Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-t7fkt Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-24T07:57:37.482Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

10 - Monastic libraries: 1400–1557

from COLLECTIONS AND OWNERSHIP

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2008

Get access

Summary

The century and a half from 1400 to the Dissolution of the Monasteries is one of the most interesting in the history of monastic libraries. It is dominated by the introduction of the New Learning and the invention of printing with movable type, but the period also witnessed the full impact of the universities, a growing dissatisfaction with the Church and a corresponding increase in private devotion, a dramatic improvement in vernacular literacy, and the dissemination of a great deal of religious literature in English. Indeed, it is perhaps an anomaly that the fifteenth century, which has been termed (not without some justice) ‘a literary desert’, should also have been a period in which we see, as Derek Pearsall says, ‘an increase in the demand for, availability and ownership of books of all kinds’.

Let us begin our investigation with a glance at the source-materials at our disposal. N. R. Ker and A. G. Watson have drawn our attention to about forty-four records of books in monastic libraries for the period in which we are interested. I exclude for the moment the lists compiled by John Leland. Most of these records are incomplete. Many are concerned only with donations or bequests; some list only the books in the church; some are no more than lists of volumes brought from or sent to one house from another; some list only alienations; some record only those volumes owned by, or acquired by or for, a particular prior or abbot; and one – St Mary of Graces in London – lists ten volumes which form part of an action for debt.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1999

