Rediscovering Rycote

Jan Kip and Leonard Knyff, Rycott in the County of Oxford, Bodleian MS. Gough Maps 26, fol. 70
Jan Kip and Leonard Knyff, Rycott in the County of Oxford, Bodleian MS. Gough Maps 26, fol. 70

On the 1st June 1807 an extraordinary auction began at Rycote Park, near Thame in Oxfordshire. Over the course of the next three days, Rycote’s grand Tudor mansion was sold off brick by brick and demolished to help pay family debts. All that survives today is a fragment of the south-west tower. It was an inglorious end for a house which had once been the dominant force in Oxfordshire politics and entertained kings and queens. Henry VIII visited with his new bride Katherine Howard in 1540. The young Elizabeth I was entertained at Rycote en route to her incarceration at Woodstock in 1554, and she returned on four occasions during her reign. Charles I and his court were accommodated in 1625 when the first parliament of his reign was reconvened in Oxford due to an outbreak of the plague in London. Rycote’s regional and national importance, however, has long been neglected. Not only was the mansion demolished in 1807, but perhaps more importantly, the main bulk of its archive was thrown onto a bonfire.
A Bodleian Libraries project has helped to reveal and shed new light on Rycote’s past. The Rediscovering Rycote website brings the voices and stories of Rycote back to life through manuscripts, letters, maps, accounts and drawings brought together in digital form from more than fifty different Bodleian collections. The website also explores the lives of Rycote’s owning families, generations of whom played active roles in political, military and cultural circles. A range of digitised resources explore their involvement in areas such as Henry VIII’s suppression of the monasteries; Elizabethan warfare; the politics of the Restored Stuart monarchy; and the London music scene in the eighteenth century.
Visit the Rediscovering Rycote website to find out more.

Installing the Red Book of Hergest at National Library of Wales; and the ungloved hand

The Red Book of Hergest, held in the Bodleian Library on deposit from Jesus College, was recently installed in the exhibition 4 Llyfr/4 Books : Welsh Icons United at the National Library of Wales.
Photos of the installation can be seen on the NLW’s facebook page.
In these pictures, we can see that during the exhibition installation some of the conservators were wearing gloves, and others not.  Cotton or latex gloves are useful for those installing exhibitions, to prevent fingerprints on acrylic book cradles and glass display cases. But they are not always required for the handling of rare materials themselves. The Bodleian Library prefers that staff and readers have  clean, dry hands – not gloves – when handling any rare books and manuscripts. The reasons are outlined in these posts from the University of Reading Special Collections and from the National Archives.

Understanding parchment

From 24-28 June, the Bodleian Libraries, in collaboration with the Oxford Colleges Conservation Consortium, hosted a workshop taught by Jiří Vnouček, of the Royal Library in Copenhagen. He led a team of conservators through the physical process of converting animal skins into parchment. At a lecture to a larger group of students, academics and library staff, Dr Vnouček related the appearance of parchment in medieval manuscripts to the process of production, drawing lessons for the technical examination and identification of parchment. The workshop, which is running for the first time in the UK, is generously sponsored by the Wellcome Trust, AMARC, Conservation by Design and the Leathersellers‘ Foundation.

Making parchment workshop

Stories from the Oxfam Archive: ‘Walking for a new Rwanda’

by Rosanna Blakeley, Archives Assistant, Saving Oxford Medicine

Doris M. Auclair’s sponsor form for ‘Walking for a new Rwanda’, March 1996
Doris M. Auclair’s sponsor form for ‘Walking for a new Rwanda’, March 1996

