ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a brief history of this teaching library and some of its functions in roughly its first century, especially as compared with the institution which surrounded but neither formally comprehended nor controlled it, the Bodleian Library itself. It encounters a published list of the Savilian instruments in John Pointer’s 1749 visitors’s guide to the university, but it is just a transcript of Caswell’s list. The key to the foundation of Savile’s library for his readers is Savile’s friend Thomas Bodley. Bodley and Savile were both great men of Merton College, Bodley slightly senior to Savile, and within the college, there had initially been some political tensions between the two. The evidence is primarily from Savile’s stipulations in his statutes concerning the geometer’s responsibility for ‘both speculative and practical’ mathematics, the latter including land surveying and mechanics, and the astronomer’s corresponding duties in optics, gnomonics, geography, and navigation.
