̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - John Wells

Poems on the Underground archive arrives at Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library

sjr81 — Fri, 23 Feb 2024 14:29:41 +0000

Beloved poetry project archive contains letters from Nobel Prize winners and Poet Laureates

̽��ֱ��forgotten poet of Fordham

sjr81 — Tue, 10 Dec 2019 11:45:15 +0000

Handwritten verses from a nineteenth-century Cambridgeshire poet – who died destitute despite royal patronage – have been saved by Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library.

̽��ֱ��first non-stop transatlantic flight - 100 years on

sjr81 — Fri, 14 Jun 2019 11:37:00 +0000

Exhibiton and Vickers archive at Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library celebrates aviation milestone.

Lines of Thought: Telling the Story of History

Anonymous — Fri, 16 Sep 2016 14:31:13 +0000

Since March, some of the world’s most valuable books and manuscripts have been on display as Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library celebrates its 600th birthday. This fortnight is the last chance to see this once-in-a-lifetime free exhibition of its greatest treasures.

̽��ֱ��objects in Lines of Thought: Discoveries that Changed the World, which will close to the public on September 30, communicate 4,000 years of human thought through the Library’s unique and irreplaceable collections. More than 70 per cent of the exhibits are displayed to the public for the first time.

̽��ֱ��exhibition investigates through six distinct themes how Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library’s eight million books and manuscripts have transformed our understanding of life here on earth and our place among the stars.

In Telling the Story of History, curator John Wells traces the way in which literature has treated the monarchs and heroes of history.

Long before the development of evidence-based history, this was done through story-telling. Stories that elaborate on myths, legends and folk memories accumulate down the years, connecting successive ages with their past, and influencing writers of the present. In the Western European tradition fables inherited from classical antiquity have been passed down the centuries to inspire countless reinventions and retellings. Themes and characters from Homer’s Odyssey, for example, surface again and again in literature, from James Joyce’s Ulysses to Margaret Drabble’s novel ̽��ֱ��gates of ivory.

"Homer stands at the head of the Western European tradition of narrative, and there are no epics older than the Homeric epics – the influence that these texts have had is really quite incalculable," says Wells.

̽��ֱ��plays of William Shakespeare, gathered here in the ‘First Folio’ of 1623, are a highwater mark of imaginative literature. Their fictional depiction of real people and real events, such as Henry V at the Battle of Agincourt, can shape our understanding of historical events.

" ̽��ֱ��'First Folio' of Shakespeare, the collection of his plays which was published soon after his death by his friends John Heminges and Henry Condell, collects many plays which never saw print in Shakespeare's lifetime," explains Wells. "If it hadn't been for the work of Heminges and Condell, so many plays which are at the peak of English literary tradition would simply not be known to us."

"Shakespeare's views and interpretations of his characters really have affected the way in which we now think of historical figures," says Wells.

Fantastical fictional writings such as Dante’s Divine comedy also draw on figures of the past for their protagonists, or use allusion to pass on subtle messages. Folk stories, whether written on ancient papyri or in a modern novel, weave their way through Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library’s collections and through our collective imaginations.

"Our line of thought, which we began with a papyrus fragment of Homer, leads right to the end of the 20th century now with Cambridge-educated novelist Margaret Drabble," says Wells.

"In her novel ̽��ֱ��gates of ivory, Drabble sets her characters against the great sweep of history, and in particular the revolution in Cambodia in the 1970s. ̽��ֱ�� ̽��ֱ�� Library is actively acquiring the archives of literary authors because we know that they are going to be subjects of study in the years to come - the notes and drafts which are accumulated are sources of scholarship in their own right."

Inset image: Homer, Fragments of the Odyssey, XII, ll. 250–304, Second century CE.

Shakespeare's 'First Folio', Dante's Divine Comedy, and fragments of Homer's Odyssey from the second century CE, are among the objects in our final film celebrating Lines of Thought at Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library.

