Library Newsletter Lent 2020

St John’s College Library Newsletter L

LENT 2020

VOLUME 3, ISSUE 2

A tale from the Tower Some of the treasures in our lovely Old Library seem all along to have been destined for St John’s College. One such is MS B.19, simply labelled as ‘L. Carlyon’ in M. R. James’s century – old but still definitive catalogue to our medieval manuscripts. B.19 arrived in the Library in 1635, one small part of the magnificent collection originally assembled by the Elizabethan scholar and cleric William Crashaw, subsequently acquired by Shakespeare’s friend and patron Henry Wriothesley, third Earl of Southampton, and formally presented to St John’s

by Wriothesley’s son Thomas, the fourth Earl.

All three were loyal Johnians, and in making this gift they helped establish the grand new College Library as the largest and most important collection of books in seventeenthcentury Cambridge.

MS B.19 is in spectacular company.

Some of our oldest manuscripts, including the so-called Table of lunar eclipses

Southampton Psalter (MS C.9) and a tenth-century collection of works relating to St Benedict (MS F.27), came from this source.

But B.19 is intriguing in its own right. Still in its fine fifteenthcentury binding – handsome stamped leather on boards – it is a copy of an intricate mathematical work, a collection of tables of eclipses of the moon and sun, with related topics, some originally gathered together in 1482 by the physician and astronomer Lewis of Caerleon (who died in or after 1495). The detail in the calculations remind us of the skill and mathematical dexterity demanded of the Astronomical diagram medieval astronomer.

Then there is the ‘Johnian’ back story to the volume which James never spotted. Subsequent research, notably by Pearl Kibre, tells us more about Lewis and the turbulent political world in which he lived. Lewis is believed to have facilitated plots initiated by Lady Margaret Beaufort and Elizabeth Woodville which led to the marriage of their children, the future Henry VII and Elizabeth of York. A loyal supporter of the House of Lancaster in the Wars of the Roses, he was imprisoned in the Tower of London by the

Yorkist King Richard III following the suppression of a rebellion in 1483. This collection in B.19, representing work done after King Richard’s plundering of his papers, reassembles the original calculations and adds new material, including observations taken

by Lewis in the Tower on 16 March 1485. He apparently presented several copies to the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, and to

individual Colleges. Today we cannot know the identity of the intended recipient of B.19, but it somehow seems fitting that the book found its way a century later to a College founded by Lady Margaret Beaufort and greatly valued by the dynasty that Lewis worked hard to establish.

New old books: a snapshot of the continuing development of the Old Library’s collections

on display in the Fitzwilliam Museum’s Feast & Fast exhibition).

These papers illustrate the management and economics of the slave trade, complementing and expanding our existing primary sources, giving even greater scope for teaching and research.

Do we still buy books for the Old Library? The answer is yes. A generous benefactor has provided an annual budget for purchasing special collections. These may be books or papers with a direct Johnian connection, or material closely associated with particular strengths of our collections. This year’s selection includes satire, slave gangs, medieval religion, and Cambridge high jinks.

Our first purchase was an early eighteenth-century satirical novel

by Mary Davys, The reform’d coquet. Mrs Davys was well-known to many Johnians as the keeper of a coffee-house just a stone’s throw from St John’s. Women don’t feature much in the College’s history, so the work of an intelligent, independent woman writing in Cambridge in 1724 is a welcome addition.

William Phelp Perrin was not a Johnian, so correspondence relating to his Jamaican plantations may seem a strange acquisition, but St John’s is home to internationally significant collections relating to Slavery Abolitionists. Both Thomas Clarkson and William Wilberforce were Johnians. Their papers attract researchers from around the world, and provide a key teaching resource at university and school level. We bought a handful of Perrin’s papers in 2014 (including an utterly chilling list of slaves with their prices, currently

Underground art inspiration In the Chapel Wing of the open-access Basement is a collection of over 800 fine art auction house catalogues, all of which were donated to the Library. The bulk of the collection is made up of catalogues from Christie’s and Sotheby’s, but it also includes catalogues from less well-known auction houses.

