The Savile Library

Lunchtime lecture by Will Poole accompanying the exhibition Marks of Genius: Masterpieces from the Collections of the Bodleian Libraries. Henry Savile (1549-1622) founded at Oxford in 1619 the two Professorships that still bear his name, one in Astronomy, the other in Geometry. He equipped his professors with a library, which they in turn augmented down the centuries, and that library was transferred to the Bodleian itself in 1884. The Savilian books therefore comprise one of the most historically significant scientific libraries in the West.