Ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much indeed for coming.
As the saying goes, Brooke, to avoid disappointment. This these lectures are being video podcast.
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.
Ladies and gentlemen, my name is Richard Ovenden, and I have the privilege of being Portlaoise librarian.
And it's my great pleasure to welcome you to the Bodleian Library this evening.
High up in the list of the joys of spring, alongside longer days,
warmer weather and the occasional patch of blue sky are surely be the lectures in bibliography traditionally held at the start of 2010.
Before I go any further,
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.
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.
James PR Lyle was a lawyer and book collector who lived in Oxford and on his retirement in Abingdon.
He not only collected books in a serious way, but also studied them closely.
Publishing his research on early book illustration in Spain in 1925,
over 100 of his best medieval manuscripts were bequeathed to the property and on his death in 1948.
And the library subsequently purchased another 60 manuscripts and many early printed books from his executors.
Tilly de la Mer, then on the staff of the Berkeley and published a scholarly catalogue of medieval manuscripts, then in Bodley in 1971.
And he, of course, he's watching over us this evening.
In addition to this great generosity to the Bodleian,
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.
To this end,
the university established a board of electors to review the state of scholarship and to invite the leading proponents to hold the readership.
It is this body, one that I've trained since 2013 that has invited the current reader to deliver this year's lectures.
The lower lectures have more than fulfilled the expectations of the benefactor.
The lectures have made a substantial contribution to the field of bibliography and its broadest interpretation.
A high proportion of the lectures have been published and many of these have become heavily cited
works of scholarship and not a few are known internationally as groundbreaking works in the field.
The lower lectures were first delivered in 1952 three by Neil Curr,
read in bibliography in the University of Oxford and published by HP in 1960 as English Manuscripts in the Century after the Norman Conquest.
Since then, many distinguished readers have delivered lectures which have produced scholarship of an enduring quality.
Walter Gregg in 1954 five published his as some aspects and problems of London publishing between 19 between 1515 1654.
Its embarrassing after gave his publishers bibliography and textual criticism.
David Folsom was the reader in 1975 six and delivered the lectures which were
eventually published as Poet in the early 18th century book trade in 1979.
The reader was Howard Nixon, who delivered lectures as English decorated book bindings, which were eventually published in 1992.
John Jonathan Alexander published Medieval Illuminators and their methods of work in 93 from
his 1982 three Liles and on Mackenzie gave them in 1987 eight as bibliography and history.
17th century England. Well, they certainly they've never been published.
David McKittrick of 1999 2000 were given a set in print.
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.
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.
Read it this year more than lives up to the standards of eminence set by the best of his predecessors.
He's a medieval scholar whose work has shaped more than one field and whose work brings the primary sources of medieval history,
books and documents, libraries and archives into the forefront of broader historical investigation.
Richard Sharp has been since 1998, professor of Diplomatic in the Faculty of Modern History in this University and a fellow of Wadham College,
educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, both undergraduate and postgraduate.
He moved to Oxford in 1991, working initially as assistant editor in the Dictionary of Medieval Latte before
being appointed first reader and then professor in the Faculty of Modern History.
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.
And on the chances of William the second, Ed Henry, the first funded by the HRC, British Academy Film Fund, etc., etc., etc.
And among his many academic appointments, he is a member of the Committee on International Diplomacy, Latin and the President of the City Society.
Our particular relevance to these lectures. He has been since 1990.
General editor of the Corpus of British Medieval Library Catalogues.
His faculty website lists 92 publications.
I made the mistake of trying to print the list out after I'd replaced the toner cartridge and a paper stock.
I was hugely impressed by this extraordinary academic achievement.
His works range from an article on Betmakers in the 17th century,
published in 1976 through a volume of medieval Irish Saints lives 1991, and additional adornment of I Own His Life,
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.
You get a good sense of his academic contribution by just looking at the essays, articles and chapters he published in 2005.
Books stolen from the Ely Cathedral Priory and found in Paris circa 3030.
King had Wallace Roman epitaph, address and delivery and anglo-norman rates and unit charters.
The variety of Bede's Prose. Thomas Tanner.
The 1697 Catalogue and the Biblioteca Britannica.
Monastic Reading at Thorney Abbey 1323 to 1347.
And the English bibliographical tradition from Henry DeCosta to Thomas Turner.
First as Trump was elected to a fellowship of the British Academy in 2003,
as well as the Fellowship Society of Antiquities into the Royal Historical Society.
