Matthew Parker: The Book as Archive

Abstract

Recent scholarship has illuminated the growth of state archives in early modern Europe—and, though less frequently, the rise of other sorts of archival collection. This article offers a case study, using the collections of Matthew Parker, archbishop of Canterbury and impresario of scholarship, to illuminate the range of archival collections and practices in early modern Europe. The article shows that Parker treated his own collection as both a library and an archive, blurring the distinction between the two forms. His principles and practices of collection, storage, use, and preservation emerge as complex and sometimes contradictory. And the concept of the archive that he developed in discussions with colleagues—like those of other scholars in his period and after—proves to have been both labile and broad enough so to embrace medieval and modern histories as well as collections of documents

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