Cambridge University Library Research Articles

A Manuscript of the Arabian Nights and Its Journey to Cambridge

Abstract Cambridge University Library holds an Arabic manuscript of The Thousand and One Nights (Ms Qq.106–109). The library records it as entering the collection in 1819 and codicological evidence shows that the manuscript was copied in Cairo in the early 19th century. This paper discusses the complex narrative of its acquisition, including the roles played by prominent travellers and collectors. The significance of the text of the ‘Nights’ and its popularity in England and Europe are also examined as are the factors that made the Arabic text of this work much sought-after at the time. The influence of the contemporary political situation, the conditions of travel in the Middle East, and the individuals involved with the text’s acquisition are described, focusing on those with a Cambridge connection. A detailed analysis of the activities and twists of fate resulting in the acquisition of this particular manuscript are traced in contemporary sources.

Celebrating St Melor at Amesbury Priory

ABSTRACT This article examines relevant information from Amesbury Priory to elucidate the ways in which the priory celebrated the life of their patron saint Melor in a commemorative office. Based on Cambridge, Cambridge University Library Ee.6.16, the article examines ways in which the Amesbury telling of Melor’s life differs from both other English as well as French sources. Drawing upon English breviaries that include lessons for Melor’s feast day, it shows the ways in which they differ from the Amesbury material. Rather than focusing on Melor’s wounding and prosthetic hand and foot, the Amesbury commemorative office emphasises the role of the one female character in the story in the days leading to Melor’s death. The article includes a transcription the breviary sources, and the commemorative office in CUL Ee.6.16 as well as material from two fragmentary breviaries associated with the priory.

Collaboration and mediation: a guide to the creation of the Stephen Hawking Archive

In this paper we discuss the creation of the Stephen Hawking Archive through processes of collaboration, and human and technological mediation.[1] We focus on the production of documents including scientific and popular writings, correspondence and lectures in different media and forms of communication from handwriting, diagrams and typing to word processing and digital communication. We consider these processes to think about what is important in the Stephen Hawking Archive, including where authorship is located, and what this shows about scientific collaboration and communication in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. We also briefly consider how archivists have mediated the Archive since it was received by Cambridge University Library (CUL) in 2021 through its arrangement and description, and we look forward to developing the Archive in the future, including the possibility of acquiring further digital files to include in the Archive.

Two Judeo-Spanish ‘Marrano’ hymns in the liturgy of the Jews of Cochin

The liturgy of the Jews of Cochin, Kerala, is extant in several manuscripts, the oldest dating back to the end of the seventeenth century. Among the Hebrew pieces, we find two compositions in Old Spanish written in Hebrew characters, Alto dio de Abraham and Todos kiriados . Here we provide for the first time an edition of these texts (from MS. Roth 33 of the Brotherton Library, University of Leeds and MS. Or. 2242 of the Cambridge University Library). A philological analysis reveals that these two texts – a supplication paraphrasing Psalm 121 and a translation of a medieval Hebrew pizmon, Kol bĕruʾe – are orally transmitted versions of prayers belonging to the liturgy of the Hispano-Portuguese New Christians. A comparison with their European counterparts and the study of the linguistic peculiarities of these Indian versions show influences from Portuguese and Malayalam. In the context of the history of Jewish and Marrano migrations to the Malabar Coast, these texts represent an important vestige of a Judeo-Iberian heritage within Indian Jewish culture.

Rediscovering Arnold Dolmetsch: going back to the sources of the early music revival

Abstract This article provides a retrospective overview of the discussion of Arnold Dolmetsch, his family, students and friends in Early Music since its first issue in 1973. It connects these cases with a broad range of other literature, suggests the need to rethink and recontextualize the lifetime of Arnold Dolmetsch and considers the significance of archival materials in the Jeanne-Marie Dolmetsch Collection newly available at Cambridge University Library (Ms. Add. 10371). In particular, it demonstrates the largely overlooked intercultural dimension of the Dolmetsch family’s contribution to the early music revival, highlighting their interactions with people and music cultures from beyond western Europe. Finally, it suggests a programme for possible future research on the Dolmetsch phenomenon.

Raymond Briggs: A Retrospective, Raymond Briggs, curated by Katie Currach and Nicolette Jones

Review of: Raymond Briggs: A Retrospective, Raymond Briggs, curated by Katie Currach and Nicolette Jones Cambridge University Library, Cambridge, 29 April–26 August 2023 Raymond Briggs: A Retrospective, a touring exhibition from the Quentin Blake Centre for Illustration, was installed at Cambridge University Library from 2 April to the 26 August in 2023. The collection, courtesy of the Raymond Briggs Archive and Penguin Random House, consists of annotated page designs and original illustrations selected from over sixty years of award-winning work. From fairytales to political satire, this exhibition showcases the intricate detail and deep emotional resonance of Briggs’ work; a legacy of powerful storytelling which has moved so many readers, old and young alike, over the decades.