̽��ֱ��influence that these texts have had is really quite incalculable

John Wells

Lines of Thought: Telling the Story of History

Mr. William Shakespeares comedies, histories, & tragedies: published according to the true originall copies (the ‘First Folio’) London: printed by Isaac Jaggard and Edward Blount, 1623

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

Yes

Waterloo: the first draft of history

sjr81 — Thu, 30 Apr 2015 10:05:51 +0000

A Damned Serious Business: Waterloo 1815, the Battle and its Books, will be launched by the current Duke of Wellington, Charles Wellesley, at Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library tonight and opens to the public on May 1. ̽��ֱ��exhibition runs until September 16, 2015.

Looking at how Waterloo was written about in the immediate aftermath of the battle fought on June 18, 1815, it draws on the rich and varied collections at the Library and includes political propaganda, broadsheets, military drill-books, maps, plans, coloured engravings and early historical accounts of the bloodshed.

Historian Dr Mark Nicholls, who has co-curated the exhibition, said: “ ̽��ֱ��exhibition really shows us the first draft of history as it was being written in the days, months and years after the battle.

“When Waterloo is talked about today, there is sometimes a tendency to view the battle as strictly France versus Britain; Napoleon versus Wellington. What the Library’s exhibition reminds us is that the armies opposing Napoleon were very much a combined force of Allied troops – chiefly British, Netherlandish and Hanoverian, commanded by Wellington, and Prussians led by Blücher.”

̽��ֱ��exhibition also features artefacts and mementoes from the battlefield itself, including a musket ball and a charred fragment of Hougoumont, the farmhouse which occupied a vital position in Wellington’s line. ̽��ֱ��relics were collected by a teenaged girl visiting the field ten years after the battle.

Other items that have never been on display before include a letter from the traveller William Crackanthorpe to his sister Sarah in August, 1814, giving a first-hand account of a conversation with Napoleon in exile on Elba; and William Turnor’s battlefield letter from Mont St Jean on June 19, 1815 (see attached transcript).

̽��ֱ��letter, which has never been published in full, describes the exhilaration, confusion and savagery of ‘the most bloody as well as the most decisive battle’ and claims that the British infantry has ‘immortalised itself and its conduct has never been surpassed, indeed never equalled’. Although his own regiment, stationed on the right of the line, was spared the fiercest fighting, Turnor passes on rumour and gossip in an authentically breathless style.

“ ̽��ֱ��field of Battle exhibits this morning a most shocking spectacle too dreadful to describe. Buonaparte (sic)…showed the greatest courage; led in person many charges both of infantry & cavalry. ̽��ֱ��escape of Lord Wellington is next to a miracle, for he was exposed the whole day to the hottest fire. We know not the extent of our loss, but it must be great indeed.”

Exhibition Co-Curator John Wells said: “ ̽��ֱ��importance of Waterloo was fully recognised by the generations which came after it. Both Byron and Tennyson wrote of Waterloo as an ‘earthquake’. Victor Hugo said that the battle changed the perspective of the human race.

“Waterloo is the most famous battle in modern European history, and from the very first moment soldiers and civilians alike wanted to put their experiences and emotions into words. In this exhibition we examine how the battle’s impact was expressed through the written word, and how the documentary records of the time continue to have resonance for us today. Waterloo is still news, two hundred years later.”

̽��ֱ��exhibits on display in Cambridge will illuminate how historical accounts of the campaign proliferated within months of the battle as Waterloo was assimilated into popular culture, becoming the subject of poems, novels, works of visual art and even comic entertainments.

Part of the wider Waterloo 200 commemorations, A Damned Serious Business also charts the build-up to the battle and its aftermath, following the journey from a Europe in turmoil to Waterloo becoming a tourist destination, a legacy which remains to this day.

