This blog post is the second in a series focusing on maps of Europe from the #ManGeogSoc Map Cataloguing project. The first blog post featuring antiquarian maps of Europe can be read here.

This post delves into the provenance of thirty-six manuscript maps of the Greek Archipelago.

The images above are a small selection of the thirty-six maps of the Greek Archipelago that feature in the Manchester Geographical Society map collection. This collection of hand-drawn charts of islands in the Greek archipelago is attributed to Major Baseggio and stated as being created between 1773 and 1776. This set of maps is not detailed enough for navigation, but they do include place-names surrounding the edges of the islands, identify ports and settlements and also reference groups of hills. As they are highly decorative, they could possibly have been created as a gift. They are indeed incredibly beautiful.

An interesting aspect of these maps is that we have a number of letters that are stored together.

These are from the year 1910, and are enquiring into the legitimacy of the maps. It seems that Harry Sowerbutts, who was the secretary of the Manchester Geographical Society at this time, was interested in finding out more information about this set of maps. So he wrote letters to and received replies from H. T. Crook, the Royal Geographical Society, and the Bishop of Salford at the time, Louis Charles Casartelli.

The Bishop of Salford, Louis Charles Casartelli, was educated in Classics, Oriental literature and Iranian languages. He was the founder of the Manchester Dante Society and a supporter of the Oriental, Geographical, Antiquarian and other societies. He was also instrumental in the early years of the Manchester Geographical Society. So his interests and expertise were useful to Harry Sowerbutts when carrying out an enquiry into these maps.

However, there seems to have been some disagreement. H. T. Crook was an engineer and surveyor who donated many maps to the Manchester Geographical Society map collection, including his own edited Ordnance Survey maps. He states that the Bishop may be mistaken and that the style of the maps is prior to the 16th century.

The response from E. A. Reeves, Map Curator of the Royal Geographical Society, led me to contact the British Library, as the map mentioned by Reeves, ‘Black Sea by Baseggio dated 1793’ from the British Museum catalogue, is now in the British Library collection.

This correspondence displays how map enquiries were carried out in 1910!

On the back of the manuscript map of ‘Sdile’, I discovered a pencil portrait drawing of a man. Whilst researching who the creator, ‘Major Baseggio’, may be, I came across an individual named Massimino Baseggio, who has a map to his name. Massimino Baseggio lived from 1737-1813 as a painter and fresco artist within the famous Italian Baseggio family of sculptors. So it may be plausible that he used one of his maps to sketch a draft figure on the back!

With thanks to Donna Sherman, Map Curator, for her help and the Imaging team for digitising these maps and letters.

As we all know, The John Rylands Library is currently closed during the corona virus emergency, in common with all other libraries, museums, galleries and other cultural institutions throughout the UK. Although we are able to provide a vast range of services and resources online, sadly, our physical collections remain locked away.

However, today we are able to announce that scientists at the University of Manchester’s Full Online Operations Laboratory have developed advanced robot technology, which will enable us to retrieve rare books, manuscripts and archives without members of staff having to enter the building. Robots are being trained to retrieve books from our shelves, and pack them into crates, so that our hugely successful DAFFODILS drone deliver service can continue to operate.

Such is their sophistication and delicacy of touch, they are even able to unlock the glass-fronted bookcases in the Historic Reading Room. The mobile shelving in our modern stores has proved more problematic, however: one or two robots got carried away turning the handles – literally – resulting in several detached arms.

And of course robots aren’t subject to the same health and safety concerns as humans. They can fearlessly climb rickety wooden ladders that are banned to humans.

Of course, any cutting-edge system is bound to have teething problems. The robots are so intelligent and inquisitive that they have been known to start reading the books. Perhaps robot researchers will be the next stage in automating the Rylands.

This blog post is the third in a series focusing on maps of Europe from the #ManGeogSoc Map Cataloguing project. The first blog post featuring antiquarian maps of Europe can be read here. The second blog post delving into the provenance of manuscript maps of the Greek Archipelago can be read here.

This post explores an interesting piece of ephemera, a map of ‘Rome in 1890’ published in The Graphic newspaper in 1890.

This map, ‘Rome in 1890’, is by Henry Brewer, who produced a map titled, ‘A Bird’s Eye View of Victorian Manchester’, one year earlier in 1889. This was also published in The Graphic. The Map of Manchester by Brewer is a favourite in our Map collection, and you can view the digitised version here.

Henry William Brewer was a Victorian illustrator and architectural draughtsman known for his depictions of cities drawn from an elevated viewpoint. He tried to depict a 3-dimensional view of the cities he focused on. Copies of these maps are now rare and often fragile because they were produced on poor quality paper as supplements in widely circulated magazines. This beautifully detailed map was published in 1890, therefore giving a contemporary view of Rome at the time of publication.

In this section of the map, the easily recognisable Colosseum is located at the bottom right of the map, as well as a depiction of the Roman Forum to the bottom left of this snippet. The detail of this map can be seen through the depictions of buildings and ruins, even individual trees and small footpaths are illustrated.

In this snippet of the map, the curve of the River Tiber can be seen, with the Tiber Island in the middle. Can you spot a chimney in the bottom of this snippet? These buildings represent the gas works that was built by the Anglo-Italian Gas Society on top of the Circus Maximus remains in 1852. The works were then moved in 1910 to the edge of the city so that the area could be excavated as an archaeological site. As these buildings do not exist today, this map provides an artistic representation of the works in 1890, before demolition.

The cartouche at the forefront of the map features many aspects reminiscent of the history of Rome. The Capitoline wolf is pictured with Romulus and Remus as babes underneath, suckling, which illustrates one of the founding myths of Rome. Also featured along the bottom of the cartouche is a Galea, a traditional roman helmet, as well as the papal tiara which was worn by popes of the Catholic Church until 1963. To the right stands the abbreviation SPQR, representing ‘the Roman Senate and People’, which is still prominent all across Rome today, stamped into man-hole covers and lamp posts around the city. This post shows a small sample of the information that can be gleaned by studying ephemeral maps such as this one.

Many thanks to the Imaging team for the digitisation of this map.

Hello, Clío and Max here! We are postgraduate students at the University of Manchester (studying MA Art Gallery and Museum Studies and MA History respectively). We have been assigned a placement at the John Rylands Library in which we will be helping to study and preserve the history of the Wood Street Mission, one of the oldest charities in Manchester.

The charity was established in April 1869 by the Methodist minister Alfred Alsop, who sought to address the widespread poverty and destitution that engulfed Manchester in the nineteenth century. To tackle poverty in the city, Alsop realised that charitable movements needed to spread more than just an evangelical message. As a result, the Mission set out to alleviate the suffering of working families in Manchester and Salford by helping to provide them with shelter, clothing, and food (whilst also delivering a religious message). Shelter was provided for the homeless, soup kitchens were established to provide free meals, and free clothing was distributed to children and families.

However, the Mission provided much more than the material day-to-day necessities. The charity also provided many children with toys and from the 1880s onwards began organising trips to Southport and Blackpool for children who otherwise would not have had the chance to visit the seaside. The charity expanded upon its campaigns to improve the physical welfare of children in Manchester in the twentieth century. For example, in the 1960s and 1970s, the Wood Street Mission helped to establish youth clubs and sports facilities in the centre of the city. This proved extremely popular and gave opportunities for everyone in the area to get involved in sport. Whilst the Mission today remains committed to providing basic family necessities, the charity now primarily focuses upon organising education and literacy projects which aim to improve children’s opportunities. Despite the shifts in focus that have taken place over the years, the Mission’s head office is still located on Wood Street (and is conveniently right next door to the John Rylands Library!)

Last year was the 150th anniversary of the Wood Street Mission and Des Lynch (the charity’s manager) sought to expand the already extensive records of the charity’s long history to commemorate this. A project was carried out (led by Rebecca Rees, University of Edinburgh) to interview former staff members, and service users. It was hoped that these audio records would supplement the paper archive adding a new dimension to the story of the Wood Street Mission. After the completion of this audio project, these new audio records, along with a further donation of paper records (4 large boxes and a tin trunk) were deposited with the John Rylands to be catalogued.