The Stylized Hedera in Cambridge, University Library, Kk.3.18

One of the distinctive paleographical features of Cambridge University Library (CUL), Kk.3.18 (xi2; Worcester) transmitting the latest extant version of the Old English translation of Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica is a punctuation symbol consisting of a triangle of dots above a comma. Ker points out that this punctuation mark is characteristic of Hemming, the main scribe of CUL Kk.3.18, who also copied parts of British Library, Cotton Tiberius A. xiii; Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 146 and 391; Oxford, Bodleian Library, Hatton 114 and Junius 121; and Harley Charter 83. A.3.1 According to The Production and Use of English Manuscripts 1060 to 1220, a triangle of dots above a comma is found only in the manuscripts associated with Hemming—CCCC 391 and CUL Kk.3.18.2 Houghton suggests that this punctuation mark is a stylized version of the decorative hedera symbol, ‘probably the oldest punctuation mark in the West, appearing in inscriptions of the second century B.C.’ (Parkes).3 Parkes observes that hedera can still be found at the beginnings and ends of sections of texts in manuscripts dating to the seventh and eighth centuries, but its replacement with punctus versus in Oxford, Bodleian Library, Bodley 819 demonstrates that it was misunderstood by the twelfth-century annotator.4 In the manuscript described by Parkes (Bodley 819; viii1; Wearmouth-Jarrow), the hedera is used to separate lemma from commentary. In the manuscripts discussed by Houghton, the stylized hedera (a triangle of dots above a comma) signals the end of exegesis and quotation (Budapest, National Széchényi Library, Cod. Lat. 1, folios 1–58; ca. 800; St. Amand and Amiens, Bibliothèque municipale, MS 88; ix or x). In CUL Kk.3.18 (henceforth Ca), the stylized hedera not only has more diverse functions but also a wider variety of forms. Its graphic variants include a triangle formed of two dots above a comma (e.g. 4v signalling the end of the heading of Book I Chapter 8); a parallelogram formed of three dots and a comma in the low right corner (e.g. 4r signalling the end of the West-Saxon Regnal List); and a parallelogram formed of four dots above a comma (e.g. 6v signalling the end of heading of Book II Chapter 22).5 Its functions range from marking the boundaries of books and chapters to micro-episodes and points of theological and historic interest.

Early Music and materiality—1

Many of Early Music’s readers will remember their first encounter with the journal. Mine took place in 1977 among the stacks of open shelves of Cambridge University Library, not quite at the start but nevertheless in its early years of publication. The volume I took down from the shelves (with all four issues of a year bound together) was surprisingly heavy, and of an intriguingly different size—no other journal on the shelves shared its dimensions. At the time, I had no idea, of course, that the weight of paper and page size would come to form an important part of my working life, but they were noticeable characteristics even with my then ignorance of such matters. This distinction from other tomes in the journals section became even clearer on opening an issue: the eye was captivated by illustrations and advertising copy on almost every page. The layout was complex, but elegant: type, column widths and sizing of illustrations bore witness to a serious design element. It was an object of beauty, both immediately attractive and intriguing, almost compelling the reader to be drawn into the intricacies of making gut strings or interpreting arcane ornament signs. Yes, dear reader, it was love at first sight.

Translation Effects: Language, Time, and Community in Medieval England

Translation Effects: Language, Time, and Community in Medieval England

Edmund Gosse's "Tristram Jones" (c. 1872), and the Legacy of the Maternal Portrait

Edmund Gosse broke the mould of nineteenth-century life writing with his study of family relationships, Father and Son (1907), a book now widely recognised as having made a crucial intervention in the transition from Victorian to modern forms of biography. Modern academic interest in Father and Son was first stimulated by the 1970s rise of auto/biographical studies, and the book has continued to attract attention from a wide range of disciplines. Father and Son has, however, never been approached through the lens of Gosse’s juvenilia. Amongst Gosse’s papers archived at Cambridge University Library is a manuscript entitled “Tristram Jones” (c. 1872). Written when he was twenty-two, it contains ideas and imagery that anticipate Father and Son, and both narratives, strikingly, conclude with a gesture of freedom. At the end of “Tristram Jones,” the eponymous protagonist celebrates having extricated himself from an incompatible engagement, and looks forward to the single-minded pursuit of an aesthetic career. Similarly, in Father and Son, Gosse rejects a parentally-determined life of Christian service to devote himself to a literary vocation. A shift from limitation to liberation thus structures both texts. Against this background, my focus in this essay is on Gosse’s importation into “Tristram Jones” of a chain of conflicting emotions and memories impelled by a material object, namely, a portrait of his mother, Emily, painted in 1831 when she was twenty-four. Gosse’s imaginative deployment of this portrait into his 1872 fiction has a powerfully unsettling impact, one which, as I shall show, he reintroduced four decades later into his 1912 Booklover’s edition of Father and Son.

