Last Tuesday, a gaggle of CMT members were treated to a guided tour of the Fitzwilliam’s ‘Colour’ exhibition by the curator, Stella Panayotova. Entering the dimly-lit space and seeing the greens, reds and blues that surround the meeting of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden would be a sublime experience in anyone’s book. But this exhibition is really about the meeting of art and science, and in particular the use of modern non-invasive methods to work out which pigments were used in each image. Part of the reason why this image was heading up the show was that it turned out to be concealing instructions for its own colouring. Like a painting-by-numbers, particular areas had written instructions for the colours to be employed in them. And while the manuscript is Parisian, the instructions were in Dutch, which tells you something about flows of expertise around the time of the illumination in 1414.

Such migrations of artists and materials are at the heart of the exhibition. Precious substances travelled thousands of miles along the silk road to be ground up and used in pigments; techniques such as the application of egg yolk to lend sheen to a surface migrated (perhaps) from panel painting to manuscript illumination; identifying particular rare materials in a manuscript can be used to solve mysteries about a manuscript’s provenance, to place or displace it. (The presence of smalt from ground glass in a manuscript by the ‘Murano Master’ appears to confirm that he did indeed work in that centre of glass production, however much the stylistic evidence might tell against this).

Part of the point of the exhibition is to show that a vast amount of medieval painting, particularly from northern Europe, survives between the covers of books. But this overlap between the bookish and the visual has had unfortunate consequences, since over the years many manuscripts have been broken up and mounted as wall-paintings, for display in frames. ‘Colour’ reunites a number of these scattered fragments to see what can be learnt from them, and pulls together the work of researchers at a number of institutes devoted to exploring the chemistry of manuscripts. It’s a wonderful example of what can be achieved by crossing borders, and a tribute to Stella’s infectious enthusiasm for her subject.

Attention student book-collectors!

Your chance to win £500

You can enter any type of collection provided it is solely owned by you and has been collected by you. The books do not have to be especially valuable – a collection of paperbacks, put together with imagination, is equally eligible. The contest is open to all current undergraduate and graduate students of the University of Cambridge.

The closing date for entries is the first day of Lent Full Term, Tuesday 17 January 2017

Full details of how to enter are given on the University Library website at:
http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/about-library/prizes-and-fellowships/rose-book-collecting-prize

The Gordon Duff Prize is an annual competition for an essay on any one of the following subjects: bibliography, palaeography, typography, book-binding, book-illustration, or the science of books and manuscripts and the arts relating thereto.

The Prize, which will be of the value of £500, is open to all members of the University.

To enter, candidates must submit the proposed subjects of their essays to Dr Jill Whitelock, Head of Special Collections, Cambridge University Library, Cambridge, CB3 9DR (jw330@cam.ac.uk)  so as to reach her not later than the last day of the Michaelmas Term, i.e. 19 December 2016. Candidates will be informed whether their proposed subjects are approved by the Library Syndicate after its meeting on 7 February 2017.

If the proposed subject is approved, essays, which must not exceed 10,000 words in length, must be submitted by the last day of Lent Term, 25 March 2017.

For further information see http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/about-library/prizes-and-fellowships/gordon-duff-prize.

PETER STALLYBRASS, ‘Shakespeare’s Desk’

18 November 2016, 18:15 – 19:15

The new Cambridge University Library exhibition opens today. Entitled ‘Curious Objects’, it’s a fascinating display of some of the things that the library accumulated, mostly in a period before the strict demarcation between libraries (for books) and museums (for objects) had kicked in.

Among the curiouser articles on display is a leather boot from Lithuania, which was presented to the library along with a shoe and a copy of the New Testament in Lithuanian by the widow of the translator, Tomasz Ramsaeus. Quite why she thought the library needed this footwear is not fully explained. There is also a ‘luminous trumpet’ or spirit trumpet, for use in a séance, together with some ectoplasm in the form of a ‘cloth-like substance’ (which appears to the untrained eye merely to be cloth). ‘This example was captured during a séance given by the medium Helen Duncan and is part of the archive of the Society for Psychical Research’.

For devotees of literature like me, there’s a tobacco stopper made of wood from the mulberry tree supposedly planted by Shakespeare at New Place in Stratford. The catalogue tells us that the tree was cut down by the Reverend Francis Gastrell in the 1750s because he had ‘grown tired of tourists asking to see it’. (That’s one solution to the blight of tourism). Souvenirs made from Shakespeare’s mulberry were apparently commonplace in later eighteenth-century England. A neighbouring cabinet has a beautiful silk bookmark with thirteen strings, each woven with a verse from a medieval Latin prayer to Jesus.

Those of us who suspect that the theory of evolution would not have been formulated had it not been for the proliferation of facial hair in Victorian England will have their views confirmed by another item in the exhibition: a set of cuttings from the beard and whiskers of Frank Chance, who considered himself an exception to Darwin’s rule that ‘when in man the beard differs in colour from the hair of the head … it is … invariably of a lighter tint’, and who wrote to Darwin (with enclosures) to tell him so.

