Restoring Duke Humfrey's Library

Oxford University had possessed a substantial library since the fifteenth century, built around a major donation of manuscripts from Humfrey, Duke of Gloucester, but the collection was largely dispersed and the library building itself stripped of books and fittings during the religious upheavals of the Reformation in the mid sixteenth century, leaving the university without a functioning central library for decades.

Sir Thomas Bodley, an English diplomat and scholar who had studied at Oxford and later served the crown on diplomatic missions across Europe, retired from public service in 1597 and turned his attention and considerable personal wealth to restoring the university's library, offering in 1598 to fund its refurbishment and re-endowment at his own expense. Bodley oversaw the physical restoration of the medieval library building, known as Duke Humfrey's Library, and the assembly of a new collection through purchase and donation, and the restored library formally reopened to readers on 8 November 1602 under the name that has attached to it ever since, the Bodleian Library. Bodley continued to expand and secure the library's future for the remainder of his life, appointing a first keeper to manage its daily operation and negotiating with the university over its governance, laying institutional foundations that allowed the library to grow well beyond what its founder could have stocked from his own resources alone.