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Downside houses the largest
library in the West of England after that at Longleat.
It is a living collection, growing at the rate of
about 2000 books a year. With more than 150,000 books,
it contains over 50 mediaeval manuscripts, 183 incunables
(books published before 1500) and over 200 bound
journals.
The strength of the collection
lies on those areas characteristic of the principal
fields of monastic theology, Scripture, Patristics,
Liturgy and Church History. Dogmatics and Moral theology
are less well represented apart from major writers.
As a specialist library it has an unrivalled collection
of Recusant literature, with many Seventeenth Century
manuscript works of devotion and polemic, and lecture
notes of university theological courses. The library
also houses a number of collections bequeathed to
us, including those of Edmund Bishop, close friend
of Aidan Gasquet and a specialist in antiquarian
liturgy, Archbishop David Mathew, historian of the
Stuart period, David Rogers, who assembled one of
the finest collections of early editions of the works
of St Francis de Sales, and Joseph Gillow, the bibliographer
of Recusancy especially in Lancashire. Teignmouth
Abbey, the successor monastery to the community of
nuns established in the Sixteenth Century in Dunkirk,
presented us with the greater part of their library,
and Sir Francis Cruise with his enormous collection
of copies of The Imitation of Christ. More unusual
are the Gatty collection on sundials, the Hartung
collection of ornithology, and sizeable collections
of Bibliography, Byzantine studies, and Somerset
local history.
The Library is available
to visitors, who are welcome to stay in the Guest
House, and is rarely without researchers who come
from all parts of the world.
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