̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - British Library

How will history tell our stories?

lkm37 — Mon, 24 Mar 2025 09:17:37 +0000

Historian Helen McCarthy helps us make sense of our recent past. She infuses her subjects – from working mothers to modern retirees – with urgency and personality.

̽��ֱ��graduate student rewriting Deaf histories and disability histories

cg605 — Fri, 05 Jan 2024 12:00:50 +0000

When Kirstie Stage was diagnosed with hearing loss, she realised that the experiences of Deaf and disabled people were missing from the history books. Kirstie is determined to bring these narratives to the fore.

Earliest-known children’s adaptation of Japanese literary classic discovered in British Library

sjr81 — Wed, 14 Jun 2017 09:38:47 +0000

Dr Laura Moretti, from the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at Cambridge, came across an unknown children’s picture-book, dating from 1766, under the title of Ise fūryū: Utagaruta no hajimari ( ̽��ֱ��Fashionable Ise: ̽��ֱ��Origins of Utagaruta) while on a study trip with her students.

̽��ֱ��British Library copy, part of the collection belonging to Sir Ernest Satow, a 19th century British scholar and diplomat, is a picture-book adaptation of Ise Monogatari. Translated into English as ̽��ֱ��Tales of Ise, it is one of the most important works in Japanese literature and was originally composed probably in the late 9th century following the protagonist, Ariwara no Narihira, through his many romances, friendships and travels.

̽��ֱ��Tales of Ise has since been adapted and reinterpreted continually down the centuries as part of the canon of Japanese literature.

“If we were to hazard a comparison, ̽��ֱ��Tales of Ise could be seen as the equivalent of the works of Shakespeare in terms of canonical status in Japan but I had never heard of or seen a children’s adaptation before – no-one knew of this book,” said Moretti. “This is a missing piece of the jigsaw. No one ever knew if it had been rewritten for children – but now we know. And it was sitting in the British Library all along.”

Dr Moretti’s new book, Recasting the Past (Brill, 2016), presents a full-colour reproduction of the 18th century edition, alongside a transcription in modern Japanese, an English translation, and textual analysis. ̽��ֱ��publication of the 1766 adaptation of the Tales of Ise fills a gap in scholars’ understanding of the work’s history. Although much scholarship has taken place on the reception of Tales of Ise and its target audiences in different epochs, no one has previously explored the age of its readership.

̽��ֱ��1766 introduction by the publisher shows that the book was intended to be read by children and there are various clues to support this view. ̽��ֱ��main character Narihira first appears as a young boy at school, a portrayal which encourages young people to identify with him. ̽��ֱ��whole text is also written using mainly the phonetic syllabary which could be understood by readers with only two years of schooling. ̽��ֱ��story was also abbreviated to include only 13 of the original 125 episodes – making it easily accessible to a broad readership and was useful for introducing those with basic literacy to Japan’s cultural heritage. ̽��ֱ��book would have educated children in the narrative of ̽��ֱ��Tales of Ise as well as the aesthetic quality of the poetry.

Moretti, though, counters the notion that only children would have read Utagaruta no hajimari, and argues that the text could also work as a substitute of the ̽��ֱ��Tales of Ise for those adults with limited linguistic and cultural literacy.

Now, after several years of negotiating the necessary permissions to use the two complete extant copies (one held at the National Institute of Japanese Literature and the other at the Gotoh Museum, both in Tokyo; alas the British Library copy has only one volume of three) and to finish the transcription, translation and textual analysis, Utagaruta is available again for readers to enjoy – more than 250 years after it was first printed.

While graphic novels and comic books such as manga remain hugely popular in Japan and across the world today, instances of books where images and text are interdependent abound in pre-modern and early-modern Japanese literature. In this specific case, Moretti shows that the primary function of images was to complement the prose by filling in the gaps left by the narrative. Images set the scene for the story and helped to characterize the protagonists by depicting their dress and physical appearance.

Moretti believes that studying this children’s adaptation can give a contribution to the study of children’s literature in general, discovering aspects that might not be apparent in other cultures.

“Utagaruta no hajimari, for example, is trying to draw children into the world of the adult, rather than shield them from it by introducing children to sex and appropriate romantic behaviour,” she said.

“A vast number of early-modern Japanese picture-books that adapt canonical literature awaits to be studied. This research is the first step in the foundation of this field of study. If appropriately developed, it has the potential to shed light onto new sides of children’s literature as well as to advance in the understanding of how early-modern Japanese graphic prose functioned.”

