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Journal article
The Curzon Collection
Through the generosity of Dr Peter Curzon and Mr Fritz Curzon the British Library has recently acquired an extensive collection of annotated scores, notebooks, and other papers of the late Sir Clifford Curzon. The working scores amount to some 300 items. Nearly all are printed editions, but there are a...Neighbour, O. W.
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'The grammar of research': some implications of machine-readable bibliography
Research into the history of man's culture and his institutions has always been conducted with procedures which have a basic grammar. Upon that basic grammar scholarship has developed, since Poliziano, ever more complex routines as the raw materials for research have proliferated. The provision of these raw materials has been,...Alston, R. C.
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Journal article
Recent acquisitions: Department of Printed Books: Selected acquisitions April 1983-March 1984: English books 1501-1800
Recent acquisitions: Department of Printed Books: selected acquisitions April 1983-March 1984: English books 1501-1800.Archibald, Jean ; Jannetta, M. J.
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Journal article
Matthew Prior's last manuscript: 'Predestination'
Until now the only known manuscript of Matthew Prior's unfinished poem, 'Predestination', has been the copy written in the fine italic hand of his secretary, Adrian Drift, which is labelled 'Brouillon of a Poem Began at Wimpole in August 1721. Transcribed From the Authors Papers since his Death.' It was...Wright, H. Bunker ; Croft, P. J.
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Journal article
A Chaucer from Chief Justice Coke's collection
The sixteenth-century books acquired by the British Museum Library from Holkham Hall included Chaucer's Workes, printed by John Reynes in 1542 (SFC 5070). This volume belonged to Chief Justice Sir Edward Coke and is no. 861 in his Library Catalogue. L. H. Horstein showed that this actual copy was quoted...Hassall, W. O.
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Journal article
Benito Monfort, 1716-1785: a tentative list of holdings in the reference division of the British Library
Benito Monfort is the last of the three best-known printers in eighteenth-century Spain to be considered in this series of articles. He is generally thought to be the most gifted of a group of printers centred in Valencia and in a wider context he is regarded by some as not...Whitehead, H. G.
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Journal article
Modern bookbindings added to the Department of Printed Books, 1974-1983
The British Library's collection of twentieth-century bookbindings has not received much publicity, overshadowed as it is by the unrivalled collections of bindings from the past. When Howard M. Nixon wrote about the English and foreign bookbindings added to the Department of Printed Books between 1963 and 1974 most emphasis was...Foot, Mirjam M.
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Journal article
A newly discovered leaf of 'The Sforza Hours'
IN 1894, twenty-three years after the discovery of the Sforza Hours (BL, Add. MS.34294) and shortly after its presentation to the British Museum, Sir G. F. Warner, in his monograph on the manuscript, drew attention to a letter from the Milanese illuminator Giovan Pietro Birago. Neither the date nor the...Evans, M. L.
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Journal article
Fragment of an unpublished essay on printing by William Camden
THE known facts concerning the origins of printing from movable type in western Europe have been ably gathered and assessed by recent scholars and there is a large measure of agreement among them, but the information available to William Camden in the sixteenth century is interesting both where it agrees...Dunn, R. D.
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Journal article
Recent acquisitions: Department of Printed Books: Polish books
Recent acquisitions: Department of Printed Books: Polish books.Swiderska, H.
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Journal article
Recent acquisitions: manuscript collections: acquisitions January-December 1982
Recent acquisitions: manuscript collections: acquisitions January-December 1982.McKendrick, Scot
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Journal article
The Elgar sketch-books
A major gift from Mrs H. S. Wohlfeld of sketch-books and other manuscripts of Sir Edward Elgar was received by the British Library in 1984. The sketch-books consist of five early books dating from 1878 to 1882, a small book from the late 1880s, a series of eight volumes made...Willetts, Pamela
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Journal article
Terra incognita: the Beudeker Collection in the map library of the British Library
The name 'Beudeker Collection' or 'Beudeker Atlas' commemorates the eighteenth century Dutchman who compiled these twenty-four large folio volumes, bound ingold-tooled white vellum, placed at Maps C.9.d.1-11, e.1-13. Each volume contains an average of a hundred to a hundred and fifty leaves, on to and between which large single or...Simoni, Anna E. C.
