I want to begin the second lecture by recollecting my debt to Roger Minors,
whom I identified on Tuesday as the one who had the idea for what became MGB.
Its initial purpose was to authenticate the data presented in Registrant Anglia,
that union catalogue created by the Greyfriars of Oxford towards the end of the 13th century, which was in a display case on Tuesday.
Back in the mid 1980s when I was an assistant editor of the Medieval Latin Dictionary,
miners would join us for tea in the bulky and staff canteen of the shop.
And he and I discussed then my aspiration to produce what was eventually published as canned lists of Latin writers of Great Britain and Ireland.
Before 15, 40 some months after miners died in October 1989, his executor,
Michael Winterbottom, gave me a suitcase of material designated to come to me.
And in passing, I cannot recommend too highly winterbottom's absolutely admirable memoir of minors in the Academy's proceedings for 1991.
Now the material in the suitcase included the typescript of minors as edition of the Register from from 1935,
never published in that form and a series of related studies,
a small attache case containing hundreds of little cards, recording manuscript, shelf walks, works of British writers,
a few of which she had lent me several years earlier, and a row of what we used to call copy flow.
Continuous paper printout from microfilm. The printouts.
Showed it comprised a catalogue of books.
20 pages of it like this under headings for 18 authors, each with a list of titles.
Each title accompanied by one or more shelf marks.
I reckon the date of writing is around 1430 or a bit after, but there was no clue to what library it came from.
The manuscript is highly 2268, which at the time had no known provenance.
Soon after that, during 1990, I was asked by Joseph Trent, director of the Warburg Institute,
to become general editor of the Corpus of Medieval Library Catalogues, which is largely my subject for today.
Joe chaired the project committee and its secretary, Margaret Gibson,
had already persuaded me to take on the editing of some of the Benedictine Library catalogues.
So I now had reason to want to understand better this catalogue that had come to me entirely unexpectedly and with no clue to what it was.
So one evening in July 1993, I did what one does in the circumstances.
I transcribed it in order to get to know it thoroughly with 653 entries.
This was a substantial catalogue. It's the most substantial in the 900 page volume of the Benedictine Shorter catalogues.
It appeared to be based on the entire contents of the books.
So the shelf mark L9 turns up six times against different titles or short works,
and presumably in the one volume for some works, many copies were reported.
And I don't know how legible this will be, but here under the heading Liberal Party Bernardi.
I cropped it since the first title you read is meditative and you see them.
And there are 14 shelf marks immediately following each seven and 7f9l9 and 16 l 17 p 24 be 25.
And then we switch to o 11 in Roman F 13, B 14, k 14, k 24 O and then g 22.
Now again, those of you who tuned in to progression will see that the sequence is driven not by the letters at the front,
but by the numbers that are the second element in these shelf marks.
The progression is numerical rather than alphabetical.
So J 22 appears to be out of sequence, some kind of an afterthought, and then a couple more at the end where he specifies tabular E 16 and P 16.
These shells marks unusually use both a Arabic and eight Roman.
To refer to different books. We actually have a full double sequence.
Here was a possible means to identify this catalogue.
How many places? I think not many would use the double sequence.
So I picked up an LGB too and started browsing.
My guardian angel inspired me to start at the back of the book,
and it took me about a minute and a half to realise that St Mary's Abbey in York had just such shelf marks in two series Arabic and Roman.
Within a few more minutes,
I had tested two or three of them against the descriptive catalogues on my shelves at home and confirmed two hits and one miss.
This was the miss. The right hand side.
You have sumo and your stem and the shell smoke.
C9 is quite clear. The right hand end.
On the left you have the book that is being described and at the bottom left in a rather spacious hand in c nine with the C closed someone else's.
Then it is in oh nine and Moore James is catalogue transcribed.
It is o nine. So MLG be reported it is o nine.
And I had to sort that one out or explain what was going on.
And this gives you the contents of the actual manuscripts.
And at the bottom, I've put down 174175 and 356.
All the entries in the catalogue that have come from that book.
So most of the contents were irrelevant to the select authors that were being indexed in the document.
I was seeking to interpret so the shelf marks, while not perspicacious in isolation,
become much clearer when you have them in aggregate giving priority to number letter.
And with hundreds of them in the catalogue,
it was quickly apparent the number designates the location within the library and the letter, the running number at that location.
So a three volume work might be D 12, E 12 and F 12.
You wouldn't naturally have sequenced them in that way.
And for almost all of the numbered locations, there were books from A to P and nowhere beyond P.
