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

Abstract

ROSSM..odern canon-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

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