Mapping Early Modern Libraries

Benlowes’ publishing activities began around 1630 when, after two years of travel abroad, he returned home to England. He had seen the court at Brussels and the university at Louvain, visited famous presses and printshops in Antwerp, sailed the Rhine and crossed the eastern Alps over the Semmering Pass. In the sun-soaked southern provinces, he would have toured glittering porphyry palaces brimming with larger-than-life portraits, carved imprese, and hand-fitted stone mosaics known as pietra dura. Virtuosic displays of technical proficiency appealed to his aesthetic sensibilities, and the art and architecture that he saw in Florence would later influence his own publishing projects. He may also have visited Rome, the epicenter of both Catholicism and the exuberantly baroque style of decoration then spreading across the continent. No doubt Benlowes’ nascent Protestantism, wavering under pressure from his recusant family, would have been tested by the pomp of the Vatican, as well as the religious iconography and dazzling cathedrals of France as he made his way home. Yet there was also something vulgar to his eye in this ostentatious opulence, and judging from his later comments, Benlowes seems to have been equally impressed with the muted displays of Reformed humanism that he had encountered in small German university towns. When he finally came home to Brent Hall—laden with crates full of printed books, Flemish engravings, and Italian ornaments—it was as a man more nuanced in his opinions on religion, more cosmopolitan in his knowledge of art, and most importantly committed to nurturing these trends at home, particularly within his intellectual community at nearby Cambridge. Like the household at Little Gidding—just then completing their first cut-up harmonies—he was eager to infuse the appealingly simple rhythms of his country gentleman’s life with the rich refrains of the great cities he had visited, cultivating uniquely English, and Anglican, patterns of reading and writing.

Returning with him was Jan Schoren, a printer from Brussels and the man who would become his companion of several decades. Benlowes had met Schoren early in his travels, while still in the Low Countries. His knowledge of the arts of mechanical reproduction must have endeared him to the Englishman, as did his facility with foreign languages, and soon Benlowes was offering to pay him twenty marks a year to serve him during his travels.25 Schoren agreed, and the existing English servant was dispatched home. When their relationship later soured over a money dispute, Schoren would claim Benlowes was less than honest in these early dealings with him. In a Chancery suit of 1662, he stated that Benlowes had “earnestly Desired [him] to waite on him in his travells and made many p[ro]mises and faire pretencies of what he would do for him,” and by that way “did inveigle [him] from his trade goods and Country”—phrasing that suggests the eagerness with which Benlowes may have sought the printer’s company.26 At this point, however, the agreement seems to have been mutually desirable, and the two journeyed together for nearly two years, experiencing all the thrills and tediousness of seventeenth-century travel together. When Benlowes fell ill with a near-fatal case of smallpox in Venice, Schoren patiently nursed him back to health, an act that neither man would forget.27 And when Benlowes, still weak from illness, decided it was time to return home, he asked Schoren to come back to live with him at Finchingfield and serve as his secretary, responsible for managing his finances and estates. Schoren—at this point perhaps himself as dependent upon Benlowes as the latter was attached to him—again agreed, and together the young English gentleman and this printer from Brussels settled into life at Brent Hall.

In his role as secretary, Schoren was invaluable to the inveterately disorganized Benlowes. More than a servant, though, he became a crucial collaborator on a variety of creative projects and indeed “one of the most important persons in [Benlowes’] life,” as Jenkins puts it.28 It can be difficult to find traces of their work together—Schoren is not named in any of his publishing projects, for instance—but he does appear obliquely in moments of contention or distraction. For instance, in the same suit cited above, Schoren claims that he helped Benlowes set up a rolling press in Brent Hall, turning a part of his house into a domestic printing workshop much like the Concordance Room at Little Gidding.29 More, Benlowes seems to have profited from his labor:

he [Schoren] wrought with him in his trade to worke at the Rouling presse vpon cutts in Brasse which [Benlowes] made greate benefits thereby and alsoe in painting guilding and severall other wayes which [he] made vse of him soe that he neuer maintained him vppon Charrity[.]30

