Catalogs of the Manuscript Books of England and Ireland Collected into One Volume

I pass over several anonymous treatises which I have assigned to their authors (as they are believed to be); I ask the reader to hold me excused in this matter if they should occasionally find something in the Indexes assigned to a name that does not appear in the Catalog. So, for example, in the first Index, one finds Servius Maurus Servius Honoratus, a 4th-century grammarian famous for his Virgil commentaries at number 1253, where the Catalog simply lists Commentary on Virgil’s Aeneid, with the name of Servius omitted. Likewise, in the same Index, St. Hermas appears at number 1087, where the name Hermas does not appear in the Catalog, but rather that book titled Visions, or The Shepherd of St. Hermas. Again, in the same Index, one finds Pancratius the Monk at number 3373; yet in the Catalog, only The Music of Manuel Lampadarius is listed; but when I personally inspected the book, I discovered two other authors, Pancratius and John of Damascus. Likewise, in the same Index, Ivan Vasilyevich original: "J. Basilides"; referring to Ivan IV, known as Ivan the Terrible is listed at numbers 3324 and 3325, where the Catalog only lists Muscovite Books original: "Libri Moscovitici". When I recently showed these manuscript books (along with many others) to the learned man Mr. Wilhelm Heinrich Ludolf A scholar famous for writing the first Russian grammar, he pointed out to me that they contained the laws of Ivan Vasilyevich, Emperor of Russia. I repeat these few examples not so much to show how much labor was required in arranging the Indexes, but so that the reader does not accuse me of error if they do not immediately find the name suggested by the Index in the work itself, until they have inspected the work itself and searched to see if the indicated author wrote such a piece.

Regarding the method I used in the Indexes: I refer the reader not so much to the written page number as to the number of the manuscript Codex A "Codex" is a manuscript book, as opposed to a scroll; this I thought would be more convenient for the reader. Yet I do not do this repeatedly, even if several treatises by the same author are contained in the same manuscript volume, as the reader can easily discover this by inspecting all the titles of that manuscript. However, where a manuscript number is lacking (which occurs up to page 258), I refer to the page and its first or second column, designated by the letters a and b.

I mark the names of authors with an asterisk (*) to distinguish them from anonymous writers. I usually list the author’s name (whether it be a first name or a surname) by which they are most widely known and usually called. Where an author's name is missing, such an anonymous treatise is indicated either by the subject matter treated, or by the place it concerns, or some similar characteristic. Historical or topographical works are indicated by the name of the place they concern. Those which concern the Biblical text follow the name Bibles in the Index, in the same order that the books follow continuously in the Vulgate The late-4th-century Latin translation of the Bible; the alphabetical order is set aside for these.

It should further be noted that those 39 books mentioned on page 329 are not included in the Index, because a summary of all of them is contained in Mr. Ashmole’s History of the Garter original: "Historia Periscelidis"; refers to Elias Ashmole's 1672 work on the Order of the Garter. Nor have I included here the printed books of the Savilian Library on page 303, since those are arranged in alphabetical order in the Catalog. Nor several other books of the second volume which are not manuscripts. Certain works of Dodsworth, Dugdale, Langbaine, Leland, etc. (which contain a great abundance of genealogies, charters, epitaphs, descriptions, etc.), I have indicated every one of them individually in the Index. Of the two treatises by Leland assigned to number 5112, the latter is held at number 5113. There are also several manuscript volumes found in the libraries of certain Colleges which had not been included in the Catalog (either because they were not noticed before, or because they were given as gifts later), and therefore they are moved to the Appendix; reference is made to these with the word App. Likewise, the second volume of the catalogs was finished at page 388, and the Index pertaining to it was already printed, when finally some books arrived too late to be mentioned in their proper place in the Index, which are found there at the end.

Finally, I thought it useful to mention that, after the death of the Reverend Doctor Edward Bernard A polymath and Savilian Professor of Astronomy at Oxford, the University acquired for itself (at a price of more or less 400 English pounds) a great many volumes, either manuscripts, or those compared with manuscripts, or illustrated with the annotations of learned men, or esteemed for some other reason; these (together with others, either given as gifts or bought for a price) are in the