Early modern history (British & W European c. 1500-c. 1800): Reference

This volume is primarily concerned with the establishment of the University in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and the development of its studies in the high age of scholasticism, up to the great philosophical debate between William of Ockham and his Mertonian opponents in the fourteenthcentury. Contributors: R. W. Southern, M. B. Hackett, C. H. Lawrence, J. I. Catto, M. W. Sheehan, J. R. L. Highfield, T. H Aston, R. Faith, J. M. Fletcher, P. O. Lewry, J. A. Weisheipl, J. L. Barton, L. E. Boyle, Jean Dunbabin.

This is the first volume of a four-part History of the University of Cambridge, under the general editorship of Professor C. N. L. Brooke, and the first volume on the medieval university as a whole to be published in over a century. It provides a synthesis of the intellectual, social, political and religious life of the early university, and gives serious attention to the development of classroom studies and how they changed with the coming of the Renaissance and the Reformation. Following the first stirrings in the early thirteenth century, the evolution of the university is traced from the original corporation of masters and scholars through the early development of the colleges. The second half of the book focuses on the century from the 1440s to the 1540s, which saw the flowering of the university under Tudor patronage. In the decades preceding the Reformation many colleges were founded, the teaching structures reorganised and the curriculum made more humanistic. The place of Cambridge at the forefront of northern European universities was eventually assured when Henry VIII founded Trinity College in 1546, in the face of changes and difficulties experienced during the course of the Reformation.

This publication is a survey of libraries in Britain and Ireland up to the Civil War. It traces the transition from collections of books without a fixed local habitation to the library, chiefly of printed books, much as we know it today. It examines changing patterns in the formation of book collections in the earlier medieval period, traces the combined impact of the activities of the mendicant orders and the scholarship of the universities in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and the adoption of the library room and the growth of private book collections in the fourteenth and fifteenth. The volume then focuses upon the dispersal of the monastic libraries in the mid-sixteenth centuries, the creation of new types of library, and finally, the steps whereby the collections amassed by antiquaries came to form the bases of the national and institutional libraries of Britain and Ireland.

v. 3. 1400-1557 / edited by Lotte Hellinga and J. B. Trapp -- v. 4. 1557-1695 / edited by John Barnard, D.F. McKenzie and Maureen Bell -- v. 5. 1695-1830 / edited by Michael F. Suarez and Michael Turner .

This is the first comprehensive survey of the history of the book in Britain from Roman through Anglo-Saxon to early Norman times. The expert contributions explore the physical form of books, including their codicology, script and decoration; examine the circulation and exchange of manuscripts and texts between England, Ireland, the Celtic realms and the Continent; discuss the production, presentation and use of different classes of texts, ranging from fine service books to functional schoolbooks; and evaluate the libraries that can be associated with particular individuals and institutions. The result is an authoritative account of the first millennium of the history of books, manuscript-making and literary culture in Britain which, intimately linked to its cultural contexts, sheds vital light on broader patterns of political, ecclesiastical and cultural history extending from the period of the Vindolanda writing tablets through the age of Bede and Alcuin to the time of the Domesday Book.