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

This project, which is funded by the AHRC Open-Oxford-Cambridge Doctoral Training
Partnership, 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 and
Queens' Fellows with their books. The College's most significant Tudor English book collector was
Thomas Smith (1513-1577), whose failed attempts to colonise Ireland can be linked to his "active
reading" 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. Their
methodology, which involves the close study of humanist reading and annotations in books, will
be 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 the
Library will require close study of their physical characteristics, including bindings - the books
being formerly chained to the lecterns - along with inscriptions and annotations. The study of the
books will be carried out in conjunction with a recently completed catalogue of the Library, two
sixteenth-century book lists from the Library and the Queens' Donors' Roll. I will show which
books were collected and purchased for the sixteenth-century Library, from the "stationers" of
Cambridge' as well as from abroad, and how the Library's collections developed within the
broader context of continental humanism and its trade in books.
Research questions posed by this project will include: Why and how did Thomas Smith use and
annotate his books? Can we use signs of ownership in Queens' books of the sixteenth century
more generally to construct and explore intellectual networks spreading from Cambridge across
Europe? How can we use both printed books and manuscript archives to reconstruct the practical
and intellectual life of a sixteenth-century corporate library? How can we apply the study of a
specific corporate library and its dynamics over a given period to pose and answer the wider
historiographical questions about early English humanism?
Queens' Old Library remains an understudied resource; the majority of the books' annotations
and inscriptions are yet to be translated. Broader elements of Thomas Smith's life and studies
remain understudied, such as his interest in numismatics: Andrew Burnett, Richard Simpson and
Deborah Thorpe (2017) have revealed a "virtually unknown" and apparently unpublished work by
Smith 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 betterknown
career of Sir Philip Sidney, whose father Henry was governor of Ireland. Smith's use of
classical texts will further illustrate humanist reading practices, already described by Jardine and
Grafton in the readings of Livy undertaken by Sidney and his secretary Gabriel Harvey, another
member of the Cambridge circle. Indeed, Smith developed his own reading group for Livy's texts
at Hill Hall in Essex, presumably also undertaken with Ireland in mind. Smith's bequest of some
eighty books to Queens' Library, arguably one of the most important sixteenth-century humanist
gatherings extant in England, provides an understudied and highly interconnected resource for
the study of the broader networks of humanist learning in England and throughout the continent. I
will aim to answer the questions above by placing the book collection of a specific corporate
library within a much wider intellectual context: the study of, and trade in, humanist texts from the
continent with a view to their practical application in Tudor English learning and politics.