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John Denham: new letters and documents
IT was inevitable that the fundamental divisions made in English society by the Civil Wars should affect the ranks of the poets and playwrights, and unsurprising that the former largely and the latter almost entirely would adhere to the king's party. Not that, from our more distant vantage-point at least,...Kelliher, Hilton
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Journal article
Medieval and Renaissance manuscripts from the library of Sir Sydney Cockerell
I THINK that the first article by Derek Turner that I ever read was his list of medieval and Renaissance manuscripts which had belonged to Eric Millar (1887-1966) in an offprint from The British Museum Quarterly sent to me by Mrs June O'Donnell. I read it through and through, bewitched...Hamel, Christopher de
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Journal article
The Cranbrook papers: stray letters from a politician's archive
THE main body of the papers of the Conservative statesman Gathorne Gathorne-Hardy, 1st Earl of Cranbrook (b. 1814, d. 1906), were deposited by the 4th Earl in the Suffolk Record Office at Ipswich (Ref. HA 43; NRA report 1182); these papers were drawn upon by his son A. E. Gathorne-Hardy...Smith, Robert A. H.
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Journal article
Acquisitions in the Department of Printed Books, 1935-50, and the effects of the war
THE great period of expansion in the Department of Printed Books which occurred in the third quarter of the nineteenth century has been described in an earlier article (British Library Journal, x (1984), pp. 114-46). After 1886/7 the purchase grant was cut from the former figure of £10,000 p.a., and...Harris, P. R.
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Journal article
John Bagford, bookseller and antiquary
JOHN BAGFORD was born in London, lived his sixty-five or sixty-six years there, and was buried in the city in May 1716. From at least 1686 until his death, he was at the centre of the London book trade, involved both in the dispersal of existing collections and the formation...Gatch, Milton McC.
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Recent acquisitions: Department of Printed Books: notable acquisitions 1975-1985: Italian books 1501-1600
Recent acquisitions: Department of Printed Books: notable acquisitions 1975-1985: Italian books 1501-1600.Rhodes, D. E.
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Journal article
The account book of a Marian bookseller, 1553-4
MS. EGERTON 2974, fois. 67-8, preserves in fragmentary form accounts from the day-book of a London stationer who was active during the brief interval between the death on 6 July 1553 of Edward VI, whose regents allowed unprecedented liberty to Protestant authors, printers, publishers, and booksellers, and the reimposition of...King, John N.
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Journal article
An annotated copy of Goldsmith's Life of Nash, 1762
To some it may seem extravagant for a library already endowed with four copies of a book knowingly to acquire a fifth. The copy of the first edition of Oliver Goldsmith's Life of Richard Nash (London, 1762), recently purchased by the British Library will, however, for students of the author,...Jannetta, M. J.
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Journal article
Deciphering the Cotton Genesis miniatures: preliminary observations concerning the use of colour
THE Cotton Genesis (British Library, Cotton MS. Otho B. VI) was written and illuminated at some point during the period of the fourth to sixth centuries AD, and very badly charred in the Cotton Library fire of 1731. Since 1979 I have been recording all the decipherable features of the...Wenzel, Marian
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Journal article
Richard Garnett as censor
DURING the 1890s the Department of Printed Books at the British Museum was beset by problems of censorship, most of them arising from complaints of libellous statements in library materials, and one of them actually resulting in litigation. The mere thought of being taken to court distressed the officers of...McCrimmon, Barbara
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Journal article
An addition to the bibliography of Nantes
PRINTING began at Nantes with an isolated venture in 1493, when on 15 April an otherwise unknown printer named Etienne Larcher completed an edition of Jean Meschinot, Les Lunettes des princes, Vingt-cinq ballades. Commemoration de la passion. Of this exceptionally rare incunable the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris has two incomplete...Leevers, Joanna
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Journal article
W. R. S. Ralston (1828-89): scholarship and scandal in the British Museum
ONE of the best-known members of staff in the British Museum in the late 1860s and early 1870s was William Ralston Shedden Ralston, an expert on Russian life and literature who was both a translator for, and a friend of, Ivan Turgenev. Ralston was respected in the Museum for his...McCrimmon, Barbara
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Journal article
The structure of English pre-conquest Benedictional
A FORM of liturgical manuscript which particularly interested Derek Turner was the benedictional. In his edition of the pontificals in BL, Cotton MS. Claudius A. III he made an important contribution to the study of this type of service-book, providing in his introduction a useful account of their nature and...Prescott, Andrew
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Journal article
The embroidered binding of the Felbrigge Psalter
MANY fine medieval manuscripts are exhibited in the British Library's Grenville Library, but one of the most unusual is the Felbrigge Psalter (Sloane MS. 2400), which was probably written and illuminated in Northern France in about the middle of the thirteenth century. At some time the manuscript came to England...Wallis, Penelope
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Journal article
W. H. Auden's Poems of 1928
