The Libraries of Collegiate Churches: Corpus of British Medieval Library Catalogues, Volume 15

The medieval collegiate church library is best characterized by the form it took in Oxford and Cambridge. But colleges outside the universities were very numerous before the Reformation—including such institutions as Eton and Winchester, the aristocratic colleges at the castles of Arundel and Fotheringhay, and the royal chapels of St. George at Windsor and St. Stephen at Westminster—and these colleges housed their own distinctive libraries, about which little has hitherto been known. The two magnificent volumes of The Libraries of Collegiate Churches shed light on the holdings of these libraries and contribute significantly to the knowledge of the diffusion of print in England as well as to the history of the late Middle Ages.