Sub-Librarian Steven Archer describes why a medieval manuscript is so important to Roskilde, Denmark. In the year 1022, King Cnut, ruler of both England and Denmark, assembled a group of his nobles and church leaders on St Æthelthryth’s Day (23 June) to witness the grant of a piece of land at Wood Ditton to the …
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Fellowship admission photograph, 1929. F.A.II.7[2] One of the most famous images of Ludwig Wittgenstein is the photograph which he sent to Trinity College as a requirement for his election to a scholarship in 1929. A new exhibition at the Leopold Museum in Vienna allows us to see this photograph in a new light. The …
Trinity College has loaned three manuscripts to the exhibition ‘Thomas Becket: murder and the making of a saint’ which opens at the British Museum on 20 May 2021. Thomas Becket was murdered on 29 December 1170 in Canterbury Cathedral. From relatively humble beginnings he had risen to serve as Royal Chancellor and then as Archbishop …
Trinity has loaned manuscript O.7.16 to a new exhibition - The Human Touch: Making Art, Leaving Traces - which opens at the Fitzwilliam Museum on 18 May and explores the fundamental role of touch in human experience. The popular 13th-century text - De spiritu et anima (On the Spirit and the Soul) - was attributed to …
Until the Covid-19 pandemic forced the closure of museums and art galleries, the exhibition British Baroque: Power and Illusion was showing at Tate Britain in London. Trinity College lent two of the carvings by Grinling Gibbons from the Wren Library to this exhibition. You can read more about all the Wren carvings in an earlier …
Continue reading Godfrey Kneller’s Portrait of Matthew Prior: a Mystery Solved
Trinity College has lent two manuscripts to a fabulous new exhibition at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. Book of Beasts: The Bestiary in the Medieval World looks at the imaginative world of the medieval bestiary. A bestiary is a compendium of animals - mythical and real – which usually highlights the religious …
The novel by Daniel Defoe commonly known as Robinson Crusoe was first published 300 years ago, on 25th April 1719. Robinson Crusoe is the only survivor of a shipwreck who spends 28 years on a remote tropical island before he is finally rescued. He has only what he can salvage from the wreckage: tools, weapons, …
Trinity College Library has lent some of the rotating lecterns and readers' stools designed by Sir Christopher Wren as part of the furnishing of the Wren Library to a pop-up exhibition at Downing College. Over the last two years Cambridge-based photographer Sara Rawlinson has taken pictures of almost all of the College libraries in Cambridge. …
Trinity College has lent a number of items to an exhibition on the artist and Trinity alumnus, Julian Trevelyan (1910–1988) at the Pallant House Gallery in Chichester. Julian was the son of Robert Trevelyan and Elizabeth des Amorie van der Hoeven. As a young child, Julian created a complex imaginary town which he named Hurtenham, …
The last of the five manuscripts lent by Trinity College to the British Library’s Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms exhibition is one of the most intriguing and visually appealing manuscripts in the Wren Library. B.16.3 is a collection of poems by one of the most talented writers of the ninth century, a monk named Hrabanus Maurus. Hrabanus (or …
The Rare Books & Manuscripts Library of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge
Worcester Cathedral Library contains nearly 300 medieval manuscripts, 5500 printed books, and 20,000 archival documents. The aim of this blog is to open up the fascinating collection of a Medieval English Cathedral to the wider world.
News from the Peterhouse Perne and Ward Libraries
Erik Kwakkel blogging about medieval manuscripts
Treasures from the Collection
Special Collections of King's College, Cambridge
One of Cambridge's hidden gems
Treasures from the Collection
Trinity College Library, Cambridge 