Analysing an eighteenth-century Irish booklist, Part 2: the present state of somewhere else

Abstract

This article is the second of a pair which consider an early eighteenth-century booklist in the library of the National Trust's Castle Ward. Part 1 identified the titles and when these were present in the Castle Ward library, today and previously. It provided an assessment of the titles in relation to patterns of book ownership in English and Irish seventeenth-century and early eighteenth-century contexts. Building upon Part 1's refinement of the information drawn from the titles, library catalogues, surviving books, and known details of individual's reading interests, Part 2 uses further provenance details alongside biographical, archaeological, and architectural information to attribute the booklist to a specific time, place, and family unit. Particular emphasis is placed upon discovering the material environment in which this book collection was housed.