Sixteenth-Century Readers, Fifteenth-Century Books

Margaret Connolly is Senior Lecturer in Medieval Studies at the University of St Andrews, Scotland. Her previous publications include Insular Books: Vernacular manuscript miscellanies in late medieval Britain, edited with Raluca Radulescu (2015); The Index of Middle English Prose, Handlist XIX: Manuscripts in the University Library, Cambridge (2009); Design and Distribution of Late Medieval Manuscripts in England, edited with Linne Mooney (2008); and John Shirley: Book Production and the Noble Household (1998).

• Introduction; 1. Family matters: the Roberts family of Willesden; 2. Private faces in public places; 3. Devotional reading in the reigns of Henry VII and Henry VIII; 4. Out of the cloister, out of the family; 5. Books and their uses; 6. Devotional reading in the reigns of Mary Tudor and Elizabeth I; Conclusion: Newly reformed readers?; Postscript: after the family: the manuscripts' later histories; Appendix 1. Timeline of key events during the lifetimes of Thomas and Edmund Roberts; Appendix 2. Summary list of contents of manuscripts owned by the Roberts family; Appendix 3. Manuscripts and printed books of uncertain association; Appendix 4. Other families named Roberts; Bibliography; Index of manuscripts; General Index.

'Overall, Sixteenth-Century Readers, Fifteenth-Century Books offers a compelling case study of a kind of reading and class of readers … it is well written, copiously documented, and should serve as a model to other researchers working in a similar vein.' Megan L. Cook, The Library