Primary Contributors:
Cultures of Knowledge, based on the metadata collated from P. L. Heyworth, ed., ‘Letters of Humfrey Wanley: Palaeographer, Anglo-Saxonist, Librarian, 1672–1726’ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989)
Humfrey Wanley, by Thomas Hill. 1711. Oil on canvas, 122 by 102 cm. (Society of Antiquaries, London)
Humfrey Wanley (1672–1726)
Humfrey Wanley was born in Coventry, the son of a vicar and a council clerk’s daughter. On leaving school he was apprenticed to a linen draper, but his inclination towards Anglo-Saxon and palaeography was already apparent and, by 1694, he was working on Edward Bernard’s Catalogi librorum manuscriptorum Angliae et Hiberniae (1697), to which he contributed four catalogues.
Wanley moved to Oxford, probably under the patronage of William Lloyd, bishop of Coventry and Lichfield, and matriculated at St Edmund Hall in 1695, before transferring (at the invitation of the master, Arthur Charlett) to University College. In November of the same year, he obtained the position of assistant at the Bodleian Library, an appointment that provided him with unparalleled access to manuscript collections. Although he never took a degree, during his time in Oxford he completed the bulk of his catalogue of Anglo-Saxon manuscripts, the Librorum veterum septentrionalium, qui in Angliae bibliothecis extant … (1705), which would prove his main published contribution to scholarship. His correspondence from this period, particularly those letters exchanged with Thomas Smith and George Hickes, reveals his outstanding contributions to the field of palaeography.
Oxford in 1700 was not always an institution in which it was easy to work, riddled as it was with factions, prejudice, and jealousies. Wanley left for London and found administrative employment with the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge and as an assistant to Hans Sloane, then secretary of the Royal Society. In 1705, he married his landlady, the widow Ann Berenclow, with whom he had three children; none of the children survived infancy. During this period, ever on the hunt for a role more suited to his talents, he was engaged on a regular basis by Robert Harley, the manuscript collector who was, at that point, speaker of the House of Commons. Eventually he found permanent employment in 1708 as library keeper to, first, Robert Harley and, subsequently, following the latter’s death in 1711, to his son, the book collector and patron Edward Harley. Wanley occupied this post for the rest of his life and under his oversight, of which his diaries provide a detailed record, the Harleian Library expanded to vast proportions. Wanley’s catalogue of the collection in his care stands as a monument to his significance as a librarian. He died in London on 6 July 1726. His second wife, also named Ann, survived him.
Partners and Additional Contributors
Humfrey Wanley’s correspondence was suggested for inclusion in the Early Modern Letters Online union catalogue by the late Professor Richard Sharpe (of Wadham College, University of Oxford) prior to his death in 2020. The ‘Cultures of Knowledge’ resarch project, for which Richard served as a long-standing member of the Steering Committee, would like to thank former EMLO Digital Fellow Alex Hitchman for his work to collate the metadata from P. L. Heyworth’s edition of Wanley’s correspondence, published in 1989 by Oxford University Press. This edition is available for consultiation (via a subscribing library or institution) on Oxford Scholarly Editions Online, and each letter record in EMLO directs users to the relevant text in the edition.
Key Bibliographic Source(s)
P. L. Heyworth, ed., ‘Letters of Humfrey Wanley: Palaeographer, Anglo-Saxonist, Librarian, 1672–1726’ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989).
Launch letters printed in P. L. Heyworth, ed., ‘Letters of Humfrey Wanley …’ (1989)
Launch al letters listed to, from, or mentioning Wanley