The thesis has profiled silk facing treatments to manuscripts in the Stein Collection in the British Library, via its unique historical background, compared with the lamination technique that was prevalent in conservation in the last century in libraries and archives. The correction of the previous inappropriate preservation methods might have not aroused enough attentiveness, or critical attention, in the conservation arena. IR and Raman spectroscopy were widely applied in this project, for the characterisation of the different silks removed from the manuscripts, in comparison with new silk from commercial suppliers, revealing the ageing of silk, its fragility and stiffness, which causes mechanical abrasion toward the scrolls of ancient manuscripts. Silk's absorption of moisture, and exposure to light, exacerbate this problem. The characterisation of a series of vegetable and animal derived glues emphasises the poor record-keeping of the conservation studios. The non-native and pipeline-processed starches show almost the same pattern in both IR and Raman spectroscopy. Animal glues also show different patterns from the starch-based glues in both IR and Raman spectroscopy. The problems of applying gelatine-base glue in the conservation process are also discussed. The dye-transfer phenomenon has been confirmed: the yellow dye from the manuscripts (which were dyed by water-soluble huangbo extracts) transfer to the glue paste and then to the silk materials, thus causing the discolouration of the manuscripts. Finally, solid-state NMR characterisation with magic angle spinning was used to characterise the silks and glue pastes. The SEM and EDAX study provided the evidence for the existence of fungi and/or bacteria on the glues al1ached to the manuscripts, data being provided from a strong collaboration with Dr. Cristina Silva Pereira from the Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal. Preliminary studies have confirmed that the silk and glue carry Aspergillus niger, Neurospora crass a and Penicillium chrysogenum. This observation provides unimpeachable evidence that long-term damage will occur to the faced manuscripts if the facing is not removed. Currently, the desire for digitisation of manuscripts in the Stein collection in the British Library also enhances the case for the removal of the silk facing materials. The sill<, glue, water and dye, compose a complicated matrix which influence the lifetime and stability of the manuscripts by interaction with the external environment, thus it is believed that the removal the silk facing materials is reasonable, and should be performed if economically viable

The focal point of this thesis is my complete transcription of the thirteenth-century Coventry Pontifical manuscript (Cambridge, University Library, Ff. VI. 9). In order to contextualise the Coventry Pontifical manuscript, this thesis comprises two investigative strands. The first is an exploration of the significance of the manuscript in the lives of its medieval users; the interactions between the manuscript and its culture; and the interplay between the manuscript and its users. To further our understanding of the significance of the Coventry Pontifical to its users, this thesis surveys the liturgical practices included in the manuscript, and how these practices and the production of the manuscript required the skills and money of the general population as well as the monastic community. An examination of routines of the time and an overview of the politics and people connected to the Diocese of Coventry and Lichfield follows. Contemplating the people who used the manuscript and how they used it leads to appreciation of the manuscript, and my transcription of it, beyond the significance to the user. It increases awareness of how and why the manuscript was compiled. The second strand uses the Coventry manuscript as a focus for a broader exploration of textual and musical liturgical transmission patterns of insular pontifical manuscripts in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Tracing these patterns of transmission, using a combination of variant categorisation and statistical analysis, reveals any relationships which exist between manuscripts produced across medieval Britain. The analysis, combined with consideration of the nature of pontifical exemplars, allows me to explore how pontifical transmission differs from that of other types of liturgical manuscript. This investigation of transmission patterns pinpoints the relative position of the Coventry manuscript in its insular liturgical setting, and thus emphasises the significance of my complete transcription of the manuscript to current scholarship.