Finally, it's important to say here in Oxford,
Professor Sharp's influence on medieval studies here in this university has been both profound and positive,
and through dedicated teaching, through the support of many postdocs,
his leadership of projects he's serving on, committees dedicated to the subject,
and his devotion to the proper pursuit of the advanced study of his field make him an ideal choice as long time reader.
Ladies and gentlemen, a great pleasure in inviting Professor Richard Sharpe to deliver the 2018 19 line lectures,
libraries and books in medieval England.
As Richard has just said, the first loyal reader into the obituary was Neil Care of Morton College, whom I never knew.
That may well be someone present today who didn't know him.
He died in August 1982, following a fall while picking Bill Bruce on the slopes of she how you.
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.
A key member of the manuscript reading community.
The wonderful Margaret Gibson, who I think many of you may have known like himself,
she was from Edinburgh, was standing beside the photo and talking to readers about.
And I thought I should just mention that it was Margaret Gibson who six years later and a long time ago,
first inveigled me into working on medieval libraries.
James Lyall himself had nominated Neal Keller as the first loyal reader.
And today my focus is on the book that bears his name.
Good. Put my glasses on. Make life easier. Cause medieval libraries of Great Britain or as I will usually refer to it, MLG be.
Before starting on today's topic, however, I should make a few remarks by way of program for this series of six lectures.
The question what is a library always baked?
Must wait. Though I may say that the definition applied in an LGB has its problems.
The book announces itself as a list of surviving books that carry evidence of the medieval provenance organised by provenance.
Whether that is an institution.
The word library is equated with institutional ownership, but care included service books whose relationship to a library is debateable.
But he excluded culture and registers, which held no interest for him.
In Lyle's will. Top of the list of his manuscripts that he most wanted to go into.
The Bodleian is the Register of Abingdon MP.
Which I found, he says,
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.
15. In the library.
Its existence is ignored to find between the locus of Great Britain.
I don't think Lyle himself meant to imply that it had been in Parker's warehouse for those 300 years.
The two lectures this week are concerned with the main evidence for medieval libraries in England.
Today's lecture is centred on surviving books that carry evidence of institutional provenance.
While on Thursday I shall turn to library catalogues drawn up in the Middle Ages.
Documents that really speak to the question of what works a library held and how the books were organised.
These two bodies of evidence are complementary. The documentary sources do much more to depict a library as a whole.
But comparison with surviving books allows us to add material detail to some of the books described in the documents.
The case is outside. We have a catalogue and one of the books described on that page can match up the shelf marks.
This process enriches the written record and in the other direction.
The documents give us the setting to enlarge our view from individual books to whole collections.
I've spent a fair number of years on editing and annotating the book lists and other documentary evidence from medieval libraries in Britain.
And more recently it was under my direction that an LGB itself has been digitised and is still in process of autumn of augmentation.
So that's week one.
If an extra week had been interpolated, I should have given time to discussing the holdings of medieval libraries in terms of authors,
titles, subjects to which the best guide, in my view, is the cumulative index to the corpus of British Medieval Library catalogues.
This has been available online since 2003, but it does keep growing.
It's known to Google as list of ID, so those three words in quotation marks will find it.
It's also accessible from the MLG B3 website.
Based on the documents edited in the corpus, but signalling where these can be controlled by the extant copies described in the record.
It gives a fuller and truest sense than has hitherto been available of what works existed in British libraries.
In what numbers? It allows one to see what works were available widely or sparsely or in a particular setting.
Hopefully this knowledge can be related meaningfully to the pursuit of learning in the Middle Ages is an important and difficult question.
That will be left untouched. In the second week, I shall discuss two questions.
Simply put. Where do you library books come from and where do they go to?
One cannot simply by looking differentiate a library book from other books for study.
The same book might be a personal book and then an institutional book and then a personal book again.
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.
How large or how small a part is something I think we've not articulated very well.
And I have a suspicion that the mere existence of MGP may have fostered a tendency.
In Britain to exaggerate library's share in the overall book economy.
Now I am conscious that the 40 years since I graduated have seen a huge increase,
increase in the study of medieval manuscripts in England as well as in other countries where the subject has had a longer tradition.
We've grown a long way from treating manuscripts just as carriers of texts.
I'm conscious too that I am not as well read in the recent literature as I ought to be.
Or indeed, some of you are. I followed a narrow path.
Helping to build the tools for picturing medieval libraries rather than cultivating
expertise in paleo code ecology or studying large numbers of books in detail.
But I followed that narrow path from reconquest.
Collections such as we can move them at all to early Tudor libraries in as
much as we can say such a thing existed distinct from late medieval libraries.
My primary concern in these lectures is to think how we might get from the evidence of provenance,
books and medieval lists to a lively understanding of the diversity of medieval libraries in England over time.