:Translation Effects: Language, Time, and Community in Medieval England

:<i>Translation Effects: Language, Time, and Community in Medieval England</i>

How to Cure a Horse, or, the Experience of Knowledge and the Knowledge of Experience

How to Cure a Horse, or, the Experience of Knowledge and the Knowledge of Experience

Trouble in Paradise

This article examines how the Circum-Caribbean region’s cultural and geographic complexities make it difficult to describe or index relevant archival materials using the mainstream authority controls used in galleries, libraries, archives, and museums (GLAMs). This difficulty stems from the fact that authority controls utilised by GLAMs are primarily created by North American or European authorities and, therefore, have Western-centric views imbued with colonialist overtones. When these systems are used to catalogue, index, or describe Circum-Caribbean-related collection materials, a tension arises: a system with a white, Euro-American perspective is applied to material reflective of a significantly multicultural place, culture, subject, and population. The rigidity of controlled vocabularies and their applications—which typically follow specific indexing methodologies—cannot accommodate the fluidity necessary to accurately denote the complex Circum-Caribbean region, especially with regard to geographic indexing. This article demonstrates the difficulties that emerge from trying to delimit and define the Caribbean region; provides an abbreviated analysis of the Circum-Caribbean’s representation in the Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names® (TGN), which mirrors the difficulties of defining and delimiting the region; and presents a case study in which the West Indian Postcard Collection at Cambridge University Library was indexed using augmented applications of the TGN. The research presented in this paper supports the theory that employing both general and specific indexing strategies creates enhanced access to Caribbean-related collection materials by enabling regional, sub-regional, and territorial/national avenues to retrieve collection materials.

Searching for the Last Genizah Fragment in Late Ottoman Cairo: A Material Survey of Egyptian Jewish Literary Culture

AbstractThe Cairo Genizah is well known as a repository for hundreds of thousands of manuscripts that the Jewish residents of Fustat (Old Cairo) produced and consumed in the premodern period. Foreign “collectors” acquired most of these manuscripts for European libraries in the second half of the nineteenth century, with the majority arriving at the Cambridge University Library in 1897 under the auspices of Solomon Schechter. Less well known is the fact that hundreds of Genizah fragments were produced in the late nineteenth century, even as European collectors were scouring Cairo for ancient texts. This later corpus includes witnesses to the social and economic history of late Ottoman Cairo and provides copious evidence for the material history of Egyptian Jewish literary activity at that time. Despite this, it remains understudied for both Ottoman and Jewish history. Late Genizah material also raises questions about the integrity of “Cairo Genizah” manuscript collections around the world, as some fragments postdate Schechter's Genizah “discovery,” and others were never in Egypt at all.

‘Lock up your libraries’? Women readers at Cambridge University Library, 1855–1923

This article explores the admission of women readers to Cambridge University Library from the mid-nineteenth to early twentieth centuries. The period covered begins with the introduction of new library rules in 1854, which allowed for the formal admission of readers who were not members of the university, including women. It focuses in particular on women students, who arrived in Cambridge with the founding of the first women’s colleges, Girton College in 1869 and Newnham College in 1871. It argues that the control of access to (male) privileged spaces such as the University Library (alongside lecture halls and laboratories) was bound up with and symbolic of the status of women in the university, part of the long battle for women to be admitted as full members of the university.

The Reception of Chaucer's Shorter Poems, 1400–1450: Female Audiences, English Manuscripts, French Contexts by Kara A. Doyle

