Books Owned by Mary Astell in the Old Library of Magdalene College, Cambridge

Abstract

the chapel in first court, is often overshadowed by its famed counterpart, the Pepys Library. While the latter arrived in 1724 upon the death of Samuel Pepys’s nephew, John Jackson, the Old Library is a collection of books and manuscripts amassed by the college since its formation as a Benedictine hostel in 1428.1 A recent ‘provenance survey’ of the Old Library has led to the identification of collections of books belonging to individuals without a formal affiliation to Magdalene College. One of these collections is particularly notable: a group of books, pamphlets and manuscript items formerly owned by the philosopher Mary Astell (1666–1731). It is these items, intermingled throughout the Old Library, which will form the subject of this paper and will hereafter be termed ‘the Astell collection’.2 In an address to the Bibliographical Society at the turn of the millennium, David McKitterick discussed a group of books and manuscripts belonging to Elizabeth Puckering at Trinity College, Cambridge, and, more widely, female book ownership in seventeenth-century England.3 He used the example of Puckering’s collection to extend ‘our currently somewhat thin know ledge of women’s reading and book ownership in the seventeenth century’, and adds, ‘the subject is long overdue for a book’.4 Thankfully,