On the evidence of his own will, Carpenter was a well-connected bibliophile, a friend of the preacher William Lichfield, whose voluminous output is now largely lost, and Reginald Pecock, one of the fifteenth century’s most committed advocates of lay education. The library he helped assemble held a significant collection of religious books that in addition to the original endowment, would be bolstered by continuing bequests throughout the fifteenth century, before, according to John Stow, being sequestered by Edward Seymour, Lord Protector of England. Only a single book would be returned to the Guildhall library.

While the Guildhall has been recently proposed as a critical centre for the distribution of now canonical literary works, such as Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, this project to be undertaken through a collaboration between myself and Hannah Schulhe-Lewis in the University of Kent and Dr Stephen Kelly and Dr Natalie Calder at Queen’s University of Belfast, contends that the Guildhall's collection of religious books had a considerably greater significance for fifteenth-century Londoners. The project aims to ‘reconstruct’ the Guildhall’s devotional collection, in part through generating an anthology of texts, many edited for the first time, that we contend were sourced from the library and repeatedly copied for a religiously cosmopolitan readership. The material evidence for the books that the library once held is partly to be found in the extraordinary corpus of Middle English religious miscellanies that proliferated in fifteenth-century London. Amongst the 84 fifteenth-century manuscripts tagged as 'miscellaneous manuals' by Robert Raymo in the Manual of Writings in Middle English, are dozens of London books that forms the core of our project’s corpus.

This corpus – comprised of assemblages of texts that encompass basic catechesis alongside more theologically challenging and spiritually improving works – has long been known to have been produced through copying from common exemplars, and it has been thought that either stationers or scribes in London's book-making industry were loaning, exchanging or even 'pooling' portfolios of texts to fulfill the voracious market for anthologies of vernacular religious literature.

This project will assess systematically what we hypothesise is material evidence that it was the Guildhall collection, compiled for the use of both the college of priests attached to the Guildhall building complex, but also for those directly involved in lay spiritual instruction – for those described in Carpenter's will as, 'sermonizancium communi populo' (sermonising to the common people). We believe that the manuscript record testifies to a pastoral drive, a ground up movement driven by the city’s poorer clerisy, simultaneously facilitating their own ministrations and a growing demand for spiritually improving literature among the London citizenry.

The smoking gun in respect of the library’s role in the explosion of pastoral literature comes through the 'common profit' book phenomenon in fifteenth-century London. These catechetical and devotional books, which, according to the inscription each book shares, were produced from the estates of London citizens as a 'commun profite' to be passed from person to person, 'man or woman', with the beneficiaries tasked to pray for the souls of the testators. We contend that these circulating spiritual insurance policies represent microcosmic material iterations of the concept of the 'common library' assembled through Whittington's gift. My own research has proposed that these books were unlikely to have been made as part of the city's commercial book trade, in part because of learned correction provided by a team of collaborating scribes.

These books might only have been made by people involved in religious instruction who had access to a range of texts that they had the knowledge to augment according to a shared pastoral mandate. The copyists were mainly not professional scribes, but were, we believe, priests, friars and canons. The fact that all surviving common profit books can be linked to a man called John Colop, someone who was  specifically employed by John Carpenter in setting up the library in the Guildhall, provides compelling circumstantial evidence that the exemplars facilitating the common profit enterprise were drawn from the new Guildhall collection. Furthermore, initial analysis of the manuscripts by the project team has demonstrated direct lines of connection, through their scripts and their punctilious methods of production, to that much larger corpus of ‘miscellaneous manuals’ traditionally understood to be circulating amongst London bookmakers. It is our hypothesis – to be tested through detailed analysis of the project corpus – that what looks like 'pooling' is rather evidence for scribes who were able to access the same books.

Please follow the project through our blog:  https://blogs.kent.ac.uk/whittingtonsgift/

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