Rod Thomson's catalogue of the Peterhouse manuscripts effectively replaces that of M. R. James, published in 1899. It deals with a collection of unusual importance for the history of medieval universities. Most of the 277 complete manuscripts still in the college's collection were there before the Reformation and, despite some losses, and a lot of vandalism, the reader is presented with a tolerably complete picture of a working academic library of about 1500. The remarkably slow rate at which printed books replaced manuscripts at Peterhouse is implicated in this. Not until 1589, with the large bequest of Andrew Perne, did more user-friendly volumes swamp the medieval holdings. The manuscripts thus remained practically valuable into a period when their interest and potential value to scholarly collectors and virtuosi alike would have been clear enough to their custodians: this extended utility got them over a serious hurdle that most other academic libraries did not negotiate well, or at all. However, despite their collectability, Peterhouse's books were not dispersed in the seventeenth century either. Thomson notes that only three or four manuscripts accounted for in 1600 are absent today (p. xxxviii). The reasons for preserving such a large collection of increasingly redundant objects, whose texts correspond overwhelmingly to medieval interests in philosophical theology and legal theory, are possibly to be sought in a developing sense of institutional pride rooted in longevity, as well as a steadfast reluctance to alienate documented gifts (not that this stopped custodians elsewhere). But as Thomson points out, the preservationist impulse did not save the manuscripts from extensive mutilation and generally shoddy care. Almost all that were made with illuminated letters have had these letters removed, apparently early in the seventeenth century. Many of the excisions are of relatively small ‘champe’ initials, and it is hard to know why it was done. The systematic nature of the damage is, moreover, not absolute, for some initials do survive in books from which most were taken (for example mss 1, 6, 18, 40, 67, 86). Here is something for the broad-minded historian of illumination to ponder; Thomson hints at compilation by someone of a scrap-book (pp. xxxviii, 11), and if so then one wonders at such a purpose in an academic context at this date, and at the assiduity of the compiler.

Thomson's introduction says much about the acquisition and use of Peterhouse's collection. The sources of information are various. Some sixty donors are recorded by inscriptions in the books themselves, and other inscriptions shed light on the circulation and use of individual volumes, and by extension the general economy of books in the late Middle Ages. For example, donors like Robert of Muskham, rector of the parish of Over in the later fourteenth century, expected rather a lot of the college in exchange for one or two old manuscripts (see mss 12, 13), while others seem to have given more freely. There are also extraneous sources of information, the most valuable being a list of titles belonging to the college made in 1418, with later updates. Account rolls survive which contain information about the acquisition and housing of the collection. (As usual in his catalogues Thomson pays detailed attention to the architecture and layout of the pre-Reformation library.) The most interesting person to emerge from the evidence is William Dyngley, Fellow and sometime college bursar in the first half of the fifteenth century, who evidently did much to convert a gaggle of ad hoc donations and acquisitions into a proper working library. Dyngley donated at least twenty-nine books, seventeen of which he personally commissioned. Some of these contain records of the cost of their making (pp. xxvii–xxix).

All of this and more is contained in Thomson's introduction, on which I risk spending all the space available to me. It is of course hard to review something as intricate and diverse as a catalogue of medieval books with balance as well as economy, not least because what one reader likes about cataloguing style another will like less. Personally, I find Rod Thomson's catalogues highly useful for their interest in all aspects of what they record. They serve the interests of someone interested in books as working objects as well as repositories of texts. Thus, things like vernacular annotation, scraps of music and added imagery are discussed as well as text and provenance (for scraps of Middle English at Peterhouse see mss 11, 20, 42, 69, 77, 81, 82, 109, 151, 238, 248 and 268, as well as the wholly vernacular mss 190 and 257). The analysis is backed up with generous selections of plates. In this case, too, there is a painstakingly compiled appendix of medieval binding fragments in the college's printed books (among which one must appreciate the gallows humour in a single leaf from a dictionary beginning ‘rapina, raptus’: see p. 177). A second appendix contains surviving manuscripts not now in Peterhouse's possession, and it is no mere list, but a catalogue of fifteen strays in the manner of the other entries. Indeed, it must be thus, given the function of Thompson's volume as a record of an institutional whole which is greater than the sum of its parts. There is a lot that was previously obscure in these appendixes, including what seems to be a fresh identification of provenance. Printed book K. 6. 16, a copy of Bernardino de Busti's Rosarium printed at Hagenau in 1508, has an ex libris of Combwell, an Augustinian priory near Tunbridge Wells, along with a pertinet inscription of a vicar of nearby Ticehurst (see p. 178). All in all, while some of Thomson's editorial concerns were also those of M. R. James, others are new to this catalogue, and the whole is naturally more attentive to the needs and expectations of current scholarship. It is an easy matter to recommend this painstaking, sympathetic, effective contribution to the history of English medieval books.