Library Newsletter Michaelmas 2022

St John’s College Library Newsletter L

MICHAELMAS 2022

VOLUME 6, ISSUE 1

Lady Margaret Beaufort’s Household Accounts October sees the publication of Household Accounts of Lady Margaret Beaufort (1443-1509) From the Archives of St John's College, Cambridge Records of Social and Economic History, edited by Professor Susan Powell and published by Oxford University Press (now available in College Archives).

These accounts, which cover the period 1498 to 1509, are one of the most used collections in the College archives and it will be a tremendous boon for scholars to now be able to consult Professor Powells’ definitive edition, both for the transcribed accounts and the comment and analysis.

At the time when these accounts commence, Lady Margaret’s son, King Henry VII, had been on the throne for 13 years and she was acknowledged by contemporaries as being Queen in all but name.

Although married to her third husband, Thomas Stanley, earl of Derby, she had been granted the status of femme sole on Henry’s accession, making her legally and financially independent. Even

with estates and houses spread across the country – at Croydon, Hatfield, Collyweston in Northamptonshire, Coldharbour in London and Boston in Lincolnshire – Lady Margaret maintained a close personal interest in their management and her signature appears at the foot of many pages of the account books.

The accounts are used by researchers into a variety of subjects, including social, economic, and art history. They can also be interrogated for insights into Lady Margaret’s relationships and aspects of her role in national politics.

This image, for example, shows some of the expenditure for the burial of Cecily of York, for which Margaret paid in part despite Cecily, after the death of her husband (Margaret’s half-brother), having married without the Crown’s permission and been banished from Court. The extract in the photo shows payments for tapers, torches, alms, and gifts to some of Cecily’s servants, but the whole entry also shows that she paid for items including the coffin, a Mass, and bringing Cecily’s chaplain and five others from London to Hatfield. As well as telling researchers more about Lady Margaret’s relationship with Cecily, the entry also adds to the body of knowledge around 16th century funeral practices. Brief catalogue descriptions of the household accounts can be seen here https://www.sjcarchives.org.uk/institutional/index.php/household-accounts Lynsey Darby, Archivist Image: SJLM/1/1/3/3, Household Accounts, Hatfield, 1507

Meet the Graduate Trainee Hello, I’m Caroline, and I’m the Graduate Trainee for 2022-23. I started at St John’s in August, and was startled to realise last week that I’m already a quarter of the way through my traineeship!

The time has absolutely flown, and I feel as though I’ve either been here for five minutes, or forever. Before coming to Cambridge, I read Classics at Oxford, and I naïvely thought my college library was pretty big – I don’t think I was quite prepared for the sheer amount of space and resources at John’s. I feel immensely lucky to work in such a wonderful environment: walking back from my lunch break

through sunlit cloisters is a continual delight, even on the most hectic day.

My favourite thing about the traineeship is the infinite variety.

Most days I work at the Issue Desk, fielding users’ questions and trying my best to solve problems. But I also spend time over in the Archives and the Old Library, working with the fascinating treasure trove of the College’s history, and out on field trips to other libraries with the rest of my lovely cohort of Cambridge Trainees.

It’s fantastic, and I still can’t quite believe that “look at gorgeous medieval manuscripts” often counts as a legitimate part of my working day!

The Working Library is reassuringly busy right now – as well as helping readers find the texts they need, we’re currently in the middle of the stock check, which has turned into something of a scavenger hunt to find our “missing” books. It’s been very interesting to see the whole process of building up a library collection, from bookshop to borrower. Every day’s a little different, and I’m really enjoying my time here so far.

Caroline Ball, Graduate Trainee

Celebrating Johnian female authors One of the more creative aspects of my job is putting together the displays in the Working Library – as an incorrigible art kid, it always feels like a treat getting to make the posters! This term, to mark the 40th anniversary of the College’s

decision to finally admit women, the first display was a celebration of books written by female members of St John’s. It was fascinating to see the range of work to which our alumnae have turned their talents – everything from poetry, to travel guides, to my personal favourite, a book on the history of sandwiches. There were more serious tomes as well, including books on oceanography and Renaissance music, though sadly their more austerely academic hardback covers didn’t hold quite the same visual appeal! (Cue the old adage of “not judging a book”…)

Although this display is only a very small tribute to the immeasurable contribution of women to College life, it was a lovely chance to bring a few of their books into the spotlight.

Caroline Ball, Graduate Trainee

Progress towards a new Medieval Manuscripts Catalogue Regular readers may recall that last term Sarah Gilbert wrote about the fascinating Lindsey Psalter, but that was just one of the many manuscripts she was cataloguing. For eight months, thanks to a grant from the College’s Annual Fund, we were able to employ

Sarah to work on a new catalogue of the College’s superb collection of 270 medieval manuscripts. Many of these were formerly owned by the Renaissance bibliophile William Crashaw, whose friend and fellow Johnian, Henry Wriothesley (patron of

Shakespeare), acquired the collection to give to their old College.

More manuscripts came to the College from various donors over the following centuries. The manuscripts cover a glorious mix of subjects: more are in Latin and are religious in nature, than not, which is normal in any medieval book collection, but they also encompass law, music, literature, medicine, science, and astronomy.

