Notes
- For Parker, see David J. Crankshaw and Alexandra Gillespie, ‘Parker, Matthew (1504–1575)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) (hereafter ODNB) <http://www.oxforddnb.com> [accessed 5 September 2012]. Until at least the late nineteenth century, the Library was simply known as the College Library, and even when the undergraduate library was in place, there are references to the Old Library or Upper Library. ‘Parker Library’ is a late innovation.
- Cheney CR, ‘A Register of MSS Borrowed from a College Library, 1440–1517: Corpus Christi College, Cambridge MS 232’, Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society, 9·2 (1987), 103–29; and J. M. Fletcher and J. K. McConica, ‘A Sixteenth-Century Inventory of the Library of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge’, Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society, 3·3 (1961), 187–99.
- Fletcher and McConica, p. 190.
- For general accounts, see B. Dickins, ‘The Making of the Parker Library’, Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society, 6·1 (1972), 19–34; E. C. Pearce, ‘Matthew Parker’, The Library, 54th ser., 6·3 (1925), 209–28; and T. Graham, ‘Matthew Parker’s Manuscripts: An Elizabethan Library and its Use’, in The Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland, i: To 1640, ed. by E. Leedham-Green and T. Webber (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 322–41. For a recent account of the contents of the Library, see C. de Hamel, The Parker Library: Treasures from the Collection at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, England (Cambridge: Corpus Christi College, 2000).
- Graham T, Watson AG, The Recovery of the Past in Early Elizabethan England: Documents by John Bale and John Jocelyn from the Circle of Matthew Parker (Cambridge: Cambridge Bibliographical Society, 1998), p. 336.
- See de Hamel, pp. 16–19, for one example, an edition of the Old English Gospels, now Parker MS 140; and generally, R. I. Page, Matthew Parker and his Books (Kalamazoo, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1993), p. 52.
- Page, p. 52. For some more detailed comments, see Graham, pp. 328–32.
- In the contents of the Parker Library, there are copious annotations made with a red pen or crayon. Interest in these annotations has been high. B. S. Robinson, ‘‘Darke speech’: Matthew Parker and Reforming of History’, Sixteenth-Century Journal, 29·4 (1998), 1079, attributes the start of the red-pen ‘mythology’ to Thomas James, who first speculated its source when he compiled the second catalogue of the Parker Library in 1600, and associated the red-pen annotations with Parker. For the James catalogue, see Dickins, pp. 29–30.
- Ker NR, Catalogue of Manuscripts Containing Anglo-Saxon (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957), p. lii; and C. E. Wright, ‘The Dispersal of the Monastic Libraries and the Beginning of Anglo-Saxon Studies’, Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society, 1·3 (1951), 228. Wright also provides examples of different hands at the end of his article.
- Page, p. 87.
- A point made forcefully by M. McKisack, Medieval History in the Tudor Age (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), p. 37. See also Graham, pp. 332–36.
- See J. Gascoigne, Cambridge in the Age of the Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 1–23. On the library context, see C. Benson, ‘Libraries in University Towns’, in The Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland, ii: 1640–1850, ed. by G. Mandelbrote and K. Manley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 102. One recent scholar argues there has been ‘a simple failure to distinguish between the minimum requirement for graduation, and the scope, and increasingly the necessity, for intensive study’ during this period; see E. Leedham-Green, A Concise History of the University of Cambridge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 113.
- Gascoigne, pp. 7, 160.
- For the Yorkes, see John Cannon, ‘Yorke, Charles (1722–1770)’, ODNB [accessed 5 September 2012] and Stephanie L. Barczewski, ‘Yorke, Philip, Second Earl of Hardwicke (1720–1790)’, ODNB [accessed 5 September 2012]. The Athenian Letters, an imagined commentary on Thucydides by an equally imaginary Persian ambassador in Athens during the Peloponnesian War, was in fact a work of contemporary political satire written by the Yorkes and a few others in their circle, most of them Cambridge men. The first edition (of ten copies) was for private circulation only, and was published in 1741–43. It is this private edition which appears in the Corpus borrowing register.
- John Lamb Masters’ History of the College of Corpus Christi and the Blessed Virgin Mary in the University of Cambridge with Additional Material and a Continuation to the Present Day (London: Murray, 1831), p. 223.
- After his death Green gave £50 for the purchase of books. See Lamb, p. 248.
- The register is kept in the Parker Library with the class mark Q.1·17B.
- We are grateful to Melvin Jefferson from the Cambridge Colleges’ Conservation Consortium for his comments on the book register.
- Fellow-commoners, pensioners, and sizars were undergraduates divided by their socioeconomic status. See J. A. Venn, Alumni Cantabrigienses: A Biographical List of All Known Students, Graduates and Holders of Office at the University of Cambridge, from the Earliest Times to 1900, i (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1922), xxvii.
- A system of quarter days, along with orders very similar to the rules reproduced here, was introduced to the University Library in an attempt to end ‘half a century of sloppy administration’. See D. McKitterick, Cambridge University Library: A History: The Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 222.
- These library-keepers may have been final-year undergraduates. The changing hands, names, and scripts in the register appear to show that the library-keeper changed every year. The name of a student called J. Topham (Corpus, 1745–48) appears as that of the library-keeper in 1748.
