Lady Margaret Beaufort was a patron of early printers and herself a translator of religious texts. Her house at Collyweston became a hub for the literary and religious culture of her day. Printing was new technology, and brought literature and religious texts to a wider audience. It was an expensive business, for which the support of wealthy and influential patrons was key. Lady Margaret was a patroness of several early printers. The first work that she is known to have commissioned from William Caxton was  thirteenth-century French romance, Blanchardin and Eglantine, printed in 1489.

In 1494, the gloriously named Wynkyn de Worde, who would later publish both Lady Margaret’s funeral sermon and that of her son Henry VII, dedicated his edition of Walter Hilton’s devotional work the Scale of Perfection to her, one of at least ten devotional works known to have been dedicated to Lady Margaret. 

Lady Margaret Beaufort was both a highly educated woman and a religious one. The Speculum aureum animae peccatricis ('Mirror of Gold for the Sinful Soul') was written in Latin by Jacobus de Gruytrode (d. 1472) and later translated into French. Lady Margaret, keen to encourage wider circulation of devotional texts, translated it into English from the French version. Her translation was printed by Richard Pynson in 1506, and she appears to have bought fifty copies herself.

Thomas à Kempis (d. 1471) was a prolific writer of devotional works. He was probably the author of De imitatione Christi (‘On the imitation of Christ’), one of the most popular and influential of 15th-century devotional books. Lady Margaret commissioned William Atkinson, a Fellow of Jesus College, to translate the first three books of De imitatione from Latin into English while she herself translated the fourth book from a French version.  Shown below is a copy of their combined work, published by Richard Pynson in 1504, which marked a landmark in the history of the book in England. The royal arms of the period appear at the top of the left hand page and below them a portcullis surmounted by a crown, which was a badge of the Beaufort family used by Lady Margaret and her son Henry VII.

Another manuscript owned by, and in fact copied by a woman is a manuscript containing liturgical offices. This is bound together with a printed copy of a psalter following Sarum and York usage, published in 1516. The manuscript is contemporary with the printed work. It was, according to the ownership inscription on the final leaf, the property of Elizabeth Trotter, a nun at the Benedictine priory at Ickleton, in the diocese of Ely. The hand in which her ownership is recorded is the same as that of the manuscript text, and in annotations in the printed psalter, including the record of the deaths of other members of her family which she noted in the calendar. There is very little evidence for nuns as scribes in medieval Europe, making this volume containing otherwise ordinary text a fascinating piece of history.

This page of Elizabeth Trotter's book demonstrates her skill as a scribe. 

Elizabeth Trotter's ownership inscription reads:

Thys bowke belonggs unto Dame elizabeth Trotter, prophessyd noyne in the abbay of Ikelyngton in the dyocess of Ely.

Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, gave a number of her works to the College Library. Her husband, William Cavendish was a member of St John’s. The range of her writing is wide, encompassing literary and scientific fields. She wrote both poetry and drama, and a biography of her husband which was highly regarded. She also produced works of natural philosophy, attending meetings of the relatively newly formed Philosophical Society, and taking a keen interest in the scientific experiments demonstrated there. Aside from her biography of William Cavendish her work was subject to criticism and even ridicule. In one of her prefaces she acknowledges that those who publish expose themselves to public censure in a 'malicious and envious age'. She declares that she writes solely for her own pleasure, writing being her 'chiefest delight and greatest pastime'. 

Her Observations upon experimental philosophy includes the work The description of a new blazing world, an extraordinary work of imagination which can be regarded as a forerunner of science fiction and the utopian novel. 

For a twenty-first-century readership, Margaret Cavendish's works present some challenges, due to her ambivalence over whether women were intellectually equal or inferior to men. 

While the College did purchase books for the use of its members, the Library at St John’s grew more by donation than purchase, and was more a collection of many gentlemen’s libraries than a strictly academic facility. Fellows and alumni who donated and bequeathed books, sometimes their entire collections, had wider interests, and their personal libraries reflected these. While literature did not form a large part of the collections during the long period before English literature became part of the Cambridge syllabus, donated collections did include some leisure reading. Women authors are represented in literary works: poetry, drama, and early novels. 

Another popular female playwright in the Restoration period was Aphra Behn, the first woman to earn a living from her writing. She came under criticism for some of her writing for bawdiness, and protested that such censure would not have been applied had she been male. Several of her plays, and others' adaptations of them made it into the Library's collections, from various Fellows. It is unsurprising that her loyal poems in support of the Stuart monarchy found favour with the members of a traditionally royalist College. 

The Library only acquired its copy of Mary Davys’s novel The Reform’d Coquet in the twenty-first century, but it is likely to have been known to Johnian readers on its publication in 1724. Indeed, Mrs Davys herself would have been a familiar local figure. The success of her play, The Northern Heiress, or the Humours of York, which was performed in both London and York and published in 1716, had enabled her to set herself up as a coffee-house keeper in St Sepulchre’s (i.e. the Round Church) parish in Cambridge. Situated just a stone’s throw from St John’s, the intellectual circle who patronised her premises to mull over the news and discuss the literature of the day would have included many Johnians.

It is thanks to John Couch Adams that we have a copy of one of the most influential works of Abolitionist literature. Adams studied mathematics at St John's, and found time whilst still an undergraduate to work out that something was causing Uranus to move in strange ways (after graduation his calculations proved the existence of the previously unknown planet Neptune) and to teach his bedmaker to read. Adams was a champion of women's education, being one of a select few lecturers who permitted women to attend his classes. Amongst the books he left to the College was his copy of Uncle Tom's Cabin, probably bought new in 1852 in this cheap popular edition. 

Originally written as a newspaper serial, it was published in book form in the USA in 1852. Numerous English editions appeared the same year, from which the author received no profits, and it is estimated that around 1.5 million copies were sold in the UK. Although its portrayal of enslaved Africans is now regarded as somewhat problematic, containing stereotypes which would not be acceptable today, at the time it was highly influential, drawing from and building upon the narratives of those who had suffered enslavement.