In the following article Dunstan Speight offers a few initial thoughts on the implications for law libraries of the October 2023 cyber-attack on the British Library. While the remarks apply particularly to larger institutional libraries (such as those of professional bodies like the Inns of Court) there are lessons to be learnt for all types of library and information service.

A challenge has recently been made to the venerable tradition that the passage of Henry VIII's first act for suppressing monasteries (1536) was facilitated by the presentation in parliament of details of monastic sexual misconduct gathered during the royal visitation of the monasteries in 1535–6. This article, by following up clues missed in the evidence cited for that challenge, precisely identifies a now lost source, last sighted in the hands of John Bale, which casts important new light on the visitation and, it is argued, was very probably the exact document presented to parliament in 1536.

This article calls into question a story that has become part of the folklore and indeed the official history of Cambridge University. Supposedly, the passage of the Chantries Act posed a threat to university colleges which was averted by the lobbying of Cambridge academics early in 1546, and this adroit intervention inspired Henry VIII to found new colleges at Oxford and Cambridge. Close reading of the sources, however, indicates that the universities were singled out for special treatment from the start and that Henry's new foundations were in his mind before the Chantries Act was passed.

This paper re-examines three of the major arguments on the validity of Henry VIII's first marriage, suggesting that, though the king misplayed his cards, he held a much better hand than his contemporary or modern critics have allowed. With a better presentation of his cause, an unbiased court might well have concluded that, on canonical principles and precedents, the union with Katherine should not have been permitted.Unfortunately for Henry, however, even such a favourable verdict could have failed to free him from his Spanish consort.

This article examines how lay people brought preaching of the Word to their locality in early seventeenth-century Yorkshire and Lancashire by acting collectively to build chapels, raise funds for ministers’ wages and provide fees and hospitality. A wide cross-section of society was willingly involved in this support, suggesting that enthusiasm for sermon-centred worship was not just the preserve of a godly few. It is proposed that this collective behaviour and its rhetorical representation could foster an inclusive sense of local identity. The importance of the personal style and skills of individual preachers in engendering support is also considered.

William Harvey's famous quantitative argument from De motu cordis (1628) about the circulation of blood explained how a small amount of blood could recirculate and nourish the entire body, upending the Galenic conception of the blood's motion. This paper argues that the quantitative argument drew on the calculative and rhetorical skills of merchants, including Harvey's own brothers. Modern translations of De motu cordis obscure the language of accountancy that Harvey himself used. Like a merchant accounting for credits and debits, intake and output, goods and moneys, Harvey treated venous and arterial blood as essentially commensurate, quantifiable and fungible. For Harvey, the circulation (and recirculation) of blood was an arithmetical necessity. The development of Harvey's circulatory model followed shifts in the epistemic value of mercantile forms of knowledge, including accounting and arithmetic, also drawing on an Aristotelian language of reciprocity and balance that Harvey shared with mercantile advisers to the royal court. This paper places Harvey's calculations in a previously underappreciated context of economic crisis, whose debates focused largely on questions of circulation.

The authorship of the Life of the twelfth-century English holy woman, Christina of Markyate (c. 1096–after 1155), has inspired considerable scholarly speculation. Though the writer never once positively identifies himself in extant versions of the text, oblique references locate his activity at the Benedictine monastery of St Albans in Hertfordshire during the 1130s under the patronage of the reigning abbot, Geoffrey de Gorron (1119–46), and intimate the close connections that he enjoyed with his narrative's subjects. Building on these references, and incorporating clues from related sources from St Albans and Markyate, this article reconstructs the likeliest candidate for authorship – Robert de Gorron (d. 1166), Geoffrey's nephew, appointed sacristan and later abbatial successor – and assesses his eligibility.

What was the source of authority in the Church in Tudor England? This article traces the use of an ancient symbol of the power of metropolitan archbishops, the woollen pallium, between 1533 and 1603. The later Henrician Church saw this garment as a sign of royal supremacy. Under Mary, however, Archbishop Pole made extravagant claims which led the Elizabethan Church to reject earlier Tudor notions of this symbol. Set against the backdrop of the source of episcopal jurisdiction, this article traces the use of the pallium in England in a Church moving from Roman obedience to a Protestant settlement.

This paper presents a probable identification of not one but two portrait miniatures of Gregory Cromwell, only son of England's only vice-gerent in spirituals, by Hans Holbein the Younger. The historical evidence has hitherto remained unconnected because of misunderstandings about Gregory's age, which are clarified here, and also thanks to the unexpected modern locations of the two relevant miniatures.

This article by Jennie Grimshaw presents an overview of the transition of UK government publishing from print to electronic between the mid-1990s and 2016. It goes on to describe the tools being developed by the British Library in collaboration with the other five legal deposit libraries, to collect, preserve, organise and provide access to born digital government publications. This paradigm shift in official publishing gives the libraries a window of opportunity to improve their management of these materials and ensure that they can be found through their catalogues more easily than their print predecessors.

Jonathan Sims looks at the way the British Library has been redefining its role in light of the changing environment of society's information revolution. An overview of challenges from the information society and the institutional complex is followed by descriptions of how the Library is responding through content strategy and programmes for digitisation, digital preservation and web archiving. A brief look is also taken at the new social science strategy and a new content specialist role for law and socio-legal studies.