The best interpretation was 50 locations, each with 15 books a tipi.
Alas, too few surviving books to make anything out of the size of the actual books.
If I could measure them, one might have been able to come up with a better picture of the library room.
But those locations, I think, were most likely desks rather than shelves or cupboards or chests.
MLG be had provided the means to locate what was evidently a very important document showing a large collection of books.
Seemingly in a library room in the newest style for 1430 or so with readers desks.
In an abbey in York, north of England, about whose library we had hitherto known no more than 20 titles recorded by John Leland in 1534.
A By-product of this discovery was the provenance for the manuscript.
Holly two, two, six, eight.
Medieval double bunked the components of quite different origin, but was a 15th century hand in the margins showing that it had been bound together.
By the time this was part of it. Very little different in time.
It also contains sermons in northern English.
Humanist works from Italy and a rather surprising note across the top margin of one of these pieces,
referring to a copy of Petrarch de Remedio Citrus au trio Squid Fortuna in the Broad Mirus Ecclesia.
My Order Ecclesia is the absolutely standard way of referring to York Minster in York,
and I'm very surprised to find reference to a library in Minster and one containing a work of Petrarch in the mid 15th century.
In this example, we see how much light a single catalogue might shed,
and it was a special pleasure for me to identify it first because I knew the site of St Mary's very well.
I pass through it many a day between my school and the public library in York.
And second, because it was a Benedictine list which went into my own volume of the corpus, then in an advanced stage of preparation.
And coming in as York did not disturb the numbering of documents.
I felt that that guardian angel had been busy.
Reading Medieval library catalogues is by far and away the best way to learn about the holdings and organisation of medieval libraries.
All five, five, 90 in the Western Gallery if you want to get started.
In England. This was recognised in the 1830s.
Joseph Hunter, who started his career as a Cutler but became an antiquity a Yorkshireman.
From the West Riding had printed the 1555 post dissolution booklist from Monk Bretton Priory with notes on other monastic libraries.
1831 If I didn't mention you, the book included an indenture recording the loan of 19 books from Hinton Charterhouse,
which he'd taken from a manuscript belonging to Thomas Phillips, which we haven't seen since.
A few years later, 1838,
Briar Butterfield in the City Society published many of the medieval catalogues and other library records of Durham Cathedral Priory of Volume,
which I'm in the process of trying to replace.
Durham will be the lost volume of the corpus of medieval library catalogues to go to press.
This interest in the 1830s represented a healthy change.
If I look back a generation earlier in 1795, still in the age of led, as far as medieval studies is concerned,
the antiquity John Nichols commented on the late 15th century Leicester Abbey Library catalogue by William Charity.
Ms. Lord, 6 to 3, if you wish to call it up, which has a double listing.
Nicole says many books are referred to some other arrangement.
Many have only two folio. The first words of summer given.
And after all our inquiries, many of the writers here enumerated must remain as unknowns, as they are uninteresting.
And perhaps posterity has very little reason to regret the loss of the Library of Leicester MP.
Well, there's 18th century medieval studies, the revival of medieval studies from the 1840s and fifties onwards,
so contributions to medieval library history in England.
But it was in the years between about 1895 and 1925 that more James and Mary Beetson brought out editions of most of the major catalogues.
These editions sought to cross-match catalogue entries with surviving books,
but they made no attempt to identify the works that the medieval books contained.
Works,
which might include classical and patristic books as well as writings of any period in the Middle Ages down to the date of the catalogue itself.
How far this lack of identifications arose from the belief that readers could recognise the titles that appeared in medieval catalogues?
I can't say, but I harbour a suspicion that they knew how difficult it can be to recognise all the works that turn up,
but they preferred to hide behind the pretence that all this was commonly known.
Let me not press the point, but some 8000 different works have turned up in the medieval library records from England.
And those of us who've worked on the corpus have had a long learning curve in recognising some of these works in here.
They're not all as straightforward as the city of gold. Some identifications are difficult, but not impossible.
Some become possible only when one joins up a second or third or fourth occurrence of the title, each bringing.
Some extra bit of information. The corpse of British medieval library catalogues set out to annotate line by line.
The more experienced reader with these volumes will make rapid progress because the experienced reader doesn't need to read these into line notes.
But for someone new to the subject, the information to help you make sense of the document is there as you read it.
And who is to decide what is easy enough not to need annotation.
My view is that we annotate everything, even if it's virtual.