While the catalogues are all from twenty-first-century auctions,

Dr Mark Nicholls, Librarian

A privately printed edition of Thomas à Kempis’s Imitatio Christi owned by the Johnian Lionel Graham Horton-Smith adds to our extraordinary collection of about 200 copies of this same work, collected by George Udny Yule. Yule, a statistician, initially bought a range of editions for statistical text analysis, then became fascinated by medieval devotional works in their own right.

We can’t buy every letter written by a Johnian which comes onto the market, but those with substantial Cambridge content are of particular interest. The detailed and lively account which George Augustus Selwyn wrote to Charles Merivale of the Cambridge Commencement of 1831 was an obvious choice.

Adding to the Old Library’s collections is always exciting, as one never knows what may come up for sale. Every year brings surprises.

Kathryn McKee, Special Collections Librarian they refer to works of art over many centuries. For example, they include sales of drawings by old masters through to early modern and impressionist paintings, and every decade of twentiethcentury art.

College members are most welcome to consult the catalogues.

The simplest way to use the collection would be as a source of information about a particular artist or work. Using the search engines on the auction house websites you can easily find out when a particular work was sold. If you head down to the

Basement armed with this information and find the relevant auction catalogue you might be surprised by what’s inside.

Alongside the superb photographs – comparable to those in the best art books – you might find a critical essay or two, quotes from an interview with the artist, and photos from the artist’s studio documenting how a particular piece was produced.

Flower, and then easily move to David Bowie’s art collection, and then a catalogue called The Artist’s Muse, which juxtaposes all kinds of fantastic pieces on this theme from Gustav Courbet to Yoshitomo Nara.

Be warned though – if you are interested in fine art you could easily spend a lot of time browsing such a rich and interesting collection.

For example, your eye might be caught by Jeff Koons’ Balloon

Rebecca Le Marchand, Library Assistant

Lent term exhibition: Wordsworth at 250 A new exhibition in the Library delves into the life and work of poet William Wordsworth, who turns 250 on 7th April this year. From relatively humble beginnings in the mountainous region of northwest England, Wordsworth came to St John’s as an undergraduate in 1787. He didn’t much care for the dreary, flat landscape of Cambridge, nor for the College’s ‘three gloomy courts’. He spent his time wandering in the surrounding fields and reading works of European literature that weren’t on the syllabus. Consequently, in 1791, he graduated without honours – then went on to compose some of the most memorable and enduringly popular poems in the English language, eventually becoming Queen Victoria’s Poet Laureate.

The exhibition tells the story of Wordsworth’s time at St John’s, his subsequent travels in Europe, and his move to the Lake District, where he lived from 1799 until his death in 1850. From there he maintained vital friendships with some of the greatest poets and artists of his time. Not least among these was Samuel Taylor Coleridge, co-author of Lyrical Ballads: a small book that altered the course, and the sound, of English poetry. Alongside first

editions of Wordsworth’s published works, the exhibition includes original letters to the likes of Coleridge and Robert Southey (another ‘Lake poet’), which show that Wordsworth was as preoccupied with medical matters as with literature. Among the unique artefacts on display are his breakfast tea cup and his ‘life mask’ – a cast of his face, resulting from the 45-year-old poet having agreed to sit very still, with straws stuck up his nose, while wet plaster was slathered over his face and left to set. Artist Benjamin Robert Haydon made the mask in 1815, and it is displayed alongside three manuscript sonnets that Wordsworth addressed to Haydon later that year, in a delightful example of creative exchange.

Wordsworth at 250 is open to all, 9am–5pm Monday to Friday (excluding public holidays) in the Library Exhibition Area.

Rebecca Watts, Projects Assistant

Women’s History Month and World Book Day This month (March) is Women’s History Month, which corresponds with World Book Day on the 5th March and International Women’s Day on the 8th March. To celebrate all three events, the Working Library is mounting a display to showcase the history of feminism, and women’s writing in both fiction and non-fiction texts. The books on display, all authored by women, have been specially selected by Library staff

as some of their favourite reads. Among the favourites are Her body and other parties by Carmen Maria Machadol; Wild by Cheryl Strayed; Circe by Madeleine Miller; My Cousin Rachel by Daphne du Maurier; Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo; and To the River by Olivia Laing. Many of the staff picks were books that were not formerly part of the Library collection. Hence in celebrating women’s contributions to literature, we have taken the opportunity to revitalise our General Interest section with new selections of poetry, novels, short stories and non-fiction.

