Edmunds, established by Bishop William Curteys in the middle of the century, and that of Duke Humfrey of Gloucester, who would go on to endow the central university library at Oxford. The chapter makes this point by considering two of the most important libraries of the fifteenth century: the library of Bury St. At a time when literacy could no longer be considered the exclusive domain and defining privilege of the clergy, the newly centralized libraries worked to safeguard literacy and its privileges by other means. This argument counters an assumption that the growth of libraries was a natural outcome of, or necessarily promoted, the spread of books and literacy, and it carries implications for understanding the broader cultural significance of libraries. This chapter presents and examines the implications of the following argument: while the fifteenth-century “age of libraries” took place against the backdrop of expanded literacy in late medieval England, to both their founders and their critics, the new libraries represented an effort to restrict, rather than advance, popular literacy.
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