So building on the evidence discussed in the first two weeks of the questions and in the middle two lectures in my third week,
I intend simply to outline the history of libraries in England as they evolved over a period of some 500 years.
The period is a long haul and the tools we use especially.
Medieval libraries of Great Britain have a tendency to flatten the evidence into lists that
do not reflect the real dimension of time in the comings and goings of individual books,
which were not always new when acquired by an institution.
Did not necessarily remain in the same institution from the production to the institution's extinction.
In most cases, in England, in the 1530s and forties.
There are three points I hope you'll be able to take away.
Libraries in medieval England and everywhere else, too, took many forms.
And we must never talk about the medieval library as if medieval libraries conformed to a definable type.
Second, the libraries of medieval England were not static.
Still less cumulative, but often changing.
Despite the obvious fact that some books managed to stick around for more than five centuries.
The books we have do not always speak for those.
We have not. And third, we cannot think about libraries without thinking about the books themselves.
While there were episodes when we think of this or that library as a planned collection with managed production.
In England, chiefly a phenomenon of the early 12th century.
Most libraries at most times represented the unplanned migration of books between personal ownership and institutional ownership,
a migration that often proved temporary training of books notwithstanding.
Now there are two considerations to be held in memory alongside these three points.
I express these as a matter of opinion. We do not really understand, in my view,
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.
If someone decided he wanted to see a copy of this.
How did he do it? We certainly do not understand the attrition of the book supply in diverse contexts over the long period.
Under Review. We are used to imagining that books have disappeared since the dissolution of the monasteries.
But an awful lot of books disappeared during the previous 500 years, too.
And we may know about them from lists. But factoring in that attrition is very difficult.
No medieval libraries of Great Britain.
I expect you all know of the books.
We have two editions left and centre under supplements.
1941. 1964.
1987. Those of you who solve the arithmetic puzzle on the Today programme.
If observed by nine 2010 is the next date in the progression.
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,
medieval catalogues with the new ones from the corpus.
Well, the corpus of medieval library catalogues was not finished in time and is still not finished.
But from 2009, for several years,
there was funding from the Mellon Foundation to digitise the 1964 edition and the supplement and LGB two and MLG two plus,
as we referred to them in the office with a view to a third edition and an electronic version that could do much more.
And No. Judy three, which I will open up in a little while, and you can see that the first one was quite thin.
The second one, a good deal fatter. The thin one is just a supplement.
The story of how the work was created is well known through the biographical memoirs of four protagonists, Roger Miners who had the idea.
Richard Hunt of this parish who encouraged it.
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,
who alone remained in Oxford during the war years as a hospital orderly.
The idea rose out of mine as his work on Registrar Anglia and the manuscript of Tristram Anglia is in the display case outside.
This is a union catalogue listing copies of select authors, mainly from monastic libraries.
It was compiled by the Oxford Franciscans in as I think, the late 13th century.
A subject fully treated by Mary and Richard Rose in volume two of the Corpus.
Miners back in the mid-thirties wanted to be able to test whether particular libraries
could be shown to have held copies of the works catalogued by the Friars in registry.
So the notion of an index of manuscripts by provenance emerged, albeit with only the briefest indication.
Of the contents of the works contained in each book.
Writing to Richard Hunt. In 1937, miners referred to it as an index of monastic libraries.
And monastic libraries have continued to be seen as the dominant thread.
It was a major achievement involving the reading of a great many pages of descriptive
catalogues and filling out cards for each book with evidence of its medieval provenance.
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
so they can be joined up with those held in the reference area behind the reading room.
Never before had provenance. Research pulled together so much information that had been so long dispersed.
The early dissolution of the monasteries in England had a devastating effect, both in destruction and in scatter.
Something which much of Europe avoided, where secularisation came much later and in a different form.
Because of the early dispersion and destruction.
This kind of prevalence research began sooner in England than in Italy, France or Germany.
Early work on English provinces such as.
Or more from France on land Tony.
Or email James in Cambridge or Bury St Edmunds focussed on libraries that had left large caches of
survivors comparable to the preservation of large religious libraries from France and Germany.
Or they depended on cross matching surviving books with entries in the large medieval
library catalogues that had already attracted attention in the late 19th century,
such as the early 14th century catalogue of Canterbury Cathedral primary.
Now by dividing up the reading of all the descriptive catalogues that you could get their hands on between five pairs of hands.
The fifth man being Richard Hunt's friend, Jock Liddle of Corpus Christi College,
who would soon leave Oxford for Athens and a much more colourful career.