IN April 1987 the Modern British Section of the British Library acquired a rare and important copy of W. H. Auden's Poems of 1928. This was Auden's first published work, privately printed by his fellow poet and undergraduate Stephen Spender during the Oxford summer vacation.Leevers, Joanna
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Journal article
The Tilliot Hours: comparisons and relationships
THE provision of a new catalogue for the Yates Thompson manuscripts now in the British Library, taking into consideration the many advances in scholarship which have taken place since the collector himself issued his original catalogues at the beginning of the century, was among the major ambitions which Derek Turner...Backhouse, Janet
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Journal article
The Evanion Collection
IN 1895 the British Museum's Department of Printed Books acquired a collection of ephemeral material relating to the nineteenth-century entertainment world and contemporary life in general. It was purchased from a man who had been a moderately successful conjuror and ventriloquist but now in his old age had fallen into...Harland, Elizabeth
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Journal article
A skeleton in the cupboard: James West and the Portland Papers
IN an earlier article in this issue (pp. 123-33), Clyve Jones has surveyed the main collections which make up the archive of Robert Harley, first Earl of Oxford. Another small group of strays which is worth noting are the letters to Oxford and his son's father-in-law, John Holies, Duke of...Harris, Frances
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Journal article
An unrecognized Spanish edition of Poliziano's Silvae
ANGELO Ambrogini, born in 1454 and universally known as Il Poliziano from his birthplace of Montepulciano in Southern Tuscany, wrote four Latin poems which go under the collective title of Silvae. Of these, Manto was first published in Florence in 1482; Ambra was printed without date, also in Florence, probably...Rhodes, Dennis E.
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Journal article
Recent acquisitions: Slavonic and East European Collections: three Polish pamphlets on Pseudo-Messiah Sabbatai Sevi
IN 1669 the press of the Monastery of the Caves in Kiev published a substantial book Messyia pravdyvyi Isus Khristos [The true Messiah Jesus Christ] and in 1672 the Ukrainian version was followed by the Polish, Messiasz prawdziwy. Its Orthodox author, Ioannykii Haliatovskyi (Joanicjusz Galatowski), Rector of the Kiev Academy...Alsop, J. D.
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Journal article
Stefan Zweig's copy of Rimbaud, Une Saison en enfer (1873)
IN 1908 Stefan Zweig was given a copy of the first edition of Rimbaud's Une Saison en enfer; the volume now forms part of the Zweig Collection in the British Library.Michaelides, Chris
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Journal article
The making of a collection: Burmese manuscripts in the British Library
THE Burma manuscripts collection in the British Library by virtue of its size, range of material, and state of preservation constitutes the most significant collection of manuscripts to be found outside Burma. It numbers over 1,000 manuscripts, of which approximately 800 are in Oriental Collections and 350 in the India...Herbert, Patricia
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Journal article
Robert Harley's parliamentary apprenticeship: 1690-1695
WILLIAM'S 1690 Parliament has a claim to a particular place in the development of parliamentary procedure and processes. From 1690 began the unbroken record of annual sessions. The House of Commons met from late October or early November through until March, six days of the week, breaking only briefly for...Rowlands, Ted
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Journal article
Problems in the history of Chinese bindings
THE origins and development of different binding formats form a subject of importance amongst the many aspects of the history of the Chinese book that require further research. In 1986, I published an article on the distinctions between jingzhe ['pleated sutra' or accordion binding with the first and last pages...Zhizhong, Li
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Journal article
John Wilson, Hume's first printer
THE first two volumes of David Hume's A Treatise of Human Nature were published (anonymously) in January of 1739, by John Noon. The third and final volume was published (again anonymously) near the end of October, 1740, by Thomas Longman. None of the volumes includes the name of the printer,...Brown, Sally
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Journal article
Robert Harley's 'middle way': the Puritan heritage in Augustan politics
THE character of Robert Harley, first Earl of Oxford, was a puzzle to contemporaries and has continued to vex historians ever since. Harley's motives, objectives, principles (if indeed he had any) are of a piece with his notoriously difficult handwriting: often obscure and sometimes quite indecipherable. Of course, for a...Hayton, David
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Journal article
English Language Collections: selected acquisitions 1982-1987
English Language Collections: selected acquisitions 1982-1987.Archibald, Jean ; James, Elizabeth
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Thomas Tudway and the Harleian Collection of 'Ancient' church music
ONE of the best known sets of documents in British musical history is Harl. MSS.7337-7342, the first volume of which is titled A Collection of the Most Celebrated Services and Anthems used in the Church of England, from the Reformation to the Restauration of K. Charles If. Composed by the...Weber, William
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Journal article
Missing folios in Cotton MS. Nero A. I
THE manuscript, Cotton Nero A. I, has been reproduced in facsimile edition entitled: A Wulfstan Manuscript containing Institutes, Laws and Homilies: British Museum Cotton Nero A. I, recognizing its importance to Anglo-Saxonists, and, by caption, indicating its associations, and designating some of the literary production in Latin of Wulfstan and...Cross, J. E.
