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Journal article
Sir Frederic Madden and the Battle of the Brass Rubbings
In 1844, brass-rubbings made by Lewis Pryce Madden in the west of England were acquired for the British Museum at the behest of his brother Sir Frederic Madden, Keeper of Manuscripts. No record of them survives in the current catalogues of either the British Museum or the British Library. The...Wright, C. J.
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The Ingenious Mr Dummer: Rationalizing the Royal Navy in Late Seventeenth-Century England
Edmund Dummer (1651-1713) joined the Royal Navy in 1668 and rose to become its Surveyor from 1692 to 1698. His period of service coincided with the 'Scientific Revolution' and efforts made by early Fellows of the Royal Society to apply scientific principles to the processes of navigation and ship design....Fox, Celina
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Leandro Fernández de Moratín's La Mogigata: The Significance of the Holland Manuscript in the Light of Comments from Elizabeth, Lady Holland's Spanish Journal (BL, Add. MS. 51931)
A comparative study of several manuscripts of Leandro Moratin's La mogigata, with particular reference to that presented by the author in the summer of 1804 to Elizabeth, Lady Holland. Drawing on revelations in the original manuscript of her journal (BL, Add. MS. 51931), which is much fuller than the edition...Kitts, Sally Ann
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A Wesleyan Musical Legacy
This article describes the contents of the manuscript music collection Add. 69859 assembled by Ms Rosalind Eleanor Esther Glenn (1834-1909) and presented to the British Library by the firm of Novello & Co. The principal composers represented are Jonathan Battishill (1738-1801) and Samuel Wesley (1766-1837). The album includes several autographs...Pont, Graham
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Robert Harley, Christmas and the House of Lords’ Protest on the Attainder of Sir John Fenwick, 23 December 1696: The Mechanism of a Procedure Partly Exposed*
On 23 December 1696 the House of Lords passed the bill of attainder for treason on the jacobite Sir John Fenwick. Many of the lords on the minority side of the division entered a written protest against the vote into the journals of the House. Because the vote had been...Jones, Clyve
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The Royal Image and Diplomacy: Henry VII’s Book of Astrology (British Library, Arundel MS. 66)
One of the most intriguing manuscripts associated with Henry VII of England, British Library, MS. Arundel 66 combines astronomical tables and works of so-called judicial astrology with a short collection of political prophecies. As an informal note added at the end of one of its texts suggests, the volume was...Frońska, Joanna
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The Charles G. Leland Collection of Romani Books and Manuscripts
The American writer Charles G. Leland (1824-1903) is primarily known for his comic verses. He was, however, also a pioneering linguist who published widely on the languages of the Roma (Gypsy) people of Britain, Ireland and continental Europe. Archival collections in the American north-east hold a range of Leland's literary...Edwards, Adrian S.
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Reading Between the Lines: Sir George Smart's Annotated Programmes for Manchester's 1836 Musical Festival
Among the papers of the distinguished conductor Sir George Thomas Smart, held by the British Library in the George Smart collection, are numerous concert programmes covered in his handwritten annotations. Reflecting his punctilious approach, these document in great detail aspects including timings, planned encores, and changes to programme and personnel....Johnson, Rachel
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The Only Early English Translation of Giovanni Botero's Della ragion di stato: Richard Etherington and Sloane MS. 1065
Giovanni Botero (1544–1617) was an extremely popular Italian author of the late 16th and early 17th centuries. His works were translated into a number of languages and saw many editions. One of his most famous works, the Della Ragion di Stato (1589), was particularly popular in Europe. This response to...Trace, Jamie
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Hugh James Rose, James Murray and The Foreign Quarterly Review
The identity of the author of the famous article, 'Foreign Views of the Catholic Question', which appeared in The Foreign Quarterly Review in April 1829, gave rise to much contemporary debate. It has traditionally been attributed to the high church cleric Hugh James Rose. However, neither its contents or style...Wright, C. J.
