24 June 2021. |. 19:00-20:00
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Helen Kemp and Anna-Lujz Gilbert explore the public libraries of early modern England. Anna will outline the development of library provision across England and how these sat within their local societies. Helen will share a study of Thomas Plume's Library in Maldon, Essex which he placed in the newly-renovated St Peter’s church in the 1690s with the books made available for consultation and borrowing.
The Speakers
Helen Kemp is a historian of early modern reading and writing, and has been managing Thomas Plume’s Library as the “Plume Librarian” on behalf of its Trustees since September 2019. She is also Community Fellow in the Department of History at the University of Essex, and Special Collections Champion at the Albert Sloman Library. Plume’s collection of notebooks and papers was the focus of her PhD and also the subject of her chapter in the recent Plume biography. She is currently working on a monograph about seventeenth-century notebooks, alongside two articles under revision about individual notebooks from the Plume Library.
Anna-Lujz Gilbert is a final year PhD student at Exeter University researching parish and town libraries in early modern England. Her thesis focuses on the four surviving collections, founded between 1619 and 1721, of what was once a larger tapestry of library provision in Devon. Through bringing a range of methodologies to bear on these under-researched collections, her work brings to light rich provincial book cultures in which books were both reading materials and social objects.
Anna’s talk will outline the development of a varied landscape of library provision in early modern England from the last decade of the sixteenth century to the first decades of the eighteenth century. She will discuss the ways in which public and semi-public libraries could be situated in their local societies and the kinds of evidence that can be used to investigate this.
Thomas Plume's Library
Thomas Plume’s Library is a great example of a library provided for local “gentlemen and scholars” at the turn of the eighteenth century. Plume had accumulated over 8,000 books and pamphlets by the end of his life, which was a large collection for someone of his social standing and career level as an archdeacon from a mercantile family. Plume renovated the redundant site of St Peter’s church in the 1690s to provide a home for the town’s grammar school on the ground floor and his library on the upper floor. He made provision in his will for the books to be made available for consultation, either on site, or borrowed on the Library Keeper’s approval. Although Plume’s benefaction is in many ways typical of a town library of the period, it is unusual in a few significant ways, and these issues will be explored in Helen’s case study.