The note may be very brief. The head notes to each library make a concise attempt to draw together what can be
learnt from the evidence available for the development of each collection represented.
Writing such head notes is a straightforward exercise in research and interpretation.
Piecing the evidence together in relation to what we know about a library, its books and the institution that owned it.
Working through the evidence for this or that library, be it rich or meagre, is straightforward.
The big question for these lectures is how do we extrapolate from that particular to fill the gaps in
our evidence and to see the larger picture of libraries as such and their place in the book Economy?
Now,
I didn't do a map to show where we have documents from and where we don't put the scatter of red dots would have been thinner than it was for an LGB.
But the number of books attested through the documentary evidence is many times greater than that, attested by surviving books.
So a little more about the corpus. There are 16 volumes now out.
Some of them in more than one physical volume. A page count so far is just over 12,000 pages plus another 1200 pages of introductions.
If we had it on the table, it would be a couple of centimetres short of a metre.
In Burgundy cloth. The principle is to publish book lists or other records that bear witness to the library of an institution.
In most cases, lists that have only surface books or at least were excluded.
We found no lists of bursary books. So my complaints about care from Tuesday doesn't apply here.
Registers do turn up in a few catalogues.
During work on the secular institutions, the avoidance of service books was relaxed so that the voluble secular cathedrals will includes the
long and richly detailed 13th century descriptions of the many service books at St Paul's Cathedral.
When really would not want to leave that out.
Though we have no real medieval library catalogue for St Paul's, the earliest catalogue of the library is 1622.
Despite our knowing that it has an important library.
In the early days of the corpus, a list had a minimal definition of two entries.
Even that has occasionally been relaxed. Principles as to the genre of record and the desire to enter whatever will usefully contribute
to the eventual index as a key to knowledge have sometimes pulled us in contrary directions.
Rather than follow the practice of the German and Swiss series which is organised by diocese,
the British Corpus is organised mainly by institutional categories.
So there is a volume on the libraries of the Austin Canons,
a volume that combines but does not merge the libraries of Cistercian monks with those of Gilbert in canons and Fremont's retention canons.
Benedictine monks occupy several volumes.
Including several devoted to large and very large catalogues.
The two universities each have volumes and their volumes on the late medieval collegiate churches and secular colleges,
among them Eton and Winchester. There is here an underlying view that it makes more sense to treat cistercians all together.
Than to treat the abbeys convents and colleges of Lincoln Diocese or London Diocese as a local group.
It was a decision taken before I became involved, but I think it was a correct one.
Scotland, on the other hand, was treated geographically. And two volumes are devoted to works of a different nature.
Registrar Anglia has been mentioned and will come up again in a few minutes time.
This union catalogue from the 13th century, which is the second volume of the corpus and quite challenging to use.
The other odd one is Henry to cook sterne's bibliographical essay on more than 100 ecclesiastical authors.
Henry used registrar from Anglia, but he doesn't have very much in the way of locations.
He was the librarian of Bury St Edmunds, and his book is a valuable witness to.
Mid to slightly after mid-14th century perceptions of church authors and their works.
But it brings little grist to the mill of copies, in particular libraries and some confusion.
In the form of entries which he derived from learned sources,
not from books seen for works already lost when Jérome was drawing up his catalogue of Christian writers.
So you will find entries for third century authors not seen since A.D. 300.
And I had to I had to devise a signal to say this is an empty entry.
But there it is in the index still to appear of volumes on secular cathedrals on the cathedral, prioress of Canterbury and Durham.
Both of them, including important documents.
And if I Live There, is meant to be a new edition to replace the first volume of the series the Friars Libraries from 1990,
as well as a printed cumulative index.
Provided I can get that past the publisher. I repeat that the policy of annotation entry by entry makes it possible to build understanding
quite rapidly and that the head notes to each document and each library provide interpretation.
The list of IDs, which I mentioned on Tuesday,
was originally intended to speed Diplo by providing contributors with readymade ID notes for works already
encountered to stabilise the form of these notes and ensure consistency and fingers crossed accuracy.
As more documents have been edited, the accumulation of evidence sometimes corrected IDs.
So if you really want to be scrupulous before citing something, check it against the list of IDs.
This cumulative index should be the starting point if you're wanting to know about the frequency of particular titles,
that kind of thing, as in a printed form, you can actually see from the layout on the page.
The common books, the averagely common books, the rare books.
I'm afraid in a database form you have to ask the right question and you won't see the neighbours.
