eBLJ 2022

Collection Details

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English

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Facts, Fictions, and Fascism: A Life of Actor Mary Taviner (1909-1972)
(2022)
St John-McAlister, Michael
Despite an acting career spanning both silent film and talkies, as well as London and regional theatre, Mary Taviner was not a household name. In fact she attracted more press coverage for her political views, being an active fascist from the 1930s to the 1960s. She fell in with, and later fell out with, both Oswald Mosley and William Joyce, also known as Lord Haw Haw, and attempted to maintain the extreme right as a force in her corner of west London. The bizarre claims she made about her ancestry and lineage, and of being the reincarnation of a Scottish queen, also interested the press, and kept her in the public eye. Perhaps she hoped these tall tales would render her more interesting to producers and directors. Yet, after this fascinating life she died in relative obscurity, not even garnering an obituary in the film and theatre world’s main journal, and until now she has been little more than a passing mention, a footnote, in the history of the far right. However, as this article shows, beyond the amusement raised by the eccentricity and the myth-making, her life sheds light on the fringes of the acting world and the local operation of right-wing extremism over thirty years.
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A Gold Girdle Book and its Connection with Anne Boleyn
(2023-02-20)
Jackson, Eleanor
The miniature prayer book with the shelfmark Stowe MS. 956 has long attracted attention because of a story associating it with Anne Boleyn. According to an oft-repeated account, this tiny girdle book with a gold metalwork binding was handed by Anne to one of her maids of honour on the scaffold at her execution in 1536. Through examination of eighteenth and nineteenth century sources, this article demonstrates how the story originated. In the process, it untangles the history of the manuscript from that of another sixteenth-century gold girdle book, an heirloom of the Wyatt family. The findings clearly disprove the connection with Anne Boleyn, while alternative evidence suggests a more probable original owner for the volume.
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British Library Additional Manuscript 8537 as a Source for Florentine/Pisan University History
(2022)
Rossi, Elena
British Library Additional Manuscript 8537 contains a selection of statutes related to the university of Florence and Pisa from the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. The manuscript was originally produced to specifically document rulings between the institution and Florentine government, suggesting it may have been a personal vademecum of a Florentine official. Over time, it evolved into a referencing guide for other university and government administrators, as exemplified by updates to its contents and the inclusion of finding aids. There are also statutes included that have not been detailed elsewhere, including Armando Verde’s collection of documents related to the Florentine Studio. Through closer examination of its contents and context, the manuscript reveals itself to be an untapped resource for not only Italian university history, but also university archival practice. The present article sheds light on the treasures of Add. MS. 8537, facilitating its introduction into the broader history of the Studium.
5 4
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The London Stage 1660-1800: A Short History, Retrospective Anatomy, and Projected Future
(2023-02-20)
Hume, Robert D.
The London Stage, 1660-1800, a day-by-day performance calendar spanning 140 years, was for its time a magnificent achievement published in eleven volumes (1960-1968 [recte 1970]) running to 1058 pages of introductory matter and 7182 pages of text, plus 672 pages of volume indexes. A one-volume cumulative index compiled from scratch totalling 979 pages finally appeared in 1979. The London Stage remains fundamental to scholarship and criticism in this period, though few users are aware that it suffers from dire problems and inconsistencies, and the 1979 Index compiled by Ben Ross Schneider, Jr is an utter disaster. Part 1 (1660-1700) was credited to William Van Lennep, though he never contributed anything to the project, and he turns out to have concealed major sources at Harvard from his collaborators that went unused. None of the editors made any use of important government documents in the Public Record Office, so Chancery lawsuits (a very rich source) and regulatory documentation in the Lord Chamberlain’s records went entirely ignored. Little attention was paid to the publication of plays, and almost none to surviving manuscripts. The many surviving promptbooks were almost totally ignored. Attention to music, dance, and opera was pathetically sketchy and inadequate. Helpful though the five ‘Part’ Introductions are in many ways, they are narrow and shallow, not even making obvious use of the old British Museum Catalogue of Printed Books. These defects and deficiencies notwithstanding, the 1960s calendar served as a crucial foundation for major later scholarship. Publication of such resources as the Highfill-Burnim-Langhans 16-volume Biographical Dictionary of Actors, Actresses, Musicians, Dancers, Managers, and Other Stage Personnel in London, 1660-1800 (1973-1993), Milhous and Hume’s Vice Chamberlain Coke’s Theatrical Papers 1706-1715 (1982), and Pierre Danchin’s monumental 15-volume edition of Prologues and Epilogues 1660-1776 (1981-2001) have added enormously to our knowledge of theatrical practice and regulation in London. Daunting as the enterprise admittedly must be, a re-do of the entire project is clearly necessary – economically unthinkable in a world of physical print, but now feasible in a world of electronic databases.
