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Well, I'm going to spend 30 minutes also telling you extremely potted history of the

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civilian library and telling you a little bit about what you might find in it,

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why it was set up, why we might be interested in it.

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As Wilma says, I'm rather interested in the history of institutional libraries, particularly in this parish.

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It seems to me one of the more interesting things about the body, and is that it's not just a library,

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but a library of libraries, and it's the ones inside that, particularly the historic ones that I have an interest in.

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Why am I interested in them? Well, they often function as sort of barometers for intellectual history.

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If you want to work out what the horizons of scholarship are at a given time, then you need to spend time with library catalogues.

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And that's what I do. Well, if you walk into the exhibition room just over there, right on the back against the against the firewall there,

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the back of black girl who you will see a huge display case about the size of a library.

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And inside, if you look down, you'll see immediately a 15th century English manuscript, which is an astrological manuscript someone is coming from.

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It's got a kind of moving vol well, as we call them, turning diagrams in manuscripts.

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Next to that, you'll see a copy of not the first, but the second edition of Copernicus, which is 1566, isn't it?

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And then next to that, you'll see Kepler's Astronomia Nova, which is quite a big book in which Kepler announces various laws,

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most famous obviously being his principle about elliptical orbits.

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Next to that, you'll see in many ways what was a much more exciting book.

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Galileo's little book on the Starry Messenger, the SIDERIS Nuncio to 1610, in which he says that I have a new thing called the telescope.

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And I looked at the moon and I can see all sorts of ridges and mountains and pitted things in the moon.

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And he also talks about the new stars. He's he calls them that he's discovered around Jupiter and he talks about the phases of Venus.

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That's a really impressive book. Behind that, however, there is a whole row of books and they are printed books from the civilian library.

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And as you look at their spines, you'll see on their spines a lot of them have simply John Wallace written on that spine.

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I'll come back to that. He is one of the most long serving civilian professors of geometry.

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He actually held his chair from 1649 to 1703, which is quite his tenure.

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Alongside that, you'll see a lot of other books with a kind of CW monogram on the spine all the way down to tooled and gold.

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That's Christopher Wren. And that tells you immediately that two of the big contributors to that library were John Wallace and Christopher Wren.

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Well, the civilian library is named after Henry Saville, the founder of the Civilian Professorships.

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Saville Fine funds, two professorships, one geometry, one in astronomy in 1619.

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He is a quite long lived man. He's born in 1549, dies in 1622.

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He was one of the big men, Elizabethan Learned World, and his very good friend was Sir Thomas Bodley.

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They were both bigwigs in Merton College, and Bodley was in many ways a patron of learning rather than a scholar of of real significance himself.

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Saville was both, and Saville was very much a man who worked in in the in the public sphere, as we would say,

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accruing various appointments and honours, but was also a serious scholar who from the 1570s was lecturing in Oxford on astronomy.

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Remarkably, he lectures publicly on the Copernican on the Ptolemaic system side by side,

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making him really not quite an exponent of component Hinduism as a full physical model,

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but certainly an explainer of the mathematical consequences of Republicanism extremely early.

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This is in the 1970s when really one can number on on two hands the number of committed companions in Europe.

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At that time, people were much more keen on his mathematics.

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They weren't quite sold on on the physical system that the mathematics implied.

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Well, Saville had an idea in in the second decade of the 17th century to found two chairs in the mathematical arts.

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Well, he called them his mathematical readers. And we have one in geometry and one in astronomy.

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And obviously they still go on today and they're attached to my college, new college.

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The reason why, incidentally, is that initially they didn't have college fellowships, but in the in the 19th century reforms,

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some bright spot pointed out that the medieval statutes of New College from the 1370s and

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eighties contained provision for two of the 70 fellows to study astronomy if they wished.

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And on this piece of. Marianne Witt.

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The professors were reassigned to New College in the Victorian reforms, so that's why they were the way they are now.

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Well, Saville equipped his professors with a library, and that library sat in the in the Great Tower, the tower of the orders.

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As you walk into the body and the thing immediately above your head as you walk through the gate is the original saddle library.

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It's now the kind of collection desk in the reading room.

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But that was where the civilian professors hung out and they had a study on either side for the geometry professor and the astronomy professor.

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And they shared a study in the middle, which is where all their books were.