The whole range of data from England,
Scotland and Wales was brought together wherever a book had been described that could be prevalent on what cow would call positive evidence.
The core information was collected on index cards during the years.
13, 14 boxes of these cards between 1938 and 1940.
The. I don't know whether you can read any of that.
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.
In dated it say written to Andrew Watson and this is Andrew Watson's writing 1987 to say it's gone into the supplements.
These false cards.
Five In the handwriting of Roger Linares, he was going through more James's edition of the Ancient Libraries of Canterbury and Dover.
And in the appendix, the James lists the cross matched books.
So this is simply coming from those one line entries in M.R. James's book.
And it was then organised by Care to Look Like This.
I hope you're mostly familiar with that extraordinarily condensed shell smoke and italicised letter denoting the evidence.
A brief indication of context. The date of the manuscript.
And then sometimes a shelf mark. A reference to a medieval catalogue.
A question mark which usually means there isn't positive evidence.
The information on each individual book is presented with much concision in one line,
a brilliant compression of information that really works for the army and has been found user friendly to a remarkable degree.
It's been imitated in similar projects in Belgium, Germany, and though far from complete in France.
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.
Anything that involves listing by shelf lock that the shape is so diverse that printers and for heaven's sake,
the word processing packages that we mostly use don't like it.
Curious flaw in the design is the lack of roaming heads.
On many pages you can see lots of boldface headings for libraries, but where there's a big library,
you have pages and pages and you don't know where they are, where you are.
This copy was Andrew Watson's, I mean, hasty pencil at the top.
You could see Canterbury, Christchurch, Britain, rather telling graphically.
When Digitising MGP, I particularly wanted to retain this feature in the database.
Now I have to try and do something small here.
Yeah. Now. Where's my cursor? Get that out of the way.
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,
designating the number of books from that library that have been entered.
And I'm going to whizz ahead to Norwich Cathedral, Priory 126 books.
You can see 11 1114161 and the surrounding books.
So here. We have something that imitates the one line legs.
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.
MLG be brings together the books.
From a huge number. Of places.
This map shows a red dot for every institution from which a book has been recorded in an MGB three.
The small blue dots. Green dots represent institutions with the potential to appear, but from which no books have been recorded.
There are a lot of grey dots around. The blue dots or grey dots are probably more incomplete than the red lines.
One can map religious houses regardless of whether they appear in an LGB or not.
But no attempt has been made to time guilds or parish churches or other small
institutions that might have held collections of books in the later Middle Ages,
and from which a book or two might have survived with evidence of prevalence.
The map is a reminder that our information is woefully incomplete, even at this basic level.
A rather difficult question to answer is this. What is the most conspicuous gap?
Is there some large and prosperous religious house for which no books have been identified?
I don't have a ready answer to that one, but I leave the thought with you.
The second map is exactly the same, but leaves out Scotland.
I said I would concentrate on England and Wales still, but I am going to have little to say about Wales.
The surviving evidence from Wells in Scotland just isn't big enough to construct a any kind of narrative.
Is there? Now we can see there are areas in the north of England, for example,
in the middle of Wales or the Moors in the south west where there were no institutions.
But there's also areas where there's quite a lot of institutions and no surviving books.
This is true immediately west of Oxford, for example.
And one would have thought that books from such places might have been hoovered up in Oxford, but they weren't.
Now the third map leaves out the places that are given as notebooks and uses differentially sized dots.
The dots do not increase in scale proportionately to the number of books or the biggest would swallow whole counties.
Now. Most of the time, I think,
and I say this without complaint and no GP is used simply as a ready reckoner to check whether
this or that book of interest to the Inquirer at the time has an established provenance.
And on what grounds? In the other direction.
We may go to the book or the website and scroll through to find libraries represented by a substantial number of identified survivors.
Places where there's a body of material evidence that invites further work and self wrote a
number of articles focussed in this way on interpreting the books from a particular library.
And I shall go back. Again to Norwich for a moment on which he published a paper in, I think 1949.
The marks in a good many Norwich books have a commonplace appearance.
Now the final point on here, do you get my course?
You do. So here we have E 23 and 61 X 153 x 78.
Next for don't y. So MOX looks like they're all open to several completely different interpretations.
And 20 years ago, in a paper for the committee to publish a few Latin young.
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.
Should Fox News exist and something to observe at a technical level.
But if you understand the mark in its context,
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.
In the case of Norwich Care himself, it showed that the letterbox increased progressively over time.
The books marked end with those that had survived the Great Fire in 1272, when the citizens of Norwich burnt and looted the Priory.
An unconventional approach to deaccessioning books in the Abbey Church.