In addition to his technical skills, Schoren’s ties to the printing trade in the Low Countries may have been especially useful to Benlowes, serving as a conduit to the overseas market.31 But the Dutch printer also comes into view in archival remnants in more touching ways. At the Bodleian is one of Benlowes’ youthful Latin exercise-books, a small quarto bound in marbled pasteboard. It contains Latin prose and poetry, all neatly copied onto ruled lines in a inexperienced italic hand, some embellished with red initials or an ornate signature. This was no working notebook but is instead a fair copy of young Benlowes’ most-prized compositions, neatly compiled in ways that anticipate his later publishing projects. At some later point in the 1630s or 1640s, Benlowes returned to the manuscript and added two new lines of verse in his more confident adult hand to the last poem. He also used a flyleaf to work out some fragments of verse, borrowing rhymes and plundering other poems for turns of phrase. There is even, as Jenkins notices, “a whole string of words to see which offered the best possibilities in his quest for a rhyme: ‘provide descry’d side imply’d spy’d defy’d ty’d ride’.”32 Finally, on the recto of this first flyleaf, Benlowes has written his own name with great ornament around several iterations of the words “morere mundo ut vivas deo” (“you must die to the world, so that you may live with God”)—a phrase that would become one of his mottos, worked into Theophila and his broadside A glance at the glories of sacred friendship.33 Then, on the leaf after Benlowes’ name, he has added a florid “Johannes Schoren” above another pen trial of the word “understanding.”34 More than a secretary or servant, Schoren was something like family to Benlowes and a partner in his creative work, situated firmly at the center of his thoughts and writing process.

All of this was yet to come, though. Between the childish Latin exercises and the more mature inscriptions, Benlowes and Schoren returned from the continent and undertook their first project together, a donation to the new library at St. John’s College, Cambridge, Benlowes’ alma mater. Gently stretching our own sense of the verb “publish” to better match the more flexible early modern use, we might imagine this donation as Brent Hall’s first major publication: it was a means of making public Benlowes’ increasingly baroque and Protestant commitments to a scholarly cohort within the collective space of the college’s library, completed in 1624. Materially, it laid the groundwork for the poetics made manifest in later projects like The Purple Island and Theophila. The donation included two globes, now lost, and some scaglioli ornaments of carved stone, probably acquired in Florence. The ornaments were an unusual enough addition to the college’s decor to warrant comment by several subsequent visitors. In a diary entry for September 1st, 1654, John Evelyn writes of seeing “all the ornaments of Pietra Commessa” given by “one Mr. Benlous” to the library, “whereof a Table, and one piece of Perspective is very fine.”35 The gift also included £50 worth of books, some of which may have been acquired during his travels.36 Each book is stamped with a supralibros of his arms—the same design Benlowes would later use on copies of books he published—and pasted with a large, letterpress-printed bookplate naming “Benevolus” (the benevolent) as the donor. Long before such practices were standard in libraries or even private collections, Benlowes conceived of and marked his gift to the library as a coherent set of documents, the product of a particular person and the output of his atelier.

In some lines of Latin printed on the bookplate, Benlowes theorizes the purpose of a library and the role of his gift books within it, writing:

Printed bookplate of Edward Benlowes (“Benevolus”) pasted to the volumes in his 1631 gift to St John’s College Library.

In typical Benlowes fashion, the first two lines naming God as the life of the soul and the soul as the life of the body are borrowed from elsewhere. They quote John of Salisbury’s Policraticus, a twelfth-century book of ethics and princely advice; Benlowes probably encountered the fragment secondhand in a book like William Sparke’s recently-published The Mystery of Godlinesse (1628), where it annotates a passage on one of his favorite topics, the union of body and soul.37 Taking up Sparke’s chain of analogies, Benlowes pushes the comparisons further, adding more links between the physical and spiritual world. Just as the heavens infuse the sky, he writes, and just as the spirit animates the body or citizens people the world, so too do books give life to a library’s building. The thought anticipates Milton’s famous line in Areopagitica that describes books as containing “a potencie of life in them to be as active as that soule was whose progeny they are”; but more concretely and to the point, it also shows Benlowes imagining his gift as knowledge that imbues and dwells within but also transcends the limitations of the physical space. By giving a case (“theca”) of little books to his college’s “biblio-theca”—its library, or literally its “book-case”—Benlowes has breathed a spirit into his college’s new building.

The idea that a library encompasses both a physical space and the collection that inhabits it was relatively new in 1630. Throughout much of the sixteenth century, the college libraries had largely retained their medieval form: they were small rooms, anywhere from thirty-five to sixty feet long, capable of holding between roughly two hundred and five hundred volumes.38 The books—mostly manuscripts—would have been chained to lecterns and laid flat rather than shelved upright. Political upheaval and unrest at the colleges after the Marian persecutions slowed collecting to a halt, and in fact between 1530 and 1573 there are no extant records of any Cambridge University expenditure on its library—not for purchases, chaining, binding, or repair.39 At the same time, scholars were acquiring for themselves the books that they needed in the smaller printed formats being pumped out of presses in Antwerp, Geneva, and Lyon, such that by the end of the century a scholar might have more books in his personal collection than any college library had available to him as reference works. Most of these books would have been printed abroad, and nearly all of them would have been too flimsy to be chained and thus considered unsuitable for a college’s furniture.40 The discrepancy between personal and institutional collections increased over the course of the sixteenth century, coming to a head in the last decades as a generation of scholars—perhaps the first generation who had never known a world before print—began passing away and donating their books to their alma maters.41 This new influx of printed work forced the university and colleges to rethink the structure and purpose of their libraries.42 Why maintain an aggregated, corporate collection when printed editions were so readily available to students? Should the library serve as a repository responsible for saving a record of all human knowledge? Or should it buy only the latest editions of any given text, regularly exfoliating all that is obsolete? Should it skew toward preservation and accumulation, or access and dispersal?

