Originally the property of the Reverend John Shaw, this library was bequeathed by him to the parish of Bengeworth, Evesham, Worcestershire in 1854. It consists mainly of theological and classical works from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries.
There are several notable Hebrew Bibles, including:
- Sefer Ketuvium [c1566], printed in Antwerp by the great Renaissance scholar Christopher Plantin
- Benjamin Kennicott's Vetus testamentum hebraicum (Oxford, 1776-80). This includes his Dissertatio Generalis where he published the results of his lifelong research into the textual variants of hundreds of Hebrew manuscripts worldwide.
Another specialism of the collection is Arabic language and culture, for example:
- published together with a copy of Grammatica Arabica (1636) by the Dutch Orientalist Thomas Erpenius is an edition of Lukman's Fabulae et selecta quaedam Arabum adagia
- a splendidly illustrated folio first edition of Travels: or observations relating to several parts of Barbary and the Levant (1738) by Thomas Shaw. He who travelled in North Africa, Egypt, the Sinai desert, Palestine and Syria in the 1720s. He aimed to provide a "natural history", especially of Algeria, where he was appointed chaplain to the factory of English merchants in 1720.