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Journal article
Recent acquisitions: manuscript collections: acquisitions January-December 1983
Recent acquisitions: manuscript collections: acquisitions January-December 1983.McKendrick, Scot
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Journal article
Some officials of the early eighteenth-century Secretaries of State
PRESENT knowledge of the personnel in the offices of the Secretaries of State is dependent upon the pioneering work of J. C. Sainty whose researches provide an essential foundation for historical study of this period. In the interests of completeness, this note is intended to fill in several gaps for...Alsop, J. D.
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Journal article
A preliminary check-list of Sir Hans Sloane's catalogues
THE purpose of this article is to provide a convenient means of locating the extant original catalogues of Sir Hans Sloane's collections. With the notable exception of Sloane's catalogue of coins and medals these have survived rather better than the collections themselves, and with their aid it is possible to...Jones, Peter Murray
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Sir Robert Harley, K.B., (1579-1656) and the 'character' of a puritan
IN February 1621 Thomas Shepherd caused a furore in the House of Commons by attacking the bill 'for the Punishment of divers Abuses on the Sabaoth-day' at its second reading. It was, he said 'very inconvenient and indiscreete' and 'it savours of the spirrit of a Puritan', and he called...Eales, Jacqueline
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Journal article
Ephraem's 'On Repentance' and the translation of the Greek text into other languages
EPHRAEM the Syrian, who died on 9 June 373 in Edessa, was a writer of prodigious output if it is true, as the church historian Sozomen tells us, that he wrote three million verses. Certainly, the Catalogues of Syriac Manuscripts in the British Library list ninety or so manuscripts which...Pattie, T. S.
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Journal article
James II in pursuit of a pirate at Malta
AMONGST the British Library's many manuscripts which describe Britain's long involvement with Malta and the Mediterranean, Add. MS. 19306 is interesting for several reasons. 'Wood's Journal' is evidence of how the Royal Navy's Mediterranean squadron supported and protected from piracy that English trade to the Levant which had been growing...Allen, D. F.
