6 - College and university book collections and libraries

Summary

At some point during the middle years of the fifteenth century a monk of the Yorkshire Cistercian house of Meaux sold two theological texts, one a work by Aquinas. Appropriately enough, given the character of the two books, the purchaser would seem to have been a Cambridge academic, William Wylflete, sometime fellow and later master of Clare College. Subsequently Wylflete came to doubt whether the monk possessed the authority to dispose of the volumes and he returned them to the community of Meaux. Shorn of its apparently happy outcome, the story is characteristic and could be repeated many times over. Prior to 1500, former monastic books were to be found in considerable numbers throughout the collegiate libraries of both Oxford and Cambridge. But the transaction was also emblematic. It is a commonplace in the history of later medieval Europe that the previous intellectual leadership of the monasteries had tended to pass into the hands of the universities, and indeed that in some respects monastic intellectual life had become dependent on that of the universities. The change is symbolised in the foundation of monastic houses of study at the universities and in the way in which, under papal direction, the most talented monks of the day came to spend their most formative years at university. Many signs of this transition are apparent in the history of libraries. The major formative age of the monastic libraries had now in a sense largely passed. Of course, the change was not immediate or total. Monastic libraries continued to grow, often substantially.