1 00:00:07,040 --> 00:00:14,090 I want to begin the second lecture by recollecting my debt to Roger Minors, 2 00:00:14,990 --> 00:00:21,860 whom I identified on Tuesday as the one who had the idea for what became MGB. 3 00:00:23,450 --> 00:00:28,669 Its initial purpose was to authenticate the data presented in Registrant Anglia, 4 00:00:28,670 --> 00:00:37,550 that union catalogue created by the Greyfriars of Oxford towards the end of the 13th century, which was in a display case on Tuesday. 5 00:00:39,590 --> 00:00:45,530 Back in the mid 1980s when I was an assistant editor of the Medieval Latin Dictionary, 6 00:00:46,280 --> 00:00:51,680 miners would join us for tea in the bulky and staff canteen of the shop. 7 00:00:52,730 --> 00:01:02,030 And he and I discussed then my aspiration to produce what was eventually published as canned lists of Latin writers of Great Britain and Ireland. 8 00:01:02,450 --> 00:01:10,909 Before 15, 40 some months after miners died in October 1989, his executor, 9 00:01:10,910 --> 00:01:16,490 Michael Winterbottom, gave me a suitcase of material designated to come to me. 10 00:01:17,870 --> 00:01:28,370 And in passing, I cannot recommend too highly winterbottom's absolutely admirable memoir of minors in the Academy's proceedings for 1991. 11 00:01:30,030 --> 00:01:38,550 Now the material in the suitcase included the typescript of minors as edition of the Register from from 1935, 12 00:01:39,090 --> 00:01:43,380 never published in that form and a series of related studies, 13 00:01:44,100 --> 00:01:52,470 a small attache case containing hundreds of little cards, recording manuscript, shelf walks, works of British writers, 14 00:01:52,950 --> 00:01:59,250 a few of which she had lent me several years earlier, and a row of what we used to call copy flow. 15 00:01:59,970 --> 00:02:05,790 Continuous paper printout from microfilm. The printouts. 16 00:02:09,740 --> 00:02:12,770 Showed it comprised a catalogue of books. 17 00:02:13,490 --> 00:02:21,110 20 pages of it like this under headings for 18 authors, each with a list of titles. 18 00:02:21,650 --> 00:02:26,150 Each title accompanied by one or more shelf marks. 19 00:02:27,760 --> 00:02:36,370 I reckon the date of writing is around 1430 or a bit after, but there was no clue to what library it came from. 20 00:02:37,210 --> 00:02:42,550 The manuscript is highly 2268, which at the time had no known provenance. 21 00:02:45,130 --> 00:02:50,709 Soon after that, during 1990, I was asked by Joseph Trent, director of the Warburg Institute, 22 00:02:50,710 --> 00:02:57,250 to become general editor of the Corpus of Medieval Library Catalogues, which is largely my subject for today. 23 00:02:58,480 --> 00:03:03,370 Joe chaired the project committee and its secretary, Margaret Gibson, 24 00:03:03,370 --> 00:03:09,130 had already persuaded me to take on the editing of some of the Benedictine Library catalogues. 25 00:03:10,030 --> 00:03:21,670 So I now had reason to want to understand better this catalogue that had come to me entirely unexpectedly and with no clue to what it was. 26 00:03:23,380 --> 00:03:30,310 So one evening in July 1993, I did what one does in the circumstances. 27 00:03:31,090 --> 00:03:38,740 I transcribed it in order to get to know it thoroughly with 653 entries. 28 00:03:39,430 --> 00:03:48,670 This was a substantial catalogue. It's the most substantial in the 900 page volume of the Benedictine Shorter catalogues. 29 00:03:50,430 --> 00:03:56,250 It appeared to be based on the entire contents of the books. 30 00:03:56,730 --> 00:04:05,040 So the shelf mark L9 turns up six times against different titles or short works, 31 00:04:05,370 --> 00:04:11,770 and presumably in the one volume for some works, many copies were reported. 32 00:04:12,510 --> 00:04:18,780 And I don't know how legible this will be, but here under the heading Liberal Party Bernardi. 33 00:04:20,210 --> 00:04:25,280 I cropped it since the first title you read is meditative and you see them. 34 00:04:27,470 --> 00:04:39,980 And there are 14 shelf marks immediately following each seven and 7f9l9 and 16 l 17 p 24 be 25. 35 00:04:40,400 --> 00:04:50,510 And then we switch to o 11 in Roman F 13, B 14, k 14, k 24 O and then g 22. 36 00:04:51,110 --> 00:04:58,970 Now again, those of you who tuned in to progression will see that the sequence is driven not by the letters at the front, 37 00:04:59,270 --> 00:05:05,059 but by the numbers that are the second element in these shelf marks. 38 00:05:05,060 --> 00:05:09,080 The progression is numerical rather than alphabetical. 39 00:05:10,250 --> 00:05:24,950 So J 22 appears to be out of sequence, some kind of an afterthought, and then a couple more at the end where he specifies tabular E 16 and P 16. 40 00:05:27,180 --> 00:05:34,740 These shells marks unusually use both a Arabic and eight Roman. 41 00:05:36,050 --> 00:05:41,150 To refer to different books. We actually have a full double sequence. 42 00:05:42,790 --> 00:05:46,030 Here was a possible means to identify this catalogue. 43 00:05:46,450 --> 00:05:50,170 How many places? I think not many would use the double sequence. 44 00:05:52,060 --> 00:05:56,710 So I picked up an LGB too and started browsing. 45 00:05:58,520 --> 00:06:02,120 My guardian angel inspired me to start at the back of the book, 46 00:06:03,050 --> 00:06:13,820 and it took me about a minute and a half to realise that St Mary's Abbey in York had just such shelf marks in two series Arabic and Roman. 47 00:06:15,210 --> 00:06:16,830 Within a few more minutes, 48 00:06:16,830 --> 00:06:27,810 I had tested two or three of them against the descriptive catalogues on my shelves at home and confirmed two hits and one miss. 49 00:06:30,230 --> 00:06:37,250 This was the miss. The right hand side. 50 00:06:37,250 --> 00:06:42,110 You have sumo and your stem and the shell smoke. 51 00:06:42,110 --> 00:06:47,540 C9 is quite clear. The right hand end. 52 00:06:48,080 --> 00:07:02,030 On the left you have the book that is being described and at the bottom left in a rather spacious hand in c nine with the C closed someone else's. 53 00:07:02,030 --> 00:07:07,729 Then it is in oh nine and Moore James is catalogue transcribed. 54 00:07:07,730 --> 00:07:12,980 It is o nine. So MLG be reported it is o nine. 55 00:07:14,060 --> 00:07:18,920 And I had to sort that one out or explain what was going on. 56 00:07:19,760 --> 00:07:24,650 And this gives you the contents of the actual manuscripts. 57 00:07:24,980 --> 00:07:29,630 And at the bottom, I've put down 174175 and 356. 58 00:07:29,960 --> 00:07:35,480 All the entries in the catalogue that have come from that book. 59 00:07:35,900 --> 00:07:46,610 So most of the contents were irrelevant to the select authors that were being indexed in the document. 60 00:07:47,330 --> 00:07:54,740 I was seeking to interpret so the shelf marks, while not perspicacious in isolation, 61 00:07:55,220 --> 00:08:02,540 become much clearer when you have them in aggregate giving priority to number letter. 62 00:08:03,970 --> 00:08:05,860 And with hundreds of them in the catalogue, 63 00:08:06,220 --> 00:08:15,580 it was quickly apparent the number designates the location within the library and the letter, the running number at that location. 64 00:08:16,600 --> 00:08:23,920 So a three volume work might be D 12, E 12 and F 12. 65 00:08:24,640 --> 00:08:27,430 You wouldn't naturally have sequenced them in that way. 66 00:08:28,870 --> 00:08:37,870 And for almost all of the numbered locations, there were books from A to P and nowhere beyond P. 67 00:08:39,530 --> 00:08:45,710 The best interpretation was 50 locations, each with 15 books a tipi. 68 00:08:46,640 --> 00:08:54,170 Alas, too few surviving books to make anything out of the size of the actual books. 