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Journal article
Swift, the Earl of Oxford, and the management of the House of Lords in 1713: two new lists
THE two lists of members of the House of Lords published here are from the Harley papers in the former Portland Loan in the British Library (Add. MS. 70305, formerly Loan 29/31/2), and are in the hand of Jonathan Swift, with additions by Robert Harley, Earl of Oxford. They can...Jones, Clyve
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Journal article
The 'Sloane Group': related scientific and medical manuscripts from the fifteenth century in the Sloane Collection
IN his entry on Sir Hans Sloane in the Dictionary of National Biography, Norman Moore observed that the Sloane Manuscripts 'must always be one of the main sources of medical history in England from the time of Charles II to that of George II'. While the validity of that observation...Voigts, Linda Ehrsam
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Journal article
Colour notes in English Romanesque manuscripts
COLOUR notes, indicating the colour to be used, have been recorded by Patricia Stirnemann in a group of late twelfth and early thirteenth-century French manuscripts. L. Gilissen has noted two other methods for indicating colour used in a group of thirteenth-century Cistercian manuscripts. One of these consists of writing the...Petzold, Andreas
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Journal article
Working with Vaughan Williams: some newly discovered manuscripts
IN the Autumn of 1988 the British Library published Working with Vaughan Williams my account of eleven years spent as musical assistant to the composer, and of the friendship which grew up between us during that time. The volume prints in full seventy-four letters written to me by Vaughan Williams,...Douglas, Roy
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Journal article
A memento of Napoleon
ON 5 May 1821 Napoleon died in exile on his island prison of St Helena. Amongst those Englishmen particularly affected by the news was John Cam Hobhouse, the eldest son of Sir Benjamin Hobhouse. His mother was a dissenter, and Hobhouse himself had attended a school run by a Unitarian...Daniels, Morna
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Journal article
The authorship and date of HARL. MS. 6249, ff. 106V-110
HARL. MS. 6249 contains an anonymous and undated general history of the world. Part of this manuscript is printed in Memorials of the Empire of Japan in the XVI and XVII Centuries (Hakluyt Society: London, 1850), but the editor of this book, Thomas Rundall, failed to identify its author. Quoting...Shimada, Takau
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Journal article
An autobiographical ballad by Matthew Prior
IN the most recent edition of Prior's works, the editors asserted their confidence that, while Prior was a parliamentary prisoner, he composed a poem reflecting some of the circumstances of his confinement and his first acquaintance with Elizabeth Cox, the mistress of his later years. However, the only vestige of...Wright, H. Bunker ; Wright, Deborah Kempf
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Journal article
The great gun at Agra
IN 1974 there appeared on the London art market two bound volumes of watercolours entitled 'Views by Seeta Ram from Moorshedabad to Patna. Vol. V and 'Views by Seeta Ram from Secundra to Agra. Vol. IX'. Each of these volumes contained twenty-three large watercolours, normally on paper watermarked 'John Dickinson...Losty, J. P.
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Journal article
A catalogue of Sir Robert Cotton's printed books?
THE inventory of the goods and chattels of Sir Robert Cotton taken on 20 May 1631, two weeks after his death, records that the upper study at Cotton House, Westminster, was furnished, inter alia, with 'i iron prese & ix presses with printed bookes'. This brief reference draws attention to...Daniels, Morna
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Journal article
London, Bengal, the China trade and the unfrequented extremities of Asia: the East India Company's settlement in New Guinea, 1793-95
ON 25 October 1793 an Englishman, Captain John Hayes, hoisted the British flag at Dore Bay on the north-west coast of New Guinea, near present-day Manokwariin Irian Jaya. With appropriate ceremony a twenty-one gun salute was fired and Hayes, on behalf of the King and nation of Great Britain, took...Griffin, Andrew
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Journal article
Isaac Bernard: Prague Jew, jeweller, mintmaster and spy
IN his 'Catalogus Brevior' (1709-24), the text of which now constitutes the first part of the existing Catalogue of the Harleian Manuscripts, Robert Harley's librarian, Humfrey Wanley hesitantly - and ambiguously - recorded that a Hebrew cabbalistic work, now Harleian MS. 1204, was 'ut accepi, a quodam Isaaco Bernard, Judaeo...Barber, Peter
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Journal article
Guglielmo Libri and the British Museum: a case of scandal averted
IN December 1845 Antonio Panizzi, Keeper of Printed Books in the British Museum, sat down at his desk to answer a letter from his friend, the distinguished professor at the Sorbonne and the College de France, Guglielmo Libri. His fellow expatriate, a bibliophile of note, had informed him of his...Maccioni, P. Alessandra
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Journal article
Camden, Cotton and the chronicles of the Norman Conquest of England
The collaboration between William Camden (1551-1623), the Clarenceux King of Arms, and his pupil Sir Robert Cotton (1571-1631) in antiquarian studies is well known. Whereas Camden developed the principles on which the study of history should be based. Cotton provided the raw material by gathering together what, judged by quality...Houts, Elisabeth M. C. van
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Journal article
Two unrecorded incunables: Rouen, circa 1497, and Lyons, circa 1500
FOR a number of years, I have been re-examining the British Library's books printed in France between 1501 and 1520 for a typographical catalogue of the Library's French post-incunables. This catalogue is a revision of the unpublished manuscript of Col. Frank Isaac's Index to the British [Museum] Library's books printed...Shaw, David J.
