1 00:00:09,930 --> 00:00:13,020 Ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much indeed for coming. 2 00:00:15,210 --> 00:00:23,030 As the saying goes, Brooke, to avoid disappointment. This these lectures are being video podcast. 3 00:00:23,250 --> 00:00:35,520 So anybody who has been unable to attend will be able to view them as indeed all of you can in the coming coming days. 4 00:00:37,680 --> 00:00:43,259 Ladies and gentlemen, my name is Richard Ovenden, and I have the privilege of being Portlaoise librarian. 5 00:00:43,260 --> 00:00:48,690 And it's my great pleasure to welcome you to the Bodleian Library this evening. 6 00:00:49,950 --> 00:00:54,780 High up in the list of the joys of spring, alongside longer days, 7 00:00:55,560 --> 00:01:04,440 warmer weather and the occasional patch of blue sky are surely be the lectures in bibliography traditionally held at the start of 2010. 8 00:01:06,150 --> 00:01:07,379 Before I go any further, 9 00:01:07,380 --> 00:01:16,830 I'd like to warmly invite you to join us for a spring libation after this lecture in black hole just outside of where we're standing. 10 00:01:18,570 --> 00:01:25,350 Before we move on to the specifics of this evening's lecture, allow me to explain a little of the background and history to them. 11 00:01:26,610 --> 00:01:33,060 James PR Lyle was a lawyer and book collector who lived in Oxford and on his retirement in Abingdon. 12 00:01:33,720 --> 00:01:38,160 He not only collected books in a serious way, but also studied them closely. 13 00:01:38,460 --> 00:01:42,990 Publishing his research on early book illustration in Spain in 1925, 14 00:01:43,890 --> 00:01:49,470 over 100 of his best medieval manuscripts were bequeathed to the property and on his death in 1948. 15 00:01:49,920 --> 00:01:56,040 And the library subsequently purchased another 60 manuscripts and many early printed books from his executors. 16 00:01:57,030 --> 00:02:04,530 Tilly de la Mer, then on the staff of the Berkeley and published a scholarly catalogue of medieval manuscripts, then in Bodley in 1971. 17 00:02:06,030 --> 00:02:09,930 And he, of course, he's watching over us this evening. 18 00:02:11,340 --> 00:02:14,160 In addition to this great generosity to the Bodleian, 19 00:02:14,790 --> 00:02:22,620 Lyle also left a bequest to establish a series of lectures and bibliography to be delivered by invitation by leading scholars working in the field. 20 00:02:23,160 --> 00:02:23,729 To this end, 21 00:02:23,730 --> 00:02:30,360 the university established a board of electors to review the state of scholarship and to invite the leading proponents to hold the readership. 22 00:02:31,110 --> 00:02:37,560 It is this body, one that I've trained since 2013 that has invited the current reader to deliver this year's lectures. 23 00:02:38,730 --> 00:02:42,390 The lower lectures have more than fulfilled the expectations of the benefactor. 24 00:02:43,140 --> 00:02:48,300 The lectures have made a substantial contribution to the field of bibliography and its broadest interpretation. 25 00:02:48,900 --> 00:02:53,310 A high proportion of the lectures have been published and many of these have become heavily cited 26 00:02:53,320 --> 00:02:58,830 works of scholarship and not a few are known internationally as groundbreaking works in the field. 27 00:03:00,250 --> 00:03:04,190 The lower lectures were first delivered in 1952 three by Neil Curr, 28 00:03:04,420 --> 00:03:13,060 read in bibliography in the University of Oxford and published by HP in 1960 as English Manuscripts in the Century after the Norman Conquest. 29 00:03:14,050 --> 00:03:19,450 Since then, many distinguished readers have delivered lectures which have produced scholarship of an enduring quality. 30 00:03:20,260 --> 00:03:29,680 Walter Gregg in 1954 five published his as some aspects and problems of London publishing between 19 between 1515 1654. 31 00:03:29,680 --> 00:03:34,210 Its embarrassing after gave his publishers bibliography and textual criticism. 32 00:03:35,350 --> 00:03:39,879 David Folsom was the reader in 1975 six and delivered the lectures which were 33 00:03:39,880 --> 00:03:45,640 eventually published as Poet in the early 18th century book trade in 1979. 34 00:03:45,670 --> 00:03:53,500 The reader was Howard Nixon, who delivered lectures as English decorated book bindings, which were eventually published in 1992. 35 00:03:54,080 --> 00:03:59,590 John Jonathan Alexander published Medieval Illuminators and their methods of work in 93 from 36 00:03:59,590 --> 00:04:07,120 his 1982 three Liles and on Mackenzie gave them in 1987 eight as bibliography and history. 37 00:04:07,270 --> 00:04:10,930 17th century England. Well, they certainly they've never been published. 38 00:04:12,520 --> 00:04:17,050 David McKittrick of 1999 2000 were given a set in print. 39 00:04:17,290 --> 00:04:28,180 The fortunes of an idea circa 1452 1800 were published as print manuscript and the Search of Order 14 5020 1930 and published in 2003. 40 00:04:28,870 --> 00:04:37,690 Most recently, David Pearson in 20 1718 gave us a stunning series of lectures on the history of private book ownership in 17th century England. 41 00:04:39,720 --> 00:04:44,550 Read it this year more than lives up to the standards of eminence set by the best of his predecessors. 42 00:04:45,210 --> 00:04:51,690 He's a medieval scholar whose work has shaped more than one field and whose work brings the primary sources of medieval history, 43 00:04:51,930 --> 00:04:57,540 books and documents, libraries and archives into the forefront of broader historical investigation. 44 00:04:59,280 --> 00:05:07,500 Richard Sharp has been since 1998, professor of Diplomatic in the Faculty of Modern History in this University and a fellow of Wadham College, 45 00:05:07,920 --> 00:05:11,670 educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, both undergraduate and postgraduate. 46 00:05:11,970 --> 00:05:17,940 He moved to Oxford in 1991, working initially as assistant editor in the Dictionary of Medieval Latte before 47 00:05:17,940 --> 00:05:22,260 being appointed first reader and then professor in the Faculty of Modern History. 48 00:05:23,010 --> 00:05:30,090 He's been PI on the digital edition of the Medieval Times of Great Britain, funded by the Mellon Foundation and now hosted by the Bodleian. 49 00:05:30,360 --> 00:05:37,950 And on the chances of William the second, Ed Henry, the first funded by the HRC, British Academy Film Fund, etc., etc., etc. 50 00:05:39,030 --> 00:05:46,710 And among his many academic appointments, he is a member of the Committee on International Diplomacy, Latin and the President of the City Society. 51 00:05:47,220 --> 00:05:51,180 Our particular relevance to these lectures. He has been since 1990. 52 00:05:51,330 --> 00:05:54,750 General editor of the Corpus of British Medieval Library Catalogues. 53 00:05:56,940 --> 00:06:00,060 His faculty website lists 92 publications. 54 00:06:00,090 --> 00:06:07,740 I made the mistake of trying to print the list out after I'd replaced the toner cartridge and a paper stock. 55 00:06:09,360 --> 00:06:16,530 I was hugely impressed by this extraordinary academic achievement. 56 00:06:17,340 --> 00:06:21,600 His works range from an article on Betmakers in the 17th century, 57 00:06:21,900 --> 00:06:30,090 published in 1976 through a volume of medieval Irish Saints lives 1991, and additional adornment of I Own His Life, 58 00:06:30,090 --> 00:06:38,690 as from Columbus, 1995, and his handlers to the Latin writers of Great Britain and Ireland before 5040 has become a standard work of reference. 59 00:06:40,380 --> 00:06:48,120 You get a good sense of his academic contribution by just looking at the essays, articles and chapters he published in 2005. 60 00:06:48,840 --> 00:06:53,310 Books stolen from the Ely Cathedral Priory and found in Paris circa 3030. 61 00:06:54,120 --> 00:07:00,630 King had Wallace Roman epitaph, address and delivery and anglo-norman rates and unit charters. 62 00:07:01,530 --> 00:07:05,160 The variety of Bede's Prose. Thomas Tanner. 63 00:07:05,190 --> 00:07:08,670 The 1697 Catalogue and the Biblioteca Britannica. 64 00:07:09,180 --> 00:07:12,810 Monastic Reading at Thorney Abbey 1323 to 1347. 65 00:07:13,110 --> 00:07:17,280 And the English bibliographical tradition from Henry DeCosta to Thomas Turner. 66 00:07:19,400 --> 00:07:23,360 First as Trump was elected to a fellowship of the British Academy in 2003, 67 00:07:23,870 --> 00:07:28,130 as well as the Fellowship Society of Antiquities into the Royal Historical Society. 68 00:07:29,000 --> 00:07:31,550 Finally, it's important to say here in Oxford, 69 00:07:32,000 --> 00:07:37,610 Professor Sharp's influence on medieval studies here in this university has been both profound and positive, 70 00:07:37,950 --> 00:07:41,660 and through dedicated teaching, through the support of many postdocs, 71 00:07:41,870 --> 00:07:46,130 his leadership of projects he's serving on, committees dedicated to the subject, 72 00:07:46,400 --> 00:07:52,610 and his devotion to the proper pursuit of the advanced study of his field make him an ideal choice as long time reader. 