A By-product of all this work on IDs was by Latin writers,
although it had been conceived rather earlier, and a little book in a nice blue cover called Titulos,
in which I set out facts and considerations about how we can and should stabilise references to works red in the Middle Ages,
as well as showing how identities might be changed in the process of transmission,
which is a process subject to textual criticism like the text itself.
Now it's time to look at some numbers across the 21 volumes that will be printed and annotated.
We have what appear to be about 1200 documents as to the count of documents.
That number. See what I've got next here. Right.
You can see the third column has document numbers.
They have zeros in to make them sortable. I meant to take the zeroes out.
The count of documents from this numbering system would say 1200 or more,
but it counts many times over a few documents that each report books in many institutions.
Documents which are broken up in the corpus to be treated as evidence under each institution.
Two of these documents represent short tours in England, one by Marcelo Carini, later Pope Marcellus, the second in 1526,
and by an unknown agent of Henry the eighth in Lincolnshire in 1528, reporting between them on 50 libraries.
And John Leland provides reports on mostly rare titles from some 120 institutions between 1533 and 1535.
There are also some wills that bequeath books to more than one institution,
and their treatment depends on whether or not the institutions in question are in the same volume of the corpus or across several.
And one could reduce that to about 1000 to 4000 documents, therefore.
The documents can be categorised by function catalogues in a broad sense inventories,
location lists for pots of a collection, lists that reflect accession or loss or expenditure.
Today, I'm concerned with those that seek to reflect the entire contents of a library at a particular time.
Now, even here, one could speak of typological variation in catalogues, much of which reflects the period when a catalogue was drawn up.
Early lists tend to survive because they were written into the back or the front of books,
and it's the books that have been preserved on the lists come in by chance.
Later, we have lists kept as records on parchment rolls,
and we have catalogues like the Dover catalogue that was in the display case on Tuesday that fill a volume.
I'm. There are early lists that you look at and you can't tell whether it's listing off the books or listing the contents of books.
And you can't draw a line between one book and another because you can't tell titles from from volumes.
By the 12th century, we often have catalogues that will name the first or principal work.
In principle, work is the identifier of the volume.
And then add a note of contents in quo. Continue to enlist the remaining works within the book.
Such contents lists would have been entered at the front of the volumes in question, very likely in preparation for making the catalogue,
though they might also help the reader of the book so the regular existence of contents lists in books from one institution.
If this turns up in MLG, BE is probably evidence that there was a catalogue.
Even though we don't have that catalogue. A 14th century catalogue from Peterborough MP,
very strangely has a consistent practice of omitting the first work from any volume that contains more than one.
We can see this by cross matching the catalogue and survivors,
and I think the explanation is likely to be that the compiler was copying from an earlier catalogue that had been based on
contents lists and that he ignored the top line and thought what he needed was what followed the words in Continental.
He was doing the contents. Obviously, if there was only one work, there was only one word.
But it really was a very strange realisation in that catalogue.
I'm inclined to take this as evidence that what we have there is a secondary document copied with some
measure of incompetence from an earlier catalogue and copied by someone other than the keeper of the books.
In the display case we had the catalogue of Martins Priory at Dover.
This is one I've shown quite often, so some of you may have seen it more than once.
It's the catalogue of Martin's Priory of Dover, a small house dependent on Canterbury Cathedral PRIORY.
The catalogue was drawn up by Brother John Whitfield in 1389 and edited as Volume five of the Corpus by William Stoneman.
It is a fine example of the librarian's craft and one of several representatives of a 14th century golden age for catalogues.
It's in three parts.
The first, acting as an inventory for the custodian is in shelf mock order with one line for each book, including the Second Folio,
the arbitrary identifier, the first words on the start, the start of the second leaf that identifies a manuscript as an object.
The one entry from the catalogue also appears in the lower margin of the book, to which it refers all the Second Folio or any of the Folio.
If the Second Folio equivalent has been taken from the third.
The fourth. The fifth. And on display.
We also had a book that can be matched up with it so that you can see the front,
the details that appear you see in the lower margin, the details that match the catalogue.
The second part of this catalogue goes through the collection again in the same sequence,
this time using as many lines as were needed to list the contents, including the opening words of each work.
This was for the dedicated library user who wanted to browse the catalogue.
And the third part was an index for the brisk library user who wanted to find something quickly.
Whitfield's inclusion of opening words Insipidus, as we call them, in the craft of identifying medieval works.
Or perhaps I should say the mystery of identifying medieval works is very useful to the corpus as a whole, because when you have an obscure title,
if it comes with the insipid, you have a means to track down through ordinary descriptive catalogues what the work is.
