About the Collection

The Lambeth Palace Library collections (excluding Sion College collections) contain some 120,000 books, 40,000 pamphlets, and over 100 current periodicals relating in the main, but not exclusively, to the history of the Church of England and its relations with other Churches both in Great Britain and overseas. 

The core of the collection of early printed books was bequeathed by the Library's founder, Archbishop Bancroft, in 1610 and includes books belonging to some of his predecessors, namely Cranmer, Grindal and Whitgift. 

The collections have been enlarged by gifts from successive archbishops, especially Abbot, Sheldon, Tenison, Secker, and Davidson, by the acquisition of the libraries of the Dutch Church and Church House, and by a judicious policy of purchase by recent librarians.  Many of the books and pamphlets relate to or amplify the archives and manuscripts.

Catalogues

The catalogue of printed books held by the Library is complete and available online, and can be accessed through the ‘Search Collections' section of the website.

Information about the collections can also be found online via the COPAC [1] academic and national library catalogue, the English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC) [2] and the Incunabula Short Title Catalogue (ISTC) [3] catalogue.

Offsite storage of periodicals

Some closed sequences of Lambeth Palace Library's periodicals are stored at the Church of England Record Centre.  They will be available for use in the Record Centre's Reading Room, not at Lambeth Palace Library. 

If you wish to use periodicals stored at the Record Centre, please contact the Record Centre to request them at least five working days in advance, as the Reading Room is open by appointment only.

Periodicals stored at the Record Centre are shown in the online printed books catalogue with a classmark of the form "CERC Box", and a list of the periodicals affected is available from Reading Room staff.

New Acquisitions

Lambeth Palace Library's function as a library of printed books, serving not only the Archbishop but also the Church and nation, dates from its foundation in 1610.  It now serves as the principal library for the history of the Church of England, and continues to collect current scholarship in the following categories:

(a) Material relating to the history and administration of the Church of England (pre- and post-Reformation), or providing necessary background sources for research in this field.

(b) Material supporting, or stemming from, the study of the historic collection of archives, manuscripts and early printed books in the care of the Library.

Recently acquired items include:

The origins of feasts, fasts and seasons in early Christianity. Paul F. Bradshaw and Maxwell E. Johnson (Alcuin Club Collections 86, 2011)

The devil in disguise: deception, delusion and fanaticism in the Early English enlightenment. Mark Knights (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011)

Mary I. England's Catholic Queen. John Edwards (London: Yale University Press, 2011)

Godly reading: print, manuscript and puritanism in England, 1580 - 1720. Andrew Chambers (Cambridge: Cambridge Univerity Press, 2011)

Last updated December 2011.