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Journal article
Malay manuscript art: the British Library collections
MANUSCRIPTS written in the Malay language originate from throughout the Malay archipelago, the area occupied by the present-day nations of Malaysia, Indonesia, Brunei, Singapore and the southern, ethnically Malay, regions of Thailand and the Philippines. Malay manuscripts are usually written on imported paper of European, Chinese or Indian manufacture in...Gallop, Annabel Teh
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Journal article
An archive of the 1989 Chinese Pro-Democracy Movement
A collection of photocopies of leaflets relating to the Spring 1989 Pro-Democracy Movement in China has been assembled in Oriental and India Office Collections. Most of the original leaflets were collected in Peking by Robin Munro, who was working for Amnesty International at the time and is now a member...Bond, Sherry
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Journal article
The 'Tregian' manuscripts: a study of their compilation
BETWEEN 1609 and 1619, during his confinement in the Fleet Prison, in London, Francis Tregian the younger, a Cornish Roman Catholic recusant, has hitherto been thought to have compiled an important group of music anthologies. These comprise the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book: Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Museum Mus. MS. 168; British Library, Egerton...Thompson, Ruby Reid
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Journal article
Sir Robert Cotton's record of a royal bookshelf
OUR knowledge of the early history of the English royal library, conveniently sketched out by Warner and Gilson in 1921, has been considerably amplified in recent years. An edition of the vital Westminster library catalogue of 1542 is now in preparation and will be of major advantage to future students....Backhouse, Janet
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Journal article
Books seen by Samuel Ward 'In Bibliotheca regia' circa 1614
As early as the 1530s the antiquary John Leland (1503?-1552) envisaged the establishment of some sort of royal library, designed as a repository for the manuscript collections being removed from their previous monastic homes. From the period in which Leland was gathering, there is one particularly valuable piece of evidence:...Carley, James P.
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Journal article
The Royal Library as a source for Sir Robert Cotton's collection: a preliminary list of acquisitions
PUBLIC Record Office, Augmentation Office, Misc. Books 160 (E. 315/160), ff. 107v-120r, contains an alphabetical list of 910 books, printed and manuscript, found in the Upper Library at Westminster Palace in 1542. At approximately the same time the inventory was compiled, so it would appear, a number was entered into...Carley, James P.
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Journal article
From copy to facsimile: a millennium of studying the Vatican Vergil
BOOKS do have their fate. When it was produced in Rome sometime around A.D. 400, presumably for a wealthy pagan aristocrat of the old school, the manuscript we know as the Vatican Vergil (Vat. lat. 3225) was a nice book for a gentleman's library, but not an extraordinary artistic accomplishment....Wright, David H.
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Journal article
A glimpse above the clouds: the Japanese Court in 1859
THOSE of us seeing pictures of the recent enthronement of the 125th Emperor of Japan on television or in the newspapers might have been forgiven for thinking that we were seeing a Heian picture scroll come to life. The ceremonies serve to remind us of the great antiquity of the...Todd, Hamish
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Journal article
English bookbindings: additions to the collections 1975-1985
DURING the ten years from 1975 to 1985, the Library has been fortunate in obtaining through purchase or gift several particularly interesting English bookbindings dating from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries.Marks, Philippa
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Journal article
The role of the wax tablet in medieval literacy: a reconstruction in light of a recent find from York
MOST scholars are aware of the major role played by writing tablets as a vehicle for informal composition, learning exercises, note-taking, correspondence, accounting and document-production during Antiquity. Fewer, perhaps, are familiar with the extension and modification of their use throughout the Middle Ages (and indeed even until the nineteenth century...Brown, Michelle P.
