British Library Journal (volume 13, number 2, autumn 1987)

British Library Journal (volume 13, number 2, autumn 1987)

Collection Details
Creator (organisation)
British Library
ISNIISNI logo
Language
English
Related collection

Settings

Now showing 1 - 6 of 6
  • Thumbnail Image
    Some of the metrics are blocked by your 
    consent settings
    Item type:Journal article,
    The Tilliot Hours: comparisons and relationships
    (1987-11)
    Backhouse, Janet
    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 did not live to fulfil. The forty-six manuscripts which the collector's widow bequeathed to the nation in 1941, together with the half-dozen volumes already in the department, represent a period of some six centuries and come from all over Europe, offering an unusual opportunity for a survey of the present state of knowledge over a very wide spectrum. The accumulation of notes and descriptions which Derek left will of course be utilized in the catalogue when it eventually appears.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Some of the metrics are blocked by your 
    consent settings
    Item type:Journal article,
    The artists of the Rutland Psalter
    (1987-11)
    Morgan, Nigel
    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 very restricted access, and was known to most scholars only through the facsimile edition prepared by Eric Millar for the Roxburghe Club in 1937. The availability of the Psalter for study in the British Library has at last enabled a detailed and prolonged examination of the book to be carried out. The black and white plates in the facsimile edition, although of excellent quality, had not made it possible to assess the number of artists involved and to describe the ways in which they divided their labour. As is often the case, the difference in use of colour clearly indicates the work of an individual artist when other aspects of the style may not, on first appearance, seem too different from the work of another hand.
      12  5
  • Thumbnail Image
    Some of the metrics are blocked by your 
    consent settings
    Item type:Journal article,
    The structure of English pre-conquest Benedictional
    (1987-11)
    Prescott, Andrew
    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 development, and printing the texts of two early benedictionals. Of all the manuscripts in the British Library's collections, the one which fascinated him most was probably the Benedictional of St à†thelwold (Add.MS. 49598) (pi. I), produced at Winchester between 971 and 984. Derek's enthusiasm for this manuscript is not surprising, given its significance in both his main areas of interest, the history of the liturgy and medieval illumination. It is the finest surviving artistic product of the great cultural revival in England during the tenth century and, after the Lindisfarne Gospels, the most important surviving English illuminated manuscript. It is also of interest as a product of the influential and imaginative liturgical reforms undertaken by St à†thelwold as Bishop of Winchester between 963 and 984. Moreover, as a manuscript commissioned by St à†thelwold for his personal use, it is a splendid illustration of one of Derek's favourite themes, the hagiographical significance of manuscripts of this kind, which are one of the best authenticated forms of saintly relic and should be venerated as such.
      4  2
  • Thumbnail Image
    Some of the metrics are blocked by your 
    consent settings
    Item type:Journal article,
    D. H. Turner (1931-1985): a portrait
    (1987-11)
    Backhouse, Janet
    ;
    Jones, Shelley
    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 offers in his memory a series of articles, each in some degree associated with material on which he himself worked during a professional career of almost twenty-nine years.
      1  7
  • Thumbnail Image
    Some of the metrics are blocked by your 
    consent settings
    Item type:Journal article,
    New light on the 'Sforziada' frontispieces of Giovan Pietro Birago
    (1987-11)
    Evans, M. L.
    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 later Turner selected both the Sforza Hours and the Grenville Library Sforziada, with its frontispiece by Birago, for the exhibition 'Renaissance Painting in Manuscripts' held in 1983-4. During the run of this exhibition a previously unknown calendar leaf from the Sforza Hours was brought to the attention of British Library staff and was purchased by the Department of Manuscripts. Turner encouraged the publication of the calendar leaf by the present writer in a recent issue of The British Library Journal (vol. xii (1986), pp. 21-7). He was also instrumental in the preparation of this essay on the Sforziada although, sadly, he did not live to see it completed.
      4  16
  • Thumbnail Image
    Some of the metrics are blocked by your 
    consent settings
    Item type:Journal article,
    Medieval and Renaissance manuscripts from the library of Sir Sydney Cockerell
    (1987-11)
    Hamel, Christopher de
    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 by my first view of a world in which a reputable manuscript curator was also a connoisseur who bought and possessed his own illuminated manuscripts. It revealed to me real manuscripts still out of captivity and gave a glimpse of the obsessive excitement of quests in pursuit of them. At the time of his death, Derek Turner had in draft a similar list of manuscripts which had belonged to Henry Yates Thompson (1839-1928). I have attempted here to record the medieval and Renaissance manuscripts from the private collection of the third great English connoisseur. Sir Sydney Cockerell (1867-1962), friend and adviser to both Millar and Yates Thompson, and the man who led several generations of manuscript enthusiasts in a kind of bibliophily that was peculiarly English. Eric Millar himself wrote that it was to be regretted that no catalogue of Cockerell's own manuscripts existed, and this article is a first attempt to fill that gap.
      2  1