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This article and checklist present the contents of the Spencer Album of Marcantonio Raimondi prints, long considered to be lost. By examining its composition and tracing its provenance from the Spencer collection at Althorp House to the John Rylands Library, Manchester, we offer new insight into how attitudes toward Marcantonio Raimondi‘s work evolved during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, particularly in Great Britain. Our article also explores Victorian collecting practices and the importance of the graphic arts for Mrs Rylands‘s vision for the Library to be dedicated to her late husband‘s memory.
The John Rylands Library is an outstanding example of neo-Gothic architecture, and is without parallel in Britain as a memorial library. This article situates the Library‘s foundation at the close of the nineteenth century within the economic and cultural development of Manchester, the worlds first industrial city, and within wider trends in library history. Enriqueta Rylands‘s aims in establishing the Library are analysed, as well as her influence on the design and construction of the building. The article includes a detailed examination of the iconography of the building and the innovative use of building services technology designed to protect the remarkable collections that were amassed by Mrs Rylands. Later developments are also treated, including the most recent ‘Unlocking the Rylands’ project, 2000-07.
Postcolonial theory has yielded productive methodologies with which to examine an institution such as the John Rylands Library. This paper reinterprets aspects of the Library‘s history, especially its collecting practices, using Bhabha‘s concept of hybridity. The Library‘s founder, Enriqueta Rylands, embodied hybridity and colonial talking back in her remarkable trajectory from a Catholic upbringing in Cuba, via her conversion to Nonconformity and her marriage to Manchester‘s most successful cotton manufacturer, to her usurpation of the cultural hegemony in purchasing spectacular aristocratic collections for her foundation. Hybridity was embedded in many other aspects of the Library‘s development: it was established as a public library with a board of governors but its collections were largely shaped by Enriqueta‘s tastes and interests; it was independent until 1972, while maintaining very close links to the University of Manchester; it has always fulfilled a dual remit of addressing the research needs of scholars and attracting wider audiences; and it is simultaneously a library of printed books and manuscripts, an archive repository, and a gallery of visual materials.
This article examines cuttings from a now-lost manuscript decorated by the little-known Florentine illuminator Littifredi Corbizzi (1465–c.1515) at the turn of the sixteenth century. This manuscript, a choirbook produced for the monks at San Benedetto in Gubbio in 1499–1503, was dismembered in the nineteenth century. Until now, all but one of its cuttings were believed to be lost. Through the emergence of several key pieces of evidence, most notably the identification of tracings of the manuscript made by the German artist Johann Anton Ramboux in the mid-1830s before its dismemberment, I have been able to link definitively three initials to this largely unresearched commission. Two of these are in a previously unstudied manuscript album at the John Rylands Library, recently digitised. Considering the cuttings stylistically and, critically, interrogating their provenance, I propose that a further ten cuttings can also be linked to Littifredi’s work for the monastery, and argue that Ramboux played a significant role in their initial collection.
The John Rylands Library houses one of the finest collections of rare books, manuscripts and archives in the world. The collections span five millennia and cover a wide range of subjects, including art and archaeology; economic, social, political, religious and military history; literature, drama and music; science and medicine; theology and philosophy; travel and exploration. For over a century, the Bulletin of the John Rylands Library has published research that complements the Library's special collections.
Within the holdings of The University of Manchesters John Rylands Library is a remarkable collection of 337 letters to and from Baptist ministers and laypersons written between 1741 and 1907. Nearly half (165) can be found among the autograph collections of Thomas Raffles (1788-1863), Liverpool Congregationalist minister and educator, with another 103 letters belonging to the collections of the Methodist Archives. John Sutcliff (1752-1814), Baptist minister at Olney and an early leader within the Baptist Missionary Society, was the recipient of more than seventy of these,letters. Among the correspondents are the leading Baptist and Congregationalist ministers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Although largely unknown today, these letters provide important insights into British Baptist history between 1740 and 1900, establishing the John Rylands Library,as a valuable resource for Baptist historians.
This article proposes that Manchester, John Rylands Library, Latin MS 165 was an ‘accessory text’ produced and gifted within the Tudor court and passed down by matrilineal transmission within the influential Fortescue family. It proposes that from the text’s conception, the book of devotions participated in various projects of self-definition, including Henry VII’s campaign for the canonisation of his Lancastrian ancestor, Henry VI. By analysing visual and textual evidence, it posits that later female owners imitated the use of marginal spaces by the book’s original scribe and illuminator. Finally, it traces the book’s ownership back from its acquisition by the John Rylands Library to the viscounts Gage, in whose custody the book underwent a transformation from potentially subversive tool of female devotion to obscure historical artefact.
Alex Sanders (1926–88), one of the founders of modern pagan witchcraft in the UK, worked briefly at the John Rylands Library in 1962 as a book duster before being dismissed for ‘neglect of his duties’. The full circumstances were more complex, and although Sanders is now the subject of an article in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography the episode has never been fully investigated. This article makes use of all relevant sources, including unpublished records at the John Rylands Library, books damaged by Sanders, and interviews with former staff, to establish what happened and what bearing the events had on Sanders’s future career as an occultist and propagator of pagan witchcraft.
In 1954 and 1958 the John Rylands Library acquired a significant portion of the library of Dr Moses Gaster (1856–1939). As a scholar and bibliophile, Gaster collected manuscripts, printed books, pamphlets and amulets. His collection reflects his wide ranging interests: philology (including Romanian language, folklore and literature), Judaica, magic and mysticism, and Samaritan studies. This article presents a survey of the varied Rylands Gaster collection. It includes an inventory of the miscellaneous manuscript sequence, a complete handlist of Gaster‘s German manuscripts and an introduction to the archival material.
This paper analyses an unpublished Dutch-language Book of Hours in the John Rylands Library, focusing on unusual core texts the manuscript contains and distinctive features of its cycle of illumination. The miniatures and the richly painted decoration of the manuscript can be attributed to the Master of the Haarlem Bible and dated c.1450–75. The inserted full-page miniatures include iconographically noteworthy examples, and the placement of some in the volume is anomalous, suggesting that they may not have been planned when the volume was written. Our analyses of distinctive texts and images of the manuscript lead us to offer suggestions about the religious status or affiliations of its patron and to propose possible monastic settings in which it might have been used. We discuss the disparate character of its textual and illustrative components in relation to current reappraisals of the organisation of manuscript production in the Northern Netherlands.