"In the thousands of inventories on decease compiled for the purpose of probate during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in England, books are often among the items listed. They are also recorded in a variety of other documents associated with men and women of this period, including wills, account ledgers, receipts, and inventories of goods distrained. Private Libraries in Renaissance England (PLRE) transcribes and annotates such book-lists produced between the beginning of the sixteenth century and the mid-seventeenth century; it also reconstructs private library holdings of that period based on extant books. The information thus derived is then entered into a uniform database which can be searched and from which material about those books and their owners is retrieved and published"--Publisher's website.

Bringing together the surviving material and manuscript evidence, this book looks closely at a fascinating medieval sundial in the form of a ship. It considers who made and used the surviving instruments, as well as studying the scholars who wrote about it.

In Greeks, Romans, and Pilgrims David Lupher examines the availability, circulation, and uses of Greek and Roman culture in the earliest period of the British settlement of New England. This book offers the first systematic correction to the dominant assumption that the Separatist settlers of Plymouth Plantation (the so-called “Pilgrims”) were hostile or indifferent to “humane learning”— a belief dating back to their cordial enemy, the May-pole reveler Thomas Morton of Ma-re Mount, whose own eccentric classical negotiations receive a chapter in this book. While there have been numerous studies of the uses of classical culture during the Revolutionary period of colonial North America, the first decades of settlement in New England have been neglected. Utilizing both familiar texts such as William Bradford’s Of Plimmoth Plantation and overlooked archival sources, Greeks, Romans, and Pilgrims signals the end of that neglect.

This is the latest in an important series of reviews going back to 1928. The book contains 26 chapters, written by experts in their field, and reviews developments in the principal aspects of British librarianship and information work in the years 2006-2010.

On the accession of Mary Tudor many Catholic recusants left England for the continent. Some managed to take their books with them. The two inventories post mortem and one auction list studied in this volume shed light on the books of Englishmen in the Low Countries in the later-16th century.