The next seminar in this series based in London will take place on Tuesday 5 October at 5.30 p.m. by Zoom. Registration details will be posted nearer the time.  

Seminar convenors: Giles Mandelbrote (Lambeth Palace Library); Dr. Keith A. Manley; Dr. Raphaële Mouren (Warburg Institute); Professor Isabel Rivers (Queen Mary).

The seminars are jointly sponsored by the Institute of English Studies, the Institute of Historical Research, the Warburg Institute, and the Library & Information History Group of CILIP.

Speaker:  Tara Lyons (Associate Professor of English Literature, Illinois State University)

Title:  Finding English Playbooks in the Early 17th-century Institutional Library

This talk will present new evidence for the inclusion of English playbooks - what Bodley called ‘baggage bookes’ - in the pre-1635 Bodleian Library. By turning to Bodleian Library records, documents showing the acquisition, purchase, binding, deduplication, and cataloguing of books, this talk invites further consideration of the array of genres that found a home in England’s institutional libraries before the English civil war.