The manuscript library at Holkham Hall is among the most significant private collections in the world-yet no catalogue of its riches has ever been published. The volumes in this series will cover all the Holkham manuscripts and open up these hidden treasures to scrutiny for the first time. This first volume in the Catalogue is devoted to the heart of the collection at Holkham Hall: manuscripts made in Italy in the Middle Ages and the age of humanism. This first part of Volume 1 covers one hundred and twenty-seven Italian manuscripts: biblical and liturgical codices (notably a lavishly illuminated Book of Hours made for Lorenzo de' Medici), patristic texts, and the exceptional collection of Latin classical authors collected by Thomas Coke (1697-1759). New attributions to illuminators and significant discoveries in textual history and provenance will stimulate new research; every manuscript catalogued is generously illustrated, and a full bibliography and indices are also included. A substantial historical introduction, drawing on unpublished archives at Holkham, reconstructs in detail for the first time the formation and development of the Holkham manuscript library in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.