A Pair of Book Stamps

John Hacket (1592-1670) was a member and fellow of Trinity College. As Bishop of Lichfield and Coventry he oversaw the rebuilding of the cathedral, contributing £3,500 and raising far more. He was also generous towards his former college making a bequest of £1200 in his will towards the rebuilding of the ‘ruined’ Garret Hostel. The …

Hockney’s Bigger Book – and a smaller one.

This morning we took delivery of A Bigger Book, David Hockney’s retrospective collection of more than 450 works from throughout his career. Measuring 70 x 50 cm, it is a spectacular survey of more than 60 years of Hockney’s work, from his teenage days at the Bradford School of Art, Los Angeles swimming pools in …

Wren Curios

Currently we welcome around 100 people a day to the Wren Library. Tourists come to marvel at the architecture of the building, the stained glass, portraits and marble busts, and to view the special displays of manuscripts and printed books. Visitors to the Wren Library during the 18th and 19th centuries, however, would have had …

Roubiliac in the Wren Library

The Wren Library houses a magnificent series of portrait busts by Louis François Roubiliac, the leading sculptor in England in the mid-18th century. By Wren’s time, there was a well-established tradition of furnishing libraries with painted and sculptural portraits. The subjects of these portraits would often be ancient and modern authors, great men worthy of …

William Lamb, 2nd Viscount Melbourne (1779-1848)

This painting hanging in the staircase-pavilion of the Wren Library is a copy of 1830 after Sir Thomas Lawrence's portrait in the National Portrait Gallery, London. It was painted at the time of Lamb's marriage to Lady Caroline Ponsonby in 1805. The marriage was unhappy, marred by infidelities on both sides, though most notoriously, Caroline's …

Eclipses

A solar eclipse can be viewed over much of Britain later this week on Friday 20th March. A solar eclipse occurs when the moon passes between the earth and the sun. It may completely obscure the view of the Sun from the Earth (a total eclipse) or only partially (a partial eclipse). This week's eclipse …

Evangelia IV. Glosata.

Tucked away in one of the locked bays in the Wren Library is Trin MS B.5.3, a huge and "exceptionally splendid"* 13th century manuscript produced at the Benedictine abbey in St. Albans, Hertfordshire. The St. Albans scriptorium was a hub of illuminated manuscript production, perhaps best known for the St. Albans Psalter and for Matthew Paris, a monk, …

Hamsa i Jami

Hamsa i Jami ('Five Poems by Jami'). Persian, transcribed by Abdullah ul Hardy, 1531. R.13.8 Abdul-Rahman Jami (1414-1492), known simply as Jami, was one of Iran's most prolific and best known poets of the 15th century. His works feature scholarship, theology and religious allegory in the Sufi tradition, a form of Islamic mysticism that valued an …

Wolf Hall

Excitement about royal Tudor England is everywhere in anticipation of the televised adaptation of Hilary Mantel's Booker prize-winning novels Wolf Hall and Bring Up The Bodies beginning this week on the BBC . Here in the Wren Library we have a number of manuscripts which belonged to King Henry VIII. His libraries, housed in several …

The Trinity Carol Roll

The Trinity Carol Roll (MS O.3.58), a parchment scroll over six feet long, is the earliest source for English polyphonic carols. Dating from the early 15th century in East Anglia, the roll contains words and musical notation on a five line stave for thirteen carols in Middle English and Latin. These include the patriotic 'Deo gracias …