"This literary cornucopia will now belong permanently to the public domain in the UK," FNL said in a statement.īlavatnik has long been a patron of the arts in the UK, and is best known for his funding of Tate Modern’s Blavatnik Building. It was acquired by Friends of the National Libraries (FNL) for £15m after Leonard Blavatnik, the 64-year-old businessman known as the richest man in Britain, matched the £7.5m sum raised by the charity.
The Honresfield Library, a 19th century private library created by the Rochdale mill owner William Law, has been in private ownership for more than a century. Schoolchildren and members of the public will now be able to read priceless literary artefacts like a letter written by Jane Austen to her sister Cassandra in January 1796, in which she mediates on the end of a love affair, a letter she wrote on the eve of a ball.Īlso on view will be the poems Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë wrote throughout their twenties from their home in Haworth, Yorkshire, and which were for a time believed lost, and have yet to be properly examined. The “unprecedented” acquisition of the Honresfield Library ensures the texts will remain in Britain, and for public use, rather than being sold to private collectors around the world. The Winchester Psalter: Cotton MS Nero C IV, ff.Original manuscripts by the Brontë sisters, Jane Austen, Robert Burns and Walter Scott have been acquired by a huge consortium of British literary organisations, and will now be donated to libraries and writers’ houses across the UK.
#British library manuscripts online full
"Over the coming months, and throughout the Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms exhibition, we will be blogging about some of the Anglo-Saxon charters in the British Library's collections.Ī full list of the 203 charters is currently available to down British Library plans to add the remaining 8 charters in due course. Collectively, these charters provide us with substantial evidence for early English political, ecclesiastical, administrative and social history" note British Library's Julian Harrison & Alison Hudson. Some of the documents are originals or were issued contemporaneously, while others are later copies or are deemed to be forgeries. They are composed primarily in Latin but with a considerable number in Old English (or with Old English bounds). The charters supply significant testimony to the evolution of English handwriting (the scripts deployed include uncial, pointed minuscule, square minuscule and English Caroline minuscule). They are issued in the names of kings, bishops and laypeople, and include a considerable number of writs, wills, records of disputes and decrees of synods. "The British Library holds the world's largest collection of Anglo-Saxon charters. In anticipation of this major Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms exhibition, which opens on 19 October British Library added the vast majority of Anglo-Saxon single-sheet charters to it's Digitised Manuscripts site. The iconic publication will be displayed with the St Cuthbert Gospel, also made at Wearmouth-Jarrow around the same time, and acquired by the British Library in 2012. The Codex Amiatinus, one of three giant single-volume Bibles made at the monastery at Wearmouth-Jarrow in the north-east of England in the early eighth century and taken to Italy as a gift for the Pope in 716, will be returning to England for the first time in more than 1300 years, on loan from Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana in Florence. Spanning six centuries, from the eclipse of Roman Britain to the Norman Conquest, highlights from the British Library’s outstanding collection of Anglo-Saxon manuscripts will be presented alongside a large number of exceptional loans at Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms, our major exhibition opening in autumn 2018. A landmark exhibition on the history, art, literature and culture of Anglo-Saxon England is about to shine bright.
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