Lists of Manuscripts - Formerly Owned By, Dr. John Dee #268532

IN J. O. Halliwell edited for the Camden Society a volume entitled T be Diary of Dr. John Dee. To the diary itself, which extends with considerable gaps over the years (1554) 1577 to 1601, he appended the catalogue of Dee's manuscript library, taken from an autograph ms. In the Gale Collection at Trinity College, Cambridge (0. 4. This catalogue it is my purpose to reprint here, and to fiarnish what information I can about the books entered in it. Biblio raphers will readily agree that this is worth doing. They wil? Remember that Dee was not merely an alchemist and spiritualist, but a really learned man, and one who had done his best, by petitions and otherwise, to stimulate interest in the rescuing of mss. From the dissolved monastic libraries and to induce the sovereign to establish a central national collection of them. They will also be aware that we have but very few sixteenth-century English catalogues of manuscript collections, and that the investigation of the destinies of a dispersed library may be made to throw much light upon the formation of the collections which still exist.