Search Constraints
Search Results
-
2011
Journal article
Beyond the Template: Aesthetics and Meaning in the Images of the Roman d'Alexandre en prose in Harley MS. 4979
The Roman d’Alexandre en prose is the translation into Old French of a Latin text known as the Historia de preliis. The processes of language conversion and transcription during the Middle Ages allowed patrons and manuscript-making ateliers to adapt and bring classical works up to date with medieval tastes and...Pérez-Simon, Maud
-
2011
Journal article
The Library Catalogues of Sir Hans Sloane: Their Authors, Organization, and Functions
This article undertakes a detailed examination of the library catalogues of Sir Hans Sloane, whose collections formed the basis of the British Museum and thus of the British Library. These are now held in the British Library: Sloane MS 3972B, Sloane MS 3972C, Sloane MS 3972D and an interleaved copy...Blakeway, Amy
-
2011
Journal article
Kissing Images, Unfurling Rolls, Measuring Wounds, Sewing Badges and Carrying Talismans: Considering Some Harley Manuscripts through the Physical Rituals they Reveal
This article considers how early users of prayer books handled and interacted with their manuscripts. Deploying evidence from signs of wear within the manuscripts themselves, the author argues that medieval believers used manuscripts ritually in such a way that they blurred the distinction between images and their referents. Votaries treated...Rudy, Kathryn M.
-
2011
Journal article
Advising France through the Example of England: Visual Narrative in the Livre de la prinse et mort du roy Richart (Harl. MS. 1319)
Some time between November 1401 and March 1402 Jean Creton wrote an eyewitness account of King Richard II’s deposition in 1399. Around 1405 Duke John of Berry, the uncle of the French King Charles VI, was given the only richly illuminated copy of the text to survive. This article examines...Hedeman, Anne D.
-
2011
Journal article
Good Morals for a Couple at the Burgundian Court: Contents and Context of Harley 1310, Le Livre des bonnes meurs of Jacques Legrand
London, British Library, Harley MS. 1310 has received no scholarly attention for decades, perhaps even centuries. The aim of this article is to frame more precisely the early owners whose arms are painted in the lower margin of the frontispiece folio and to contextualize the manuscript and especially its illumination....Wijsman, Hanno
-
2011
Journal article
1793: A Song of the Natives of New South Wales
‘A Song of the Natives of New South Wales’, written down in London in 1793, documents the first Australian Aboriginal song heard in Europe. The singers, Bennelong and his young kinsman Yemmerrawanne, were far from their Wangal homeland on the south bank of the Parramatta River in Sydney, New South...Smith, Keith Vincent
-
2011
Journal article
The Metamorphoses of a Late Fifteenth-Century Psalter (Harl. MS. 1892)
This article examines in detail a psalter for the use of Sarum executed in Rouen c. 1490-1500, to which a series of unexpected additions have been made. These include sections painted in the style of the Netherlandish Dark Eyes Masters and added leaves in various hands copied after engravings by...Yvard, Catherine
-
2011
Journal article
Some Greek Gospel Manuscripts in the British Library: Examples of the Byzantine Book as Holy Receptacle and Bearer of Hidden Meaning
The Gospel book is by far the most numerous, and hence the most important and characteristic, genre of book production in Byzantine culture. A detailed survey of the surviving material in the British Library carried by the author provides an overview of the Byzantine perception of the Gospel book, and...Takiguchi, Mika
-
2011
Journal article
The Printed Books of the Cotton Family and Their Dispersal: Additions
As a supplement to the author’s ‘The Printed Books of the Cotton Family and Their Dispersal’, in Giles Mandelbrote and Barry Taylor (eds.), Libraries within the Library: The Origins of the British Library’s Printed Collections (London: British Library, 2009), pp. 43-75, the present article identifies five copies and adds two...Tite, Colin G. C.
-
2011
Journal article
The Westminster Tournament Challenge (Harley 83 H 1) and Thomas Wriothesley's Workshop
On the twelfth and thirteenth of February, 1511 Henry VIII held a tournament to celebrate the birth of his first son, Prince Arthur. The tournament is famously immortalized in the Westminster Tournament Roll (London, College of Arms, Westminster Tournament Roll) – a 60-foot long vellum roll that was painted soon...Walker, Alison Tara
-
2011
Journal article
Harley MS. 3469: Splendor Solis or Splendour of the Sun – A German Alchemical Manuscript
‘Splendor Solis or Splendour of the Sun’ is one of the most beautiful and well known illuminated alchemical manuscripts. The text survives in many witnesses dating from the early sixteenth to the nineteenth century, of which Harl. MS. 3469 is definitely the most famous and best preserved example. Yet the...Völlnagel, Jörg
-
2011
Journal article
Humfrey Wanley and the Harley Collection
In the field of manuscript studies, the name Humfrey Wanley (1672-1726) is well known. Scholars have long recognized his achievements as Anglo-Saxonist, antiquarian, palaeographer, cataloguer, and librarian to Robert Harley and his son, Edward, 1st and 2nd earls of Oxford, who created one of the most outstanding private libraries in...Jackson, Deirdre
-
2011
Journal article
The Progress of the Text: The Papers of J. G. Ballard at the British Library
The article provides an overview of the archive of J. G. Ballard, acquired by the British Library in 2010. The successive drafts of Ballard’s novels, in manuscript and typescript, comprise the majority of the archive, with the exception of Ballard’s first novel (The Wind from Nowhere) and The Unlimited Dream...Beckett, Chris
-
2011
Journal article
The Harleys as Collectors
To understand the nature and origins of the Harleian collection it is necessary to go back well beyond the date usually given for its foundation (the early 18th century), beyond the first evidence of Robert Harley’s collecting in the 1680s, to the time of his father and even his grandparents;...Harris, Frances
-
2011
Journal article
Harley MS. 2979 and the Books of Hours Produced in Avignon by the Workshop of Jean de Toulouse
This contribution is centred on Harley MS. 2979, a Book of Hours illuminated in the last decade of the fourteenth century in Avignon, the capital of the antipopes during the Schism. Although now rather worn, it seems to have been one of the finest and most expensive of the Books...Manzari, Francesca
-
2011
Journal article
'In this signe thou shalt ouercome hem alle': Visual Rhetoric and Yorkist Propaganda in Lydgate's Fall of Princes (Harl. MS. 1766)
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....Pittaway, Sarah