Work on the Oxfam archive is well under way. Phase I of the project started in January 2013, and is due to be completed in June 2014, and will be followed by two further phases finishing in 2017. The work falls under the umbrella of the Library’s Saving Oxford Medicine initiative, and has been generously funded by the Wellcome Trust.
As part of the first phase the project team has been appraising and cataloguing various communications materials, and within this section of the archive are a series of files entitled ‘Oxfam personalities’ from the former Press Office. In order to give you a glimpse of the variety of stories we are encountering in the archive, what follows relates to just one of these ‘personalities’: Doris Munganyinka Auclair.
Doris Auclair left Rwanda in 1962, aged 18, due to the conflict between the Hutu and Tutsi, and took refuge in Goma, Zaire – now the Democratic Republic of Congo. However, after more violence erupted, she came to Britain where she worked as a teacher and volunteered in one of Oxfam’s shops in Chiswick. She was not able to return to Rwanda until 1995, after 33 years absence. Doris had no idea whether any of her family had survived the violence in Rwanda up until this point, but discovered that only three out of her nine siblings were alive. Her father had also died in 1994. After this, Doris decided she had to do something to help.
She states on her sponsorship form for ‘Walking for a new Rwanda’,

Having seen their plight I could no longer justify spending petrol money to drive a car, so I decided to auction my very beloved 1966 VW Beetle at Sotheby’s and all the proceeds were donated to the Oxfam Rwanda Appeal.

‘Charlie’ the green Beetle, auctioned at Sotheby’s 18th September 1995
‘Charlie’ the green Beetle, auctioned at Sotheby’s 18th September 1995. (Bodleian Libraries, Oxfam Archive)
Sotheby’s advert for ‘Charlie’ the Beetle which states: ‘The proceeds of this lot will be donated to Oxfam’.
Sotheby’s advert for ‘Charlie’ the Beetle which states: ‘The proceeds of this lot will be donated to Oxfam’.. (Bodleian Libraries, Oxfam Archive)

Doris walked 360km from Goma in Zaire back to her former family home in Kibeho in Rwanda in March 1996. In the Oxfam archive there is a day-by-day diary account, handwritten by Doris, which reveals the mixed emotions that accompany a trip of this nature. The opening of this diary reads: ‘Walking for a new Rwanda Buhoro buhoro (slowly slowly)’. Another poignant entry dates from 3rd March, when Doris writes:

‘Got up at 6 am had a glass of water and started the walk at 6.30am it is very pleasant at this time of the [day] and the view along the Lake Kivu was spoiled mostly by the thought that land mines may be anywhere’.

During her walk Doris also visited Kigali, where there was an Oxfam office, and went to some schools in order to look into ways she could help with Rwanda’s devastated education system. On a post-it note stuck to a photograph Doris has written ‘some of the schools I visited in Kigali…many with broken windows and bare classrooms’. Doris also accompanied the deputy director of Oxfam Kigali to investigate repairs to water pumps in the area.
Doris has since been awarded an MBE for her services to Oxfam and was the treasurer for The Rwanda UK Goodwill Organization (RUGO). There are countless examples of the ‘personalities’ who tirelessly work for, and support Oxfam, and this is just one of the individual stories we are coming across everyday as we appraise, arrange and catalogue the Oxfam archive.

(Re)Constructing the Bodleian’s Index of Literary Correspondence; a post from the Cultures of Knowledge blog

The card index of literary correspondence, in Duke Humfrey's Library
The card index of literary correspondence, in Duke Humfrey’s Library

This recent post from Miranda Lewis, in the Cultures of Knowledge blog, delves into the history of the Index of Literary Correspondence. Kept in Duke Humfrey’s Library, this card index of sixteenth-, seventeenth-, and eighteenth-century correspondence in Bodleian collections became a core dataset for Early Modern Letters Online (EMLO), a union catalogue of correspondence from the early modern period.

Ghosts in the Machine: (Re)Constructing the Bodleian’s Index of Literary Correspondence, 1927-1963

Taking revenge on wicked Lord Byron – Chris Fletcher on a ‘Byronic trophy cabinet’

Keeper of Special Collections Chris Fletcher writes in the Spectator blog about the commonplace album kept by Lord Byron’s friends, the Parkyns family, Bodleian MS. Eng. c. 7967 …

http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/books/2013/05/taking-revenge-on-wicked-lord-byron/

Bodleian MS. Eng. c. 7967, a commonplace book kept by members of the Parkyns family
Bodleian MS. Eng. c. 7967, a commonplace book kept by members of the Parkyns family

Automated matching for early modern printed images

Image matching demo
Choose an area within the digital scan of an item.
Image matching demo
Highlight the chosen area
Image matching demo
Press ‘Search’
Image matching demo
Image matching software finds the illustration appears in multiple different items.