69 00:08:54,980 --> 00:09:02,000 If I could measure them, one might have been able to come up with a better picture of the library room. 70 00:09:03,550 --> 00:09:12,130 But those locations, I think, were most likely desks rather than shelves or cupboards or chests. 71 00:09:13,170 --> 00:09:23,520 MLG be had provided the means to locate what was evidently a very important document showing a large collection of books. 72 00:09:24,550 --> 00:09:32,380 Seemingly in a library room in the newest style for 1430 or so with readers desks. 73 00:09:33,660 --> 00:09:46,230 In an abbey in York, north of England, about whose library we had hitherto known no more than 20 titles recorded by John Leland in 1534. 74 00:09:47,720 --> 00:09:51,260 A By-product of this discovery was the provenance for the manuscript. 75 00:09:51,260 --> 00:09:52,850 Holly two, two, six, eight. 76 00:09:53,480 --> 00:10:03,620 Medieval double bunked the components of quite different origin, but was a 15th century hand in the margins showing that it had been bound together. 77 00:10:05,330 --> 00:10:09,200 By the time this was part of it. Very little different in time. 78 00:10:10,250 --> 00:10:14,810 It also contains sermons in northern English. 79 00:10:15,290 --> 00:10:22,640 Humanist works from Italy and a rather surprising note across the top margin of one of these pieces, 80 00:10:23,210 --> 00:10:31,760 referring to a copy of Petrarch de Remedio Citrus au trio Squid Fortuna in the Broad Mirus Ecclesia. 81 00:10:32,030 --> 00:10:37,400 My Order Ecclesia is the absolutely standard way of referring to York Minster in York, 82 00:10:38,120 --> 00:10:46,070 and I'm very surprised to find reference to a library in Minster and one containing a work of Petrarch in the mid 15th century. 83 00:10:48,350 --> 00:10:53,180 In this example, we see how much light a single catalogue might shed, 84 00:10:54,140 --> 00:11:01,100 and it was a special pleasure for me to identify it first because I knew the site of St Mary's very well. 85 00:11:01,130 --> 00:11:06,620 I pass through it many a day between my school and the public library in York. 86 00:11:08,340 --> 00:11:17,220 And second, because it was a Benedictine list which went into my own volume of the corpus, then in an advanced stage of preparation. 87 00:11:18,300 --> 00:11:22,920 And coming in as York did not disturb the numbering of documents. 88 00:11:24,690 --> 00:11:27,120 I felt that that guardian angel had been busy. 89 00:11:29,640 --> 00:11:39,420 Reading Medieval library catalogues is by far and away the best way to learn about the holdings and organisation of medieval libraries. 90 00:11:40,890 --> 00:11:46,620 All five, five, 90 in the Western Gallery if you want to get started. 91 00:11:49,300 --> 00:11:52,900 In England. This was recognised in the 1830s. 92 00:11:53,740 --> 00:12:00,190 Joseph Hunter, who started his career as a Cutler but became an antiquity a Yorkshireman. 93 00:12:01,170 --> 00:12:10,770 From the West Riding had printed the 1555 post dissolution booklist from Monk Bretton Priory with notes on other monastic libraries. 94 00:12:11,370 --> 00:12:21,359 1831 If I didn't mention you, the book included an indenture recording the loan of 19 books from Hinton Charterhouse, 95 00:12:21,360 --> 00:12:27,240 which he'd taken from a manuscript belonging to Thomas Phillips, which we haven't seen since. 96 00:12:29,050 --> 00:12:31,000 A few years later, 1838, 97 00:12:31,000 --> 00:12:42,040 Briar Butterfield in the City Society published many of the medieval catalogues and other library records of Durham Cathedral Priory of Volume, 98 00:12:42,040 --> 00:12:45,160 which I'm in the process of trying to replace. 99 00:12:45,400 --> 00:12:50,470 Durham will be the lost volume of the corpus of medieval library catalogues to go to press. 100 00:12:52,410 --> 00:12:57,810 This interest in the 1830s represented a healthy change. 101 00:12:58,770 --> 00:13:08,040 If I look back a generation earlier in 1795, still in the age of led, as far as medieval studies is concerned, 102 00:13:08,760 --> 00:13:16,680 the antiquity John Nichols commented on the late 15th century Leicester Abbey Library catalogue by William Charity. 103 00:13:17,730 --> 00:13:23,670 Ms. Lord, 6 to 3, if you wish to call it up, which has a double listing. 104 00:13:25,390 --> 00:13:29,230 Nicole says many books are referred to some other arrangement. 105 00:13:29,500 --> 00:13:35,320 Many have only two folio. The first words of summer given. 106 00:13:36,070 --> 00:13:45,310 And after all our inquiries, many of the writers here enumerated must remain as unknowns, as they are uninteresting. 107 00:13:47,170 --> 00:13:53,590 And perhaps posterity has very little reason to regret the loss of the Library of Leicester MP. 108 00:13:54,190 --> 00:14:02,050 Well, there's 18th century medieval studies, the revival of medieval studies from the 1840s and fifties onwards, 109 00:14:02,350 --> 00:14:05,770 so contributions to medieval library history in England. 110 00:14:06,160 --> 00:14:16,690 But it was in the years between about 1895 and 1925 that more James and Mary Beetson brought out editions of most of the major catalogues. 111 00:14:18,060 --> 00:14:22,050 These editions sought to cross-match catalogue entries with surviving books, 112 00:14:22,680 --> 00:14:28,170 but they made no attempt to identify the works that the medieval books contained. 113 00:14:29,840 --> 00:14:30,200 Works, 114 00:14:30,200 --> 00:14:38,300 which might include classical and patristic books as well as writings of any period in the Middle Ages down to the date of the catalogue itself. 115 00:14:39,710 --> 00:14:48,830 How far this lack of identifications arose from the belief that readers could recognise the titles that appeared in medieval catalogues? 116 00:14:50,120 --> 00:14:59,240 I can't say, but I harbour a suspicion that they knew how difficult it can be to recognise all the works that turn up, 117 00:14:59,870 --> 00:15:06,110 but they preferred to hide behind the pretence that all this was commonly known. 118 00:15:06,500 --> 00:15:14,990 Let me not press the point, but some 8000 different works have turned up in the medieval library records from England. 119 00:15:16,760 --> 00:15:24,020 And those of us who've worked on the corpus have had a long learning curve in recognising some of these works in here. 120 00:15:24,030 --> 00:15:31,670 They're not all as straightforward as the city of gold. Some identifications are difficult, but not impossible. 121 00:15:32,450 --> 00:15:42,320 Some become possible only when one joins up a second or third or fourth occurrence of the title, each bringing. 122 00:15:43,320 --> 00:15:52,460 Some extra bit of information. The corpse of British medieval library catalogues set out to annotate line by line. 123 00:15:53,450 --> 00:16:02,900 The more experienced reader with these volumes will make rapid progress because the experienced reader doesn't need to read these into line notes. 124 00:16:03,830 --> 00:16:12,740 But for someone new to the subject, the information to help you make sense of the document is there as you read it. 125 00:16:15,370 --> 00:16:21,760 And who is to decide what is easy enough not to need annotation. 126 00:16:22,120 --> 00:16:25,480 My view is that we annotate everything, even if it's virtual. 127 00:16:26,110 --> 00:16:35,120 The note may be very brief. The head notes to each library make a concise attempt to draw together what can be 128 00:16:35,120 --> 00:16:40,550 learnt from the evidence available for the development of each collection represented. 129 00:16:41,450 --> 00:16:46,310 Writing such head notes is a straightforward exercise in research and interpretation. 