Ellie Capeling, Graduate Trainee

First month in the Archives At the time of writing I have come to the end of my fourth week as College Archivist, and the time has flown by.

There has been a lot to discover, from the College site to the various databases and spreadsheets which the Archivist maintains. The School of Pythagoras is of course every archivist’s dream. The effort that goes into maintaining the building and keeping it secure, on the part of the Maintenance department, the Porters, and our excellent Housekeeping team, has become very clear, with the regular services of the dehumidification system, fire alarms, and gas suppressant system (used instead of a water-based sprinkler system in case of fire) all having taken place in these last few weeks.

The Archive Centre is open to researchers on Wednesdays and Thursdays and since I started has been used by researchers from Germany, Oxford, and the College itself. I’m fortunate to be assisted on these days by our Library Graduate Trainee and Library

The Second World War is the greatest epic and the greatest tragedy of modern times.

Even people who read or care little about history know quite a lot about it. Family memories, television programmes, films, monuments, novels, popular histories and museums elaborate the saga. Every country has its own variant. For Germany, it is a dark history of moral collapse, bombing, invasion and ruin. For France, a story of occupation and resistance. Russian memory focuses on invasion, stubborn defence at Stalingrad and final victory.

Americans remember the war in the Pacific and D-Day. We too have our story, which runs something like this: German military might threatened a weak and vulnerable Britain with invasion in 1940, with aerial bombing of our cities paving the way; ‘the Few’ of the RAF narrowly managed to beat off the attack; but the war then dragged on, with a desperate Britain threatened with starvation by German U-Boats until the Russians and Americans came to our rescue and finally defeated Nazi Germany. This is the staple version repeated in a huge popular literature.

The War for the Seas is a book that turns all this on its head. The truly decisive struggle, it argues, was on the seas, where the Royal Navy was throughout a major, and at times the predominant,

Assistant, both expert multi-taskers! This means that researchers are not left unsupervised when, for example, archive material has to be fetched from the lower strong room. Enquiries, both internal and external, come in a steady flow and for the new Archivist offer an excellent opportunity to look in more detail at the material held here.

The College Archivist also has to make sure that records created now are saved to be the archives of the future. Records created by College departments but no longer required for either frequent or occasional use are transferred to the Archive Centre; after a period of time they are reviewed and a decision is made on whether they are to be destroyed or kept in perpetuity as archives (often first being closed to researchers for a suitable period). In a similar vein, material about College clubs and societies, and other aspects of College life (e.g. the May Ball), is collected to be archived. If you sit on the committee of a club or society, or help to organise any other event in College, please do contact me about donating material to the Archives. You may also like to browse the online catalogue, currently a work in progress to which new descriptions continue to be added: there is much to be learned there about the College’s history and it could be that an old society is listed that’s just calling out to be re-formed!

Dr Lynsey Darby, Archivist force, especially in the crucial Atlantic and Mediterranean theatres.

Germany was so weak at sea that there was never a serious prospect of Britain being invaded: the half-hearted planning undertaken on Hitler’s orders simply served to show how impossible it was. Germany’s U-Boat force was weak and obsolescent, and it was the handful of German surface ships like the battleship Bismarck that briefly posed the greatest threat to Britain’s supply lines. But the German navy was too weak and badly led to prove a long-term danger. Russia could not have survived without the support of the Anglo-Americans, who were bound to win because they could – with only brief interruptions – control the world’s oceans, and so mobilise and deploy global resources themselves while denying them to their enemies. They were helped by the astonishing inability of the Germans or the Japanese to understand this, which makes their decision to provoke wars they were never likely to win even more insane.

Moreover, as Mawdsley remarks, this perspective means that ‘the contribution of the British Empire to the Allied victory … deserves more credit than it is often accorded today’ (p.476).

Evan Mawsdley is a serious academic historian (formerly Professor of International History at Glasgow) who has the advantage of having written major works on the land war between Germany and Russia, and he is master of a vast literature in German, Russian and English. He also writes clearly and vividly, and succeeds in making this vast global history meaningful and gripping.

Professor Robert Tombs, Fellow in History