You may get to much of what you want by asking what are the books
likely to be read by a person who was by the standards of her age
very well educated and indeed quite learned, had a serious cast of
mind, etc. She didn't leave as many direct traces of her learning as
did Montaigne, an almost exact contemporary. I don't know whether
there is somewhere a database that has catalogued the holdings of
'gentlemen's libraries' from the sixteenth century. If there were,
the overlap area between those collections would be a good place to
start.
Come to think of it, it would be an interesting project to gather
information from such libraries or from publications and develop some
estimates about what a person of a certain class was likely to read.
Then, if you have just a few clues about what the person actually did
read you can make a lot of plausible inferences what else she was
familiar with. That's the Amazon method (customers who have bought X
have also bought Y). It's insulting to the thought of human autonomy
but works better than it should.
On Jul 21, 2006, at 8:10 AM, William Oram wrote:
> Can anyone tell me where (if anywhere) I can find out what English
> authors Elizabeth I was familiar with? (To a lesser extent I'm also
> interested in what she knew of French and Italian writers.)
> Thanks,
> Bill Oram
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