130 00:16:47,570 --> 00:16:55,190 Piecing the evidence together in relation to what we know about a library, its books and the institution that owned it. 131 00:16:56,510 --> 00:17:03,050 Working through the evidence for this or that library, be it rich or meagre, is straightforward. 132 00:17:03,440 --> 00:17:11,239 The big question for these lectures is how do we extrapolate from that particular to fill the gaps in 133 00:17:11,240 --> 00:17:18,740 our evidence and to see the larger picture of libraries as such and their place in the book Economy? 134 00:17:19,370 --> 00:17:19,579 Now, 135 00:17:19,580 --> 00:17:34,130 I didn't do a map to show where we have documents from and where we don't put the scatter of red dots would have been thinner than it was for an LGB. 136 00:17:34,310 --> 00:17:43,190 But the number of books attested through the documentary evidence is many times greater than that, attested by surviving books. 137 00:17:44,870 --> 00:17:50,900 So a little more about the corpus. There are 16 volumes now out. 138 00:17:51,620 --> 00:18:02,510 Some of them in more than one physical volume. A page count so far is just over 12,000 pages plus another 1200 pages of introductions. 139 00:18:03,440 --> 00:18:07,580 If we had it on the table, it would be a couple of centimetres short of a metre. 140 00:18:09,570 --> 00:18:19,500 In Burgundy cloth. The principle is to publish book lists or other records that bear witness to the library of an institution. 141 00:18:20,430 --> 00:18:27,540 In most cases, lists that have only surface books or at least were excluded. 142 00:18:28,800 --> 00:18:36,780 We found no lists of bursary books. So my complaints about care from Tuesday doesn't apply here. 143 00:18:37,260 --> 00:18:41,040 Registers do turn up in a few catalogues. 144 00:18:42,620 --> 00:18:52,909 During work on the secular institutions, the avoidance of service books was relaxed so that the voluble secular cathedrals will includes the 145 00:18:52,910 --> 00:19:00,590 long and richly detailed 13th century descriptions of the many service books at St Paul's Cathedral. 146 00:19:00,860 --> 00:19:02,990 When really would not want to leave that out. 147 00:19:04,560 --> 00:19:11,760 Though we have no real medieval library catalogue for St Paul's, the earliest catalogue of the library is 1622. 148 00:19:13,560 --> 00:19:16,920 Despite our knowing that it has an important library. 149 00:19:19,670 --> 00:19:25,370 In the early days of the corpus, a list had a minimal definition of two entries. 150 00:19:26,840 --> 00:19:39,879 Even that has occasionally been relaxed. Principles as to the genre of record and the desire to enter whatever will usefully contribute 151 00:19:39,880 --> 00:19:47,050 to the eventual index as a key to knowledge have sometimes pulled us in contrary directions. 152 00:19:49,200 --> 00:19:55,980 Rather than follow the practice of the German and Swiss series which is organised by diocese, 153 00:19:56,670 --> 00:20:01,560 the British Corpus is organised mainly by institutional categories. 154 00:20:02,190 --> 00:20:06,060 So there is a volume on the libraries of the Austin Canons, 155 00:20:06,720 --> 00:20:16,080 a volume that combines but does not merge the libraries of Cistercian monks with those of Gilbert in canons and Fremont's retention canons. 156 00:20:17,220 --> 00:20:20,520 Benedictine monks occupy several volumes. 157 00:20:21,580 --> 00:20:26,560 Including several devoted to large and very large catalogues. 158 00:20:27,880 --> 00:20:35,740 The two universities each have volumes and their volumes on the late medieval collegiate churches and secular colleges, 159 00:20:35,740 --> 00:20:47,390 among them Eton and Winchester. There is here an underlying view that it makes more sense to treat cistercians all together. 160 00:20:48,800 --> 00:20:56,660 Than to treat the abbeys convents and colleges of Lincoln Diocese or London Diocese as a local group. 161 00:20:57,470 --> 00:21:02,270 It was a decision taken before I became involved, but I think it was a correct one. 162 00:21:03,380 --> 00:21:11,270 Scotland, on the other hand, was treated geographically. And two volumes are devoted to works of a different nature. 163 00:21:11,990 --> 00:21:16,880 Registrar Anglia has been mentioned and will come up again in a few minutes time. 164 00:21:17,420 --> 00:21:24,980 This union catalogue from the 13th century, which is the second volume of the corpus and quite challenging to use. 165 00:21:25,910 --> 00:21:34,700 The other odd one is Henry to cook sterne's bibliographical essay on more than 100 ecclesiastical authors. 166 00:21:35,450 --> 00:21:42,140 Henry used registrar from Anglia, but he doesn't have very much in the way of locations. 167 00:21:43,280 --> 00:21:49,670 He was the librarian of Bury St Edmunds, and his book is a valuable witness to. 168 00:21:51,090 --> 00:21:57,360 Mid to slightly after mid-14th century perceptions of church authors and their works. 169 00:21:58,560 --> 00:22:05,640 But it brings little grist to the mill of copies, in particular libraries and some confusion. 170 00:22:07,000 --> 00:22:13,030 In the form of entries which he derived from learned sources, 171 00:22:13,030 --> 00:22:21,010 not from books seen for works already lost when Jérome was drawing up his catalogue of Christian writers. 172 00:22:21,670 --> 00:22:29,020 So you will find entries for third century authors not seen since A.D. 300. 173 00:22:29,030 --> 00:22:36,129 And I had to I had to devise a signal to say this is an empty entry. 174 00:22:36,130 --> 00:22:46,990 But there it is in the index still to appear of volumes on secular cathedrals on the cathedral, prioress of Canterbury and Durham. 175 00:22:47,290 --> 00:22:50,260 Both of them, including important documents. 176 00:22:50,860 --> 00:22:59,140 And if I Live There, is meant to be a new edition to replace the first volume of the series the Friars Libraries from 1990, 177 00:23:00,250 --> 00:23:03,340 as well as a printed cumulative index. 178 00:23:03,340 --> 00:23:13,059 Provided I can get that past the publisher. I repeat that the policy of annotation entry by entry makes it possible to build understanding 179 00:23:13,060 --> 00:23:20,470 quite rapidly and that the head notes to each document and each library provide interpretation. 180 00:23:21,760 --> 00:23:25,150 The list of IDs, which I mentioned on Tuesday, 181 00:23:25,420 --> 00:23:33,909 was originally intended to speed Diplo by providing contributors with readymade ID notes for works already 182 00:23:33,910 --> 00:23:42,520 encountered to stabilise the form of these notes and ensure consistency and fingers crossed accuracy. 183 00:23:44,230 --> 00:23:50,740 As more documents have been edited, the accumulation of evidence sometimes corrected IDs. 184 00:23:51,040 --> 00:23:57,040 So if you really want to be scrupulous before citing something, check it against the list of IDs. 185 00:23:57,970 --> 00:24:05,680 This cumulative index should be the starting point if you're wanting to know about the frequency of particular titles, 186 00:24:05,680 --> 00:24:12,280 that kind of thing, as in a printed form, you can actually see from the layout on the page. 187 00:24:12,490 --> 00:24:16,000 The common books, the averagely common books, the rare books. 188 00:24:16,420 --> 00:24:22,180 I'm afraid in a database form you have to ask the right question and you won't see the neighbours. 