I've forgotten what the title I gave for the sixth lecture was,
but it was something like the decay and closure of libraries to send you off on a happy note.
The dissolution of the monasteries plays a large role in English perceptions of medieval libraries and has done ever since.
Students began to think about the subject a very long time ago.
Keller indicated in the first edition of Mel B in 1941 that the limit of date is about 1540 for English and Welsh libraries.
And a decade or two later for Scottish libraries, books with inscriptions, etc. dating from the period of the Marian revival are not listed.
He hasn't mentioned dissolution, but Queen Mary did not revive medieval libraries.
She revived a handful of monasteries. The mere mention of 1540 and the dissolution is understood.
Its immediate aftermath locally has an important effect on the preservation of books from the dissolved houses,
the subject of great interest to which I have not devoted time in these lectures
as long as I'm LGB was dominated by books from dissolved religious houses.
There was a close link between the events of 1536, 1540 and the listing of what survived the wreck.
The dissolution has had the blame for our loss of countless medieval books that might otherwise have survived.
But our dashed hopes must be qualified. Nigel Ramsey,
in an essay in 2004 on The Break-Up of English libraries in the 16th century spelt
out reasons why the dissolution came at the worst possible time for libraries,
which was struggling to survive anyway.
The dissolution had only indirect impact on the universities and the religious houses in Oxford and Cambridge disappeared,
including the Benedictine colleges in Oxford. But there was no eager takeover of the books by neighbouring colleges.
Canterbury College ceased to exist when its parent body, the cathedral priory,
surrendered and there was no thought of its continuance in relation to the cathedral.
Re founded as a secular chapter, its recognisable books, that is,
medieval manuscripts from the cathedral that had been assigned to the college were well
represented among leaves used by Oxford Binders to bind modern printed books in Cambridge.
No money was spent on books for the university library.
Between 1530 and 1573, it was in effect, abandoned in 1546.
Seven being found of no use to anyone.
The space was converted into a theology lecture room.
The older university library in Oxford faded away in the same period, almost unvisited after the 1530s.
So the antiquarian bibliography,
John Bell was there some time between 1548 and 1553 hunting for little known medieval works among the neglected books.
Soon after that, Protestant reformers cleared the desks of books, and in January 1556, even the furniture was sold off.
The desks and benches were bought by Richard Marshall, dean of Christchurch,
to set up a college library in the former monastic refectory of Freud's whites.
Marshall was dean only under Queen Mary.
His Catholic views were often to the fore,
and he may have wished to create an old fashioned home for books displaced by more forward looking heads of colleges.
This was perhaps a rear guard action, therefore, rather than an early sign that libraries might recover.
There was much more afoot than to reduce the role of libraries than just the dissolution of the monasteries.
The dissolution happened early in England has focussed on it, a change that was widespread in Europe in the preceding decades.
Gallup poll fits in an article entitled Liberty in Utilities Useless Books in Scripture.
Miriam from 1996 spoke of a great perishing of books Bishop Stebbing and also more actively of a great Sir
Stuart Spark a work of destruction in countries that escaped the secularisation of monasteries at this period.
The evidence shows that the flood of printed books was accompanied by a large scale disposal of manuscripts.
Poets put some emphasis on the need for scrap parchment to bind the flood of new books and notes,
also the concurrent binding of manuscripts that were retained.
But binding leaves are a symptom of destruction.
They do not represent the cause of disruption, of destruction.
Scrap parchment, it seems, had a greater value than the same parchment as bearer of manuscript text.
The cause here was simply obsolescence.
The second hand market was allowed 12th and 13th century manuscripts to be sold on had dried up at some point.
We identified the example of William Charities acquiring such books for Leicester around 1480 or 1490,
when he might just as well have bought new printed books 20 or 30 years later.
There is no evidence for keeping the old and ample evidence for the move from manuscript to print.
We have therefore two topics in parallel in the closing years of the 15th century and the first decades of the 16th century.
One is the taking up of printed books in the same institutional settings as had for hundreds of years,
maintained libraries of manuscripts in countries where religious houses were not dissolved at the time of the Reformation.