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A Sense of Place: The ‘London’ Cityscapes of BL, Royal MS. 13 A. III
(2022-05-24)
Chunko-Dominguez, Betsy
The British Library, Royal MS. 13 A. III, containing a copy of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britannie, was likely produced in southeast England in or around London between the late thirteenth century and the first quarter of the fourteenth century. The only manuscript with an extended series of illustrations, it contains a number of bas-de-page cityscape drawings. Two such drawings are examined here: those found on folio 14r and folio 28v, respectively. The present article argues that the artist of these marginal illustrations was based in London, and that the two cityscapes under analysis most likely represent London itself and Caerleon as influenced by the artist’s own familiarity with London. The drawings are of particular interest in that they suggest at least some of the considerations artists of the era brought to the task of creating geographical and structural representations. As such, this article also explores the nature of these cityscape drawings to contextualize them as, alternately, real and ‘archetypal’ urban spaces.
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Selected English Masonic Bookbindings
(2022-09-22)
Marks, P. J. M.
Books as artefacts, as well as the texts that they contain, play a fundamental role in English freemasonry. The esteem in which they were held is shown in paintings. This detail comes from a portrait of freemason Dr Robert Crucefix (1797-1850) who is shown with significant items of regalia as well as the masonic bindings. Bound Bibles, masonic texts, minute books or accounts ledgers were often given lavish decoration and were frequently presented as gifts to brother freemasons and to the lodges themselves. Donors paid for the most costly leather they could afford (commonly grained goatskin or calf or cheaper leathers made to resemble them) and specified particular types of ornamentation, such as gold tooled masonic motifs or lettering with the donor’s and recipient’s masonic membership details.
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Orwell’s Political Pamphlet ‘Solar System’: A Network Interpretation of a British Library Collection
(2022-09-22)
Treacher, Claudia
This article examines the network of publishers, authors and topics included in George Orwell’s Collection of Political Pamphlets at the British Library (shelfmark 1899.ss.1-49.), some of which were catalogued as part of a Ph.D. placement in 2019. It explores how the pamphlets came to be held at the British Library, what cataloguing of the pamphlets has previously taken place, and how the pamphlets offer an insight into the political print culture of the 1930s and 1940s. Most importantly, this article will argue that Orwell’s collection reveals the networks of political print culture of the early twentieth-century in Britain.
4 2
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Italian Futurist Books (1909-1944) at the British Library
(2023-02-20)
Mirabella, Valentina
The Futurist book was instrumental in the circulation of Futurist ideas and represents a very experimental phase in book production, paving the way for the book object, the artist’s book, advertising and design. The purpose of this article is to produce a survey of the Italian Futurist collections held at the British Library. The survey, arranged by date of acquisition, is a tool for studying the circulation of Italian Futurist books in the UK.
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American Political Pamphlets 1917-1945 at the British Library
(2022-09-22)
Collins, Jodie
The twentieth century was a golden age of pamphleteering in America, especially during the period between the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the conclusion of the Second World War in 1945. Pamphlets were vital tools for radical organizations in educating and communicating with their own members and persuading the public of the righteousness of their cause. Though some pamphlets could be obtained free of charge, they were usually sold at a low cost. Among the many modern pamphlets held by the British Library is a modest assortment of American political pamphlets, which have been collated to help researchers and the public to more easily discover and engage with this fascinating material.
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Sir Hans Sloane’s Books: Seventy Years of Research
(2022-12-16)
Walker, Alison
The library of Sir Hans Sloane (1660-1753), became one of the foundations of the British Museum, but was dispersed among other collections within the Museum, and for over 250 years it has not been possible to view it as a whole. The Sloane Printed Books Project aims to provide a virtual reconstruction of this library. The project’s progress and its findings are outlined, and suggestions made for further lines of investigation.
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eBLJ 2022

eBLJ 2022

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