
Bodleian Library
Historic research library with a medieval reading room and an oath readers still swear aloud.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to the Bodleian Library in Oxford starts with a sentence every new reader is asked to promise, and with the November day in sixteen hundred and two when the old room upstairs opened its doors again. It reaches back to Duke Humfrey's fifteenth-century library, the Tudor purge that emptied it, and the letter Thomas Bodley wrote in fifteen ninety-eight. Best heard standing among the tall windows of the courtyard.
This audio guide was created using AI.
Similar places
Radcliffe Camera
Circular domed library of the eighteenth century, now a working reading room of the Bodleian.
Weston Library
Rebuilt special-collections library with a public hall, exhibition galleries, cafe and glass book bridges.
All Souls College
Fifteenth-century college of fellows only, with a Gothic-fronted classical library and twin spires.
The Divinity School
Fifteenth-century vaulted hall for theology teaching, its ceiling studded with hundreds of carved bosses.
Merton College
Thirteenth-century college around a medieval quad and library, cradle of early mathematical physics.
Corpus Christi College
Tudor college with a humanist founding, a twenty-seven-dial pelican sundial and garden beehives.