"The manuscript library at Holkham is among the most significant private collections in the world, yet no catalogue of its riches has ever been published. The library has two historic cores: the books of the immensely influential lawyer and parliamentarian Sir Edward Coke (1552-1634) and those of his eighteenth-century successor, Thomas Coke, first Earl of Leicester (1697-1759), the builder of Holkham Hall. Sir Edward's books include works on law, heraldry, and religion, as well as an important group of literary and historical works in Middle English; his manuscripts are mainly of British origin. In contrast, Thomas Coke's library was acquired through a series of large-scale purchases on his Grand Tour of Europe (1712-18) and includes examples of the whole range of European book production, from a twelfth-century Atlantic Bible to unpublished seventeenth-century letters, drama, and poetry. The classicism that Coke expressed most obviously in the architecture of Holkham Hall also underpinned his manuscript collecting, and his collection of Latin poets and historians, many of them splendidly illuminated, is unrivalled."--Publisher's description.