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Journal article
Twentieth century Italian imprints
PRINTING with movable type was introduced into Italy in 1465 by two Germans, Conrad Sweynheym and Arnold Pannartz, who printed the first Italian book, Lactantius's De Divinis Institutionibus at the Monastery of Subiaco near Rome. By the beginning of the sixteenth century, Italian printers had earned an unrivalled reputation for...Reidy, Denis
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Journal article
The Apocalypse, British Library, Royal MS. 19 B. XV: a reassessment of its artistic context in early fourteenth century English manuscript illumination
THE Apocalypse, British Library, Royal MS. 19 B. XV, is traditionally attributed to the workshop which produced Queen Mary's Psalter, BL, Royal MS. 2 B. VII; indeed, the first sixteen folios have been assigned to the Queen Mary Artist himself. For example, Sandier has recently written that 'the gatherings by...Dennison, Lynda
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Journal article
British foreign policy and international affairs during Sir William Trumbull's career
SIR William Trumbull served as envoy, and subsequently as Secretary of State, during a period of major change in Britain's international position. He was Ambassador Extraordinary to Louis XIV of France from 2 September 1685 to 12 October 1686, and then Resident Ambassador at Constantinople from November 1686 to October...Black, Jeremy
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Journal article
Public revisions or private responses? The oddities of BL, Arundel MS. 197, with special reference to Contemplations of the Dread and Love of God
ARUNDEL 197 is a curious manuscript. Dating from the third quarter of the fifteenth century, it is a small volume of seventy-three folios, measuring 192 x 132 mm, very plain, without decoration, and showing no signs of ownership from the medieval period. The volume once belonged to Henry Howard, Duke...Connolly, Margaret
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Journal article
The author portraits in the Bedford Psalter-Hours: Gower, Chaucer and Hoccleve
AN inscribed portrait of John Gower, literary champion of Lancastrian kingship, provides the key to the reading of the unique illustrative programme of the Duke of Bedford's Psalter-Hours, Add. MS. 42131, the only manuscript he is known to have commissioned in England. Two hundred and ninety of the 300 minor...Wright, Sylvia
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Journal article
William Trumbull and art collecting in Jacobean England
THIS article is concerned with some of the papers of William Trumbull the Elder in the British Library, which relate to the visual arts in Jacobean England. As was suggested by Sonia Anderson and Leonard Forster in a recent issue of this journal, the Trumbull archive is remarkably rich for...Howarth, David
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Journal article
Paine's Rights of Man, Swedenborgianism and freedom of the press in Sweden: a publishing enigma of 1792
A copy of the earliest Swedish translation of Thomas Paine's Rights of Man, recently acquired by the British Library, illustrates the old tag that 'books have their fates'. The item is a slim octavo volume in plain grey board covers entitled Menniskans rattigheter and bearing the imprint Stockholm, tryckte hos...Hogg, Peter C.
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Journal article
The Weckherlin Papers
THE Weckherlin Papers are part of the vast archive of the Trumbull family, which passed through the female line to the Marquesses of Downshire. It was kept at Easthampstead Park in Berkshire until it was deposited on loan with the Berkshire County Record Office at Reading in 1954. A large...Forster, Leonard
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Journal article
A 'catalogue of Hebrew printers'
FOR most of this century, an unbound manuscript of nearly a thousand leaves lay in the offices of the Hebrew Section of the Department of Oriental Manuscripts and Printed Books of the British Museum (later the Oriental Collections of the British Library). Despite its bulk, the manuscript remained unaccessioned, apparently...Hill, Brad Sabin
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Journal article
A fragment of Ephraem the Syrian and the rare word asiantos vindicated
ADDITIONAL MS. 39583 is a miscellany of fragments collected by Robert Curzon, the writer of Travels to Monasteries in the Levant. One of the fragments, f. 14, is a single leaf written in Greek in about the tenth century in upright so-called 'Slavonic' uncials. On the facing page Curzon made...Pattie, T. S.
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Journal article
Yiddish manuscripts in the British Library
FEW Yiddish manuscripts predating the age of printing have survived the storms of Jewish and general history. The oldest extant dated Yiddish document is a rhymed inscription of a dozen words in the Worms Mahzor ('festival liturgy') of 1272, now in the Jewish National and University Library, Jerusalem. By far...Prager, Leonard ; Hill, Brad Sabin
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Journal article
Mátyás Seiber's collaboration in Adorno's jazz project, 1936
IN 1982 the British Library acquired the papers of the Hungarian-born composer Matyas Seiber (1905-60) through the generosity of his widow, Mrs Lilla Seiber. This large collection contains not only sketches and scores of Seiber's musical works but also scripts for lectures and broadcast talks on a variety of musical...Chadwick, Nick
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Journal article
The works of Paolo Angelo
NOTHING seems to be recorded about the life of Paolo Angelo, except for the meagre scraps of information which his own books reveal. He was a humble priest of Venice, apparently a member of the Dominican Order, and he had a fanatical hatred of Luther and his doctrines, which he...Rhodes, Dennis E.