73 00:07:52,940 --> 00:07:59,150 Ladies and gentlemen, a great pleasure in inviting Professor Richard Sharpe to deliver the 2018 19 line lectures, 74 00:07:59,450 --> 00:08:01,400 libraries and books in medieval England. 75 00:08:05,790 --> 00:08:14,910 As Richard has just said, the first loyal reader into the obituary was Neil Care of Morton College, whom I never knew. 76 00:08:15,840 --> 00:08:19,170 That may well be someone present today who didn't know him. 77 00:08:20,820 --> 00:08:27,720 He died in August 1982, following a fall while picking Bill Bruce on the slopes of she how you. 78 00:08:28,650 --> 00:08:38,860 And I do remember how the news was posted along with a photograph of the Duke Humphrey Reserve in the library where he had been for 50 years. 79 00:08:39,240 --> 00:08:42,240 A key member of the manuscript reading community. 80 00:08:44,120 --> 00:08:50,870 The wonderful Margaret Gibson, who I think many of you may have known like himself, 81 00:08:51,170 --> 00:08:56,510 she was from Edinburgh, was standing beside the photo and talking to readers about. 82 00:08:58,260 --> 00:09:04,170 And I thought I should just mention that it was Margaret Gibson who six years later and a long time ago, 83 00:09:04,800 --> 00:09:08,760 first inveigled me into working on medieval libraries. 84 00:09:11,090 --> 00:09:18,200 James Lyall himself had nominated Neal Keller as the first loyal reader. 85 00:09:18,860 --> 00:09:23,330 And today my focus is on the book that bears his name. 86 00:09:25,040 --> 00:09:37,230 Good. Put my glasses on. Make life easier. Cause medieval libraries of Great Britain or as I will usually refer to it, MLG be. 87 00:09:39,130 --> 00:09:48,760 Before starting on today's topic, however, I should make a few remarks by way of program for this series of six lectures. 88 00:09:50,760 --> 00:09:54,750 The question what is a library always baked? 89 00:09:55,140 --> 00:10:01,980 Must wait. Though I may say that the definition applied in an LGB has its problems. 90 00:10:03,390 --> 00:10:11,820 The book announces itself as a list of surviving books that carry evidence of the medieval provenance organised by provenance. 91 00:10:12,300 --> 00:10:14,220 Whether that is an institution. 92 00:10:15,650 --> 00:10:26,300 The word library is equated with institutional ownership, but care included service books whose relationship to a library is debateable. 93 00:10:27,110 --> 00:10:32,390 But he excluded culture and registers, which held no interest for him. 94 00:10:34,970 --> 00:10:40,520 In Lyle's will. Top of the list of his manuscripts that he most wanted to go into. 95 00:10:40,520 --> 00:10:43,850 The Bodleian is the Register of Abingdon MP. 96 00:10:45,540 --> 00:10:47,040 Which I found, he says, 97 00:10:47,220 --> 00:11:00,180 and bought in the warehouse of an Oxford bookseller some 300 years after it had been supposed to have been lost or destroyed like a manuscript. 98 00:11:00,180 --> 00:11:03,180 15. In the library. 99 00:11:03,390 --> 00:11:06,600 Its existence is ignored to find between the locus of Great Britain. 100 00:11:08,390 --> 00:11:13,610 I don't think Lyle himself meant to imply that it had been in Parker's warehouse for those 300 years. 101 00:11:16,490 --> 00:11:24,080 The two lectures this week are concerned with the main evidence for medieval libraries in England. 102 00:11:24,950 --> 00:11:31,460 Today's lecture is centred on surviving books that carry evidence of institutional provenance. 103 00:11:32,120 --> 00:11:38,270 While on Thursday I shall turn to library catalogues drawn up in the Middle Ages. 104 00:11:38,900 --> 00:11:46,730 Documents that really speak to the question of what works a library held and how the books were organised. 105 00:11:48,360 --> 00:11:57,750 These two bodies of evidence are complementary. The documentary sources do much more to depict a library as a whole. 106 00:11:58,530 --> 00:12:08,160 But comparison with surviving books allows us to add material detail to some of the books described in the documents. 107 00:12:09,120 --> 00:12:16,350 The case is outside. We have a catalogue and one of the books described on that page can match up the shelf marks. 108 00:12:17,730 --> 00:12:22,379 This process enriches the written record and in the other direction. 109 00:12:22,380 --> 00:12:30,450 The documents give us the setting to enlarge our view from individual books to whole collections. 110 00:12:31,910 --> 00:12:40,760 I've spent a fair number of years on editing and annotating the book lists and other documentary evidence from medieval libraries in Britain. 111 00:12:41,780 --> 00:12:51,620 And more recently it was under my direction that an LGB itself has been digitised and is still in process of autumn of augmentation. 112 00:12:53,360 --> 00:12:54,320 So that's week one. 113 00:12:54,350 --> 00:13:05,329 If an extra week had been interpolated, I should have given time to discussing the holdings of medieval libraries in terms of authors, 114 00:13:05,330 --> 00:13:15,140 titles, subjects to which the best guide, in my view, is the cumulative index to the corpus of British Medieval Library catalogues. 115 00:13:15,860 --> 00:13:21,080 This has been available online since 2003, but it does keep growing. 116 00:13:22,530 --> 00:13:29,310 It's known to Google as list of ID, so those three words in quotation marks will find it. 117 00:13:29,730 --> 00:13:33,330 It's also accessible from the MLG B3 website. 118 00:13:34,890 --> 00:13:43,920 Based on the documents edited in the corpus, but signalling where these can be controlled by the extant copies described in the record. 119 00:13:44,730 --> 00:13:52,680 It gives a fuller and truest sense than has hitherto been available of what works existed in British libraries. 120 00:13:52,980 --> 00:14:02,880 In what numbers? It allows one to see what works were available widely or sparsely or in a particular setting. 121 00:14:04,990 --> 00:14:14,740 Hopefully this knowledge can be related meaningfully to the pursuit of learning in the Middle Ages is an important and difficult question. 122 00:14:15,820 --> 00:14:24,130 That will be left untouched. In the second week, I shall discuss two questions. 123 00:14:24,400 --> 00:14:29,800 Simply put. Where do you library books come from and where do they go to? 124 00:14:31,870 --> 00:14:38,020 One cannot simply by looking differentiate a library book from other books for study. 125 00:14:39,140 --> 00:14:45,590 The same book might be a personal book and then an institutional book and then a personal book again. 126 00:14:46,910 --> 00:14:58,670 The improvements are very important for how we reconstruct what I've called in my title to the book Economy, in which libraries were not a part. 127 00:14:59,300 --> 00:15:05,600 How large or how small a part is something I think we've not articulated very well. 128 00:15:06,980 --> 00:15:13,430 And I have a suspicion that the mere existence of MGP may have fostered a tendency. 129 00:15:14,390 --> 00:15:19,400 In Britain to exaggerate library's share in the overall book economy. 130 00:15:21,410 --> 00:15:27,889 Now I am conscious that the 40 years since I graduated have seen a huge increase, 131 00:15:27,890 --> 00:15:35,690 increase in the study of medieval manuscripts in England as well as in other countries where the subject has had a longer tradition. 132 00:15:37,160 --> 00:15:42,200 We've grown a long way from treating manuscripts just as carriers of texts. 133 00:15:43,610 --> 00:15:49,490 I'm conscious too that I am not as well read in the recent literature as I ought to be. 134 00:15:49,910 --> 00:15:56,090 Or indeed, some of you are. I followed a narrow path. 135 00:15:57,400 --> 00:16:03,729 Helping to build the tools for picturing medieval libraries rather than cultivating 136 00:16:03,730 --> 00:16:09,730 expertise in paleo code ecology or studying large numbers of books in detail. 137 00:16:11,390 --> 00:16:14,480 But I followed that narrow path from reconquest. 138 00:16:14,720 --> 00:16:23,090 Collections such as we can move them at all to early Tudor libraries in as 139 00:16:23,090 --> 00:16:28,220 much as we can say such a thing existed distinct from late medieval libraries. 140 00:16:30,580 --> 00:16:38,160 My primary concern in these lectures is to think how we might get from the evidence of provenance, 141 00:16:38,470 --> 00:16:48,640 books and medieval lists to a lively understanding of the diversity of medieval libraries in England over time. 142 00:16:50,310 --> 00:17:00,870 So building on the evidence discussed in the first two weeks of the questions and in the middle two lectures in my third week, 143 00:17:01,200 --> 00:17:11,250 I intend simply to outline the history of libraries in England as they evolved over a period of some 500 years. 