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A Mirror for Deaf Ears?A Medieval Mystery
Speculum medicine (The Mirror of Medicine) is the title of several works attested in manuscripts of the High Middle Ages. The present study deals with two of them that share some material, although their exact relationship is not clear at present. The shorter and certainly older text is a compilation,...Fischer, Klaus-Dietrich
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Beyond Photography: An Introduction to William Henry Fox Talbot’s Notebooks in the Talbot Collection at the British Library
William Henry Fox Talbot is now primarily remembered as the pioneer of photography. This was reinforced by the disposition of his papers, notably the separation of photographs and the few notebooks which document his photographic innovations from the rest of his archive mostly concerned with other scholarly activities beyond photography....Brusius, Mirjam
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From the 'Bibliographical Nightmare'to a Critical Bibliography. Tesori politici in the British Library, and Elsewherein Britain
This is the first critical bibliography of one of the most intricate bibliographical cases of early-modern Europe: the Tesori politici (1589-1618). For the first time, printers involved in the publication, dedicatees, and many authors of the various texts have been identified; the complete content of the various editions, reprints, and...Testa, Simone
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A Collection of German Occasional Verse, 1701-1743, Mostly from East Frisia
An introduction to some of the noteworthy features of a recently-acquired collection of occasional verse from the former German principality of East Frisia. The collection forms a fascinating resource for the study of this material, its writers and printers, and the society in which its subjects lived. A listing of...Reed, Susan
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Lord Nelson, HMS Victory and Sardinia - A Forgotten Episode?
This article describes the circumstances of Nelson's gift of a solid silver crucifix and two candlestick holders to the church of Santa Maria Maddalena, La Maddalena, Sardinia, in 1804.Reidy, Denis V.
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Political Verse in Late Georgian Britain: Poems Referring to William Pitt the Younger (1759-1806)
Political verse has been part of political discourse in England since before the invention of printing. It was probably past its peak by the early nineteenth century but still played a significant role in the dissemination of ideas, and provides important evidence regarding contemporary attitudes. This annotated check-list of poems...Johnson, Miles ; Harvey, A.D.
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Effigies ad Regem Angliae and the Representation of Kingship in Thirteenth-Century English Royal Culture
The Effigies ad Regem Angliae is an unusual manuscript depicting images of the Kings of England from Edward the Confessor to Edward I. A deluxe volume, with its brief Anglo-Norman texts and its narrative scenes, it is unlike any other illustrated English historical work produced in this period. The images...Collard, Judith
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A Franciscan Bible Illuminated in the Style of William de Brailes
The decoration in Harley MS 2813, a Bible hitherto unpublished except for an inaccurate three-line description in the Harley Catalogue, is here attributed to the famous 13th-century Oxford illuminator William de Brailes. In addition to biblical texts it contains a selection of masses which show that it was probably made...Kidd, Peter
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George Ellis of Ellis Caymanas: A Caribbean Link to Scott and the Bronte Sisters
A biography and genealogical account of George Ellis (1753-1815), Jamaican land-owner, Whig politician and man of letters, friend of Sir Walter Scott, Richard Heber and George Canning. It is also possible that via Scott he was the inspiration for Emily Bronte's choice of the nom de plume Ellis Bell.Gawthrop, Humphrey
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‘Swifte and Secrete Writing’ in Seventeenth-Century England, and Samuel Shelton’s Brachygraphy
In the autumn of 2006 the British acquired S. Shelton's Brachygraphy of 1672, the only copy now known to be extant. This article sets Shelton's invention in the general context of seventeenth-century shorthand and considers its importance in understanding contemporary attitudes to the new fashion of short-writing both then and...Henderson, Frances
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A Knight Hospitaller's Nostalgia for Italy during the 1790s
With the intention of making better known some manuscripts acquired by the British Library in 1987, this article introduces travel journals written by a French Knight Hospitaller of St John in the late eighteenth century and focuses on Goujon de Thuisy's nostalgia for Italy and its past during the 1790s.Allen, David Frank
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Confiscated Nazi Books in the British Library
The British Library possesses eleven or twelve thousand books seized from German libraries and institutions between June 1944, when Anglo-American forces invaded western Europe, and 1947. Nearly half the confiscated books came from a single library, that of the German Army's Kriegsschule (known in the British Library as the Hanover...Harvey, A.D.