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This also gave them access to the top of the tower, which they had some pointed telescopes at the sky.

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And I might tell you a little bit about the instruments that they had as well.

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An early modern library tends to contain books, but also other things, typically coins.

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The Saville Library doesn't have coins, but instruments as well.

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Mathematical instruments, and these have a library has quite a few of those that I'll tell you about in a minute.

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Well, this library was augmented down the centuries by the holders of the civilian chair until it really

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conked out in the late Victorian period and was handed over to the body in its entirety in 1884.

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It had always, as it were, been geographically part of the problem, but it was institutionally separate.

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But nonetheless, I'm going to tell you a little bit about about this library,

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as it's really one of the most historically significant scientific libraries in the West.

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And it contains both manuscripts and printed books almost entirely in mathematics, but with some very interesting exceptions as well.

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It was also a library that accrued various manuscripts that were presented to it by people, I think by the late 17th century.

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It was clearly being thought of as a place where one could deposit important objects, and I'll mention a few of those.

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Well, first of all, some professors, when the chair in geometry was founded, 1619, the first holder was a man called Henry Briggs.

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He was followed by a man called Peter Turner.

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Then by the exceptionally long lived John Wallis, who as the eminent series of 17th century Oxford Writers Room.

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And then following his death in 1783, Edmund Halley by that point and civilian professors were living in New College Lane.

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John Wallace Head back to that house just on your left hand side as you go down your college lane of the crook.

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The corner. And when Wallace died, Wallace, his son, arranged for the two professors to hold the lease of that house in perpetuity,

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which they did until, in historical terms, quite recently.

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That is why there is a turret on top of that building. That was the observatory of the civilian professors in the early 18th century.

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And Edmund, how you will have used that turret? I had a visit last week from three people from London who wanted to see it.

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The turret is not particularly interesting. The birds got in and trashed the place, but we whitewashed it and there's a 19th century telescope in it,

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but it's at the top of the student staircase.

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So I had to give the students notice on Saturday morning that we were going to crash in at midday and walk up the staircase,

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scattering the students as we went. As for the astronomy professor, the first one there, again by chance found in 1690, was John Bainbridge,

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an interesting character who was then followed by John Greaves, who's an extremely interesting man.

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And I'll tell you a bit about because he went to Egypt, that was followed by Seth Ward,

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one of the we associate him with the Wilkins crowd in modern war and actually taught the civilian

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trustees into allowing him to build telescopes off the top of the central tower of Wadham.

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And so the astronomy towns of Oxford, roughly the Central Bodleian Tower, the Walden Tower, and then College Lane.

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That's the three historical ones that the civilian professors were using.

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After him comes Christopher Wren, and after him comes an interesting meteorologist called Edward Beaumont.

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And then finally, David Gregory, who's a name you'll know. Well, Saville has close connections with Bodley.

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As I said, they were both the grandees of Martin College, and Bodley appointed Saville as one of the executors to his will.

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Bodley also asked Saville for various bits and bobs for the library itself,

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which has opened obviously a decade and a half before the civilian professor's.

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And, says Saville, is quite a significant turn into the body in itself.

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And these these donations are quite separate from from the civilian chairs.

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When they die, is he he gives us silver salt with his arms on it worth £20 to Saville.

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In his will, Saville clearly thought about his new foundation,

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the the library that he wanted to attach to his chairs in terms that were very influenced by Bodley.

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Yesterday I was looking at a collection of papers now known as Saville 1 to 1, which is various bits and bobs that were scraped together and bound up.

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And one of them contains in Saville's extremely scratchy handwriting.

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Saville has really bad. Handwriting, his ideas about how he wanted his chair to function and how he wanted his library to function.

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He wanted a parchment registry of his books to be kept. And he wants this to be held by the keeper of the library.

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So he actually sees this really is as quite intertwined with the body and connections, even at this date.

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He says that books can be lent, which is a very interesting provision.

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That's not true of the both of them, but only to the two professors who hold the chairs.

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And it's quite strict. They have to give caution money worth the value of the book before they're allowed to loan it.

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And they all have to be returned every year in order for an annual check to take place, which is again following the statutes of the body at the time.

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So one thing I learnt yesterday was that the civilian library actually was set up

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to mimic the body in collections and that makes sense is held in the same place.