So the incipient leads to the work, which then helps you to interpret the title.
And an identification secured on an incipient through Dover or a number of other catalogues can be
exported to help identify copies of the same obscure title in other book lists in the cumulative list.
Watch out for ink in brackets after an index entry.
It stands for Incipient and it shows that this identification is based on real evidence.
Now from the thousand plus documents edited in the corpus, the number of entries annotated is currently 50,242.
About 38,000 of those amount IDs that can be indexed on the author and title in the list of IDs.
The others may be generic titles, gospels, epistles, missiles, brief furies, or anonymous unidentifiable titles.
Perhaps the equivalent of trade books or careless titles.
A Book of Physic. A book of grammar that you can't do much with.
All of these are nonetheless indexed generically in the individual volumes,
and I have to decide how far we may be able to get with a cumulative generic index.
The overall pattern is that we have many more later records than earlier,
and the idea of a bar chart for M LGB I said wouldn't work for this, would show something.
There are 2028 documents from the 12th century.
I think there are ten from before the 12th century. The pre 12th century ones are very short.
Some of the 12th century ones are substantial. From the 13th century, the number of records rises to 54.
Some of these are short lists of gift or accessions. Equally short reports of loans or losses.
They are not catalogues describing whole collections. Subsidiary documents of this kind increase numbers as time goes on.
From the 14th century. The number of documents is 190 from the 15th century.
The number is 420. Those of you following the projection, forget it.
The Reformation, the invention of printing, all sorts of things came into being that for the 16th century, it doesn't continue.
If I were to provide average numbers of entries per document by century, there would be a steep decline as the number of lists mentioning only five,
four, three, two books becomes a bigger and bigger share of the documents we have.
We are collecting documents that individually tell us relatively little about the libraries that were in receipt of gifts.
The steep increase in the records may reflect several factors.
One is the increasing importance of secular institutions as against monastic institutions and the fact that university colleges,
secular cathedrals and such like have had uninterrupted histories and retain substantial archives.
Archive keeping from the 14th century onwards is usually less selective than from an earlier period,
and the secular institutions were more likely to receive documented gifts than religious
houses were whose gifts of books more likely came undocumented from within their communities.
It becomes very important to tune into the developing character of the record evidence and the changing shape of
the library economy that it reflects as a precursor to trying to interpret the vast number of these documents.
Now, lest you become depressed by this welter of documentary evidence,
let me interject an example that shows how even one document can make a huge difference.
Among the relatively thin records at the beginning of the 14th century, and among the even thinner evidence for the holdings of Cistercian libraries,
Z2 is a list of books baled into the hands of the Abbot and Convent of Bordesley MP in Worcestershire by Guida Beecham,
Earl of Warwick, 1st of May 1306.
The list survives only as a transcript made in 1689, but it describes the contents of 27 volumes of French romances,
and there is no better testimony to a private aristocratic collection of such books.
This doesn't tell us anything about what the Cistercians of Bordesley was reading,
but it's enormously important as telling as what the the Earl and Countess of
Warwick and their families might have been reading at the end of the 13th,
beginning of the 14th century. The deed commits the books to the MP to remain indefinitely.
There is nothing to suggest that this was merely a short term bail.
Once in a while they had the library decorated. What it says about the reading habits of the monks of Bordesley is quite another matter.
Oldie died in 1315 and was buried at Bordesley.
Now I want to focus for a time on the high end libraries and you had a few minutes to read through the table.
You will remember from Tuesday that MGP has 15 institutions with more than 100 recognised books surviving and
another 85 with ten or more books leaving close to 500 institutions with fewer than ten books now recognised.
The evidence of catalogues is much fuller.
No. I have difficulties. I can't really see the list in either position.
I was not able to fit on the slide more than 24 rows, which shows the four lists of catalogues with more than 350 entries.
A catalogue of 40 or 50 books can feel quite meaty when I'm studying it and we have more than 200 lists with upwards of 50 entries.
So this is quite rich material. Among the 24 at the top of the scale.
And this is a count of entries in catalogues. There are ten Benedictine catalogues, two Augustinian, one Cistercian and one Bridgetown.
Exeter Cathedral is the only secular church to appear on the strength of an inventory dated 1506.
The comparative evidence suggests that Exeter Cathedral Library was indeed exceptional at this date in its collection of older books,
and many of the manuscripts from Exeter were given to a more appropriate home 100 years later,
when the canons handed them over to Thomas Bodley for his new library in Oxford.
