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As Heavy as Two Cats or a King Penguin: Introducing the Bodleian Library’s Donor Register

Since the publication of our last blog post, the Shaping Scholarship team at UCL’s Centre for Editing Lives and Letters has been busy continuing our important research into early donations to the Bodleian Library in Oxford. Our post-doctoral research associate Anna Lujz Gilbert has spent the past few months at the University of Oxford, examining hundreds of valuable rare books to establish which titles gifted to the library survive amongst the Bodleian’s thirteen million printed items. I’ve also joined the team as a research associate. When I’ve not been working on my DPhil (PhD) in English literature and women’s book history c.1550-1760 at the University of Oxford, I’ve been completing the Institute of Historical Research’s excellent course in database design and getting up to speed with the project’s progress. A key part of this has been getting to grips with Shaping Scholarship’s foundational document and the subject of this blog post: the first volume of Donor Register used to record the thousands of gifts to the library between 1602 and 1688.

Introducing the Shaping Scholarship Project

Welcome to our Shaping Scholarship project blog!

In this first post we’ll be introducing the broad aims of the project and the team behind it. Because we’re keen to use the blog series to highlight our methodologies as well as our research finds, this post will also mention some of the questions that we've been working through over the first months of the project as we work out our approach. These are discussions that we’ll be developing as we move through the project, so expect more detail on that in blog posts to come.

Introducing the Shaping Scholarship Project

Photograph of the title page of the Bodleian Benefactors' Register, showing a paragraph set in italic type printed onto a large vellum page

Welcome to our Shaping Scholarship project blog! In this first post we’ll be introducing the broad aims of the project and the team behind it. Because we’re keen to use the blog series to highlight our methodologies as well as our research finds, this post will also mention some of the questions that we've been working through over the first months of the project as we work out our approach. These are discussions that we’ll be developing as we move through the project, so expect more detail on that in blog posts to come.

Seventeenth-Century Libraries: Problems & Perspectives

This symposium brings together a group of UK-based academics and librarians, as well as key continental scholars, in an attempt to consolidate current research, for the first time, on seventeenth-century libraries and book collecting. Seventeenth-Century Libraries: Problems & Perspectives will address questions of topography and typology, networks of library activity, administration, visual identity, dispersal, owners and content, and definitions of public and private. The symposium will also confront current topics of cultural and intellectual history – especially heritage and antiquarianism, the circulation and management of knowledge, and the rise of consumerism and the culture of collecting.

Digital Launch Event: The Archaeology of Reading in Early Modern Europe

This symposium, co-hosted by the Centre for Editing Lives and Letters(CELL) at University College London, and the Warburg Institute, University of London, caps off a four-year, international collaboration between Johns Hopkins University’s Sheridan Libraries, the Princeton University Library, and CELL at UCL, with funding from the 

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