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Adamson, J. W. 1946The extent of literacy in England in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries: notes and conjectures’, The Library. Transactions of the Bibliographical Society, 4th ser., 10, 1929–30 ; rpt in Adamson, , The illiterate Anglo-Saxon and other essays, Cambridge.Google Scholar
Bataillon, L. J. et al. 1988 (eds.), La production du livre universitaire au moyen âge: exemplar et pecia. Actes du symposium tenu au Collegio San Bonaventura de Grottaferrata en mai 1983, Paris.
Bateson, M. 1898 Catalogue of the library of Syon Monastery, Isleworth, Cambridge.
Bell, D. N. 1989bThe English Cistercians and the practice of medicine’, Cîteaux, 40.Google Scholar
Bell, D. N. 1995 What nuns read: books and libraries in medieval English nunneries, Cistercian Studies Series 158, Kalamazoo MI.
Bell, D. N. (ed.), The Libraries of the Cistercians, Gilbertines and Premonstratensians, 1992; IV.
Bell, H. E. 1937The price of books in medieval England’, The Library. Transactions of the Bibliographical Society, 4th ser., 17.Google Scholar
Bennett, H. S. 1946–7The production and dissemination of vernacular manuscripts in the fifteenth century’, The Library. Transactions of the Bibliographical Society, 5th ser., 1.Google Scholar
Blunt, J. H. (ed.) 1873 The Myroure of oure Ladye, Early English Text Society Extra Series 19, London (rpt 1983).
Carley, J. P. 1989bJohn Leland and the contents of English pre-Dissolution libraries: Lincolnshire’, Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society, 9, 3.Google Scholar
Christ, K., Kern, A. and Otto, T. M. 1984 The handbook of medieval library history, Metuchen NY.
Clark, J. W. 1975 The care of books (1902), Cambridge.
De Hamel, C. F. R. 1991 Syon Abbey: the library of the Bridgettine nuns and their peregrinations after the Reformation, Roxburghe Club, London.
Destrez, J. 1935 La pecia dans les manuscrits universitaires du XIIIe et du XIVe siècle, Paris.
Doyle, A. I. 1988The printed books of the last monks of Durham’, The Library. Transactions of the Bibliographical Society, 6th ser., 10.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Doyle, A. I. 1989Publication by members of the religious orders’, in Griffiths, J. and Pearsall, D. A., Book production and publishing in Britain 1375–1475, Cambridge 1989.Google Scholar
Doyle, A. I. 1990Book production by the monastic orders in England (c. 1375–1530): assessing the evidence’, in Brownrigg, L. L. (ed.), Medieval book production: assessing the evidence, Los Altos Hills CA.Google Scholar
Doyle, A. I. and Parkes, M. B. 1978The production of copies of the Canterbury Tales and the Confessio Amantis in the early fifteenth century’, in Parkes, M. B. and Watson, A. G. (eds.), Medieval scribes, manuscripts and libraries: essays presented to N. R. Ker, London 1978.Google Scholar
Dreyfus, J. 1988The invention of spectacles and the advent of printing’, The Library. Transactions of the Bibliographical Society, 6th ser., 10.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Durkan, J. 1961aAn Arbroath book inventory of 1473’, Bibliotheck, 3.Google Scholar
Emden, A. B. 1968 Donors of books to S. Augustine’s Abbey Canterbury, Oxford Bibliographical Society, Occasional Pub. 4, Oxford.
Gillespie, V. 1989Vernacular books of religion’, in Griffiths, J. and Pearsall, D. A., Book production and publishing in Britain 1375–1475, Cambridge 1989.Google Scholar
Griffiths, J. and Pearsall, D. A., Book production and publishing in Britain 1375–1475, Cambridge 1989.
Guiges, I. 1984 Coutumes de Chartreuse, ed. Un Chartreux, Sources chrétiennes 313, Paris.
Hirsch, R. 1967 Printing, selling and reading 1450–1550, Wiesbaden.
Humphreys, K. W. (ed.), Corpus of British medieval library catalogues, London: I. The Friars‘ libraries, 1990; II.
Hunt, R. W. 1978The library of the abbey of St Albans’, in Parkes, M. B. and Watson, A. G. (eds.), Medieval scribes, manuscripts and libraries: essays presented to N. R. Ker, London 1978.Google Scholar
Hunter, J. 1831 English monastic libraries, London.
James, M. R. 1903 The ancient libraries of Canterbury and Dover, Cambridge.
James, M.R. (ed.) 1936–41Catalogue of the library of Leicester abbey’, Trans. of the Leicestershire Archaeological Soc., 19 (1936–7); 21 (1939–41).Google Scholar
(Ker, ); Supplement to the second edn, Royal Historical Society, London 1987 (ed. Watson, ).
Ker, N. R. 1949Medieval manuscripts from Norwich Cathedral priory’, Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society, 1.Google Scholar
Ker, N. R. and Watson, A. G. 1964–87 Medieval libraries of Great Britain: a list of surviving books, 2nd edn, Royal Historical Society, London 1964
Kingsford, C. L. 1925 Prejudice and promise in fifteenth-century England, Oxford (rpt London 1962).
Knowles, D. 1948–55 The religious orders in England, 3 vols., Cambridge.
Lehmann, , Erforschung des Mittelalters (Stuttgart), 3, 1960).
Lehmann, P. 1924Bücherliebe und Bücherpflege bei den Kartäusern’, Miscellanea Francesco Ehrle (Rome), 5 Google Scholar
Leland, J. 1549 The laboryouse journey & serche of Johan Leyland, for Englandes antiquitees …, London (rpt Amsterdam 1975).
Leland, J. 1774 De rebus Britannicis collectanea, ed. Hearne, T., 2nd edn, 6 vols., Oxford (rpt 1970).
Lenhart, J. M. 1935 Pre-Reformation printed books, New York.
Liddell, J. R. 1939Leland’s lists of manuscripts in Lincolnshire monasteries’, English Historical Review, 54.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lovatt, R. 1992The library of John Blacman and contemporary Carthusian spirituality’, Jnl of Ecclesiastical History, 43.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lucet, B. 1977 Les codifications cisterciennes de 1237 et de 1257, Paris.
Lyall, R. J. 1989Materials: the paper revolution’, in Griffiths, J. and Pearsall, D. A., Book production and publishing in Britain 1375–1475, Cambridge 1989.Google Scholar
Mynors, R. A. B., Rouse, R. H. and Rouse, M. A. (eds.), Registrum Anglie de libris doctorum et auctorum veterum, 1991; III.
Parkes, M. B. 1969 English cursive book hands 1250–1500, Oxford (rpt London 1980).
Parkes, M. B. 1991 Scribes, scripts and readers: studies in the communication, presentation and dissemination of medieval texts, London.
Piper, A. J. 1978The libraries of the monks of Durham’, in Parkes, M. B. and Watson, A. G. (eds.), Medieval scribes, manuscripts and libraries: essays presented to N. R. Ker, London 1978.Google Scholar
Pollard, G. 1978bThe pecia system in the medieval universities’, in Parkes, M. B. and Watson, A. G. (eds.), Medieval scribes, manuscripts and libraries: essays presented to N. R. Ker, London 1978.Google Scholar
Raine, J. (ed.) 1838 Catalogi veteres librorum ecclesiae cathedralis Dunelm, Surtees Society 7, London.
Rouse, R. H. and Rouse, M. A. 1982Statim invenire: schools, preachers, and new attitudes to the page’, in Benson, R. L. and Constable, G. (eds.), Renaissance and renewal in the twelfth century, Cambridge MA.Google Scholar
Schramm, W. L. 1933The cost of books in Chaucer’s time’, Modern Language Notes, 48.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schulz, E. 1924 Aufgaben und Ziele der Inkunabelforschung, Munich.
Sharpe, R., et al. (eds.), English Benedictine libraries: the shorter catalogues, 1996; v.
Sheehan, M. W. 1984The religious orders 1220–1370’, in HUO, I.Google Scholar
Talbot, C. H. 1958The universities and the mediaeval library’, in Wormald, and Wright, 1958.
Talbot, C. H. 1962The English Cistercians and the universities’, Studia Monastica, 4.Google Scholar
Thompson, A. H. (ed.) 1969 Visitations of religious houses in the Diocese of Lincoln (1519–27), Canterbury and York Society, Oxford.
Thompson, E. M. 1930 The Carthusian order in England, London and New York.
Webber, T. and Watson, A. G. (eds.), The Libraries of the Augustinian Canons, 1998.
Wilson, R. M. 1940The medieval library of Titchfield Abbey’, Proc. of the Leeds Philosophical and Literary Soc. (Literary and Historical Section), 5.Google Scholar
Wilson, R. M. 1958The contents of the medieval library’, in Wormald, and Wright, 1958.
Wormald, F. and Wright, C. E. (eds.) 1958 The English library before 1700: studies in its history, London.

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×