144 00:17:12,860 --> 00:17:17,270 The period is a long haul and the tools we use especially. 145 00:17:18,140 --> 00:17:26,330 Medieval libraries of Great Britain have a tendency to flatten the evidence into lists that 146 00:17:26,330 --> 00:17:34,370 do not reflect the real dimension of time in the comings and goings of individual books, 147 00:17:35,300 --> 00:17:38,960 which were not always new when acquired by an institution. 148 00:17:40,040 --> 00:17:48,230 Did not necessarily remain in the same institution from the production to the institution's extinction. 149 00:17:48,800 --> 00:17:52,730 In most cases, in England, in the 1530s and forties. 150 00:17:54,480 --> 00:17:57,870 There are three points I hope you'll be able to take away. 151 00:17:59,550 --> 00:18:05,340 Libraries in medieval England and everywhere else, too, took many forms. 152 00:18:05,340 --> 00:18:14,070 And we must never talk about the medieval library as if medieval libraries conformed to a definable type. 153 00:18:16,830 --> 00:18:20,580 Second, the libraries of medieval England were not static. 154 00:18:21,420 --> 00:18:25,500 Still less cumulative, but often changing. 155 00:18:26,790 --> 00:18:34,560 Despite the obvious fact that some books managed to stick around for more than five centuries. 156 00:18:36,330 --> 00:18:40,649 The books we have do not always speak for those. 157 00:18:40,650 --> 00:18:51,320 We have not. And third, we cannot think about libraries without thinking about the books themselves. 158 00:18:52,750 --> 00:19:01,180 While there were episodes when we think of this or that library as a planned collection with managed production. 159 00:19:02,150 --> 00:19:05,210 In England, chiefly a phenomenon of the early 12th century. 160 00:19:06,050 --> 00:19:17,450 Most libraries at most times represented the unplanned migration of books between personal ownership and institutional ownership, 161 00:19:18,290 --> 00:19:24,560 a migration that often proved temporary training of books notwithstanding. 162 00:19:26,830 --> 00:19:34,030 Now there are two considerations to be held in memory alongside these three points. 163 00:19:34,900 --> 00:19:41,650 I express these as a matter of opinion. We do not really understand, in my view, 164 00:19:41,650 --> 00:19:54,880 how the demand for books or for works was met in the Middle Ages outside the specific context of curriculum books in a university setting. 165 00:19:57,020 --> 00:20:00,770 If someone decided he wanted to see a copy of this. 166 00:20:02,150 --> 00:20:13,070 How did he do it? We certainly do not understand the attrition of the book supply in diverse contexts over the long period. 167 00:20:13,070 --> 00:20:20,290 Under Review. We are used to imagining that books have disappeared since the dissolution of the monasteries. 168 00:20:21,630 --> 00:20:26,550 But an awful lot of books disappeared during the previous 500 years, too. 169 00:20:27,330 --> 00:20:34,490 And we may know about them from lists. But factoring in that attrition is very difficult. 170 00:20:35,790 --> 00:20:38,880 No medieval libraries of Great Britain. 171 00:20:40,290 --> 00:20:44,490 I expect you all know of the books. 172 00:20:44,520 --> 00:20:49,920 We have two editions left and centre under supplements. 173 00:20:50,670 --> 00:20:54,000 1941. 1964. 174 00:20:54,900 --> 00:21:01,480 1987. Those of you who solve the arithmetic puzzle on the Today programme. 175 00:21:02,680 --> 00:21:07,240 If observed by nine 2010 is the next date in the progression. 176 00:21:09,700 --> 00:21:22,000 It was long in my mind that there should be a third edition of MLG in 2010 and that it should replace the old references to Small Dreams editions, 177 00:21:22,210 --> 00:21:26,860 medieval catalogues with the new ones from the corpus. 178 00:21:28,060 --> 00:21:35,200 Well, the corpus of medieval library catalogues was not finished in time and is still not finished. 179 00:21:37,110 --> 00:21:40,979 But from 2009, for several years, 180 00:21:40,980 --> 00:21:51,030 there was funding from the Mellon Foundation to digitise the 1964 edition and the supplement and LGB two and MLG two plus, 181 00:21:51,030 --> 00:21:59,640 as we referred to them in the office with a view to a third edition and an electronic version that could do much more. 182 00:21:59,760 --> 00:22:07,589 And No. Judy three, which I will open up in a little while, and you can see that the first one was quite thin. 183 00:22:07,590 --> 00:22:12,000 The second one, a good deal fatter. The thin one is just a supplement. 184 00:22:13,710 --> 00:22:25,770 The story of how the work was created is well known through the biographical memoirs of four protagonists, Roger Miners who had the idea. 185 00:22:27,570 --> 00:22:30,960 Richard Hunt of this parish who encouraged it. 186 00:22:32,010 --> 00:22:46,980 My predecessor. But. To Christopher Chaney, who got cards printed to manage the work and found a publisher for it in wartime of new care himself, 187 00:22:47,460 --> 00:22:52,890 who alone remained in Oxford during the war years as a hospital orderly. 188 00:22:54,810 --> 00:23:04,710 The idea rose out of mine as his work on Registrar Anglia and the manuscript of Tristram Anglia is in the display case outside. 189 00:23:05,460 --> 00:23:12,990 This is a union catalogue listing copies of select authors, mainly from monastic libraries. 190 00:23:13,930 --> 00:23:20,140 It was compiled by the Oxford Franciscans in as I think, the late 13th century. 191 00:23:21,580 --> 00:23:28,000 A subject fully treated by Mary and Richard Rose in volume two of the Corpus. 192 00:23:29,540 --> 00:23:35,480 Miners back in the mid-thirties wanted to be able to test whether particular libraries 193 00:23:35,840 --> 00:23:43,240 could be shown to have held copies of the works catalogued by the Friars in registry. 194 00:23:44,390 --> 00:23:53,270 So the notion of an index of manuscripts by provenance emerged, albeit with only the briefest indication. 195 00:23:54,220 --> 00:23:57,790 Of the contents of the works contained in each book. 196 00:23:59,550 --> 00:24:07,860 Writing to Richard Hunt. In 1937, miners referred to it as an index of monastic libraries. 197 00:24:09,470 --> 00:24:14,240 And monastic libraries have continued to be seen as the dominant thread. 198 00:24:16,240 --> 00:24:22,240 It was a major achievement involving the reading of a great many pages of descriptive 199 00:24:22,240 --> 00:24:28,540 catalogues and filling out cards for each book with evidence of its medieval provenance. 200 00:24:29,080 --> 00:24:36,730 I brought in a few cards. I have quite a lot more in the office that I have before long to hand them all over to Martin 201 00:24:38,590 --> 00:24:44,380 so they can be joined up with those held in the reference area behind the reading room. 202 00:24:46,760 --> 00:24:55,610 Never before had provenance. Research pulled together so much information that had been so long dispersed. 203 00:24:56,270 --> 00:25:05,840 The early dissolution of the monasteries in England had a devastating effect, both in destruction and in scatter. 204 00:25:07,400 --> 00:25:15,230 Something which much of Europe avoided, where secularisation came much later and in a different form. 205 00:25:17,200 --> 00:25:20,230 Because of the early dispersion and destruction. 206 00:25:20,530 --> 00:25:27,460 This kind of prevalence research began sooner in England than in Italy, France or Germany. 207 00:25:28,590 --> 00:25:32,430 Early work on English provinces such as. 208 00:25:33,410 --> 00:25:36,590 Or more from France on land Tony. 209 00:25:37,130 --> 00:25:45,890 Or email James in Cambridge or Bury St Edmunds focussed on libraries that had left large caches of 210 00:25:45,890 --> 00:25:53,420 survivors comparable to the preservation of large religious libraries from France and Germany. 211 00:25:54,990 --> 00:26:02,040 Or they depended on cross matching surviving books with entries in the large medieval 212 00:26:02,040 --> 00:26:07,050 library catalogues that had already attracted attention in the late 19th century, 213 00:26:07,800 --> 00:26:12,150 such as the early 14th century catalogue of Canterbury Cathedral primary. 214 00:26:13,920 --> 00:26:24,360 Now by dividing up the reading of all the descriptive catalogues that you could get their hands on between five pairs of hands. 215 00:26:25,260 --> 00:26:31,140 The fifth man being Richard Hunt's friend, Jock Liddle of Corpus Christi College, 216 00:26:31,620 --> 00:26:36,120 who would soon leave Oxford for Athens and a much more colourful career. 217 00:26:37,740 --> 00:26:39,719 The whole range of data from England, 218 00:26:39,720 --> 00:26:50,040 Scotland and Wales was brought together wherever a book had been described that could be prevalent on what cow would call positive evidence. 