ABSTRACT
Robert Sidney, second earl of Leicester (illustration 23 ), is perhaps the least-known of the early modern Sidneys, but he made a significant contribution to our understanding of their world. Leicester left no “works” to stand beside those of his uncle Sir Philip Sidney, his father Robert, his aunt the Countess of Pembroke, his sister Lady Mary Wroth, or his son Algernon. But in his twenties-perhaps earlier-he began to buy books, assembling over forty years a collection that absorbed and then massively exceeded his father’s smaller one. The resulting library at Penshurst represented in its richness and diversity the intellectual life of a gifted magnate family during more than a century of political and intellectual crisis. Leicester’s library, or what remained of it, was sold at auction in 1743, but the catalogue his servant gilbert Spencer prepared c. 1652, and which various hands (including Leicester’s) added to up to 1665, still exists to give us entry to that world (CKS U1475 Z45/2). Leicester read intensively among his books, for from young manhood he recorded what he read in heavy, vellum-bound folios, six of which, plus some loose collections, are still among the family papers deposited in the Centre for Kentish Studies, Maidstone. if Leicester left us no works of poetry or fiction, he nevertheless produced an exceptional record of how a seventeenth-century english nobleman-courtier, soldier, ambassador, and eventually bitter recluse-interpreted the works of others and the world in which he read them.
