Sacred, Profane, Troublesome, Adventurous

This article is concerned with a gigantic unpublished dictionary of Ancient Greek, most probably compiled at Alexandria during the first half of the sixth century ad. The dictionary is ascribed to Patriarch Cyril of Alexandria, an ascription strongly doubted. It is the first Greek dictionary which unites entries (usually rare ancient Greek words) found in Christian as well as pagan writers. The article investigates the ideology of the lexicon, which is strongly Christian, but also displays a warm acceptance of the classical literary past. The lexicon became the most influential in the history of Greek lexicography, having influenced almost all medieval Greek lexica (Hesychius, Synagoge, Photius, Suda, Zonaras and others). The article assembles all the information available today concerning the complicated history of scholarship on the lexicon, whose 200 preserved manuscripts and different surviving receptions have long puzzled scholars.

Light, Vision and Observation in Norman Nicholson’s Topographical Notes

This article examines a notebook owned by the poet and topographical writer Norman Nicholson, which is held in his collection at the John Rylands Library. The notebook, entitled Topographical Notes: Morecambe Bay etc., includes detailed notes and sketches taken at numerous locations in Cumbria, many of which recur in Nicholson’s poetry and topographical texts. The article analyses Nicholson’s note-taking practices, with particular attention to sensory experience and how this was expressed by the writer. The notebook is especially valuable because no other book of its kind survives in Nicholson’s archive, and because it can be dated towards the end of a long interlude in his career as a poet. The notes can be understood as lying in the space between Nicholson’s poetry and his topographical writing: although ostensibly collecting information for Greater Lakeland (1969), Nicholson’s treatment of light and vision suggests that he was beginning to experiment with some of the themes that characterise his later poetry. The article reflects on what these notes can tell us about Nicholson’s note-taking ‘in the field’, and suggests that his habit of treating the landscape as a repository of history is akin to what Kitty Hauser has called the ‘archaeological imagination’.

‘Amongst stuffed beasts and fire-buckets’

This article focuses on women at Owens College, Manchester between 1883 and 1900. It does so through the lens of the everyday places, spaces and material features that symbolically defined an everyday experience on the periphery of college life. Having achieved admission to Owens in 1883, the first women to enter this newly coeducational space were met by hostility and resistance that expressed itself both in words and the careful guarding of formerly male preserves. This article therefore examines the objects, doorways, rooms and lecture halls that formed the daily environment for women as they crossed the boundary of Manchester’s Oxford Road. It considers how they navigated and appropriated space within the college and how, physically and discursively, they carved out room to belong.

John Goodwin on Zechariah 13:3

This article on an early modern pamphlet which can be found in the John Rylands Library Special Collections asserts the importance of John Goodwin’s analysis of Zechariah 13:3 in A Post-Script or Appendix to […] Hagiomastix (1647). I argue that this pamphlet’s significance is not only its emphasis on toleration, but also that it is a striking example of Judaeo-centric millenarian thought in which Zechariah 12–14 is understood as prophesying a future time in which the Jews will be restored to the Land of Israel. I also analyse the pamphlet’s relationship to supersessionism and compare Goodwin’s interpretation with those of Samuel Rutherford, William Prynne, John Owen and, in particular, Jean Calvin. I explain that Goodwin’s use of the analogy of Scripture hermeneutic helps to explain his belief in Judaeo-centric eschatology. I then show how one of Goodwin’s followers, Daniel Taylor, used Judaeo-centric biblical exegesis to petition Oliver Cromwell for Jewish readmission to England.

‘With the Lady of Coucy’

Judging from repetitious appearances of her marital arms in the painted line-endings, the Psalter-Hours John Rylands Library Latin MS 117 probably belonged to Jeanne of Flanders (c.1272–1333), daughter of Count Robert III of Flanders and in 1288 second wife to Enguerrand IV of Coucy. Yet the line-endings also contain some 1,800 diminutive painted escutcheons, many of which refer to other members of the local nobility active during the 1280s. This study, based on an exhaustive survey of the total heraldic and codicological evidence, suggests that the majority of the extant Psalter predated the Hours and that the two parts were combined after the 1288 marriage. The ‘completed’ manuscript bears witness to major events that unfolded in and around the Coucy barony over the course of the decade. It suggests a complex relationship between Jeanne of Flanders and a lesser member of the local nobility, a certain Marien of Moÿ, who may have served as her attendant.