There are also seven university college lists among this top 24.
And this is the normality which older editions of MGB had belied.
I talked about the the manuscript in the medieval colleges being left out of the the count in MGB.
The university colleges were an important part of the late medieval library sector,
and they are better known both by record and by survival than most of the parts of the sector.
Now this is ranked by number.
I want to see if our perceptions change when we look at the same list in date order from the 12th century at the top,
we have only one big list from Durham Cathedral Priory.
Now, of course, we cannot say that Durham was the only library of this size in England in the middle of the 12th century.
But we can see that it compares very favourably with Bury St Edmunds, which had a catalogue of some 261 entries and so is nowhere near the top 24.
That catalogue dates from the third quarter of the 12th century, so a comparable date by the late 14th century.
We know that Bury would have a library getting on for twice the size of that of Durham.
So relative position on the scale of size is not stable.
By aggregating two lists from Durham and they should both be here 516 and 386 dated 1392 and 1395.
I'm not cheating here. These lists cover the books in the cloister and the spend amount.
You add the two together to get a sense of the library.
So the Durham Library in the 1390s, around 900 books.
We have no list at all from Barry at this date,
but Henry to Kirk and used a system of class marking by author and subject A for Augustine and Ambrose, so on and so on.
Rising to a 138 B for Bernard and Bible rising to be 350 something and so on by taking
the highest numbers in each letter class as represented by recognised survivors.
The total number of books at Berry under this system was not less than 2100.
And that's the biggest number we can project for any library in England.
I can't quite give you a date on that because I don't know exactly how long the system continued after Henry's time.
So the 456 Durham, it's it's looking big in the 12th century, but it's the only big evidence we have from the 13th century.
We have only Glastonbury showing it around 400 entries by the middle of the century.
The 13th century is a thin period, and if I get there, we'll see that.
We can only wonder why evidence of this kind become scarcer in the 13th century than in the 12th or the 14th.
If it were a simple matter that 13th Century Records had been superseded and discarded.
Which is plausible. Then we need to consider why we have more from the 12th century than from the 14th.
And it may be that if I did my statistics on what lists are preserved inside books that I might get, get an answer to that.
In the fourth column of the table catalogue the prevailing word here we have a categorisation of the documents,
and these very substantial lists are mostly described as catalogues.
That is, they seek to describe a whole collection in some detail, allowing that early catalogues tend to have less detail than later ones.
Catalogues were meant to serve library purposes,
helping the keeper know what was in the collection and by the 14th century at least
helping the potential reader inventories and some inventories appear among these are made
to record and control property so that the entry for a book will usually be a single
line identifying the book by one work only and the secondary folio as a type of record.
These begin in a very small way in the 13th century.
There are three from the 13th century, but they become numerous in the 14th, 15th and 16th centuries.
In the corpus as a whole, I count 197 in inventories, a few of them with above 400 books seen here,
many with a mere handful of books, but plenty with hundreds.
200. 300. In the table, showing the biggest by size.
St Albans. It will be the previous table.
St Albans appears right at the bottom, the smallest we could fit on the screen with 362 entries.
But it's a select list from Regis, from Anglia.
So this is not 362 books.
Registrar Anglia has a list of titles. That's 362 titles and we can't control.
And if a lot of those are sermons of Augustan.
It may be that the number shrinks dramatically into books.
And it's a select list because the compilers of registry manga were only looking for certain authors.
It is difficult to integrate the evidence of request stream that comes like this into the wider picture based on book lists,
which just makes no attempts to describe books or their contents.
Rather, it's a list of works. Some of them, in the case of Augustine,
taken from his retract or alternates with a numerical union reference showing whether a
particular place designated by that number had reported holding a copy of that title.
Now, the next slide in a reduced form shows the reportage of quite big returns from registries.
These are returns of 98 and upwards.
21 institutions visited by the friars who report on more than 100 titles.
Some of these are places that have left as little of the evidence of the books at all.
So these are places that should earn a head note in MGP, even though there may be no recognised survivors to record.
Now I'll go on to the next table,
which takes over the first three columns and then adds as controls register circa 1290 and the number
of number of titles and LGB to 1540 is the number of recognised survivors that have been logged.
Then Big Cat means have we a catalogue that gives us for any particular date a sense of the
size of that library and the big catalogues appearing there come from a wide variety of dates.
