While the inspiration – and the first donations – for a university library at Oxford may be traced back to Duke Humfrey of Gloucester in the fifteenth century and the impetus for the restoration of the space above the Divinity School and the origins of the current collection, of course, to the philanthropic leadership of Sir Thomas Bodley in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the prominence of the Bodleian Library as an archival repository was only fully established by the number, size, and importance of donations that came to the library in the course of the seventeenth century. Among the first were those of the Earl of Essex, Thomas Roe, the Earl of Pembroke's Barocci manuscripts, Sir Kenelm Digby, and Archbishop William Laud; later came those of Robert Burton, John Selden, and Lord Fairfax. Along with these came other important, but less noteworthy, additions among which are the Hatton and e Musaeo collections, the subject of this handlist.

The Hatton manuscripts are associated with the Hatton family that traces its lineage to Sir Christopher Hatton (1540–1591), a courtier and confidant of Queen Elizabeth I, who served as Chancellor of England and Chancellor of Oxford University. While Sir Christopher was himself a patron of literature (Edmund Spenser gave him a copy of the Faerie Queene), the family interest in books and antiquarian matters rests primarily with Sir Christopher's cousin and eventual heir, the first Baron Hatton of Kirby (1605–1670).