Reviewed by: The Reception of Chaucer's Shorter Poems, 1400–1450: Female Audiences, English Manuscripts, French Contexts by Kara A. Doyle Sarah Wilma Watson Kara A. Doyle. The Reception of Chaucer's Shorter Poems, 1400–1450: Female Audiences, English Manuscripts, French Contexts. Chaucer Studies. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2021. Pp. 306. $99.00 cloth; $24.99 e-book. Kara A. Doyle's new book uncovers an exciting early chapter in the reception of Chaucer's poetry. Exploring six manuscript compilations dating to [End Page 397] between 1410 and 1450, Doyle demonstrates how early compilers placed Chaucer in a French literary context that encouraged readers to focus on Chaucer's female-voiced critique of fin'amors. Creators of fifteenth-century compilations developed Chaucer's reputation as "womanis frend" by positioning his poetry alongside French and English texts that highlight female perspective, agency, and voice. Through codicological interpretation and comparative literary analysis, Doyle reconstructs the intertextual reading experience of medieval audiences, showing how compilers and readers encountered Chaucer, Hoccleve, and Lydgate through the lens of French lyric sequences and dits and debats amoureux. This French literary context foregrounded for medieval readers a concept that Doyle terms "the female hermeneutic dilemma"—"when confronted with fin'amor gallantry, should women believe men's protestations of love and fidelity or treat them with skepticism?" (3). Tracing the development of this idea in Chaucer's poetry and in the works of his French and English contemporaries and successors, Doyle explores how medieval authors, compilers, and readers responded to bids for female agency and challenges to courtly and chivalric masculinity. Before turning to the six manuscript compilations that structure her book, Doyle devotes Chapter 1 to exploring the "female hermeneutic dilemma" featured in all six collections. Influenced by Ovid's Heroides; the Ovide moralisé; the dits amoureux of Guillaume de Machaut; and the French lyric sequences of Eustache Deschamps, Christine de Pizan, and John Gower, Chaucer developed a female-voiced critique of fin'amors that is portrayed especially prominently in Anelida and Arcite. Analyzing this poem, Doyle identifies five tropes that constitute the female hermeneutic dilemma: "female ventriloquism, exposing male fickleness, skepticism about male fin'amor rhetoric, demonstrating female fidelity, and warning the female audience" (21). Doyle argues that this critique of fin'amors runs through much of Chaucer's work prior to the Canterbury Tales and receives especially extended and sincere treatment in Anelida and Arcite, a text popular among Chaucer's early readers. With the female hermeneutic dilemma in mind, in Chapter 2, Doyle turns to Cambridge University Library, MS Gg.4.27 (c. 1410–25), the earliest known attempt to compile a complete works of Chaucer. Doyle observes that the compiler opens the collection with "French-inflected materials" to create a "French lyric backdrop" (13) for Chaucer's works, and closes the collection with John Lydgate's Temple of Glass, a text that offers "an unusually thoughtful retrospective on the female-voiced tropes [End Page 398] in Chaucer's work" (14). The compiler of Gg.4.27 thus "encourages readers to see Chaucer through the lens of late fourteenth-century French literature and sets audiences up to think of Chaucer as 'womanis frend'" (52). Next, in Chapter 3, Doyle analyzes Durham Cathedral Library, MS Cosin V.ii.13, an anthology dating to between 1425 and 1450 that includes Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde and Thomas Hoccleve's Letter of Cupid (an adaptation of Christine de Pizan's Epistre au dieu d'amours). Doyle argues that by pairing these texts, "the compiler gives Chaucer's masterpiece a French framework and helps construct a Chaucer who teaches women to be wary readers of [fin'amors] rhetoric" (76). In Chapter 4, Doyle returns to Chaucer's Anelida and Arcite, considering how this text is positioned within two anthologies created by John Shirley: British Library, Additional MS 16165 and Trinity College, Cambridge, MS R.3.20. In both manuscripts, Shirley situates Anelida and Arcite in a context that reinforces female skepticism of fin'amors rhetoric, placing Chaucer's poem alongside lyric poems that question the morality of courtly life and show the wide range of male intentions that women must interpret. Through prologues, headers, and marginal...

The Poet and the Antiquaries: Chaucerian Scholarship and the Rise of Literary History, 1532–1635

The Poet and the Antiquaries: Chaucerian Scholarship and the Rise of Literary History, 1532–1635

A Previously Unpublished Letter of Introduction by an Andalusi Karaite (T-S 8J41.7)

The document published in this article is a letter of introduction written by a Karaite Andalusi Jew upon his arrival to Egypt, on his route to Jerusalem. The text, which was deposited in the Cairo Genizah, is currently held at Cambridge University Library in the Taylor-Schechter Collection (Genizah Research Unit). Although undated, the text has the distinction of being the only known letter written by an Andalusi who presents himself as a Karaite, and is thus a first-person confirmation of the presence of this religious group in al-Andalus.

Chinese Folklore for the English Public: Herbert A. Giles’s 1880 Translation of Pu Songling’s Classical Tales

Chinese Folklore for the English Public: Herbert A. Giles’s 1880 Translation of Pu Songling’s Classical Tales

Katrina O’Loughlin. Women, Writing, and Travel in the Eighteenth Century.

Katrina O’Loughlin. <i>Women, Writing, and Travel in the Eighteenth Century</i>.