- A breakdown of the 1314 days on which books were borrowed shows that 9 per cent of all books were borrowed on Sundays, 18 per cent on Mondays, 16 per cent on Tuesdays, 12 per cent on Wednesdays, 16 per cent on Thursdays, 15 per cent on Fridays, and 15 per cent on Saturdays.
- Dickins, p. 27.
- Lamb, p. 406.
- There were ninety-two other borrowings that occurred, but we cannot identify the books borrowed on these occasions.
- The most frequently borrowed was Biblia sacra Hebraice, Chaldaice, Græce, & Latine (1569), which accounts for twenty-two of the loans. Moreover, at least two of these thirteen are definitely not original Parker books, as they were replaced following a Parker audit in 1595. In the sense that Parker had bequeathed copies, however, they were part of the original collection. See Page, pp. 28–29.
- The class marks in the borrowing register confirm that the Parker books were not kept separately, but had been integrated into the printed collection.
- Page, p. 15.
- 398 of the books identified have determinable publication dates; 75 were published after 1740, 235 after 1700.
- Rivers I, ‘Biographical Dictionaries and their Uses from Bayle to Chalmers’, in Books and their Readers in Eighteenth-Century England: New Essays, ed. , Rivers I, ed (London: Leicester University Press, 2001), p. 137.
- D. Wootton, ‘David Hume: ‘The historian’’, in The Cambridge Companion to Hume, ed. by D. F. Norton and J. Taylor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 447. More generally, see K. O’Brien, ‘The History Market in Eighteenth-Century England’, in Books and their Readers in Eighteenth-Century England, ed. by Rivers, pp. 105–34.
- De Hamel, p. 15.
- O’Brien, p. 106.
- Young B‘Theological Books from The Naked Gospel to Nemesis of Faith’, inBooks and their Readers in Eighteenth-Century England, pp. 79–104. For these writers, see Scott Mandelbrote, ‘Stackhouse, Thomas (1681/2–1752)’, ODNB [accessed 5 September 2012]; Martin Greig, ‘Burnet, Gilbert (1643–1715)’ [accessed 5 September 2012]; Isabel Rivers, ‘Tillotson, John (1630–1694)’ [accessed 5 September 2012]; John Gascoigne, ‘Clarke, Samuel (1675–1729)’, ODNB [accessed 5 September 2012]; Robert D. Cornwall, ‘Bull, George (1634–1710)’, ODNB [accessed 5 September 2012].
- I. Jackson, ‘Approaches to the History of Readers and Reading in Eighteenth-Century Britain’, The Historical Journal, 47·4 (2004), 1041–54.
- Lamb, pp. 455–95.
- For which we have used the online version at <http://www.oxforddnb.com>.
- See above, n. 15.
- See J. Nichols, Literary Anecdotes of the Eighteenth Century, i (London: Nichols, Son and Bentley, 1812), 694, referring to British Library, MS Add. 5886. Corpus Christi College was commonly known as Benet College, because of its proximity to St Benet’s Church, hence the name ‘Benedictine Antiquaries’.
- They are Robert Masters, Philip Yorke, Earl of Hardwicke, Richard Gough, William Colman, James Nasmith, Michael Tyson, Edward Haistwell, John Denne, Frederick Hervey, Earl of Bristol and Bishop of Derry, Brock Rand, and George North. See Nichols.
- For Nasmith, see J. D. Pickles, ‘Nasmith, James (bap. 1740, d. 1808)’, ODNB [accessed 5 September 2012], and McKitterick, pp. 344–48. He was subsequently employed to compile the catalogue of the University Library’s manuscripts because of his success in doing so at Corpus.
- Published in 1567 and edited by Parker. See STC 17518.
- See R. H. Sweet, ‘Gough, Richard (1735–1809)’, ODNB [accessed 5 September 2012].
- For which see J. Evans, A History of the Society of Antiquaries (Oxford: The Society of Antiquaries, 1956).
- See W. D. Macray, Annals of the Bodleian Library, 2nd edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1890), pp. 285–90.
- Sweet, ‘Gough, Richard (1735–1809)’, ODNB.
- See above, p. 4.
- College Archives, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge: officers, receipted bills, CCCC02/B/52-/68. There are identical entries in 1748, 1749, 1750, 1751, 1753, 1754, 1755, 1756, 1757, 1759, 1760, 1762, and 1764. The wording of each annual entry is identical.
- See Page, p. 38, noting that the precise condition of making the replacement within three months was not always adhered to even in the early years.
- For an overview, see C. Benson, ‘Libraries in University Towns’, in The Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland, ii: 1640–1850, ed. by Mandelbrote and Manley, pp. 102–21; Benson concludes (p. 121) that ‘in most institutions there was not a consistent pattern of purchasing’, which was clearly not the case at Corpus.
- See Joseph M. Levine, ‘Ancients and Moderns: Cross-Currents in Early Modern Intellectual Life’, in The Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland, ii: 1640–1850, ed. by Mandelbrote and Manley, pp. 9–35; the argument on pp. 25–33 is particularly pertinent to the point being made here.
- D. Pearson, Books as History: The Importance of Books Beyond their Texts (London: British Library, 2008), pp. 163–66.
- Lamb, p. 406.