Early Bodleian Donations Online

The dataset contains information regarding donations of books, manuscripts, and money made to the Bodleian Library of the University of Oxford in the period 1600–1620. The data are biographical (for donors), bibliographical and codicological (for books and manuscripts), financial (for monetary donations), and for a subset of books copy-specific material descriptions. The dataset was primarily based on the records of the Bodleian Library, including the Donors' Register (Oxford, Bodleian Library, Bodleian MS Library Records b.903), and the historic collections of the Library. We are grateful to the Bodleian Library for their support throughout this project. The research was funded by a grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, UKRI.Early Bodleian Donations Online (EBDO) is a digital resource based on research undertaken by UCL’s Centre for Editing Lives and Letters during the project “Shaping Scholarship: Early Donations to the Bodleian Library”. Our focus is on the first two decades following its seventeenth-century refurbishment by Sir Thomas Bodley (c.1600-1620), and the study examines the shape of the collection of the books donated and purchased with funds, the social backgrounds of the c.220 donors, and how these men and women were connected across the social compass of the time.The project is multidisciplinary, drawing on the fields of literary studies, network analysis, political, economic, social and intellectual history, library and information studies and more. Using the overlooked and under-used records of one of the United Kingdom’s principal research libraries, we will explore the relationships between people, things and places, giving a broader sense of philanthropy, book-ownership, and social connectedness in Jacobean England. While many of the donors are well-known historical figures, a greater number have been omitted from the conventionally rehearsed narrative, and these include scholars, merchants, soldiers, women and diplomats. <br>