Trinity College Library Dublin

The world-famous collection of manuscripts in Trinity College Dublin Library largely consists of items which came to the College in 1661 from the library of Archbishop James Ussher, primate of All Ireland, who had been a fellow and professor there. Ussher&;s manuscripts were mainly in Latin, but he also collected material in English, Irish and other languages&;including a number of ancient eastern languages. His interests were principally in theology and religion, history, and some practical sciences, and though, later, other donors contributed other valuable items, the character of the collection remained what it was. Accordingly, among the Middle English items, there are many religious texts, in both poetry and prose, a lot of which are reformist&;Wycliffite Bibles and polemical works, many of which are unique to this collection. Among the histories appear ten copies of the popular Brut Chronicle, of which five are in Middle English and two of which (MSS 489 and 505) are richly illuminated, Robert Bale&;s Chronicle of London 1189&;1461, and translations of Giraldus Cambrensis&;s Expugnacio Hibernica, as well as William Lambarde&;s invaluable text (MS 631), made in 1563, of The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle to the year AD 1001, copied from a manuscript destroyed by fire in 1731. John Benet&;s personal miscellany (MS 516), compiled over many years in the middle of the fifteenth century, preserves many unique texts relating to the Wars of the Roses. This catalogue, put together by its authors over many years, is the first to concentrate on these manuscripts and to describe them in detail.

This is the first comprehensive, scholarly history of Trinity College Library Dublin. It covers the whole 400 years of the Library's development, from its foundation by James Ussher in the seventeenth century to the electronic revolution of the twenty-first century. Particular attention is given to the buildings and to the politics involved in obtaining funding for them, as well as to the acquisition of the great treasures, such as the Book of Kells and the libraries of Ussher, Claudius Gilbert and Hendrik Fagel. An important aspect is the comprehensive coverage of legal deposit from the beginning of the nineteenth century, viewed for the first time from the Irish perspective. The book also draws parallels with the development of other libraries in Dublin and with those of the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, and features throughout the individuals who influenced the Library's development - librarians, politicians, readers, book collectors and book thieves.