A detailed project to catalogue around 100 early modern manuscripts in Queens’ College Library is drawing to its close. This exhibition presents some of the most intriguing and significant items to have been covered by the project. Highlights include a sixteenth-century diplomat’s description of Russia, exercises written by students for their tutors in the seventeenth century, and a copy of a work by Cicero which was found under a bathroom floor in the President’s Lodge in the 1980s. These and other exhibits will offer visitors vivid insights into the life of the College in the early modern period, interspersed with glimpses of the wider world which awaited many of its graduates.
The exhibition will then be open on weekdays (1.30pm-4.30pm), initially from 12 March-4 April (as part of Cambridge Festival), and then from 28 April-9 May after which it will be available to view by appointment for the remainder of Easter Term. Access is via the first floor of the War Memorial Library.
Thursday 30 January 5.30 pm [note time], Board Room, Faculty of English Satoko Tokunaga (Keio), ‘Hagiographies in Transit: Caxton’s Golden Legend and its Materialities’
Thursday 27 February, 5 pm, Board Room, Faculty of English Alessandro Bianchi (University Library), ‘Bookbinding, Bibliophilia, and a Passion for Japan: The Collection of Eugène Gillet (1859–1938)’
Thursday 6 March, 5 pm, Board Room, Faculty of English Katharina Boehm (Passau), ‘“Pageants of Pasteboard and Buckram”: Antiquarian Practices and the Historical Imagination in the Long Eighteenth Century’
[This seminar will be run jointly with the Eighteenth Century and Romantic Studies seminar]
Faculty of English, University of Cambridge, first floor foyer
An exhibition of work by the artist Chloe Steele as part of a collaborative project investigating the use of printed forms. Generously funded by a Judith E. Wilson Fund Practice-Led Research Award. For more information, see www.chloesteele.com and https://www.english.cam.ac.uk/cmt/projects.
The exhibition and project will be launched at the Centre for Material Texts research seminar on 28th November 2024 (5pm, Board Room, Faculty of English, University of Cambridge).
Back in 2019, I used this blog to raise the possibility that a copy of the First Folio of Shakespeare’s plays, held in the Free Library of Philadelphia, might bear annotations in the hand of the poet John Milton. The tantalising notes, often taking the form of tiny textual corrections and scratchy brackets in the margins, had just been analysed in detail for the first time by a scholar at Penn State, Claire M. L. Bourne, and her dating and description made it look as if a Miltonic provenance was a distinct possibility. Thanks to digital technology and in particular social media, you can now get instant responses to even the wildest propositions, and within a few hours I made contact with Claire and floated the idea with the wider academic community. I received rapid confirmation that this was more than just a viable idea–it was actually true. Claire and I spent the Covid lockdown giving online talks about the volume, and last year we published an article describing it in detail, in the journal Milton Quarterly.
Fast forward to 2024 and another book from Milton’s library has resurfaced, which I’ve not yet had time to discuss here. At the end of March, scholars from Arizona State University hosted a Research Forum at the public library in Phoenix, with the aim of exploring a collection of books bequeathed to the library in 1958 by Alfred Knight, a real estate magnate and philanthropist. Among Knight’s books was a copy of Holinshed’s Chronicles (1587), a gargantuan work that charted the histories of England, Scotland and Ireland from their mythical origins through to the present day. And among the scholars present were Aaron T. Pratt (curator at the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin), and the aforementioned Claire M. L. Bourne. Aaron spotted some marginalia that roused his suspicions; Claire took a look and confirmed those suspicions; and then Claire sent me some images to see if I agreed. The identification was relatively easy for us to authenticate, not just because of the handwriting, but also because Milton took detailed notes from his reading of Holinshed in his Commonplace Book (Add. MS 36354), now in the British Library. It was immediately clear that there were strong connections between the marks in the book and the notes. Here, for example, is an excerpt from the Commonplace Book, in which Milton collects evidence that kings of England (unlike American Presidents?) are not above the law. A few lines down he reports that the Empress Maud, failing to revoke the laws of the Norman invaders, lost the support of Londoners and with it her claim to the crown. And beneath that is the section of Holinshed from which he gleans this information, marked with a marginal bracket.
The match is by no means 1:1, but there are so many cases where the Holinshed ties up with the Commonplace Book evidence in this way that there can be no doubt that the annotator is Milton.