219 00:26:51,270 --> 00:26:57,690 The core information was collected on index cards during the years. 220 00:27:01,000 --> 00:27:07,570 13, 14 boxes of these cards between 1938 and 1940. 221 00:27:08,630 --> 00:27:11,840 The. I don't know whether you can read any of that. 222 00:27:12,200 --> 00:27:23,630 The top one is a code filled in by the young care about 1940 from the second in a sort of college filled in by the mature care in 1973. 223 00:27:23,970 --> 00:27:32,000 In dated it say written to Andrew Watson and this is Andrew Watson's writing 1987 to say it's gone into the supplements. 224 00:27:33,950 --> 00:27:35,900 These false cards. 225 00:27:36,860 --> 00:27:46,700 Five In the handwriting of Roger Linares, he was going through more James's edition of the Ancient Libraries of Canterbury and Dover. 226 00:27:47,060 --> 00:27:51,170 And in the appendix, the James lists the cross matched books. 227 00:27:51,560 --> 00:27:56,570 So this is simply coming from those one line entries in M.R. James's book. 228 00:27:58,890 --> 00:28:03,810 And it was then organised by Care to Look Like This. 229 00:28:06,380 --> 00:28:14,660 I hope you're mostly familiar with that extraordinarily condensed shell smoke and italicised letter denoting the evidence. 230 00:28:15,170 --> 00:28:19,190 A brief indication of context. The date of the manuscript. 231 00:28:19,550 --> 00:28:24,380 And then sometimes a shelf mark. A reference to a medieval catalogue. 232 00:28:24,770 --> 00:28:29,450 A question mark which usually means there isn't positive evidence. 233 00:28:32,690 --> 00:28:38,840 The information on each individual book is presented with much concision in one line, 234 00:28:39,230 --> 00:28:47,540 a brilliant compression of information that really works for the army and has been found user friendly to a remarkable degree. 235 00:28:48,260 --> 00:28:55,100 It's been imitated in similar projects in Belgium, Germany, and though far from complete in France. 236 00:28:56,860 --> 00:29:08,170 If you've ever tried to get something like this printed, you will know that there are very likely major difficulties with the layout of proof stage. 237 00:29:08,590 --> 00:29:17,660 Anything that involves listing by shelf lock that the shape is so diverse that printers and for heaven's sake, 238 00:29:18,550 --> 00:29:24,280 the word processing packages that we mostly use don't like it. 239 00:29:28,710 --> 00:29:32,430 Curious flaw in the design is the lack of roaming heads. 240 00:29:33,610 --> 00:29:39,850 On many pages you can see lots of boldface headings for libraries, but where there's a big library, 241 00:29:40,180 --> 00:29:43,300 you have pages and pages and you don't know where they are, where you are. 242 00:29:43,870 --> 00:29:47,889 This copy was Andrew Watson's, I mean, hasty pencil at the top. 243 00:29:47,890 --> 00:29:52,050 You could see Canterbury, Christchurch, Britain, rather telling graphically. 244 00:29:54,010 --> 00:30:02,320 When Digitising MGP, I particularly wanted to retain this feature in the database. 245 00:30:02,350 --> 00:30:06,460 Now I have to try and do something small here. 246 00:30:07,900 --> 00:30:12,590 Yeah. Now. Where's my cursor? Get that out of the way. 247 00:30:12,590 --> 00:30:26,090 And we have MLG three. If I go to medieval library, I get an alphabetical list and after each one is a not a number, 248 00:30:26,390 --> 00:30:31,340 designating the number of books from that library that have been entered. 249 00:30:31,790 --> 00:30:39,649 And I'm going to whizz ahead to Norwich Cathedral, Priory 126 books. 250 00:30:39,650 --> 00:30:46,640 You can see 11 1114161 and the surrounding books. 251 00:30:47,420 --> 00:30:54,940 So here. We have something that imitates the one line legs. 252 00:30:55,510 --> 00:31:09,260 But. In a digital form, you can hit the ground and go into detail so that you're getting to see the card behind the one line entry. 253 00:31:13,080 --> 00:31:18,390 MLG be brings together the books. 254 00:31:19,910 --> 00:31:23,550 From a huge number. Of places. 255 00:31:25,560 --> 00:31:32,970 This map shows a red dot for every institution from which a book has been recorded in an MGB three. 256 00:31:33,870 --> 00:31:44,010 The small blue dots. Green dots represent institutions with the potential to appear, but from which no books have been recorded. 257 00:31:45,830 --> 00:31:53,530 There are a lot of grey dots around. The blue dots or grey dots are probably more incomplete than the red lines. 258 00:31:55,210 --> 00:32:00,640 One can map religious houses regardless of whether they appear in an LGB or not. 259 00:32:01,300 --> 00:32:07,209 But no attempt has been made to time guilds or parish churches or other small 260 00:32:07,210 --> 00:32:12,610 institutions that might have held collections of books in the later Middle Ages, 261 00:32:12,910 --> 00:32:17,680 and from which a book or two might have survived with evidence of prevalence. 262 00:32:18,370 --> 00:32:24,760 The map is a reminder that our information is woefully incomplete, even at this basic level. 263 00:32:27,170 --> 00:32:34,140 A rather difficult question to answer is this. What is the most conspicuous gap? 264 00:32:36,180 --> 00:32:42,630 Is there some large and prosperous religious house for which no books have been identified? 265 00:32:45,020 --> 00:32:49,340 I don't have a ready answer to that one, but I leave the thought with you. 266 00:32:51,290 --> 00:32:55,520 The second map is exactly the same, but leaves out Scotland. 267 00:32:57,970 --> 00:33:05,800 I said I would concentrate on England and Wales still, but I am going to have little to say about Wales. 268 00:33:07,540 --> 00:33:16,840 The surviving evidence from Wells in Scotland just isn't big enough to construct a any kind of narrative. 269 00:33:17,290 --> 00:33:24,830 Is there? Now we can see there are areas in the north of England, for example, 270 00:33:24,840 --> 00:33:29,790 in the middle of Wales or the Moors in the south west where there were no institutions. 271 00:33:30,240 --> 00:33:34,560 But there's also areas where there's quite a lot of institutions and no surviving books. 272 00:33:34,950 --> 00:33:38,820 This is true immediately west of Oxford, for example. 273 00:33:39,930 --> 00:33:47,100 And one would have thought that books from such places might have been hoovered up in Oxford, but they weren't. 274 00:33:47,940 --> 00:33:58,920 Now the third map leaves out the places that are given as notebooks and uses differentially sized dots. 275 00:33:59,370 --> 00:34:09,390 The dots do not increase in scale proportionately to the number of books or the biggest would swallow whole counties. 276 00:34:13,140 --> 00:34:16,410 Now. Most of the time, I think, 277 00:34:16,770 --> 00:34:25,049 and I say this without complaint and no GP is used simply as a ready reckoner to check whether 278 00:34:25,050 --> 00:34:32,160 this or that book of interest to the Inquirer at the time has an established provenance. 279 00:34:32,640 --> 00:34:38,030 And on what grounds? In the other direction. 280 00:34:38,030 --> 00:34:48,650 We may go to the book or the website and scroll through to find libraries represented by a substantial number of identified survivors. 281 00:34:50,240 --> 00:34:57,920 Places where there's a body of material evidence that invites further work and self wrote a 282 00:34:57,920 --> 00:35:05,620 number of articles focussed in this way on interpreting the books from a particular library. 283 00:35:06,660 --> 00:35:18,790 And I shall go back. Again to Norwich for a moment on which he published a paper in, I think 1949. 284 00:35:20,710 --> 00:35:26,800 The marks in a good many Norwich books have a commonplace appearance. 285 00:35:27,280 --> 00:35:31,599 Now the final point on here, do you get my course? 286 00:35:31,600 --> 00:35:43,330 You do. So here we have E 23 and 61 X 153 x 78. 287 00:35:44,830 --> 00:35:56,590 Next for don't y. So MOX looks like they're all open to several completely different interpretations. 288 00:35:57,700 --> 00:36:03,300 And 20 years ago, in a paper for the committee to publish a few Latin young. 289 00:36:04,580 --> 00:36:15,300 Illustrated how shelf locks. TS But if you've got enough examples from one place, you can sometimes work out what the system means and. 290 00:36:16,880 --> 00:36:21,560 Should Fox News exist and something to observe at a technical level. 291 00:36:21,920 --> 00:36:25,220 But if you understand the mark in its context, 292 00:36:26,150 --> 00:36:37,070 they allow you to understand the organisation of life and they may allow you to predict how many books there were at the height of that system. 293 00:36:39,270 --> 00:36:46,350 In the case of Norwich Care himself, it showed that the letterbox increased progressively over time. 294 00:36:47,380 --> 00:36:58,150 The books marked end with those that had survived the Great Fire in 1272, when the citizens of Norwich burnt and looted the Priory. 