Priory Church survived and were locked away after 1272.
A new books acquired after that were marked with letters B, L and numbers that were incremented.
The precise significance of these letters is not apparent, but as they grew larger,
further letters field l added over time on the letter class x, we have x 153 here.
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.
Came from Adam Easton, Cardinal of England, died in Rome in 1396.
The numbers in those surviving books go up to X 228.
They were shipped from Italy to England in 1407, 11 years after Easton's death.
We know that because letters patent were issued to say the monks of Norwich didn't have to pay duty on importing these books,
which they already owned. At Norwich, a single hand into the Norwich Marks in Easton's book books.
No, I've opened one other than what I.
Want to speak about. Scroll down to 126 sibley's.
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.
Defects in its text were made good in a leaked 14th century hand.
Miners who dropped the volume catalogue,
showed the letter mark and partially erased inscription to care who once identified the book was from Cardinal Easton's library.
Kevin Drew to the attention of Billy Panton Memorial College.
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.
Perhaps more likely still himself, the clock working for him in two very different contexts.
I say that tentatively. In his description of the manuscript miners at the footnote happy the maker of catalogues who has such friends.
228 books arriving from Cardinal Easton in 1407.
This example anticipates a theme of my third lecture on personal books that become institutional books,
or in this case, a substantial personal library which would have its own story if we have enough evidence to read it.
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.
Soon, followed by reference to Henry, whose.
And they price kritsky in mocks.
The song is now eligible. Then in minus words, not much later a new Exlibris was added produced by the only Sony.
The book has migrated from knowledge to value.
That anticipates a point from my fourth lecture that books with sound provenance evidence from a certain date may nonetheless move elsewhere.
It also illustrates one of the big limitations of MLG v.
Back in 1941. Care admitted major collections still in situ.
In 1964, he changed policy as regards cathedrals so that the cathedral collections of Durham, Hereford,
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.
But he didn't include books still in the medieval colleges of Oxford and Cambridge.
So you have to switch back again. For Angel.
In MLG LGBT one. The head note simply refers to Cox's catalogue.
I don't know whether this is even readable.
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.
19 books in 122 in the Nielsen.
The policy. Who's to say that everyone who's interested in such things knows which colleges still have their medieval manuscripts?
This may still be true within Oxford. But it's unhelpful to the world beyond.
It also conceals the difficulty of knowing which of the medieval manuscripts now in the college library has been there since the Middle Ages.
Balliol has perhaps 350 medieval manuscripts today.
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.
A work done by Jacob Curry for MLG B three will add 290 Bayley manuscripts to MLG B three
that are not there in MLG v2 and we will be able to see for the first time Easton's.
John of Salisbury becoming x 187 at Norwich and then appearing at Balliol.
This change across colleges as a whole will make a substantial difference, which I shall come to.
Another limitation I should mention is the treatment of printed books.
Given that evidence for manuscripts is taken down to the dissolution in 1540,
MGP could include books printed at any time in a period of more than 80 years.
Since Gutenberg began the printing revolution.
Can recorded printed books with evidence of provenance, only where he came across them.
There was no campaign to harvest them. With manuscripts, the campaign had taken the form of reading descriptive catalogues of manuscripts,
but there were no descriptive catalogues of printed books down to 1540 in English
libraries or indeed in libraries from other places that might contain English books.
It is now become possible to do that for Nampula and Christina.
Doing this project will in time gather the evidence.
But it remains difficult to track Peruvians for books printed between 1515 40.
I won't demonstrate this,
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,
and it will sort by provenance and date.
But you can't sort by dates alone to get an overview of these 482 printed books.
It's very likely that further work on in situ collections,
in cathedrals and in university colleges will increase the number of printed books quite substantially.
Ian Doyle For example, it identified.
A considerable number of printed books from Durham Cathedral Priory, which we expect Sheila Hinckley sometime Palace Library to publish in due course.
Before going further into the challenge of using MLG, it is time to look at some numbers.
I mentioned that miners at a very difficult I'm losing track this is what your mine is is copy of MLG V1.
So this is miner's notice of additions. This is Neil Cairns copy of an LGB two.
So you can see there's more additions arising and they will go will going into the supplement in 1987.
Now. Time to look at some numbers I mentioned of miners at a very early stage,
referred to the project as an index of monastic hooks relevant to cross matching with copies recorded from monastic libraries in request from Anglia.
He overlooked the fact that the friars in Reduced from Anglia reported on titles from six
of the secular cathedrals as well as from those cathedrals for the monastic community.
Indeed from Exeter to London and from Salisbury, they reported.
