Research Collections at Trinity
New tales from the Old Library, Trinity College Dublin
Well it’s that time of year again – colds and flus are out in full force! As we stock up on various cold & flu medication and the odd herbal tea if you’re that way inclined, did you know that medieval and early modern people concocted an assortment of recipes in the hope of warding off plagues?
Continue reading “Avoid like the Plague!”
You may remember a time, not so very long ago, when everybody was suddenly obliged to work at home. Without access to books or readers or, for the first week or two, the cataloguing system, there was a limit to what work Research Collections staff could usefully do. One possibility was writing blog posts.
Continue reading “Alphabet in Miniature”
Trinity College Dublin
Registration Now Open!!! Join us from 30th November – 1st December 2023 for ‘The Many Lives of Medieval Manuscripts’ Symposium at Trinity College Dublin. The event aims to showcase manuscripts digitised as part of the ‘Manuscripts for Medieval Studies’ Project, supported by Carnegie Corporation of New York.
Enjoy a sneak peek of our draft programme below.
Continue reading “Registration Now Open! The Many Lives of Medieval Manuscripts Symposium: 30th Nov – 1st Dec 2023”
By Jenny Coulton
Jenny Coulton worked with the Fagel Collection during a month-long placement at the Library of Trinity College Dublin, as part of an internship with Durham University’s Archives and Special Collections Department. She will be starting a DPhil in medieval history at The University of Oxford in 2023.
When Trinity College Dublin purchased Hendrik Fagel the Younger’s (1765–1838) estimated 20,000 volumes in 1802, it was not a library of new, clean books. Some of the items had passed through numerous hands and institutions before finally arriving in the Old Library, and still today bear the marks of their previous lives on their leaves.
The names and signatures of previous owners in Fagel volumes were recorded in 1962 by the Dutch book historian Ernst Braches, in annexes IV and V of his report. As part of my placement with the Library of Trinity College Dublin, I supplemented Braches’ annexes with binding descriptions, images and transcriptions of inscriptions and associating named individuals with authority files wherever possible. Through this, I examined numerous forms of provenance evidence, and in this post, I detail the types of evidence I encountered, and reflect on how these marks might be used to explore the acquisition, use, and organisation of books by private readers.
Continue reading “Marking Books and Bookmarks: Evidence of Provenance and Use in the Fagel Collection”
Billy Shortall.
TCD Library is home to the Cuala Business Archive (TCD MS 11535). However, like all archives, inevitably it is incomplete as materials over the years of the business and subsequent storage may be discarded or damaged. Of what does remain, Cuala’s minute books, artist lists, and sample designs for prints and embroideries are, arguably, among its most important artefacts, and as shown in earlier posts in this series, this material enables a deeper understanding of Cuala Industries, the Irish Arts and Crafts movement, and Irish history more widely. Historian Anne Dolan has stated that because history is written from available records, and these may show people in a professional capacity, or at their lowest, such as, in court reports, military pensions, business troubles, the happier moments, unrecorded times of play, holidays, relationships, are often overlooked. This blog is about a happy Yeats family occasion with threads to the TCD Cuala Business archive.
Continue reading “A family occasion”