This transformation happened and would no doubt have been as well attested in England as in France and Italy if religious houses had survived.
Here it is noticeable in English evidence, but we tend to overlook it, in part because libraries have,
since the 17th century, separated manuscripts as old and printed books as part of a continuing tradition.
The practical reason why Care and his colleagues made no search for printed books back in
1930 840 printed books that had belonged to institutions before the dissolution wars.
And is that catalogues of printed books have not usually recorded marks of ownership,
and that the work involved might have meant working along library shelves and opening countless 16th and perhaps 17th century books.
You can't tell from the outside, necessarily. In the process of finding those few that might be relevant, it was not done.
The evidence is therefore under recorded because M LGB only includes printed books
with Monette with medieval provenance when the compilers happened upon them.
The second topic is the cessation of libraries.
The university libraries closed because they were no longer needed.
Cathedrals and colleges that entered enjoyed continuity through the period might
retain their old books alongside new books if they had space and so pleased,
but few did. Libraries disappeared, whether the institution closed or remained open.
No, this is a phenomenon that might be expected as much on the continent as in England.
But I'm not conscious that it has attracted attention and I'm in no position to point to examples.
If, as in England, there was a revival after a gap of 30 or 40 or 50 years, then the gap may have been forgotten.
In places where there was more, especially in countries where monastic institutions simply continued to exist,
it would take close attention to say, whether accessions have more or less dried up.
For a few decades, in the middle of the century, while the old books gather dust until times changed and new books were acquired,
the reason library ceased is because printed books were so much cheaper and so much more easily
obtained that individuals who wanted to know the materials that individuals wanted to read.
No, I'm losing my thread here that individuals individuals who wanted to read could form their own personal studies in the 16th century.
If college fellows could buy what they needed with ease, they had less need to depend on the lending books held by the college for generations past.
They could have copies in the new medium. Lighter. Cleaner.
Easier to consult over time.
The need for libraries re-emerged not because books had reverted to being too expensive,
but because scholarship sometimes demanded that one consult old editions or works no longer available in print.
The accumulation of a third and fourth generation of printing needed libraries not so much to manage the availability of any current work,
but to manage availability.
From generation to generation, the gap between the closure of libraries and the formation of new ones was therefore relatively short.
I've given the dates for Cambridge University Library new acquisitions and in 1530, maintenance lapsed in 1546 seven and purchases restarted in 1573.
Here in Oxford, the lapse was a little later and the revival came only with Thomas Bodley in 1598.
In the meantime, some college libraries were growing apace in the 16th century.
I think Corpus Christi, for example, with its catalogue of 371 books from 1589,
making it a rare example of possibly continuity or at least of revival.
After a relatively short break, although not a medieval college nor a medieval booklist,
this was included in the volume of medieval catalogues for Oxford.
No, I have no pictures today, but a bit of text.
I can show you a couple of pages of printed text to make several points in one go.
These are pages from William Farrell's edition of The Contrary of Cox.
And here he prints an inventory taken two years before the dissolution.
1530 637. It has survived among the rentals and surveys retained in the archive of the Duchy of Lancaster, so not part of the dissolution materials.
Detailed inventory is taken at the time of dissolution are not rare,
but it is very rare to find them into books which formed no part of the commission's brief.
I've highlighted two points here on the left hand page and we're under the heading ornaments of the church.
We see 30 stalls in the choir just above the read books valued at 66 shillings and eight points,
far less than they would have cost to make at the time of the surrender in 1539.
There were 22 cannons beside the abbot at cock Hassan so 30 stalls is not terrific over and the institution was not
to run down the next item in the red box is 54 parchment books in the choir valued again at 66 shillings and £8.
A marginal note given at the bottom. So is too much.
On the right hand page, there is a heading for the library itself, an unusual thing to find.
And three items of valued 52 books in the library.
Five shillings. That's just over a penny per book in old money, six feet of glass, tuppence burfoot,
a shilling and 54 books in the old brief on the cloister side, six shillings and $0.08.
Now that's almost $0.03 per book in old money, but the rate per book does not seem to matter.
The commission's clerk might as well have tempted them and said One penny per book.
