Spotlight
Welcome
Welcome Welcome to the latest edition of Discover, the University of Nottingham Manuscripts and Special Collections’ newsletter. I’d like to take this opportunity to send readers our best wishes for the New Year. In the last edition, I was pleased to report our success in acquiring the papers of Ada Clarke, DH Lawrence’s younger sister. During the summer, we were very pleased to acquire further items for our designated DH Lawrence collection. The manuscript ‘Note on Miss Mollie L Skinner’, 1924, is unusual in that it is written on two postcards of scenes from Mexico and describes Lawrence’s first meeting with his future collaborator Mollie Skinner in Western Australia. In the manuscript of A Little Moonshine With Lemon, 1925, Lawrence reminisces about life on the ranch in New Mexico, while drinking a glass of vermouth on the Italian Riviera. The final acquisition is a small archive relating to the first US publication of an unexpurgated edition of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, by the Grove Press in 1959, which contains a fascinating insight into the US court process in the year before the Chatterley trial in the UK. Last issue I also reported on the award of a grant by the Wellcome Trust to catalogue, preserve and selectively digitise papers relating to the development of Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) at the University. I am delighted to report that we have now appointed the project team: Zoe Ellis has been seconded as Project Archivist, Rachael Orchard recruited as Archive Assistant and Jonny Davies and Abigail Cobley as Digitisation Assistants; the project officially started in October. In this edition we also report on the digitisation process. One of our hopes was that the project would lead to the discovery of further records relating to MRI and, almost before the team had started work, additional papers of the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Sir Peter Mansfield were discovered in the Imaging Centre which bears his name, and transferred to Manuscripts and Special Collections. If you’d like to find out more about any aspect of our work please do not hesitate to contact me. Meanwhile, I hope you enjoy reading this edition of Discover.
Mark Dorrington
Keeper of Manuscripts and Special Collections
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A parish library is a collection of books formed to support the theological and pastoral work of English parish churches. Manuscripts and Special Collections holds the parish libraries of Coleorton, Ashby-de-la-Zouch, Oakham, Elston and Loughborough. Debates about the future of public libraries have regularly referenced the legal basis from which this well-regarded British institution originated. The 1850 Public Libraries Act required all local authorities to provide free access to the main published works on which society relied for information. The groundbreaking liberal thinking behind the Act was to offer free access to the printed word for all members of society. However, the 1850 Act was not the first library legislation passed by Parliament. That first Act, the 1709 Act for the Better Preservation of Parochial Libraries, England, came from a comparably philanthropic mindset but favoured only a small part of the community. The 1709 Act instituted support through public funding for book collections available to clerics in rural situations. The libraries remained under the control of the parochial authorities and the main beneficiary was the clergy. The promoter of this legislation was Dr Thomas Bray (1656-1730) on behalf of the Church of England, whose interest at that time was to re-establish its authority by investing in the continuous education of its clergy. Libraries in parish churches existed before 1709. The term “parish library” appears in the 17th century, though even earlier, in the years following the Reformation, there were injunctions and archiepiscopal directives demanding that parish churches should keep copies of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, the Paraphrases by Erasmus and Bishop Jewel’s Defence of the Apology – in addition to an English Bible. The efforts of Bray were apt at the time because of the widely differing standards of service in richly and poorly beneficed parishes in rural England. At the beginning of the 18th century, the great debates about how best to worship God, whether in the Catholic or Protestant faith, had died down. At the dawn of the secular age philosophy, empirical science and industrialisation were casting doubts on the very existence of God. The Church of England needed its clerics to be able to debate and represent the Church’s authority to the emerging middle class. Rich parishes such as Coleorton, Ashby-de-laZouch, Oakham, Elston and Loughborough came to their book collections by way of gifts from individual benefactors, such as the bequest in 1616 to All Saints’ Church, Oakham, by Lady Anne Harington, widow of John, 1st Baron Harington of Exton in Rutland. At the time of the bequest, Anne Harington was recently bereaved of her son John, and it is believed that the books were his library. John had been a student at Sidney Sussex College in Cambridge and had bought books while accompanying the Prince of Wales on his travels in Europe. Almost all the books are in Latin and printed in Paris or Basel. The contents hint at an inclination towards pre-reformation theology: Greek