Title: The Uses of Orthodoxy and Jacobean Erudition: Thomas James and the Bodleian Library
Abstract: Abstract What was the Bodleian library for when it opened its doors in 1602? This question has gone more or less unasked: a university library explains itself. Scholarship on the Bodleian has long focused on the internal history of the library and the personality of its founder, Sir Thomas Bodley. It is only very recently that serious attention has been given to the immediate constituency for the library at Oxford and the wider complex of books, libraries, and scholarship of which the Bodleian was part. Regardless of Bodley’s own motives in founding the library – personal, intellectual, religious – as an institution the Bodleian had a life, as well as a librarian, of its own. How did the library function within the sphere of its community of users? What was its status as a public library both at Oxford and nationally? And what was its position within the spider’s web of religious, political and cultural motivations which entangled early Stuart rule? In considering many such questions, we may have recourse to the Bodleian’s wonderful embarrassment in the form of its first librarian, Thomas James. A scholar and rabid anti-papist, James frequently occupies an awkward position in treatments of the library. Though James was Bodley’s chosen librarian, modern discomfort with his extreme antiCatholicism – he eagerly chased down Jesuits in the Oxfordshire countryside – has allowed him to be gently excused from many accounts of the library’s history. Considered unbecoming of the worthy intentions of the library’s founder, James’s stridently polemical outlook fits poorly with modern ideas of the disinterested nature of a university library. Few, however, have looked beyond the bombast to consider the nature and purpose of James’s scholarship. The scholarly work James carried out as Bodley’s librarian affords a rare glimpse of the interaction of libraries, manuscripts, printed books, and the readers who used them.
Publication Year: 2007
Publication Date: 2007-09-13
Language: en
Type: book-chapter
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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Cited By Count: 17
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