295 00:36:58,690 --> 00:37:05,110 An unconventional approach to deaccessioning books in the Abbey Church. 296 00:37:05,560 --> 00:37:10,540 Priory Church survived and were locked away after 1272. 297 00:37:10,990 --> 00:37:19,180 A new books acquired after that were marked with letters B, L and numbers that were incremented. 298 00:37:20,560 --> 00:37:25,570 The precise significance of these letters is not apparent, but as they grew larger, 299 00:37:26,110 --> 00:37:37,720 further letters field l added over time on the letter class x, we have x 153 here. 300 00:37:40,340 --> 00:37:54,800 Book of the Church of Norwich by most adult eastern monk of the said place sees well all of the six surviving books from the letter Class X. 301 00:37:56,690 --> 00:38:03,020 Came from Adam Easton, Cardinal of England, died in Rome in 1396. 302 00:38:05,030 --> 00:38:11,720 The numbers in those surviving books go up to X 228. 303 00:38:14,640 --> 00:38:20,910 They were shipped from Italy to England in 1407, 11 years after Easton's death. 304 00:38:22,750 --> 00:38:31,450 We know that because letters patent were issued to say the monks of Norwich didn't have to pay duty on importing these books, 305 00:38:31,450 --> 00:38:41,670 which they already owned. At Norwich, a single hand into the Norwich Marks in Easton's book books. 306 00:38:42,450 --> 00:38:46,940 No, I've opened one other than what I. 307 00:38:48,160 --> 00:39:00,460 Want to speak about. Scroll down to 126 sibley's. 308 00:39:03,750 --> 00:39:19,890 I'm looking for somebody new. College X 187, a 14th century copy of John of Souls for his Polish critics now believe college manuscripts 300 B. 309 00:39:21,840 --> 00:39:26,880 Defects in its text were made good in a leaked 14th century hand. 310 00:39:28,480 --> 00:39:31,090 Miners who dropped the volume catalogue, 311 00:39:31,480 --> 00:39:40,780 showed the letter mark and partially erased inscription to care who once identified the book was from Cardinal Easton's library. 312 00:39:42,220 --> 00:39:46,300 Kevin Drew to the attention of Billy Panton Memorial College. 313 00:39:47,050 --> 00:40:01,910 He responded with a photograph. Of a letter in Easton's name from the Archive of Westminster Abbey in the same handwriting as the corrector in x 187. 314 00:40:03,270 --> 00:40:12,000 Perhaps more likely still himself, the clock working for him in two very different contexts. 315 00:40:12,480 --> 00:40:25,030 I say that tentatively. In his description of the manuscript miners at the footnote happy the maker of catalogues who has such friends. 316 00:40:31,630 --> 00:40:36,460 228 books arriving from Cardinal Easton in 1407. 317 00:40:37,030 --> 00:40:44,920 This example anticipates a theme of my third lecture on personal books that become institutional books, 318 00:40:45,400 --> 00:40:54,640 or in this case, a substantial personal library which would have its own story if we have enough evidence to read it. 319 00:40:55,000 --> 00:41:04,990 Half a dozen survivors is not enough. After the book reached Norwich and was assigned a letter mark, the title of the work was written at the front. 320 00:41:06,030 --> 00:41:09,570 Soon, followed by reference to Henry, whose. 321 00:41:11,340 --> 00:41:14,580 And they price kritsky in mocks. 322 00:41:15,330 --> 00:41:28,920 The song is now eligible. Then in minus words, not much later a new Exlibris was added produced by the only Sony. 323 00:41:30,450 --> 00:41:34,140 The book has migrated from knowledge to value. 324 00:41:35,760 --> 00:41:47,220 That anticipates a point from my fourth lecture that books with sound provenance evidence from a certain date may nonetheless move elsewhere. 325 00:41:49,120 --> 00:41:54,970 It also illustrates one of the big limitations of MLG v. 326 00:41:56,780 --> 00:42:05,070 Back in 1941. Care admitted major collections still in situ. 327 00:42:07,260 --> 00:42:17,490 In 1964, he changed policy as regards cathedrals so that the cathedral collections of Durham, Hereford, 328 00:42:17,670 --> 00:42:30,840 Salisbury and Worcester found a place in LGB too, which is a substantial part of the reason why it's a good deal better than an LGB one. 329 00:42:34,040 --> 00:42:40,810 But he didn't include books still in the medieval colleges of Oxford and Cambridge. 330 00:42:42,240 --> 00:42:52,340 So you have to switch back again. For Angel. 331 00:42:53,340 --> 00:43:01,170 In MLG LGBT one. The head note simply refers to Cox's catalogue. 332 00:43:01,770 --> 00:43:04,260 I don't know whether this is even readable. 333 00:43:06,240 --> 00:43:15,810 The first refers to Cox's catalogue and the second ad's reference to his catalogue, published in 63, just before the appearance of the second edition. 334 00:43:17,900 --> 00:43:21,680 19 books in 122 in the Nielsen. 335 00:43:23,370 --> 00:43:33,770 The policy. Who's to say that everyone who's interested in such things knows which colleges still have their medieval manuscripts? 336 00:43:36,350 --> 00:43:44,170 This may still be true within Oxford. But it's unhelpful to the world beyond. 337 00:43:47,150 --> 00:43:56,540 It also conceals the difficulty of knowing which of the medieval manuscripts now in the college library has been there since the Middle Ages. 338 00:43:58,160 --> 00:44:02,690 Balliol has perhaps 350 medieval manuscripts today. 339 00:44:03,380 --> 00:44:16,580 The use as here of 300 B for this and 380 for a 15th century copy of the same work makes the numbering less transparent than it might be. 340 00:44:17,660 --> 00:44:29,510 A work done by Jacob Curry for MLG B three will add 290 Bayley manuscripts to MLG B three 341 00:44:30,260 --> 00:44:37,430 that are not there in MLG v2 and we will be able to see for the first time Easton's. 342 00:44:38,600 --> 00:44:44,810 John of Salisbury becoming x 187 at Norwich and then appearing at Balliol. 343 00:44:46,260 --> 00:44:51,690 This change across colleges as a whole will make a substantial difference, which I shall come to. 344 00:44:53,340 --> 00:44:56,730 Another limitation I should mention is the treatment of printed books. 345 00:44:58,410 --> 00:45:03,720 Given that evidence for manuscripts is taken down to the dissolution in 1540, 346 00:45:04,380 --> 00:45:09,900 MGP could include books printed at any time in a period of more than 80 years. 347 00:45:10,350 --> 00:45:13,440 Since Gutenberg began the printing revolution. 348 00:45:14,620 --> 00:45:20,110 Can recorded printed books with evidence of provenance, only where he came across them. 349 00:45:21,300 --> 00:45:31,880 There was no campaign to harvest them. With manuscripts, the campaign had taken the form of reading descriptive catalogues of manuscripts, 350 00:45:32,450 --> 00:45:39,529 but there were no descriptive catalogues of printed books down to 1540 in English 351 00:45:39,530 --> 00:45:44,300 libraries or indeed in libraries from other places that might contain English books. 352 00:45:45,740 --> 00:45:50,180 It is now become possible to do that for Nampula and Christina. 353 00:45:50,180 --> 00:45:53,720 Doing this project will in time gather the evidence. 354 00:45:54,230 --> 00:46:00,290 But it remains difficult to track Peruvians for books printed between 1515 40. 355 00:46:02,560 --> 00:46:03,670 I won't demonstrate this, 356 00:46:03,670 --> 00:46:15,340 but the advanced search in Mojave three allows you to select printed books and you can then view all 482 of them presently in there, 357 00:46:16,080 --> 00:46:19,330 and it will sort by provenance and date. 358 00:46:19,720 --> 00:46:27,370 But you can't sort by dates alone to get an overview of these 482 printed books. 359 00:46:29,680 --> 00:46:34,209 It's very likely that further work on in situ collections, 360 00:46:34,210 --> 00:46:40,720 in cathedrals and in university colleges will increase the number of printed books quite substantially. 361 00:46:41,560 --> 00:46:43,930 Ian Doyle For example, it identified. 362 00:46:45,090 --> 00:46:54,990 A considerable number of printed books from Durham Cathedral Priory, which we expect Sheila Hinckley sometime Palace Library to publish in due course. 363 00:46:57,140 --> 00:47:04,790 Before going further into the challenge of using MLG, it is time to look at some numbers. 364 00:47:06,570 --> 00:47:14,610 I mentioned that miners at a very difficult I'm losing track this is what your mine is is copy of MLG V1. 365 00:47:15,150 --> 00:47:21,510 So this is miner's notice of additions. This is Neil Cairns copy of an LGB two. 366 00:47:22,440 --> 00:47:29,520 So you can see there's more additions arising and they will go will going into the supplement in 1987. 367 00:47:30,270 --> 00:47:38,759 Now. Time to look at some numbers I mentioned of miners at a very early stage, 368 00:47:38,760 --> 00:47:50,430 referred to the project as an index of monastic hooks relevant to cross matching with copies recorded from monastic libraries in request from Anglia. 