Search results for ""Author Julia C. Walworth""

The Merton library is rightly known for its antiquity, its beautiful medieval and early modern architecture and fittings and for its remarkable and important collection of manuscripts and rare books, yet a nineteenth-century plan to tear the medieval library down and replace it was only narrowly frustrated. This brief history of Europe’s oldest academic library traces its origins in the thirteenth century, when a new type of community of scholars was first being set up, through to the present day and its multiple functions as a working college library, a unique resource for researchers and a delight for curious visitors. Drawing on the remarkable wealth of documentation in the college’s archives, this is the first history of the library to explore collections, buildings, readers and staff across more than 700 years. The story is told in part through stunning colour images that depict not only exceptional treasures but also the library furnishings and decorations, and which show manuscripts, books, bindings and artefacts of different periods in their changing contexts. Featuring a timeline and a plan of the college, this book will be of interest to historians, alumni and tourists alike.

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Parallel Narratives examines several richly illustrated manuscripts as reflections of a transitional moment in the history of the book in medieval Germany. In the thirteenth century the nobility and their emulators had aspirations to own and to read books privately as an alternative to the traditional social experience of listening to recitation or to a reading in a group, large or small. But comfortable reading skills were not yet widespread. One solution was to `read' privately an illustrated book in which the images could carry the storyline without recourse to the written text. The focus of this study is a mid-thirteenth-century illustrated manuscript of Gottfried's Tristan. A close analysis of the visual narrative and its relation to the text demonstrates that the pictorial narrative presents a parallel independent telling of the Tristan story. A foil to the unusual Tristan is provided by a slightly later illuminated manuscript of the Willehalm von Orlens of Rudolph von Ems, in which the written text takes communicative precedence over sumptuous illuminations. In the course of developing its argumentthis book provides an introduction to the whole subject of the early manuscript illumination of vernacular German secular narratives. Julia C. Walworth is Research Fellow and Librarian at Merton College Oxford.

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