Rambling around rock holes
November 26, 2024
William Parsons was a solicitor who lived between around 1809 and 1881, and who, between his legal work, his participation in the political and civic life of Nottingham and his often-rambunctious social life, was witness to major transformations to the fabric of the city due to increasing urbanisation and enclosure – a change to which …
Dear sisters: Have you seen this feminist zine?
October 28, 2024
Is it a collage? Is it poetry? Is it a meditation in pink rice bran-based ink? The zine Dear sisters is all of the above. Each page prints a response by a woman living in Notts to second wave feminism. In the 1970s-1990s hundreds of feminist magazines and newspapers circulated in the UK. They rallied …
Feminist Footnotes
August 9, 2024
This is a guest post by Chiara Rebora, a University of Nottingham student, who recently completed a Summer Research Placement at Manuscripts and Special Collections. Expectations of my role? When I began this placement, I felt under-qualified and completely out of my comfort zone. I had to remind myself I was selected for this placement …
Dead End? Tunnels under Nottingham in fact and fiction
June 28, 2024
Considering the number of manmade caves which lie beneath the streets of Nottingham, it is unsurprising that, over the years, a tangled web of stories has developed which imagines a secret network of tunnels beneath the city. The details vary, with passages variously linking the city centre, the castle, and Wollaton Hall or running instead …
The phoenix in early modern print woodcuts
June 4, 2024
This blog post was written by our Special Collections Librarian in the course of her work on an upcoming exhibition at the Old Rectory Museum, Loughborough, where facsimiles of books from the Loughborough Parish Library collection will be displayed. The early Christian writer St Isidore of Seville described the phoenix in his Etymologies: ‘The phoenix …
A grand day out from Rochdale to Nottingham via Aachen: to Know Power
June 27, 2023
This is a guest post by Helen Chicot, Reform and Prevention Lead at Rochdale Borough Council It honestly felt like an act of rebellion. In our little Whatsapp group, we half-joked about what the dress code might be (opting for “radical chic with arty vibes”) and took care to plan the snacks for the journey, …
Plants & Prayers
April 30, 2023
Healing is what makes us human – but concepts of health and methods of healing have changed much over time. Visitors to our latest exhibition Plants and Prayers: health and healing before 1700 will see how healthcare in the past was not just the domain of the physician: priests to apothecaries to housewives all provided …
My experience interning for Manuscripts and Special Collections
September 27, 2022
This is a guest post by Helena, who successfully applied for a Faculty of Arts funded summer work experience placement. I’m Helena, a second-year History student at the University of Nottingham and I had the amazing experience of getting a placement and working at King’s Meadow Campus for a couple of weeks. My role was …
Prose Responses to Editing DH Lawrence
May 20, 2022
On 5 May 2022, 14 writers from the Writer Highway group, led by Cathy Grindrod, were invited to respond to our exhibition Editing DH Lawrence. Here are the prose responses, check our other blog-post for poetic responses! D.H. Lawrence Exhibition, Lakeside by Bobbie Prime [including 4 poems by DH Lawrence] The exhibition revealed how hypocritical …
What is ‘censorship’?
March 24, 2022
This is a guest post by Gregory Walker, Midlands4Cities Doctoral Student. ‘I would emphasize, first of all, that there is in England no censorship of books’.[1] These were the words of Home Secretary Sir William Joynson-Hicks in the same year (1929) that he seized two typescripts of D. H. Lawrence’s poetry collection, Pansies, in the …
Find, follow, join us