369 00:47:51,850 --> 00:47:57,759 He overlooked the fact that the friars in Reduced from Anglia reported on titles from six 370 00:47:57,760 --> 00:48:02,710 of the secular cathedrals as well as from those cathedrals for the monastic community. 371 00:48:03,570 --> 00:48:08,550 Indeed from Exeter to London and from Salisbury, they reported. 372 00:48:09,530 --> 00:48:11,870 Well over 100 titles in each case. 373 00:48:14,250 --> 00:48:22,860 And LGB has been referred to as providing evidence for the survival of some 5000 books from the dissolved monasteries. 374 00:48:24,030 --> 00:48:27,790 But it pays to look more closely at the figures here. 375 00:48:27,810 --> 00:48:37,830 Organised monastic orders, mendicant orders, secular institutions and universities are then broken down into smaller band. 376 00:48:38,490 --> 00:48:46,650 You have a number of institutions from which a report exists and the number of books. 377 00:48:47,310 --> 00:48:58,320 And these are very basic numbers. There are 6726 books reported under the headings of 595 institutions. 378 00:48:59,640 --> 00:49:06,990 It's difficult to allow for those books entered under two institutions, but there weren't very many of them. 379 00:49:08,370 --> 00:49:16,020 In the printed editions. And Easton's public credit is only only under one. 380 00:49:17,280 --> 00:49:20,850 They're not so numerous as to make a mess of all figures. 381 00:49:21,240 --> 00:49:26,430 And I do count 140 institutions that have a hidden note in the book. 382 00:49:26,700 --> 00:49:31,620 But on the books, this means that you mean that there is something to say. 383 00:49:31,950 --> 00:49:36,680 But Leland or Bale may say, I saw books there, but we don't have it. 384 00:49:38,360 --> 00:49:50,900 Benedictine abbey. Some Prioress dominates with books recorded from 127 houses, of which 102 are men's houses and 25 women's houses. 385 00:49:51,560 --> 00:49:58,450 We should look at women's houses separately in a few minutes. They account for 66 books. 386 00:49:58,810 --> 00:50:08,530 I took the 3500 from Benedictine houses, which include most of the largest collections of surviving books. 387 00:50:09,370 --> 00:50:14,500 Over 50% of the total books in MGP as printed. 388 00:50:15,440 --> 00:50:23,090 We're from Benedictine houses on these figures. Augustinian canons and Cistercian monks account for some hundreds, 389 00:50:23,690 --> 00:50:31,400 and so do the secular cathedrals of which souls free Exeter and Hereford, Iowa and Lincoln are well-represented. 390 00:50:33,060 --> 00:50:37,830 On the big percentages here monastic houses, the solitude calls. 391 00:50:38,280 --> 00:50:47,100 Monastic houses account for three quarters of the recorded prevalence of survivors, not quite the 5000. 392 00:50:48,840 --> 00:50:59,520 Secular institutions for 15%, with the remaining 10% divided to and one between the mendicant and the universities. 393 00:51:01,460 --> 00:51:02,240 At this point, 394 00:51:02,240 --> 00:51:14,190 I should reveal the very significant impact on numbers that will result from the incorporation into the database of Jacob Currie's work in separating 395 00:51:14,190 --> 00:51:24,380 the medieval books that belonged to Oxford and Cambridge colleges in the Middle Ages and the medieval books they have acquired since the 16th century. 396 00:51:26,170 --> 00:51:37,840 These figures. I hope the rate is distinct will add approximately 1900 books to the road for colleges and homes. 397 00:51:38,560 --> 00:51:43,720 So it goes from 234 to 2134. 398 00:51:43,960 --> 00:51:47,650 It's an approximate figure because two and a half colleges have still to be done. 399 00:51:51,120 --> 00:51:57,750 So this bumps up the share of university books to 25%. 400 00:51:58,960 --> 00:52:08,080 Proportionately knocks down the Benedictines from 52 to 40 under monastic orders from 74 to 57. 401 00:52:12,830 --> 00:52:25,490 24 of the Oxford and Cambridge Colleges appeared in a LGB two because the prevalence of books that no survive outside the medieval colleges. 402 00:52:26,860 --> 00:52:32,860 That number rises to 28 when we include four institutions that still have some 403 00:52:32,860 --> 00:52:38,890 of their medieval books but whose books have not been found wandering abroad. 404 00:52:40,270 --> 00:52:50,770 The numbers 25 and black and 29 read. One higher than the Oxford and Cambridge totals because they include King's College in Aberdeen. 405 00:52:52,060 --> 00:53:01,720 But I haven't attempted to exclude Scottish evidence from an LGBT which takes a a British view. 406 00:53:04,480 --> 00:53:11,650 Institutions represented by substantial numbers, by figure numbers, inevitably draw one's attention, 407 00:53:12,160 --> 00:53:17,110 offering the promise of a collection much more open to study and understanding. 408 00:53:18,760 --> 00:53:33,380 See what comes next. Out of the 595 institutions included only 15 or presents represented by more than 100 proven survivors. 409 00:53:35,540 --> 00:53:38,810 I may interpolate all the all important comment. 410 00:53:39,200 --> 00:53:47,000 Let no one imagine that MGP records the books surviving from any particular house. 411 00:53:48,770 --> 00:53:54,380 It can only record those that carry evidence of their preference. 412 00:53:54,770 --> 00:54:00,979 And there may be thousands of books from nesting houses or mendicant homes or secular 413 00:54:00,980 --> 00:54:08,380 institutions that carry no evidence so far interpreted as to where they were. 414 00:54:12,520 --> 00:54:24,430 We would guess that institutions with large numbers of recognised survivors were better at marking their property and so registered good evidence. 415 00:54:25,930 --> 00:54:29,380 Than those with fewer recognised. 416 00:54:30,950 --> 00:54:36,620 That's a bit of a guess and not what I should set my store by. 417 00:54:38,250 --> 00:54:43,830 But the reality is that all books surviving today have to have some route of preservation. 418 00:54:45,850 --> 00:54:49,329 The houses are represented by substantial numbers of surviving. 419 00:54:49,330 --> 00:54:53,530 Books have usually benefited from some form of group survival. 420 00:54:55,320 --> 00:55:02,790 Big numbers may certainly reflect better chances of preservation than better evidence prudence. 421 00:55:03,180 --> 00:55:15,150 But it's certainly dangerous to treat numbers of recognised books as in any way a proxy for the size of a medieval library as it was. 422 00:55:17,020 --> 00:55:22,150 If 15 institutions are represented by 100 books or more. 423 00:55:23,000 --> 00:55:25,730 Then 580 are represented by fewer. 424 00:55:26,450 --> 00:55:40,910 And the fact is that 100 institutions, as currently listed, are represented by ten or more books and 495 by fewer than ten. 425 00:55:41,840 --> 00:55:45,310 No. You go back to the map. 426 00:55:48,100 --> 00:55:57,460 We must be aware that a very high proportion of these doors stand for very small numbers of books. 427 00:55:58,850 --> 00:56:02,780 47 institutions are represented by three books. 428 00:56:04,150 --> 00:56:10,050 95 by just two books. 225. 429 00:56:10,630 --> 00:56:17,480 By a single book. Now I am not sure whether one is allowed to do this, but if you treat that as a growth, 430 00:56:18,200 --> 00:56:22,099 the temptation is to project the line and say are still larger. 431 00:56:22,100 --> 00:56:30,400 Number of houses must be represented by New X and those were the grey dots on map. 432 00:56:32,460 --> 00:56:38,760 Working at home may extrapolate from a handful of books to some perception of the collection 433 00:56:38,760 --> 00:56:45,120 they represent is one way to move from such data towards the history of a library. 434 00:56:46,740 --> 00:56:52,800 Even in isolation, the presence of a shelf lock is still evidence of a collection. 435 00:56:53,610 --> 00:56:59,550 An X Libraries represents a management and a more elaborate note on contents. 436 00:57:01,840 --> 00:57:05,010 May reflect cataloguing, for example. 437 00:57:06,780 --> 00:57:20,400 No. I have not studied the evidence sufficiently to study for how many one book institutions will has the option to construct an edifice. 438 00:57:20,430 --> 00:57:28,020 There's a lot of work that. But for many houses there is little indeed to go. 439 00:57:29,150 --> 00:57:34,490 On the other hand, we have 15 houses with big numbers. 440 00:57:34,790 --> 00:57:44,780 These 15 libraries are two and a half percent of the institutions, and they supplied 58 and a half percent of the books recorded by CARE. 441 00:57:46,010 --> 00:57:50,120 The top five houses are 0.8. 442 00:57:50,120 --> 00:58:05,989 4% of institution supplied 1917 books, 28.5%, three of the Benedictine cathedrals and two major abbeys, with more than 600 surviving books recognised. 