A ‘strange, odd Book’: Collecting Late Medieval Concertina-Fold Almanacs
Abstract:
A ‘strange, odd Book’: Collecting Late Medieval Concertina-Fold Almanacs
The eighteenth-century, antiquarian Thomas Hearne described one manuscript in his collection as a, ‘strange, odd Book (upon wch I set a very great Value, having never seen the like)’. The curiosity that Hearne so esteemed—now Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS. Rawlinson D. 939—was a fourteenth-century concertina-fold almanac: over two-and-a-half meters long when fully unfolded, its surface covered with colorful pictures and a variety of texts and tables. When opened for inspection in the reading room, the manuscript still attracts attention and comment from even the most seasoned scholars, who, like Hearne, ‘have never seen the like’. Although, at one time, folded manuscripts may have been common, few survive intact and fewer still maintain their original structure. Their flexible form made them vulnerable to wear and, as portable manuscripts, they were exposed to all the dangers of a vagabond life. This talk introduces the corpus of twenty-nine concertina-fold almanacs, which I am cataloguing with Kathleen Doyle and Sarah Griffin, and considers the later fate of a few of these manuscript oddities: how they came to their current holding institutions, how they were classed and treated and what this tells us about institutional understanding of books.
This seminar session will be held online via Zoom. The joining details will be sent to registered attendees approximately one week before the date of the event.
This page was last updated on 15 March 2025
