@article {RN12232,
	title = {Inventory Booklists in Legal Context},
	journal = {Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society},
	volume = {XVII},
	year = {2020},
	pages = {75-82},
	type = {Journal Article},
	abstract = {Probate inventories are among the best evidence we have of sixteenth-century book ownership and patterns of reading, due to the individuated booklists - recording individual authors or titles - that inventories taken between the 1530s and 1580s contain. Outside this 50-year period, however, numbers of individuated booklists diminish; books are more likely to be recorded at inventory under catch-all headings such as "and all his books." Whereas previous accounts have explained this phenomenon in terms of personnel changes at the Registry offices, or overworked or lazy clerks, I reconstruct the taking of inventory as a legal tool with considerable financial incentives for all parties to an estate. Laziness is not a plausible explanation when money was on the line. I argue that the drop in individuated booklists is better explained by shifting economic conditions in the book market across the course of the sixteenth century.},
	author = {Lazarus, Micha}
}
