Thomas Cranmer's library is one of the best-known collections of books and manuscripts to have survived in some form from the early Tudor period. Few private collections of Cranmer's day contained more than 200 books and manuscripts. In 1530, the university libraries at Cambridge and Oxford contained 500 to 600 volumes, but as a result of censorious royal acts and proclamations during the reigns of King Henry VIII, King Edward VI, and Queen Mary I, the collections of these libraries dwindled to fewer than 175 volumes by 1557. Cranmer's collection, according to David G. Selwyn in The Library of Thomas Cranmer (1996), contained more than 700 printed books. Only some of the monastic libraries were larger.

A scholar by nature and an important political figure by chance, Cranmer obtained books not for the sake of collecting them but because he was interested in their contents. He was a passionate annotator and seldom read without a pen...