Dr Robyn Adams, Senior Research Officer at the Centre for Editing Lives and Letters, has been awarded the Humfrey Wanley Fellowship at the Bodleian Library, Oxford.

This fellowship is named after Humfrey Wanley, regarded as a pioneer in the study of manuscripts. As a member of staff of the Bodleian Library in the 1690s, Wanley was one of the first scholars to regard books as research materials in themselves and during this period he was instrumental in developing the skills that he would later deploy in ground-breaking publications.

Dr Adams' research project as Humfrey Wanley Fellow, entitled 'Building a Library without Walls: the Early Records of the Bodleian Library', explores the intellectual and friendship networks and spaces of the early years of the Library, developing directly from previous research on the period of Sir Thomas Bodley's diplomatic service.

In particular, Dr Adams will be looking at the letters between Bodley and his first Librarian, Thomas James, in conjunction with the Benefactors Register to establish patterns of book donation and purchase, as well as patronage and scholarship connections.

The project will also study the architectural decisions taken by Bodley and James in relation to book storage and library usage during his refurbishment of the library in the early seventeenth century.

This research is intended to form part of a new CELL project in partnership with the Bodleian Library (currently under consideration with the AHRC) which links Bodley's diplomatic correspondence to that of his re-foundation of the University Library at Oxford.