The individual values are insignificant. It's particularly interesting to see here that there was a room designated as a library.
It has one window. So this is presumably not a large room fitted out with reading as a reading room with desks.
The rest of the books are still in the room on the side of the cloister where books are presumably being kept.
Since church and Cloister were built at the beginning of the 13th century.
Nothing. Nothing of this survives. No. There's only the chapter house in use as a cattle shed.
The valuation of the books, I say, is almost insignificant.
But the parchment books in the choir are valued at more than a shilling apiece.
Now, we may guess that these included choir books, perhaps some service books, and the relatively high value perhaps suggests large format books.
But service books from a Pre-monsoon retention MP had no second hand value at all in England at this date.
So still guessing. Is this a value based on their scrap value as parchment?
It looks like it, but it seems to me like an awful lot of money.
So in a few lines of inventory, we see a library that is modernised now equipped with a library room and a stock of 100 more printed books.
I think we have to take them as printed books by default.
Parchment is not mentioned. This is a small library for the 1530s, and many an individual would have had more books of insignificant value,
it seems, and Watchmen books with a more significant value.
Speculatively, I say as scrap. From Monk Britain near Barnsley in South Yorkshire.
We have a still more unusual record of 140 books kept by a small group of former
monks of the Priory who continued to live a communal life for 20 years and more.
We may wonder whether the making of the list in 1558 and of the culture in which it was written,
is a sign of the hoping that Queen Mary would renew life at their monastery.
The list is concise, with no second folios in the old style and no place and year of printing that would become the new style of listing.
We have just titles, but these are sometimes distinctive of title pages from printed books,
and there can be little doubt that they were nearly all printed books, almost all in Latin.
There are a few items of in English, all of them printed off the 1500 calendar of shepherds, for example,
of which there were seven London editions between 1506 and 1528, but then none again until 1559.
So the 1558 list must have one of those from the early part of the century.
I might interject here a concern with what I perceive as a discontinuity between what was read in
English language manuscripts and what was printed in English in the early decades of the 16th century.
But I ought to plead ignorance. Impulse by. Most curious to me on the Britain list is an entry for our rural Aurora totem ferry biblio matrix.
Vestibules complex turns the aurora embracing the whole Bible in poetic verse,
which looks to me like the title from a 16th century edition of the late 12th Century Work of Petrus Reger.
But no edition is known to have existed from any date earlier than this list.
So we may have here a unique attestation from South Yorkshire of an edition of an internationally used schoolbook, otherwise totally lost.
Only one work. Britain appears definitely to be in manuscript, and that's a copy of the musical Monachorum of the Yorkshire Carthusian, John Norton.
So here in Britain it seems we have evidence for a modest monastic library on the eve of the
dissolution still held in common by four monks who simply kept the books when pensions 24 years,
20 years before the list was made.
Of course, we cannot swear that there were not also quantities of old manuscripts in the Priory which they chose not to keep.
MLG B shows only a 13th century Bible and the 13th century breviary its calendar Cluny EC and associated with nearby Pontefract,
which was bought by a monk Monk Breton in the early 16th century.
So not a survivor from the long history of the Priory.
Now MGB is a book for medieval lists,
and a list such as that from Monk Breton is really of interest to students of Catholicism on the eve of the Reformation, not to medieval lists.
Sometimes we see the same attitude reflected in our sources.
John Little, one of the five compilers of the first MLG, be edited for the English Historical Review,
a list of works noticed by someone touring some of the religious houses of Lincolnshire and picking up books on behalf of perhaps the King,
perhaps Cardinal Woolsey. The list had in the past been associated with John Leland, the King's Antiquity,
who was known to have toured parts of England between 1533 and 1535 and to have made such
notes as well as for acquiring some of the books for himself and for the King's Library.
These lists from Lincoln should show a plus sign against some titles.
And wherever the plus is used, the book can usually still be found in the Royal Library.
So there's a clear connection between the visit and books taken to the Royal Library.
But at no fewer than 16 out of 32 houses, the visitor recorded no titles.
