12 - Humanism and Printing

Summary

After the death in 1521 of a Cambridge scholar, Bryan Rowe, his associates drew up an inventory of his hundred-odd books. Those books identify Rowe as a follower of the studia humanitatis, the studies least deceivingly translated as the humanities but usually translated now as humanism. Rowe read about classical literature and history, about grammar and rhetoric modelled on classical standards, and about the new ideas of people such as Erasmus who were inspired by a changing understanding of classical texts. Rowe's inventory tells us a lot about the use of humanist printed books in England. First, most of the works on it had not been printed in England by 1521, so Rowe's collection typifies the predominance of imported books for the studia humanitatis in England (the subject of the first section of this chapter). And the relative coherence of Rowe's collection also suggests that receiving imports was not a passive process; the activities of commissioning, collecting and annotating might make the usefulness and character of such books clear – and clearer to us than a mere booklist makes them.

Yet the sketchy evidence of Rowe's inventory makes it uncertain whether all his books were imports: for example, he owned grammars by the humanists Niccolò Perotti and Giovanni Sulpizio, which could have been imports but could equally have been one of eight editions printed in London (STC 19767.3, 23425–23427a, 23427a.7).