The Bodleian Library: More Than a Place
The living library at the heart of A Discovery of Witches
Few places in the All Souls trilogy feel as alive as the Bodleian Library.
For many readers, including me, it is the setting where the story truly begins.
It’s where Diana Bishop sits down to research alchemy.
It’s where she calls the mysterious manuscript Ashmole 782 from the stacks.
And it’s where the quiet rhythms of scholarship suddenly collide with the hidden world of witches, vampires, and daemons.
But the Bodleian in Deborah Harkness’s story is more than a backdrop.
It feels almost like a character — exhaling when Diana opens the Ashmole manuscript
It’s a place that holds centuries of history, connection, and perhaps even a little magic within its stacks.
A Library Older Than the Story
The real Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford is one of the oldest libraries in Europe.
Its origins stretch back to the early seventeenth century, when the scholar and diplomat Sir Thomas Bodley rebuilt Oxford’s university library and opened it to scholars in 1602.
From the beginning, the Bodleian was designed to preserve knowledge.
Unlike many earlier libraries, its books were not meant to circulate. Scholars came to the books rather than taking them away. Over time, the library developed one of the most remarkable collections of manuscripts and printed works in the world.
Today, the Bodleian holds millions of items, including medieval manuscripts, early scientific texts, maps, and rare books.
It’s the kind of place where centuries of scholarship quietly accumulate.
Which makes it a perfect setting for the beginning of a story about a hidden manuscript.
Duke Humfrey’s Reading Room
One of the most recognizable spaces in the Bodleian is Duke Humfrey’s Reading Room, where Diana first encounters Ashmole 782.
The room feels almost unchanged from earlier centuries.
Long wooden desks stretch across the hall beneath a high timbered ceiling. Tall bookcases line the walls. Portraits of historical figures watch silently from above the shelves.
Readers work quietly under the gaze of centuries of scholars who came before them.
The atmosphere is part study, part cathedral.
It’s easy to imagine how a historian might lose track of time there while reading old manuscripts.
And it’s equally easy to imagine how a book like Ashmole 782 might appear suddenly among the ordinary texts of academic research.
A Library That Notices Everything
One of the subtle details in A Discovery of Witches is the way the Bodleian seems to react when Ashmole 782 appears.
The moment Diana calls the manuscript from the stacks, creatures throughout Oxford become aware of it.
The library itself becomes a gathering point.
Witches arrive to investigate.
Vampires begin watching the reading room.
Daemons appear among the scholars.
The Bodleian suddenly becomes the center of a hidden conflict.
This moment captures something important about the library itself.
For centuries, scholars have believed that libraries are places where knowledge waits patiently to be discovered.
But stories like this suggest something slightly different.
That libraries also hold connections.
Ideas linked across time.
Readers connected through centuries of study.
Manuscripts waiting for the moment when the right person opens them.
The Scholar’s Ritual
Part of the magic of the Bodleian lies in its rituals.
To read a manuscript there, scholars must first request it using a call slip. The request disappears into the vast system of stacks behind the reading rooms.
After some time, a librarian appears with a box containing the manuscript.
The reader opens it carefully.
For the first time in years—or sometimes centuries—the manuscript’s pages are turned again.
Deborah Harkness understands this ritual intimately. As a historian of early modern Europe, she spent years working in libraries like the Bodleian.
Which is why the scenes in A Discovery of Witches feel so authentic.
The quiet desks.
The careful handling of manuscripts.
The sense that knowledge lives not only in the books themselves but in the community of readers who study them.
The Bodleian Today
The Bodleian Library is still very much alive.
Scholars from around the world continue to work there, studying manuscripts and rare books that connect modern research with centuries of intellectual history.
Many of its collections can now be explored online.
Bodleian Library Digital Collections
Visitors to Oxford can also tour several of the Bodleian’s historic spaces, including Duke Humfrey’s Reading Room and the Divinity School.
Walking through these rooms, it is easy to see why Harkness chose this library as the starting point of her story.
Few places feel so filled with the presence of the past.
In the world of A Discovery of Witches, the Bodleian is more than a setting.
It is a place where centuries of knowledge converge.
A place where scholars gather.
Where manuscripts wait quietly in the stacks.
And where the past sometimes reveals itself at exactly the right moment.
Which is why the story begins there.
Because if a mysterious manuscript were ever to reappear in the modern world, the Bodleian Library might be exactly where you would expect it to happen.
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Coming Friday
Next we’ll return to the creature world with another question from Between the Lines:
Gallowglass and Philippe’s impossible command.
Was Gallowglass’s love for Diana truly his own — or was it shaped by centuries of loyalty to Philippe de Clermont?