That’s where we come in! Over the next few months, we will be examining and organising these materials and helping to integrate them into the Wood Street Mission archives. Our placement will involve sorting, box listing, and preserving old paper records. However, another key task will be to create the metadata for the audio records that were produced in the 2019 project. We will also be editing these oral reminisces, creating inventories of the topics covered in the interviews and trying to find links between the oral histories and the stories documented in the paper archive.
Managing audio files in this manner and working within archives is something that is brand new to us, so the placement offers a great chance to learn new skills in a historic institution. The work that we will be doing in the next couple of months will allow us to explore the fascinating history of the Wood Street Mission, the important work that this local institution continues to carry out, and the experiences of the individuals who have worked with the Mission in the past. Through our work we will be able to study the experiences of families who faced terrible conditions of poverty and how the Mission and its workers addressed and viewed these issues. We are both fascinated to learn about local history and the ways that charitable causes have been pursued in Manchester, and we are sure that you are too!

As we undertake this work, we will be updating this blog with any interesting information that we come across. We will also be creating a Twitter page where we will post the most informative sound clips that we find in the audio sources (a link will be provided to this in our next blog). Make sure to keep an eye out in the upcoming weeks to see what we have discovered about the Wood Street Mission, we can’t wait to get started!

From 1969 to 1976 a University of Manchester Library initiative collected flyers, posters, letters and handbills distributed around the campus forming a substantial archive within Special Collections. Since starting work at the John Rylands Library Reading Room I have begun listing the contents of the Student Ephemera Collection (GB133 SEC) which although numbered and assiduously organised has remained uncatalogued for the best part of fifty years. What’s exciting about the archive is its insight into student life from that period – particularly radical politics (on which I’ll focus in future blogs) but also adverts for gigs, concerts, and performances largely across most of the city’s different academic institutions.

The Manchester Digital Music Archive is an excellent initiative documenting the city’s musical ephemera (https://www.mdmarchive.co.uk) its website containing scanned posters, flyers, tickets and photographs from the live scene and which I highly recommend giving a visit. But, although it holds a huge amount of musical material (both pop and classical) most of the artefacts date from later in the 1970s onwards. There are notable exceptions such as those of the Royal Northern College of Music and the Free Trade Hall but the posters and flyers held in the Student Ephemera Collection are nowhere to be seen within the MDMA making it an entirely new window upon the city’s cultural events of the late 1960s and 70s. Apologies for the poor quality photographs accompanying this blog but that’s because they were originally taken only as reference points for the box listing and not for display on the John Rylands Library website. The other thing to note is that I had only listed material from about one and a quarter boxes (i.e. 1969 and the first few months of 1970) by the time the virus quarantine hit so this is an analysis of just a fraction of the collection.

Probably the first thing to note is what a hard working band Slade were in that period – appearing several times in Manchester over just a few months here with Pete Brown’s Piblokto! at the University’s student union. Brown connects this archive with several others held in Special Collections as he was initially known as an experimental poet linked with Dave Cunliffe, Jeff Nuttall and Jim Burns who he appeared alongside in Mike Horovitz’s Children of Albion (Penguin, 1969) anthology. Brown is better known as the lyricist with the band Cream, song-writing for Eric Clapton, Ginger Baker and Jack Bruce, Piblokto! being a relatively short lived outfit (69-71) notably featuring future Gong drummer Laurie Allan.

Most won’t recognise the name Christine Perfect, here gigging at the SU in November 1969, but becoming much better known when she married Fleetwood Mac’s John McVie, joining the band just a few months after this gig and also appearing elsewhere in the collection playing with blues band Chicken Shack. Mystified by the name Petrus Booncamp on this flyer I initially presumed the gig to be sponsored by the liqueur Petrus Boonekamp L’Amaro but then stumbled across a reference to the band on the It’s Psychedelic Baby website (www.psychedelicbabymag.com) Booncamp’s Linda Rothwell and John Williamson going on to be vocalist and bass player with Manchester’s premier Prog Rock outfit Goliath. The flyer also refers to a Nova Express Lightshow, this being the area’s principle psychedelic lightshow run by future computer artist Paul Brown, a fascinating interview about his work appearing on the Oxford University Press Blog: (https://blog.oup.com/2018/12/nova-express-psychedelic-light-show/) including some fantastic slides from that period.

Grass Eye was one of Manchester’s alternative newspapers running from 1968 to 1971 and which included cartoons by Ray Lowry whose work I discovered many years later in the NME but who also drew for the Guardian and Private Eye. This flyer advertises a benefit gig by Keith Relf’s Rennaisance, Relf having a major impact on British psych-pop earlier in the sixties playing guitar with the Yardbirds and co-writing some of their best tunes including Shapes of Things. Most countercultural publications were run on a shoestring budget so benefit gigs of this sort weren’t unusual, the connection with the underground lending bands an element of reflected hipness in return.

Beginning in the early 1960s playing trad-jazz, the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band had by 1969 become a well-known rock group with the 1968 hit I’m an Urban Spaceman written by the now sadly deceased Neil Innes. The Bonzos had already crafted a strange musical career as resident band on the TV show Do Not Adjust Your Set, band members appearing in comedy sketches alongside Michael Palin and Terry Jones and featuring in The Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour film, Innes working with Eric Idle creating fab four spoof band The Rutles and mockumentary All You Need is Cash.

More esoterically these flyers advertise Royal Manchester College of Music Student Union concerts with a performance by Lancashire’s Harrison Birtwistle alongside Peter Maxwell Davies who studied together and the singer Mary Thomas who often worked with the latter in the Nash Ensemble, here playing their own compositions and Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire in full costume with lighting effects. The second flyer is for a performance by Roger Smalley, Tim Souster, Andrew Powell and Robin Thompson, composers who had earlier studied under Karlheinz Stockhausen and then collaborated in various ways including in the electronic experimental group Intermodulation Powell then joining influential avant-garde band Henry Cow.

Please Take One was a gig listings freesheet covering Manchester and beyond this edition giving some idea of how lively the region’s music scene then was. Some of the standouts include Black Sabbath playing the University SU only a few weeks after the release of their first LP, Mott the Hoople at the Electric Circus (a venue perhaps best known for hosting numerous punk gigs later in the decade), Love Sculpture featuring Dave Edmunds who became an important pub rock, punk and new wave producer and an ad for the first edition of Time Out North West edited by Jeremy Beadle who organised the 1972 Bickershaw Festival where Captain Beefheart and the Grateful Dead played to thousands of muddy hippies on an old coalfield near Wigan.

Now that most gigs are advertised mainly through social media it’s worth pondering how difficult it may be to fully archive these compared to the SEC which preserved paper documents giving researchers the opportunity to study past culture. I understand that great progress is being made archiving digital material and perhaps preserving electronic footprints may actually enable a more sophisticated and comprehensive cultural analysis, less reliant on the whims of outlying librarians or their ability to collect paper from around an academic campus. I believe though that there is something important about being able to handle the original material as it often contains other elements of the story – the quality of the paper, the typeface or pictures and the method of reproduction giving archivists and academics information unlikely to be retained for the future study of electronic media.

In the architect Thomas Worthington’s Chorlton Union Hospital (1864-6), we saw in this city the first application of the ‘pavilion’ system to a workhouse hospital. Sent to each board of guardians in the country, its would become a national model for workhouse hospital design. The ‘pavilion’ system had been vigorously promoted by Florence Nightingale in her Notes on Hospitals (1858). Her enthusiasm for his plan is reflected in five letters we have from her to Worthington (English MS 1154), covering both the hospital’s design and her efforts to see it replicated elsewhere.    

In the first of her letters to Worthington in July 1865, Nightingale noted: 

“I am deeply interested in Workhouse Hospitals, and I am sure that it is a question which will come very much before the public next year [1866], in relation to London Workhouses.”   

The ‘pavilion’ system 

Worthington’s plan for the new hospital was to be based on the ‘pavilion’ system. Originating in France in the 18th Century, it aimed to curb the spread of cross-infection through separation and isolation, with parallel blocks widely separated by open courts or gardens. These courts would also maximise the amount of fresh air, ventilation and light in each ward. As Worthington noted: 

“The great feature of this principle is the entire detachment of the several blocks of buildings appropriated to different classes of disease, and the perfect isolation of each ward, in such a manner as to prevent the communication to other parts of the hospital of infected air existing in one or more wards.” 

