Andrew Holes and John Burgh: Two Wykehamists, One Manuscript Collection

The fifteenth-century Cheshire-born ecclesiastic and diplomat, Andrew Holes, is known as a 'harbinger of the Renaissance' in England. This is because, since the nineteenth-century re-discovery of Vespasiano da Bisticci's _Vite_, he has been known as a book collector, though it was only at the start of the 1990s that a full reconstruction of his library was published. This article reviews Holes's biography, adds to the number of manuscripts that can be identified as from his collection and resolves an unnoticed problem in earlier discussions: two styles of annotations have been attributed to him, but one can now be shown not to be his. Instead, we can introduce a newly identified scribe and secretary to Holes, John Burgh, who, like his employer, was educated at Winchester College and then New College, Oxford. This is has implications for how we understand the use of an individual's library: it was not collected for the owner alone but for the coterie around him, as well as with a sense of an audience beyond his own death.