In 1977, a long-lost collection of manuscripts of plays, poems, and non-fiction texts from the 17th century was re-discovered in the library of Castle Ashby, Northamptonshire. Most of the items are not signed by an author, and have no known record of publication or performance. These technically anonymous items have received minimal scholarly attention in the three-plus decades since their recovery, and what comment there has been has not entirely agreed upon the collection's authorship, purpose, or even era of composition. This thesis takes a confident position on those debates by investigating the unsigned manuscripts and their contents through a variety of techniques. This study reviews the collection's known history, past commentators' findings and conclusions, and the physical and textual properties, and comes to an authorial conclusion based on a fresh palaeographic investigation; it then offers a biography of the proposed writer. It statistically analyses the collection's material, palaeographic, and metrical traits, in search of trends that might show a development over time. It applies modern electronic resources to investigate the collection's textual interrelationships and plausible literary sources, and uses contemporary history and the proposed author's biography to suggest conjectural allusions in the writing. Together, those avenues of analysis allow for a best-guess ordering and dating to be proposed for the collection's contents. Turning specifically to the dramatic texts, the thesis then considers the proposed author's potential theatrical resources, searches the manuscripts for evidence of possible professional theatrical use, and gathers dramaturgical information from the texts themselves to form an opinion about how plausible contemporary performances would have been; this is supplemented with the findings from the first modern stagings of all of the dramatic texts, which establish what minimum physical needs the plays would demand in performance, and identify where there are dramaturgical issues that could limit the plays' theatrical practicality. The study's findings up to that point then allow for the collection to be positioned within their period's larger context of authorial and theatrical activity, conclude whether the writer achieved anything unique, and, identifying the collection's major recurring thematic elements, propose a rationale for the writer's authorial activity. In summary, this thesis sets out to determine the conditions that brought the unsigned Castle Ashby texts into existence, and to suggest why they were written at all.

The Peniarth 22 manuscript is, except for the last four pages, a fifteenth-century copy of Brut y Brenhinedd, the Welsh translation of Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae; it was penned in 1444 by one Dafydd ap Maredudd Glais. It belongs to the Dingestow family of manuscripts, which in turn is related, in part, to the Llanstephan Version and Liber Coronacionis Britanorum manuscripts, although the detail of this relationship - and that of the Dingestow manuscripts to one another - still begs a number of questions. Peniarth 22 itself is very similar to, though not a copy of, the early fourteenth-century NLW 3036B manuscript. But there are differences in the orthography, and to a lesser extent in the grammatical constructions used by Dafydd which shed light on the changes that were being gradually adopted in the fifteenth century. This is particularly true of the last four pages, which contain Dafydd's own translation of a Latin chronicle, which comprises a continuation of the Brut. While incomplete, largely formulaic and in parts illegible, it includes detail of historical as well as linguistic interest. Dafydd himself, far from being an institutional scribe, led a colourful life including both murder and public service in fifteenth-century Aberystwyth. But he was not, as previously thought, a cleric.

Late medieval vernacular literary texts frequently reflect on their physical existence; they establish a poetics of material composition that is productively ambivalent about the contingencies of literary making in a manuscript culture. This thesis traces the ‘potential life’ of a late medieval manuscript. Four keywords (blankness, palimpsests, textiles, and fragments) provide the impetus for a discussion that connects a wide range of literary, codicological, and theoretical materials, in a mode that is iterative and additive. Manuscripts are not simply containers or substrates for literary texts; varied and ambivalent ideas about manuscripts are deeply embedded in the medieval period’s cultural and philosophical moment: they are the ‘matter’ of medieval writing in the dual sense of that word. In exploring the theoretical, figurative, and interpretative possibilities of manuscript study this thesis turns to a wide range of late medieval texts: these include the works of Geoffrey Chaucer, vernacular romance, The Book of Margery Kempe, The Book of Sir John Mandeville, and Thomas Hoccleve’s Series. The numerous and varied manuscripts of The Book of Sir John Mandeville form a central focus. As well as engaging with the late medieval period’s own rich vocabulary for describing the transformations of matter, I use contemporary ecological theory and new materialism in order to think further about the materials of medieval books. The work of Michel Serres, Bruno Latour, Tim Ingold, and Jonathan Gil Harris provides the occasion not simply to ‘apply’ contemporary theory to medieval materials, but to trace a more dialectical history in which theoretical, literary, and manuscript materials are brought into productive contact. This thesis demonstrates that late medieval manuscripts are sites where multiple temporalities are interwoven, in a manner that should encourage a critical self-­‐‑reflexiveness about how scholars narrate the lives of manuscripts, as well as about the modern archiving procedures that have come to condition our access to the medieval past. It reflects critically on the ways in which the medieval textual record has come to be fragmented, archived, and disciplined in the postmedieval period.

