Africans in East Anglia, 1467-1833

parallel to a bequest to fund apprenticeships there) and money to build there a public library to house his own collection of books, running to nearly 5000 volumes and manuscripts. A series of chapters reconstruct Plume’s library and the vicissitudes through economic and architectural crises of the building, book and manuscript collection to its now important status as an architectural and bibliographical treasure house, on which ongoing work in cataloguing and digitising has extended and democratised access to the Library in accordance with Plume’s founding principle of public availability. Here several chapters, notably those by Doe, David Pearson and Helen Kemp successfully demonstrate the value of the volume’s emphasis on understanding through contextualisation. Placing the library’s foundation in the context of the contemporaneous establishment of parochial and other public libraries and the culture of book auctions, bequests and ‘borrowings’, this work underpins the argument that this was a library, as Pearson puts it, of a scholar-clergyman, not antiquarian, with two-thirds perhaps predictably devoted to theology and religion, but the other third to a wider variety of classical and other authors and subjects. Here as in other chapters, notably that by Thornton and Max Earnshaw, there is much fresh and important material on the local history of trusts, their membership and the important role they played (and play) in the establishment and maintenance of Plume’s bequests, on the numbers drawn into their running from his death to the present and the sometimes considerable demands this placed on local groups of trustees. Plume was perhaps unexceptionable in much of his (recorded) life, but for his philanthropy. Future work, stimulated by this volume, will help to answer the question that runs quietly through the volume as to where the balance between typical and exceptional lies in the scale of his philanthropy. As various chapters make approvingly clear, Plume did not seek fame, not wishing to have his many bequests named after him. Nevertheless, given the quality of this volume, it is to be hoped that future comparative work on the local history of early modern philanthropy will draw on the excellent work here and make the example of Thomas Plume, called by an eighteenth-century historian of Essex ‘this munificent person’, better known.