Peter Beal

Peter George Beal, FBA, FSA (born 1944) is a manuscript expert and indexer. Educated at the University of Leeds, Beal worked in publishing as an editor before entering the auction house Sotheby's in 1980, where he was director of the department of printed books and manuscripts from 1996 to 2005. Since 2002, he has been a senior research fellow at the Institute of English Studies in the University of London.

Beal was responsible for editing the Index of English Literary Manuscripts, 1450–1700 between 1966 and 1993. This was a project to produce a full catalogue of manuscripts of 128 key authors from the period; spanning 23,000 entries, it included authors with entries in The Concise Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature (1974). He supported an AHRC-funded project to digitise and update the index; this was launched in 2011. He was elected a fellow of the British Academy in 1993. He was the J. P. R. Lyell Reader in Bibliography at the University of Oxford from 1995 to 1996 and was elected a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London in 2007.

Since 1998, Beal has been an editor or co-editor of the British Library's series English Manuscript Studies, 1100–1700.

Publications

• Index of English Literary Manuscripts, 1450–1700, 4 vols (London: Mansell, 1980–1993)
• In Praise of Scribes: Manuscripts and their Makers in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998)
• (editor, with Grace Ioppolo) Elizabeth I and the Culture of Writing (London: British Library, 2007)
• A Dictionary of English Manuscript Terminology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008)