Sixteenth-Century Readers, Fifteenth-Century Books
Continuities of Reading in the English Reformation

Explores the reception of fifteenth-century English manuscripts and two generations of a Tudor family who owned and read them.

Margaret Connolly (Author)

9781108445528, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 23 June 2022

332 pages, 19 b/w illus. 2 maps 4 tables
24.9 x 16.9 x 1.8 cm, 0.583 kg

'… this book is an important contribution to our understanding of how and why books were read during the English Reformation.' Hilary Maddocks, Script & Print

This innovative study investigates the reception of medieval manuscripts over a long century, 1470–1585, spanning the reigns of Edward IV to Elizabeth I. Members of the Tudor gentry family who owned these manuscripts had properties in Willesden and professional affiliations in London. These men marked the leaves of their books with signs of use, allowing their engagement with the texts contained there to be reconstructed. Through detailed research, Margaret Connolly reveals the various uses of these old books: as a repository for family records; as a place to preserve other texts of a favourite or important nature; as a source of practical information for the household; and as a professional manual for the practising lawyer. Investigation of these family-owned books reveals an unexpectedly strong interest in works of the past, and the continuing intellectual and domestic importance of medieval manuscripts in an age of print.

Introduction
1. Family matters: the Roberts family of Willesden
2. Private faces in public places
3. Devotional reading in the reigns of Henry VII and Henry VIII
4. Out of the cloister, out of the family
5. Books and their uses
6. Devotional reading in the reigns of Mary Tudor and Elizabeth I
Conclusion: Newly reformed readers?
Postscript: after the family: the manuscripts' later histories
Appendix 1. Timeline of key events during the lifetimes of Thomas and Edmund Roberts
Appendix 2. Summary list of contents of manuscripts owned by the Roberts family
Appendix 3. Manuscripts and printed books of uncertain association
Appendix 4. Other families named Roberts
Bibliography
Index of manuscripts
General Index.

Subject Areas: Antiques & collectables: books, manuscripts, ephemera & printed matter [WCS], Medieval history [HBLC1]