Abstract What led Earl Spencer to collect? This chapter recovers his childhood and adolescence as the son of self-involved, neglectful parents and the younger brother of the future society hostess, Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire. The young Spencer was tutored first by William Arden (who committed suicide) and then by William Jones (1746–1794), the brilliant philologist, then still a young university student, before going to Harrow. The effect of his early life on his collecting is considered through the lenses of different psychologies of collecting as is the influence of William Jones on his intellectual and emotional development.

Abstract Spencer died in 1834 and his grandson sold his library to Enriqueta Rylands in 1892, after which it formed (and still forms) the core of the John Rylands Library in Manchester. This chapter briefly outlines that subsequent trajectory, but principally concerns itself with the larger question: were Spencer’s collecting practices legal and/or moral? Regrettably, the inescapable conclusion is that they were rarely both and often neither. Spencer’s library was both a remarkable bibliophilic achievement and a crime against the common European cultural heritage on a grand scale. The chapter concludes with reflections on how this might make us view these books—and others like them—differently in their present institutional homes.

Abstract In autumn 1790 Earl Spencer bought a copy of the Gutenberg Bible from the London bookseller Thomas Payne. This chapter examines that purchase and traces the Bible itself back to an Augustinian convent in Colmar from which it was pillaged, stolen, or sold in the unstable period at the beginning of the French Revolution. In doing so, it recovers erased provenance, restores the febrile context surrounding the closure of the Augustinian convent itself, and situates this Bible’s move from France to England within the unparalleled confiscation of books undertaken by the French state itself during this period. Spencer’s Gutenberg Bible was only one of millions of books dislodged from their homes in the early 1790s.

This article discusses the dramatic dispersal of monastic libraries in Europe and the Christian East during the early nineteenth century through two contrasting examples. These are: (1) the 1423 St Christopher woodblock print and other early examples of fifteenth-century printing, formerly the property of the Charterhouse at Buxheim in Swabia but purchased in 1803 by Alexander Horn for George John, 2nd Earl Spencer; and (2) a series of Byzantine manuscripts, formerly the property of the monastery of Karakallou on Mount Athos but purchased in 1837 by Robert Curzon, later 14th Baron Zouche. It identifies changing perceptions surrounding the value and use of books on the parts of both monks and collectors as central to this moment and explores the different - but often surprisingly similar ways in which books left monastic ownership in western vs. eastern contexts.

This article draws on the concept of the 'cabinet of curiosities', Aby Warburg's Mnemosyne atlas, and Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project, to articulate a shared process of 'distillation of affinities' whereby disparate items, texts, images, and concepts are juxtaposed together to generate rich and unexpected meanings which do not inhere in the chosen items separately. It then proposes that such a process could be applied to the practice of historical biography, explores the implications of this, and presents a proof of concept in the form of a 'life-cabinet' of the Scottish antiquary and collector Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe (1781-1851). Sharpe was an eccentric by any standard and his 'Hand of a Murderer, Preserved', punning calling card (a C#), intimate sketches, and odd books offer a rich field for this essay.

"How the Secularization of Religious Houses Transformed the Libraries of Europe, 16th–19th Centuries (Bibliologia 63), edited by Cristina Dondi, Dorit Raines, and Richard Sharpe." Library & Information History, 39(3), pp. 205–206

"The Polymath: A Cultural History from Leonardo da Vinci to Susan Sontag." Cultural and Social History, 18(4), pp. 585–586

This chapter assesses the cultural impact of the works of scholarship discussed here. Were they read and, if so, by whom? Using subscription lists, it argues that not only were these texts widely received throughout and furth of Scotland but that their reception allows us to trace the culture of the north-east exporting its own traditions to Scotland at large in a crucial, but subsequently forgotten, moment of cultural and intellectual upheaval. This in turn is placed within the wider context of Early Enlightenment reading, within and beyond the nation. Finally, the conclusion reiterates the arguments of the book as a whole and looks towards the end of the eighteenth century and the fate of Early Enlightenment thought.

Abstract Traditional accounts of the Scottish Enlightenment present the half-century or so before 1750 as, at best, a not yet fully realized precursor to the era of Hume and Smith, at worst, a period of superstition and religious bigotry. This is the first book-length study to systematically challenge that notion. Instead, it argues that the era between approximately 1680 and 1745 was a ‘First’ Scottish Enlightenment, part of the continent-wide phenomenon of Early Enlightenment and led by the Jacobites, Episcopalians, and Catholics of north-eastern Scotland. It makes this argument through an intensive study of the dramatic changes in historiographical practice which took place in Scotland during this era, showing how the documentary scholarship of Jean Mabillon and the Maurists was eagerly received and rapidly developed in Scottish historical circles, resulting in the wholesale demolition of the older, humanist myths of Scottish origins and their replacement with the foundations of our modern understanding of early Scottish history. This volume accordingly challenges many of the truisms surrounding seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Scottish history, pushing back against notions of pre-Enlightenment Scotland as backward, insular, and intellectually impoverished and mapping a richly polymathic, erudite, and transnational web of scholars, readers, and polemicists. It highlights the enduring cultural links with France and argues for the central importance of Scotland’s two principal religious minorities—Episcopalians and Catholics—in the growth of Enlightenment thinking. As such, it makes a major intervention in the intellectual and cultural histories of Scotland, early modern Europe, and the Enlightenment itself.