By the late middle ages St Albans Abbey had one of the largest and most significant book collections of any Benedictine house in England. The important and beautiful manuscripts produced in the scriptorium were all dispersed when the monastery was dissolved in 1539, never to be reunited. Fortunately, many have found their way into the collections of libraries and archives.
Some have now been digitised and are freely available to view on their websites, notably those of the British Library, the Parker Library at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge and the Bodleian Library, Oxford. St Albans Cathedral’s Archives team has compiled a matrix of these digitised manuscripts which can be seen at: https://bit.ly/3AVPbIk.
Trinity College, Dublin has recently digitised a very important manuscript from St Albans by our famous monk and chronicler, Matthew Paris. The Book of St Albans incudes The Life of St Alban, with its wonderful illustrations. You can read more at: https://bit.ly/3IJqGzX.
