Libraries and Books in Medieval England
The Role of Libraries in a Changing Book Economy
Medieval England was full of books, but when the country’s monasteries were suppressed by King Henry VIII their libraries were scattered and lost. Twentieth-century scholarship has been enterprising in establishing what survives and in discovering what libraries once held. This volume, by the country’s leading expert in the field, paints a new picture of the history of books and libraries in medieval England from the totality of the available evidence.
To be able to reconstruct the transmission of culture in the Middle Ages, we need to understand and employ with care the evidence of the surviving books on the one hand and medieval library catalogues on the other.
Libraries and Books in Medieval England seeks to move away from the modern conceptualisation of the monastic library as the only venue for medieval book provision, broadening awareness of the wider book economy, including private ownership and the birth of the book trade. The result, based on the author’s Lyell Lectures in the University of Oxford, is a work that offers an unparalleled view of the field.
Richard Sharpe (1954 – 2020) was Professor of Diplomatic in the University of Oxford and Fellow of Wadham College. As well as being one of the country’s leading experts on medieval books and libraries, he was also a foremost critic and editor of medieval Latin texts and charters. For thirty years he had the oversight of a monumental series, the Corpus of British Medieval Library Catalogues, which aims to gather, print and interpret the scattered documentary evidence for book ownership in the middle ages. James Willoughby is Research Fellow in Medieval History at New College, Oxford.
