Manuscripts This Atlas Already Cites

Two manuscripts held by the British Library appear throughout this atlas by their shelfmark long before this entry existed to name the institution holding them. Sloane MSS 3188 and 3189, catalogued together as the Mysteriorum Libri Quinque and the Liber Loagaeth, are the working diaries John Dee and Edward Kelley kept of their angelic conversations in the 1580s, the primary source behind the Enochian alphabet and the ninety one Enochian Governors and thirty Aethyrs recorded elsewhere in this atlas. The manuscripts survived Dee's own library dispersal and passed through several private hands before entering the Sloane collection that became one of the British Museum's founding donations in 1753, and from there into the Library's manuscript holdings at the 1973 split.

The Library's Cotton collection, assembled by the antiquarian Sir Robert Cotton in the early seventeenth century and given to the nation on his family's behalf in 1700, long before the Museum itself existed, separately holds Cotton MS Tiberius B.V, which preserves the tenth century Itinerary of Archbishop Sigeric, the earliest detailed written record of the pilgrim road later known as the Via Francigena. Both manuscripts illustrate the same pattern: a private antiquarian collection, assembled for reasons that had nothing to do with the specific texts this atlas cites them for, becoming, by a chain of donation and later institutional reorganization, the reason a scholar today can go and check the primary source rather than take a secondary account on faith.