ABSTRACT
The library of Bury St Edmunds abbey, like most other monastic libraries in England, was dispersed in the course of the 16th century. In seeking to recover information about English monastic libraries one depend on three classes of evidence: library catalogues where they have survived; other documentary evidence, such as lists of books acquired or loaned at a particular time; and those books that survive and can still be identified as having come from a particular library. Most of the surviving books known to have belonged to Bury are identified on the basis of Henry of Kirkstead's mark, and his activity is a major horizon in the understanding the library at Bury. Horizons have the effect of putting an element of stratigraphy into the task of reconstructing medieval libraries. Henry assigned to each book a letter appropriate to the main item of the contents, using the initial letter of an author’s name or the initial letter of a subject class.