Well over 100 titles in each case.
And LGB has been referred to as providing evidence for the survival of some 5000 books from the dissolved monasteries.
But it pays to look more closely at the figures here.
Organised monastic orders, mendicant orders, secular institutions and universities are then broken down into smaller band.
You have a number of institutions from which a report exists and the number of books.
And these are very basic numbers. There are 6726 books reported under the headings of 595 institutions.
It's difficult to allow for those books entered under two institutions, but there weren't very many of them.
In the printed editions. And Easton's public credit is only only under one.
They're not so numerous as to make a mess of all figures.
And I do count 140 institutions that have a hidden note in the book.
But on the books, this means that you mean that there is something to say.
But Leland or Bale may say, I saw books there, but we don't have it.
Benedictine abbey. Some Prioress dominates with books recorded from 127 houses, of which 102 are men's houses and 25 women's houses.
We should look at women's houses separately in a few minutes. They account for 66 books.
I took the 3500 from Benedictine houses, which include most of the largest collections of surviving books.
Over 50% of the total books in MGP as printed.
We're from Benedictine houses on these figures. Augustinian canons and Cistercian monks account for some hundreds,
and so do the secular cathedrals of which souls free Exeter and Hereford, Iowa and Lincoln are well-represented.
On the big percentages here monastic houses, the solitude calls.
Monastic houses account for three quarters of the recorded prevalence of survivors, not quite the 5000.
Secular institutions for 15%, with the remaining 10% divided to and one between the mendicant and the universities.
At this point,
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
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.
These figures. I hope the rate is distinct will add approximately 1900 books to the road for colleges and homes.
So it goes from 234 to 2134.
It's an approximate figure because two and a half colleges have still to be done.
So this bumps up the share of university books to 25%.
Proportionately knocks down the Benedictines from 52 to 40 under monastic orders from 74 to 57.
24 of the Oxford and Cambridge Colleges appeared in a LGB two because the prevalence of books that no survive outside the medieval colleges.
That number rises to 28 when we include four institutions that still have some
of their medieval books but whose books have not been found wandering abroad.
The numbers 25 and black and 29 read. One higher than the Oxford and Cambridge totals because they include King's College in Aberdeen.
But I haven't attempted to exclude Scottish evidence from an LGBT which takes a a British view.
Institutions represented by substantial numbers, by figure numbers, inevitably draw one's attention,
offering the promise of a collection much more open to study and understanding.
See what comes next. Out of the 595 institutions included only 15 or presents represented by more than 100 proven survivors.
I may interpolate all the all important comment.
Let no one imagine that MGP records the books surviving from any particular house.
It can only record those that carry evidence of their preference.
And there may be thousands of books from nesting houses or mendicant homes or secular
institutions that carry no evidence so far interpreted as to where they were.
We would guess that institutions with large numbers of recognised survivors were better at marking their property and so registered good evidence.
Than those with fewer recognised.
That's a bit of a guess and not what I should set my store by.
But the reality is that all books surviving today have to have some route of preservation.
The houses are represented by substantial numbers of surviving.
Books have usually benefited from some form of group survival.
Big numbers may certainly reflect better chances of preservation than better evidence prudence.
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.
If 15 institutions are represented by 100 books or more.
Then 580 are represented by fewer.
And the fact is that 100 institutions, as currently listed, are represented by ten or more books and 495 by fewer than ten.
No. You go back to the map.
We must be aware that a very high proportion of these doors stand for very small numbers of books.
47 institutions are represented by three books.
95 by just two books. 225.
By a single book. Now I am not sure whether one is allowed to do this, but if you treat that as a growth,
the temptation is to project the line and say are still larger.
Number of houses must be represented by New X and those were the grey dots on map.
Working at home may extrapolate from a handful of books to some perception of the collection
they represent is one way to move from such data towards the history of a library.
Even in isolation, the presence of a shelf lock is still evidence of a collection.
An X Libraries represents a management and a more elaborate note on contents.
May reflect cataloguing, for example.
No. I have not studied the evidence sufficiently to study for how many one book institutions will has the option to construct an edifice.
There's a lot of work that. But for many houses there is little indeed to go.
On the other hand, we have 15 houses with big numbers.
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.
The top five houses are 0.8.
4% of institution supplied 1917 books, 28.5%, three of the Benedictine cathedrals and two major abbeys, with more than 600 surviving books recognised.
And that's a number that will rise. Durham is certainly the best preserved medieval collection by number from the Middle Ages.
It may well be the best preserved as a proportion of its original holdings in the 1390s.
Two catalogues of the two main stores of books.
