Thursday 14 November, 2013, 1-2 pm
Stephen Boyd Room, Kennedy Hall, School of English
Dr Margaret Connolly, Senior Lecturer in the School of English, will lead a reading group entitled ‘A 16th Century Lawyer and his 15th Century Books’. This topic draws from her current research on a 16th Century gentry family which is provisionally entitled: Newly Reformed Readers and their Reading: A Sixteenth-Century Family and their Medieval Books, taking one member of the family, Thomas Roberts, who was a London lawyer as the focus of the session.
The texts for discussion are:
- A summary of how the material relating to Thomas Roberts is like/is not like that relating to other contemporary lawyers, and which lists the contents of surviving books that may be associated with him.
- An article by C. E. Moreton, ‘The “Library of a Late Fifteenth-Century Lawyer’, The Library 6th Series, 13.4 (1991), 338-46. This is an example of the type of study that’s been made of late medieval/early modern lawyers and their books, so that people have some frame of reference for her work.
Dr Connolly’s research concerns later medieval English literature and its manuscript context, and she has a strong interest in book history. Of her previous publications, the most relevant in this context to mention is an essay, ‘Sixteenth-Century Readers Reading Fifteenth-Century Religious Books: The Roberts Family of Middlesex’ that has recently appeared in a volume edited by Nicole Rice, Middle English Religious Writing in Practice: Texts, Readers, and Transformations (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013).