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In our time of increasing reliance on digital media the history of the book has a special role to play in studying the codex form and the persistence of old media alongside the growth of new ones. As a contribution to recent work on the continued use of manuscript in the handpress era, I focus on some examples of manuscripts copied from printed books in the Rylands Library and discuss the motivations for making them. Some of these manuscripts were luxury items signalling wealth and prestige, others were made for practical reasons – to own a copy of a book that was hard to buy, or a copy that could be customized in the process of copying. The act of copying itself was also considered to have devotional and/or pedagogical value.
5 Epigrams in manuscript Though the word spoken live, the written dye; Yet that shall end, this live eternally.1 As explored in Chapter 4, individual epigrams were apt, after initial oral circulation or as ‘separates’ on paper, to be recorded in commonplace books or miscellanies that gathered a range of materials on a topic, or that included an unorganized variety of poems. This chapter examines a different sort of gathering, where the manuscript was largely limited to epigrams. These manuscripts can be divided into two main groups: those put together by a
12 Three annotated letter manuscripts: scholarly practices of religious Franks in the margin unveiled Mariken Teeuwen Annotating manuscripts was common practice in the Carolingian world. Four out of five, or maybe even nine out of ten manuscripts from the eighth, ninth and tenth centuries are annotated. Sometimes they are filled with extensive commentaries and dense interlinear glossing; sometimes we only find minute signs, a few corrections and some occasional structuring devices. It is a rarity, however, to find a completely unannotated manuscript. A
23v. 1 As we have seen in previous chapters, the surrounding herbal—typically known as the Old English Herbarium —is the first text in a manuscript compilation dedicated exclusively to the practice of medicine and provides an excellent point of access into early medieval healing at the moment of transition from what we now think of as Old to Middle English. 2 Before proceeding any further, however, I must explain that few, if any, modern readers would be likely to first encounter the Old English mandrake through the
8 The manuscript text 1r–2v 1 The Chara[c]ter of Robert Carr Earle of Salisbury. Hee came of a Parent, that counselled the state into pietie, honor and action. […] Hand P. 4-page essay, which a number of contemporary MSS ascribe to Cyril Tourneur (1575–1626), and which is printed as his in The Works of Cyril Tourneur, ed. by Allardyce Nicholl (London: Fanfrolico, 1930). [After 1612, Salisbury’s death.] 3r–6v Blank 7r 2 (Marginal note: 9-1.) Sir. Yf the memory of our old frendship remayne constant, not less’ned thorough oblivion, I thinke you will receave these
Rylands Irish MS 22 is a copy of Geoffrey Keatings Trà Biorghaoithe an Bháis (1631), made by the well-known scribe Risteard Tuibear in 1710, a professionally made vernacular book, making available for circulation a widely read devotional text. In the last two pages the scribe permitted an apprentice to copy, and as a result he had to write the ending a second time more correctly. Like several other books made by Tuibear, it belonged to Muiris Ó Gormáin in Dublin in the later eighteenth century and is found in his book lists from 1761 and 1772. Inside the front is the book-plate of the Duke of Sussex, and the catalogue of his library from 1827 shows that this is a book given to him by Sir William Betham a year earlier. When the Duke‘s library was auctioned, this was sold to a London dealer, reappearing in sales between 1866 and 1869. It was bought by the Earl of Crawford and came with all his manuscripts into the Rylands Library, where for its origin and history it stands out from a collection of books largely made for or by Denis Kelly, of Castle Kelly, in the mid-nineteenth century.
This article looks at Frances Burneys contribution to life writing through her composition, preservation and curatorship of her own personal archive and management of family papers. It charts Burneys chronic anxieties about the possible interpretation of the record that she had created, and the tension between self-expression and self-exposure which underlay her very revealing difficulties with editing, archivism and publication.
John Hall’s Latin manuscript is the one record we have of his authentic voice, even if expressed at times in the words of others. It is contained in a small notebook, measuring approximately 18 by 10 centimetres. It is now in a leather binding marked ‘British Museum’ (from around 1868, before its transfer to the British Library) with a title, ‘Case Book of Dr John Hall’, on its spine. The manuscript is complete, with no missing pages. The paper has faded to a light brown with only a few stains and blemishes. The top, bottom and sides of each page have faint
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.
Over eighty years ago, a third, previously unidentified copy of the Anglo-Norman prose chronicle, Le Livere de Reis de Engleterre(LRE),was discovered in John Rylands French MS 64. Despite this discovery, and the paucity of witnesses to this chronicle, scholars of LRE generally pass over the version contained in the John Rylands manuscript. Through an examination of the sources and variant readings of LRE, this article argues that this previously overlooked copy of LRE is more authoritative than the other two. The superiority of the John Rylands manuscript enables us to determine best text readings of LRE with improved accuracy. It also allows us to date the chronicle with greater precision than previously possible, and provides grounds for tentatively locating the origins of the chronicle to northeastern England.