A Tudor Family Library: Social Ambition and Continental Books in Sir Michael Dormer's Donation to the Bodleian Library

abstract:This essay argues that an examination of the list of books donated to the Bodleian by Sir Michael Dormer in 1603 complicates our assumptions about the audience for Italian Renaissance literature in the Tudor period. Such study causes us to readjust our knowledge of the kinds of books owned by the gentry when set against the known book collections represented in the standard literature. It demonstrates that, by scrutinizing institutional donation lists in granular detail, we can increase the cumulative bibliographical data available to study book ownership across a wider social spectrum than has previously been accessible to scholars across the disciplines.