These include six houses of Friars, five of Austen Canons, three of Gilbert ten canons,
one of Pre-monsoon retention canons, and one of Cistercian monks.
James Carney has directed the list to the summer of 1528 and the purpose to find
books that might aid the King's argument for his divorce from Queen Catherine.
Only once is the word library are used and that of Lincoln Cathedral, where there was nothing worse recording.
The visitor wrote, in varying words, that there were books but nothing but common printed books, or sometimes common or printed books.
Computer res library communities are taking Empresarial literary study to computers, critics said.
Well, communities are t where impressed Sawyer literary.
In booty he sometimes sees that there were printed books or books not to all purpose, which at least implies they were not printed.
Multi sunt Ibid. Library Noam TEMIN av rem pertinent days well community in precis commonly printed for this visitor.
There is a persistent equation between communists usual commonplace and printed, so his lack of interest signals to us that these places,
most of the minor, have no historic collection to interest him, but merely modern books, sometimes sufficient for him to use the word multi.
It's not what we want to hear if we're looking for medieval manuscripts.
But it tells us that small religious houses had modernised by the early 16th century.
It should not surprise us. It seems to have disappointed the visitor as it would have disappointed the compilers had been LGB.
Only two Benedictine houses were visited on this tour and the largest number of titles recorded.
13 was bought and the MP two books were recorded at Friston, a little cell of the Benedictine Abbey of Crowland.
We can't read anything about the Library of Botany from this information.
Places where he records manuscripts may also have had modern collections, but the record focussed on older items and does not tell us.
The positive evidence for the move into printed books is not often readily accessible,
and the best view that we get is at Syon, where the large catalogue of the Brethren library from around 1500,
with nearly 300 overwritten entries from around 1524 shows that printed books were being acquired by the Brethren from as early as 1468.
Mary Beetson, a good medievalist, remarked in her preface that she embarked on her edition with no sense of the bibliographical challenge involved.
She did well, but we now have Gillespie's edition,
which I often think is the most straightforwardly rewarding volume of the corpus of medieval library catalogues.
It's an outstanding catalogue and it's very well presented.
Some hundreds of early printed editions can be recognised mostly from their second folios,
which lead you to an edition rather than to an individual copy, as they would with manuscripts.
And their most common source of editions is Cologne.
This appears clearly enough from the index of Imprints, and if you contrast it with the index of imprints in the libraries of King Henry the Eighth,
you see that his books came for preference from Paris.
The surviving books from Scion. The surviving books associated with Scion, I should say, include a handful still later than 1524.
But these are mostly books that belonged to the Sisters of the Abbey.
For example, a copy of Richard Woodford's Work the Pipe or Tongue of the Life of Pursuit of Perfection.
London Robert Redmond 1532.
And the copy is now Bodley Quarto w2th sold belonged to Eleanor Fetty Place, whom we can identify as a sister of Scion at the dissolution.
A copy of The Tree and 12 Fruits of the Holy Ghost.
London Robert Coupland 1535 Now Cambridge,
Trinity College C 712 belonged to I'm going from a printed report Mart wins Dominar
to Scion and I'm not sure what's implied by her baptismal or her forename,
at least the a sister of the MP and another copy of the same work.
Note Ampleforth belong to Dorothy Codrington, a sister of Scion at the time of the dissolution.
It may be doubted whether these books should have a place in MGB,
since the sisters very lightly kept the books after the dissolution if they were not entered in them LGB However,
I should not have known they had this connection and I wonder whether they could have been found without two vast research.
A curious pair of books which we can associate with the Brethren Library are now in Boston College that are not mentioned in the catalogue.
There's a Bible concordance, all in Hebrew, printed at Venice in 1524 and a Hebrew grammar printed at Basel in 1525.
One carries the name of John Futura, sometime fellow of Pembroke College, Cambridge, who appears as donor of 75 books in the signed AP catalogue.
So this is a perhaps a follow up. I printed 1524.
It shouldn't be in the catalogue. The other has the name of Bond identified with William Bond donor of 29 books in the catalogue.
Neither of these two books appears. Both persons were still very much alive when the catalogue was drawn up.
Bond died in 1530 future in 1536.
