NYU Medieval Forum: Emily Steiner

     Richard de Bury, Bishop of Durham and Lord Chancellor of England, was ruined by his books, which are said to have bankrupted him and driven him to an early death. De Bury’s Latin Philobiblon (1345), a treatise on his inordinate love of books, is well-known for its condemnation of readers with runny noses, usurious Jews, and doodling boys who put books in constant jeopardy. It’s also a wonderful guide to medieval book acquisition, copying, and conservation. Less remarked upon is de Bury’s account of his uncontrollable desire for books, the unscrupulous lengths to which he will go to obtain them, and the violent scenes that bibliophilia causes him to imagine. Part Thomas Cromwell, part John Leland, Bury describes his quest for books – which includes harassment of schoolmasters and exploitation of the friars – as a self-aggrandizing and self-destructive enterprise.
With the exceptions of Ned Denholm, who in the 1930s compiled de Bury’s life records, and the art historian Michael Camille, who wrote a brilliant article on de Bury in 1997 (“The Book as Fetish”), modern scholars haven’t given the Philobiblon much thought. In this talk, I focus on the violence of collecting in the Philobiblon, and the way that that violence opens up new ways of thinking about English nationalism, the medieval/post-medieval divide, and the long history of culture. Together, we might want to talk about the ways that collecting and violence underwrite literary history and shape the way we view modern collections of medieval books.