443 00:58:05,990 --> 00:58:14,990 And that's a number that will rise. Durham is certainly the best preserved medieval collection by number from the Middle Ages. 444 00:58:15,500 --> 00:58:24,710 It may well be the best preserved as a proportion of its original holdings in the 1390s. 445 00:58:25,220 --> 00:58:30,260 Two catalogues of the two main stores of books. 446 00:58:31,860 --> 00:58:37,290 Describe for us 900 volumes, say 600 books. 447 00:58:37,350 --> 00:58:45,270 Surviving from all periods looks quite good next to 900 there in 1392. 448 00:58:45,270 --> 00:58:52,490 1395. Compare Canterbury from where 360 books, 449 00:58:52,670 --> 00:59:05,930 361 books of all periods is still a high rate of preservation when compared with a catalogue of 1837 books in 1326. 450 00:59:06,620 --> 00:59:09,770 We need to be careful in our language in such comparisons. 451 00:59:10,270 --> 00:59:20,830 We're including books now in existence. That were not made until after the documents were drawn up, from which I'm getting the overall numbers. 452 00:59:21,430 --> 00:59:26,920 Such books are not survivors from the catalogues, but from the libraries. 453 00:59:27,370 --> 00:59:31,790 And we must hold this lack of chronological fit in our mind. 454 00:59:31,810 --> 00:59:35,530 This is an inevitable anomaly in the evidence we've got. 455 00:59:37,370 --> 00:59:45,290 A majority of the manuscripts of Durham Cathedral priory remain in the Cathedral Library today, nine managed by the university. 456 00:59:46,610 --> 00:59:52,850 Many, but not a majority of the manuscripts from Worcester remain Worcester today, 457 00:59:53,600 --> 00:59:59,990 but more with their in the early 17th century when listed by Patrick Young in 1622. 458 01:00:01,430 --> 01:00:05,690 Otherwise, documentary evidence from Worcester is severely limited. 459 01:00:07,320 --> 01:00:15,360 Canterbury Cathedral, Priory and St Augustine's Abbey in Canterbury benefited from the interest of manuscript collectors in the 16th century. 460 01:00:16,110 --> 01:00:24,870 And in the case of the cathedral, it was demons and archbishops who had the interest to preserve many of the surviving books. 461 01:00:25,850 --> 01:00:35,270 In an important lecture from 1941, CARE showed the differential rates of survival of different types of book. 462 01:00:35,840 --> 01:00:44,540 By comparing the books we have with the evidence of the launch medieval catwalks from those institutions. 463 01:00:45,350 --> 01:00:50,749 He drew attention to the mocked preference of 16th century collectors for handsome, 464 01:00:50,750 --> 01:00:55,820 well-made books of the 12th century containing works of the Latin fathers. 465 01:00:57,390 --> 01:01:08,520 These he showed had survived much better than works of 13th or 14th century scholastics, which had lost their interest by the 16th century. 466 01:01:09,180 --> 01:01:17,130 Bronze, unscrupulous have been set in Boccardi. Other explanations may operate in other contexts. 467 01:01:17,520 --> 01:01:23,429 But one must always bear in mind that the preservation of large groups of manuscripts 468 01:01:23,430 --> 01:01:29,580 or indeed of printed books may be conditioned by preferences 400 years ago. 469 01:01:30,360 --> 01:01:35,250 500, nearly 500 years ago. That may not be apparent to us. 470 01:01:36,030 --> 01:01:44,870 Before moving on, I should just show you how the freshly collected data from the university colleges alter this total. 471 01:01:46,460 --> 01:01:54,980 Two Oxford colleges and three Cambridge colleges come in as retaining more than 100 of their medieval manuscripts. 472 01:01:55,850 --> 01:02:05,240 This data is not complete. I expect that new college and very likely Lincoln College will also be added to this table in due course. 473 01:02:07,450 --> 01:02:15,190 So including the university colleges. The top 20 are either Benedictine or secular foundations, 474 01:02:15,640 --> 01:02:22,990 with the exceptions of Lentini Priory of Augustinian canons near Gloucester and the early 15th Century Foundation, 475 01:02:23,350 --> 01:02:33,710 Zion Abbey of the Order of the Holy Saviour. Land, Tony, with 166 has the largest tally from any Augustinian house. 476 01:02:34,370 --> 01:02:40,310 And from here, we also have a 14th century catalogue with 400 entries. 477 01:02:41,610 --> 01:02:47,579 X libraries are inconsistently found, but a large proportion of the survivors, 478 01:02:47,580 --> 01:02:54,090 a very large proportion of the survivors have come down to us as a collection in Lambeth Palace Library. 479 01:02:55,260 --> 01:03:00,870 The next largest tally from an Augustinian house is 14 from Simon's sister. 480 01:03:02,640 --> 01:03:12,210 From. AP We have 111 identified survivors from a catalogue of of the 1400. 481 01:03:13,660 --> 01:03:15,459 Only half a dozen carrion, 482 01:03:15,460 --> 01:03:26,920 x liquorice and even fewer the shelf blocks that are very prominent in structuring the important early 16th century catalogue of this library. 483 01:03:27,220 --> 01:03:37,520 Superbly edited by Vincent Gillespie. Cion is an example where the identification of excellent books depends quite heavily. 484 01:03:38,440 --> 01:03:45,380 On the evidence from the documentary record. But I was not going to fall into first a subject. 485 01:03:46,490 --> 01:03:52,100 The highest number of books known from other religious orders is generally much lower. 486 01:03:53,750 --> 01:04:00,830 A tally of 20 or 30 books appears quite substantial, but next to the major collections. 487 01:04:02,710 --> 01:04:10,360 It is not easy to build rich interpretations from the largest number from any Cistercian house is 54 from build was. 488 01:04:11,860 --> 01:04:22,180 But we shall see that their survival is a complicated one because Build Walls was deaccessioning books of the Great Race in the early 15th century. 489 01:04:23,880 --> 01:04:31,410 Three. Yorkshire House is following in the ranking fountains with 42 by land with 27 and Riva with 22. 490 01:04:32,310 --> 01:04:35,550 Numbers of books from the Conference of Friars are small. 491 01:04:36,450 --> 01:04:40,950 The largest number being 36 from the Austin Friars in Cambridge. 492 01:04:42,060 --> 01:04:48,750 The library in their conference in York is represented now by ten survivors. 493 01:04:49,650 --> 01:04:59,520 But we have the catalogue showing more than 300 books in 1372, a collection that would double in size within 20 years. 494 01:05:00,150 --> 01:05:06,870 With the accession shown as additions in the catalogue of the books of Friar John Ogham, 495 01:05:07,440 --> 01:05:11,640 the largest private collection documented for us for medieval England. 496 01:05:13,500 --> 01:05:17,220 There's a library of more than 600 books at the end of the 14th century. 497 01:05:17,550 --> 01:05:22,740 Was winnowed away over the next. Century. 498 01:05:22,740 --> 01:05:30,240 Over the last century, half of the Ferrari's existence in the 500 years since is clear evidence that we 499 01:05:30,240 --> 01:05:35,430 should not rush to treat low survival numbers as implying a small collection. 500 01:05:37,170 --> 01:05:47,700 In numbers. What makes the difference between Lent to me with 400 books in its catalogue of around 1360 and it's 166 known survivors and 501 01:05:47,700 --> 01:05:58,290 these your crayons with 600 books around 1390 ten recognised survivors is explained by the opportunity of preservation. 502 01:06:00,290 --> 01:06:11,540 When we look at books from countries, we find that in aggregate there are 109 books recognised for 41 different houses on average. 503 01:06:11,840 --> 01:06:16,310 Little more than two perhaps. I mean, reality mostly just won't. 504 01:06:18,110 --> 01:06:21,980 Best preserved in a number of 16 books from Barking Abbey. 505 01:06:22,820 --> 01:06:27,500 The earliest of these is a gospel book of the early 11th century. 506 01:06:27,710 --> 01:06:38,180 Now boldly 155 owned in the 16th century by Stephen Batman, Archbishop Parker's chaplain who helped in the collection of Parker's famous library. 507 01:06:39,350 --> 01:06:47,420 The others include a higher proportion of late medieval books in French and in English than is usual in an LGBT. 508 01:06:48,780 --> 01:06:59,850 But some of the earlier Latin books share the same long Exlibris inscription entered by a librarian at Barking in the 13th century, 509 01:07:00,180 --> 01:07:10,830 organising a library. And she was presumably the nun referred to as Ra in the Cozumel of the Abbey. 510 01:07:11,220 --> 01:07:16,050 Known to us in our crew, a copy made for Abu Simbel in 1484, 511 01:07:16,350 --> 01:07:23,970 a copy of an earlier manuscript which describes the procedure of the Lenten reflection 512 01:07:24,360 --> 01:07:31,620 in terms very similar to what we find in the Westminster and Canterbury costumes. 513 01:07:32,190 --> 01:07:41,720 So that. Connections through the customer is a warning that don't take 16 looks for barking as evidence. 