189 00:24:24,710 --> 00:24:30,320 A By-product of all this work on IDs was by Latin writers, 190 00:24:30,740 --> 00:24:37,100 although it had been conceived rather earlier, and a little book in a nice blue cover called Titulos, 191 00:24:37,730 --> 00:24:47,060 in which I set out facts and considerations about how we can and should stabilise references to works red in the Middle Ages, 192 00:24:47,720 --> 00:24:52,850 as well as showing how identities might be changed in the process of transmission, 193 00:24:53,630 --> 00:24:58,220 which is a process subject to textual criticism like the text itself. 194 00:24:59,930 --> 00:25:07,130 Now it's time to look at some numbers across the 21 volumes that will be printed and annotated. 195 00:25:07,760 --> 00:25:15,440 We have what appear to be about 1200 documents as to the count of documents. 196 00:25:16,580 --> 00:25:20,209 That number. See what I've got next here. Right. 197 00:25:20,210 --> 00:25:24,860 You can see the third column has document numbers. 198 00:25:25,580 --> 00:25:30,470 They have zeros in to make them sortable. I meant to take the zeroes out. 199 00:25:33,530 --> 00:25:39,710 The count of documents from this numbering system would say 1200 or more, 200 00:25:40,370 --> 00:25:48,800 but it counts many times over a few documents that each report books in many institutions. 201 00:25:50,920 --> 00:25:56,920 Documents which are broken up in the corpus to be treated as evidence under each institution. 202 00:25:58,030 --> 00:26:06,940 Two of these documents represent short tours in England, one by Marcelo Carini, later Pope Marcellus, the second in 1526, 203 00:26:07,420 --> 00:26:15,250 and by an unknown agent of Henry the eighth in Lincolnshire in 1528, reporting between them on 50 libraries. 204 00:26:15,940 --> 00:26:25,900 And John Leland provides reports on mostly rare titles from some 120 institutions between 1533 and 1535. 205 00:26:27,450 --> 00:26:32,760 There are also some wills that bequeath books to more than one institution, 206 00:26:33,150 --> 00:26:41,010 and their treatment depends on whether or not the institutions in question are in the same volume of the corpus or across several. 207 00:26:42,510 --> 00:26:49,650 And one could reduce that to about 1000 to 4000 documents, therefore. 208 00:26:51,260 --> 00:26:57,050 The documents can be categorised by function catalogues in a broad sense inventories, 209 00:26:57,560 --> 00:27:06,500 location lists for pots of a collection, lists that reflect accession or loss or expenditure. 210 00:27:07,940 --> 00:27:14,480 Today, I'm concerned with those that seek to reflect the entire contents of a library at a particular time. 211 00:27:15,980 --> 00:27:24,920 Now, even here, one could speak of typological variation in catalogues, much of which reflects the period when a catalogue was drawn up. 212 00:27:26,870 --> 00:27:33,349 Early lists tend to survive because they were written into the back or the front of books, 213 00:27:33,350 --> 00:27:38,120 and it's the books that have been preserved on the lists come in by chance. 214 00:27:39,770 --> 00:27:44,000 Later, we have lists kept as records on parchment rolls, 215 00:27:44,390 --> 00:27:51,320 and we have catalogues like the Dover catalogue that was in the display case on Tuesday that fill a volume. 216 00:27:54,010 --> 00:28:06,409 I'm. There are early lists that you look at and you can't tell whether it's listing off the books or listing the contents of books. 217 00:28:06,410 --> 00:28:12,890 And you can't draw a line between one book and another because you can't tell titles from from volumes. 218 00:28:13,970 --> 00:28:20,270 By the 12th century, we often have catalogues that will name the first or principal work. 219 00:28:23,790 --> 00:28:29,220 In principle, work is the identifier of the volume. 220 00:28:29,580 --> 00:28:38,310 And then add a note of contents in quo. Continue to enlist the remaining works within the book. 221 00:28:38,880 --> 00:28:48,120 Such contents lists would have been entered at the front of the volumes in question, very likely in preparation for making the catalogue, 222 00:28:48,600 --> 00:28:57,510 though they might also help the reader of the book so the regular existence of contents lists in books from one institution. 223 00:28:57,870 --> 00:29:03,780 If this turns up in MLG, BE is probably evidence that there was a catalogue. 224 00:29:04,050 --> 00:29:12,030 Even though we don't have that catalogue. A 14th century catalogue from Peterborough MP, 225 00:29:12,450 --> 00:29:21,000 very strangely has a consistent practice of omitting the first work from any volume that contains more than one. 226 00:29:23,550 --> 00:29:27,510 We can see this by cross matching the catalogue and survivors, 227 00:29:27,990 --> 00:29:38,040 and I think the explanation is likely to be that the compiler was copying from an earlier catalogue that had been based on 228 00:29:38,550 --> 00:29:47,400 contents lists and that he ignored the top line and thought what he needed was what followed the words in Continental. 229 00:29:48,240 --> 00:29:54,570 He was doing the contents. Obviously, if there was only one work, there was only one word. 230 00:29:55,260 --> 00:29:59,880 But it really was a very strange realisation in that catalogue. 231 00:30:01,140 --> 00:30:07,860 I'm inclined to take this as evidence that what we have there is a secondary document copied with some 232 00:30:07,860 --> 00:30:15,630 measure of incompetence from an earlier catalogue and copied by someone other than the keeper of the books. 233 00:30:17,190 --> 00:30:23,280 In the display case we had the catalogue of Martins Priory at Dover. 234 00:30:23,290 --> 00:30:27,780 This is one I've shown quite often, so some of you may have seen it more than once. 235 00:30:29,130 --> 00:30:36,480 It's the catalogue of Martin's Priory of Dover, a small house dependent on Canterbury Cathedral PRIORY. 236 00:30:37,470 --> 00:30:45,960 The catalogue was drawn up by Brother John Whitfield in 1389 and edited as Volume five of the Corpus by William Stoneman. 237 00:30:46,770 --> 00:30:56,130 It is a fine example of the librarian's craft and one of several representatives of a 14th century golden age for catalogues. 238 00:30:57,750 --> 00:30:58,920 It's in three parts. 239 00:30:59,520 --> 00:31:09,690 The first, acting as an inventory for the custodian is in shelf mock order with one line for each book, including the Second Folio, 240 00:31:09,930 --> 00:31:20,250 the arbitrary identifier, the first words on the start, the start of the second leaf that identifies a manuscript as an object. 241 00:31:21,360 --> 00:31:32,879 The one entry from the catalogue also appears in the lower margin of the book, to which it refers all the Second Folio or any of the Folio. 242 00:31:32,880 --> 00:31:36,390 If the Second Folio equivalent has been taken from the third. 243 00:31:36,390 --> 00:31:41,390 The fourth. The fifth. And on display. 244 00:31:41,390 --> 00:31:46,430 We also had a book that can be matched up with it so that you can see the front, 245 00:31:46,430 --> 00:31:51,620 the details that appear you see in the lower margin, the details that match the catalogue. 246 00:31:54,250 --> 00:31:58,720 The second part of this catalogue goes through the collection again in the same sequence, 247 00:31:59,170 --> 00:32:07,000 this time using as many lines as were needed to list the contents, including the opening words of each work. 248 00:32:08,620 --> 00:32:12,910 This was for the dedicated library user who wanted to browse the catalogue. 249 00:32:13,690 --> 00:32:19,330 And the third part was an index for the brisk library user who wanted to find something quickly. 250 00:32:21,250 --> 00:32:28,360 Whitfield's inclusion of opening words Insipidus, as we call them, in the craft of identifying medieval works. 