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Popular History and the Literary Marketplace (review)

Summit begins with a central metaphor: memory is a library (1). This is not a new concept but one deeply embedded in the medieval mindset. Mary Carruthers’s exposition of the medieval understanding of memory as a quasi-physical process that is the seat of human creativity, as set forth in her Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge University Press, 1990), is used by Summit as a foundational metaphor for her understanding of how a library functions. The collecting, cataloging, and accessibility of books, then, mark a shift from a religious memory to a national memory, which also characterized the shift from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. Like Elizabeth Eisenstein’s books on the move from a manuscript book technology to the printing press (including The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early Modern Europe, Cambridge University Press, 1979), Summit’s work, it seems to me, has equally important applications to the current debates about the future of libraries. The implication is that simply collecting information and making it available is not enough. Collecting with an evaluative eye and providing the means to access that information have the power to create a discourse. That is the difference between the Web and a library, and Summit’s book makes this clear. So what happened to all those books from the monastic libraries in England? Today we would say that they were “reimagineered” into libraries of national memory to serve England rather than the church. Summit contends that they transformed the discourse on medieval topics and continue to provide this service today.