That said, there are so many annotations in this enormous book that it is going to take some time for us to process them and to work out they have to tell us about Milton’s reading practices. We published a preliminary account in the Times Literary Supplement in May; in that piece, the star exhibit was a photograph which shows Milton censoring his Holinshed by running a line across a passage which described how Arlete/Herleva, the mother of William the Conqueror, behaved when she was summoned to the bed of the Duke of Normandy. In the margins, he added a critical note: ‘An unbecoming tale for a history and as pedlerly expresst’ (or something like that–his words were cropped when the book was rebound). ‘John Milton was a prude‘ was how the story was covered in the online Daily Mail, offering news that may not have come as a huge shock to readers of Comus and Paradise Lost. Other images that we used in the article showed Milton citing other texts he had read, including Edmund Spenser’s View of the State of Ireland and ‘the booke of Provenzall poets’, i.e. Jean de Nostredame’s Les vies des plus célèbres et anciens poètes provençaux (1575), a book that was not previously known to be on his shelves.
We thought we had found the juiciest images to illustrate our article, but we missed one that might just turn out to be the juiciest of all. This is the woodcut initial ‘I’ that kicks off the Preface to the second bound volume of the Chronicles. As you can see, it depicts Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, with the newly-created world all around them. But what is being covered up by that big black mark up in the sky to the left?
The answer is, of course, that it is God, as you can see by contrasting this version of the same letter, from a copy of the 1587 Chronicles at the Harry Ransom:
So what exactly is that black splodge doing, covering up God? The answer is, almost certainly, that this is another act of censorship. Protestants objected to the visual depiction of God, viewing it as an incitement to idolatry, and from the early sixteenth century (in a process documented by the historian Margaret Aston), pictorial representations were frequently replaced with the tetragrammaton, the four Hebrew letters for the God of Israel: YHWH. Holinshed’s image offended against a widespread prohibition; hence its vigorous correction in this copy.
The next question is: so who did the correcting, and was it Milton? In a recent article entitled ‘Milton among the Iconoclasts’ (in Depledge et al., eds, Making Milton: Print, Authorship, Afterlives [2021]), Antoinina Bevan Zlatar surveys the poet’s lifelong engagement with iconoclasm (at its most conspicuous in his prose work attacking the veneration of the executed Charles I, Eikonoklastes), but suggests that Milton did not adopt the extreme puritan position on the depiction of the deity. In Paradise Lost, Milton permits his God to have the kind of human features that he given in Scripture; this is a God who can be said to sit on a throne, and to have an eye that he can bend down to view his works. That said, Zlatar also reminds us that Milton casts God the Father as invisible, ‘throned inaccessible’ in a blaze of glory, and presents the Son as the visible form of the Father. So perhaps he did have difficulties with too defined and delimited an image of God, as ‘an old man sitting in heaven on a throne with a sceptre in his hand’ (to quote the contemptuous description of the puritan William Perkins). Determining the date and the origins of that smudge of black ink in the Holinshed will be tricky, perhaps requiring non-invasive pigment analysis. At this stage we can only say: it could be Milton.
“Before Copyright” examines the long-term history of printing privileges from a cross-disciplinary perspective. The intimate relationship between legal frameworks and the politics of knowledge is the primary focus of the project.
We invite applications for PhD research on any aspect of the history of printing privileges in the period 1500-1800.
Potential candidates may wish to focus on a particular period, person, archive, or location. For example, one might consider political alliances and conflicts, but also scientific and commercial networks, media strategies and censorship, or the cultural dynamics of specific places in a globalizing world. Applicants are expected to state in their project proposal why they have chosen a particular approach and what sources they intend to use (e.g. printed literature, engravings, court records, maps, newspapers, chancellery archives, etc.). Preference may be given to projects on France and Scandinavia, and to projects dealing with the (legal) Enlightenment.
The selected candidate will be affiliated with the faculty’s organized research training. The academic work is to result in a doctoral thesis that will be defended at the Faculty with a view to obtaining the degree of PhD. The successful candidate is expected to join the existing research milieu or network and contribute to its development. Read more about the doctoral degree.
The appointment is for a duration of 3 years. All PhD Candidates who submit their doctoral dissertation for assessment with a written recommendation from their supervisor within 3 years or 3 ½ years after the start of their PhD position, will be offered, respectively, a 12 or 6 month Completion Grant.
The expected start date for the position is between October and December 2024.
The London Rare Books School is offering a new full-day course on the movable book, hosted at Cambridge University Library. Using the library’s extensive collections, the course traces the history and varied uses of movable features, from early modern spinning volvelles and flap anatomies to Victorian toy books, elaborate pop-ups and contemporary artists’ books. It considers how these interactive pages with their tabs and flaps, wheels and string, might reframe the concept of reading, highlighting a long history of embodied, tactile interactions with the book.
