Abstract

On 30 December 1634 the Bodleian Library in Oxford received an important gift. Fourteen trunks bearing a mass of manuscripts bound in no fewer than 237 “handsome calf” volumes arrived from London. They bore the coat of arms of Sir Kenelm Digby , courtier and philosopher, who was to be prominent three decades later in the early Royal Society. At least half of the volumes contain material of scientific and philosophical interest and have been extensively quarried by twentieth‐century scholars of “medieval” science. Many of them are from Merton College and have cast light on “Merton science.” Most of the manuscripts, as has only recently been fully appreciated, were bequeathed to Digby by Thomas Allen of Gloucester Hall. Allen was reputedly one of the “magi” who had served Henry Percy, ninth earl of Northumberland , during his long imprisonment in the Tower after the Gunpowder Plot. Digby's father had been executed for alleged complicity in that plot when Kenelm was only an infant. Allegiance to the old religion, while conforming outwardly to the English church, constituted a strong bond between Allen and Kenelm. It may also explain the untiring zeal with which Allen sought out manuscripts from the purged libraries of Oxford colleges and from dissolved religious houses throughout the land. He thereby rescued them from being totally destroyed or surviving only as binding material for the flood of volumes from the printed press for which librarians now had to find shelf space.Digby's decision to present the Allen manuscripts to the Bodleian was rather sudden. It came very soon after he came into their possession and just after he had them sorted and bound. Those of scientific and philosophical interest had, for example, been classified as astronomical, astrological, alchemical, mathematical, or medical. The decision to part from “the library which with so much cost and labour I haue raked together” followed his resolve, after the death of his wife in 1633, to devote the rest of his life to penitence, prayer, and meditation.William Dunn Macray, the compiler of the original 1883 catalogue of the Bodleian Digby manuscripts, succeeded in tracing only a few of them to the Allen bequest. With A. G. Watson's researches, spanning a quarter of a century, Allen's status as one of the most important contemporary English collectors of medieval manuscripts has secured full recognition. The “Notes” in the present volume supplement Macray's own descriptions of individual manuscripts and help to indicate the importance of the collection as a resource for historical research. There is an index of incipits, as well as an index of the manuscripts cited in the original catalogue and its notes. Watson has appended a catalogue of Allen's own manuscript collection that was compiled during Allen's lifetime and consulted by Macray but has never before been published.The revised edition of the catalogue will greatly assist the study of the Digby manuscripts. It also adds much to our knowledge of the English collectors who saved manuscripts from wanton destruction after the dissolution of religious foundations and the purging of university libraries that followed the Henrician Reformation