The current catalogue of manuscripts was compiled by M.R. James in 1913. An essential research tool for over a century, it reflects the academic interests of the early 1900s. The idea of

the history of the book as material object had not emerged.

Bindings were ignored by James, yet now provide so many clues to the previous lives and uses of the volumes. Reliant on limited printed sources of information, his identification of the precise texts contained in some volumes was approximate in places.

Sarah’s brief was to write physical descriptions of the manuscripts, concentrating on bindings and collation (physical page structure).

However, in the course of determining the arrangements of quires and pages, the use of new, online resources enabled her to identify some hitherto unknown texts, establishing where further research is required, and correcting earlier cataloguing errors. She discovered intriguing links between manuscripts and more facts about those who owned and used them. In eight months she produced descriptions of about a third of the collection, prioritising the earliest manuscripts and unusual bindings. Completing the catalogue will require further external funding, and Sarah, having built up such knowledge of the collection and its history, is as keen to finish the task as we are. We’ve made a fantastic start.

Every binding tells a story

Kathryn McKee, Special Collections Librarian

Searching Library collections on iDisocover Many of you would have experience in searching for a book or a journal on iDiscover.

Now you can search some of the Library collections on iDiscover. We recently created a few such collections include New Books, AudioVisual Material, Graphic Novels, Language Learning Material, Health & Wellbeing Collection, Kenneth Maxwell Collection and Guy Lee Collection. All of these are searchable by collection names, for example, if you key in ‘St John’s Health and Wellbeing’ in the search box on iDiscover, you can view all the available items forming this collection. In addition, individual titles can be searched within collections. Items can also be sorted by date and author for easy browsing. Each title has a link to take you to the item’s location and classmark. If you do not know the name of the collection, you can simply enter ‘St John’s collections’ in the search box, and view all of those available.

Janet Chow, Academic Services Librarian For comments on this issue, and contributions to future issues, please contact Janet Chow. Email: jc614@cam.ac.uk; Tel: (3)38662

The Buildings of England. Cambridgeshire / Nikolaus Pevsner, 1954, rev. 1970 The Master’s Lodge at St John’s ‘is of no particular merit’. On the other hand, Cripps Court—so often maligned as a matter of course—is ‘a masterpiece’. (‘One approaches it in studied meanness through the middle of New Court. The surprise is supreme.’) The primary value of a Pevsner Guide does not lie in judgements such as these, but in the matter-of-factness and descriptive accuracy of its entries and the scope of its interests. All volumes offer extensively and unpatronisingly informative commentary on a wide range of buildings, in succinct and often technical language that non-specialists can take some satisfaction in decoding (aided by a glossary at the back). But the human touches of evaluative opinion are important to the character of these books, and they can coax or shock readers into new ways of looking at even very familiar, or half-familiar, bits of their everyday environment.

Pevsner was a Fellow of St John’s. In the section devoted to the College buildings, he takes us in through the Great Gate, with its ‘gorgeous display of heraldic carving’ on a background ‘powdered with daisies and borage’—yes, borage—and under the fan vaulting of the gatehouse into First Court. ‘On passing through the gateway the court itself comes as a disappointment.’ One hopes that visitors who have just paid for entrance do not think so. The Chapel’s disproportionate size is judged to be ‘somewhat detrimental to its effect’, and the gap left by its refusal to play nicely with the rest of First Court on the eastern side, fronting St John’s Street, is ‘especially painful’. Moving into Second Court with

*This third edition is available in College Library

the Guide in hand, we are asked to differentiate between brickwork c.1515 and brickwork c.1600, a difference said to be very clear—although here, I believe, Pevsner’s own prose has become muddled in condensation, and one ‘angle turret’ is syntactically confused with the other. Such things can be interesting to puzzle out. The ‘central frontispiece’ in the cloister in Third Court—i.e. the decorated section under which one passes on the way to the Bridge of Sighs—is of ‘extremely odd design, with demi-columns on the ground floor and above two superimposed orders of short shapeless pilasters with rose, portcullis, and other (originally no doubt painted) emblems across their waists.’ You will have to go and look at it to see what is meant, and to form an opinion on the verdict: ‘This gives a most unclassical effect of corpulence.’ Of the famous bridge itself: ‘The openings have iron bars—necessary to make the bridge and thereby the buildings inaccessible to undergraduates at night.’ Pevsner, as noted above, was a Fellow of St John’s.

A third edition of the Cambridgeshire volume*, fully updated, was prepared in 2015 by Simon Bradley; but the previous version, revised once by Pevsner himself, is the one I have to hand and have come to know. Any edition would be of value to Johnians curious about their built surroundings. The older ones now have an additional interest, however, and a melancholy charm, for their very out-of-dateness. The multi-storey carpark on Park Street, near the ADC and the Maypole pub, has recently been demolished.

Freshers, as well as many of us who remember it reasonably well, may need to be informed that this was ‘well designed’ and that its ‘concrete surfaces [were] partly ribbed, and there [was] also a concrete grille, too fussy for an otherwise straightforward and successful building’. Reading this makes me regretful that I should have to change the tense from present to past. The carpark, I learn, was built in ‘1962-3 by Truscon Ltd (Michael de St Croix)’. .

Find these books on new acquisitions display

Dr Alex Wong, Fellow in English