251 00:32:29,560 --> 00:32:39,850 Or perhaps I should say the mystery of identifying medieval works is very useful to the corpus as a whole, because when you have an obscure title, 252 00:32:40,180 --> 00:32:49,180 if it comes with the insipid, you have a means to track down through ordinary descriptive catalogues what the work is. 253 00:32:50,050 --> 00:32:55,000 So the incipient leads to the work, which then helps you to interpret the title. 254 00:32:56,530 --> 00:33:02,739 And an identification secured on an incipient through Dover or a number of other catalogues can be 255 00:33:02,740 --> 00:33:10,920 exported to help identify copies of the same obscure title in other book lists in the cumulative list. 256 00:33:10,930 --> 00:33:15,010 Watch out for ink in brackets after an index entry. 257 00:33:16,210 --> 00:33:22,060 It stands for Incipient and it shows that this identification is based on real evidence. 258 00:33:24,120 --> 00:33:36,630 Now from the thousand plus documents edited in the corpus, the number of entries annotated is currently 50,242. 259 00:33:38,310 --> 00:33:47,640 About 38,000 of those amount IDs that can be indexed on the author and title in the list of IDs. 260 00:33:48,330 --> 00:33:57,600 The others may be generic titles, gospels, epistles, missiles, brief furies, or anonymous unidentifiable titles. 261 00:33:57,900 --> 00:34:03,120 Perhaps the equivalent of trade books or careless titles. 262 00:34:03,300 --> 00:34:07,170 A Book of Physic. A book of grammar that you can't do much with. 263 00:34:09,150 --> 00:34:13,200 All of these are nonetheless indexed generically in the individual volumes, 264 00:34:13,590 --> 00:34:19,110 and I have to decide how far we may be able to get with a cumulative generic index. 265 00:34:21,320 --> 00:34:28,040 The overall pattern is that we have many more later records than earlier, 266 00:34:28,460 --> 00:34:35,060 and the idea of a bar chart for M LGB I said wouldn't work for this, would show something. 267 00:34:35,810 --> 00:34:41,000 There are 2028 documents from the 12th century. 268 00:34:41,390 --> 00:34:48,020 I think there are ten from before the 12th century. The pre 12th century ones are very short. 269 00:34:48,410 --> 00:34:55,570 Some of the 12th century ones are substantial. From the 13th century, the number of records rises to 54. 270 00:34:57,050 --> 00:35:03,710 Some of these are short lists of gift or accessions. Equally short reports of loans or losses. 271 00:35:04,100 --> 00:35:11,990 They are not catalogues describing whole collections. Subsidiary documents of this kind increase numbers as time goes on. 272 00:35:12,740 --> 00:35:19,400 From the 14th century. The number of documents is 190 from the 15th century. 273 00:35:19,730 --> 00:35:27,880 The number is 420. Those of you following the projection, forget it. 274 00:35:28,060 --> 00:35:35,080 The Reformation, the invention of printing, all sorts of things came into being that for the 16th century, it doesn't continue. 275 00:35:36,880 --> 00:35:47,170 If I were to provide average numbers of entries per document by century, there would be a steep decline as the number of lists mentioning only five, 276 00:35:47,170 --> 00:35:52,480 four, three, two books becomes a bigger and bigger share of the documents we have. 277 00:35:54,200 --> 00:36:02,000 We are collecting documents that individually tell us relatively little about the libraries that were in receipt of gifts. 278 00:36:03,080 --> 00:36:07,910 The steep increase in the records may reflect several factors. 279 00:36:08,900 --> 00:36:18,320 One is the increasing importance of secular institutions as against monastic institutions and the fact that university colleges, 280 00:36:18,320 --> 00:36:25,820 secular cathedrals and such like have had uninterrupted histories and retain substantial archives. 281 00:36:27,980 --> 00:36:35,150 Archive keeping from the 14th century onwards is usually less selective than from an earlier period, 282 00:36:36,110 --> 00:36:42,469 and the secular institutions were more likely to receive documented gifts than religious 283 00:36:42,470 --> 00:36:48,890 houses were whose gifts of books more likely came undocumented from within their communities. 284 00:36:50,000 --> 00:36:58,129 It becomes very important to tune into the developing character of the record evidence and the changing shape of 285 00:36:58,130 --> 00:37:06,230 the library economy that it reflects as a precursor to trying to interpret the vast number of these documents. 286 00:37:07,500 --> 00:37:12,480 Now, lest you become depressed by this welter of documentary evidence, 287 00:37:13,260 --> 00:37:18,810 let me interject an example that shows how even one document can make a huge difference. 288 00:37:20,010 --> 00:37:30,180 Among the relatively thin records at the beginning of the 14th century, and among the even thinner evidence for the holdings of Cistercian libraries, 289 00:37:30,900 --> 00:37:40,830 Z2 is a list of books baled into the hands of the Abbot and Convent of Bordesley MP in Worcestershire by Guida Beecham, 290 00:37:40,950 --> 00:37:44,430 Earl of Warwick, 1st of May 1306. 291 00:37:46,190 --> 00:37:56,600 The list survives only as a transcript made in 1689, but it describes the contents of 27 volumes of French romances, 292 00:37:57,740 --> 00:38:06,170 and there is no better testimony to a private aristocratic collection of such books. 293 00:38:06,890 --> 00:38:11,450 This doesn't tell us anything about what the Cistercians of Bordesley was reading, 294 00:38:12,050 --> 00:38:17,480 but it's enormously important as telling as what the the Earl and Countess of 295 00:38:17,480 --> 00:38:21,950 Warwick and their families might have been reading at the end of the 13th, 296 00:38:21,950 --> 00:38:29,380 beginning of the 14th century. The deed commits the books to the MP to remain indefinitely. 297 00:38:30,790 --> 00:38:34,780 There is nothing to suggest that this was merely a short term bail. 298 00:38:34,810 --> 00:38:42,700 Once in a while they had the library decorated. What it says about the reading habits of the monks of Bordesley is quite another matter. 299 00:38:43,780 --> 00:38:48,010 Oldie died in 1315 and was buried at Bordesley. 300 00:38:49,480 --> 00:38:58,480 Now I want to focus for a time on the high end libraries and you had a few minutes to read through the table. 301 00:38:59,260 --> 00:39:09,879 You will remember from Tuesday that MGP has 15 institutions with more than 100 recognised books surviving and 302 00:39:09,880 --> 00:39:19,330 another 85 with ten or more books leaving close to 500 institutions with fewer than ten books now recognised. 303 00:39:20,230 --> 00:39:23,380 The evidence of catalogues is much fuller. 304 00:39:24,920 --> 00:39:30,980 No. I have difficulties. I can't really see the list in either position. 305 00:39:31,310 --> 00:39:43,280 I was not able to fit on the slide more than 24 rows, which shows the four lists of catalogues with more than 350 entries. 306 00:39:44,660 --> 00:39:58,160 A catalogue of 40 or 50 books can feel quite meaty when I'm studying it and we have more than 200 lists with upwards of 50 entries. 307 00:39:59,030 --> 00:40:06,500 So this is quite rich material. Among the 24 at the top of the scale. 308 00:40:08,090 --> 00:40:19,670 And this is a count of entries in catalogues. There are ten Benedictine catalogues, two Augustinian, one Cistercian and one Bridgetown. 309 00:40:20,660 --> 00:40:27,590 Exeter Cathedral is the only secular church to appear on the strength of an inventory dated 1506. 310 00:40:29,720 --> 00:40:39,380 The comparative evidence suggests that Exeter Cathedral Library was indeed exceptional at this date in its collection of older books, 311 00:40:40,400 --> 00:40:46,460 and many of the manuscripts from Exeter were given to a more appropriate home 100 years later, 312 00:40:47,150 --> 00:40:52,880 when the canons handed them over to Thomas Bodley for his new library in Oxford. 