... was vested in those possessing copies of such materials. It examines the practices of figures like Otho Nicholson, who enriched himself fulfilling a royal commission to use Tower Records to claim lands for the crown in defiance of custom, as well as the strategies of figures like Robert Cotton and Arthur...

.... It also explains in detail the focus of each chapter of the entire book. The History of the World Ross Alexander historical counsel historical scholarship early modern Tower of London Cadiz Niccolo Machiavelli William Camden Robert Cotton William Lambarde Jacobean regime historicist The captive...

..., when the great antiquarian Sir Robert Cotton died, the book revises the history of the modern library by focusing on its origins in medieval and early modern England. The author argues that the medieval sources that survive in English collections are the product of a Reformation and post-Reformation...

... of Humfrey, Duke of Gloucester (1390–1447), whose foundational bequests to Oxford University are still commemorated in the Bodleian's Duke Humfrey's Library, to the death of Robert Cotton (1571–1631), whose library has been called “the most important collection of manuscripts ever assembled in Britain...

...This chapter focuses on the early-seventeenth-century library of Sir Robert Cotton, which represents a later stage in the history of the post-Reformation library and its response to the medieval textual past. It argues that the first users of the Cotton Library generated protocols concerning...