This thesis is a study of the physical features of the four earliest manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales all dated to the first years after the death of Geoffrey Chaucer. I assess the ways in which codicological examination can contribute to the understanding of a complex textual tradition and inform the study of the text. The thesis is divided into two volumes. The first volume contains the seven chapters which make up the thesis. The first chapter contains a review of the printed editions of the poem since Caxton's first edition of 1476 and a summary of the most important contributions of scholarship in the twentieth century. It reveals that many influential editions and much scholarship on the textual tradition of the poem have been achieved with scant consultation of the extant manuscripts. The second chapter addresses the problems which have arisen as a result of this neglect and offers suggestions for a different approach to manuscript analysis which will be provided as a result of the examination of the manuscripts in the remainder of the thesis. Chapters three to six contain detailed analyses of the four manuscripts in the survey: Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales MS. Peniarth 392D (Hengwrt), Oxford, Corpus Christi College, MS. 198 (Corpus), London, British Library MS. Harley 7334 (Harley 4), and California, San Marino, Huntington Library MS. El. 26 C 9 (Ellesmere). In chapter seven, I summarise the findings and offer suggestions for future research. The second volume contains all the appendices numbered 1-20 followed by 22 Plates. For each manuscript there are four or five separate appendices which provide details of the following: a visual overview, a detailed analysis of individual quires, a list of all rubrics, lines added, omitted or variant in each manuscript, and a list of catchwords.

No description available.

My thesis consists of editions of thirty unpublished Greek literary and documentary papyri from the Oxyrhynchus collection housed in the Sackler Library, Oxford.

Manuscript recipe books come in all shapes and sizes and run from tens to hundreds of pages. Those from the eighteenth century are not exclusively culinary, also incorporating medical, veterinary and household recipes. Surviving examples are almost all from genteel or elite households, the people who had time and resources to create them, and are preserved in local archives or dedicated collections. This thesis examines the medical recipes in particular and considers their role at a time when alternatives to domestic healthcare were proliferating: increasing numbers of physicians and surgeons, a growth in apothecaries’ shops, commercial offerings such as proprietary medicines and a variety of irregular practitioners. Advice and remedies in print were also widely available in books, periodicals and newspapers. This is the largest study of eighteenth-century manuscript medical recipes yet undertaken, encompassing 241 collections and a total of 19,134 recipes. It begins by considering the collections themselves as material objects, rather than merely text, which no other major study in this area has done. The range of recipes and ailments are assessed against prevalent illnesses and causes of death, and variations in recipe types identified regionally and temporally. Detailed case studies of coughs and colds, gout, hydrophobia, diet drinks and Daffy’s Elixir illustrate the variety of ingredients and methods, as well as regimens for health and differences by gender and age. Examination of compilers and contributors of recipes demonstrates that both women and men were involved in this practice. Recipe exchange is delineated as a form of social currency requiring trust and reciprocity, and case studies show how knowledge circulated through three forms of network: familial, sociable and political. Finally, a major contribution of this thesis is that it identifies manuscript medical recipe collections as fulfilling four important functions for their compilers: oeconomic, symbolic, personalised and instrumental.

This thesis is about networks in seventeenth-century England: the making and re-shaping of networks of people and texts, and the ways in which they evolved and transformed. It focuses on the manuscripts collected by Dr Thomas Plume (1630-1704), vicar of Greenwich and archdeacon of Rochester, who left them with a substantial body of books and pamphlets to the Library he endowed in Maldon. They take the form of notebooks and papers complied by a number of different clergymen, in particular Dr Robert Boreman (d.1675) and Dr Edward Hyde (1607-1659), in addition to Plume. The significance of the research lies in its reconstruction of the intellectual lives of the middle-status loyalist clergy through their handwritten texts. The research intervenes into debates about the nature and status of the manuscript form in an age of print and asks why these texts were left with the Library. The content and material form of these notebooks and papers evidence the reading and writing practices of the middle-status clergy, and the ways they were able to use their positions to influence and persuade on local and national levels. The main sections of the thesis encompass: a critical analysis of the manuscript collection; an examination of why the manuscripts were created and re-used; an appraisal of themes of identity, memorial, and legacy reflected within them; and the relationship between the handwritten items and printed books. This thesis argues that these seemingly-ephemeral texts were in fact the ‘heart’ of Plume’s library collection, representing a network of clergymen whose commitment to each other’s work extended as far as if they had been related by blood. Their working papers symbolised a memorial to their scholarship, saved for posterity under the shadow of destruction and loss during the Civil Wars.