The Library of John Veysy (d. 1492), Fellow of Lincoln College, Oxford, and Rector of St James, Garlickhythe, London

摘要

All too often, the student of the libraries of pre-Reformation England has to rely for his sources on records that afford, at best, a partial picture. Most useful in establishing the contents of a particular collection are, naturally, full booklists or library catalogues that offer a snapshot at a given date, but these tend to survive mainly for institutional collections. For the libraries of private individuals, recourse must be made to an almost equally rare type of document, the probate inventory, which purports to list what a deceased individual possessed at the time of his or her death. Early examples of such inventories are in short supply: the records of the archbishop of Canterbury's prerogative court, one of the principal collections of testamentary documentation from the southern province, contains fewer than one hundred dating from before 1495, and of these only a fraction list book collections of any substance. Perhaps rather more tantalizing than helpful are the far more common testaments which scholars have sought to analyze in their hundreds, but which fall short in almost every respect, in that they not only name merely those of an individual's books of which he or she thought to make individual bequests, but also usually give no indication whether the testator already owned the book he wished to bequeath or relied on his executors to procure it for that purpose. The picture that these records provide is thus not only incomplete, but also unreliable. Nevertheless, at their best, probate records have more to offer than even actual library catalogues: in those rare instances where testament and probate inventory survive together, the combined records can give an indication not only of an individual's books but also of their probable movement into and out of his or her collection, both during the owner's lifetime and after his or her death.