Corpus of British Medieval Library Catalogues

Chair: Professor Vincent Gillespie FBA
Project Directors: Professor Teresa Webber FBA

Libraries have been fundamental to all humanistic inquiry since antiquity. Catalogues compiled in the middle ages provide the means to understand what books were available and how they were organised and used, even though the libraries themselves were dispersed centuries ago and most of the actual books lost.

This is the British Medieval Library Catalogues project, a collaboration between the British Academy and the British Library, which deals with fundamental evidence for the transmission of culture. A beta-version of a new digital resource for it is being developed.

With a policy of systematic annotation to identify the thousands of texts referred to, the volumes provide an interpretative guide to British library records from the earliest, a short list from the tenth century, down to the mid-16th century, a wide enough definition of 'medieval' to include many works of Renaissance humanism.

Professor Teresa Webber FBA