Gathering Places: William Lambarde's Reading

Abstract

Discussions of William Lambarde’s interests as a reader have usually focused on his strategies of tracing place names and etymologies in the margins of his books, tying him in with a larger subsection of the Tudor reading public who annotated books in a similar fashion. This article surveys the annotations in Lambarde’s early books to trace the evolution of his reading over time and in collaboration with his contemporaries. In so doing, it explores the uses that Lambarde found for his books beyond organising information within them or excerpting material for publication. The process, as well as the products, of Lambarde’s reading, was shared among his fellow antiquarians and members of the Inns of Court, for whom reading was both a professional practice and a means to communicate privileged information. When juxtaposed with the equally collaborative drafting and reception of his published work (discussed in the articles which follow) the annotations preserved in Lambarde’s books paint a dynamic and evolving picture of his reading practices. Over the course of his lifetime, Lambarde returned to the books in his library, with new questions or acquisitions prompting the re-reading of earlier acquisitions and occasioning new discoveries in them. Lambarde’s habit of marking up and circulating copies of his own published works, as well as the books he owned, publicised both his reading practices and the knowledge they generated about the past to his scholarly and professional companions.