The community of Russian émigré intellectuals who settled in London in the 1880s and the 1890s continued their scholarly and revolutionary activities in England, congregating around the British Museum. Two leading figures, Prince Petr Kropotkin (1842-1921) and Vladimir Burtsev (1862-1942), made donations to the Library and wrote to the Library’s...
A coloured woodcut portrait of Mikolaj [Nicholas] Krzysztof Radziwill (known as Sierotka, 'The Orphan') (1549-1616) is included in the album amicorum compiled c. 1563 by Hieronymus Köler of Nuremberg (BL, Egerton MS. 1184). An uncoloured version of the portrait also occurs in a volume of Greek poems by Martinus Crusius,...
With its much abridged text and impressive visual scheme, Harl. MS. 1766 (c. 1450-60) is unique amongst the extant manuscripts of Lydgate’s Fall of Princes (c. 1431-38/39). This paper identifies and explores a rhetoric of kingship developed by the rearranged text and amplified through the design of the visual scheme....
This article explores two guard books containing First World War ephemera (shelfmark Tab.11748.aa.4) held at the British Library that were catalogued as part of a PhD placement during the summer of 2016. It examines the acquisition of ephemera during the war, what the collection held at the British Library comprises...
In December 1692 John Sheffield, 3rd earl of Mulgrave, intervened in the House of Lords to speak in favour of the Place Bill – a measure aimed at limiting the numbers of MPs permitted to hold offices in the armed forces and central government. At one point Mulgrave equated the...
The Living with Machines Digital Residences have offered our research team a remarkable opportunity to experiment with methods for extracting data from historical newspapers dating back 100 to 150 years. This interdisciplinary project aims to expand the scope of digital humanities and historical research by developing automated techniques for data...