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The other thing I saw yesterday, which was rather fun, is that I tracked down what this this early list of books probably is,

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which is the the indenture that Saville makes with the university about what books he's going to give to his professors.

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It's probably a manuscript about 16, 20, and it turned up in the tiny little boxes of roll.

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And it's quite rare to find rolls in body and records.

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They're very common in other forms of administrative document. But early modern rules in libraries are quite rare,

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and it's about this wide between three and a half metres long, and they unrolls all the way down like that.

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So I had to kind of arrange it down with snake weights down the table and and see what was there.

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And Saville's scratchy signature is right at the bottom three and a half metres down.

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Well, Saville gives this set of books and manuscripts.

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He actually, it's often said for those who the library, library nerds,

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it's often said he gives printed books and then he later thinks about manuscripts.

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This is not true. He's obviously giving in this in this list several manuscripts of his own and indeed several of his own writings.

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And it's in this donation to establish his chair that he hands over.

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A lot of annotated books, very important in the history of mathematics, is annotated books,

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because you often copy down chains of assumptions of great mathematicians knew track them across Europe and he hands over his own lecture notes,

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particularly the lectures from the 1570s that he's been giving.

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And that's that's how we have those texts.

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So his little manuscript that he hands over with all the books is headed for the use chiefly of the mathematical readers who may borrow any of them,

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putting in a sufficient real caution, which must mean insufficient caution.

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And he's crossed out, written real above, by which he wants to underscore that the cash value of the books has to be put down.

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As I look down at this, the kind of things that you see are Greek, Latin, English, Italian books.

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He's very keen on Italian books as well.

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He has all the standard ancient writers, of course, but he has some modern writers as well, which, given the date, are rather interesting.

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Scala Ajar on the psyche, Lloyd digs and writes the great English practical mathematicians William Gilbert,

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the big man of English science at the time, his book on the magnets of 1600 and Saville's own papers.

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And this is the library which is put in that room, which is just over the over the town,

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and it grows very, very significant in the 17th century, and then it slows down after that.

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Many of the manuscripts that Saville gave of Greek mathematical manuscripts, they are actually quite recent.

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An awful lot of them are are 14th, 15th century copies of all the texts.

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So Saville has been picking up on the continent quite a lot of recent copies of mathematical texts,

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which underscores once again that mathematical publishing is expensive and slow.

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And as a result, the circulation of mathematical texts in manuscript continues really quite late.

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Various other genres are easier to print, mathematical books are hard, and the proofreading is particularly difficult for mathematical books.

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Looking at the manuscripts themselves that are in the sample collection today,

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you can see that successive professors have started donating their papers.

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Peter Turner, who I mentioned earlier on, he gives a whole stack of manuscripts.

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One of them, which I was looking at, is a copy of Apollonius.

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His comics had actually been Saville's own manuscripts and Saville gave it to Turner and Turner gave it back to the Sabbath library.

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And this bears collections down the side from a manuscript in Paris that shows that Saville has been travelling and collating mathematical texts,

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having is is a serious scholar himself. This manuscript also shows how the professors kept things in use.

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It has diagrams added to it, and they were added by David Gregory in 1707.

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So there we have a text which is been collated by the main man given to one of his professors,

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given back to the library, taken out a century of almost a century later, and drawn over by a subsequent professor.

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This manuscript itself actually then, was the manuscript from which the printed edition of this text in 1710 was set.

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And that's actually something which is quite common in the Sappho manuscripts is the manuscripts behind Oxford printed books.

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There are four or five manuscripts that were used to print out mathematical texts, particularly by John Wallace,

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who had a habit of getting manuscripts made up for the press, printing from them, and then depositing them back in the library.

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Some of the manuscripts have common origins people are interested in in the deep history of libraries behind libraries.

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There's a whole group of these manuscripts that ultimately came from the Franciscan Monks of Doncaster, which is rather, rather interesting,

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at least two of which then bear the signature of the Elizabethan mathematician John Dean, who will be known to to all of you.

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And so I presume all of those Doncaster manuscripts came through D and that they eventually ended up in Saville's hands.

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And then in his library, one of these, which is a copy of Boethius, his arithmetic is actually presented to by a man called Christopher Saxton.

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Some of you will know as the great Elizabethan cartographer.

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So there's a lot of patterns of exchange and donation hiding around in the Southern manuscripts.

