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The deliberate destruction of the university library in Louvain during World War I caused an international outcry, but also elicited constructive reactions. One of the most impressive responses was the collection in England of an enormous donation of books to replace those lost, a project coordinated by the John Rylands Library in Manchester. Although the librarian, Henry Guppy, documented the donation in issues of the Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, this generous and altruistic work has received little mention in the recent scholarship on the burning of the library and its rebuilding. This article charts the development of the project and the extent of the contribution, drawing on Guppy’s publications and documents in the library archives of the University of Manchester, Oxford University and the University of Toronto. Some of the most valuable gifts from private individuals receive special attention, as do the institutional donations by the Bodleian Library and the University of Toronto.
Much has been published about John Rylands, whether during his lifetime, in response to his death, or by historians looking back. While records of his business are plentiful, archival records for the Longford estate he bought in Stretford, Lancashire in 1855, including the hall he subsequently built, were not easily found. In recent years, however, estate records have emerged with new information, suggesting others may have survived. These records prompt a reassessment of the date at which Longford Hall was built, and identify the architect as Philip Nunn. This article explores Nunn’s career, and his work as a leading architect is set in the context of the contemporary vogue for Italianate architecture, especially for warehouses. Longford Hall’s demolition in 1995 was a major loss to Longford Park, but a more positive approach to the Park’s history is in prospect, with a multi-million pound Lottery bid approved, and plans to catalogue Stretford’s building plans.
This article examines three medieval charters of the Norman abbey of Mont Saint-Michel, today preserved among the collections of the John Rylands Research Institute and Library. Rare survivors of the destruction of the abbey’s archives in 1944, these charters previously formed part of the enormous private library assembled by Sir Thomas Phillipps (1792–1872), antiquarian and bibliophile. They are here studied in detail for the first time, showcasing them not just for what they can tell us about the property to which they relate and the celebrated abbey to which it once belonged, but, more importantly, for what they reveal about the structure and organisation of the lost institutional archive of which they formed a part in the Middle Ages. This article also contextualises these charters within the wider Phillipps collection, exploring questions associated with the antiquarian practice of preserving and presenting medieval documents, a subject which has only recently begun to receive the scholarly attention it deserves.
The nature of Britain’s unreformed parliamentary electoral system has been the focus of interest and study for over two centuries. For the unreformed period, historians have identified a range of factors influencing the outcome of parliamentary elections: prevailing economic and social power structures; the nature, extent and effectiveness of electoral treating and corruption; and the role of political issues, among both the political elite and the electorate. Within these interpretations, the role of parliamentary boroughs dominated by electoral patrons has been seen as an important feature. This article considers one such borough, Newton in Lancashire. Often presented as the archetypal ‘pocket borough’, Newton’s parliamentary elections were indeed dominated by the lords of the manor, the Leghs of Lyme. The papers of this family show, however, that this electoral control was more complex than has previously been thought, and required significant electoral management by the family.
The abbey of Holy Trinity, Caen, was founded by Mathilda of Flanders, Duchess of Normandy and Queen of England, in June 1066. The abbesses of Holy Trinity are the focus of this study, especially their judicial role and their power to imprison. These rarely discussed aspects of women’s authority are revealed in Manchester, John Rylands Library, GB 133 BMC/66. Produced in 1292 at the meeting of the Exchequer at Rouen, the modest parchment reveals the existence of a prison in Ouistreham, France, under the authority of the abbesses of Holy Trinity. This article engages heretofore unexamined elements of female abbatial authority, jurisdiction and the mechanisms of justice. The preservation of BMC/66 also reflects the documentary imperatives of the women who governed Holy Trinity and fits into a broader context of memory and documentary culture.
The Laws of Oléron are a compilation of regulations concerning sea conduct drawn up in the thirteenth century in French. Copies of the text appeared in varieties of French in England and on the Continent, but it was only in the sixteenth century that the code was translated into English. Multiple issues concerning this English text are still vague. An attempt at settling some of them, such as the relationship between different exemplars and determining their French source text, has been undertaken in two recent studies. This article tries to verify whether the conclusions reached there can be corroborated with the use of mathematical methods of analysis, and to measure the correlations between the extant copies of the English translation and a group of French texts named by different researchers as the source texts for the rendition. The analysis is conducted by means of text similarity measurements using cosine similarity.
This is part II of a two-part article on the questions on the Sentences of the Servite Lorenzo Opimo of Bologna. This part focuses on the doctrine and sources of the work, which would become the theological guide for the Order by the end of the Middle Ages. An appendix offers a catalogue of the theses Lorenzo defended: conservative but also up to date at a time when radical ideas were spreading. His explicit citations suggest that he was well versed in fourteenth-century theology, citing ten theologians of the era by name as opposed to just five for the more famous thirteenth century. He also favoured Austin Friars over Franciscans and he completely ignored Dominicans, except for Thomas Aquinas. Upon closer inspection, however, and in common with some of his contemporaries, Lorenzo’s knowledge of some of these fifteen theologians was indirect via passages borrowed from the Augustinians Gregory of Rimini and Hugolino of Orvieto from the 1340s and the Franciscan Francis of Perugia, the Minorite regent master during the year in which Lorenzo lectured.
In March 1506, Machiavelli was in the Casentino when he received a letter from Agostino Vespucci in Florence. A few weeks earlier, Machiavelli had arranged for his Decennale primo – a verse history of Florence between 1494 and 1504 – to be printed by Bartolomeo de’ Libri, with Vespucci bearing the costs. It was the first of his works in print and had already met with some success. Much to Vespucci’s alarm, however, a rival printer, Andrea Ghirlandi da Pistoia, was now selling a pirated version, festooned with mistakes. This article explores how Vespucci tried to protect Machiavelli’s interests and his own investment. It shows how Vespucci successfully circumvented the lack of copyright protection by casting the pirated version as a form of defamation and exploiting both secular and ecclesiastical authorities. In doing so, it casts fresh light on the legal and commercial challenges of printing in sixteenth-century Florence.
Rylands MS French 5 is a thirteenth-century Bible picture book consisting of a single pictorial cycle depicting scenes from the Old Testament. The manuscript is remarkable for the predominance of its imagery and the erasures that selectively mar its otherwise unspoiled folios. The sites of these erasures can be categorised as evil, obscene, and divine subjects. Examining each in turn, I hope to demonstrate the importance of both the Bible picture book tradition and manuscript erasure for considerations of later medieval visuality. Where the Bible picture book encapsulates thirteenth-century confidence in the visual sense, the erasures signal the boundaries of this confidence, revealing a paradoxical mode of sight in which ocular passions merge and clash. In turn, these findings problematise attempts to theorise a homogenous thirteenth-century visuality, as different understandings of vision surfaced in the decades after the production of MS French 5 and played out in impassioned and contradictory ways on the manuscript page.
The study introduces the reader to the Aldine edition of the Greek epistolographers published by Marcus Musurus in 1499.