The pioneer of this system in England was John Robertson, surgeon at the Manchester Lying-in Hospital, and a man whom Worthington knew through their membership of the Manchester Statistical Society.  

Nightingale was a great campaigner for its widespread adoption. The attraction of Worthington’s plan to her was not its innovation (construction began on ‘pavilion’ hospitals at Blackburn Infirmary and Marine Barracks, Woolwich in 1858), but its cost. The ‘pavilion’ system had been criticised as being too expensive: to Nightingale’s evident delight, Worthington’s plan was both compliant and affordable. 

“If you succeed in completing the buildings for anything like the money with due regard to the simple sanitary arrangements of so great a building, you will have inaugurated a new era in building. And we shall hasten to imitate you; for you will have set up a model for the whole country.”  

A New Model of Workhouse Hospital 

That this plan was for a workhouse hospital only increased Nightingale’s interest: 

“And, in these days when so much attention, wise and unwise, is being directed to Workhouse Infirmaries (and so little is being really done) the world’s gratitude is due to those who have solved a problem in a way which must be a model to the country.  

“…For the good and cheap must prevail over the dear and bad, tho’ it is by no means certain that the good and dear will.”  

The hospital opened in 1864, providing 480 beds on five, three storey ward blocks. His design allowed each of the hospital’s ‘inmates’ an “air space of 1350 cubic feet or thereabouts… more than double the minimum space required by the Poor Law Board”. The Chorlton Union Hospital also introduced a new system of nursing, using trained nurses under superintendent sisters. 

Publication of Worthington’s plans 

Worthington had already published two reports on the question of housing in the Manchester Statistical Society’s Transactions; in 1867 he presented a paper to them on the Chorlton Union Hospital, sending copies to a grateful Nightingale.  

“It is of the greatest use to us, as giving details of the best and cheapest hospital that has yet been built. …If I had 20 copies I could place them well- abroad and at home. 

“… [the charge] Made to me against Pavilion hospitals is: the construction is too expensive. To which I answer: look at the Chorlton Union Hospital.” 

In her next letter, Nightingale informs Worthington she has sent copies of his plan across the world, and how she intends to use his example in future editions of her Notes on Hospitals.  

The final letter we have from Nightingale concerns her questions about Worthington’s design for the Prestwich Poor Law Union’s new workhouse, on which work began in 1868, and the Woolton Convalescent Home in Liverpool. 

Worthington would go on to design seven other hospitals, as well as many of Manchester’s finest buildings: Memorial Hall (1866), Albert Memorial (1867) and City Police Courts (1873); yet it was the Chorlton Union Hospital that was his most influential work, inaugurating a new standard in workhouse hospital design. 

Find out more 

• Florence Nightingale Letters to Thomas Worthington (Eng MS 1154).
• Commonplace Book of Thomas Worthington (Eng MS 1416) .
• Stella Vera F. Butler, ‘“A model for the country”: letters from Florence Nightingale to the architect, Thomas Worthington, on hospitals and other matters 1865–1868’,
  Medical Humanities 39 (2013), 91–97. https://mh-bmj-com.manchester.idm.oclc.org/content/39/2/91.short

In March 2020 like many others across the world, the Imaging team found ourselves working from home, in new and very strange circumstances. But if you know us, we like to turn anything we can into an opportunity. So whilst being busy developing our formal Imaging skills (more posts to come on that later), the team have also taken the opportunity to take an ‘Isolated View’ of the collections.

All of the Imaging team are, or have been, creative practitioners at work inside, and outside, the Library. Each member of the team has reinterpreted the collections in a creative way of their choice. The results are a real treat, and whilst we don’t present contextual knowledge of the collections, you will be seeing the collections like never before. For now, I’m going to introduce each member of the team and tell you a little more about them.

Our longest serving member of staff Jamie Robinson is also a Video Artist, originally trained as a photographer Jamie started ‘messing about’ with old video cameras in around 2013 and now has an INCREDIBLE portfolio of experimental streaming, filming, video production, workshops and installations, take a look here impatv.com. For his interpretation of the collections Jamie has taken pages from some of his favourite manuscripts from our new Digital Collections and given them the IMPATV treatment. Highly meditative, highly therapeutic, take some time to spend with them when we release them.

Tony Richards, a prolific blogger and expert in Historic Photographic Processes (although he’ll be very cross with me for saying expert, but there is no denying it, he is) didn’t apply his knowledge of Historic Photographic practice to the collections, but went to the other end of the spectrum and experimented with creative outputs using software that we use for Advanced Imaging techniques such as Multispectral Imaging. His results are so clever, and a nod to iconic ‘Manchester’ imagery… watch this space.

Our project photographers Jo Castle and Lisa Risbec have taken inspiration from the projects that they are working on. Jo has just completed the digitisaton of the Heinrich Simon Papers held at the Rylands and has started to compile a Sigillography, a study of wax seals found within the papers. And Lisa Risbec, who has been working on the Unlocking the Mary Hamilton papers project, and is also a visual artist, has been inspired to create new artworks using elements of the visual aspects of the material she has been photographing.

Even our Imaging Assistant, Angie McCarthy, who keeps our Imaging Service in excellent working order, is also a practising artist in her own time. Angie has taken inspiration from Dom Sylvester Houedard to create some fantastic new work in response to his style of Concrete Poetry.

I’ve been working on my own contribution too, I am a practising photographer outside of the Library. I usually create portraits of people, and have managed to find a way to do that even in lockdown. But I really enjoyed being able to spend some time actually looking at the digital collections. I have been thinking about how to visually interpret isolation, and have used my favourite digital collection (no prizes for guessing which one that’s going to be) as source material – the Photography Collection.

We’ll be releasing our work as a series of posts tagged ‘Isolated View’. We’d love to hear what you think, and if it inspires you to interpret the collections in new ways, we’d love to see what you create. You can comment on the posts here, email us uml.imaging@manchester.ac.uk or contact us via the usual social media channels @thejohnrylands

Where possible images in our Digital Collections are available to download and reuse for non-commercial purposes. Just click download and get creative!

Manchester Digital Collections

Library Digitised Collections

Working from home has given us the opportunity to delve deeper into our image processing software. What has become clear is that we only use 20% of a software’s true capabilities. The number of menus, sub menus and plugins can be somewhat overwhelming at first and of limited use within specific imaging fields. 

This led me to take a look at our Multispectral Imaging software, ImageJ. ImageJ is an open source image processing program for multidimensional image data with a specific focus on scientific image analysis. We use ImageJ for processing multispectral image data of palimpsests, faded and obscured texts and also for pigment analysis using spectral reflectance curves. We use it in a very specific way with a tested workflow and set of tools. 

For the my Isolated View, I thought I’d take a look through the multitude of plugins and macros available on ImageJ. I had a basis of an idea from our work with spectral curves of pigments and was interested in alternative ways of visualising data.  

The plugin that caught my attention was the Interactive 3D Surface Plot plugin. This plugin creates interactive surface plots, the luminance of an image is interpreted as height for plotting in a graphical space. Luminance is best characterised, in this case, as an indication of the brightness of a surface to the human eye. 

At first, I started with our multispectral images but found I could import any image format. I was interested in how pigment and colour from an image could be represented in a graph, this then led to a more visually creative outputs by removing the grid, axis and key so that the plots only remained. We have seen too many graphs and charts on the news and social media of late. 

Here’s video clip to give an idea of the software interaction:

An image of one of our Golden Thread colour calibration charts and then an image of the same chart as a 3D lined ribbon.

So, how about a John Rylands Library Special Collection item?  

Here’s Greek P 457 – the St John Fragment, a papyrus fragment of St John’s Gospel, Chapter 18, verses 37-38, in which Christ appears before Pilate. It was discovered in Upper Egypt, possibly at Oxyrhynchus. It is part of a codex, and is the earliest known fragment of the New Testament in any language. It was acquired by the Library in 1920. 

Here is the verso of P 457 in the ImageJ plugin.

And a screengrab of the verso as a cross section crop. Remember this is not a topographical representation but a representation of luminance. 