Another book, a Latin commentary on the Pauline epistles printed at Paris in 1528, now at Stonor Park,
is inscribed with the name of John Coppinger, who died shortly before the dissolution as a brother at Syon.
And this has an inscription.
Also pray for William Bond and John Coppinger, good daughter, suggesting that it had been passed to a family member, possibly a sister at Syon.
So these are books from the very end of the monastic tradition, recent printed books.
Scion was a relatively recent foundation with a relatively modern, late medieval collection of books, and it was clearly moving forwards.
Half the library was made up of printed books. A Benedictine house with a large and old library such as Canterbury Cathedral.
Priory was also acquiring printed books.
In this case from around 1470.
But our knowledge of them is close to insignificant, and such knowledge is equally thin for any printed books.
At Canterbury College in Oxford.
Although we have inventories from the early 16th century, the books were mostly the same as had been there for decades,
and those that survived from the college lists are mostly recognised by Marx from the Priory.
And we can associate the books on the college list with books in the priority catalogue.
In both universities, the evidence for the shift from manuscript to printed books is less apparent.
The more might wish and expect. The explanation for this, I suspect, is price colleges old collections still at the beginning of the 16th century.
Colleges retain their old collection still at the beginning of the 16th century.
But fellows were buying books for themselves.
An unusual example of a major donation is more than 200 volumes gifted to Corpus Christi College,
Cambridge and OSU magistrates of Hiram to the use of the Master and Fellows by its former master, Peter Nobbs.
But some date between 1525 and 1542, the college library as such was in abeyance.
But when a new library was fitted out in the 1560s and that's an early renewal, there were then just over 100 books in the six stools of the library.
So that one gift for the former master was double the size of the college library.
The magnificent gift of Archbishop Parker would transform Corpus Christi, his library,
into a treasure house of old and very old manuscripts, many of them from Canterbury.
But that belongs to a different world in which we recognise that medieval books were collected as antiquities.
I have argued the likes of John Geiger.
Burton thought this thought this way a century earlier, but that did not in itself present discontinuity in many college libraries.
The changes in college libraries are, in most cases, pretty obvious.
For two centuries, roughly 13, 22, 15, 20,
these small institutions had used communal resources to provide students and scholars with sufficient books for their studies.
But in the early 16th century, investment in libraries generally ceased.
Books chained to desks languished. Or worse.
This remembers the time when Leland is knocking at the door of the Greyfriars saying, Let me in, and finding that they've got rid of their old books.
Lending stocks were depleted and not replenished.
And old handwritten volumes on parchment fell into the hands of book binders to be used one or two by folio at a
time in binding modern books and manuscripts before those centuries before intellectual change always present.
But fast moving in the early 16th century coincided with the relatively recent medium of print.
The convenience of paper and significantly lower prices to make old books.
Lumber apparently worth more scrap than for use.
In his catalogue of the few manuscripts held by Clare College Cambridge,
M.R. James emphasised how often it could be said that and I quote this and that college
once possessed a large and interesting library which has now entirely disappeared.
In another catalogue published in the same year, Christ's Later Foundation.
He began, The lament over the lost library has to be uttered as in other cases.
So in that of Christ's college it was a recurring theme peterhouse Glenville Hall and to some extent Penn Brook retained many of the medieval books.
But most colleges did not. The same is true in Oxford, though.
There are some more colleges here still with numbers of medieval books, but in no case a reflection of the size of the late medieval library.
M.R. James did not dwell on the circumstances for the loss of these medieval libraries, but that generally belongs to the early to mid 16th century.
And it was not the result of carelessness, and it was not the impact of dissolution.
It was the result of keeping up to date.
And we may ask why some colleges did not clear out their old and useless books, but kept them for us to enjoy.
No,
those that did keep them would find 40 or 50 years later that they had an advantage in historic collections and by the beginning of the 17th century.
Thomas James's at Clogher suggests that it was already an advantage to make public.
While college libraries had languished, university libraries had closed.
That may reflect the difference in available space or in the presence of a community of fellows.
The libraries of secular cathedrals and of colleges outside the universities rarely fared better.