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The manuscripts also contain saddles in translation of Ptolemy's almagest, with the commentaries of Theon and covered sea lots.

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And that was actually the text on which Savall gained his M.A.

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So it's really his kind of thesis, if you like, which is hanging around there.

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There are also a set of four manuscripts, which are his lecture notes from 1570, which, as I say,

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are very exciting for historians of science because they show what was going on at the cutting edge of

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mathematics in astronomy in the 1570s in Oxford and Saville in the standard Oxford Indian Way is not dogmatic.

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A very important thing to understand about the history of science in the English universities is that,

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particularly in the post reformation universities,

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they prided themselves on not banning texts on Catholic University, said, you know, you can't read this and don't regard it until it is corrected.

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The Protestants, rightly or wrongly, in England, certainly in less than the low countries, prided themselves on not censoring.

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But the concomitant of that is that they also did not like saying very solidly, we believe in Copernicus, we believe this.

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So that would be to fall into the error of dogmatism again.

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So when I say that Saville lectures on different systems side by side, I don't want to say that he's some sort of pussyfooting fence sitter.

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I wouldn't say that this is real intellectual honesty of that time to say, well,

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there are various theories about how this might work and the English pride

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themselves on the Libertas philosophy and the right through the 17th century.

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Well, what else can we find there? John Greaves I mentioned earlier on, I said he he travelled in the Orient.

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John Greaves. His papers were there. He is my favourite of the civilian professors.

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He was a metro allergist. He wrote books about the Roman coinage and the weights of coinage, a very technical form of numismatics,

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quite different from the there's a picture of a pretty emperor on this.

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He was really interested in ancient weights and measures, but he was also extremely interested in the pyramids.

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In the 1630s, he goes out to Egypt with a set of Oxford mathematical tools on his back.

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He takes a camel ride to the Great Pyramids and he crawls inside and he measures it with instruments from Oxford.

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He comes back and he publishes a book called Pyramids of Great Fire, which is all about his journeys into the pyramids.

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He it's an extremely sensible book and it contains some remarkable statements in it for the Bosnian people here.

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He refers to a Chinese map in his keeping, which is an extremely interesting remark.

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I have some ideas about what that map is. It's not the seldom map, but it is.

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There are earlier maps of China knocking around the developing not as famous as the Sultan, not that I know of at least two.

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And I really do wonder where his map of China went.

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He said it's printed in China. Is it so it's a real one that's come across.

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Well, Greaves was walking around in the pyramids and he had a notebook with him.

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And you can order up in this type of manuscripts today.

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And I think it's clearly been in his pocket on on camelback, because the thing is, is bent round like this.

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It follows the line of one's thigh. And it is an extraordinary thing.

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It has pencil hieroglyphs in it that must have been drawn from hieroglyphic reliefs in the 1630s.

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That's quite a wandering around for a civilian professor at the time.

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And it really is, I think, one of the most astonishing objects I know in the population, but that went into the Saville manuscripts.

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What was his interest in the pyramids? If I digress very slightly, it's crazier than it sounds.

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Greaves said that in the modern world,

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we have such a problem with the weights and measures in different countries using different weights and measures.

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If only we could all agree on a kind of, you know, a metre in a box somewhere, then we could all understand what we were saying.

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And he says, Well, the interior dimensions of the great chamber in Great Pyramid have remained unchanged for thousands of years.

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Why don't we adopt that as the international standard of measurement, which is quite an idea.

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It didn't catch all that interesting.

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Orientalism, by the way, is also. Witnessed in the papers and a rather surprising manuscript as well.

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Saville, 48, which is the manuscripts of William Adams, who some of you will know is a navigator of the period who went to Japan.

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Siam coach in China on a series of different voyages between 1614 and 1690.

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And that manuscript was deposited in the Saville Papers where it was not recognised for centuries until the early 20th century.

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Someone dug it out and said, This is amazing and I can tell you who it is as well.

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And that was only published in 1916. Well, there are various unpublished works as well, which are contemporary to the the time of the civilian shows.

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I was looking yesterday a rather peculiar, enormous manuscript by my Uncle John Chambers, who was a relatively minor academic.

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He was a fan of Eton, but he wrote this enormous manuscript called A Confrontation of Astrological Demonology.

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And it's this enormous book with wonderful binding the royal arms inside.

