Medieval Libraries of Great Britain
Tracing lost libraries of England, Scotland, and Wales.
Medieval libraries are attested first by their surviving books and second by surviving medieval catalogues of the collections. The digital edition of Medieval Libraries of Great Britain (MLGB) unites these complementary fragments, allowing an integrated approach to the evidence. It presents the original file cards underlying the printed editions of Medieval Libraries of Great Britain, edited by Neil Ker; augmented by identifications from booklists edited in the Corpus of British Medieval Library Catalogues (CBMLC).
Since 1937, researchers have been collecting evidence for reconstructing institutional book collections of England, Wales, and Scotland through Medieval Libraries of Great Britain and the Corpus of British Medieval Library Catalogues.
Medieval Libraries was originally available as a card index in the Bodleian Library, published as a Royal Historical Society handbook in 1946–87 under the editorship of Neil R. Ker, analysing the surviving books known to formed part of an institutional collection in the Middle Ages. Other key figures in the project included R. A. B. Mynors, R. W. Hunt, C. R. Cheney, and Andrew Watson.
In 2009, Richard Sharpe and James Willoughby began a digital edition of the resource. In 2025, a team at the Bodleian Library relaunched this digital resource, building on a shared technical framework with Medieval Manuscripts in Oxford Libraries. It provides open access to these pioneering records, searchable alongside data from the Corpus, allowing for richer citation, new modes of analysis, and deeper insight into the intellectual networks of medieval Britain.
In 2025-6, a grant from the British Academy’s Neil Ker Memorial Fund is enabling completion of the process of revising the original file cards in digital form, images of which will be available online for the first time. Andrew Dunning and Matthew Holford now lead the project at Oxford under the guidance of an advisory board that ensures the project’s viability as it nears its centenary.
Readers are invited to contribute by sharing feedback, corrections, and additional provenance data to enhance the resource.
