236
Textualities
to be in Latin or French but increasingly in English. Thomas of Woodstock,
duke of Gloucester (1355–97), and Richard II’s uncle, has the largest
recorded collection for the Middle English period, over 80 items. Richard
II inherited 14 books in 1384–5. In the later fifteenth century, an inventory
of one of the Johns Pastons lists 17 works, many of them compilations in
English, including texts by Geoffrey Chaucer and John Lydgate, romances,
and some of William Caxton’s printed books.
Richard de Bury (1287–1345) was born near Bury St. Edmunds in Suffolk
and went on to study at Oxford University. He became tutor to Edward,
earl of Chester, the son of Edward II and Isabella of France. When Edward III
assumed personal rule in 1330, Richard was made envoy to Pope John XXII
at Avignon where he met Petrarch. He was consecrated bishop of Durham
in 1333 and made High Chancellor of England in 1334 and Treasurer
in 1336. He was influential in the founding of Durham College at Oxford,
and he intended that his large library, which he had developed throughout
his life, would supply its basis (see the image, “New College, Oxford Uni-
versity,” p. 149). No list of the books he owned survives, although it is
possible to piece together the kinds of books he preferred, which are fairly
typical of his age: religious works, legal texts, rhetorics and grammars,
philosophies, histories, and poetry and drama.
Richard completed his
Philobiblon in the last year of his life. It survives in
35 manuscripts from the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, which the
modern editor Ernest Thomas collated for his translation. The
Philobiblon
contains praise for books, criticisms of their mistreatment, his stated prefer-
ences for the ancients over the moderns, and his reasons for favoring certain
genres; he also extols the benefits of reading and pleads for the careful
copying and preservation of manuscripts.
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