An authoritative account of the history of Cambridge University Library before the twentieth century is given by J. C. T. Oates (from its foundation up until the Copyright Act of Queen Anne in 1710) and David McKitterick (the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries); the brief summary of the library's development which is given below is greatly indebted to their work. More recently Peter D. Clarke has edited the surviving early catalogues and booklists of the university library for the Cambridge volume in the Corpus of British Medieval Library Catalogues series. An overview of the collections is given in the volume of essays edited by Peter Fox, Cambridge University Library: The Great Collections, where information about manuscripts may be found particularly in the contributions by George Henderson and Jayne Ringrose. Descriptions of some of the university library's illuminated manuscripts may also be found in the catalogue produced to accompany the exhibition The Cambridge Illuminations held jointly at the Fitzwilliam Museum and the University Library in 2005.4 Other specialized guides and catalogues are discussed at relevant points below.

History of the Cambridge University Library Collection

Various inventories and wills from the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries testify to the university's possession of a small collection of books. The earliest such document, an indenture of 1363, records that the contents of the university's common chest comprised money, vestments, royal charters, and papal bulls, and also five books, four on canon law and one on theology. These were probably kept in the treasury, in the tower of Great St Mary's church, until physical accommodation for a library was developed in the fifteenth century on the site now known as the Old Schools.

The earliest surviving library catalogue, Registrum librorum per uarios benefactores comuni librarie universitatis cantebrigiensis collatorum, dates from 1424–40. It lists 122 books under eleven sub-headings: religion and theology; scholastic theology; moral philosophy; natural philosophy; medicine; logic; sophistry; grammar; canon law; poetry; and chronicles, but the last two categories contain no entries, suggesting that the university possessed no such works at this time. Three of these books survive, including one, Ii.3.21, which contains Middle English prose writing: this is a Latin copy of Boethius with Chaucer's translation, described by Henry Bradshaw as ‘the gem of our original library’, which was given by John Croucher (d. 1453), a fellow of Gonville Hall in 1407–8 and dean of Chichester 1426–47.