313 00:40:54,300 --> 00:41:00,360 There are also seven university college lists among this top 24. 314 00:41:01,290 --> 00:41:08,250 And this is the normality which older editions of MGB had belied. 315 00:41:08,400 --> 00:41:16,350 I talked about the the manuscript in the medieval colleges being left out of the the count in MGB. 316 00:41:17,100 --> 00:41:21,960 The university colleges were an important part of the late medieval library sector, 317 00:41:22,830 --> 00:41:30,660 and they are better known both by record and by survival than most of the parts of the sector. 318 00:41:32,360 --> 00:41:36,040 Now this is ranked by number. 319 00:41:36,050 --> 00:41:46,340 I want to see if our perceptions change when we look at the same list in date order from the 12th century at the top, 320 00:41:46,340 --> 00:41:50,720 we have only one big list from Durham Cathedral Priory. 321 00:41:51,620 --> 00:41:57,860 Now, of course, we cannot say that Durham was the only library of this size in England in the middle of the 12th century. 322 00:41:58,460 --> 00:42:11,150 But we can see that it compares very favourably with Bury St Edmunds, which had a catalogue of some 261 entries and so is nowhere near the top 24. 323 00:42:11,870 --> 00:42:19,700 That catalogue dates from the third quarter of the 12th century, so a comparable date by the late 14th century. 324 00:42:19,910 --> 00:42:25,880 We know that Bury would have a library getting on for twice the size of that of Durham. 325 00:42:27,860 --> 00:42:32,660 So relative position on the scale of size is not stable. 326 00:42:33,740 --> 00:42:46,070 By aggregating two lists from Durham and they should both be here 516 and 386 dated 1392 and 1395. 327 00:42:48,500 --> 00:42:53,900 I'm not cheating here. These lists cover the books in the cloister and the spend amount. 328 00:42:54,200 --> 00:42:57,290 You add the two together to get a sense of the library. 329 00:42:57,830 --> 00:43:04,430 So the Durham Library in the 1390s, around 900 books. 330 00:43:04,880 --> 00:43:07,970 We have no list at all from Barry at this date, 331 00:43:08,780 --> 00:43:17,719 but Henry to Kirk and used a system of class marking by author and subject A for Augustine and Ambrose, so on and so on. 332 00:43:17,720 --> 00:43:26,930 Rising to a 138 B for Bernard and Bible rising to be 350 something and so on by taking 333 00:43:26,930 --> 00:43:33,080 the highest numbers in each letter class as represented by recognised survivors. 334 00:43:34,010 --> 00:43:40,490 The total number of books at Berry under this system was not less than 2100. 335 00:43:42,300 --> 00:43:46,530 And that's the biggest number we can project for any library in England. 336 00:43:46,770 --> 00:43:53,430 I can't quite give you a date on that because I don't know exactly how long the system continued after Henry's time. 337 00:43:55,230 --> 00:44:09,120 So the 456 Durham, it's it's looking big in the 12th century, but it's the only big evidence we have from the 13th century. 338 00:44:10,080 --> 00:44:16,350 We have only Glastonbury showing it around 400 entries by the middle of the century. 339 00:44:16,920 --> 00:44:20,730 The 13th century is a thin period, and if I get there, we'll see that. 340 00:44:21,420 --> 00:44:30,120 We can only wonder why evidence of this kind become scarcer in the 13th century than in the 12th or the 14th. 341 00:44:31,500 --> 00:44:37,500 If it were a simple matter that 13th Century Records had been superseded and discarded. 342 00:44:38,560 --> 00:44:45,520 Which is plausible. Then we need to consider why we have more from the 12th century than from the 14th. 343 00:44:46,060 --> 00:44:54,460 And it may be that if I did my statistics on what lists are preserved inside books that I might get, get an answer to that. 344 00:44:56,520 --> 00:45:04,980 In the fourth column of the table catalogue the prevailing word here we have a categorisation of the documents, 345 00:45:05,370 --> 00:45:09,330 and these very substantial lists are mostly described as catalogues. 346 00:45:09,720 --> 00:45:18,630 That is, they seek to describe a whole collection in some detail, allowing that early catalogues tend to have less detail than later ones. 347 00:45:19,530 --> 00:45:23,579 Catalogues were meant to serve library purposes, 348 00:45:23,580 --> 00:45:29,070 helping the keeper know what was in the collection and by the 14th century at least 349 00:45:29,550 --> 00:45:37,470 helping the potential reader inventories and some inventories appear among these are made 350 00:45:37,470 --> 00:45:44,490 to record and control property so that the entry for a book will usually be a single 351 00:45:44,490 --> 00:45:51,630 line identifying the book by one work only and the secondary folio as a type of record. 352 00:45:51,930 --> 00:45:56,250 These begin in a very small way in the 13th century. 353 00:45:56,820 --> 00:46:03,360 There are three from the 13th century, but they become numerous in the 14th, 15th and 16th centuries. 354 00:46:04,110 --> 00:46:14,010 In the corpus as a whole, I count 197 in inventories, a few of them with above 400 books seen here, 355 00:46:14,520 --> 00:46:19,379 many with a mere handful of books, but plenty with hundreds. 356 00:46:19,380 --> 00:46:26,210 200. 300. In the table, showing the biggest by size. 357 00:46:26,660 --> 00:46:30,140 St Albans. It will be the previous table. 358 00:46:30,590 --> 00:46:40,729 St Albans appears right at the bottom, the smallest we could fit on the screen with 362 entries. 359 00:46:40,730 --> 00:46:43,820 But it's a select list from Regis, from Anglia. 360 00:46:44,420 --> 00:46:48,080 So this is not 362 books. 361 00:46:48,560 --> 00:46:56,410 Registrar Anglia has a list of titles. That's 362 titles and we can't control. 362 00:46:56,770 --> 00:47:00,280 And if a lot of those are sermons of Augustan. 363 00:47:00,640 --> 00:47:06,040 It may be that the number shrinks dramatically into books. 364 00:47:07,330 --> 00:47:13,390 And it's a select list because the compilers of registry manga were only looking for certain authors. 365 00:47:15,070 --> 00:47:23,440 It is difficult to integrate the evidence of request stream that comes like this into the wider picture based on book lists, 366 00:47:24,310 --> 00:47:29,190 which just makes no attempts to describe books or their contents. 367 00:47:29,200 --> 00:47:33,639 Rather, it's a list of works. Some of them, in the case of Augustine, 368 00:47:33,640 --> 00:47:40,060 taken from his retract or alternates with a numerical union reference showing whether a 369 00:47:40,060 --> 00:47:46,270 particular place designated by that number had reported holding a copy of that title. 370 00:47:47,830 --> 00:47:58,780 Now, the next slide in a reduced form shows the reportage of quite big returns from registries. 371 00:47:58,840 --> 00:48:04,180 These are returns of 98 and upwards. 372 00:48:06,580 --> 00:48:12,280 21 institutions visited by the friars who report on more than 100 titles. 373 00:48:12,700 --> 00:48:20,290 Some of these are places that have left as little of the evidence of the books at all. 374 00:48:21,130 --> 00:48:30,220 So these are places that should earn a head note in MGP, even though there may be no recognised survivors to record. 375 00:48:30,760 --> 00:48:34,060 Now I'll go on to the next table, 376 00:48:34,450 --> 00:48:44,290 which takes over the first three columns and then adds as controls register circa 1290 and the number 377 00:48:44,290 --> 00:48:53,830 of number of titles and LGB to 1540 is the number of recognised survivors that have been logged. 