University and College Libraries of Cambridge

The medieval university at Cambridge was a centre for the circulation of books. In complicated networks of acquisition and exchange, books were bought, borrowed, copied, and bequeathed. Colleges came to own collections of books for the use of their fellows, and in the late middle ages many colleges built library-rooms to house their books. Some colleges, notably Peterhouse, Gonville and Caius, and Pembroke, still retain large parts of their medieval collections.