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 …
Women’s Suffrage in the D H Lawrence Collection
July 18, 2018
One hundred years after the ‘Representation of the People Act’, which awarded the vote to women over the age of 30 who owned property, it seems like a good time to rediscover some gems from the archives that provide intimate snapshots of the fight for the vote. Louisa ‘Louie’ Burrows, a friend and onetime fiancée …
Mum’s gone to Iceland
June 17, 2018
Famous for its harsh landscapes and heroic sagas, Iceland was a source of endless fascination for 19th century travellers. Many were sent on geological, botanical or other scientific expeditions. Ida Pfeiffer was different. Born in Vienna in 1797, she was bitten by the travel bug aged 5 when she accompanied her parents to Palestine and Egypt. Her father …
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. …
One Born Every Minute
May 2, 2015
As William and Kate welcome their baby daughter into the world at the state-of-the-art private maternity ward The Lindo Wing of St Mary’s Hospital, we had a look back through our collections to see what childbirth was like in the 17th and 18th centuries. Traditionally, pregnancy and birth were social and domestic occurrences, which predominantly …
An Ancient Historian in the Archives
March 15, 2012
From May to November last year I was given the opportunity to conduct some research in the Manuscripts and Special Collections on behalf of the University’s Gender Histories Network. My task was to identify key areas within the collections that would be of interest to those researching topics related to the study of women and …
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