History of Libraries Research Seminar

The purpose of the seminars is to encourage further research into all aspects of the subject of library history following the publication in 2006 of the "Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland" by Cambridge University Press. A steering group has been appointed which will also oversee the use and development of Professor Robin Alston's "List of Libraries", which has been available on the internet for a number of years.

Steering Group: Peter Hoare (general editor, "Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland"); Professor Alistair Black (Leeds Metropolitan University); Dr. Elisabeth Leedham-Green (Darwin College, Cambridge); Dr. Teresa Webber (Trinity College, Cambridge); Ian Willison, CBE (Institute of English Studies, University of London); and the convenors.

Seminar convenors: Mr Giles Mandelbrote (Early Printed Collections, The British Library, London); Dr Keith A. Manley (Institute of Historical Research, University of London).

The seminars are jointly sponsored by the Institute of English Studies, the Institute of Historical Research, and the Library & Information History Group.

Meetings take place on Tuesdays, 5.30-7.30pm

Click here for information about the new Stewart House seminar rooms.

02 March 2010
(Tuesday)

Venue: Room G37 (Senate House, Ground Floor)
Time: 17:30 - 19:30
Speakers: Dr. James Willoughby (University of Oxford), 'The medieval library of St George's Chapel, Windsor'
English collegiate libraries of the middle ages are poorly known outside those of the two ancient universities. The royal collegiate chapel of St George at Windsor possessed one of the finer collections, as witnessed by several medieval booklists as well as many surviving books.

27 April 2010
(Tuesday)

Venue: Room G37 (Senate House, Ground Floor)
Time: 17:30 - 19:30
Speakers: Scott Mandelbrote (Peterhouse, Cambridge), 'The history and archaeology of a seventeenth-century library: Peterhouse, Cambridge, from Andrew Perne (d. 1589) to John Cosin (d. 1672)'
At the death of Andrew Perne, Peterhouse received a bequest that transformed its library. This talk reconstructs the effects of that bequest and of subsequent decisions about the library of the College on buildings, furniture, catalogues, and the management of the collection. It reconstructs a hitherto unknown early seventeenth-century library, describes the relationship of the College with the London Stationers' Company, and charts the rise and fall of a library that, from 1595 to 1655, might reasonably be described as the finest in Cambridge.

04 May 2010
(Tuesday)

Venue: Room G37 (Senate House, Ground Floor)
Time: 17:30 - 19:30
Speakers: Stephen Massil (National Trust), 'Libraries of the National Trust: some houses in Kent and Sussex - Shakespeare, landscape and the in-laws'
Some observations and experience of cataloguing for the National Trust where place, family, and changing generations put `provenance' at the heart of the process.

25 May 2010
(Tuesday)

Venue: Other
Time: 17:30 - 19:30
Visit to Dulwich College Library. Numbers will be limited. Bookings to Keith Manley.

Alleyn's legacy at Dulwich - the College of God's gift, now Dulwich College - preserves in its Archives one of the world's major resources of Jacobean theatre history, reflecting the interests and career of its founder Edward Alleyn, contemporary of Marlowe, Donne, Jonson et al. Its Fellows' Library of nearly 6,000 books represents the acquisitions of 350 years by gentlemen clerics, sometimes academic, sometimes schoolmasterly in taste, with the flavour of the country house library closet dispersed throughout. The group will be given a taste of the collections' history, shown the Archives premises and some of the gems of the collections, which in addition to theatre material span medieval MSS, incunabula, and exploration and literary figures among former alumni (Wodehouse, Chandler, Shackleton, etc.).

01 June 2010
(Tuesday)

Venue: Room G37 (Senate House, Ground Floor)
Time: 17:30 - 19:30
Speakers: Michelle Johansen (University of East London, Bishopsgate Institute, Birkbeck), 'An "unglamorous" profession?: the public librarian in late-Victorian London'
A variety of occupational identities were available to the first generation of chief librarians working in London's rate-assisted libraries ca. 1900. The identities these quasi-professionals adopted and `performed' (in their modes of leadership and methods of library management, in their inter-institutional allegiances and enmities and in the journal articles and correspondence they wrote) tell us much about late-Victorian public library history. They also shed light on wider historical issues relating to such themes as gender, family, location and social class.