This article contextualises contemporary heritage imaging science at the John Rylands Library by exploring the twentieth-century development of its photographic services. Taking an archives-led approach, we argue that the core purpose of photography was to support research, primarily by providing access to textual content. We also consider the status and visibility of photographers and photographic services within this institutional context. Although the library has had a photographic studio since 1910, this was staffed by librarians rather than professional photographers for the first fifty years of its existence. The article examines in turn three overlapping areas of activity: photographic reproduction for publications; the supply of facsimile copies to researchers; and the use of specialist imaging techniques. Although digital technologies have transformed imaging activities at the library, their core purpose remains-namely, to facilitate research with the library's collections.
The findings of recent scientific investigation into the pigments employed in the ninth-century Psalter-Hymnal, JRRIL, MS lat. 116, are reported here. The pigments of this book are compared with those that have been reliably identified in other Carolingian manuscripts, with particular attention being paid to the use (or otherwise) of vermilion. Changing patterns in the utilisation of vermilion in manuscripts from late antiquity to the high Middle Ages are outlined, and possible reasons for fluctuations are considered.
This article surveys the advantages of using digital imaging to enhance the catalogue of a collection of Jewish amulets in the Rylands Library Manchester. Like manuscripts, there are obvious advantages in having images of amulets online, in terms of making them more widely accessible to scholars, in allowing more easy comparison one with the other, in promoting conservation by reducing handling, in aiding detailed analysis (e.g. through magnification) and in encouraging public engagement; but amulets pose their own distinctive problems: they are often 3D, which makes photographing them more difficult than photographing the flat surface of a manuscript. The article describes how 3D photogrammetry was used to solve this problem. It also describes how X-ray computed tomography was used to discover what was contained in a number of sealed amulets, without damaging the artefacts. These techniques are costly: the article concludes by calling for the development of criteria to guide us when they should be applied.
The article discusses the use of imaging methodology in research on featherwork heritage. The project team of historians, imaging scientists and photographers, conservators and curators was the first to systematically develop an advanced imaging approach to the study of historic featherwork. The object of analysis was a highly elaborate feather fan produced either in the Low Countries or in Dutch colonial Brazil, likely around 1665, that is today held in the Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge. Building on existing scholarship by biologists, conservators and ornithologists, the article discusses the extent to which imaging approaches help contextualise discussions about photosensitivity, pigmentation and the fluorescence of feathers as well as species identification. Imaging also allows for new insights into crafts knowledge, intricate manufacturing skills as well as invisible artisanal interventions, such as the use of adhesives. Moreover, imaging generates new opportunities for the conservation and display of featherwork and provides momentum for novel collaborations to be built with Indigenous descendant communities and feather practitioners today.
This article examines the contested legacy of colonial collections, focusing on the digitisation and dialogical curation of the Sri Guru Granth Sahib held at the John Rylands Library. It explores the ethical, legal and cultural implications of preserving and digitising sacred artefacts acquired through colonial exploitation. Using the example of collaboration between the University of Manchester and the Sikh community, the article highlights how digital technologies can both democratise access and perpetuate epistemological violence. By tracing the history, provenance and recent community consultations, the article underscores the importance of dialogical curation in addressing the legacies of colonialism.
This article focuses on a copy of the hitherto unknown acting edition of Charles Calvert's The Tempest in the catalogue of the University of Kent's Pettingell Collection that offers new insights into Calvert's Shakespearean revivals in Manchester. It begins by considering the metropolitan influences from which Calvert derived the approach to his revivals, before discussing his experimental adaptations from British, French and American melodramas, culminating in him writing his own original play, The Hive of Life, between his exit from the Theatre Royal in 1860 and his appointment as actor-manager at the Prince's Theatre in 1864. It then turns to Calvert's acting edition of The Tempest, explaining how and why he wished to adhere to the 'genuine' text, reversing most of Charles Kean's changes, which he had applied for his revival at London's Princess's Theatre in 1857. Finally, it demonstrates how these amendments contributed to the revival's commercial success, something which had eluded Calvert's illustrious predecessors.