And edited in Adobe Photoshop.

A screengrab of the full Verso.

And edited in Adobe Photoshop.  

Some of you will be able to see where this is going…  

A nod to Manchester born Graphic designer, Peter Saville, and his 1979 iconic Joy Division album cover design “Unknown Pleasures”. 

Since January I have been working as a photographer on the Imaging team working to digitise the Mary Hamilton Archive for the Unlocking the Mary Hamilton Papers project, which has been amazing to work on and one that I’m looking forward to finding more about as it progresses.

One of the key factors when photographing objects in this way is accuracy and consistency. Lighting, background and settings are the same for each object, presenting the items as ‘objectively’ as possible.

As a practicing artist alongside my role as a photographer, I’m interested in the aesthetic qualities and life cycles of objects. My work is based around experimental drawing and often consists of collage, assemblage and printmaking, creating mainly abstract works; an opposite way of working to my role digitising the Mary Hamilton archive.

I wanted to test out elements of my own practice by exploring the visual elements of the Mary Hamilton archive, seeing the letters as objects in their own right and adding my subjective viewpoint and picking out small elements such as ink spills, marks and signs of history.

I wanted to play around with them as I would an analogue collage, so I made a series of crops, highlighting interesting sections that may have been missed and made digital collages comprised of elements of them whilst keeping some of the conventions of cultural object photography in place.

by Angie McCarthy

I have been working at the John Rylands Library for two years becoming an Imaging Assistant in November 2019. This role allows me to get up close and personal to the collections and archive.  I get to assess and retrieve a variety of items for customers requesting a digital copy of collection items. In just over four months I have found myself totally immersed in the collections and archive.  I have selected a few objects from the dsh archive and used them in response to the artist’s work.

I was introduced to the artist Dom Sylvester Houedard over a coffee with Stella Halkyard. Stella was responsible for obtaining the dsh collection (more about Stella in a later blog.)  

The Spectacles worn by dsh are a simple and functional design.  A strong black frame locks a pair of lenses to enhance vision for the wearer.  They are worn to enable a better focus on the world, to focus on the detail. Glasses have the ability to become part of a person’s identity, a decoration worn on the face that, when not being worn, the person becomes almost transformed, looking unlike themselves, like a stranger!   The photographs of dsh clearly depict that the spectacles he wore were part of his persona, the windows through which he assessed the world, looking at and creating Art; Poetry; Concrete poetry; Typestracts; Kinetic artist; Visual poetry.

dsh’s glasses inspired me to create work in response to his concrete poetry.  Working remotely on a laptop belonging to the University of Manchester I wanted to keep my work simple.  dsh used an Olivetti Typewriter to create some of his poems and Typestracts.  Using the Paint App on my laptop (having little knowledge of much more regarding anything too technical) I began to use dsh’s glasses to work on and work with.  I wanted to create a drawing using letters typed from Paint App. The glasses literally became a frame I worked onto.  My response to the Man, the Monk, The Artist, the Visionary. 

The dsh archive at the John Rylands Library contains objects that are totally unique; unique to the person, an extension of their personality and an aspect of their very existence.  Residue energy from the artist is still present and contained in the inked fabric of the ribbon, rubber, metal and screws of the typewriter.  The Olivetti Lettera typewriter therefore becomes a representation and a symbol of the man and artist who used this object to create his Art; Poetry; Concrete poetry and Typestracts. 

The sound made by hitting the individual keys on a typewriter is like no other sound; hard, direct, linear.  Ink meets paper, each letter stamped, leaving a mark by process of fingers and eyes working together.  

I used an image of the Olivetti Typewriter in response to the work dsh produced using this very typewriter.  My materials were a borrowed laptop and Paint App.  Keeping to the ethos of dsh I kept the process as simple as possible. 

The feed roller on a typewriter holds paper, this was the area I decided to write/type onto.  The inked ribbon on a typewriter uses black or red ink therefore typed letters are black or red.  I decided to use a strong blue font with a linear strike through, acknowledging my deliberate mistake, the paradox of colour, words and repetition symbolise the artist and his work.   Finally, the roller on a typewriter usually contains a trace of the past, dried ink, layers of type, and ghosts of previous work.  The Olivetti Lettera Typewriter sits in the archive in poetic silence. 

Cut and paste

I would love to have used the actual typewriter owned by dsh to make work in response to his art and poems.  If I closed my eyes I imagined the long metal, spindly arms rising to the command of a finger, printing an indelible mark onto paper. If I tried I could almost hear the roller feeding the paper through and jolting aggressively back into place on the completion of a line.  The cold blue machine is tactile and inviting.

Keeping my work and materials as simple as I could I wanted to use letters directly from the ergonomically designed keys on the typewriter? 

Using Paint App I carefully cut letters from the typewriter keys to spell out crude looking the words. This act left certain keys on the Olivetti Typewriter blank, a space where letters were once placed, letters silenced by my act of cutting away, like missing teeth losing their bite.

dsh text arrangement.

I created an arrangement of letters using the initials of the artist, poet and monk, dom sylvester houedard on my laptop using Paint App.  dsh used three letters in lower case when writing his name.  I layered, erased, allowed the letters to fade, brought them back in bold, I silenced them, a breath taken in a confusing arrangement of letters.

5 words below describe my response to the work of dsh.

cut

type                       poetry                                                                                                          

                                       silence                

 dsh

As well as being a photographer at the Rylands, I have been creating visual art for a number of years. I started IMPATV with my partner and we’ve been making videos, streaming events and creating interactive installations for about 5 years. 

During this time of lockdown, we’ve been looking at how the images we take at the Rylands can be used in different ways.  For my ‘Isolated View’ I thought I’d experiment with using some of the more graphic images from the collections and my own visual equipment. We’re lucky enough to live in the amazing Islington Mill studios just over the river in Salford, and we also have our studio here.

During my 13 or so years at  the Rylands, I’ve had the chance to see truly mind blowing things across our entire collections. One of my favourite manuscripts is Latin MS 8, ‘Beatus Super Apocalypsim’, a stunning 12th Century manuscript with a number of incredibly well presented illuminations. The manuscript has been digitised in full, and you can see it in Manchester Digital Collections here.

I chose ‘Bird Killing a Serpent’ (JRL1316338) for the tests, as it had the most negative space around the illumination, and great detail in the bird and serpent. The negative space meant there was lots of room to cut the background of the page out to generate more patterns.

There’s no audio on this video, but play it along with whatever music you feel like and see if it will fit as a visual.

To create the effects, the only piece of software that was used is Resolume Arena, which we use for live projection, video processing and video mapping. The laptop running this is then plugged into our video hardware with HDMI, and the older equipment with composite connections (the yellow plug older cameras use).

I’ve made a short video to try to explain what I’m doing to make the effects, it’s a video feedback loop that is created by a camera filming a monitor, that is showing what the camera sees. It’s the same effect as holding up 2 mirrors and seeing an endless reflection, only this is in video. The Rylands image has a digital effect added to create movement, then this effects the video loop by being played on the monitor.

You may be familiar with this type of technique from the early Dr. Who intro scenes from the 60’s, with music arranged by Delia Desrbysire, whose amazing archive we now hold in The Rylands. There’s a really great article here that talks about the titles over the years. (original feedback loop ones are the best of course)

A feedback loop can be as big as you can make it, it depends on how big your screen is. So if you have a projector, you can create some rather large results as shown in this video using a dancer to create the effects.

You can even try this at home, by simply plugging a camera into a tv and pointing the lens at the screen.

Using these old mixers all linked up together can create some really incredible results. The video here really is only the tip of the iceberg, and I’ll often find myself in the studio after long periods not knowing how I’ve got to an effect that’s being generated, and returning to the equipment after it’s been turned off can give you something  entirely different. It’s a real rabbit hole. 

I was interested in the seals of the Simon Papers letters from both a typological perspective and an informational one.

Wax seals are about identity and integrity of information; unique identifiers both authenticating the origin of a message and, if unbroken, showing that the enclosed information remained secure.

Photographing the archives of Heinrich Simon, I was struck by the amount of correspondence, the physical qualities of the letters giving them an intimate feel. Though I could not read the letters (being mid-19^th century German script) I became interested in the symbols, the designs chosen, and what that says about the person to whom the seal belongs.