Framing the Enemy

This article is about how one approaches images that are both disjunctive and disjointed. It studies a set of nineteen images by the Flemish printmaker Gaspard Bouttats, focusing on four specific examples. The nineteen prints are now in the Whitworth Gallery but come without any provenance beyond the signature of their maker. Hitherto, they have not been studied in detail, but were in fact made for a book, Prudencio de Sandoval’s Historia de la vida y hechos del Emperador Carlos V, published in Antwerp in 1681 by Hieronymus Verdussen III. However, the prints now take the form of a set of loose sheets. Accordingly, the core argument rests on the fact that it is not helpful to study Bouttats’s prints in the context of de Sandoval’s book because this fails to account properly for their composite nature, their current state and their virtually limitless potential for circulation. The main contention is that such prints are best understood as collages. Therefore, they are viewed here through the lens of emerging scholarly literature on medieval and early modern texts and images that also fall into this category.

The Manchester Medical Students Gazette

The Manchester Royal Infirmary Students Gazette (1898–99) and its subsequent titles, the Manchester Medical Students Gazette (1901–13), the Manchester University Medical School Gazette (1921–59), the Manchester Medical Gazette (1960–78) and Mediscope (1979–98), are a valuable resource for the history of the social and academic life of the medical students and the work of the Medical School at the University of Manchester. The volumes provide a record of advances in medical practice, historical articles and biographical details of staff. A recently completed database of the main articles and authors is a new resource to research these journals. This article sketches the history of the Gazette and outlines its value as a source for medical historians.

A Forgotten Letter to Mrs Thrale

This article annotates and publishes a previously overlooked letter in the Thrale-Piozzi collection of the John Rylands Library. The letter dates from the summer of 1774, and was addressed to Mrs Hester Thrale by Giuseppe Baretti, a member of Samuel Johnson’s circle, who had been teaching Italian to the Thrale eldest daughter for almost a year. The discovery of this forgotten document has offered an opportunity to reconsider the relationship that this Italian intellectual entertained with the Thrale family. The reassessment of the role Baretti played in their household, in the course of his three-year tutorage, is conducted also in light of a reappraisal of the Easy Phraseology, a collection of Italian-English dialogues created for and with his pupil, and therefore affording important insights into the writer’s domestic and educational experience at Streatham Park.

The Writings of Sir Lewis Namier

Sir Lewis Namier (1888–1960) was not only a major twentieth-century historian, a pioneer of ‘scientific history’ who gave his name to a particular form of history-writing, but an important public intellectual. He played a significant role in public affairs, as an influential adviser to the British Foreign Office during the First World War and later as an active Zionist. This article offers a new perspective on his life and work by providing, for the first time, as comprehensive a bibliography as is currently possible of his voluminous writings: books, scholarly articles and contributions to periodicals and newspapers, including many hitherto unknown, and some published anonymously. The annotation includes not only bibliographical information but explanations and brief summaries of the content. The introduction gives an account of Namier’s life and an assessment of his significance as a historian and thinker.

Caraglio and Rosso Fiorentino between Pen and Press

The John Rylands Library’s recently rediscovered Spencer Album 8050 contains a proof state of the Battle of the Romans and the Sabines, an engraving pivotal in the short-lived but ambitious collaboration between Jacopo Caraglio (1500–65) and Rosso Fiorentino (1495–1540) in Rome. This proof impression was first printed in black ink, and then densely covered with hand-drawn ink. A comparison between the new proof state and previously identified states of the engraving using a novel technical approach involving long-wave infrared light to isolate the printed lines optically indicates that the Spencer proof state precedes any other known state of the engraving. The use of penwork and printing on this early proof and subsequent proof states demonstrates how Caraglio and Rosso saw drawing and printing as intimately connected, iterative steps in the print’s production.