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A Fragment of the Library of Theodore Haak (1605-1690)
In 1703, as part of his ongoing donations to the Bodleian Library in Oxford, Hans Sloane (1660-1753) sent from his London collection some 95 volumes exclusively in German or Dutch. This article demonstrates that these books were in fact not, like his other gifts, duplicates from Sloane's library, but form...Poole, William
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The Harleian Medical Manuscripts
The article offers an overview of the contents and chronological and geographical range of the medieval medical manuscripts in the Harleian collection which has recently been the object of a full cataloguing project sponsored by the Wellcome Trust. It also provides information regarding the provenance of the manuscripts highlighting the...Nuvoloni, Laura
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Sarah Jones and the Jacob-Jessey Church: The Relation of a Gentlewoman
Sarah Jones was a leading member of the semi-separatist Jacob-Jessey Church, in trouble with High Commission in 1632. She is here identified as Sarah Hayes, daughter of Thomas Hayes, an Alderman and Mayor of London (1614-15). She married Thomas Jones of Lambeth in 1606 and was the author of two...Wright, Stephen
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Thomas Smith, Humfrey Wanley, and the 'Little-Known Country' of the Cotton Library
Although there were many handwritten, often informal catalogues of Sir Robert Cotton's manuscripts and books during his lifetime and in the years afterwards, the desire for an official printed catalogue which could be circulated in the public realm did not really bear fruit until the late 1600s. And when two...Joy, Eileen A.
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Tupaia's Sketchbook
A group of watercolours in the British Library painted during the Pacific Ocean voyage of HM Bark Endeavour has long been attributed to the 'Artist of the Chief Mourner', sometimes identified as Joseph Banks. This article identifies the true artist as an indigenous Polynesian, Tupaia.Smith, Keith Vincent
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Emigration, Abolition and the Atlantic World in the Revolutionary Era
The upheavals of the French Revolution not only affected France and Europe, but heralded crucial consequences for the Caribbean. Revolution in Saint-Domingue (modern-day Haiti) led to the collapse of slavery and the creation of Haiti as an independent republic. 'Jacobin' slaves fleeing the island carried word of Revolution to British...Shaw, Matthew J.
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Using a Collection to Discover Reading Practices: The British Library Geneva Bibles and a History of their Early Modern Readers
This paper uses the British Library's entire collection of Geneva Bibles, dating from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, to investigate their early modern readership. A survey of both the paratextual material of the vast range of editions in the collection, and of the marks which men and women from this...Molekamp, Femke
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Caricatures from the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 and the Paris Commune
This article identifies and illustrates some little-known collections of caricatures on the subject of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 and the Paris Commune of 1871.Daniels, Morna
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The English reception of Hugh of Saint-Victor's Chronicle
Explicit evidence for the reception of Hugh of Saint-Victor's Chronicle, a twelfth-century Biblical, historical and geographical compendium, has previously been limited to mainland Europe, predominantly France, Germany and Italy. This list can now be extended to include the British Isles, based on the identification of a further seven manuscripts of...Harrison, Julian
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The Library of Henry Oldenburg
This article presents three hitherto unpublished listings of books in the library of Henry Oldenburg (c.1619-1677), the first Secretary of the Royal Society. The main list is a catalogue of his collection, first drawn up in 1670 and augmented in 1677 by his friend John Pell, who surveyed the library...Malcolm, Noel
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A New Parallel to the Prayer 'De tenebris' in the Book of Nunnaminster (British Library, Harl. MS.2965, f.28rv)
This article studies and edits the text of the prayer 'De tenebris' as preserved in the Book of Nunnaminster (BL, Harl. MS. 2965).Raw, Barbara
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The Potter Almanacs
On the occasion of the British Library's purchase of fourteen items from Colonel W. A. Potter's collection of rare English almanacs, this paper places these new acquisitions on the context of the genre of popular ephemeral publications of the 16th and 17th centuries.Capp, Bernard
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The Tale of Charles Perrault and Puss in Boots
The publication in 1697 of Charles Perrault's Histoires ou contes du temps passe, better known by their subtitle of Contes de ma mere L'Oye, was to prove a seminal event in the history of children's literature. Often assumed subsequently to be folk tales, these stories were, in fact, the product...Daniels, Morna
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Little Red Riding-Hood
The history of the tale of Little Red Riding-Hood from Charles Perrault's manuscript of 1695, via illustrated editions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to the present day.Daniels, Morna
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The British Museum Library and the development of the international exchange of official documents
In 1867 the United States Congress empowered the Smithsonian Institution to negotiate complete reciprocal exchanges of official publications with foreign governments. The impetus to such international exchanges was eventually embodied in two Brussels Conventions of 1886, although the United Kingdom was not a signatory. This article traces how, despite this,...Sternberg, Ilse
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George Chowdharay-Best: a bibliography
Until his death in April 2000, George Chowdharay-Best was a familiar figure in the reading rooms of the British Library. For many years he was on the staff of the Oxford English Dictionary, rising to be a Senior Assistant Editor. While most of his scholarly work was subsumed in this...Beedell, A. V. ; Harvey, A.D.