Of course, the vast majority of seals within the archive were already broken at the time of photographing as the correspondence had largely been received and read, so I decided to try and reconstruct some of them, enhance the designs to make them clearer, and present them next to each other to see what kinds of variations and complexities might be revealed.

The archive of Heinrich Simon is split chronologically into eight volumes, each of which is largely correspondence, so I decided to look through the images and choose letters from each volume, as this would then give a view over time. When the archive was photographed the letters were shot as whole pages and the wax seal halves are relatively small within the image, so it is not possible to crop in that close without compromising image quality, add to that the lighting for shooting a page of manuscript is not optimal for showing a textured surface. Therefore, I tried to select shots in which the seal had not been too badly damaged or had the surface texture worn away.

I then processed the images, using Photoshop, in the following way:

1. I began by selecting the broken halves of each seal and putting them each on their own new layer, allowing me to match up the sides and rotate them so that the design would be upright.
2. I then added an empty layer to clean the image, as some of the seals have a dark discolouration in places which would obscure the detail I was trying to highlight. To minimise this, I set the empty layer blending mode to ‘Lighten’, used the colour picker to match my brush colour to the seal, then used a soft brush at 30% opacity to lighten the discoloured areas. For some seals I found it necessary to repeat this layer after the image had been further processed.
3. A Curves adjustment layer was added, with a gentle S-curve, to slightly increase contrast.
4. The next few layers are to try and subtly bring out highlights and shadows by:
   • Using the ‘Select Colour Range’ tool to select Highlights/Shadows only
   • Copying the Highlight/Shadow selection into a new layer
   • Setting the new layer opacity to 50% and the blending mode to Screen (for a highlights layer) or Multiply (for a shadow layer).
5. This should help to increase the contrast in detailed areas while leaving the rest of the image unchanged. These layers can also be duplicated to increase the effect.
6. The final step is to stamp down all the visible layers (do not include the background layer) and sharpen it using Smart Sharpen, with an amount of 200. Then reduce the layer opacity to 50% and set the blending mode to Darken, so that it mostly affects the contrasty edge areas.

This is the final post in our series of Imaging taking an ‘Isolated View’. I hope that you have enjoyed all of the different responses to the collections from the team. I have certainly enjoyed seeing everyone share their creative responses, and its been fun to see some work for the sake of creativity, rather than always being focused on directed ‘purpose’. I remember when I was studying, someone told us to ‘take a line for a walk’, see where it will get you. One of the wonderful things about creative practice is that when you set off, you don’t always know where you are going to end up.

If this has inspired you to create a response to the collections we’d love to see it, so please do share it with us via a comment or email to uml.imaging@manchester.ac.uk.

In the final part of the post I will share with you something that I have been working on. When we first started working at home, I took a walk around the Photography Collection online. I searched ‘landscape’ to see what came up and was struck by my response to viewing these images. I love being in the wide open space, and knew that I wouldn’t be out there again for quite some time. Perhaps its silly for me to write this, given the number of years I have spent studying images, but I had never realised quite how much looking at an image can make you feel like you are in the scene. Try it, spend some time looking at these images and see if it helps you relax a little, even just a tiny bit? Maybe it doesn’t and you can skip down to the other bit below, but if it does, remember it and use it.

These images by Roger Fenton, Francis Bedford, and George Washington Wilson, are selected from an album titled ‘English architecture and landscapes‘ which can be viewed in full here, or in our Reading Room once our building reopens.

I noticed a few images that contained a solitary figure, and a couple of scenes of busy streets in seaside towns, Blackpool and Llandudno (in case you’ve not seen it, also take a look at some more contemporary footage of the goats enjoying lockdown in Llandudno).

I was considering how to visualise isolation and it made me think about a technique I had employed a few years ago, which was inspired by Mishka Henner’s ‘Less Américains’.

I started to cut out figures from busy streets; making scenes suddenly void of their inhabitants.

I looked closely at solitary figures and removed them from the place that they looked to be contemplating comfortably.

I considered the landscape without these figures.

A surprise to me whilst in isolation is how much I crave empty spaces, as my daily 1 hour walk is increasingly spent dodging busier and busier paths, pavements and parks.

I’m lucky I can find relaxation in other ways, and creating work like this provides me with an escape. There is something about losing yourself in the thing you are concentrating on. Some people call it flow. Maybe you find it listening to music, gardening, cooking, drawing or reading. I find it cutting figures out of old photographs in Photoshop. However you find it, make sure you dedicate some time to it.

Who knows what the Prime Minister will announce on Monday regarding reducing lockdown restrictions. This much we know, life won’t be back to ‘normal’ for some time yet. On the other hand, here we have an unprecedented opportunity to create some new ‘normals’ and find some new flows.

This blog is the third in a series showcasing a collection of religious testimonies written from the heart of the 18^th century Evangelical Revival. Created by converts from every social class, the collection describes spiritual struggle against the backdrop of daily life.

The collection was first digitised in 2016 https://rylandscollections.com/2016/09/13/rapture-and-reason-accounts-of-evangelical-conversion-in-georgian-britain/ and transcripts were added to the site two years later https://rylandscollections.com/2018/10/29/rapture-and-reason-revisited/.

The earlier posts focussed on promoting the launch of the resource and the addition of new material. The transition to remote working provided this opportunity to revisit the testimonies and write a third blog with a different approach. This post will highlight one characteristic of the collection to illustrate both research value and interest for non-academic faith audiences.

A striking feature of the testimonies is the importance given to the bible. The collection is so full of biblical language that it is often difficult to distinguish between the scriptural voice and that of the 18^th century author. In one short passage written by Elizabeth Bristow, there are nine biblical allusions woven seamlessly into the narrative and that is typical of the collection.

What does this characteristic of the archive tell us about early Methodism and the society from which it emerged?

“I do search and Study the Scriptures, day and Night and I thank God he does Increase in me every Fruit of his Spirit” (John Butcher 1763)

It is a given that the leaders of the Revival were, as John Wesley asserted, men of “one book”, but the impact of that message on audiences is often unclear. The testimonies demonstrate the centrality of bible reading and study across all levels of the evangelical movement.

Works of Methodist scholarship often give the impression that preaching was the central foundation on which the Revival was built. The heroic image of the travelling preacher became part of the movement’s iconography. What is often missing from that picture is the part played by converts in their own salvation – the intense private study of scripture and agony of prayer and reflection over many years. The testimonies fill that gap in our understanding.

Methodists of all backgrounds pored and agonised over the scriptures. Interpreting the bible through personal study, group fellowship and attendance at preaching was not a pastime, but a matter of eternal life and death. The results can seem strange to modern readers – people were driven by the bible and its teachings to violent mood swings from despair and desperation to “joy unspeakable” and the “peace of mind that passeth all understanding”.

 “For the word of God is quick, and powerful … piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart.” (Hebrews 4:12)

The testimonies illustrate how dangerous the bible could be, as working men and women struggled with literal interpretation of complex doctrinal questions. Did God offer salvation to everyone, or are we predestined to heaven or hell? What do the scriptures mean by “perfection”? For many of the testimony writers, some of whom were barely literate, the bible was a pandora’s box.

The Wesley brothers struggled to impose discipline over a movement desperate for knowledge as a pathway to heaven, but lacking tools of critical analysis. When one reads the testimonies, it becomes clear why Methodism was prone to doctrinal division and feared by many for its extremist tendencies.

“In my infancy from the time of my having learnt to Read … the Scriptures was so much my Delight that I was seldom prevail’d upon to leave that pleasure.” (Martha Clagett, 1738)

Regardless of education and social status, the writers of the testimonies tended to have one thing in common. Most were acquainted from childhood with the bible. A copy of the King James translation could be found in most homes, and in poor households, it was often the only book. The language of the testimonies is biblical because the bible was an important part of cultural, linguistic and values formation in 18^th century England, even for the non-religious. This shared background with the rest of society gave evangelical preachers an advantage that the modern Church in our more secular age lacks.

