Everything about Robert Bruce Cotton totally explained
Sir Robert Bruce Cotton, 1st Baronet (
22 January 1570/1 –
6 May 1631) was an
English politician, founder of the famous
Cotton library.
He was of a
Huntingdonshire parentage and educated at
Westminster School, where he became interested in antiquarian studies under
William Camden, and
Jesus College, Cambridge (B.A. 1585). Starting with his
antiquarian notes on the local history of Huntingdonshire, he began to amass a library, in which the documents rivalled, then surpassed the official
Public Record Office collections. He entered the
Parliament of England as a member for
Huntingdon in 1601. He helped devise the institution of the title
baronet as a means for King
James I of England to raise funds. Despite his early period of goodwill with James I, during which he was made a baronet, Cotton's politics, based on his immersion in the documents, was essentially that "sacred obligation of the king to put his trust in parliaments" expressed in his published
The Dangers wherein the Kingdom now standeth, and the Remedye (1628), which from the Court party's point-of-view was anti-royalist in nature; the authorities began to fear the uses being made of his library to support parliamentarian arguments: it was confiscated in 1630 and returned only after his death to his heirs.
The Cottonian Library was the richest private collection of
manuscripts ever amassed; of secular libraries it outranked the Royal library, the collections of the
Inns of Court and the
College of Arms; Cotton's house near the
Palace of Westminster became the meeting-place of the
Society of Antiquaries and of all the eminent scholars of England (
DNB); it was eventually donated to the nation by Cotton's grandson and now resides at the
British Library.
The physical arrangement of Cotton's Library continues to be reflected in citations to manuscripts once in his possession. His library was housed in a room 26 feet long by six feet wide filled with
bookpresses, each with the bust of a figure from
classical antiquity on top. Counterclockwise, these are catalogued as
Julius (for example, Julius Caesar),
Augustus,
Cleopatra,
Faustina,
Tiberius,
Caligula,
Claudius,
Nero,
Galba,
Otho,
Vitellius,
Vespasian,
Titus, and
Domitian. (Domitian had only one shelf, perhaps because it was over the door.) Manuscripts are now designated by library, bookpress, and number: for example, the manuscript of
Beowulf is designated
Cotton Vitellius A.xv, and the manuscript of
Pearl is
Cotton Nero A.x.
Selected manuscripts
Further Information
Get more info on 'Robert Bruce Cotton'.
|
External Link Exchanges
Do you know how hard it is to get a link from a large encyclopaedia? Well we're different and will prove it. To get a link from us just add the following HTML to your site on a relevant page:
<a href="http://robert_bruce_cotton.totallyexplained.com">Robert Bruce Cotton Totally Explained</a>
Then simply click through this link from your web page. Our crawlers will verify your link, extract the title of your web page and instantly add a link back to it. If you like you can remove the words Totally Explained and embed the link in article text.
As long as your link remains in place, we'll keep our link to you right here. Please play fair - our crawlers are watching. Your site must be closely related to this one's topic. Any kind of spamming, dubious practises or removing the link will result in your link from us being dropped and, potentially, your whole site being banned. |
