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 …
Scary Tales
August 22, 2017
In the words of her own grand-niece Rosalind Constable, Favell Lee Mortimer wrote “one of the most outspokenly sadistic children’s books ever written” [New Yorker, 1950 – subscription required], yet she topped the Victorian best-seller lists and was well-regarded as an educational author. Today is the 139th anniversary of her death, and the book referred …
Bound for Serampore
August 14, 2017
Visitors to the Weston Gallery are often prompted to share their personal connections to an exhibition. It’s always wonderful to see people engaged and to know that it’s made an impact in a way that visitor statistics can’t capture. The story one recent visitor shared about the Threads of Empire exhibition was not just his family’s …
Singing from a different Hymn sheet
December 8, 2016
‘While Shepherds Watched their Flocks by Night’ is one of the best-known Christmas carols. It is based on the Annunciation to the shepherds, as described in the Gospel of St Luke. An angel appeared to the shepherds in the fields outside Bethlehem and told them of the birth of Jesus in a scene that has …
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. …
Manuscripts Mysteries: Canada, Cake and Clergymen
October 12, 2015
The stereotypical, romanticized view of archives is one where researchers delve into a box of yellowed, long-forgotten papers to uncover clues and solve a mystery. But what happens when the boxes present more questions than they answer? For the last few months we’ve been turning to social media in an attempt to find out more …
Doodles and Divinity
July 20, 2015
This is a guest post by Ashleigh Fowler, student from the School of English. Since November 2014 I have been cataloguing the Ashby de la Zouch Parish Library as one of three student volunteers chosen to work on the collection. The library is, unsurprisingly, largely theological texts with a large helping of classical Greek literature, but …
“Macaroni looks like serpents”: A Victorian arm-chair traveller’s guide to Europe
April 20, 2015
“Superficial, incomplete, trifling! Such is the true character of this book. Inaccurate we hope it is not…the world, old as she is, would not sit still for her picture.” So begins the 1849 book ‘Near Home, or The Countries of Europe Described’ by Favell Lee Mortimer, nee Bevan (1802-1878). Now almost forgotten, Mortimer wrote 16 …
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 …
A Family Reunion
March 10, 2014
This is a guest post by Library Assistant Nicholas Blake. I never expected to discover that my new place of work was home to an archive collection of my family’s documents dating back hundreds of years. It was only after I’d been interviewed for my library assistant post here at the University of Nottingham’s Manuscripts …
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