Examination of the use of the bible and biblical language in the testimonies opens up many research avenues for theologians, historians and scholars of linguistics. It also raises areas for discussion within a modern Church that often struggles to reconnect its audience with the bible. This is just one of many areas of interest in this remarkable collection.

The Imaging team first looked at Photogrammetry back in 2016, at that time we decided to concentrate our efforts on establishing our Multispectral Imaging workflows and delivery. Just before Covid19 we began to look again at Photogrammetry, especially as the new Manchester Digital Collections has the ability to embed 3D models into the content description of a record.

Photogrammetry in its simplest form can be described as numerous images of an item or scene taken from numerous angles and combined to produce a 3D model via specialist software. For those who would like a more in depth description, here’s a link to Wikipedia. You may also be interested in taking a look at Structure from Motion.

As with all new imaging techniques the learning curve can be quite steep and difficult. The process of image capture is fairly straight forward to comprehend, although the processing of that data can be lengthy and complicated, especially when using new software and terminology.

There are a number of software packages available for photogrammetry. The main players seem to be Agisoft Metashape, Reality Capture, 3DF Zephyr, Autodesk ReCap, Meshroom and Blender.

My first couple of weeks working from home involved a great deal of reading and experimentation with each of these programs. I eventually decided to concentrate on Metashape, Reality Capture and Blender, although each have strengths and weaknesses over each other depending on the job in hand. There are a large number of online tutorials via YouTube, Blogs and Software websites, although very detailed they can often be contradictory and confusing, especially when out of date with each software update. So, I have had to carefully interpret, pick and choose certain relevant sections from a number of tutorials.

As mentioned, MDC can now display 3D models, these are embedded into the viewer from Sketchfab, a display platform in itself with a strong suite of editing tools, including lighting, material textures, annotations, audio and VR/AR options.

Sketchfab were kind enough to grant me a Pro account for the first couple of months, this provides me a platform to upload and demo the models I have been creating. Some are more successful than others.

We created a John Rylands Library Skectchfab Pro account here for our test models and environments created in the past few weeks. Please take a look and let me know what you think.

Here’s a model a John Wesley Effigy made from a horses cervical vertebrae. I had previously imaged this item and had the jpegs on a portable hard drive ready for working from home. This is created with Reality Capture and is made up of around 300 images.

I think I had taken this model as far as I could, without the original Raw image data to reprocess as higher quality images. I was very curious to see how this model would look when printed. Luckily, I have a very talented friend, Sam Cornwell, who offered to help me out .

Sam kindly printed out the Wesley model in red UV cured resin. The size of the first model came as a bit of a surprise. It was tiny. The reprint was much larger. I was really pleased at the detail and that all the holes and features were correct. Clearly, some understanding of measurement and scaling is needed on my part, this can be achieved during image capture and then imported into the photogrammetry software.

Understanding that we would be asked to work from home, I had quickly made several hundred images of the Historic Reading Room, shooting from the ground and upper levels with a Canon DSLR. I wish I’d taken several hundred more, as I now realise that quality and quantity are very important in acquiring a decent model. Although this 3D interpretation has been well received, it is something we will definitely have to revisit when we return. This is processed with Agisoft Metashape using 700 images.

Left Mouse button to rotate. Right Mouse button to pan. Mouse wheel to zoom in and out.

With limited Special Collection data to work with from home, I was pleased to see the offer of a group video call from Thomas Flynn, demonstrating the conversion of 2D images into a 3D space. The possibilities and interpretations are boundless especially with so many rich resources available online.

Here I’ve used one image of a Daguerreotype of Catherine Hannah Dunkerley. A daguerreotype can be a very difficult item to digitise due to its reflected mirror like surface, only visible from a certain angle. By using the 2D to 3D technique described by Thomas I was able to mimic the materiality of the daguerreotype. Thomas will be making some worklflow videos to show the techniques in the near future.

This is a digital “interpretation” of the actual effect of viewing a daguerreotype. I don’t mind saying I was pretty pleased with the result using Blender and Sketchfab 3D settings Editor.

You can see other examples of using a 2D image in a 3D environment on our Sketchfab account.

This 360 Panoramic image is not photogrammetry but uses a repurposed image via Blender and Sketchfab. Thanks to Louis from Sketchfab for the template of a sphere, to which a Jpeg has been mapped onto the interior surface. If anyone has a VR/AR headset at home I’d be interested in how it looks. Please let me know.

I have probably raised more questions for myself than I’ve answered. There are still a number of challenges ahead. Some of the main areas to focus on are colour accuracy, detail, scale and the challenge of imaging very fragile collection items. I also have to note that quality as much as quantity of images is very important and to remind myself that it takes time for the software to create these models, sometimes many hours. In the digital age this can be so frustrating as we are so used to that instant result.

So where do we go next? I have only dabbled in photogrammetry for the past few weeks, and there is obviously a long way to go before we have adequately met some of the challenges that this new technique has offered us.

We are aware that other departments in the University use photogrammetry and have access to a variety of structured light scanners. It will be interesting to compare the various techniques and see how they can be combined for increased output, detail and accuracy. It will also be interesting to see how the content we create can be used and reinterpreted by others.

We have also seen over the past few weeks the need for quality accessible digitised content, with many Heritage Institutions offering their data freely as open source material. I am sure that the way we work and what we can offer will change greatly over the next few months

In the meantime here a couple of links to some of the most creative uses of photogrammetry that I’ve seen so far. There are some very clever people out there.

Thomas Flynn, Cultural Heritage Lead at Sketchfab. Thank you for your help.

Erik Lernestål at the National Historic Museums of Sweden has created some truly amazing 3D content.

I also have to mention this interactive viewer that Erik worked on with the Royal Armory of Stockholm. A 55” 4k touch screen on which you can interact with high-resolution 3D models of selected pieces of armor from the collection.

Check out this Live demo.

As enjoyable as working with these headline collections are, a different level of satisfaction comes from collection discovery – a box on a dusty shelf with unrealised potential and archival X factor. Such a collection is the Buffalo Bill scrapbook, which I came across by chance in 2012, when a colleague, aware of my interest in the American West, mentioned in passing that the Rylands had some papers relating to the impresario William Cody (1846-1917).

William Cody, more popularly known as “Buffalo Bill” is not a name that one would normally associate with the John Rylands Library. My interest was sparked, especially as the collection was undocumented and its existence largely unknown, even to library staff.

It was several weeks before I found time to track the collection down. At first sight, the scrapbook had little to recommend it. But inside its tatty cover lay a wealth of rich visual material – unique photographs of the groundbreaking British tours of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, rare magazines, illustrated calendars and news cuttings. It soon became apparent that the scope and extent of this collection was unrivalled in the UK and possibly anywhere outside of North America.

Since 2012, the collection has become recognised as an important scholarly resource for many subject areas from American Studies to anthropology and the rise of mass entertainment. It has also aroused a lot of public interest. Most people have heard of Buffalo Bill and since its discovery and the digitisation of a selection of the contents, the scrapbook has became a popular feature of public tours and close-ups.

It is a privilege to play a part in revealing and promoting a collection that has lain undisturbed for over a hundred years. It represented the perfect opportunity to combine personal interest with professional insight. My area of curatorial responsibility might be Christian religious archives, but one of the delights of working at the Rylands is that there is always the opportunity and encouragement to open a box on another shelf and peek inside – that buzz of anticipation is one of the reasons why I became an archivist. The John Rylands Library with its rich and eclectic collections is the perfect place for finding the unusual and the unexpected.

New research has revealed that four Dead Sea Scroll manuscript fragments housed at The University of Manchester’s John Rylands Library, which were previously thought to be blank, do in fact contain text.

The discovery means that The University of Manchester is the only institution in the UK to possess authenticated textual fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

The study was undertaken as part of a Leverhulme-funded study held at King’s College London, a collaboration between Professor Joan Taylor (King’s College London), Professor Marcello Fidanzio (Faculty of Theology of Lugano) and Dr Dennis Mizzi (University of Malta), the imaging was carried out by The John Rylands Library Imaging team.

Unlike the recent cases of forgeries assumed to be Dead Sea Scrolls fragments, all of these small pieces were unearthed in the official excavations of the Qumran caves, and were never passed through the antiquities market.

