Philippe Garnier
Philippe Garnier et al., 'Dialogues en quatre langues' (1656)

Senate House Library and the libraries of the School of Advanced Study's research institutes contain a wealth of material in the Romance languages. Their holdings range from reference works and thematic research collections to digital resources, archives and special collections material. This page offers a brief overview of the Romance language holdings in each of these libraries, as well as highlighting some of the broad areas of strength across them. 

Locating Material

Material in Senate House Library (SHL) and the libraries of the School of Advanced Study (SAS) can be located in a number of ways. The most straightforward of these is to perform a search using the electronic catalogue. It is possible to search by location or type of material. Some search options, such as an Advanced Keyword Search, allow results to be filtered by language. If you are searching for material in SHL you can also perform an Encore search, which will include results for scholarly articles and digital collections.

The electronic catalogue contains almost all the material in the SAS institute libraries, as well as the majority of SHL’s Romance language holdings. Some items acquired prior to 1980, however, are only recorded on the older card catalogue. This has recently been digitized and can be searched using a new application (currently in beta).

Printed special collections material can be searched for directly on the electronic catalogue. It is possible to use a limited search to return only special collections items. There is a separate catalogue for archives and manuscripts, which are ordered by emailing the special collections reading room.

General Areas of Strength

In addition to the resources in the Senate House Library and the Libraries of the Institutes of the School of Advanced Study, there are a number of areas of strength that unite the Romance language holdings in individual libraries and their collections. The following descriptions are not exhaustive, but give an indication of some of these themes and key groups of material.