Library Newsletter ST JOHN’S COLLEGE
I joined the College as its new Librarian in July last year, but I had a bit of a false start – after ten weeks in post I fell and broke my leg, and I wasn’t properly back at work full time until after Christmas. But now I’m back, I’m raring to go!
I’m excited to be leading four major areas of work in the College – the Working Library, Old Library, the College Archives and the Art Collection – and to work with the amazing Library and Archives team on lots of new projects. We have plans ranging from improving student workspaces in the Working Library, to building our ability to safely store key digital records in the Archives. The latter will ensure we’ll be as adept at preserving the current history of the College as we have been at looking after the earliest parchment and paper records in the School of Pythagoras.
I’m also really excited that we’ll be opening up the Old Library again this year as part of the Cambridge Festival with our temporary exhibition ‘“The Peculiarities of the Animal”: An Old Library’s Catalogue of Beasts’ And we have treasures from the Library’s Special Collections going out on exhibition loan, notably some of our medieval manuscripts to the ‘Curious Cures’ exhibition at the University Library, which opens at the end of March
I’m new to Cambridge – I’d worked for the British Library for the last 16 years, latterly as a senior curator responsible for books printed between 1601 and 1900 I’d curated seven exhibitions while I was there, all focused around English literature, and I’d developed interests in the history of genre fiction, and in the publication history of Shakespeare I’ve also edited five collections of historic ghost stories for publication.
We’re hugely lucky at St John’s – the historical collections are outstanding, and the Working Library is well-resourced and a popular place to work. What’s really stood out to me though in my time here is what a community the College is and how welcome I’ve been made to feel, both by the Library and Archives team and also the staff, Fellows and students more widely I’m enjoying the rhythm of the academic year and looking forward to what the next few terms will bring
Tanya Kirk, Librarian
Bread, beer and burnings at Broomhall Priory
Records of Broomhall Priory, Berkshire, held in the College Archives in the School of Pythagoras, have recently been arranged and descriptions published in our online catalogue Researchers are, of course, very welcome to contact the Archivist and arrange to come and view the original documents
The Priory and its estates were granted to St John’s by Henry VIII in 1522. The Priory had been suppressed (one of many religious houses to have been dissolved before the well-known ‘Dissolution of the Monasteries’) after its membership dwindled to the Prioress and two nuns, who left in 1521. The College continued to pay a pension to the Prioress, Jane, or Joanna, Rawlings, until at least 1537
Naturally the documents that have survived are those with the nuns recognised as most important, so include royal writs and documents concerning legal disputes From the 13th century we have a group of small parchment rolls, tied together, showing royal interventions concerning estate matters. One, a writ of 1269, shows Henry III ordering his justices to pardon the Prioress for felling timber in Windsor forest without permission, as it was being used to rebuild the Priory after it had been burned down
The records also show a history of poor relations between Broomhall and Chertsey Abbey, from a dispute in the 13th century over a holding in Chertsey, to another dispute in the late 15th century concerning a corrody of bread and beer which the Prioress claimed of the Abbot
Records of the last include a deposition, in English, by former Prioress Anne Thomas, in which she recounts an extraordinary story. In the time of her predecessor, Isobel, two monks of Chertsey, visiting an affiliated house of nuns nearby, paid a visit to Broomhall. On being asked by them to produce evidence that Broomhall was entitled to this corrody, Isobel ‘brought furthe a faire writing in parchement’ bearing the seal of Chertsey Abbey. This the monks took, read, and then threw into the fire.
Although Anne goes on to depose that the nuns continued to receive the corrody, this unpleasant incident demonstrates the importance of keeping institutional archives closely guarded.
Lynsey Darby, Archivist
c 16th century roll from papers of Broomhall Priory
Lose yourself in easy-to-find fiction
Some of you may have noticed that we took advantage of the majority of students going home for Christmas to reclassify and
streamline the shelves in our General Interest Fiction section on the ground floor If you need to find something now, you’ll discover that the
classmarks have been simplified and made consistent, so you should be able to find what you’re looking for. We’ve removed the extra divisions within the classification (e g WOU s is now just WOU), so that series are now shelved together instead of being split up Where authors have the same last name, we have not differentiated the classmarks and are instead opting to just individually ensure they are shelved together – similar to how you would find things in a bookshop
There has never been a better time to have a browse of the collection and get lost in some good fiction – remember that you may be here to study, but it’s important to set aside some time for fun reading too.