And the dissolution of the Benedictine Cathedral.
Prioress did not, in most cases, lead to a rich inheritance of manuscripts by their secular successors.
Eight of 16 major medieval houses that survived under new constitutions.
Durham and Worcester are the only ones that stand out as retaining a significant fraction of their medieval books.
And despite the fact that Edward, the six Protestant ministers,
exhorted demons and chapters to build libraries of books for the study of Scripture and Protestant theology,
there is little sign that they did so until the second half of the 17th century, by which time demons and canons were a good deal more prosperous.
The circumstances of intellectual change. New books in a new medium.
And much cheaper availability. Together, we may think with a sense of looking forward, rather than continuing in the old ways,
meant that the older libraries were on the way out with or without the dissolution of the monasteries.
In England, there was no conversion of books to secular use, such as happened in Surrey in 1524.
No policy of sequestration. Such has happened in Sweden in 1528,
where thousands of books were taken off to a former Franciscan convent on an island in Stockholm Harbour and kept for decades
until someone decided that they would be useful in providing wrappers for the attempts produced by government officials.
We are now delighted to recover those binding leaves.
They can be analysed as books, sometimes putting together a good many leaves from an individual book.
And it's been said that they have preserved more evidence of ordinary 12th century liturgical books from England than survives anywhere in England.
It's equally true that in England there was no policy of sale or destruction.
If pensioned former monks or incoming buyers of monastic buildings did not want the books, anyone could have them.
And in some places, we can infer that there were men who, for whatever reason, kept books.
The colossal dispersion was not always immediate.
It's been shown at Canterbury Cathedral, which continued, of course, as a secular foundation,
that books were being removed from the coastal buildings over a period of three generations.
That is part of the story of what lies behind MLG to be something well-treated by care in his
paper to the bibliographical society immediately following the publication of the first edition.
The subject to the paper. The migration of monastic manuscripts reflected that early view of MGP and its formative stages as evidence of
what had belonged to the monasteries and had survived the dispersion and destruction caused by the dissolution.
But in these lectures, I've urged that we should not think of medieval libraries so much in monastic terms, as has been the habit.
It was a habit among 17th century antiquities, and it was reflected in the 18th centuries sneering view of the Middle Ages as monkish times.
But it is misleading. The 14th and 15th centuries have left us ample evidence that the secular institutions,
such as the university colleges, had a large role in the library economy.
When the surviving books are entered into MGB three and become visible online.
Soon, I hope then they will account for 25% of the books listed in the database.
You will remember the table I showed in my first lecture.
If one recalls that there are two universities and 35 medieval colleges and halls providing evidence against some 500 odd religious houses,
then it becomes clear that in the later Middle Ages there was some concentration of books.
In just two terms, the handful of major old libraries of manuscripts around the country were probably making very little difference,
and it would perhaps profit as to profit as little to wonder how much benefit the monks bury
St Edmunds drew from the 2000 volumes they had at the peak of their letter marking system.
We have little sense that they're using them and little sense that they let others in to use them.
The making of a library room at Bury by Abbot Curtis in the 1420s may have meant an early
15th century deaccession of surplus books with training books to desks they were selecting.
They weren't trying to cover the whole lot.
And in many religious houses, the simple decline in the number of religious over the late 14th and 15th century may have been a factor,
not simply indifference to books, but there's only five of us left.
We don't need so many.
If there is widespread evidence that the secular part of the library economy was stronger than the monastic part in the 14th and 15th centuries,
I've tried also to make a case that we've put too much emphasis on the monastic part in the 11th and 12th centuries,
forgetting the extent of a secular book economy and ignoring the evidence for London as a commercial
centre of the book trades already in the late 12th century and perhaps even in the early 11th century.
You may or may not have believed my use of that evidence from should.
I have, I think, allowed myself some time for a little summing up.
In my first lecture, I forecast three points that I intended to be remembered from these talks.
Libraries in medieval England and elsewhere to took many forms.
The abstract medieval library with a definite article is an illusion.
