Mount Street Catalogues Project
The Mount Street Catalogues Project:
Reconstructing a Nineteenth-Century Jesuit Library
Ted Simonds is an MPhil/PhD Collaborative Doctoral Award student, working on library and book history, with the collections of the British Jesuit Archive under the banner of "The Mount Street Catalogues project". This research is funded by The London Arts and Humanities Partnership (an AHRC Doctoral Training Partnership) and is co-supervised by Dr Michael Durrant and Professor Laura Cleaver at the Institute of English Studies (part of the University of London's School of Advanced Study) and Dr Lucy Vinten at the British Jesuit Archives.
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The Project
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The project centres on two nineteenth-century manuscript library catalogues as evidence that the Jesuits possessed a library which is now housed at the British Jesuit Archives. Accessions and deaccessions, as well as changing practices of library management over the 19th and 20th centuries has left us with a library different to the one that once was.
These catalogues, and the books that remain prompt us to ask: What books did the Jesuits own, and how did this change over time? How do the ways they organized, recorded and cared for their books articulate a Jesuit relationship to information, reading, and bookish culture? What does this relationship say about the intellectual, cultural, religious and devotional lives of the people who used this collection? And what testimony does this collection bear, across a significant period of significant historical development for the Jesuits in Britain.
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Updates, News, Links and Resources
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As the project unfolds, outcomes, updates, links and resources will be updated on this page.
If you have any questions or comments please feel free to contact Ted on edward.simonds@london.ac.uk.
