Poets, Printers, and Early EnglishSammelbände

Modern students of early Tudor literature only rarely encounter extantSammelbände, most of which were disbound in the nineteenth century. Yet printed editions of works by (or ascribed to) Geoffrey Chaucer, John Lydgate, Richard Rolle, Margery Kempe, Stephen Hawes, John Skelton, and writers involved in Tudor religious controversy from John Wycliffe to William Tyndale may all be traced to such composite volumes. In “Poets, Printers, and Early EnglishSammelbände,” Alexandra Gillespie describes material and circumstantial evidence—bindings and rebindings, soiling and annotation, court cases and poems—for a large number of EnglishSammelbändecompiled between 1476 and about 1550. The composition of these volumes reveals a principle of adaptability that is a key aspect of textual production in the early Tudor period.