The libraries of medieval England were not static, still less cumulative, but were often changing,
despite the obvious fact that some books remained in the same place for centuries
and found the means to survive for centuries more since the end of the Middle Ages.
And third, we cannot think about libraries without thinking about books,
because in most contexts throughout the period under review, libraries were only one sector of the wider book economy.
In the first week, I spoke about the principle two bodies of evidence books that carry evidence of institutional provenance and documentary records.
We mostly use them in a simple way to discover the provenance of this or that manuscript.
To answer the question, How many books have we from this or that place?
Or to investigate how many copies there were of, say, Grigory, the ninth decree outlaws in medieval England.
The list of IDs provides a fairly ready answer to that one.
There are 295 copies of Gregor of the nine decree files attested by documents.
MGP is not so easy to use.
One could do a full text search on the word decrypt always,
but you have then to separate out different sorts of decree files and commentary on decree files.
But I make the number around 25, and I don't know how many can be cross matched with entries in catalogues unproven and two copies are uncounted.
I'm tempted just to drop in the question how many copies were needed to keep the Canon lawyers of England adequately provided?
I thought 295 provenance copies through medieval documents.
Quite a surprisingly large number, and I wouldn't like to calculate what it represents of the complete supply.
This opens up a huge problem of texts and readers and the meeting of their needs, which in the first lecture I said I should not discuss.
Rather,
I want to encourage you to think how to use MGB and the body of information in the 16 volumes of the corpus so far 20 volumes if it is completed.
To ask more general questions about book provision through libraries of
different kinds over five centuries and having so many of the books themselves,
we can enrich the picture that we form from the documents,
and we can see how many of the books individually came into libraries from personal ownership and post out of libraries into personal ownership,
trade ownership, and the ownership of other libraries.
I want to have made a case that we should be looking for a consistent way of
reading the evidence we have across its breadth and across the long delay.
I don't want to come across as hostile to close engagement and serious thinking about one aspect of the evidence one species of library,
or about short periods of activity or inactivity.
But to do that without attempting a bigger picture leaves us with deficient views.
The Illusory Script Forum of Exeter Cathedral in the mid 11th century,
the prevalent view of monk scribes and the notion of books safely chained in quiet religious
houses for centuries all detract from a real understanding of medieval libraries.
And the way to deal with this is to take a run at it and try to see it whole.
You've patiently sat through two sessions on evidence, two sessions on questionable assumptions, and now two with some kind of narrative.
The end point of the narrative in the 1530s and forties is a gloomy one for libraries, but a successful one for books.
The big picture must be a mosaic, and it is an ancient mosaic.
The scene as a whole is made up of Tesserae that are details, surviving books, entries in book lists.
But the evidence is very patchy.
There are areas where the picture cannot be recovered on English evidence, and there are risks in writing from continental sources.
In the Devil's Gallop yesterday.
I left out whole phases where this or that kind of library can't be talked about because the evidence is just not there.
But it is no good to rely only on the evidence for big Benedictine libraries,
the kind of things edited by M.R. James that appear to tell such a rich story of Latin learning.
For an overview of the medieval libraries.
My recommendation to you in my second lecture was to read some of the full catalogues printed in the corpus.
Now select them by type of institution, by size, by period,
and you'll get types of libraries to progress outwards from that to a wider understanding of the matter actually read.
Then the list of ids available was an out of date pdf from my website or via the MLG B3 website allows a view of what was widely available.
What was not uncommon. What was rare? The very close reader of the list of IDs may notice rare works such as St Catherine's dialogues
in Latin translation appearing only at Syon and in costumes in libraries and not more widely.
That's a significant comparison. The Cos used in writer Dennis Reichel has a similar distribution and so to the work known as Do Not Just Evoke Tunis.
This will not surprise students of late medieval devotional works who will no Carthusian son Brigitte Tynes read this kind of thing.
But it's good to see it confirmed by the absences reported from so many other libraries in such a large index.
Negatives themselves can attract attention.
I feel shy of mentioning this stage of the afternoon vernacular languages.
But in MLG be 96% of the books entered with an institutional provenance are in Latin.
1% in French and 3% in English.
My impression is that we have a considerable number of manuscript books in late medieval English,
and that's without opening up the material in the public records.