We have several hundred books spanning a wide range of genres, so hopefully something will catch your eye! Of course, if we don’t have what you’re after then feel free to pop a suggestion in the box on the issue desk or fill out our online request form
Milly Dahmoune, Graduate Trainee
Library poet launches new collection
Congratulations to part-time Library
Assistant Rebecca Watts, whose latest poetry collection was published by Carcanet Press in January The Face in the Well is Rebecca’s third book, described as ‘ a resonant exploration of childhood, desire, conflict and the animal nature of the self’
Rebecca has worked in the College Library since 2011 in a variety of roles, and is currently based in the Old Library where she contributes to the cataloguing of special collections material As a writer she has completed Fellowships with the Hawthornden Foundation and the Royal Literary Fund and received awards for her works-in-progress from the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative, the Society of Authors, and Arts Council England. Her debut collection The Met Office Advises Caution (2016) was a
Poetry Book Society Recommendation and one of the Guardian’ s and Financial Times’ s ‘Best Books of 2016’. Poems from her new collection have already been featured as ‘poem of the week’ in the Financial Times, the Telegraph and the Guardian
The Face in the Well was launched in Heffers on 23 January at a packed event hosted by the Library’s other award-winning poet, Adam Crothers All of Rebecca’s and Adam’s books are available to borrow from the General Interest Poetry section on the ground floor
Janet Chow, Academic Services Librarian
Nightmare of beasthood
‘Parrot, moth, shark, wolf, crocodile, ass, flea What germs, what jostling mobs there were in me. ’
So writes the poet (and former HarperWood Student) Thom Gunn in the 1971 poem ‘Moly’, which riffs on the bestial metamorphoses inflicted upon Odysseus’s crew by the goddess Circe in Homer’s Odyssey The 17th-century Old Library will, at the end of March, welcome ‘jostling mobs’, or ‘the public’ as they prefer to be known, to a Cambridge Festival exhibition The cases will be as packed as they can sensibly be with manuscripts, rare printed books, personal papers and artefacts, pestfree but otherwise teeming with animals.
George Stubbs’s The Anatomy of the Horse (1766) and Samuel Butler’s sheep brand will surely be favourites
When in September 2024 we offered an Open Cambridge exhibition on plants, we noted that this is a library of wood and paper; it’s also a library of leather and parchment, as well as one of hooves, horns, goat blood, jarred scorpions and embalmed skinks Human interactions with animals have long included using them, controversially or otherwise, for food, clothing, medicines and writing materials. Animal death alongside animal life
Douglas Adams (1971) wrote the Last Chance to See radio series and book, with Mark Carwardine, as a warning about species threatened by human activity One of Adams’s subjects, the baiji or Yangtze
From George Stubbs’s The Anatomy of the Horse (1766)
river dolphin, has since been declared extinct. Adams describes the world humanity had, by the late 1980s, created for these gorgeous creatures: visibility in the heavily polluted water being just a few centimetres, the dolphins’ eyes atrophied through disuse; they therefore had to rely on echolocation in a river where human industry and transport created ‘ a sustained shrieking blast of pure white noise, in which nothing could be distinguished at all’. It sounds a bit like what we’re all now swimming in, figuratively, every day
Ursula K Le Guin writes that humans and animals once existed on a more equal footing than they now do ‘As hunter-gatherers, our relationship to the animals was not one of using, caretaking, ownership. We were among, not above. We were a link in the food chain ’ The way we treat our animal peers might tell us something about how we view one another and ourselves The baiji didn’t stand a chance; do we?
‘Nightmare of beasthood, snorting, how to wake.’
‘“The Peculiarities of the Animal”: An Old Library’s Catalogue of Beasts’ is open 10 00–16 00 on Saturday 29 March 2025
Adam Crothers, Special Collections Assistant