Sixteenth-Century Readers, Fifteenth-Century Books: Continuities of Reading in the English Reformation . By Margaret Connolly Sixteenth-Century Readers, Fifteenth-Century Books: Continuities of Reading in the English Reformation . By ConnollyMargaret. (Cambridge Studies in Palaeography and Codicology.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2019. xv + 316 pp. £75. isbn 978 1 108 42677 0.

Le résumé fourni par la source

As A work of manuscript studies, Margaret Connolly’s Sixteenth-Century Readers, Fifteenth-Century Books takes a somewhat familiar approach, carefully examining a number of late medieval English manuscripts. What is new and important about this study is Connolly’s decision to focus on a group of books linked not by shared contents or origins, but by their ownership by the Roberts family of Willesden, Middlesex, during the sixteenth century. Unlike other families or individuals whose post-medieval manuscript holdings have attracted scholarly attention, the Roberts family were not great collectors nor given to antiquarian leanings. Rather, they were prosperous gentry with connections in London, especially the legal profession, whose fortunes waxed and eventually waned from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century. As Connolly demonstrates through a careful examination of their family history and of the eight manuscripts that can be shown to have been in their possession, their old books were not treated as relics or antiques, but rather functioned as a part of the family’s everyday professional, domestic, and devotional life well into the sixteenth century. Connolly is rigorous about accounting for uses of all kinds (e.g., memos, records of family history) rather than restricting her enquiries to readerly engagement with the text, and this allows her to tell a wide-ranging story about the significance of these books as objects.

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