A chance discovery in the British Library has led to the discovery and reproduction of the earliest-known children’s adaptation of one of Japan’s greatest works of literature.

This is a missing piece of the jigsaw. And it was sitting in the British Library all along.

Laura Moretti

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

Yes

Buildings for books: the complete story of the library

sj387 — Wed, 13 Nov 2013 14:08:18 +0000

In 1975 archaeologists investigating the palace of the ancient city of Elba in Syria uncovered a room containing fragments of some 15,000 inscribed tablets. ̽��ֱ��shelves that once held them had collapsed but, scattered on the ground, the tablets remained roughly in the order in which they had been placed some 4,000 years ago. In 2012 a tiny library opened across the world in Jiaojiehe, north of Beijing. Its Chinese architect designed this exquisite building with an area where visitors can sit by the fire and sip tea, read and dream.

̽��ֱ��Library: A World History (Thames & Hudson) by Dr James Campbell, an architectural historian in the Department of Architecture at Cambridge ̽��ֱ��, is the scholarly and highly readable story of what happened between the making of the earliest libraries and the design of their modern counterparts. It is a journey that takes the reader through some of the grandest libraries in the world which in their various ways reflect mankind’s preoccupation with learning as represented by books in all their guises.

Campbell’s previous book Brick: A World History is an account of what mankind has constructed by employing the simplest of materials: baked mud. In writing ̽��ֱ��Library, he reveals not just his passion for books and buildings but also his grasp of the human endeavours that connect the two. Most importantly for us, he is motivated by a desire to share his enthusiasm and expertise. Without compromising on accuracy in his discussion of each of the libraries he visits, he provides a gripping narrative.

We asked Dr Campbell five questions about his book and the research that went into it.

A world history of the library is an ambitious project. How did it all start?

As a student I wrote a dissertation about the Radcliffe Camera in Oxford, a building which is in some ways a mausoleum for its benefactor, the physician Sir John Radcliffe. As I embarked on my research, I looked for a book that told the whole story of the architecture of libraries and found that there really wasn’t one. I waited 20 years for someone to write the kind of book I wanted to read – and when no-one did, I decided that I’d write one myself.

I’ve been interested in architecture since I was about eight. It was Lego, I’m afraid: I built a cathedral and that was it. When I was applying to Cambridge to study architecture, I knew that the university was keen that students got a sense of the history of buildings. So I spent a lot of time in the reference section of my local library in Harrogate – one of ten Yorkshire libraries funded by the philanthropist Andrew Carnegie at the turn of the 19th century – researching the architecture of a spa town. ̽��ֱ��experience opened my eyes to where a library and its contents could take you.

As an undergraduate at Cambridge I naturally spent a lot of time in libraries – the wonderful Wren Library at Trinity College, where I was a student, the ̽��ֱ�� Library which I love, and the Old Squire Law Library (now the Library of Gonville and Caius), where I spent a lot of time revising for exams. Libraries have a feel of their own, a smell of their own. It’s something you notice right away when you walk into the UL, the scent of thousands of dusty books – paper, leather, glue – with the inevitable and inimitable whiff of age and decay.

So libraries combine two of my interests: buildings and books. In ̽��ֱ��Library I’ve concentrated on a particular kind of library - some of the world’s finest examples of the buildings designed to house books – and I’ve explored the topic chronologically. Of course, a history of libraries is much more than a compendium of buildings: it’s also a story about the history of art, science, technology, culture, belief and education – and how all these strands mesh together.

How does the history of the library reflect the history of the book – and vice versa?

Books and the buildings made for them are closely interconnected - with advances in technology shaping both the form that books take and the ways in which they are protected, stored and made available to readers. Books as we know them have their origins in clay tablets which were inscribed with accounts. Next came the use of papyrus and parchment, followed by the development of paper made from textiles, the invention of block printing in the East and mechanical printing press in the West. Jumping almost six centuries, we see the emergence of digital technologies that transformed the storing the storage of, and access to, knowledge over the last ten years.

When the first books were produced by hand, there were no libraries. Books were stored in trunks and boxes: there’s a lovely example of an oak chest used to contain books at Merton College, Oxford. In early libraries, books were stacked on top of each other and read on lecterns. Because they were so precious they were chained to the fixtures that held them in order to prevent theft: you can see marvellous examples of chained libraries at Hereford Cathedral, Wells Cathedral and Trinity Hall, Cambridge.

