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Dissolution and the Making of the English Literary Canon: The Catalogues of Leland and Bale

2009; Iter Press; Volume: 27; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.33137/rr.v27i1.11731

2293-7374

Trevor Ross,

Scottish History and National Identity

formation, by this definition, is inaugurated in England at the moment of most intense destruction, the Dissolution of the Monasteries in the first decades of the Reformation.The unlikely pioneers in this case were the antiquaries John Leland and John Bale, who, in the massive bio-bibliographical catalogues they compiled in the 1540s and 1550s, produced the first full-scale objectifications of the canon of British letters.I say "unlikely," because both Leland and Bale were hardly moderns, and were very much concerned to argue for the instrumental value of the literature of the past.Sadly for them and for learning in England, the destruction was of such a scale that it simply overwhelmed their arguments, as well as the antiquarians themselves.Bale wrote that he was moved to tears at the sight of the destruction: "thy s is highly to be lamented, of all them that hath a naturall loue to their contrey.... That in turnynge ouer of ye super- stycyouse monasteryes, so lytle respecte was had to theyr lybraryes for the sauegarde of those noble & precyouse monumentes."^AndLeland, who went mad before he could complete his work, lamented how English books were being stolen and their glory unjustly appropriated by foreign scholars: "the Germans perceiving our desidiousness and negligence, do send daily young scholars hither, that spoileth them, and cutteth them out of libraries, returning home and putting them abroad as monuments of their own country.'"*The catalogues that these antiquaries eventually assembled are haunted by the Dissolution.One of the main functions of these works, and the source of their enduring value for later bibliographers, is to provide a documentary record of as many dispersed items as possible, which explains the antiquaries' overriding concern both for accuracy and comprehensiveness.^But the Dis- solution also haunts these catalogues as a noticeable absence: nowhere in Renaissance and Reformation / Renaissance et Réforme, XXVI, 1 (1991) 57 58 / Renaissance and Reformation these works do Leland and Bale make statements, like those I have just quoted, declaring their regret over the destruction that followed in the wake of the suppression of the abbeys.The above statements, and others like them, appear in the antiquaries' private letters, or in Bale's preface to his edition of Leland's New Year's address of 1546/7 to Henry VIII.^These catalogues trace a map of dispersal, as Leland and Bale try to keep track of the many rare items they came accross during their researches, but the causes of this dispersal are not discussed.The antiquaries' compelling silence on this matter was for them a difficult trade-off, for the established authority to whom they addressed their appeal was the very same authority, the Tudor Court, that had initiated the Dissolution in the mid-1530s.^It was also the very same authority that had for a time enlisted Bale as an anti-clerical propagandist, and that had granted Leland his famous commission "to make a search after England's antiquities."^TheCourt, through its tightly organized network of patronage, exercised full control over the national culture.There was no other possible authority the antiquaries could turn to.Leland and Bale both acknowledged that they were working within a long tradition of medieval cataloguers dating back to St. Jerome.^Theirimmediate inspiration was the work of the Continental bibliographers Johannes Trithemius and Conrad Gesner, whose exhaustive indexes of classical and patristic auctores proved both exceptionally valuable and widely popular within Europe's bur- geoning print culture.'^TheEnglish antiquaries openly borrowed the format of Trithemius' s Liber de Scriptoribus Ecclesiasticis (1494) as the model for the entries in their catalogues: an annotated list of works prefaced by a brief life of the author.But what Leland and Bale ultimately produced were no mere booklists.Bale's catalogues, the 1548 Summarium and the much-expanded second edition, the Catalogus of 1557-59, just as much as Leland's (assembled in the 1530s and early 1540s, and referred to extensively by Bale, but not published until 1709,) differed from earlier bibliographies in that the urgency of the situation, the possible loss of England's literary heritage, impelled the antiquaries to bolster the aura of their canons with a number of imperialistic and religious myths.^^Refurbishing the old writings through such allegorizing commentary, they hoped, would signal the ideological necessity of preserving the British literary canon in its entirety, as a harmonious whole.The dispersal of the libraries was indication enough that, outside the cloisters, the reasons for having a learned tradition were not self-evident.What they come up with, then, are polemics for British letters, bibliographies animated by the sense that the writings they record may already be lost.The desperate tone of the polemics is a reflection of the marginal status of antiquarianism in a rhetorical culture, where