In the 1950s, the fragments were gifted by the Jordanian government to Ronald Reed, leather expert at the University of Leeds, so he could study their physical and chemical composition. It was assumed that the pieces were ideal for scientific tests, as they were blank and relatively worthless. These were studied and published by Reed and his student John Poole, and then stored safely away.

In 1997 the Reed Collection was donated to The University of Manchester through the initiative of Rylands Professor of Biblical Criticism and Exegesis, George Brooke. These fragments have been stored in Reed’s own labelled boxes in The John Rylands Library, and have been relatively untouched since then.

When examining the fragments for the new study, Professor Taylor thought it possible that one of them did actually contain a letter, and therefore decided to photograph all of the existing fragments over 1 cm that appear blank to the naked eye, using multispectral imaging.

51 fragments were imaged front and back. Six were identified for further detailed investigation – of these, it was established that four have readable Hebrew/Aramaic text written in carbon-based ink. The study has also revealed ruled lines and small vestiges of letters on other fragments.

The most substantial fragment has the remains of four lines of text with 15-16 letters, most of which are only partially preserved, but the word Shabbat (Sabbath) can be clearly read. This text (Ryl4Q22) may be related to the biblical book of Ezekiel (46:1-3). One piece with text is the edge of a parchment scroll section, with sewn thread, and the first letters of two lines of text may be seen to the left of this binding.

“Looking at one of the fragments with a magnifying glass, I thought I saw a small, faded letter – a lamed, the Hebrew letter ‘L’,” said Professor Taylor. “Frankly, since all these fragments were supposed to be blank and had even been cut into for leather studies, I also thought I might be imagining things. But then it seemed maybe other fragments could have very faded letters too.”

“With new techniques for revealing ancient texts now available, I felt we had to know if these letters could be exposed.  There are only a few on each fragment, but they are like missing pieces of a jigsaw puzzle you find under a sofa.”

The research team is currently undertaking further investigations of these fragments in consultation with The John Rylands Library and Professor Brooke, as part of a larger project studying the various Qumran artefacts at the John Rylands Library. The results will be published in a forthcoming report.

Dr Sonia Favi is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Fellow who is carrying out postdoctoral research at the John Rylands Library on the Japanese Collection. In this blog post she introduces some of the maps, prints and guidebooks available to travellers in Tokugawa Japan…

The current travel restrictions under which we are all living as a result of the coronavirus pandemic would not have been wholly unfamiliar to residents of Tokugawa Japan.

The Tokugawa family, who controlled Japan’s government from 1603 until 1868, outlawed travel abroad and established checkpoints to limit movement within the country, as a way to preserve peace (and its own power): non-essential travel was banned. 

Travel permits were issued for work. Goods still needed to be shipped, services to be provided. Local lords (daimyō) from all over Japan were required to take periodical residence, with their retinue of warriors (samurai) and family, in Edo (now Tōkyō), the Capital of the Tokugawa. Travel was also permitted for health and religious reasons, allowing visits to the great temples, shrines and sacred mountains of Japan. 

It is hard, however, to contain the human inclination to explore. And so it happened that “sickly” widows presented permits to travel to hot springs conveniently far from home. And that groups of pilgrims planned their routes so as to touch as many sightseeing spots, shops and restaurants as possible along the road. Not everyone would get away with it, but, in a growing climate of political stability, this loophole left space for the development of a tourist industry. 

Just as today people across the world are turning to books, television, and the internet to fulfil their need to explore, for those in Tokugawa Japan who still couldn’t leave home, literature and art offered a way to explore with the mind. Publishing houses – encouraged by innovations in printing techniques and by a growing literacy – produced maps, prints, fictional works, guides and encyclopaedias, addressed to consumers of all social standing. Some works became true best-sellers, as was the case for the picaresque novel Tōkaidōchū Hizakurige (1802), where two simple-minded protagonists travelled (with many detours) to the temples of Kyoto, along the Tōkaidō. 

The Tōkaidō, a 514-km-long highway that connected Edo to Kyoto, was, by far, the busiest and most represented travel route of the time. Today we can embark on a journey on it from the comfort of our own homes, using the University of Manchester’s digital collections to travel in the same virtual landscapes that stretched the imagination of Tokugawa readers. 

Leaving Edo

The starting point of the Tōkaidō was Nihonbashi, the first of fifty-three post stations along the road. 

This is how it appeared in the popular illustrated encyclopaedia (setsuyō-shū) Edo daisetsuyō kaidaigura (John Rylands Japanese Collection, Japanese 2). The work (which had at least three successful editions since 1704 – this is a 1864 impression of a 1863 edition) is an overview of the geography and history of “Great Japan”. In its first section, it collects a number of well-known landscapes.

Nihonbashi was right at the centre of Edo, a metropolis of one million people. At most times of day it would be bustling with traffic, with working men and women and samurai crossing the bridge that connected the two sides of the Nihonbashi river. Those who had a moment to spare could enjoy the view of Mount Fuji from the bridge. With no skyscrapers, the mountain was clearly visible, on clear days, from the city.

Fuji dominates another illustration from the first section of the work. The highest mountain of Japan would loom over travellers from afar for most of the first stage of their journey on the Tōkaidō. 

By the end of the Tokugawa period, Fuji was a cultural icon, at the centre of a thriving travel industry. Its Sengen Shrine was home to an annual religious festival that attracted many visitors. Fuji confraternities (fujikō), based in Edo, organized pilgrimages to the mountain. 

People who ventured there could bring back souvenirs. One of them was the map Fujisan shinkei zenzu (Japanese 70), printed and distributed by the Sengen Shrine since 1848.

The map is an aerial representation (a style for which the painter, Utagawa Sadahide, was famous, so much that he was known as sora tobu eshi, “the flying painter”). It depicts the two divine founders of the Fuji cult at the centre of the crater, and pilgrims on the slopes. It could be cut and assembled as a 3D reproduction of the mountain. It was a keepsake of the journey, or a gift for those who couldn’t afford it: a commodified way to experience the sacredness of Fuji at home.

The “famous places” of the Tōkaidō

Fuji was not the only attraction on the Tōkaidō. To find others, one could rely on Tōkaidō meisho zue (Japanese 43). 

Meisho zue were a popular form of large format, multi-volume guides. They presented meisho (famous places) from selected areas, through pictures, descriptions, historical or legendary narrations, and poetry. 

Tōkaidō meisho zue, published in Edo, Kyoto, and Osaka in 1797, collected well-known pilgrimage sites, historical and literary landmarks on the Tōkaidō. One example is Hamana no Hashi (Hamana bridge), a location near current Shizuoka, recurrent in Japanese classical poetry. 

The actual bridge, built in 861, had been destroyed by an earthquake in the fifteenth century, and in the Tokugawa period the river was crossed by boat. Poetry lovers, however, wouldn’t be let down by the meisho zue: the “virtual” journey, in this case, made up for a lost reality.   

Tōkaidō meisho zue also collected “new” meisho – commercial and tourist sites on the rise. This was the case, for example, of Mishima. Its well-known shrine was disregarded in the guide in lieu of a different sort of attraction: its post station, renowned for prostitutes.

A “must see” landmark on the Tōkaidō, near Kyoto, was Mount Hiei, the site of the well-known and prestigious Enryakuji Buddhist complex (founded in 788). In Tōkaidō meisho zue, it appeared in a two-page illustration. A single-page illustration also followed, showing the view from the top of the mountain.

Unrealistically (given the geographical distance), Mount Fuji is included in the view. The choice is interesting: was this a reminder of the universal rule of the Tokugawa, symbolized by Edo and, in association, Fuji? Or was this, on the contrary, a way to remark on the cultural and religious challenge posed by Hiei (Kyoto) to Fuji (Edo)? Akisato Ritō, the editor of the work, was a Kyoto-born poet: was he, maybe, claiming Kyoto as the “true” Capital of Japan?

The streets of the Old Capital

Kyoto, with its elegant palaces and temples, was a very popular tourist destination.

It was one of the oldest cities of Japan, founded in 794 as the seat of the Imperial Power, with a rectilinear grid of streets evoking the grandeur of Chinese capitals. 

