4 - Opportunities for building collections and libraries

Summary

What happened to collections and to libraries in the later seventeenth century was affected by far wider social and intellectual currents: an enormous political upheaval, the scientific revolution, an improvement in standards of editing the classics, the development of antiquarian studies (in particular that of palaeography in both France and England), the growing confidence in English as a language of learned discourse, the rise of publication in periodical form, and what would now be called the ‘bibliographical control’ over the publishing of new books and journals.

The benefactions of Richard Holdsworth and John Selden, however ambiguous in intention and execution, securely established the libraries of the two English universities as large institutions of wide secular learning, whose very mass gave a sense of permanence. Selden may indeed be seen as the Commonwealth’s unofficial guardian of libraries, guiding the library of Lambeth –temporarily – to Cambridge, with an additional role, only now becoming apparent, in the preservation of papers from Lambeth, ‘keeping an eye’ on the Royal and Cottonian libraries, and himself making modest gifts to the Royal College of Physicians and to Cambridge. In the capital, the library of Sion College was very much the darling of the City of London (though that library and that of St Paul’s Cathedral were to suffer in the Fire of 1666), while Westminster Abbey’s (another episcopal refoundation) remained intact. In the absence of a university, the needs of the learned professions in the capital were served by the Inns of Court and the College of Physicians.