Public Books in Provincial Towns: Parish and Town Libraries in Early Modern Devon

Abstract

Early modern England was filled with semi-public libraries. From the late sixteenth century, these collections were housed in places such as churches, schools, parsonages, civic buildings, and purpose built accommodation. Mostly independent creations of local or locally-connected benefactors, they varied greatly: some were chained, some were available for borrowing; some numbered tens of books, some numbered thousands; some were collected and dispersed or destroyed within one or two decades, others continued in existence down to the present day. Devon’s wealthy towns were among those which were gifted libraries over the course of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries and, of these, four collections have substantially survived. That of Totnes was founded in 1619, that of Barnstaple in around 1665, that of Tiverton in 1716, and that of Crediton in 1721. This thesis foregrounds the material evidence of these surviving books and places it in the context of other libraries being founded across England at this time, as well as contemporary efforts to systematise library provision. In doing so, it shows how the libraries were both part of a shared national movement to disseminate learning and rooted in the intellectual, religious, and book-use cultures of their provincial area.

After an overview of the different forms semi-public libraries could take in early modern England, a chapter sets out the history of the four surviving libraries’ foundations. The contents of the collections are then discussed in a chapter which emphasises the unpredictability which accompanied collectors’ prioritisation of scholarly texts and religious works in particular. In a chapter on the acquisition of books, the growing impact of the provincial second-hand book trade is traced. This brought books annotated by local readers into some of the libraries which, along with a set of books annotated by a library borrower, are analysed in the final chapter for what they can say about the place of books in their annotators’ material lives.

Approaching different types of evidence in and connected to the libraries using the wide range of methodologies available for book historical research, this thesis illuminates the active and varied cultures of book use in Devon out of which its town and parish libraries were formed. It offers to update current understandings of semi-public library collections in early modern England through the lens of Devon’s libraries and it adds rich detail to our knowledge of this provincial area’s material practices of books use in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.