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Journal article
A new English keyboard manuscript of the seventeenth century: autograph music by Draghi and Purcell
MILLENNIAL fever seems to have infected even the sober arena of musicology and music manuscripts. We have heard the cry of 'Musicological Event of the Century' too frequently in recent years, trumpeting everything from the discovery of the autograph of Mozart's Fantasy and Sonata in C minor (K. 457 and...Hogwood, Christopher
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Journal article
Public relations, Panizzi-style
IN a collection of letters by and to Sir Anthony Panizzi, chiefly relating to the history of the British Museum, assembled and recently presented by the author to the British Library (Add. MSS. 70839-70854), are two letters written by Sir Anthony to the Irish essayist and politician John Wilson Croker...McCrimmon, Barbara
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Journal article
A marginal sketch in BL, Additional Ms. 25690, the Cronica del Cid Campeador, and the legend of the 'Jura de Santa Gadea'
ADDITIONAL MS. 25690 is a copy of the Cronica del Cid, incomplete at the end and with some dislocation in the sequence of the text. This chronicle circulated in printed editions from 1512. The MS. is briefly described by Gayangos, who assigns it to the fifteenth century and is of...Hook, David
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Journal article
Early printing from Africa in the British Library
ALTHOUGH the date of the introduction of printing to Africa south of the Sahara ranges across the continent from the late eighteenth to late nineteenth century, its development usually followed a similar pattern and in many cases can be traced to the arrival of Christian missionaries. Indigenous literature was predominantly...Holden, Carol
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Journal article
From Purcell to Wardour Street: a brief account of music manuscripts from the Library of Vincent Novello now in the British Library
In 1986 and 1987 Novello and Company presented to the British Library a substantial collection of scores written or collected by Novello, which had remained in the possession of the company, perhaps since its foundation. These scores joined an already large collection of Novello's material which had found its way...Banks, Chris
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Journal article
Consort and cupola: Prince Albert, Panizzi and the Reading Room of the British Museum
ON 25 October 1997 the round Reading Room of the British Museum closed its doors to readers for the last time. One hundred and forty years after it was opened Antonio Panizzi most visible achievement ceased to serve the function for which it was erected, as the chief means of...Wright, C. J.
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Journal article
The printing history of the Constantinople Hebrew incunable of 1493: a mediterranean voyage of discovery
THE place is Constantinople, capital of the Ottoman Empire; the date December 1493. Elia (Elijah), son of Benjamin ha-Levi, is writing the concluding lines to the almost complete edition of Jacob ben Asher's great early fourteenth-century religious compendium Arba'ah Turim ('The Four Rows'), a title referring to the four rows...Offenberg, Adri K.
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Journal article
John Field: the 'hidden manuscripts' and other sources in the British Library
JOHN Field's manuscripts, both epistolary and musical, are rare, a dozen letters, of which two are in the British Library, and twenty-two autograph manuscripts, of which only the Pastorale in A H.14, Nocturnes nos. 5, 6, and 14, and Concerto no. 7, are complete.Langley, Robin
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Journal article
The dating of Seiber/Adorno papers held by the British Library
THE welcome publication by Nick Chadwick of Matyas Seiber's comments on Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno's jazz research proposal (the 'Expose') of January 1936 and their correspondence during the subsequent writing of Adorno's essay 'On Jazz' ('Uber Jazz') provides valuable insight into their co-operation. Seiber's assistance was publicly acknowledged by Adorno both...Wilcock, Evelyn
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Journal article
Notes on the bibliography of Rainerius de Pisis
THE Pantheologia of Rainerius de Pisis, the Dominican who died in 1351, must be one of the longest books ever composed in the Middle Ages. Although the author was an Italian, it is noticeable that of the six editions printed in the fifteenth century the first five appeared in Germany,...Rhodes, Dennis E.
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Journal article
The Edwards of Halifax Bindery
THE story of the Edwards family of Halifax is the stuff of a Victorian three volume novel. William Edwards (baptized in 1722, died in 1808), a provincial publisher and bookseller, built up a firm which became influential in the book trade in England and abroad. William (1753-86), his first son,...Marks, P. J. M.
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Journal article
English plague regulations and Italian models: printed and manuscript items in the Yelverton Collection
AMONG the papers of Robert Beale, Clerk to the Privy Council during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, which form the nucleus of the Yelverton collection at the British Library, is a group of printed proclamations and orders of the Governor and other officials of Milan issued at the time...Basing, Patricia ; Rhodes, Dennis E.