Answering these questions led to a spate of new building at Oxford and Cambridge and eventually the wholesale reconceptualization of the library as such. Emerging from the dust of these projects was what Clare Sargent calls the “concept of the virtual library”: the idea that “a college’s books belong to the college wherever they are stored, and the majority of those books were stored in the place where they were of most use, according to their function.”43 That place was no longer a small reference room of tomes chained to lecterns but a single building outfitted with bookcases designed to enable the storage and circulation of “the greatest number of books for the greatest number of scholars.”44 Thus if a student in the second half of the sixteenth century could own more books than his college, by the early seventeenth century the colleges had reconstructed themselves as access points to a proliferation of printed texts—ideally, to more texts than any individual could acquire.45 They began designating fees for purchasing new books, set up a system for borrowing materials, and hired a dedicated staff responsible for maintaining them.46 Henry Savile—the warden of Merton College and a forerunner in implementing of these changes—even traveled to the continent on a book-buying mission with the express aim of increasing his college’s collection.47 Institutional libraries also began keeping a catalogue of their holdings, further ensconcing the notion of a “virtual library” through the accumulation of metadata. As we will see in the next chapter, these new mechanisms for information storage and retrieval would encourage the kind of comparative textual scholarship and antiquarianism that slowly blossomed over the course of the seventeenth century, giving fruit to the great editorial and collecting projects of the eighteenth century. For now, though, we might find the seeds of these changes sown in Benlowes’ bookplate of 1631 and its few lines of verse figuring books as the soul of a library’s physical space.

Benlowes’ donation, then, represents one small fulcrum in a much larger turn in the history of collecting. By constellating his singular case study with other contemporaneous private libraries and bequests, the contours of this shift—painted in broad strokes above—come into relief. Here, three libraries offer themselves up for comparison, each of which may be explored in more depth in the accompanying map and datasets derived from the Private Libraries in Renaissance England (PLRE) project and database.48 The first inventory, edited by Alain J. Wijffels, records Sir Edward Stanhope’s 1608 bequest of £20 worth of books to Trinity College, Cambridge—the foundational collection of the new college library.49 Stanhope was roughly fifty years older than Benlowes, and his library of just over 200 books (including around fifteen manuscripts) represents the interests of an Elizabethan chancellor and scholar. Nearly all of the books are in Latin and were printed abroad. They mostly come from centers of the book trade like Lyon and Venice, although one comes from as far away as Lisbon and another from Ostroh, a small town in what is now the western Ukraine. Lacking a robust scholarly or Latin press at home, sixteenth-century scholars like Stanhope relied heavily on foreign imports bought through agents, as is clear on the map. By comparison, only about one-third of Benlowes’ donated books are in Latin, and while many were produced abroad, the majority come from London, Cambridge, or Oxford—a fact that points to the growth of the English trade in the decades around the turn of the century and especially to the advancement of the university presses.

Though Benlowes’ and Stanhope’s donations are separated by just over two decades and motivated by similar desires and aims, they contain none of the same volumes. By contrast, Benlowes’ donation has seven books in common with the library of Sir Edward Dering as inventoried in the 1630s and 1640s and edited by Nati H Krivatsy and Laetitia Yeandle.50 This overlap is the most by number (rather than percentage) between Benlowes’ donation and any library in the PLRE database, and it is explainable in part by the sheer size of Dering’s collection—nearly 700 editions in total. But it also points to the similarities between him and Benlowes as educated, curious gentleman-scholars who were roughly the same age. Both Benlowes and Dering bought John Weever’s Ancient funerall monuments (1631, STC 25223), a hefty antiquarian folio and a harbinger of the historical fads discussed in the next chapter. Dering was a founding member of the Society of Antiquaries in 1638 and an avid collector of manuscripts; it is no surprise that he would have owned Weever’s book. That it would have caught Benlowes’ eye, too, suggests its role as a storehouse for Latin epigraphs, mined by scribes for their verse miscellanies and poets like Benlowes for lines of rhyming Latin.51 Both Benlowes and Dering also owned Fynes Moryson’s An itinerary (1617, STC 18205), the standard guide for gentleman traveling on the continent. Finally, they both purchased several works of controversialist and devotional literature, not uncommon for a gentleman-scholar to own; these include John Davenant’s Praelectiones de duobus in theologia controversis captibus (1631, STC 6301), Arthur Lake’s Sermons with some religious and diuine meditations (1629, STC 15134), Francis Mason’s Of the consecration of the bishops in the Church of England (1613, STC 17597), Pedro de Ledesma’s Theologia moralis (Douai, 1630), and Pierre Charron’s Of wisdome (1630, STC 5054). All told, about half of Dering’s books are in English and half are in Latin, compared to a roughly 60/40 split in Benlowes’ donation, although Dering has a wider range of other languages represented in general, including Scottish, Arabic, and Anglo-Saxon—a fact indicative of Dering’s antiquarian studies.