̽��ֱ��library at Queens' College, Cambridge, where I am a Fellow, shows evidence of how libraries were adapted over time and to meet changing needs. ̽��ֱ��lecterns made to hold a small number of books were adapted in the later 17th century to make tall bookcases to accommodate the growing number of books in the college collection. ̽��ֱ��stall system of dividing libraries into alcoves where readers could sit started in the colleges of Oxford and Cambridge and was copied all over the country in public and private libraries. It allowed for a large number of books to be shelved and accessed, with each alcove or bay being a library within a library.

Throughout history libraries have often lagged behind advances in technology. ̽��ֱ��new British Library was 40 years in the making. By the time it was complete, the card system it had been designed to incorporate had been superseded by digital technologies to do the same job using a fraction of the space.

What was (and is) the purpose of libraries?

One of the primary functions of libraries was, and still is, to protect books from the physical effects of damp, heat and sunlight and from incursions by rodents and insects. Mice love to make nests in paper in the gaps behind books and all kinds of insects will feast on paper, starch, glue and leather. They can cause huge damage. ̽��ֱ��staff of the 18th-century libraries of Coimbra and Mafra in Portugal allow colonies of tiny bats to roost behind the bookcases in winter and outside in summer. At night the bats emerge and scoop up any insects. In the morning, the librarians have to sweep up the bat droppings.

Libraries are all about capturing, storing and cataloguing knowledge. But you only have to glimpse the fabulous photographs that Will Pryce took for the book to understand that libraries are about are about much more than simply housing books. They are about power and status: they are an outward demonstration of learning and accomplishment. Some of the most spectacular libraries – particularly the great Baroque and Rococo examples found in Europe – are theatrical and palatial in their celebration of the arts and sciences. Although many of the great libraries have an impressive sense of space, they weren't designed as places for reading books. Readers would take the books and read them somewhere else: the space is a measure of the importance accorded to the contents.

̽��ֱ��medieval libraries of the monasteries – which were the great centres of learning in the West - were an attempt to capture all the knowledge in the world in one building. Some of the world’s most stunning historic libraries held what seem to us today very small numbers of books. In 1338 the Sorbonne Library in Paris had 338 books available for consultation and 1,728 books on its register, 300 of which were marked as lost.

Can you tell us about your partnership with the photographer, Will Pryce?

̽��ֱ��Library wouldn’t be the book it is without Will Pryce’s skills as an outstanding photographer. Will studied architecture at Cambridge, a few years after me, but later decided to become a photographer and went back to college to study photojournalism. His background in and understanding of architecture is immensely important as it means he is able to take images that give a true sense of the building and, of course, he is a superlative photographer. This book is not just a history of libraries; it is a photographic project as well.

You can’t experience a building without physically being there, so Will and I travelled together to all the 82 libraries that feature in the book. When we reached our destination we would discuss the key issues. Will would then pick the shots that he felt best portrayed the library while reflecting what I would be writing. ̽��ֱ��clarity of the pictures is due to the time it takes to set each shot up. Will uses a large format digital camera which produces stunning pictures of extraordinary resolution. It can take up to an hour to capture a single view.

For Will, one of the greatest challenges was light and getting a true representation of the colours. Many of the great libraries we visited for the book are now lit by electric light which turns colours yellow, green or blue so our first task was to persuade the librarians to switch off the lights and let the natural light flood in. Many of the librarians were amazed at how well their libraries were designed in terms of making the most of the natural light.

Which of the libraries that you visited would you most like to revisit?

It would make most sense to say the Tripitaka Koreana at the Haeinsa Temple in South Korea. One of the biggest hurdles that Will and I faced was gaining permission to visit the libraries we wanted to cover in the book. ̽��ֱ��most one that proved most inaccessible was the Tripitaka Koreana, a collection of 13th century artefacts described by UNESCO as the most important and complete corpus of Buddhist doctrinal manuscripts in the world. It took three years, and the help of personal contacts, for an agreement about our visit. When we got there – a five and a half hours drive from Seoul – we were allowed to stand at the open door but not allowed to set foot inside. Finally, we were permitted to take just one picture and then, as the day wore on, several others. It was a huge privilege to walk between the great timber shelves which house 81,258 wooden printing blocks, each one of them boiled in salt water, left to dry out for three years and then painstakingly carved by hand.