Stone-age tools from Nigeria, wall-paintings from Pompeii, children’s games from Paris, slippers from South India, oracle-bones from Sumatra, spear-heads from Western Australia: there is a whole world of stuff in there. Go see!

A display of the work of J.H. Prynne is available to view on the first floor of the English Faculty, with additional materials in the Faculty Library.

Reading J.H. Prynne celebrates the poet’s role from the beginnings of the British Poetry Revival, as well as his influential part in the pedagogy of this university and the study of English abroad. The display includes poems, prose, correspondence, supervision handouts, a manuscript (facsimile), annotations, as well as responses to the work by longstanding friends and fellow poets. Of especial interest is a new poem in response to Sub Songs (London: Barque Press, 2010) written by John James, entitled On Reading J.H. Prynne’s Sub Songs (Ashburton: QoD Press, 2016), with artwork by Bruce McLean.

Other materials that are not widely available include a copy of the manuscript of Kazoo Dreamboats (Cambridge: Critical Documents, 2011), as well as the poet’s annotations to Al-Dente (Cambridge: Face Press, 2014). Both are available to be examined in the Library for the course of the display.

Reading J.H. Prynne will be on display until November.

Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, 30 July – 30 December 2016

www.fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk/colour

The COLOUR exhibition and its catalogue mark the bicentenary of the Fitzwilliam’s foundation by displaying 150 of the Museum’s illuminated manuscripts. They showcase the collection – the largest and finest museum collection of illuminated manuscripts in existence. They also celebrate the advanced research supported and inspired by the collection.

Two cross-disciplinary projects form the research platform for the COLOUR exhibition and catalogue: Cambridge Illuminations, which is publishing the 4000 illuminated manuscripts and incunabula preserved at the Fitzwilliam Museum and the Cambridge Colleges (www.fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk/research/cambridgeilluminations), and MINIARE, which employs non-invasive analytical methods to identify materials and techniques in illuminated manuscripts, and integrates scholarship in the arts, humanities, physical sciences and digital technology (http://www.miniare.org/).

The research and themes presented by the COLOUR exhibition will be explored in a broader, international context during the conference organised by the Fitzwilliam Museum in association with the Departments of Chemistry and History of Art, Manuscripts in the Making: Art and Science, 8-10 December 2016 (www.fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk/colour/conference).

Wednesday 19th October, 12-30-2, Board Room, Faculty of English

Matthew Symonds (University College London/CELL) will introduce the Archaeology of Reading in Early Modern Europe Project and the new Digital Bookwheel (http://www.bookwheel.org/viewer/)

Wednesday 16th November, day symposium

‘Scribal Ingenuity in Early Modern Europe’ (Trinity Hall/Magdalene)

Convenors: Dr Alexander Marr and Professor Sachiko Kusukawa

A workshop organised by project members from Genius Before Romanticism: Ingenuity in Early Modern Art and Science and Making Visible: The visual and graphic practices of the early Royal Society. 

Speakers include Professor Peter Stallybrass, Dr Jonathan Gibson, Dr Jan Loop, Dr Angus Vine and Dr Andrew Zurcher.

Wednesday 30 November, 12.30-2, Fitzwilliam Museum, Trumpington St

A guided tour of the Fitzwilliam exhibition ‘Colour: The Art and Science of Illuminated Manuscripts’, in the company of the curator Dr Stella Panayotova.

Places are limited–please email Jason Scott-Warren (jes1003) if you would like to come.

A bicentennial conference: Birkbeck College, University of London, July 20-21, 2017

This conference takes the bicentenary of Coleridge’s Sibylline Leaves as an opportunity to reflect on the materiality of the paper archive, and processes of dispersal, scattering and recollection. We welcome proposals on the composition, publication and reception of romantic poetry, particularly those which take into account the metaphorical, material and political implications of the ‘leaf in flight’.

Abstracts of no more than 500 words should be emailed to sibyllineleaves2017@gmail.com by 15 October 2016.

For more information, please visit the conference’s website: https://sibyllineleaves2017.wordpress.com

Dates: 8-10 December 2016

Venue: Department of Chemistry, University of Cambridge
Lensfield Rd, Cambridge CB2 1EW (map)

The conference will accompany the Fitzwilliam Museum’s bicentenary exhibition COLOUR: The Art and Science of Illuminated Manuscripts (30 July – 30 December 2016).

This interdisciplinary conference will aim to break new ground in integrating recent advances in the art historical and technical analyses of illuminated manuscripts with research in social and intellectual history.  While Western illuminated manuscripts from the 6th to the 16th centuries will form a major focus of discussion, the conference will also include papers on Byzantine, Islamic and Pre-Columbian material.

For further information, visit http://www.fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk/colour/conference