Conveners: Giles Mandelbrote (Lambeth Palace Library), Dr Keith A. Manley (The National Trust), Professor Simon Eliot (Institute of English Studies), Professor Isabel Rivers (Queen Mary)

The seminars are jointly sponsored by the Institute of English Studies, the Institute of Historical Research, and the Library & Information History Group of CILIP.

Venue: Jessel Room, first floor of Senate House, unless stated otherwise below. Changes to room allocations will be displayed on the web-site of the Institute of English Studies.

Time: Tuesdays, 5.30 p.m.

Podcasts: Available online

Autumn Term 2012

4 December
Daniel Starza Smith (University College, London)
‘How Hard a Task you Lay vpon Mee you doe not Knowe’: Editing the Libraries of the First and Second Viscounts Conway, 1610-1645
Between 1610 and his death in 1631 Sir Edward Conway (later first Viscount Conway), enjoyed a spectacular rise in professional fortune, transforming from a Netherlands-based soldier to a Secretary of State who served both James I and Charles I. Conway acquired most of his education and courtly polish by seeking out literature in manuscript and by collecting around 500 printed books. Two catalogues exist of his libraries – dated, fortuitously, 1610 and 1631. I am in the process of editing these catalogues for Private Libraries in Renaissance England, and this paper presents my findings about this important statesman and patron’s intellectual profile at the beginning and end of this period. It also expands previous work on Conway’s son, Edward, second Viscount Conway (d.1655), one of the greatest private book collectors of the seventeenth century, whose collections totalled some 13,000 printed volumes.
Please note: this session takes place in the Dr Seng T Lee Centre for Manuscript and Book Studies in Senate House Library (fourth floor).

Spring Term 2013

5 February
Dr William Poole (New College, Oxford)
Seventeenth-Century Library Benefactors Books in Oxford Colleges: Some Examples and Some Uses
This talk will concern the rise of the genre following the opening of the Bodleian Library, and how we can exploit college examples of the form for different historical purpose; in other words not just to track the growth of specific collections per se but to ask if and how far such resources can be used to discuss intellectual change more generally.

5 March
Dr Paddy Bullard (University of Kent)
Title TBC – to be on either Jonathan Swift’s library or Edmund Burke’s library.

Summer Term 2013

7 May
TBC

4 June
Dunstan Roberts (Trinity Hall, Cambridge)
Title TBC
Please note: this session takes place in the Guard Room at Lambeth Palace.
Intending visitors are asked to contact in advance mary.comer@churchofengland.org.
Please note that the Great Hall will be closed during this term.

2 July
Alice Ford-Smith (Dr. Williams’s Library)
A Library Walk is being organized
Fuller details will be available at a later date. A charge of £10 will be made for this event.