A demonstration of image matching software developed to enable scholars to compare printed images is now running in the Bodleian Library.

Alongside a display of broadside ballads printed in the 17th and 18th centuries is the 21st-century technology that reveals how early modern printers copied woodcut blocks to illustrate different publications.

At a lecture on Tuesday, December 4, in the library’s Convocation House, Giles Bergel (English Faculty) will be joined by Professor Andrew Zisserman and Relja Arandjelovic (Visual Geometry Group, Department of Engineering), to talk about how the software was applied to thousands of items from Bodleian Library collections of printed ballads.

See blogposts about image matching in the Bodleian Ballads blog.

Digital versions of Bodleian catalogues of manuscripts

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Now online: digital copies of the Quarto Catalogues of Ashmole, Canonici, Digby, Laud, Rawlinson and Tanner collections, and of Greek Manuscripts.
and
Now online: the digital copy of the Summary Catalogue of the Western Manuscripts holdings of the Bodleian Library received before 1915.

‘The Bodleian Library’s catalogues of manuscripts, and especially the many volumes of the Summary Catalogue of Western Manuscripts and its supplements, are among the most important research resources in the world for scholars: time spent reading them is never wasted. Now that they are freely available and searchable online, their value and usefulness are hugely increased.’ – Professor Henry Woudhuysen

*Link here to images of SC 29493.

The Bodleian’s original First Folio of Shakespeare

The Bodleian’s original copy of the First Folio of William Shakespeare’s plays is the subject of a campaign to stabilize the volume through a conservation program,digitize the volume, and publish it freely online. This “Sprint for Shakespeare” echoes an earlier effort, over a century ago, to ensure that the book would be housed in the library after a long period of absence from the library.

This copy of the first folio arrived in the Bodleian shortly after its publication in 1623 and was bound in Oxford. Then, in later decades, it left the library, though the date of its de-accession is not clear.

It reappeared only in 1905 when an undergraduate, G.M.R. Turbutt, brought into the library a copy of the first folio that was owned by his family. The preservation of the original binding demonstrated that this was the Bodleian’s original copy.

The story that this book’s own journey tells is recounted by Emma Smith (English Faculty, University of Oxford) in a lecture recorded [here].

The Bodleian Library at different times in its history has responded to a process which had begun as far back as the eighteenth century, in which copies of early books became prized by collectors and by scholars for their embodiment of physical evidence of the history of printing and book-ownership.

In her lecture Dr Smith outlines the work by Bodleian staff in the early twentieth century to purchase the volume in the face of competition from the American collector, Henry Clay Folger, determined to secure as many copies of the First Folio as possible for his library. The multiple copies of the First Folio that Folger did successfully acquire enabled the researches of Charlton Hinman in the 1940s, who collated 55 copies (of the over 200 surviving) to complete his study, The Printing and Proof-reading of the First Folio of Shakespeare (1963).

Information about this copy of the First Folio during its first residence in the Bodleian comes from Library Records, the library’s archive of its own history. Library Records e.528, the Bodleian Library Binders Book from 1621- 1624, contains the record of the Bodleian First Folio being sent to the binder Wildgoose in Oxford, on its arrival at the Bodleian. Library Records c.1259 – c.1262 and Library Records b.862 detail the research and publications of Falconer Madan, the sub-librarian in 1905, on the volume’s history, and the efforts by the librarian, E.W.B. Nicholson, to raise funds for the purchase of the volume in 1906.

Pictures on the “Sprint for Shakespeare” blog show why the volume has not been considered suitable for handling in recent years, and why conservation has been required simply to get it into shape for digital photography.

Read more about the conservation and digitization of the Bodleian’s original First Folio, here.