Cartoons and a spoof theatrical poster illustrate popular defiance in Britain in the face of a threatened French invasion, while an infantry drill-book shows how the Army went about training its soldiers to defeat Napoleon. Large-scale volumes illustrated in full colour and published in the years straight after the battle show how the victory was celebrated in Britain through the medium of the book. ̽��ֱ��poignant memoir of Lady De Lancey highlights the appalling personal cost of the fighting.

Alongside Napoleon’s own copy of Montaigne’s Essais – from his library in exile on St Helena – the exhibition also features an 1834 letter from the Duke of Wellington in which he agrees to present a petition to the House of Lords from Cambridge undergraduates, as well as a wonderful fold-out, full colour representation of the Duke’s funeral procession in 1852. ̽��ֱ��fold-out measures more than 20 metres in length and contains a cast of thousands.

A letter written from the body-strewn battlefield at Waterloo, an invasion map of the UK, and a book from Napoleon’s personal library in exile will go on display in Cambridge during one of the first major Waterloo exhibitions of the bicentenary commemorations.

Waterloo is the most famous battle in modern European history, and from the very first moment soldiers and civilians alike wanted to put their experiences and emotions into words.

John Wells

https://exhibitions.lib.cam.ac.uk/waterloo/

Image from the Boy's book of British battles

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

Yes

Licence type:

Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike

‘A sunlit picture of hell’: Sassoon’s war diaries go online for first time

jfp40 — Fri, 01 Aug 2014 08:35:56 +0000

Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library is home to the world’s foremost collection of Sassoon material, and has digitised 23 of Sassoon’s journals and two of his wartime poetry notebooks. They are now available to all at the Cambridge Digital Library (https://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/), where they sit alongside the papers of Isaac Newton and other priceless treasures of the Library’s collections.

Until now, much of the archive has remained beyond the reach of both researchers and the public because of the documents’ poor physical condition. ̽��ֱ��only person to have had unrestricted access to Sassoon’s journals and notebooks to date was official biographer Max Egremont.

̽��ֱ��digitisation of the Sassoon material, which includes draft copies of his ‘Soldier’s Declaration’ as well as poetry, prose and sketches, fulfils an objective formulated during the Library’s £1.25m fundraising campaign to purchase the Sassoon Archive in 2009. ̽��ֱ��campaign, spearheaded by Egremont, was also supported by Sir Andrew Motion, Michael Morpurgo and Sebastian Faulks.

Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Librarian Anne Jarvis said: “ ̽��ֱ��war diaries Sassoon kept on the Western Front and in Palestine are of the greatest significance, both nationally and internationally, and we are honoured to be able to make them available to everyone, anywhere in the world, on the 100^th anniversary of the First World War.

“From his ‘Soldier’s Declaration’ to his eyewitness accounts of the first day of the battle on the Somme, the Sassoon archive is a collection of towering importance, not just to historians, but to anyone seeking to understand the horror, bravery and futility of the First World War as experienced by those on the front lines and in the trenches.”

̽��ֱ��digitisations make available online for the first time 23 of Sassoon’s journals from the years 1915-27 and 1931-32, as well as two poetry notebooks from 1916-18 containing rough drafts and fair copies of some of his best-known war poems. Sassoon wrote in a small and legible hand, frequently using his notebooks from both ends. ̽��ֱ��images of them are both powerful and evocative, showing mud from the trenches and spilled wax, presumably as he sat writing in his dug-out by candlelight.

̽��ֱ��journals give a fascinating insight into daily life in the trenches. Sassoon described the first day of the Somme as a ‘sunlit picture of hell’ and the diaries also record the moment he was shot by a sniper at the Battle of Arras, as well as a psychological profile of ‘the soul of an officer’. ̽��ֱ��poems include previously unpublished material along with early drafts of some of his best-known works including an early version of ‘ ̽��ֱ��Dug-Out’ with an additional, excised verse.

Sassoon’s journals represent much more than a simple diary record. ̽��ֱ��notebooks were small enough to be carried in the pocket of his army tunic, and he used them to draft poetry, make pencil or ink sketches, list members of his battalion and their fates, make notes on military briefings, and draw diagrams of the trenches.