This article comments on a recently discovered essay, entitled 'Rex Dei Gratia', written by the Manchester historian Mark Hovell and published in the Workers' Educational Association's journal The Highway in the summer of 1915. Hovell's essay provides a summary of key parts of the history of the Divine Right of Kings. In addition to adding to Hovell's very limited body of historical work (it is now the only identified extant piece published during his lifetime), this discovery provides an opportunity to speculate on how Hovell might have fitted the historical theme of Divine Rights into political discourse during the First World War.
Although the Irish origins of the Brethren are well known, scholars have paid little attention to the growth and impact of this form of evangelical primitivism in Ireland. This article addresses that issue by considering opposition to the Brethren and lay preachers in Ulster after the 1859 revival. It shows how criticism was stimulated by the numerical growth of the Brethren, embarrassment at the religious populism unleashed during 1859 and the perception that the Brethren posed a threat to protestant unity. It considers the critique of the Brethren offered by members of the regionally dominant Presbyterian Church in Ireland, and what their criticisms tells us about the relationships between revivalism and denominations, as well as the subsequent development of the Brethren and popular evangelicalism in Northern Ireland after 1921.
The eleven unpublished Ur III cuneiform texts presented in this article are housed in the John Rylands Library, University of Manchester. This article publishes two tablets from Puzrish-Dagan which deal with dead animals; six from Umma involving various contents; one from Girsu on the receipt of barley; one from Irisagrig with unclear recording; and one tablet with unknown provenience. Except for one text (no. 8), most are undated because of the damaged and fragmental preservation.
Among the small, but highly significant, collection of single-leaf prints amassed by George John, 2nd Earl Spencer (1758-1834), one print has consistently proved controversial. An impression from an etched metal plate, this scene of the Crucifixion bears the 'impossible' date of 1430. The date is not the only issue with the impression; stylistically and materially it is unlike any other produced in the fifteenth century. This article examines the impression afresh, recording a variety of oddities and anomalies. It introduces a new piece of physical evidence-the watermark from the paper on which the impression now at the John Rylands Library was printed-before concluding with some observations on the validity and purpose of this extraordinary print.
This article explores some overlooked aspects of the University of Manchester’s efforts in the 1930s to support Lancashire’s industry and commerce. Two examples are considered: ‘realistic economic research’ conducted by the Economics Research Section into Lancashire’s post-war economic problems, and the reintroduction of Chinese studies aimed at supporting Lancashire cotton merchants. While the successes of both endeavours were limited, the article concludes by briefly considering the legacy of such efforts on the university’s research philosophy, particularly through the introduction of the Simon Fund in 1944.
The University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology (UMIST) was created for the advancement of technical education in post-war Britain. Born of an existing technical college, fondly known as ‘the Tech’, UMIST represented optimism and Manchester’s prominent position in the ‘white heat’ epoch. Historians have recognised the political and personal role of the first principal, Vivian Bowden, in the expansion of UMIST in Manchester’s metropolitan and intellectual landscapes. Alongside colleagues and councillors, Bowden selectively harnessed Manchester’s scientific reputation and industrial heritage to forge the future. The purpose of this article is to contextualise this and understand how historical narratives and acts of commemoration aided the rapid expansion of UMIST in Manchester’s educational and civic realms. Considering the relationship of key actors with concepts of the past, present and future of technology underlines the significance of attitudes towards ‘the Tech’ in this process.
Following its charter of 1956, the Manchester Municipal College of Technology appointed a new principal, who oversaw the rapid expansion of the campus. The development of a suite of new buildings, on one of the city’s most polluted and derelict tracts, required cooperation between the College, the Victoria University of Manchester, the Manchester Corporation, and a host of central government ministries. This initiative was driven by the recognition that technology and technological education were vital tools in the retention of Britain’s global influence. Manchester was identified for the accelerated growth of higher technological education due to its history of engineering, manufacturing and the development of commercial computing. Founded on archival sources, this article explores the complex relationships between statecraft, Whitehall policy, municipal governance and space. Using the manifestation of urban planning and architecture, it argues that the ‘Warfare State’ had influence beyond overt military programmes, which informed certain civic and municipal local enterprise with objectives other than rearmament, such as education, employment and economic recovery.
