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Family Networks and Social Connections in the Survival of a Seventeenth-Century Library Collection

ABSTRACT This article discusses the collecting habits of Edward, second Viscount Conway (1564–1655), and the reasons that books from his collection in Ireland, which was allegedly destroyed during the 1641 rising, survive today at Armagh Public Library. A small number were preserved through the marriage of his daughter Dorothy to his estate manager, George Rawdon, and were passed down through the Anglo-Irish Rawdon family. This inheritance practice is analysed though the signature inscriptions in the books, ending in the late eighteenth century with Conway's great-great-grandson, John Rawdon, first Earl of Moira. These claims to ownership reveal a view of the books as inherited cultural objects that affirmed the significance of the family pedigree and entitlement to status which had been overturned in the late seventeenth century. The social networks of successive generations of the family supported intellectual interests, and it is suggested that the books' transfer to Archbishop Robinson's Library at Armagh may have occurred in the early nineteenth century through the operation of such a network.