Bodleian Library

The Bodleian Library is the main research library of the University of Oxford, its core building dating to the early seventeenth century when Sir Thomas Bodley refounded and expanded a smaller medieval university library, giving the institution and its historic quadrangle building his name. Its oldest surviving reading room, Duke Humfrey's Library, sits above the fifteenth-century Divinity School, whose vaulted stone ceiling is elaborately carved with intricate lierne vaulting and hundreds of decorative bosses, considered one of the finest examples of English Gothic stonework. The library's Tower of the Five Orders, forming one side of the Old Schools Quadrangle, displays all five classical architectural orders stacked in sequence up its facade as a deliberate architectural demonstration piece. The complex has expanded over the centuries into a network of connected historic buildings across central Oxford while continuing to function as a working library.