This article examines the history, scope and provenance of the 'Political Tracts' series of 3000 early modern pamphlets that was assembled by the British Museum c. 1790-1807, during the so-called 'synthetical arrangement', when the library of printed books was reorganized along subject-based lines. The series was designed as a repository...
The title page inscriptions 'J. Doody' or 'John Doody' in several volumes held in the Sloane Printed Books collection, have typically been taken as indicating ownership by either John Doody (1616-1680) or John Doody (1687-1753), his grandson. In fact, I suggest that these items found their way to Sloane from...
This article reviews the question of who patronized the London 'reconstructed' Carmelite Missal (Add. MSS. 29704-5, 44892). This has been raised before, and Sir Robert Knolles (d. 1407), a major patron of London Whitefriars, suggested. However, his connection to the Missal has not been examined in any detail. Through consideration...
This study contains the first detailed survey of the art works connected to the influential Augsburg _Kantor_, composer, teacher and music theorist Adam Gumpelzhaimer (1559–1625) and demonstrates that they are much more plentiful and widespread than previously realized. For instance, this survey examines nineteen portraits of Gumpelzhaimer whereas only four...
The British Library (BL, or the Library) and the National Trust (NT, or the Trust) each have a rich relationship with the history of horticulture and botany. The aim of this June – September 2023 Doctoral Fellowship was to explore the relationship between gardens and books in the BL’s printed...
We present MapReader, a free, open-source software library written in Python for analyzing large map collections. MapReader allows users with little computer vision expertise to i) retrieve maps via web-servers; ii) preprocess and divide them into patches; iii) annotate patches; iv) train, fine-tune, and evaluate deep neural network models; and...