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Preservation & Conservation: What’s That?

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The latest Long Room exhibition entitled Preservation & Conservation: What’s That? was launched last night. The exhibition invites the visitor into the world of the conservators at Trinity College Library, and offers an introduction to the wide range of activities carried out by staff in the department.

The displays explore the treatment and care of a range of different materials, from Greek and Roman papyri to Ethiopic parchment scrolls; from manuscripts to printed books; and from glass-plate negatives to twentieth-century travel diaries.

The Preservation & Conservation Department at Trinity College Library provides management and advice on the storage, handling and treatment of the Library’s collection of over 6 million items.

The exhibition, curated by the staff of the department, will be on display in the Long Room, Trinity College Library until September 2013 .

Find out more about the work of the Preservation & Conservation Department at http://www.tcd.ie/Library/preservation/

Estelle Gittins

A Pali Manuscript from Burma

TCD MS 1642 f1

This manuscript (TCD MS 1642) from Burma, now known as Myanmar, bears the text of the Upasampada Kammavaca, the ordination service for Buddhist monks, and is one of a number of Burmese manuscripts housed in M&ARL .

When one of their sons became a monk, wealthy Burmese families often commissioned a copy of the Upasampada Kammavaca for presentation to the monastery their son was intending to enter. The ordination ceremony is one of the legal acts contained in the Buddhist Monastic Rule or Vinaya. The strict requirement to follow the Rule has meant that the ceremony has remained unchanged for thousands of years, since the time of the Buddha. It is still conducted in Pali, the original language of Buddhism.

Lacquered and gilded wooden cover
Lacquered and gilded wooden cover

This elaborately lacquered and gilded manuscript set comprises two wooden covers and nine leaves. The covers and leaves would have been tied together with string or by thin sticks of bamboo threaded through the hole in the left hand side. Each strip holds six lines of Pali script, written in the square Burmese style, in black magyi zi lacquer made from tamarind seed, between hatched borders. In this instance the leaves have been described as being made from plantain but Kammavaca leaves can also be made from palm leaf, ivory, copper and brass sheets, and sometimes from the old robes of a venerated monk.

Estelle Gittins

Ina Boyle’s Symphonic Journey

MS4174-2r_LO

An exhibition entitled Ina Boyle’s Symphonic Journey will be on display in the Long Room, Trinity College Dublin, 16th April – 17th May 2013 to coincide with The Symphony and Ireland: a symposium held at DIT Conservatory of Music & Drama on 20th April 2013

Ina Boyle (1889-1967) was a prolific Irish composer whose life and works have recently begun to capture renewed attention and interest. Boyle lived all her life in her family home at Bushey Park, Enniskerry, Co. Wicklow. In her early years she studied with Percy Buck, C.H. Kitson, and Charles Wood, and between 1923 and 1939 she made occasional visits to London to take private lessons in composition with Ralph Vaughan Williams. She had the distinction of being the only female composer to receive an award from the Carnegie Trust – for her orchestral work ‘The magic harp’, published by Stainer & Bell in 1921. However most of her music remained unpublished and unperformed.

Boyle continued to compose a broad range of music throughout her life, including songs and choral pieces, chamber music and orchestral works, ballets and an opera. She composed three symphonies: ‘Glencree’ (1924-27), ‘The Dream of the Rood’ (1929-30), and ‘From the darkness’ (1946-52) – the third being a setting for contralto and orchestra of three poems by Edith Sitwell. This exhibition includes the autograph full scores of all three works, as well as the short score of ‘From the darkness’ in which Boyle added alternative words when Sitwell refused permission for her poems to be used. Also on view are Boyle’s ‘Musical Compositions Memoranda’ showing the entry for the ‘Glencree’ symphony, her notebook describing a lesson with Ralph Vaughan Williams on March 15th 1930 in which they discussed her second symphony, and Sitwell’s letter withholding consent.

The Ina Boyle papers are housed in the Manuscripts and Archives Research Library and can be discovered using the Online Catalogue. The collection is currently being digitised and will be added to Trinity College Digital Collections.

Roy Stanley

Music Librarian

It’s life, Jim …

MS10528_133r_LO cropped

Domestic account books are frequently to be found in historical family archives. On display in the Long Room at the moment is an eighteenth-century account book (TCD MS 10528) belonging to James Ware (b. circa 1699), sometime student of Trinity College and grandson of the historian Sir James Ware.

Ware was a meticulous record-keeper which means his accounts are a particularly valuable research resource for students of domestic life and the cost of living. The details included here allow us to build up an understanding of the way in which eighteenth-century life may have differed from our own. Weekly shopping for example. He records purchasing items such as a scabbard for his sword and moulds to make glass bottles. Ware also records buying himself a suit of clothes lined with silk, a pair of scarlet britches and a waistcoat with gold lace.

One of the most unusual characteristics about this account book is that Ware gives the reasons why he dismissed individual servants; he may have kept these details as an aide memoire in case he was asked to recommend a member of his staff to future employers.

Here are some of Ware’s choicest complaints: sottishness and dram drinking; immoderate hastiness of temper; marrying a man ‘tho certain of his having another wife’; intolerable sullenness, obstinacy and rudeness; one man was described as ‘slovenly and prating’; another was a ‘false shirking scoundrel’; one of the nursemaids ‘gave the children the itch’ and another was ‘a little inclined to whoring’.

Reading between the lines of Ware’s record of his child’s nursemaid’s wage agreement, one can see the great fear parents had in the face of very high levels of child mortality in the eighteenth century. The nurse, upon whom the infant’s entire well-being depended, was to get a bonus on the appearance of a child’s first tooth, no doubt to encourage her to make sure the child made it that far. Perhaps this is the origin of the ‘tooth-fairy’ stories.

Jane Maxwell

The Book of Kells: Symbols of the Four Evangelists

The Book of Kells TCD MS 58 f27v
The Book of Kells TCD MS 58 f27v

The Book of Kells folio 27v is among the most frequently reproduced pages from that famous manuscript. Its main images depict the symbols of the four Evangelists: Matthew is represented by the Man, Mark by the Lion, Luke by the Calf, and John by the Eagle. The symbols have haloes and wings, a double set in the case of the Calf. The symbol of Matthew holds a flabellum, an instrument used in the early church to protect the Eucharist and its vessels from impurities. The Eagle perches on a footstool. The symbols are in framed panels around a cross, with another, stepped cross at its centre. Interlaced snakes writhe in four T-shaped panels at each extremity of the cross. In the corner pieces at the top right and lower left of the frame, a Eucharistic chalice sprouts vine tendrils which are bitten by perching peacocks. Interlaced human figures are compressed within the corresponding corner-pieces at the top left and lower right of the frame. In the box lower right, four figures stand within the confines of their frame, their necks unnaturally elongated and their heads hanging down in what may be intended to recall the Crucifixion. In the box at the top left of the page are four men with red triangles on their cheeks; with knees bent, they pull each other’s beards.

Bernard Meehan

[Adapted from Bernard Meehan, The Book of Kells (London, Thames & Hudson, 2012) Further details from the Book of Kells are described by Bernard Meehan in http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/gallery/2012/dec/14/book-kells-pictures#/?picture=400651743&index=0]

Visit the Book of Kells Exhibition.