The titles in an individual's library should be an excellent indicator of his interests. In the case of the extensive and remarkably varied collection of annotated volumes belonging to the Renaissance scholar Gabriel Harvey, knowledge of the contents of his library can reveal much not only about the man but about his era as well.

Harvey, eldest of a family of four brothers and two sisters, was born about 1550 in Essex at Saffron Walden, an important town of that period, situated about fifteen miles southeast of Cambridge. A person of considerable intellectual attainments he became a Cambridge don and by 1578 had published several original works in Latin prose and poetry. Although highly esteemed by his close friend the poet Edmund Spenser and by a number of eminent Cambridge scholars, Harvey was undoubtedly resented by others, perhaps because of his espousal of such antitraditional notions as Ramus’ reforms of Aristotelian logic, his awareness of his own intellectual superiority, and his fellow students' disdain for his middle-class background.