378 00:48:54,550 --> 00:49:01,300 Then Big Cat means have we a catalogue that gives us for any particular date a sense of the 379 00:49:01,300 --> 00:49:07,750 size of that library and the big catalogues appearing there come from a wide variety of dates. 380 00:49:07,990 --> 00:49:21,219 I thought adding another four digit number to the table would just confuse the aggregation column involves my attempt to use other evidence to say, 381 00:49:21,220 --> 00:49:28,000 Well, have we any idea how big this library was across time and I shouldn't set too much store. 382 00:49:28,300 --> 00:49:31,980 Berry gets in 2000. I said 2100. 383 00:49:31,990 --> 00:49:38,229 Earlier on the aggregate, two of the letter classes St Mary's MP gets in at 750, 384 00:49:38,230 --> 00:49:45,880 which is a projection from the the the desk numbering the right hand column. 385 00:49:47,390 --> 00:50:00,230 Shows which institutions are best attested in terms of works from that place by registry and not by. 386 00:50:01,360 --> 00:50:04,780 Local catalogues or by surviving books. 387 00:50:07,470 --> 00:50:17,080 Now one case is particularly interesting, the list of 96 titles and sorry list of 96 books from Crowland. 388 00:50:18,360 --> 00:50:32,310 Fairly well done. That catalogue is undated and undateable, but the the rices made a good argument that it looks like a draft return. 389 00:50:33,240 --> 00:50:42,780 The kind of thing that went from an MP to Franciscan HQ to be used as the basis of the entry in Registrar Anglia, 390 00:50:43,170 --> 00:50:46,230 now for Crowland Registry has 110 titles, 391 00:50:46,560 --> 00:50:54,900 and the list, which is written in the back of a manuscript from Crowland now in Berlin, has only 96, so the return must have had a bit more. 392 00:50:56,700 --> 00:51:05,850 But there is a strong overlap there for institutions here in Scotland like Kelso or Melrose. 393 00:51:06,720 --> 00:51:13,770 This is the best information we have and there are a number of other far flung places where 394 00:51:14,550 --> 00:51:19,410 it gives you the impression of a substantial library that we would otherwise not know about. 395 00:51:20,130 --> 00:51:22,290 The Library of Woburn, for example. 396 00:51:22,440 --> 00:51:34,770 Cistercian, happy in Bedfordshire, slightly checkered history in 30 around 1390, as attested by 248 titles in Registrar Anglia. 397 00:51:35,370 --> 00:51:40,800 But other evidence for the medieval library is a single manuscript of the 12th century, 398 00:51:41,370 --> 00:51:49,830 which had left Woburn in time to be acquired by William Grey and given to Balliol College in the 15th century. 399 00:51:51,470 --> 00:51:59,710 Besides this MGB News three printed books from Weapon, two acquired by the Abbot in the 1520s, 400 00:52:00,110 --> 00:52:08,900 won by a monk in 1537, a year before the remaining monks of Wuhan were attempted and executed. 401 00:52:10,470 --> 00:52:18,150 Without the registry, the Cistercian library at Woburn would be a void filled only by assumption. 402 00:52:19,500 --> 00:52:24,370 And for close to two thirds of the institutions in this upper range of registry. 403 00:52:25,710 --> 00:52:39,450 It is the the best source we've got. Now I see my time is is running out and I've got lots of tables to show you, so I may skim through some tables. 404 00:52:39,460 --> 00:52:43,480 Don't worry. They didn't. 405 00:52:43,480 --> 00:52:49,120 They don't make the point I want to make as well as I wish they did. 406 00:52:51,010 --> 00:52:56,260 So bear with me to fulfil the promise made at the end of Tuesday's lecture to the 407 00:52:56,260 --> 00:53:00,970 effect that medieval library catalogues show as libraries as they once were. 408 00:53:01,660 --> 00:53:10,630 We must focus on true catalogues, allowing that inventories can add a sense of the size of collections and of the subject emphasis. 409 00:53:10,990 --> 00:53:19,960 You could see an inventory heavy in canon law even from single line entries, but they rarely have richness to the picture. 410 00:53:20,800 --> 00:53:27,040 I mentioned earlier that there are only about 50 true catalogues now. 411 00:53:27,880 --> 00:53:32,160 Reading these. Is the way forward. 412 00:53:33,330 --> 00:53:37,500 The old approach was to favour the biggest and best email. 413 00:53:37,500 --> 00:53:41,069 James edited Christchurch. Canterbury. St Augustine's. 414 00:53:41,070 --> 00:53:44,700 Canterbury, Dover. Peterborough, Leicester. 415 00:53:44,700 --> 00:53:53,070 Mary Beetson edited Psion. But we would mislead ourselves if we looked on these as typical. 416 00:53:54,330 --> 00:54:02,820 They're all, in their different ways, exceptional. The St Augustine's catalogue in its way, the most remarkable and challenging. 417 00:54:03,210 --> 00:54:07,950 And more. James simply didn't recognise its complexity. 418 00:54:08,310 --> 00:54:17,010 It took the extraordinary work of Bruce Barker Benfield of this parish to work out that this was a catalogue of the late 14th century, 419 00:54:17,430 --> 00:54:26,410 much augmented and then re copied in the 15th century, so that layers of editions had been flattened out in the copying. 420 00:54:26,760 --> 00:54:37,560 Unless one paid very close attention, as the editor did, really getting to grips with the catalogue of the scale is a big task. 421 00:54:38,310 --> 00:54:47,220 But if you think of the St Augustine's catalogue, Sir Henry de Kirk's did bury Whitfield at Dover all within the space of about 20 years. 422 00:54:48,870 --> 00:55:00,240 The 13 6070s was the period when cataloguing and metadata were at their most flourishing until perhaps recently. 423 00:55:02,130 --> 00:55:08,970 Now, medieval library junkies among you will no doubt go and read all 50 catalogues and benefit proportionately. 424 00:55:10,170 --> 00:55:19,420 One can form an overall picture that way, but there is a risk that different lists will cross, fertilise, or should I say cross. 425 00:55:19,440 --> 00:55:32,040 In fact, if we want to be able to characterise libraries, we need to typology of catalogues to reflect the different types of library in England. 426 00:55:33,180 --> 00:55:36,450 My assumption, or if I may use a less prejudicial word, 427 00:55:36,690 --> 00:55:45,150 my hypothesis is that our typology will most likely have to reflect three dimensions of difference. 428 00:55:47,160 --> 00:55:54,389 Let us suppose, until we have evidence to convince us otherwise, that Benedictine, Cistercian, Carthusian, 429 00:55:54,390 --> 00:55:59,850 Augustinian libraries may have differed from one another in some fundamental 430 00:55:59,850 --> 00:56:07,200 ways that the libraries of the mendicant orders very likely differed more. 431 00:56:07,890 --> 00:56:13,920 And the libraries of secular institutions, whether cathedrals or collegiate churches or university colleges, 432 00:56:14,520 --> 00:56:18,210 all had very different needs and interests. 433 00:56:19,830 --> 00:56:25,920 So species is a fundamental categorisation in a typology. 434 00:56:26,820 --> 00:56:32,610 Not all Benedictine libraries were the same, and a crucial factor is one of scale. 435 00:56:33,420 --> 00:56:40,080 Take Dover and Deeping. Both are primaries dependent on Benedictine abbeys. 436 00:56:40,500 --> 00:56:45,630 Dover, a cell of Canterbury, had 450 books in 1389. 437 00:56:47,550 --> 00:56:50,640 And they don't appear to have been a deposit from the Motherhouse. 438 00:56:50,640 --> 00:57:00,750 That was the Dover Library dipping a cell of the prosperous Fenland Abbey of Thorney had 22 books in the monks own brief. 439 00:57:01,290 --> 00:57:08,669 And they do seem to have been books deposited dipping from four, by my reckoning. 440 00:57:08,670 --> 00:57:12,150 And that's a mid 13th century list from Deeping. 