And there was Light – Day Five
Shedding light on … Literature
We are often asked why recent publications have to be consulted in the EPB reading room. The answer is that our full title is the Department of Early Printed Books and Special Collections and the modern material comes under the latter part of the heading.
And there was Light – Day Four
Shedding light on … Christianity
Trinity College Library holds a huge number of pamphlets on various subjects. Many of the early ones are religious as it was common for preachers to publish their sermons. These are often bound together, but some were bound by their owners with completely unrelated subjects. These volumes sometimes have a handwritten index which can be as interesting to researchers as the content of the tracts. This volume, from the Crofton Collection of about 2,000 items, contains a mixture of mainly political and religious material bound in an apparently random order.
And there was Light – Day Three
Shedding light on … Music
Thomas Tallis and William Byrd: Cantiones quae ab argumento sacrae vocantur (London, 1575). Shelfmark: OLS 192.n.40
The representation of Christ as the light of the world is a recurrent biblical image which has inspired a multitude of devotional texts, many of them set to music by composers in all eras. Thomas Tallis’s well-known motet ‘O nata lux de lumine’ (O light born of light) is a setting of stanzas from a Sarum hymn for the Feast of the Transfiguration, and was first published in Tallis and Byrd’s ‘Cantiones quae ab argumento sacrae vocantur’ in 1575. Continue reading “And there was Light – Day Three”
Throwing a bit of light on the subject
The celebrations in Trinity Week, which is a week of celebration of Trinity in Trinity, are normally sponsored and themed by one of the faculties. This year it’s the Faculty of Engineering, Mathematics and Science which is hosting the programme of events, beginning on 11 April, and the theme is ‘Light’.
The Library, which is so central to so much of the work afoot in College, will remind people of this important fact by staging a number of events on the theme of light during Trinity Week.
Harry Clarke, for example, used light as part of his palette, and his role in Irish cultural history will be acknowledged by the installation of a reproduction, from the Library’s Harry Clarke Studios archives, in one of the windows of The Trinity Long Room Hub. The image chosen is a glorious drawing of three roses set in a starburst.
The Library also presents itself as an ‘illuminary’ – that which illuminates – since that is what the Library does to the research mission of the College. To bring home this point, images from the Library’s historic collections in the Manuscripts & Archives Research Library and the Department of Early Printed Books and Special Collections will be projected onto the wall above the Nassau Street entrance to College and also above the entrance to the Berkeley Library.
Allying this theme with the centenary of the First World War has inspired another Library installation; ‘The lamps have gone out all over Europe. We will not see them lit again in our lifetime’ – a well-known and resonant phrase, dating from the eve of First World War, which was understood from the beginning as a threat to enlightened civilization. It is proposed to project, onto the East face of the 1937 Reading Room, the names and portraits of the Trinity engineers and medics who fell. The images from the Medical School are part of the Library’s archival collections, while those of the Engineers still grace the walls of the Museum Building.
All of the images being projected are accessible through Digital Collections
Early Printed Books and M&ARL have taken a bit of liberty with the word ‘light’ in the titles of an exhibition and of this present blog post: ‘…and there was light’ is the title of a small exhibition, curated by EPB in the Berkeley foyer, which explores the theme through texts on religion, science and literature.
The website for the Library’s projects within Trinity Week is accessible here
Jane Maxwell