eBLJ 2011

The Journal is published continuously throughout the year, with one volume per year. Articles undergo production as soon as they are ready, to ensure minimal delays in publication.

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The Metamorphoses of a Late Fifteenth-Century Psalter (Harl. MS. 1892)
(2011)
Yvard, Catherine
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 Martin Schongauer. The original content of the manuscript has thus been enhanced and re-shaped through a process of customization and recycling, which was not uncommon practice in England at the time, as it can also be observed in the so-called Hours of the Earls of Ormond (Harl. 2887).
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Advising France through the Example of England: Visual Narrative in the Livre de la prinse et mort du roy Richart (Harl. MS. 1319)
(2011)
Hedeman, Anne D.
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 the visual narrative of Harl. MS. 1319 both as it interacts with Creton’s text and as it resonated with members of the highly visually cultured French courtly audience. After analysing the textual structure of Creton’s unusual combination of verse and prose, this article suggests that the images were planned both to reinforce its eyewitness character and to place special emphasis on the absence of legitimate kingship in England after Richard’s deposition. At a moment in the early fifteenth century when the French king was ineffectual and civil unrest was brewing, Richard’s downfall offered a powerful example to the French aristocracy.
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Humfrey Wanley and the Harley Collection
(2011)
Jackson, Deirdre
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 eighteenth-century Europe. However, Wanley’s interest in the visual arts, particularly the pictorial content of illuminated manuscripts, has not been widely acknowledged. This aspect of Wanley’s intellectual development is explored in the present article, set against the larger context of the many and varied activities in which the indefatigable Wanley engaged, most significantly the acquisition and cataloguing of manuscripts for the Harleys.
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The Progress of the Text: The Papers of J. G. Ballard at the British Library
(2011)
Beckett, Chris
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 Company. Ballard’s many short stories, including The Atrocity Exhibition, are not present in the archive, although the papers include an unpublished story, in draft, set in Vermilion Sands. The archive is a rich textual resource, spanning synopses to final texts, which reveals the decisions of composition and indicates the development of Ballard’s distinctive prose style. The article discusses the process of composition, illustrated by textual examples, with particular reference to passages from the autograph manuscript of Empire of the Sun.
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Beyond the Template: Aesthetics and Meaning in the Images of the Roman d'Alexandre en prose in Harley MS. 4979
(2011)
Pérez-Simon, Maud
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 aesthetic imperatives. Iconographically, a stable program of images was likewise established from the onset. As can be expected from such an illumination-laden text, some variants arose. From all the Roman manuscripts, three are more or less related to one and other iconographically, and can be isolated as a group: Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett 78.C.I, Brussels, Bibliothèque Royale 11040 and London, British Library Harley 4979, all of which date from the late thirteenth or the beginning of the fourteenth century, and were likely made in Flanders. By acknowledging and privileging the iconographic affinities of these three manuscripts, a closer examination of the variants within the illumination cycle that unites them can prove fruitful in reconsidering the relationship between text and images. Harley 4979 proves an attentive reading of either the Historia or the Roman text. Furthermore, the coherence within these illustrative changes provoke a subtle reshuffling of the character of Alexander that ultimately underscores the exemplary nature of his behaviour and transforms, through the text-image relationship, an otherwise historico-mythical reading into that of a miroir de prince concerned with governance and jurisprudence.
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The Harleys as Collectors
(2011)
Harris, Frances
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; for it was from them that he derived a strong sense of his puritan heritage and of the role of his family in maintaining and defending its parliamentary institutions. His acquisition under Queen Anne of the collections of a notable succession of parliamentarians, Protestant champions, historians, heralds and antiquaries is in keeping with these inherited priorities, and for Harley, by this time a distinguished and learned Speaker of the House of Commons, the collection which he kept at his house in York Buildings off the Strand was also a working one. Further motives for collection-building were status, particularly in competition with Whig magnates and political opponents such as Charles Spencer, 3rd Earl of Sunderland, and, especially as the main responsibility passed to Humfrey Wanley and Robert Harley’s son Edward, the establishment of the major public collection which London so conspicuously lacked.
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Harley MS. 3469: Splendor Solis or Splendour of the Sun – A German Alchemical Manuscript
(2011)
Và¶llnagel, Jà¶rg
‘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 history of this codex, which is dated 1582, can actually traced back to south-eastern Germany at the beginning of the sixteenth century – back, in other words, to the region and era of the great masters of the German Renaissance such as Albrecht Dà¼rer, Hans Holbein the Younger and Lucas Cranach the Elder. Neither the author nor the commissioner of the Splendor Solis is known to us. Nevertheless, there is much that can be said about the conditions surrounding the production of the illuminated manuscript: we know of numerous sources that were drawn upon by both the text and the illustrations, which were to have a lasting effect. In looking carefully at the iconography we may gain a closer insight into the origins of the Splendor Solis which in turn leads us to an attribution of the original miniatures, followed by a brief discussion of the concept underlying the codex, which aspired from the very beginning to become the most beautiful of all illuminated alchemical manuscripts.
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'In this signe thou shalt ouercome hem alle': Visual Rhetoric and Yorkist Propaganda in Lydgate's Fall of Princes (Harl. MS. 1766)
(2011)
Pittaway, Sarah
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. Juxtaposing famous and infamous rulers, this rhetoric highlights the qualities necessary to be a good ruler. This concern with kingship is also intrinsically linked to motifs found in Yorkist rolls and genealogies that circulated during the early years of Edward IV’s reign which focused on the legitimacy of his claim to the throne through lineage, divine approbation and chivalric and martial right. This paper traces the links between the persons and ideals embodied both in these propagandist texts and Harl. MS. 1766, arguing that these links are a direct result of the probable patronage of the manuscript by the Tyrell family, an East Anglian gentry family whose names appear on the manuscript’s flyleaves. Commissioned as a direct response to their position as supporters of a deposed regime, Harl. MS. 1766 represents a political re-envisaging of the text designed for patrons seeking to realign themselves politically and ensure their safety in Yorkist England.
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The Printed Books of the Cotton Family and Their Dispersal: Additions
(2011)
Tite, Colin G. C.
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 previously unnoticed books with Cotton provenances.
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The Westminster Tournament Challenge (Harley 83 H 1) and Thomas Wriothesley's Workshop
(2011)
Walker, Alison Tara
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 after the tournament by the workshop of Thomas Wriothesley, Garter King of Arms. The roll illustrates the tournament’s festivities and depicts notable families who attended the event. The British Library’s Harley Collection contains another, less studied, remnant of the Westminster Tournament: the formal Challenge (Harley 83 H 1). The Challenge describes the events that took place during the tournament, puts forth the rules of the Tournament in the form of a charter, and outlines the allegorical structure of the Burgundian-style Tournament. The present article focuses on the Westminster Tournament Challenge and suggests that the Challenge was created by Wriothesley’s workshop and, in part, written by Wriothesley himself. It compares decorations in the Challenge to those found in the Tournament Roll and also examines extant examples of Wriothesley’s script to the hand that wrote the Challenge, and comments on the hand’s distinctive features. Further, this article shows the Challenge was displayed and used during the tournament itself, making Harley 83 H 1 an important extant record of the ways in which challenges were used in the Tudor period.
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eBLJ 2011

eBLJ 2011

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