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England's Populist Pindars
During the Regency of 1811-1820 English readers were regularly and abundantly supplied with racy narrative poems that digested and satirized the news of the day, poems with such titles as The Royal Brood, The Cork Rump, A Peep at the Pavilion, The Disappointed Duke, and The German Sausages. Many of...Jackson, H. J.
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Witnesses to Medieval Medical Practice in the Harley Collection
The new Wellcome Trust funded catalogue of medieval medical manuscripts in the Harley collection brings to light some of the critical documents for understanding how medicine was actually practised in fifteenth-century England. Thomas Fayreford and John Crophill both kept notes of their cures in manuscripts they owned, while the anonymous...Jones, Peter Murray
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Henry VIII and British Library, Royal MS. 2 A. XVI: Marginalia in King Henry's Psalter
The book which Henry VIII most heavily annotated is the manuscript Psalter Royal MS 2 A XVI held in the British Library. This note records and comments on one previously overlooked feature - the omission of numerous verses from Psalm 77. It also records the findings of a more detailed...Christie-Miller, Ian
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'Handsomely bound in cloth': UK Book Cover Designs 1840-1880
A review of the many varied cover designs made for cloth trade bindings, with reference to signed cover designs, together with a review of online resources for the further study of these.King, Edmund M. B.
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The British Library, Europeana 1914-1918 and the Memorialization of the Great War
Europeana 1914-1918 digitised a wealth of material in various formats (stories, films and historical material, manuscripts and printed items), all of which are directly related to World War I. A feature of the collection is that it brings together the holdings of cultural institutions (among them the British Library) and...Jenkins, Jeremy
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Sloane's Portuguese Books
This article aims to systematize and briefly analyse the collection of books printed at Portuguese presses which once belonged to Sir Hans Sloane (1660-1753). Portuguese books (or Portuguese printing) are here defined as early books and other materials printed in Portugal (including overseas territories during the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth...Costa, Júlio
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Writing-Tables and Table-Books
On the occasion of the British Library's purchase from the collection of Colonel W. A. Potter of the only known copy of a set of writing tables (or pocket notebook) issued by John Hammond and published in 1618, this paper describes this new acquisition and and surveys references to writing...Woudhuysen, H.R.
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The First Manuals of English History: Two Late Thirteenth-Century Genealogical Rolls of the Kings of England in the Royal Collection
The reign of Edward I (1272-1307) witnessed the creation of numerous genealogical rolls of the kings of England from Egbert to the reigning king, initially in Latin (for instance BL, Add. MS. 30079), but then more often in Anglo-Norman. As Thomas Wright first intuited in 1872, these much innovative aide-mémoire...Laborderie, Olivier de
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Henry of Blois's Gift Lists in Add. MS. 29436: Why the Discrepancies?
Folios 46v-48r of Add. MS. 29436 contain two lists of the gifts donated by Henry of Blois, bishop of Winchester (1129 – 71) to his cathedral church. The shorter list post-dates Bishop Henry's death, the longer list probably belongs to the last decade of his life. This article examines the...Munns, John
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Philip Harris: Accomplished Librarian and Acclaimed Historian of the British Museum Library
An appreciation of the life and work of the author of A History of the British Museum Library, 1753-1973 (London, 1998).Phillips, Andrew
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The Reading Room in Literature
A survey of references to the Reading Rooms of the British Museum Library from its foundation in 1753 to the 1960s, with some personal memories.Harris, P. R.
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A New Witness to Henry of Avranches's Vita Sancti Oswaldi in London, British Library, Cotton MS. Faustina B. VII
Cotton MS. Faustina B. VII. contains a previously unexamined piece of parchment inscribed with several verses taken from Henry of Avranches’ Vita Sancti Oswaldi, composed c. 1230. The article highlights the value of this textual witness in relation to the transmission of the Vita and discusses the function of the...Ispir, Cristian N.