However, the library I would most like to go back to is Admont Abbey Library in Austria. When Will and I went to see it, there was four feet of snow on the ground outside. It was so cold in the library that we wore outdoor winter clothing to keep warm. Designed by the architect Josef Hueber and constructed between 1764 and 1774, it is one of the world's longest monastic libraries, 13 metres wide and 72 metres long. ̽��ֱ��predominant colours are white and gold; when it was built, the abbey's existing books were rebound in white pigskin at enormous expense to match the shelves. ̽��ֱ��object of monastic study was to reach wisdom and the focus of the sumptuous decorative scheme, commissioned by the abbots to embody the church's teachings, is the figure of Divine Wisdom. ̽��ֱ��domed ceiling is lavishly pained with classical and religious scenes, the floor is tiled in a dazzling black-and-white three-dimensional pattern, and staircases to the balconied galleries are concealed behind secret doors set into the bookshelves. Walking into this ethereal space is like entering a world of thoughts.

Dr James Campbell is a Senior ̽��ֱ�� Lecturer in the Department of Architecture and a Fellow of Queens' College, Cambridge. ̽��ֱ��Library: A World History by James Campbell with photographs by Will Pryce is published by Thames and Hudson.

For more information about this story contact Alexandra Buxton, Office of Communications, ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge amb206@admin.cam.ac.uk 01223 761673

Inset images from top: Radcliffe Camera (Oxford), Library of the Chapter of Noyon Cathedral (France), Trinity Hall Library (Cambridge), Queens College Library (Cambridge), Mafra Library (Portugal), Altenburg Abbey (Austria), Tripitaka Koreana (Korea), Admont Abbey Library (Austria). Copyright Will Pryce.

For 20 years architectural historian Dr James Campbell waited for someone to write a definitive book about libraries. When he decided to write one himself, his research took him to 82 libraries in 21 countries. ̽��ֱ��Library: A World History is much overdue but well worth waiting for.

A history of libraries is much more than a compendium of buildings: it’s also a story about the history of art, science, technology, culture, belief and education – and how all these strands mesh together

Dr James Campbell

Will Pryce

Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, Paris

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Yes

Click to save the nation’s digital memory

sjr81 — Fri, 05 Apr 2013 14:53:47 +0000

Regulations coming into force on April 6 will enable six major libraries to collect, preserve and provide long term access to the increasing proportion of the nation’s cultural and intellectual output that appears in digital form – including blogs, e-books and the entire UK web domain.

From this point forward, the British Library, Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library, the National Library of Scotland, the National Library of Wales, the Bodleian Libraries, and Trinity College Library in Dublin will have the right to receive a copy of every UK electronic publication, on the same basis as they have received print publications such as books, magazines and newspapers for several centuries.

̽��ֱ��regulations, known as legal deposit, will ensure that ephemeral materials like websites can be collected, preserved forever and made available to future generations of researchers, providing the fullest possible record of life and society in the UK in the 21st century for people 50, 100, even 200 or more years in the future.

Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Librarian Anne Jarvis said: “I greatly welcome this landmark legislation as it means that Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library can collect and preserve the UK's digital publishing output, particularly that which will support current and future research.”

Culture Minister Ed Vaizey MP said: “Legal deposit arrangements remain vitally important. Preserving and maintaining a record of everything that has been published provides a priceless resource for the researchers of today and the future.

“So it’s right that these long-standing arrangements have now been brought up to date for the 21st century, covering the UK’s digital publications for the first time. ̽��ֱ��Joint Committee on Legal Deposit has worked very successfully in creating practical policies and processes so that digital content can now be effectively archived and our academic and literary heritage preserved, in whatever form it takes.”

̽��ֱ��principle of extending legal deposit beyond print was established with the Legal Deposit Libraries Act of 2003 – the present regulations implement it in practical terms, encompassing electronic publications such as e-journals and e-books, offline (or hand-held) formats like CD-Rom and an initial 4.8 million websites from the UK web domain.

Access to non-print materials, including archived websites, will be offered via on-site reading room facilities at each of the legal deposit libraries. While the initial offering to researchers will be limited in scope, the libraries will gradually increase their capability for managing large-scale deposit, preservation and access over the coming months and years.

By the end of this year, the results of the first live archiving crawl of the UK web domain will be available to researchers, along with tens of thousands of e-journal articles, e-books and other materials.