Even as Dering’s interests generally track with those of Benlowes, there are significant portions of his library that have no counterpart in the latter’s donation. Most notable is his large collection of playbooks. Dering loved drama and performance—between 1619 and 1626 alone, his expense books show twenty-seven payments for “seeing a play” as well as frequent small sums given to fiddler, tumblers, and masquers.52 There was even discovered among his papers in the nineteenth century a contemporaneous manuscript that shows him combining Shakespeare’s Henry IV Part 1 and Part 2 into a single play, probably for an amateur performance with friends and family at his home in Kent. During the same years, he was purchasing playbooks, as many as 240 in total—many of them likely duplicates, and some bound together—as well as two copies of Shakespeare’s First Folio.53 It would seem, then, that he had a desire to purchase printed records of plays he had seen both for his own personal reading and repurposing and in order to preserve them for future readers. No such playbooks are in Benlowes’ donation, an absence that may point to the fraught status of dramatic works in college libraries. Nor does Benlowes buy any of the Catholic books secretly printed at the recusant press in Lancashire that are included in Dering’s library. It would have been risky for Benlowes, himself from a recusant family, to purchase such books or donate them to St. John’s College Library. It was not until the eighteenth century that the gap between scholarly libraries and the more capacious private collections would begin close, as the former institutions came to be seen as repositories for a national cultural heritage and so aspired to universal coverage.

The last library to compare with Benlowes’ donation is that of Lady Anne Southwell and Captain Sibthorpe. Southwell—who continued to use her first husband’s name after his death and her remarriage to Sibthorpe—was a avid reader and poet. Most of her verse is preserved in a notebook now known as the Southwell-Sibthorpe commonplace book, which also contains an inventory of the books that she left to Sibthorpe upon her death in 1636.54 The collection is that of a woman with literary interests, rather than a scholar or gentleman, and thus is far from the other libraries discussed here. It contains no works in Latin or indeed any books not in English, except perhaps a single “French testament in octavo.” In keeping with these trends, the vast majority of the works listed—roughly 77 percent—were printed in London; the rest were printed nearby at Cambridge (this is George Herbert’s The Temple), Dublin, and Edinburgh, with possibly a few other volumes printed just across the channel. Nevertheless, despite the social differences between Southwell, Sibthorpe, and Benlowes, his donation has six volumes in common with this library—only one less than the number in common with Dering’s much more extensive library and a higher percentage overall. They include three slightly older anti-papal works; a large folio on the history of the Netherlands, lavishly illustrated with engravings (STC 12376); and a 1632 edition of Montaigne’s Essays (STC 18043), all books that an English reader of the first half of the seventeenth century would likely own.55 If Stanhope’s bequest reveals the breadth and depth of an Elizabethan scholar’s access to the foreign trade—and the relative paucity of the London marketplace at end of the sixteenth century—Southwell and Sibthorpe’s library shows how a burgeoning English trade in new translations and genres was expanding the average English reader’s, and especially women’s, access to texts in the first decades of the seventeenth century.56 Its overlap with Benlowes’ donation further illustrates the closing gap between domestic or private and institutional collections. Toggling between these datasets, the shift from the Elizabethan scholar-collector and his wide-ranging private library to a collegiate library as a cohesively English, and eventually British institutional repository becomes visible.

When Benlowes traveled in the early 1630s, gathering ornaments from Florence and books from Marburg, his own curiosities and desires cut a channel between the baroque stylings of the continent and the rural countryside around Cambridge. He was, of course, not the only young men to score this pathway in the first decades of the seventeenth century. When James took the throne in 1603 and ended hostilities with Spain a year later, continental travel opened up, and an entire generation of young English gentleman seized the opportunity.57 This Jacobean grand tour helped to flood the literary landscape with new verse, new emblems, new icons, and new ways of thinking about the relationship between text and image and sound. As we will see, the encounters sparked by these flows of culture into and across England helped foment much of the early modern mediascape. By zooming in at the edges of Benlowes’ donation, then panning wide to see it within broader cultures of collecting, we can begin to bring these shifts and their impact on Royalist publishing and poetics into focus.