undertaken by Sidney and his secretary Gabriel Harvey, anothermember of the Cambridge circle. Indeed, Smith developed his own reading group for Livy's textsat Hill Hall in Essex, presumably also undertaken with Ireland in mind. Smith's bequest of someeighty books to Queens' Library, arguably one of the most important sixteenth-century humanistgatherings extant in England, provides an understudied and highly interconnected resource forthe study of the broader networks of humanist learning in England and throughout the continent. Iwill aim to answer the questions above by placing the book collection of a specific corporatelibrary within a much wider intellectual context: the study of, and trade in, humanist texts from thecontinent with a view to their practical application in Tudor English learning and politics.