“ ̽��ֱ��great array of activities, difficulties and dangers that faced him as a serving officer, and the recurring inspiration of his creative responses to his conditions, are represented in the range of uses to which he put these notebooks,” said Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library’s John Wells. “Unlike edited, printed transcriptions, the digitisations allow the viewer to form a sense of the physical documents, and to appreciate their unique nature as historical artefacts.”

̽��ֱ��Sassoon collection joins other collections being delivered through the Cambridge Digital Library, which aims to make the Library’s great collections openly available to the world. ̽��ֱ��Digital Library was launched in 2011 and made possible through a generous donation from the Polonsky Foundation.

Siegfried Sassoon’s First World War diaries – some bearing traces of mud from the Somme – are among 4,100 pages from his personal archive being made freely available online from today, almost 100 years since Britain declared war on Germany.

From his ‘Soldier’s Declaration’ to his eyewitness accounts of the first day of the battle on the Somme, the Sassoon archive is a collection of towering importance.

Anne Jarvis

̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge Digital Library

̽��ֱ��Soul of an Officer, a sketch from one of Siegfried Sassoon’s journals. 1916

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence. If you use this content on your site please link back to this page. For image rights, please see the credits associated with each individual image.

Yes

Conquering a continent: how the French language circulated in Britain and medieval Europe

sjr81 — Wed, 22 Jan 2014 11:36:40 +0000

An important manuscript of the Lancelot-Grail, it lay forgotten and unopened for five centuries until its rediscovery in North Yorkshire and its sale in 1944. Detailing the search for the Holy Grail, it goes on public display for the first time alongside the only existing fragment of an episode from the earliest-known version of the Tristan and Isolde legend. Also on display is an early example of the kind of guide familiar to thousands of today’s holiday-makers: a French phrasebook.

A free exhibition, ̽��ֱ��Moving Word: French Medieval Manuscripts in Cambridge, looks at the enormous cultural and historic impact of the French language upon life in England, Europe, the Middle East and beyond at a time when French – like Latin before it and English today – was the global language of culture, commerce and politics.

̽��ֱ��exhibition, curated by Bill Burgwinkle and Nicola Morato, is part of a wider AHRC-funded research project looking at the question of how knowledge travelled in manuscript form through the continent and into the Eastern Mediterranean world, freely crossing linguistic and cultural boundaries at a time when France was a much smaller political entity than it is today.

Burgwinkle, Professor of Medieval French and Occitan Literature at Cambridge, said: “French may have been brought to England by the Normans in 1066 but it was already here well before then as a language of knowledge and commerce. It served as the mother tongue of every English king for almost 400 years, from William the Conqueror to Richard II, and it was still in use as a language of royalty, politics and literature until the Tudor period, when we see Henry VIII writing love letters in French to Anne Boleyn.

“Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� is home to one of the world’s finest collections of medieval manuscripts of this kind. This exhibition not only gives us a chance to display the Library’s treasures, but also reminds us how the French language has enriched our cultural past and left us with a legacy that continues to be felt in 21st century Britain.

“Medieval texts like the ones we have on display became the basis of European literature. ̽��ֱ��idea that post-classical Western literature really begins with the Renaissance is completely false. It begins right here, among the very manuscripts and fragments in this exhibition. People may not realise it, but many of the earliest and most beautiful versions of the legends of Arthur, Lancelot and the Round Table were written in French; ̽��ֱ��Moving Word is a celebration of a period sometimes unfairly written out of literary history.”

̽��ֱ��early phrasebook, a guide to French conversation for travellers, is the Manières de language (1396). Composed in Bury St Edmunds and one of four in existence, it provides a series of dialogues for those travelling in France that inform readers how to trade with merchants, haggle over prices, secure an inn for the night, stop a child crying, speak endearingly to your lover or insult them. It also has instructions for singing the ‘most gracious and amorous’ love song in the world.

