Matilda Houston-Brown

Thesis Title: Lost and Found: Cathedral Libraries and Ecclesiastical Textual Movement in the English Civil Wars

Supervisor: Professor Adam Smyth

Research Interests: Institutional libraries, book loss and destruction, materiality, iconoclasm, book history.

My thesis examines responses to textual loss during, and in the wake of, the Civil Wars. This research particularly focuses on cathedral libraries and ecclesiastical texts, looking to understand how they were destroyed, diminished and rebuilt, as well as considering the subsequent myth-making around supposed biblioclasm.

Conference Papers:

“Our very charter sold to make a Taylor’s Measures”: Perspectives of Loss and Dynamics of Restoration in the Rebuilding of Carlisle Cathedral Library, Early Modern Transnational Book Conference, University of Manchester, 29th May 2024

Rebuilding Carlisle Cathedral Library, Regional Heritage Centre Study Day, Carlisle Cathedral & University of Lancaster, 1st June 2024