Describe for us 900 volumes, say 600 books.
Surviving from all periods looks quite good next to 900 there in 1392.
1395. Compare Canterbury from where 360 books,
361 books of all periods is still a high rate of preservation when compared with a catalogue of 1837 books in 1326.
We need to be careful in our language in such comparisons.
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.
Such books are not survivors from the catalogues, but from the libraries.
And we must hold this lack of chronological fit in our mind.
This is an inevitable anomaly in the evidence we've got.
A majority of the manuscripts of Durham Cathedral priory remain in the Cathedral Library today, nine managed by the university.
Many, but not a majority of the manuscripts from Worcester remain Worcester today,
but more with their in the early 17th century when listed by Patrick Young in 1622.
Otherwise, documentary evidence from Worcester is severely limited.
Canterbury Cathedral, Priory and St Augustine's Abbey in Canterbury benefited from the interest of manuscript collectors in the 16th century.
And in the case of the cathedral, it was demons and archbishops who had the interest to preserve many of the surviving books.
In an important lecture from 1941, CARE showed the differential rates of survival of different types of book.
By comparing the books we have with the evidence of the launch medieval catwalks from those institutions.
He drew attention to the mocked preference of 16th century collectors for handsome,
well-made books of the 12th century containing works of the Latin fathers.
These he showed had survived much better than works of 13th or 14th century scholastics, which had lost their interest by the 16th century.
Bronze, unscrupulous have been set in Boccardi. Other explanations may operate in other contexts.
But one must always bear in mind that the preservation of large groups of manuscripts
or indeed of printed books may be conditioned by preferences 400 years ago.
500, nearly 500 years ago. That may not be apparent to us.
Before moving on, I should just show you how the freshly collected data from the university colleges alter this total.
Two Oxford colleges and three Cambridge colleges come in as retaining more than 100 of their medieval manuscripts.
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.
So including the university colleges. The top 20 are either Benedictine or secular foundations,
with the exceptions of Lentini Priory of Augustinian canons near Gloucester and the early 15th Century Foundation,
Zion Abbey of the Order of the Holy Saviour. Land, Tony, with 166 has the largest tally from any Augustinian house.
And from here, we also have a 14th century catalogue with 400 entries.
X libraries are inconsistently found, but a large proportion of the survivors,
a very large proportion of the survivors have come down to us as a collection in Lambeth Palace Library.
The next largest tally from an Augustinian house is 14 from Simon's sister.
From. AP We have 111 identified survivors from a catalogue of of the 1400.
Only half a dozen carrion,
x liquorice and even fewer the shelf blocks that are very prominent in structuring the important early 16th century catalogue of this library.
Superbly edited by Vincent Gillespie. Cion is an example where the identification of excellent books depends quite heavily.
On the evidence from the documentary record. But I was not going to fall into first a subject.
The highest number of books known from other religious orders is generally much lower.
A tally of 20 or 30 books appears quite substantial, but next to the major collections.
It is not easy to build rich interpretations from the largest number from any Cistercian house is 54 from build was.
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.
Three. Yorkshire House is following in the ranking fountains with 42 by land with 27 and Riva with 22.
Numbers of books from the Conference of Friars are small.
The largest number being 36 from the Austin Friars in Cambridge.
The library in their conference in York is represented now by ten survivors.
But we have the catalogue showing more than 300 books in 1372, a collection that would double in size within 20 years.
With the accession shown as additions in the catalogue of the books of Friar John Ogham,
the largest private collection documented for us for medieval England.
There's a library of more than 600 books at the end of the 14th century.
Was winnowed away over the next. Century.
Over the last century, half of the Ferrari's existence in the 500 years since is clear evidence that we
should not rush to treat low survival numbers as implying a small collection.
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
these your crayons with 600 books around 1390 ten recognised survivors is explained by the opportunity of preservation.
When we look at books from countries, we find that in aggregate there are 109 books recognised for 41 different houses on average.
Little more than two perhaps. I mean, reality mostly just won't.
Best preserved in a number of 16 books from Barking Abbey.
The earliest of these is a gospel book of the early 11th century.
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.
The others include a higher proportion of late medieval books in French and in English than is usual in an LGBT.
But some of the earlier Latin books share the same long Exlibris inscription entered by a librarian at Barking in the 13th century,
organising a library. And she was presumably the nun referred to as Ra in the Cozumel of the Abbey.
Known to us in our crew, a copy made for Abu Simbel in 1484,
a copy of an earlier manuscript which describes the procedure of the Lenten reflection
in terms very similar to what we find in the Westminster and Canterbury costumes.
