Bodley’s library, founded only a few decades later, was identified by religious and antiquarian book-collectors as a means of preserving the medieval written heritage. Most of the medieval manuscripts acquired in the library’s early years were English in origin, for one reason: the dissolution of the monasteries (and thus of their libraries) under Henry VIII. Although the illuminated books attract the greatest public attention, it is the library’s accumulation through the centuries of more modest text manuscripts – the pastoral manual, the copy of a classical play, the vernacular poem, the charter, the legal textbook, the medical treatise – which makes it such a rich resource for the study of medieval culture. The University’s library, ever since its re-foundation by Sir Thomas Bodley in 1602, has continued to acquire medieval manuscripts, mostly through gift and bequest. Only a handful of Duke Humfrey’s books survive today. The collecting of manuscripts by the University of Oxford (as distinct from individual colleges) goes back to the construction of the room above the Divinity School to house the manuscript books donated by Duke Humfrey of Gloucester in the 15th century. The manuscripts are mostly on parchment or paper and in codex form, and are written both in Latin and Greek and in the European vernaculars. It is the largest to be found in any university library in the world, and within the United Kingdom second only to the British Library. The Bodleian Library holds a highly important collection of manuscripts from medieval Europe and the Byzantine Empire.
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