Summary Catalogue of Post-medieval Western Manuscripts in the Bodleian Library: Catalogue (SC 37300-46393)

Résumé du livre

The Bodleian Library's holdings of western manuscripts form the second largest and most important collection in Great Britain. Accumulated over a period of almost four hundred years, their contents have been made known to scholars all over the world in a series of published catalogues of which this Summary Catalogue of post-medieval western manuscripts is the latest. Designed as a continuation of Falconer Madan's Summary Catalogue which covered acquisitions to 1915, it provides brief descriptions and detailed index entries for over 18,500 manuscript volumes, acquired by the Bodleian between 1916 and 1975. Its contents reflect the varied nature of manuscript acquisitions in a large and constantly expanding library. Single volumes and small groups of manuscripts are described alongside large collections of letters and papers generated by a wide range of men and women from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries. Here are to be found catalogues of the papers of, among many others, the philosopher John Locke, Sir John Bankes, attorney-general to King Charles I, the diarist James Woodforde, William Gilpin, schoolmaster and writer on the picturesque, the poet Shelley, the diplomat Sir John Crompton, and the antiquary William Stukeley, archaeologists like O.G.S. Crawford and Sir Aurel Stein, and bibliophiles and collectors like Francis Douce and Sir Thomas Phillipps. In the 19th- and 20th-century collections, papers of Oxford men loom large, among them Sir Henry Acland, Regius Professor of Medicine, P.S. Allen, President of Corpus Christi College and Erasmian scholar, H.A.L. Fisher, Warden of New College, historian and statesman, Gilbert Murray, Regius Professor of Greek and internationalist, Mark Pattison, Rector of Lincoln College, Samuel Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford and Sir Alfred Zimmern, Professor of International Relations. The catalogue reveals in sixty years of acquisitions the continuing importance of the Bodleian's western manuscript collections in all areas of the humanities, especially in English history and literature, topography and local studies, theology and the classics. It provides an important means of access to a major portion of the manuscript collections of one of the world's great libraries.