In the Tokugawa period, it was still the residence of the Emperor, and, formally, the Capital. It would officially lose this status only in 1868, when the Emperor moved to Edo (hence formally named Tōkyō, “Eastern Capital”). It had, however, already lost its centrality as political powerhouse. The Emperor and his Court were just a symbol – albeit a powerful one, which by the mid-nineteenth century would inspire rebellion against the Tokugawa.

With the allure of its aristocratic past, Kyoto remained a tenacious cultural competitor to Edo. 

This is why it was also a popular subject for city maps. Many, like the one above (Shinzō saiken kyō ezu daizen, Japanese 94, 1834), were printed in pocket format. They were meant to be folded and brought around as a practical guide to the city. They were also, however, pieces of art, a mirror to the beauty and order of the urban space of the Old Capital. They were, again, a way to roam and admire its streets even from the comfort of one’s home. 

Find out more: 

• Wigen, Karen; Sugimoto, Fumiko; Karacas, Cary (2016) (eds.). Cartographic Japan. A History in Maps. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Nenzi, Laura (2008). Excursions in identity: travel and the intersection of place, gender, and status in Edo Japan. Hawaii, University of Hawaii Press.
• Berry, Mary E. (2006). Japan in print. Information and Nation in the Early Modern Period. Berkeley: University of California Press.

During the lock down, I have been working from home on digital and published collections of 18th century Methodist and Anglican correspondence as part of the effort to make them more widely available. A common theme running through the material is death – both as a routine event and as an imminent prospect.

It has been fascinating to read how death (and life) was viewed 250 years ago against the backdrop of a modern global pandemic. As one might expect, the difference between attitudes exhibited during those two time periods is striking.

“In the midst of life, we are in death” (Anglican Book of Common Prayer)

Death was part of everyday existence during the period referred to by historians as the “long Eighteenth Century” (1688-1832). Average life expectancy during the 1750s was 36 and nearly two-thirds of all children died before the age of 5. It was a very different society from today, where longevity in developed countries is viewed as a human right and death prior to old age is rare.

The probability of life suddenly coming to an end, even for the very young, concentrated the 18th century mind. The words “death” and “dying” permeate personal papers and published writings to a degree that surprise the modern reader. Before the COVID epidemic, death was not a subject that typically featured in our everyday conversation. The word itself has become unfashionable and replaced by sanitised terminology.

“I can remember many things, particularly the death of a brother which was twelve months old when he died. I was then four years of age. I was very inquisitive to know where he would go and what must become of him” (Mary Ramsay, 1740)

Death in the 18th century was not an embarrassing subject, but was discussed openly. People most frequently died in the home, cared for by the family and surrounded by the routines of everyday life. Friends, relatives and neighbours gathered around deathbeds.

The act of saying goodbye remains an important part of life’s final act. One of the cruellest aspects of the current pandemic has been the complete and enforced isolation of the dying person from loved ones. This breaks one of society’s longest traditions shared by cultures around the world.

“He spoke of death with pleasure as letting him into a better world; & bringing him into the arms of his Saviour.” (William Grimshaw 1763)

Evangelical Christians often expressed a desire for death as a portal to paradise. The reality of an event that could happen at any time and was no respecter of wealth or virtue defined the values and literature of early Methodism. Death is a favourite theme of the hymns that are among the greatest legacies of the Evangelical Revival. That mindset too has changed – Christians today would probably view a wish for death as a mark of depression rather than faith. The hymns that are written for the contemporary Church reflect that shift.

Acceptance of death was not the same as lack of feeling. The Methodist leader Charles Wesley and his wife Sally lost 5 of their 8 children before the age of 4. Forced to question his own faith in God, Charles regularly drew on the experience to comfort other grieving parents.

“Jesus wept to see his creatures weeping: therefore he does not disapprove your feeling your loss … My partner sympathises with yours. We lost our son by the smallpox” (Charles Wesley to Thomas Marriott, 1785)

Personal papers like the letters of Charles Wesley do not shy away from death in any of its aspects, but also exhibit the same uncompromising approach towards life. Another word that frequently appears is “birth” – the creation and celebration of life in both the physical and spiritual sense. Death gave meaning to life and how it should be lived.

Death is a particular theme of the personal papers of early Methodists, but was also a part of the general background of Georgian society. For most people, whether conventionally religious or not, dying was the gateway to a new existence – whether that was lived in heaven or hell depended on choices made in life. Atheism in its purest form was rare and that too represents a fundamental difference with today.

In the 18th century, the philosophical and spiritual implications of death formed part of everyday discourse – people tried to understand what could not be avoided. In 2020, we either push death into a corner of the mind or we make war upon it with all the scientific and economic resources at our disposal. This is a seismic shift in how we view existence itself and one that impacts on every aspect of living – and dying.

Leah Watson writes:

Hello! I’m Leah Watson, a postgraduate student at the University of Manchester studying MA History. I have recently completed a placement at the John Rylands Library, where I was assigned the tasks of creating a box-list catalogue of the papers of Alison Brackenbury as well as a blog post about the catalogue and my experience of completing the placement with my colleague, Paige Johnston.

Background:
Alison Brackenbury was born in Gainsborough, Lincolnshire in 1953 and is a descendant of generations of skilled, prize-winning shepherds. Throughout her poetry career, she has published nine collections with Carcanet, and has won the Eric Gregory Award and a Cholmondeley Award. Her collection Skies (2016) was chosen by The Observer as one of its Poetry Books of the Year. Alison has also published Aunt Margret’s Pudding (2018) with HappenStance Publications.

Image: Fred Brackenbury, Alison’s grandfather, feeding the lambs. Image reproduced courtesy of Alison Brakenbury.

Inspiration:
Whilst cataloguing her work, I discovered she has many inspirations including, but not limited to: time, history, horses, nature, and, of course, her family.
The Alison Brackenbury Papers were donated to the Library in 2018 and include an overview of her work from University in the 1970s to the present day. However, as I was cataloguing her work, one collection of poems struck me the most: Aunt Margaret’s Pudding.

Aunt Margaret’s Pudding was inspired by her grandmother, Dorothy Elizabeth Barnes and her recipe book. She was a cook, who was born on 28th November 1894. The recipe book contained 13 pudding and 33 cake recipes, including: Treacle Sponge Pudding, Lemon Pudding, and Flamberries Pudding. Clearly, she had an eye for the sweet stuff! But what struck me most was how Alison reinvent her grandmothers’ recipes through poems.

Image: Dorothy Elizabeth Barnes, Alison’s Grandmother before her marriage. Image reproduced courtesy of Alison Brakenbury.

For example, her grandmother’s recipe for Aunt Margaret’s Pudding, includes:
½ lb flour, 3 oz lard or butter, ¼ lb sugar, 1 teaspoon B.P., mix with one egg and a little milk. Put a layer of jam at bottom of basin Steam 1½ hrs.

Alison recreates it here:

Start
Page one: Aunt Margaret’s Pudding.
Take half a pound of flour,
three ounces lard (or butter), egg,
milk, sugar, baking powder.
Spread jam in basin, summer gleam.
Poke fire! For ninety minutes, steam.

Dot took for granted custard seas,
in which all puddings swam –
yellow as straw, farmworkers’ food.
In frost, the men tramped home.
Moon glittered. No one knew how lard
would line and leave their arteries hard.

When I came home and you worked late,
our workshop gloomed with cold,
I bought flour from the corner shop
sacked cupboards for old bowls.
Softly the mixture dropped. I too
spooned Margaret’s hot jam sponge for you.

This collection of poems illuminates Alison’s strong grandmother-granddaughter relationship as well as her creativity in adapting and presenting her grandmother’s recipes in an artistic way as this also doubles as a recipe book, where she details the steps, equipment and methods needed to make each delight. This is what inspired me the most as the collection presents poetry in an exciting, heart-warming, relatable way, whilst paying tribute to her grandmother’s past and showcasing the creativity of both women.

This placement was an exciting opportunity as it allowed me to experience working with others in such a world-leading centre of learning. I have not only gained creative skills, but also organisational and self-managerial skills as this placement was mostly independent work. I thoroughly enjoyed my time at the John Rylands Library, and would recommend this placement to a wide range of students, especially history students like myself, as you gain a rich understanding of how archival catalogues work which will benefit future research.