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Journal article
The man who wrote on the manuscripts in the British Museum
IN November 1898 W. C. Hazlitt, the grandson of Hazlitt the essayist and a distinguished men of letters in his own right, received out of the blue a letter from one W. S. G. Richards. Richards explained that he was working on the genealogies of West Country families, especially those...Wright, C. J.
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'Riches for the geography of America and Spain': Felipe Bauzá and his topographical collections, 1789-1848
THE British Library's Department of Manuscripts possesses a wealth of material relating to the history and culture of Spain and its colonies. This includes one of the largest collections of maps and official papers on colonial Latin America outside the Iberian Peninsula (now Add. MSS. 17556-676). Commonly known as the...Barber, Peter
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'Fortescue': the British Museum and British Library Subject Index
THE publication of a further fifteen volumes, covering the years 1971-5, brings to close the Subject Index of books added since 1880 to the British Museum Library and the British Library, which was begun by G. K. Fortescue and is still widely (though not officially) known by its originator's name....Hill, F. J.
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Recent acquisitions: manuscript collections: acquisitions January-December 1982
Recent acquisitions: manuscript collections: acquisitions January-December 1982.McKendrick, Scot
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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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D. H. Turner (1931-1985): a portrait
THE sudden death of D. H, Turner on 1 August 1985 deprived the British Library of a scholar of international distinction, an energetic and imaginative promoter of its treasures, and a memorable-if unpredictable-character. In this special number of The British Library Journal a small group of his friends and colleagues...Backhouse, Janet ; Jones, Shelley
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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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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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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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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 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
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
Ephraem the Syrian and the Latin manuscripts of De Paenitentia
EPHRAEM the Syrian is perhaps the greatest Christian poet before Dante. He was admired by Jerome, he was loved by Syriac-speaking Christians, and on 5 October 1920, somewhat belatedly, he was declared Doctor of the Church by Pope Benedict XV. He was born about AD 306 in Nisibis in the...Pattie, T. S.
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Journal article
The printing of the 'Sermón de Amores' of Cristóbal de Castillejo
This book, printed in 1542 with no imprint, is a quarto of twenty leaves, having the unusual collation a20. Three gothic types are employed, and there is a woodcut on the last leaf verso, which we shall mention later. Despite the words 'Agora nueuamente corregido y enmendado', there seems to...Rhodes, Dennis E.
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Journal article
'Carte Blanche'
ALTHOUGH in the earlier part of the last century it was included in the permanent exhibition of manuscripts, the Department of Manuscripts has in more recent times been rather reluctant to publicize what is (or at any rate may be) one of the most dramatic items in the whole of...Skeat, T. C.
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Journal article
The artists of the Rutland Psalter
ONE of the most important acquisitions of an illuminated manuscript during Derek Turner's years in the Department of Manuscripts was the Psalter from the collection of the Duke of Rutland at Belvoir Castle, acquired in 1983, and now Add. MS. 62925. For a long time the manuscript had been of...Morgan, Nigel
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New light on the 'Sforziada' frontispieces of Giovan Pietro Birago
D. H. TURNER'S interest in the Milanese miniaturist Giovan Pietro Birago dated from his cataloguing of the detached full-page miniature of the Adoration of the Magi from the renowned Sforza Hours, which entered the British Museum in 1941, published in the Catalogue of Additions to the Manuscripts 1936-1945. Many years...Evans, M. L.