Elsewhere, perhaps some of the most impressive exhibits on display are huge medieval manuscripts that acted as compendiums of knowledge. One such example is a multilingual encyclopaedia from the 1300s featuring more than fifty texts of historical, cosmographical, literary and devotional interest. A heavily decorated volume, it is unusual for its thickness, and deals with, among other subjects, the roundness of the Earth and the force of gravity – centuries before Newton defined its laws.

In contrast, the fragment of Thomas d’Angleterre’s Roman de Tristan (Tristan and Iseut) may appear small in comparison, but its size belies its importance to the Cambridge collections. Thomas’s Tristan romance is the oldest known surviving version of the tragic love story. His work formed the basis of Gottfried von Strassburg’s German Tristan romance of the 13th century, which in turn provided the chief source for Wagner’s famous opera Tristan und Isolde. ̽��ֱ��fragment on display, detailing King Marc’s discovery of his wife Iseut and nephew Tristan sleeping together in a wood, is the sole witness of this scene from Thomas’s text to survive into the present.

̽��ֱ��Moving Word: French Medieval Manuscripts in Cambridge runs from January 22 to April 17, 2014, in the Milstein Exhibition Centre, Monday–Friday 09.00–18.00, Saturday 09.00–16.30 Sunday closed. Admission free. For further information, see https://exhibitions.lib.cam.ac.uk.

Inset images: Top, detail from a multilingual compendium of knowledge (UK, first half of 14th century). Bottom, detail from the breviary of Marie de Saint-Pol, Paris 1330-1340

A 13th-century manuscript of Arthurian legend once owned by the Knights Templar is one of the star attractions of a new exhibition opening today at Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library.

̽��ֱ��idea that post-classical Western literature really begins with the Renaissance is completely false. It begins right here, among the very manuscripts and fragments in this exhibition.

Bill Burgwinkle

Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library

Image from a 14th century manuscript of the Romance of the rose, one of the best-known texts of the Middle Ages

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence. If you use this content on your site please link back to this page.

Yes

Licence type:

Attribution-Noncommerical

̽��ֱ�� Library’s greatest treasures on show

sjr81 — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 10:40:24 +0000

Shelf Lives: Four Centuries of Collectors and their Books celebrates some of the men and women who have donated their libraries to Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� over the past four hundred years, and the diverse and extraordinary treasures they owned. It brings together the cream of ten exemplary collections encompassing more than a millennium of the written and printed word.

̽��ֱ��curators of Shelf Lives had plenty of material to choose from; Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library is home to more than eight million items – stored on mile after mile of shelving inside the iconic Giles Gilbert Scott building.

Star exhibits include a hand-coloured copy of the Nuremberg Chronicle of 1493 (a chronicle of world history and one of the most magnificent printed books of the fifteenth century, with more than 1,800 woodcuts) presented by Archbishop Matthew Parker; Napoleon Bonaparte’s copy of Montaigne’s Essais from his library in exile on St Helena; an illuminated ninth-century Mercian prayer-book known as the Book of Cerne (c. 820-840); and the second oldest surviving copy of the Ecclesiastical History of the English People by the Venerable Bede (673/4-735) – the celebrated ‘Moore Bede’.

A velvet-bound sermon book belonging to Queen Elizabeth I and embroidered with her coat of arms will share the exhibition space with handwritten manuscripts by John Donne and Virginia Woolf and, perhaps more unusually, trench journals (magazines produced by troops, for troops) and military money from the Austrian-occupied zone of Italy – part of the War Reserve Collection, an extraordinary gathering of at least 10,000 pieces of First World War ephemera.

̽��ֱ�� Librarian Anne Jarvis said: “Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library is one of the largest accumulations of books and manuscripts in Europe, and one of the most important in the world. Its holdings, though, are not a single, uniform entity, but consist of a great variety of different collections which over the centuries have come to be housed under one roof and now enrich the national heritage.”

