The Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland: Vo... - 9780521781947

The Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland: Volume 1, To 1640Author(s): Elisabeth Leedham-Green, Teresa Webber\nFormat: Hardback\nPublisher: Cambridge University Press, United Kingdom\nImprint: Cambridge University Press\nISBN-13: 9780521781947, 978-0521781947\nSynopsis\nThis volume 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.