I thought adding another four digit number to the table would just confuse the aggregation column involves my attempt to use other evidence to say,
Well, have we any idea how big this library was across time and I shouldn't set too much store.
Berry gets in 2000. I said 2100.
Earlier on the aggregate, two of the letter classes St Mary's MP gets in at 750,
which is a projection from the the the desk numbering the right hand column.
Shows which institutions are best attested in terms of works from that place by registry and not by.
Local catalogues or by surviving books.
Now one case is particularly interesting, the list of 96 titles and sorry list of 96 books from Crowland.
Fairly well done. That catalogue is undated and undateable, but the the rices made a good argument that it looks like a draft return.
The kind of thing that went from an MP to Franciscan HQ to be used as the basis of the entry in Registrar Anglia,
now for Crowland Registry has 110 titles,
and the list, which is written in the back of a manuscript from Crowland now in Berlin, has only 96, so the return must have had a bit more.
But there is a strong overlap there for institutions here in Scotland like Kelso or Melrose.
This is the best information we have and there are a number of other far flung places where
it gives you the impression of a substantial library that we would otherwise not know about.
The Library of Woburn, for example.
Cistercian, happy in Bedfordshire, slightly checkered history in 30 around 1390, as attested by 248 titles in Registrar Anglia.
But other evidence for the medieval library is a single manuscript of the 12th century,
which had left Woburn in time to be acquired by William Grey and given to Balliol College in the 15th century.
Besides this MGB News three printed books from Weapon, two acquired by the Abbot in the 1520s,
won by a monk in 1537, a year before the remaining monks of Wuhan were attempted and executed.
Without the registry, the Cistercian library at Woburn would be a void filled only by assumption.
And for close to two thirds of the institutions in this upper range of registry.
It is the the best source we've got. Now I see my time is is running out and I've got lots of tables to show you, so I may skim through some tables.
Don't worry. They didn't.
They don't make the point I want to make as well as I wish they did.
So bear with me to fulfil the promise made at the end of Tuesday's lecture to the
effect that medieval library catalogues show as libraries as they once were.
We must focus on true catalogues, allowing that inventories can add a sense of the size of collections and of the subject emphasis.
You could see an inventory heavy in canon law even from single line entries, but they rarely have richness to the picture.
I mentioned earlier that there are only about 50 true catalogues now.
Reading these. Is the way forward.
The old approach was to favour the biggest and best email.
James edited Christchurch. Canterbury. St Augustine's.
Canterbury, Dover. Peterborough, Leicester.
Mary Beetson edited Psion. But we would mislead ourselves if we looked on these as typical.
They're all, in their different ways, exceptional. The St Augustine's catalogue in its way, the most remarkable and challenging.
And more. James simply didn't recognise its complexity.
It took the extraordinary work of Bruce Barker Benfield of this parish to work out that this was a catalogue of the late 14th century,
much augmented and then re copied in the 15th century, so that layers of editions had been flattened out in the copying.
Unless one paid very close attention, as the editor did, really getting to grips with the catalogue of the scale is a big task.
But if you think of the St Augustine's catalogue, Sir Henry de Kirk's did bury Whitfield at Dover all within the space of about 20 years.
The 13 6070s was the period when cataloguing and metadata were at their most flourishing until perhaps recently.
Now, medieval library junkies among you will no doubt go and read all 50 catalogues and benefit proportionately.
One can form an overall picture that way, but there is a risk that different lists will cross, fertilise, or should I say cross.
In fact, if we want to be able to characterise libraries, we need to typology of catalogues to reflect the different types of library in England.
My assumption, or if I may use a less prejudicial word,
my hypothesis is that our typology will most likely have to reflect three dimensions of difference.
Let us suppose, until we have evidence to convince us otherwise, that Benedictine, Cistercian, Carthusian,
Augustinian libraries may have differed from one another in some fundamental
ways that the libraries of the mendicant orders very likely differed more.
And the libraries of secular institutions, whether cathedrals or collegiate churches or university colleges,
all had very different needs and interests.
So species is a fundamental categorisation in a typology.
Not all Benedictine libraries were the same, and a crucial factor is one of scale.
Take Dover and Deeping. Both are primaries dependent on Benedictine abbeys.
Dover, a cell of Canterbury, had 450 books in 1389.
And they don't appear to have been a deposit from the Motherhouse.
That was the Dover Library dipping a cell of the prosperous Fenland Abbey of Thorney had 22 books in the monks own brief.
And they do seem to have been books deposited dipping from four, by my reckoning.
And that's a mid 13th century list from Deeping.
