Research to be undertaken between the University of Kent and Queen’s University of Belfast is set to investigate a ‘common’ library founded in the 1420s at London’s Guildhall.

The £367,000 project, funded by the Leverhulme Trust, will be led by Dr Ryan Perry, senior lecturer in the School of English and co-Director of the Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Studies, and will be co-investigated Dr Stephen Kelly in the School of Arts, English and Languages, Queen’s University of Belfast.

The library was one of the charitable legacies from the estates of that famously wealthy and most storied London mayor, Richard ‘Dick’ Whittington (d. 1423). This chained library of religious manuscripts was built by Whittington’s innovative executor, the Guildhall clerk, John Carpenter, explicitly for the benefit of London’s citizens and for its poorer priests who could not afford their own books to aid them in their ministrations in the City.  The entire collection was sequestered by Edward Seymour, Lord Protector of England, in January 1549, to fill the shelves of his newly constructed library at Somerset house, and only two books from the library are now known to have survived.

The project aims to ‘reconstruct’ the collection through identifying clusters of Middle English texts that were being repeatedly copied by London scribes in an explosion of pastoral writing in the City that coincides with the foundation of Whittington’s library. It is the project team’s contention that this revolution in religio-literary culture was facilitated through the ‘common’ library.

The project, titled Whittington’s Gift: Reconstructing the Lost Common Library of London’s Guildhall, will produce an anthology of texts sourced from the library and a monograph length account of Middle English religious textual production in the City and beyond.