Cotton's Library

Cotton’s Library reveals what can happen to a museum-quality collection before it reaches the safety of a museum (and sometimes even after).. Discover the story of an embryonic British national library assembled more than 400 years ago by Sir Robert Cotton. Boasting masterpieces of medieval illumination the sole manuscript sources of Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and two of four surviving 1215 copies of Magna Carta as well as many less-famed but still priceless historic records Cotton’s library was and is an irreplaceable treasure of the English-speaking world. Cotton and his successors nonetheless struggled for centuries to preserve his library for and sometimes from formal government custodianship.. Overcoming war repression greedy heirs intriguing rivals and disastrous fires they ultimately succeeded to our own great benefit. Cotton’s Library tells how they did it.