And by my reckoning, Thorney didn't have as many as 100 at that time, though it was a wealthy MP.
Divergences of scale are not necessarily related to the wealth or number of monks, canons or friars.
These places may have had large libraries or middling libraries, and a wealthy institution can get by on a middling library.
We don't have external evidence to control for scale.
We need to try and take it out from the book evidence.
And so as well as. Species, religious order and scale.
The third dimension of difference is chronological.
All institutions change over hundreds of years, and the same is absolutely the case with libraries.
We may make the supposition that libraries start small and get bigger, but that may mean that small at a later date.
Confuses us about.
Does it tell us about scale or does it confuses what we cannot well demonstrate is the phenomenon of reshaping collections to meet current needs.
That's a polite way of saying deaccessioning. In some libraries.
This is a pervasive concern and the modernisation of libraries in the late 15th and 16th centuries by the accession of large numbers of printed books,
shows that it was going on in the Middle Ages. In one sense, our difficulty is insufficient evidence of the quality that we wish for.
But that's not a matter of reality.
Our real difficulty is choosing how best to use the evidence we've got, and that means choosing the catalogues that are types.
Now I will just whizz past because otherwise I would be keeping you here for another half hour.
What I've done is a table of the 12th century catalogues first in order of date and second in order of size.
And you see Durham up at the top and very I mentioned when commenting that it wasn't as big as Durham but would later overtake.
They come down to 59 at Peterborough.
Now we can compare 59 Peterborough with 360 at Peterborough in the late 14th century.
Peterborough certainly grew, but picking out a thread to join up.
The third, the 12th, 13th, 14th, 15th century catalogues is challenging.
The 13th century evidence is so small I could put in both sequences on one on one slide.
Glastonbury is the one we've looked at with 402 brands sold their Pre-monsoon retention
house with 147 in the late 13th century may be good going for the pre monstrous tensions.
We have only one pre-monsoon retention catalogue with more and that comes from the end of the 14th.
Beginning of the 15th century. 14th century was the great age of catalogues, and you can spend quite a lot of time peering through those.
And this is what we've to try and navigate in looking for.
Small, middling and large for each species.
But we can't do it for each century.
The 15th century evidence shrinks. And I'll spare you the detail on that.
I feel as if I ought to have arrived at a conclusion that should allow me to say roughly in a range of numbers,
let's say up to 80, 80 to 200, 200 to 500 above 500.
A range of numbers of entries that a catalogue should have that would serve as a type for small,
middling or large of this or that speech species in each of these four centuries.
But I'm not confident that I can reduce it to such relative simplicity, and I am horrified by the gaps.
When we put all the evidence for the mendicant orders together,
we see absolutely no sign of any backdrop against which the York Austin Friars
Library of 600 and old volumes in the 14th century would find its place.
The rest of the evidence for the mendicant is desperately poor, and I'm sure that's in large part lack of evidence.
We simply cannot see the major libraries that at least the Grey Friars and the Black Friars formed in Oxford in the 13th century.
Libraries that were the backdrop of much scholarship.
Scholarship that then in turn influenced the collegiate development of the university.
And if the Friars were serious book collectors.
But the evidence has gone under to later date.
The Friars of London in the very late 14th and an early 15th century look as though they should have been major libraries.
But the evidence is gone. So we can't fill all the slots in trying to frame a typology.
Yet I still think that the typological approach is the right one to adopt to catalogues in the hope of getting an overview of
the library distribution around the country better than to generalise from the richest evidence and paint a false picture.
Now MLG be. And the corpus of medieval library catalogues are complex bodies of data that can be used simply.
Do we know where this book was? Look up the shelf mark in the index of MGB and you're there.
If you don't find it, the answer is we don't know. Though I may say the number of books in M LGB has increased by one since Tuesday.
Since someone from the audience has sent me details of a book from the crushed Friars of London.
Now, in a very out of the way place with a question, like, were there copies of, say, bede's biblical commentaries in a particular place?
We can answer that. We can answer it at least for a particular time.
There aren't many institutions where we have a sequence of catalogues or not a long sequence.
We could say whether they were widely known in England in the late Middle Ages.
These are specifics, and that represents a simple use of the evidence.
But I want to invite you to think of these complementary bodies of evidence as
witnesses more generally to the diverse and developing landscape of medieval libraries.
And I've been attempting to show you approaches to reading them as evidence of the generality.
For next week, I promised questions arising from the evidence outlined this week.
Tuesday subject will investigate collection development.