Librarianship and Polemics: The Career of Thomas James (1572-1629)

Richard W. Clement, Utah State University

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Originally published by the University of Texas Press. Publisher's PDF and article fulltext available through remote link via JSTOR.

Abstract

Thomas James is well known as the first librarian of the Bodleian Library at Oxford, and the correspondence from Sir Thomas Bodley to James is justly celebrated in what it tells us of the details of library management in this period. Unfortunately, modern library historians have tended to look at James only as a librarian and have ignored or dismissed his scholarly and polemical works and activities. Yet James's librarianship was part of polemical scholarship, as indeed was the foundation of the Bodleian Library itself. If we are to understand the nature of librarianship in England in the early seventeenth century, we cannot ignore the historical context within which librarians and libraries functioned and interacted.