Investigating the origins and development of the Cotton Collection at the British Library

The library put together by Sir Robert Cotton (1571-1631) and his descendants was once described as 'the most important collection of manuscripts ever assembled in Britain by a private individual'. It contains more than 1,400 medieval and early modern manuscripts and over 1,500 charters, rolls and seals, among them items of international heritage significance, such as the Lindisfarne Gospels, Beowulf and two copies of the 1215 Magna Carta. This collection was perhaps the most important single means by which pre-Reformation textual culture was preserved: it became a repository of memory and a site of nation-making. It was also the engine which powered seventeenth-century antiquarianism, underpinning a myriad of projects -- editorial, narrative, polemical.

There are two chief avenues of research to explore. The first would be to continue, extend and deepen the investigations of Colin Tite into the early users of the Cotton Library, showing how its manuscripts came to underpin the evolution of historiography, textual editing, and religio-political debate in the seventeenth century, and how the library came to be considered a 'national' collection. The second avenue seems to the supervisory team more groundbreaking still. This would be to investigate the origins of Cotton's library itself. Where, when, and how did he acquire his manuscripts? What were the aims and motivations of Cotton's collecting? What kind of a collector was he, in comparison to other leading manuscript collectors such as Matthew Parker (1504- 1575), Archbishop of Canterbury? How was Cotton's collecting inspired and shaped by the political contexts within which he worked, and by the advice of mentors such as William Camden (whose own Britannia emerged in concert with the growth of Cotton's library)? What kind of a maker and assembler of books was Cotton? How did the other things he collected -- coins, stones, printed books -- complement his manuscripts? How far did Cotton already conceptualise his...