441 00:57:12,450 --> 00:57:19,710 And by my reckoning, Thorney didn't have as many as 100 at that time, though it was a wealthy MP. 442 00:57:22,880 --> 00:57:32,480 Divergences of scale are not necessarily related to the wealth or number of monks, canons or friars. 443 00:57:35,420 --> 00:57:43,520 These places may have had large libraries or middling libraries, and a wealthy institution can get by on a middling library. 444 00:57:43,580 --> 00:57:47,600 We don't have external evidence to control for scale. 445 00:57:47,840 --> 00:57:52,370 We need to try and take it out from the book evidence. 446 00:57:54,190 --> 00:58:00,240 And so as well as. Species, religious order and scale. 447 00:58:00,420 --> 00:58:04,200 The third dimension of difference is chronological. 448 00:58:04,800 --> 00:58:12,150 All institutions change over hundreds of years, and the same is absolutely the case with libraries. 449 00:58:12,900 --> 00:58:22,020 We may make the supposition that libraries start small and get bigger, but that may mean that small at a later date. 450 00:58:23,100 --> 00:58:24,270 Confuses us about. 451 00:58:24,570 --> 00:58:37,320 Does it tell us about scale or does it confuses what we cannot well demonstrate is the phenomenon of reshaping collections to meet current needs. 452 00:58:37,800 --> 00:58:43,640 That's a polite way of saying deaccessioning. In some libraries. 453 00:58:43,640 --> 00:58:53,630 This is a pervasive concern and the modernisation of libraries in the late 15th and 16th centuries by the accession of large numbers of printed books, 454 00:58:54,260 --> 00:59:05,750 shows that it was going on in the Middle Ages. In one sense, our difficulty is insufficient evidence of the quality that we wish for. 455 00:59:06,590 --> 00:59:09,380 But that's not a matter of reality. 456 00:59:09,560 --> 00:59:22,040 Our real difficulty is choosing how best to use the evidence we've got, and that means choosing the catalogues that are types. 457 00:59:22,610 --> 00:59:28,280 Now I will just whizz past because otherwise I would be keeping you here for another half hour. 458 00:59:29,900 --> 00:59:39,200 What I've done is a table of the 12th century catalogues first in order of date and second in order of size. 459 00:59:39,440 --> 00:59:47,210 And you see Durham up at the top and very I mentioned when commenting that it wasn't as big as Durham but would later overtake. 460 00:59:48,020 --> 00:59:51,200 They come down to 59 at Peterborough. 461 00:59:51,560 --> 00:59:58,760 Now we can compare 59 Peterborough with 360 at Peterborough in the late 14th century. 462 00:59:59,240 --> 01:00:05,510 Peterborough certainly grew, but picking out a thread to join up. 463 01:00:06,170 --> 01:00:11,570 The third, the 12th, 13th, 14th, 15th century catalogues is challenging. 464 01:00:12,230 --> 01:00:21,740 The 13th century evidence is so small I could put in both sequences on one on one slide. 465 01:00:23,480 --> 01:00:30,709 Glastonbury is the one we've looked at with 402 brands sold their Pre-monsoon retention 466 01:00:30,710 --> 01:00:36,980 house with 147 in the late 13th century may be good going for the pre monstrous tensions. 467 01:00:36,980 --> 01:00:43,459 We have only one pre-monsoon retention catalogue with more and that comes from the end of the 14th. 468 01:00:43,460 --> 01:00:55,880 Beginning of the 15th century. 14th century was the great age of catalogues, and you can spend quite a lot of time peering through those. 469 01:00:56,900 --> 01:01:00,680 And this is what we've to try and navigate in looking for. 470 01:01:03,240 --> 01:01:06,569 Small, middling and large for each species. 471 01:01:06,570 --> 01:01:10,020 But we can't do it for each century. 472 01:01:10,590 --> 01:01:20,830 The 15th century evidence shrinks. And I'll spare you the detail on that. 473 01:01:21,580 --> 01:01:30,159 I feel as if I ought to have arrived at a conclusion that should allow me to say roughly in a range of numbers, 474 01:01:30,160 --> 01:01:36,100 let's say up to 80, 80 to 200, 200 to 500 above 500. 475 01:01:37,900 --> 01:01:46,480 A range of numbers of entries that a catalogue should have that would serve as a type for small, 476 01:01:46,750 --> 01:01:54,370 middling or large of this or that speech species in each of these four centuries. 477 01:01:54,850 --> 01:02:04,210 But I'm not confident that I can reduce it to such relative simplicity, and I am horrified by the gaps. 478 01:02:05,950 --> 01:02:09,550 When we put all the evidence for the mendicant orders together, 479 01:02:10,090 --> 01:02:17,260 we see absolutely no sign of any backdrop against which the York Austin Friars 480 01:02:17,260 --> 01:02:23,230 Library of 600 and old volumes in the 14th century would find its place. 481 01:02:23,590 --> 01:02:31,990 The rest of the evidence for the mendicant is desperately poor, and I'm sure that's in large part lack of evidence. 482 01:02:33,610 --> 01:02:42,730 We simply cannot see the major libraries that at least the Grey Friars and the Black Friars formed in Oxford in the 13th century. 483 01:02:43,300 --> 01:02:47,200 Libraries that were the backdrop of much scholarship. 484 01:02:47,920 --> 01:02:52,180 Scholarship that then in turn influenced the collegiate development of the university. 485 01:02:52,510 --> 01:02:56,580 And if the Friars were serious book collectors. 486 01:02:56,590 --> 01:02:59,710 But the evidence has gone under to later date. 487 01:02:59,980 --> 01:03:09,940 The Friars of London in the very late 14th and an early 15th century look as though they should have been major libraries. 488 01:03:11,360 --> 01:03:18,350 But the evidence is gone. So we can't fill all the slots in trying to frame a typology. 489 01:03:19,580 --> 01:03:31,280 Yet I still think that the typological approach is the right one to adopt to catalogues in the hope of getting an overview of 490 01:03:31,580 --> 01:03:41,150 the library distribution around the country better than to generalise from the richest evidence and paint a false picture. 491 01:03:42,140 --> 01:03:53,540 Now MLG be. And the corpus of medieval library catalogues are complex bodies of data that can be used simply. 492 01:03:54,680 --> 01:03:59,510 Do we know where this book was? Look up the shelf mark in the index of MGB and you're there. 493 01:04:00,830 --> 01:04:10,159 If you don't find it, the answer is we don't know. Though I may say the number of books in M LGB has increased by one since Tuesday. 494 01:04:10,160 --> 01:04:17,540 Since someone from the audience has sent me details of a book from the crushed Friars of London. 495 01:04:17,540 --> 01:04:26,980 Now, in a very out of the way place with a question, like, were there copies of, say, bede's biblical commentaries in a particular place? 496 01:04:26,990 --> 01:04:31,700 We can answer that. We can answer it at least for a particular time. 497 01:04:32,000 --> 01:04:37,370 There aren't many institutions where we have a sequence of catalogues or not a long sequence. 498 01:04:38,330 --> 01:04:43,430 We could say whether they were widely known in England in the late Middle Ages. 499 01:04:43,820 --> 01:04:49,580 These are specifics, and that represents a simple use of the evidence. 500 01:04:50,180 --> 01:04:54,919 But I want to invite you to think of these complementary bodies of evidence as 501 01:04:54,920 --> 01:05:01,520 witnesses more generally to the diverse and developing landscape of medieval libraries. 502 01:05:02,000 --> 01:05:09,230 And I've been attempting to show you approaches to reading them as evidence of the generality. 503 01:05:10,580 --> 01:05:16,190 For next week, I promised questions arising from the evidence outlined this week. 504 01:05:16,940 --> 01:05:20,450 Tuesday subject will investigate collection development.