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Recent acquisitions: manuscript collections: acquisitions January-December 1983
Recent acquisitions: manuscript collections: acquisitions January-December 1983.McKendrick, Scot
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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. 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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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
A stray notebook of miscellaneous writings by Coleridge
THE passing of Samuel Taylor Coleridge on 25 July 1834 was deeply felt among the circle of his friends, but nowhere more keenly perhaps than in the household of Dr and Mrs James Gillman at No. 3 The Grove, Highgate. For the last eighteen years of his life the Gillmans...Kelliher, Hilton
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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
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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English Language Collections: selected acquisitions 1982-1987
English Language Collections: selected acquisitions 1982-1987.Archibald, Jean ; James, Elizabeth
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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 Hans Sloane, scientist
'ECCE Gloriae Mathematicarum et Physicarum'; so reads the inscription on an eighteenth-century engraving showing Sir Isaac Newton and Sir Hans Sloane. While Newton has remained a household word for scientific genius, Sloane is remembered (if at all) as a collector of curiosities, the founder of the British Museum, and Lord...Ultee, Maarten
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Sir Hans Sloane and the Russian Academy of Sciences
THE year that Sir Hans Sloane became president of the Royal Society marked the beginning of formal Anglo-Russian scientific relations. His predecessor Newton, at his last meeting as president before his death in March 1727, read out a letter received from the newly-founded Russian Academy of Sciences, proposing scientific cooperation...Thomas, Christine G.
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Hans Sloane, book collector and cataloguer, 1682-1698
IT is well known that the immense library of printed books and manuscripts collected over a period of more than seventy years by Sir Hans Sloane and unsurpassed in his own time as the work of a single collector eventually became the foundation collection of the library of the British...Nickson, M. A. E.
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Journal article
The Hastings Hours and the Master of 1499
THE book of hours once belonging to William, Lord Hastings (now BL, Additional MS.54782) is both a fascinating historical document and a work of art of the highest quality. It is of interest to the student of English history because of the important role Hastings played at the court of...Brinkmann, Bodo
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Journal article
A friend of the Clementis
ON 10 March 1832 Muzio Clementi, 'The Father of the Pianoforte', breathed his last in the unlikely setting of Evesham in Worcestershire. The 'Land without Music' had lost its most distinguished resident foreign composer since the death of Handel over seventy years before. On 2 January, realizing that his life...Wright, C. J.
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'Hundreds of selves': the British Library's Katherine Mansfield letters
IN January 1920, Katherine Mansfield 'escaped' (as she declared in a letter to her husband, John Middleton Murry) from the 'hell of isolation . . . the loneliness and fright' of the past few months, which had been spent at Ospedaletti on the Italian Riviera. She was ill with tuberculosis,...Brown, Sally
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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A rebellion in Burma: the Sagaing Uprising of 1910
THIS paper examines the British reaction to a rebellion which took place in the Sagaing district of Upper Burma in November 1910. This occurred twenty-five years after the British annexation of the kingdom of Upper Burma and the deposition of King Thibaw, the last monarch of the Konbaung dynasty. It...Ashton, S. R.
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The beginnings of Hebrew printing in Egypt
COMPARATIVELY little scholarly interest has been taken in Hebrew printing in the Islamic World, even though some of the Jews who fled there following their expulsion from Spain in 1492 and from Portugal in 1497 brought with them their printing presses and equipment. These refugees and other exiles who settled...Rowland-Smith, Diana
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Journal article
Edward William Lane and his Arabic-English 'Thesaurus'
AMONG interesting material that came to light when Oriental Collections (then Oriental Manuscripts and Printed Books) moved from the British Museum building to Store Street in 1981 was a large brown paper parcel containing some notebooks. This was immediately identified as part of the work of the Arabic scholar Edward...Stocks, Peter
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Kaempfer's album of famous sights of seventeenth-century Japan
WITHIN the covers of a large and weighty album bound in western style and preserved in The (Western) Manuscript Collections of the British Library (Add. MS. 5252; bearing Sloane's old classification 'Bibliothecae Sloanianae Min. 47') are to be found three groups of curiously varied material. The first consists of a...Brown, Yu-Ying
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The Harley family and the Harley papers
IN 1759 John Dalrymple of Cranstoun, a Scottish observer of British politics, wrote that the English 'bore two very low men Lord Oxford [Robert Harley] and Lord Orford [Sir Robert Walpole] long to reign over them, who had nothing but their own abilitys and their princes favour to support them,...Jones, Clyve
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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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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