Thursday 15 February, 5.30 pm, Board Room, Faculty of English
Dahlia Porter (Glasgow)
‘The 18th-century Illustrated Catalogue: List Logics, Identical Objects, Epistemic Images?’
This seminar will be held in association with the Eighteenth Century and Romantic Studies Graduate Seminar. For a Teams link, please email the convenors: 18cRcambridge@gmail.com (links will be provided shortly before the seminar begins).
Thursday 7 March, 5 pm [display available for viewing from 4.30 pm], Milstein Seminar Room, University Library
Irene Fabry-Tehranchi (Cambridge University Library)
‘French and English caricatures of the Franco-Prussian war (1870) at Cambridge University Library’
The next event in the Cambridge Bibliographical Society’s calendar takes place on Thursday 1st February (5.00-6.00pm) in the Milstein Room at the University Library. [NB THIS TALK HAS BEEN POSTPONED DUE TO UNITE STRIKE ACTION]
Dr Clarck Drieshen and Dr Sarah Gilbert, Project Cataloguers on Curious Cures in Cambridge Libraries, will present case studies arising from the Wellcome-funded conservation, digitisation, cataloguing and transcription project, which – led by Dr James Freeman – is enhancing the discoverability of medieval medical recipes in 187 manuscripts across 14 collections in Cambridge.
Sarah will discuss the manuscript collecting, curating, and donating practices of Roger Marchall (d. 1477), fellow of Peterhouse and doctor to the royal household, and will share examples of his unusual approach to ‘perfecting’ the books in his possession. Clarck will talk about collections of medical recipes that contain references to places, patients, and medical practitioners, and how cataloguing such ‘receptaria’ in detail can reveal new insights about their origins.
A selection of manuscripts from the project will be on show from 4.45pm and briefly after the talk.
Those interested in attending are asked to e-mail Liam Sims (ls457).
Applications are invited for an Open-Oxford-Cambridge AHRC DTP-funded Collaborative Doctoral Award at the University of Cambridge, in partnership with the British Library.
This fully-funded studentship is available from October 2024. Further details about the value of an Open-Oxford-Cambridge AHRC DTP award are available on the DTP’s studentships page.
Closing date: 4 January 2024.
This Collaborative Doctoral Award would give you the opportunity to investigate the culture of female religious communities in the Middle Ages, through a study of their surviving manuscripts. Medieval women living together in monasteries and other kinds of convent communities owned or produced an astonishing number and variety of manuscripts. These include literary works in poetry and prose, archive and record books, music manuscripts, financial and administrative accounts, maps, books for religious services, paintings in the form of manuscript illumination, documents such as charters, and sculpture in the form of seal impressions.
We are inviting applicants to propose a project that explores any aspect of women’s conventual life, with the specific aim of bringing together kinds of sources that have rarely been discussed in combination. The themes and structure of the project are entirely open, provided the proposal is interdisciplinary and combines different types of manuscripts—broadly defined, as above—in novel, creative, and productive ways. At least some element of your research should concern institutions in the British Isles, but the project as a whole may be comparative. In your proposal, you would aim to draw principally on the British Library’s collections (although we understand that some research in other collections will almost certainly be inevitable). Some indication of the BL’s holdings can be found on these sites:
The British Library has one of the world’s most extensive and diverse collections of manuscripts from medieval women’s communities. In your research for this project, you would work on these collections alongside the BL’s curatorial staff, and undertake specialised training at both the BL and at Cambridge, where you would be part of a large and collegial community of medievalists in a wide range of fields. The British Library is currently developing a major exhibition, Medieval Women, which is due to open in October 2024. Starting your doctoral research just as the exhibition is opening, you will be able to develop a close familiarity with the display, support the programme of private views and visits to the exhibition, and build on its research findings.
The Cambridge supervisor is Dr Jessica Berenbeim, University Lecturer in Literature and Visual Culture at the Faculty of English. The British Library supervisor is Dr Eleanor Jackson, Curator of Illuminated Manuscripts in Western Heritage Collections.
We welcome applications from candidates of all backgrounds and ethnicities who have an interest in any field of Medieval Studies. Applicants should meet the eligibility criteria for Open-Oxford-Cambridge AHRC studentships. Should you have any questions, or for an informal discussion about how you might approach the CDA project, you are welcome to contact Dr Jessica Berenbeim at jb455@cam.ac.uk and Dr Eleanor Jackson at ellie.jackson@bl.uk.
You should apply to the PhD in English by 4 January 2024 (midday, UK time), indicate your interest in being considered for an Open-Oxford-Cambridge AHRC DTP studentship and submit a completed copy of the OOC DTP Application Form at the same time. Please see the advert on the Cambridge jobs site.
