Of all the departments in the University of Cambridge, the University Library is by far the oldest. Oates traces its evolution in its first three and a half centuries, from its hesitant beginnings to its designation as a place of copyright deposit in the legislation of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. He pays special attention to benefactors, on whom the Library was almost entirely dependent during the Reformation, but also to its subsequent recovery and dramatic expansion in the seventeenth century. The Anglo-Saxon manuscripts given by Archbishop Matthew Parker in 1574 and the sixth-century Codex Bezae, given in 1581, are among the university's most celebrated possessions; but the author devotes no less space to those who encouraged such gifts, to other collections (some exotic and some, such as Richard Holdsworth's library, enormous) and to the prolonged negotiations that frequently preceded their arrival at Cambridge. This is the first of a two-volume history of
Of all the departments in the University of Cambridge, the University Library is by far the oldest. The first volume in this set traces its evolution from its hesitant beginnings to its designation as a place of copyright deposit in the legislation of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The second volume takes the history of the Library from the time of the Copyright Act of Queen Anne and the gift by King George I of the celebrated book collection of John Moore, Bishop of Ely, to the end of the nineteenth century when the Library's place within the University and the scholarly world was well established. The text examines how the Library responded to educational reforms, charts the growth of collections and shows how the needs of undergraduates were answered in an international research library. Both volumes were originally published in 1986.