This article demonstrates that the ' extension ' of Owens College, Manchester - the ancestor of the University of Manchester - in 1870-73 represents an important and misunderstood moment in the history of English civic universities. The new model of governance instituted by the extension movement subsequently became normative for the civic universities, and remained largely in place throughout the twentieth century. The reformers set out to devise a model of public accountability appropriate for a public institution as distinct from a private trust. The article centres on the relationship between James Bryce and the lay leaders of the extension movement, and explores the connections between the Owens College reform, the Taunton Commission's inquiry into the endowed grammar schools, and contests over the control of three major educational foundations in Manchester (Chetham's Hospital, Manchester Grammar School and Hulme's Charity).
Manchester’s Mechanics’ Institution, established in 1824, has during the past two hundred years been co-opted into narratives increasingly remote from the essence of its foundations. A substantial body of literature has evaluated the Mechanics’ Institution with a focus on ‘social control’, and has routinely privileged the history of ‘science’, narrowly conceived. Such histories have tended to conclude the Mechanics’ Institution ‘failed’. Detailed archival study, focused on the first ten years of the Mechanics’ Institution’s existence, tells a different story. This article places the foundation and early years of this institution within the story of Manchester and the broader history of working-class education. It explores some of the tensions and concerns underpinning its establishment, in particular the impact of the Peterloo Massacre, on Manchester’s Liberal nonconformist leadership. It then traces a rapid movement from fear and distrust between different elements of Manchester’s industrial society towards an environment where deeper levels of mutual support and understanding became possible.
This article explores in what ways and to what extent it is possible to talk about ' higher learning' and ' higher education' in Manchester before 1824, the date formally chosen by the University of Manchester to mark its foundation. It considers diverse sites and institutions, revealing a complex, interconnected web of knowledge spaces - dissenting academies, teaching hospitals, learned societies, independent libraries and individual initiatives - which complicate existing narratives of the development of higher education in the city that usually focus on the origins of the university. In the early nineteenth century, with Manchester rapidly becoming the ' world ' s first industrial city', we see emerging at the same time a vibrant urban educational landscape, with no parallel in the British Isles at that time.1 In contrast to England's ancient universities which remained, for the most part, closed and private entities until the mid-nineteenth century, Manchester's educational culture was self-consciously diffused, civic and participatory, strongly influenced by the city's prominent dissenting communities. Excluded from Oxford and Cambridge, Manchester's Unitarians, in particular, sought to shape the city's educational culture according to the Enlightenment ideal of polite learning as a public endeavour. While civic participatory models have been foregrounded by historians of knowledge and ideas in recent years, this article considers, for the first time, how such models influenced the history of educational cultures in Manchester.
This article examines three medieval charters of the Norman abbey of Mont Saint-Michel, today preserved among the collections of the John Rylands Research Institute and Library. Rare survivors of the destruction of the abbey's archives in 1944, these charters previously formed part of the enormous private library assembled by Sir Thomas Phillipps (1792-1872), antiquarian and bibliophile. They are here studied in detail for the first time, showcasing them not just for what they can tell us about the property to which they relate and the celebrated abbey to which it once belonged, but, more importantly, for what they reveal about the structure and organisation of the lost institutional archive of which they formed a part in the Middle Ages. This article also contextualises these charters within the wider Phillipps collection, exploring questions associated with the antiquarian practice of preserving and presenting medieval documents, a subject which has only recently begun to receive the scholarly attention it deserves.
The nature of Britain’s unreformed parliamentary electoral system has been the focus of interest and study for over two centuries. For the unreformed period, historians have identified a range of factors influencing the outcome of parliamentary elections: prevailing economic and social power structures; the nature, extent and effectiveness of electoral treating and corruption; and the role of political issues, among both the political elite and the electorate. Within these interpretations, the role of parliamentary boroughs dominated by electoral patrons has been seen as an important feature. This article considers one such borough, Newton in Lancashire. Often presented as the archetypal ‘pocket borough’, Newton’s parliamentary elections were indeed dominated by the lords of the manor, the Leghs of Lyme. The papers of this family show, however, that this electoral control was more complex than has previously been thought, and required significant electoral management by the family.