Very few of these in English books of the late 14th and 15th centuries have evidence of provenance that would get them into MGP.
They were perhaps all private, but if so, have they defied the odds in surviving?
I tend to believe that there's more chance of surviving through the centuries in a library than if they have to change hands every 20 or 30 years.
They survive much better than aristocratic books in French from England were many of them housed at
least until the 16th century in religious houses that just were not good at marking their books.
I actually do think there is a question to be answered about their survival since the 16th century,
because it's my impression that the libraries that gave safe homes to medieval books in the
late 16th and 17th centuries were not much concerned with late medieval vernacular texts,
which therefore survived in a precarious environment for a very long time.
Before I conjecture that they were in the under tested religious houses of nuns.
I should raise the big question that across the board we do not know in any century the size of the medieval book economy,
and therefore we cannot make any attempt to compute the proportion of that economy represented by libraries.
It is a consideration I think we've neglected and the consequences of various too much
focus on monastic books and on libraries as epicentres of book production in the
early period has masked openness to recognising a book trade that did much to make
works available and helps us to solve the problem of exemplars in the later period.
Libraries always draw on the trade, but often through individuals whom we call donors and they feed the trade with books.
Deaccessioned. This in turn, feeds newer libraries, but the intergenerational turnover in books not owned by institutions has always eluded us.
We do not know how long a book would last outside a library, and we cannot calibrate how how far libraries extended the lifespan of a book.
With printed books, and I'm thinking of 16th, 17th century books.
And later Bradshaw's Paradox says, Oh no, if it were rare, it would be very common.
Did you get it?
We know that libraries have played a vital role in preserving copies of disregarded works that have become truly rare rather than collectable.
The equivalent phenomenon is entirely down to chance with medieval books.
Since there are no libraries in England that are provided the security to preserve rare works across many hundreds of years,
it's down to chance entirely, and most medieval texts were in their own day, rare and becoming rarer with time.
The evidence we have from medieval libraries is vital to any appreciation of what could be found if a reader wanted to find it,
and what was so rare that one could happen across it only by chance.
The slender thread is always tempting, and when working on my collection of Latin writers from the British Isles,
I was going through documents hoping to find really, really rare things.
But the bigger picture is not something to avoid entirely.
However imperfect our attempts at it may be.
Let's just move on behalf of the electors to the lectureship.
I'd like to thank Professor Sharp for giving us an extraordinary glimpse at the libraries in monkish times.
We have drawn such extraordinary riches or riches, drawing such extraordinary riches from the sources of which he is our contemporary master.
Medieval life is a great person and the corpus of medieval library catalogues in particular.
And he's drawn the evidence together and painted a picture of libraries across the in this country, across all these countries,
across an extraordinary period of time, and reminded us of a number of important things that those libraries were not the same at any particular time.
You cannot draw inferences of a particular library at one point in time and expect it to be the same two or 300 years later.
He's reminded us of the changing values of libraries and also reminded us that the dissolution,
that great end point that we've all expected or become used to thinking of was actually not so cataclysmic after all,
and was just a sign of a process that had begun much earlier and was triggered by other
changes in the medieval book economy or perhaps the Renaissance book economy by that point.
But I think the the picture that has been painted for us will enable us to change our view of medieval libraries at that time,
and particular because the two great projects which he has overseen and continues to oversee,
will allow that general picture to be that he's painted, to be tested and re-evaluated by going down into very, very granular evidence.
And that evidence, as Richard has highlighted through the course of the lectures, continues to be built up.
And there are, if you like, data which will continue to be added to those sources, and particularly by Richard's own efforts.
And I think we should pay tribute to him as a project manager.
Projects Fund raise. And his stamina in those activities should be commended by all of us, I think.
So we will look with eager anticipation and I can speak on behalf of the limelight as to
the eventual publication of these lectures and our ability to use those in conjunction
with MGB three and the Corpus to be able to take our understanding of the medieval libraries
of Britain forward into the next future generations of analysis and understanding.
Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in congratulating and thank you, Professor Sharp, for an outstanding series of lectures.