Clare's Fellows' Library:

For centuries Clare Library would have been at once a hushed sanctuary and a bustling frontier of research and innovation. Our collections contain volumes on every conceivable subject—from Americana to zoology via cryptography and optics—spanning in date from the ninth to the twentieth century. There are medieval and post-medieval manuscripts, monuments of early printing, books associated with notable men and anonymous cranks, beautiful books, amusing books, cursed books, looted and mutilated books, books in fine bindings, picture books and pop-up books, annotated books, and books which reflect in some way every major historical event of Clare’s first 700 years. Our birthday exhibition seeks to capture this variety in four (very) loosely chronological groupings: the early years; Reformation; Stuart expansion; science and war.

The early years set the pattern for the Library’s growth. Only rarely did the college buy in books for its students; instead the Library grew as an accumulation of bequests. Some Tudor donors were especially generous. An endearing Latin inscription on a 1535 edition of Erasmus reads, ‘Laurence Maptyt bought this book with his own money so that you could use it without having to write it [i.e. copy it]. You therefore who read these things say ‘Fare thee well Laurence’”. Maptyt (d. 1557) was the Master of Corpus Christi College (then Benet Hall); perhaps he was fed up with Clare copyists hanging around their library. One thing is certain: volumes like this were precious objects. Aside from its bespoke gold-tooling, still visible on the binding is the hole left by a rivet. This suggests some early books were chained as a precaution against theft.

Characterful bindings are also a feature of the ‘Reformation’ section, including the painted buckskin cover on an early Parisian Bible. This book the college did buy in, possibly for reading out in chapel: the Clare arms can be seen on its surviving silver clasp. Alongside Hugh Latimer’s sermons and the earliest Latin translation of the Quran (partly sponsored by Martin Luther), the most striking item in this section is the manuscript ‘Story-Book’ written out in the careful hand of one of our most famous fellows, Nicholas Ferrar (1593-1637). Ferrar founded the famous community at Little Gidding in 1625. He used ‘storying’ as a method of moral and religious instruction, with his mother, nephews and nieces taking the most prominent roles under pseudonyms (‘Cheerfull’, ‘the Guardian’, ‘the Patient’, and so on). Three hundred years later his blend of erudition, holiness and literary flair appealed especially to one visitor to Little Gidding: T. S. Eliot, who immortalised it in the last of his Four Quartets.

The collection expanded considerably during the early Stuart period, partly owing to the bequest of the Clare fellow and playwright George Ruggle (1572-1622). Ruggle was the author of the comedy Ignoramus (1615), and his play did much to popularise that noun (actually a Latin verb) in English. James I so enjoyed its first six-hour performance at Trinity College—Clare could not afford to stage it—that he returned the following month for a second. Written in Latin and set in Bordeaux, Ignoramus frequently slips into other languages as well. This polyglossia reflects Ruggle’s intense interest in modern foreign languages, as does his gift of over a hundred books in French, Spanish and Italian. Also included in this section are vividly illustrated works on sericulture (connected with Clare’s interests in the Virginia Company), head wounds and the therapeutic benefits of sport.

The last section commemorates science and, unexpectedly, war. Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World (1667) is commonly considered the earliest work of science fiction in English: Clare’s handsome folio was given by its author. A first edition of Newton’s Principia Mathematica (1687) reflects the priorities of several Newtonians at Clare, notably former Master Charles Morgan (1678-1736) who bequeathed hundreds of scientific volumes to the Library as well as overseeing its current installation.

Among the final exhibits is a touching recent acquisition: a copy of Clare alumnus Siegfried Sassoon’s Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man, gifted to Winston Churchill by his children for Christmas 1928. Generously donated to Clare earlier this year by Tracey and Shanin Specter, this Christmas present has its origins in the unlikely friendship struck up in summer 1918 between Britain’s most celebrated pacifist and its best known wartime leader. This new arrival stands as a testament to curiosity and tolerance and, not unconnectedly, to the continuing life of the Fellows’ Library at Clare.