̽��ֱ��regulations were developed by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport in conjunction with the Joint Committee on Legal Deposit, which includes representatives from the Legal Deposit Libraries and different sectors of the publishing industry. They establish an agreed approach for the libraries to develop an efficient system for archiving digital publications, while avoiding an unreasonable burden for publishers and protecting the interests of rights-holders.

Angela Mills Wade, Executive Director of the European Publishers Council, Chairman of the UK Publishers Content Forum and Joint Chairman of the Joint Committee on Legal Deposit said: “Capturing our digital heritage for preservation and future research is essential. As publishers were among the first to embrace the opportunities of digital publishing, recognising advantages of dissemination beyond traditional outlets and the potential of technology to drive innovation, we welcome the extension of legal deposit to digital formats and web harvesting.”

Billions of web pages from millions of websites, as well as public Facebook posts and tweets, will be preserved for time immemorial from tomorrow by Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library and five other major libraries.

Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library can collect and preserve the UK's digital publishing output, particularly that which will support current and future research.

Anne Jarvis

Carna Botnet

Graphic showing worldwide Internet usage

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Yes

̽��ֱ��riddle of the Syriac double dot: it’s the world’s earliest question mark

ns480 — Thu, 21 Jul 2011 10:38:43 +0000

Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� manuscript specialist, Dr Chip Coakley has identified what may be the world’s earliest example of a question mark. ̽��ֱ��symbol in question is two dots, one above the other, similar in appearance to a colon, rather than the familiar squiggle of the modern question mark. ̽��ֱ��double dot symbol appears in Syriac manuscripts of the Bible dating back to the fifth century.

Syriac is a language of the Middle East with a large Christian literature and its golden age was in the centuries before the rise of Islam. Syriac studies are blessed by the survival of a collection of very early manuscripts, the remnants of one derelict monastery library. In the 1840s, the British Museum stumped up almost £5000 to buy them, and scholars have lived off this purchase ever since.

Manuscripts of the Bible are not even the majority of the collection now in the British Library, but they have their special points of interest. One of these is the way that the graceful and flowing Syriac script is peppered with dots. Some of these dots are well understood, but some are not – some, indeed, probably not even by the scribes, who did not copy them consistently. All this made for a confusing picture, and it needed a patient scholar to start to make sense of it.

One step at least has been taken by Dr Coakley, a manuscript specialist at Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library who teaches Syriac to students in the Divinity and Middle Eastern Studies faculties. “When you are sitting round a table reading a Syriac text with students, they ask all kinds of questions – like what the heck does this or that dot mean – and you want to be able to answer them,” said Dr Coakley. “In addition, as I’ve got older I’ve got fascinated by smaller and smaller things like punctuation marks.”

̽��ֱ��double dot mark, known to later grammarians as zawga elaya, is written above a word near the start of a sentence to tell the reader that it is a question. It doesn’t appear on all questions: ones with a wh- word don’t need it, just as in English ‘Who is it’ can only be a question (although we use a question mark anyway). But a question like ‘You’re going away?’ needs the question mark to be understood; and in Syriac, zawga elaya marks just these otherwise ambiguous expressions.

“Reading aloud, the same function is served by a rising tone of voice – or at least it is in English – and it is interesting to ponder whether zawga elaya really marks the grammar of the question, or whether it is a direction to someone reading the Bible aloud to modulate their voice,” said Dr Coakley.

Question marks in Greek and Latin script emerged later than in Syriac, with the earliest examples dating from the eighth century. It is likely that these symbols developed independently from each other and from Syriac. Hebrew and Arabic, close neighbours of Syriac, have nothing comparable. Armenian, another neighbour, has a similar mark, but it seems to be later.

Last month Dr Coakley presented his theory that the question mark is a Syriac invention “rather nervously” at a conference in the United States. But so far none of his fellow scholars has come up with an earlier question mark in any other ancient language.

Dr Coakley is quietly thrilled by his finding. “I’d describe it as a significant footnote in the history of writing,” he said. “And it’s satisfying to have made sense of some of those weird dots.”

Manuscripts written in Syriac, an ancient language of the Middle East, are peppered with mysterious dots. Among them is the vertical double dot or zagwa elaya. A Cambridge academic thinks that the zagwa elaya is the world’s earliest question mark.

I’d describe it as a significant footnote in the history of writing.

Dr Chip Coakley

British Library Board

Extract from the New Testament in Syriac from the sixth century

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Yes