Introduction - Matthew Dimmock, Andrew Hadfield and Margaret Healy 1. 'The Lordship of the Eye': Country houses as the setting for intellectual enquiry - Maurice Howard Part I: Cultural reconstructions of the English country house 2. William Warham's Otford Palace: An Archbishop's motivations for building (c.1514-26) - Alden Gregory 3. Rediscovering a lost Tudor mansion through archives and manuscripts: The Rycote Project at the Bodleian Library - Matthew Neely 4. 'To Knole, and then 'To Penshurst': The network of patronage between two country houses in the early seventeenth century - Edward Town Part II. Reconstructing the culture of the English country house 5. Decorating the Godly Gallery: Piety and politics in plasterwork at Lanhydrock House, Cornwall - Tara Hamling 6.

Sir Thomas Smith's stillhouse at Hill Hall: printed books, antiquity and innovative practice - Richard Simpson 7. A most studious searcher after truth: the 9th Earl of Northumberland and Scientia - Alison McCann 8. Anne Finch and the fallen country house - Nicolle Jordan 9. Elite pageantry as popular news: Elvetham House, John Wolfe, and country-house entertainment in print - Elizabeth Zeman Kolkovich Part III: The country house library and its intellectual significance 10. Country houses and the beginnings of bibliomania - James Raven 11. Looking back from 1700: problems in locating the country house library - Susie West 12. My Laydes Bookes att Noward.: Putting readers back into the english country house - Hannah DeGroff Part IV.

Case study: Wilton House 13. Wilton House and seventeenth-century country house literature - Anne Myers 14. Performing Arcadia: Wilton House, theatre, and power - Marta Straznicky 15. Wilton House and the art of floating meadows - Louise Noble Afterword - Andy Loukes, Nicholas Pickwoad and Mark Purcell Index.