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It is written in a beautiful calligraphic hand, and it is obviously written for the king.

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And it has the King James the first his arms inside it. And I'm not entirely sure what therefore it is doing in the Saville manuscripts,

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but my my guess is that it was written not for the king, but somehow it was given to Saville instead.

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The two men had connections together and ended up in the Seattle library.

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Why is this manuscript important? I wondered.

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And the answer to this, I think, is this Saville's statutes for his chair contain a very interesting cause,

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which is that his professors shall not lecture on astrology.

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That is, in intellectual terms, a rather modernist statement.

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SAVILLE Like actually quite a lot of Calvinist theologians at the time in

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Scotland probably would have identified themselves as in that particular parish,

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had a healthy scepticism about astrology, judicial astrology.

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And Saville is remarkable in saying that mathematical lecturers will not treat of astrology,

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which is really one of the major functions of mathematical knowledge at the time, is the calculation of astrological problems.

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If Saville says that's that's not what I'm interested in. Chambers is also not interested in it.

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And this is a book about how ridiculous astrology is. And I think that is why it's in the Saville Library.

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We assume from the other end of that argument that it's it's a kind of it's a done deal by that time, but it really isn't.

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And the civilian foundation in being anti astrological is really quite remarkable at the time.

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Well, I mentioned some instruments, and I want to tell you a little bit about what you might find there as well,

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which isn't book the Greaves Brothers. I mentioned John Greaves, the man inside the pyramid.

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He had a brother called Thomas Greaves, who was also a remarkable academic at the time.

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They were both orientalists as well, and they were some of the early proficient scholars of Arabic in the university.

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There's a very interesting connection between Arabic and the civilian charts.

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Quite a few of the later professors were the leading Arabists of that time as well.

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Edward Bernard is a particular example and Edmund Halley as well,

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who repeatedly taught himself Arabic by looking at parallel Arabic, Greek and working out from there if one believes that.

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But the Greaves brothers bequeathed to the civilian study a set of instruments,

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and this was thought important enough that the list was printed in a late 17th century catalogue of Oxford books.

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The acidity in establishments remarkable in this catalogue because all the

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printed books were were listed and printed in what we call Bernard's catalogue,

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which is the first Indian catalogue of manuscripts. And the only known manuscript things in it are the civilian books and the civilian instruments.

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So it was clearly thought of as an extremely important, integral phenomenon, important enough to be catalogued as one.

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And looking down the list, what the brothers gave.

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So if you're walking into what is now the catalogue room in the or the collection desk in the more reading room in the late 17th century,

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there you would have found an astrolabe,

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a quadrant to sextant, to optics, a mural quadrant of quadrant with telescopes fitted onto each of its arms to a six and a 15 foot telescope.

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A pendulum clock very important, a wooden globe, a demonstration cone,

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a pair of great compasses, and all of Euclid's elements in diagrams carved in wood.

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I wonder what happened to them. So let me think of the civilian library as it appeared from the 1650s.

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We must imagine it not just is filled with books and manuscripts, but also with instruments probably hung on the wall.

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Most of them, some of the manuscript teaching tools from the restoration survive actually used, which is remarkable.

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There are some astronomical tables, diagrams this and diagrams of moving parts, for instance, and there are various charts as well.

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But we're used to teaching were hung on the walls. We associate most of these with John Wallace.

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And any of you are interested in this? These are Sabu 100 and 105.

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If you want to see what the teaching charts for the civilian foundation look like.

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Well, Wallace also presented his library with quite a lot of material manuscripts that were given to Wallace.

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Wallace took his duties in the university very seriously, some would say too seriously.

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He was also the keeper of the archives,

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and you will recognise him from Anthony Wood's diaries and perhaps from the gruesome portrayal of his instance of the finger post as a miserable,

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rather messed up WALLACE Which I suspect is unfortunately quite close to the truth.

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Wallace presents manuscripts that he'd use for various mathematical works.

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One of them is in the hand of the great patio group for Humphry Wanli, who had the most beautiful facsimile hand of the time.

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He was the genius of manuscript scholarship in the late 17th, early 18th century, and Wallace engaged him to produce copies of texts for the press.

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And so that is why we have warmly copying magical manuscripts in the civilian library.

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The other major donor of the period, as I mentioned, who we shouldn't forget, is Christopher Wren.