So that. Connections through the customer is a warning that don't take 16 looks for barking as evidence.
Barking did not have. An organised library for the nuns.
The customer affirms the Benedictine practice of reading, by contrast, from the Franciscan nuns at Stanford.
We've identified only a copy of the Rule of Saint Bennett in English, printed in London in 1517, which belonged to the Prioress.
Dame Margaret, standing now boldly on a DE 15.
Well, that one book leaves us entirely in ignorance of conventional books.
If that was simply the Prioress book. Faced with some 595 lists of books, most of them very short.
One has to have principles for interpreting them. And Keller was of a generation that did not set out an interpretation in Haiti.
Notes at the top of these short lists. He left it to us to learn the ropes.
Though his introduction in the 1941 edition is wonderfully clear on his thinking,
particularly about the evidence of prudence, which is sometimes local and sometimes complex.
But a book can only be recognised if it carries evidence and a book can only be entered
if it survives and lays a two preconditions that many institutions may not have met.
The difficulty of reinterpreting a list in shelf mock order that should go back on almost mind.
And that's not easy to do.
But to Norwich we can take see if Norwich will work for us.
This isn't a mock order.
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.
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.
And in so far as the program can handle date painter graphic details in Roman numerals, it will attempt to give you those holdings.
In that order. I mentioned the fire of 1272.
Norwich doesn't have very many books from before 1272.
If I'd opened Bury St Edmunds, we would start with a run of ninth and 10th and 11th century books.
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.
But this is very difficult. A spreadsheet does not do well with sorting Roman numerals quantified by obliques dashes and fractions,
and translating all piratical beatings into surrogate Arabic numerals.
Forces want to review thousands of judgements, resolving numbers into a bar chart.
By the 10th century of the century, 12th century,
13th century produces a fairly uninformative result relatively small numbers from the centuries before 1100,
a great bulge in the 12th century, a drop in the 13th century, and a substantial rise in the 14th and 15th centuries.
With more experience of building library catalogues than have statistics from actual books.
I felt that the dip in the 13th century was less than I'd expected, but nonetheless, I look on such figures as unhelpful.
I do not think an LGB three will provide a great statistical resource.
But we have to stick to the things we should look for when thinking about individual libraries.
First, libraries, especially uniform ones that reflect an active librarian and may indeed provide a date horizon for provenance ability.
One librarian in the Middle Ages intellectually brings in 1250, and none of his successors did.
Later books from that institution may not be recognised.
Signs of active librarianship, even if it's only once in the Middle Ages, are a positive indicator.
Deciding whether continual, fitful or occasional activity is a necessary part of the interpretation.
Press box if we've got them of whatever kind, must be a good indicator of the mind.
And I mentioned you'll see notes of contents very likely reflect the drafting of the catalogue.
Bury St Edmunds We had a library in the 1350s and sixties.
He not only wrote quite detailed accounts of the contents, we spotted bios of all the people in front of the books,
but he also compiled them into a bibliography of church sources.
Attempting to interpret survivors in chronological terms, however, is very difficult.
If you're looking at the house, I'd say sort in chronological order, just in case.
But no matter how you look at it, MGP brings together individual books more or sometimes less plausibly under an institutional heading.
And there is rejoicing when we are able to add a book whose provenance is newly recognised,
another brick in the wall, and especially if it brings evidence for an institution hitherto absent.
And it often helps in our use of a particular book to know where it was owned and used.
But no entry in MGP represents a library in any meaningful sense at any point in its existence.
For that, we must turn to medieval library catalogues, which will give us a snapshot of collections in their entirety at a certain moment.
That is my subject for Thursday.
Ladies and gentlemen, just before we go and enjoy one another's company in the company of a glass of something or other,
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.
I think four, perhaps five things come to mind from that lecture.
First is his mastery of the data and not only of the lists themselves, but of the books,
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.
Secondly, to the community of medievalist, which Richard is not only part of now,
but the inheritor of traditions, approaches ways of working and evidence, and is how lucky we are.
I reflected during the course of this lecture here in Oxford to have had what are now called
critical mass or to have had critical mass at various points in our institutional history,
which have enabled Richard to build on the work of care and miners and Cheney and Gibson and so on.
And for him to be joined today by an astonishing group of brilliant medieval scholars here in this university today and.
Also to say how astonishing and how revelatory it was to see him rise above
the data and to draw the pictures from the individual pieces of that jigsaw,
which are so impressive,
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,
leaves us with an appetite whetted for more in the subsequent five lectures.
And finally,
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.
So, ladies and gentlemen, please join me and the electors in thanking Professor Sharpe for an outstanding line lecture.