The Libraries of King Henry VIII: an Update of the Westminster Inventory of 1542

This article provides an update to the author’s The Libraries of King Henry VIII published in the Corpus of British Medieval Library Catalogues (2000). The most substantial list in that volume (H2) consisted of an inventory in two alphabetical sequences of 910 books contained in the Upper Library at Westminster Palace in 1542. Each book had an number corresponding to its place in the inventory entered in it. Over the next five or six years further books were added, especially after Henry VIII’s death, and these too were arranged alphabetically with matching numbers inserted in the books themselves. Since 2000 fifteen more Westminster books have been found in a variety of locations, some unexpected. An annotated list of these is provided as well as an introduction explaining the significance of the discoveries and the means by which they found their way to their present locations.