Manuscripts – Page 4 – The Bodleian Conveyor

Dr James Willoughby: ‘An English library in Renaissance Rome’

On Friday, 19 February, Dr. James Willoughby (Oxford) spoke to the Seminar on the History of the Book on the library of the English hospice in Rome from 1496 until 1527. St. Thomas’ Hospice, and its library, served the needs of English pilgrims, royal envoys, commercial travellers, suitors and litigants at the curial courts, humanist scholars such as Thomas Linacre and William Lilye and English students studying in Italian universities. A remarkable surviving series of book-lists records the library’s ownership of, chiefly, scholastic, medical, legal and devotional works, in both manuscript and print. Dr. Willoughby argued that the book-lists were evidence not just for the intellectual life of the English community in Rome, but for the diffusion of print and the workings of the English book trade in the period: he demonstrated how the provenance of both manuscript and early printed books might be tracked by means of ‘secundo folio’ citations given in booklists.The library was ransacked in 1527, but exists today as part of the English seminary in Rome, retaining its manuscript records alongside a single, printed book dating from its earlier life.
The Seminar is convened at All Souls College by Prof. Ian Maclean.
— from Giles Bergel

Shelley’s ‘Symposium’

Mary Shelley's handwritten restorations of Percy Shelley's original words, in her printed copy of his prose works.

At the second Literary Manuscripts Masterclass, on 10 November, Michael O’Neill made the point that after Percy Shelley’s death, Mary Shelley wished to protect his reputation, promote his popularity, and preserve his words. But in the cultural and moral atmosphere of the time these were not always easily reconcilable goals.

In 1823 she transcribed Shelley’s prose works for publication, and Michael O’Neill showed the press copy (shelfmark: MS. Shelley adds. d.8, ) prepared by Mary, and marked in pencil by Leigh Hunt with suggested amendments. Both Hunt and Mary were concerned about passages in Shelley’s translation of Plato’s Symposium, and in Shelley’s own Essay on Love, describing love between men.

The photograph here shows the printed edition that did appear in 1840, but this is a copy (shelfmark: Shelley adds. e.19) interleaved with blank pages, on which, facing each printed page, Mary Shelley has restored the original words written by Shelley (such as “lover” for “friend”), preserving Shelley’s words despite the demands of publication and the prejudices of the time.

Jane Austen, ‘Volume the First’

At the first of the Literary Manuscript Masterclasses this term, on October 27, we were shown a small, mass-produced notebook, probably bought from a stationer in the mid-1780s, in which the young Jane Austen had set down a series of stories and plays. Kathryn Sutherland, professor of English literature, described the importance of this manuscript, one of three volumes of juvenilia.

Of Austen’s famous six published novels, only two chapters of Persuasion survive in manuscript form. The three juvenile notebooks (which include’ The History of England’, on display from the BL website) and other short pieces, working drafts of two novels and a fair copy of a novella, are all we have left from the author’s own hand

Andrew Honey of the Bodleian’s Conservation Department took the class on a tour of the physical aspects of the volume, including a session of paper folding and paper tearing (using copier paper!), to demonstrate that this was a machine-made notebook, a relatively cheap mass-produced item of stationery – the equivalent, though thank goodness in 18^th-century dress, of a Hello Kitty notepad.