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And as I said, you can immediately tell his books because they have this CW monogram all the way down the spine.

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And they are, as one would expect, chiefly mathematical well to conclude about what happened after them in the 18th century.

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Like most things in Oxford, the library went to sleep, and not an immense amount happens.

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The civilian professors at that point were happily ensconced in New College Lane,

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and it would be wonderful to know what exactly Halley was observing from that tower as a new college name.

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This was after many of the of the headline discoveries of Halley, but he can't be doing nothing.

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And I would very much like a historian of astronomy to work that problem out.

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The chair, however, was revitalised in the early 19th century by a figure known to you in the history of science is Stephen Peter Rigo.

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He is remarkable because he swapped chairs in 1827.

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He is, I think, the only civilian professor who held both chairs, held one for a few decades.

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And that's what over until the end of the few decades, which technically means he had to swap house in New College Lane.

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I don't know if he did, but I one half was for one professor and one half was for the other.

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And then they came to a deal and swapped over at some point.

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But I don't know if Rigo had to sort of, you know, take his bed linen next door and he switched that.

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But anyway, he revitalised the library completely.

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He was very interested in the history of science as well, and he buys a lot of valuable manuscripts and donates them to the saddle collection.

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So we're in the rather weird position of. Looking at early modern objects that were actually Victorian purchases and then placed back in the library.

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He was a historian of science, as I say, as well as a as a practising mathematician.

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He wrote a book on the publication of Newton's Principio, for instance,

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and he edited several sets of letters of all the scientists that many of us would have come across inside this other library that survives.

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Rather interestingly, lists of all the undergraduates who attended his lectures is because you have to pay a fee.

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It's a sort of extra course. And right from 1811 to 1838, all these lists survive,

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which is an interesting window into who was interested in the teaching of astronomy and geometry in the university.

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These were actually placed in the civilian study, not by Rega, but by his successor, who rejoices in the name Baden-Powell.

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And he is the father of Robert Baden-Powell, the founder of the Scouts.

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So it's rather peculiar, fellows, of you college, to think that the founder of the Scouts was playing in the garden and you call his name.

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Well, the later history of the library as an institution can be summarised briefly.

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The Saville Room, which is the name for the room that was over the tower, was handed over fully to the body in 1834,

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and they agreed that they would find a kind of cupboard to chuck all the stuff in.

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And this was in the southeast angle of the of the quadrangle.

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So the bit were the kind of the old shop shops and that was called the Saville Study into which all the stuff was really pushed,

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which I think is a sign that it was not really an active resource anymore in in 1884.

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As I say, the library was formally made over to the the building.

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And that's an acknowledgement, I think, that the contents of the civilian study had become of historical interest rather than practical interest

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of the professors who don't really have any serious engagement with the books from that point of view.

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But the legacy of the civilian chairs as a historical construct was maintained by the library.

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And in fairness to the board then there is a good deal of interest shown in the civilian papers in the early 20th century.

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In 1914, for instance, medieval manuscript fragments that were used for binding printed books were following the custom in Oxford at the time,

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taken out of all the civilian printed books and placed in a in a separate manuscript.

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So if you look at a manuscript, several, 1 to 6,

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you will find all these chunks of medieval cut up medieval manuscripts that were stripped out of the printed books.

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And this had a library in 1978, really quite recently.

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Stephen Rekos people who actually purchased at auction Sotheby's and were added to the body and library here.

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So it seems to me that the library has taken over custodianship of this internal library and has done so well.

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And that's really the ongoing responsibility of the library as well as its privilege.

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The building has swallowed up several libraries and those acts of swallowing are in themselves

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historically interesting as markers of how we divide up knowledge and how the disciplines are curated,

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and how the history of the disciplines is curated and the body and has swallowed up quite a few scientific libraries, we could say.

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Perhaps the other major one to think about is the Ashmolean Library that came in the 19th century as well.

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But anyway, that is the civilian library.

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It's an extremely important library in and of itself, but it has a lot of stories internally about the professors and what they did,

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whether it's crawling through pyramids or stalking around New College Lane, but also some stories behind the books,

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particularly the medieval manuscripts of who had owned those texts in the Middle Ages.

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And as such, it is one of the most interesting and accurate barometers for the history of particularly mathematics and astronomy in the period.

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Thank you very much.