John Wells, Exhibition Curator, explained: “For this exhibition, ten different curators have chosen ten different collectors, whose lives span the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries. It really was very difficult to narrow down the field. We had an initial long-list of 20 to 30 collections, all outstanding, which could all have justified a place in the exhibition. In fact, it would have been possible to replace almost every item in the exhibition with something of similar importance.

“What visitors will experience is really ten mini exhibitions rolled into one. They can see everything from priceless illuminated manuscripts to German propaganda from the First World War. ̽��ֱ��central theme drawing these elements together is the allure that books and manuscripts have held for collectors over the centuries – an attraction which thousands of people, from all walks of life, still feel today.”

Rupert Brooke’s appearance in the exhibition comes via the books and manuscripts collected by surgeon, scholar and bibliographer Sir Geoffrey Keynes, a friend of the poet from school days. On display will be ‘ ̽��ֱ��Baby’, an unpublished tongue-in-cheek parody by Brooke of fellow poet Algernon Charles Swinburne’s saccharine production ‘Étude Réaliste’. ‘ ̽��ֱ��Baby’ is far from a lost masterpiece, but the manuscript nevertheless reveals a playful and comedic side to Brooke unfamiliar from his iconic War sonnets.

Other collections in Shelf Lives include those of Matthew Parker, Archbishop of Canterbury during the reign of Elizabeth I, and the Chinese library of the Victorian diplomat Sir Thomas Wade, described by his successor as Professor of Chinese in Cambridge as ‘the best editions of the best works in the most important branches of Chinese Literature’, and considered one of the most significant such collections outside China.

̽��ֱ��Library’s music collections are represented by the Haydn collection of Marion Margaret Scott (1877-1953), a versatile and progressive woman known for several significant achievements in male-dominated fields.

While the personalities of the collectors represented in Shelf Lives all differ, they share a common fascination, even obsession, for the notion of collecting.

Fellow exhibition curator Ed Potten said: “Shelf Lives isn’t just about the books, it’s about the collectors themselves and the history of collecting. There’s a social context to this and interesting questions about why collecting was – and still is – so significant to people. It’s fascinating to uncover how and why people acquire things. In some cases it is an obsession, and in others an expression of philanthropy.

Of all the collectors in the exhibition, perhaps none sum up both the fervour of collecting and the philanthropic ideal better than Gilbert de Botton. He purchased his first edition of the French essayist Michel de Montaigne in 1981 and went on to assemble one of the world’s greatest resources for the study of the author, including ten books known to have belonged to the Montaigne himself.

De Botton sought to recreate Montaigne’s own original book collection, ideally by buying his personal copies but also acquiring other fine copies of works known to have been owned by him. De Botton’s collection of Montaigne’s own books is the third largest in the world, and the largest outside France.

From the outset, de Botton’s books were always open to scholars, and the donation of his library to the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge in 2008 safeguards the collection as a scholarly resource in perpetuity.

Despite the rising popularity of digital readers like Kindles, the curators of Shelf Lives – themselves collectors in fields ranging from post-cards of the North East and English poetry to stuffed animals – believe the future of book-collecting remains bright.

Added Potten: “ ̽��ֱ��pleasure of collecting resides both in the physical object and in the thrill of tracking down and owning something rare. ̽��ֱ��Kindle and the e-book are great if you just want to read a text, but they can never replicate the excitement of finally setting hands on that elusive book which completes your collection.”

An unpublished Rupert Brooke poem will sit alongside some of Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library’s greatest treasures when a free exhibition of highlights from its priceless collections opens to the public today.

Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library is one of the largest accumulations of books and manuscripts in Europe, and one of the most important in the world.

Anne Jarvis

Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library

A miniature showing a bishop joining the hands of a couple, from the section of the Decretals of Pope Gregory IX concerning marriage, in a copy produced in Venice around 1475.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence. If you use this content on your site please link back to this page.

Yes