A Blessing and A Curse
November 8, 2023
The Rushall Psalter is a remarkable manuscript in many ways: it is an undoubtedly beautiful volume which has lived a long and unusual life – not to mention the fact that it is the subject of a 600 year old curse… As suggested by its name, the volume’s content is largely religious in nature, consisting …
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 …
Meet the Manorial Records!
July 26, 2022
The University of Nottingham is hosting the Manorial Document Register Conference in September, along with The National Archives, and this is the perfect opportunity to talk about one of the most useful collections that researchers find most intimidating: manorial records. Mind your Manors What does the word ‘manor’ conjure up in your imagination? Grand country …
The Missing Medieval Village of Keighton
September 28, 2020
Those of you familiar with University Park campus, especially the area just behind Lakeside between the Portland Building and the Science Park, will probably have seen Keighton Hill and Keighton Auditorium, even if you weren’t aware that they are named after the village that stood there 600 years ago. This image on the left is a …
Silence
August 15, 2018
The grumpy 13th century scribe who couldn’t help but open his story by reminding his audience how underpaid and underappreciated the arts (especially storytellers) are would probably despair if he had known similar complaints would still be expressed in the 21st century. He wrote seven centuries ago, but his tale was set seven centuries before …
Medieval Christmas Mass
December 13, 2017
It’s entirely possible that the clerk who ripped the pages out of the 15th book of Roman Catholic liturgical music was just old enough to have attended church services in pre-Reformation England, but in truth we don’t know. These parchment leaves, MS 12/6-7, contain parts of masses for Christmas Day and the Feast of St Stephen …
Fragments of a Saint
October 20, 2016
Tucked away in a bundle of 17th century natural history illustrations was a single page of comparatively plain-looking handwritten text that was obviously out of place. It began abruptly in the middle of a sentence and the edges were slightly more battered- not surprising, considering it was about 200 years older than the rest of the pages. …
Celebrating Magna Carta
June 15, 2015
Eight hundred years ago today, King John affixed the Great Seal to Magna Carta, after a week of intense negotiations with the group of barons who had rebelled against his reign. It is probably one of the most famous failed peace treaties in history. Like his father and older brother before him, John believed the divine …
Happy Easter from Manuscripts and Special Collections
March 30, 2015
As this weekend is Easter, it seems appropriate to share some Easter-related images from one of our treasures: the 15th century Wollaton Antiphonal belonging to St Leonard’s parish church. An Antiphonal is a book of liturgical music. It contains the words and music to the sung portions of the Divine Office, and had to be large enough to …
Family inheritance on display
November 21, 2013
We were delighted to welcome Sir Andrew Buchanan, 5th Baronet, and his son George Buchanan to Manuscripts and Special Collections last week, on Mark Dorrington’s first day as the new Keeper of the Manuscripts at The University of Nottingham. Over the years the Buchanan family have deposited several significant collections of papers created by ancestors …
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