514 01:07:42,110 --> 01:07:48,020 Barking did not have. An organised library for the nuns. 515 01:07:49,600 --> 01:07:59,590 The customer affirms the Benedictine practice of reading, by contrast, from the Franciscan nuns at Stanford. 516 01:08:00,070 --> 01:08:11,770 We've identified only a copy of the Rule of Saint Bennett in English, printed in London in 1517, which belonged to the Prioress. 517 01:08:11,770 --> 01:08:17,050 Dame Margaret, standing now boldly on a DE 15. 518 01:08:18,440 --> 01:08:24,200 Well, that one book leaves us entirely in ignorance of conventional books. 519 01:08:24,470 --> 01:08:33,720 If that was simply the Prioress book. Faced with some 595 lists of books, most of them very short. 520 01:08:34,580 --> 01:08:43,559 One has to have principles for interpreting them. And Keller was of a generation that did not set out an interpretation in Haiti. 521 01:08:43,560 --> 01:08:50,090 Notes at the top of these short lists. He left it to us to learn the ropes. 522 01:08:51,410 --> 01:08:57,260 Though his introduction in the 1941 edition is wonderfully clear on his thinking, 523 01:08:57,680 --> 01:09:04,460 particularly about the evidence of prudence, which is sometimes local and sometimes complex. 524 01:09:06,470 --> 01:09:13,220 But a book can only be recognised if it carries evidence and a book can only be entered 525 01:09:13,340 --> 01:09:21,200 if it survives and lays a two preconditions that many institutions may not have met. 526 01:09:21,950 --> 01:09:30,160 The difficulty of reinterpreting a list in shelf mock order that should go back on almost mind. 527 01:09:30,450 --> 01:09:33,620 And that's not easy to do. 528 01:09:35,980 --> 01:09:41,950 But to Norwich we can take see if Norwich will work for us. 529 01:09:43,300 --> 01:09:44,860 This isn't a mock order. 530 01:09:45,760 --> 01:09:55,660 It's really quite difficult to make sense of it and it's even difficult to be sure that all these books were ever present at one time. 531 01:09:58,500 --> 01:10:13,320 But we can now go to the talks and instead of seeing preview, we can select table and then go to this dropdown and select provenance dates. 532 01:10:14,900 --> 01:10:29,930 And in so far as the program can handle date painter graphic details in Roman numerals, it will attempt to give you those holdings. 533 01:10:31,350 --> 01:10:35,220 In that order. I mentioned the fire of 1272. 534 01:10:35,790 --> 01:10:40,530 Norwich doesn't have very many books from before 1272. 535 01:10:40,800 --> 01:10:47,340 If I'd opened Bury St Edmunds, we would start with a run of ninth and 10th and 11th century books. 536 01:10:49,230 --> 01:11:02,400 One would like to get a more general profile by counting the six seven the 6726 or the 8626 books by you in this way. 537 01:11:03,060 --> 01:11:11,880 But this is very difficult. A spreadsheet does not do well with sorting Roman numerals quantified by obliques dashes and fractions, 538 01:11:13,620 --> 01:11:18,270 and translating all piratical beatings into surrogate Arabic numerals. 539 01:11:18,840 --> 01:11:26,040 Forces want to review thousands of judgements, resolving numbers into a bar chart. 540 01:11:26,220 --> 01:11:28,950 By the 10th century of the century, 12th century, 541 01:11:28,950 --> 01:11:37,590 13th century produces a fairly uninformative result relatively small numbers from the centuries before 1100, 542 01:11:38,130 --> 01:11:47,250 a great bulge in the 12th century, a drop in the 13th century, and a substantial rise in the 14th and 15th centuries. 543 01:11:48,810 --> 01:11:54,300 With more experience of building library catalogues than have statistics from actual books. 544 01:11:55,020 --> 01:12:04,770 I felt that the dip in the 13th century was less than I'd expected, but nonetheless, I look on such figures as unhelpful. 545 01:12:05,190 --> 01:12:10,620 I do not think an LGB three will provide a great statistical resource. 546 01:12:12,320 --> 01:12:18,710 But we have to stick to the things we should look for when thinking about individual libraries. 547 01:12:19,220 --> 01:12:30,710 First, libraries, especially uniform ones that reflect an active librarian and may indeed provide a date horizon for provenance ability. 548 01:12:32,000 --> 01:12:38,540 One librarian in the Middle Ages intellectually brings in 1250, and none of his successors did. 549 01:12:39,330 --> 01:12:42,480 Later books from that institution may not be recognised. 550 01:12:44,090 --> 01:12:50,630 Signs of active librarianship, even if it's only once in the Middle Ages, are a positive indicator. 551 01:12:51,410 --> 01:13:00,170 Deciding whether continual, fitful or occasional activity is a necessary part of the interpretation. 552 01:13:02,280 --> 01:13:07,410 Press box if we've got them of whatever kind, must be a good indicator of the mind. 553 01:13:09,140 --> 01:13:14,780 And I mentioned you'll see notes of contents very likely reflect the drafting of the catalogue. 554 01:13:15,200 --> 01:13:20,480 Bury St Edmunds We had a library in the 1350s and sixties. 555 01:13:20,840 --> 01:13:28,610 He not only wrote quite detailed accounts of the contents, we spotted bios of all the people in front of the books, 556 01:13:29,060 --> 01:13:32,900 but he also compiled them into a bibliography of church sources. 557 01:13:36,110 --> 01:13:40,610 Attempting to interpret survivors in chronological terms, however, is very difficult. 558 01:13:41,580 --> 01:13:46,680 If you're looking at the house, I'd say sort in chronological order, just in case. 559 01:13:47,910 --> 01:13:59,340 But no matter how you look at it, MGP brings together individual books more or sometimes less plausibly under an institutional heading. 560 01:14:00,000 --> 01:14:05,310 And there is rejoicing when we are able to add a book whose provenance is newly recognised, 561 01:14:05,790 --> 01:14:12,240 another brick in the wall, and especially if it brings evidence for an institution hitherto absent. 562 01:14:14,000 --> 01:14:20,330 And it often helps in our use of a particular book to know where it was owned and used. 563 01:14:20,870 --> 01:14:30,830 But no entry in MGP represents a library in any meaningful sense at any point in its existence. 564 01:14:31,700 --> 01:14:41,780 For that, we must turn to medieval library catalogues, which will give us a snapshot of collections in their entirety at a certain moment. 565 01:14:42,080 --> 01:14:44,240 That is my subject for Thursday. 566 01:14:52,220 --> 01:15:00,230 Ladies and gentlemen, just before we go and enjoy one another's company in the company of a glass of something or other, 567 01:15:01,100 --> 01:15:11,180 I'd like to say on behalf of the electors, how grateful we are to Richard for such a absolutely fabulous first lecture this evening. 568 01:15:11,720 --> 01:15:15,860 I think four, perhaps five things come to mind from that lecture. 569 01:15:15,890 --> 01:15:23,450 First is his mastery of the data and not only of the lists themselves, but of the books, 570 01:15:23,450 --> 01:15:36,650 the catalogues and the multiplicity of evidence that care pointed out its central ity to our study of and our understanding of the medieval library. 571 01:15:37,400 --> 01:15:44,540 Secondly, to the community of medievalist, which Richard is not only part of now, 572 01:15:44,750 --> 01:15:55,970 but the inheritor of traditions, approaches ways of working and evidence, and is how lucky we are. 573 01:15:56,000 --> 01:16:02,479 I reflected during the course of this lecture here in Oxford to have had what are now called 574 01:16:02,480 --> 01:16:08,870 critical mass or to have had critical mass at various points in our institutional history, 575 01:16:09,170 --> 01:16:16,790 which have enabled Richard to build on the work of care and miners and Cheney and Gibson and so on. 576 01:16:17,120 --> 01:16:29,960 And for him to be joined today by an astonishing group of brilliant medieval scholars here in this university today and. 577 01:16:32,360 --> 01:16:39,290 Also to say how astonishing and how revelatory it was to see him rise above 578 01:16:39,590 --> 01:16:45,409 the data and to draw the pictures from the individual pieces of that jigsaw, 579 01:16:45,410 --> 01:16:47,450 which are so impressive, 580 01:16:47,450 --> 01:16:58,640 and to see the visualisation of the data that he has accumulated and assessed and evaluated with the help of others and built on the work of others, 581 01:17:00,350 --> 01:17:06,020 leaves us with an appetite whetted for more in the subsequent five lectures. 582 01:17:06,260 --> 01:17:07,100 And finally, 583 01:17:07,310 --> 01:17:19,490 just to share with you the relief that of this database actually survived the repeated test in its life drive through by Richard this evening. 584 01:17:19,880 --> 01:17:28,730 So, ladies and gentlemen, please join me and the electors in thanking Professor Sharpe for an outstanding line lecture.