A Very Curious Collection: The Abbotsford Book of Deeds

Dr. Margaret Connolly

Thursday 5th March 2020

Margaret Connolly is Professor of Palaeography and Codicology at the University of St Andrews. She specialises in the study of later medieval English literature and its manuscript contexts, and is interested in both the scribes who produced medieval books and the readers who read them, as well as those who owned and preserved medieval manuscripts after the Middle Ages. These are aspects of book history that are explored in her publications: John Shirley: Book Production and the Noble Household In Fifteenth-Century England (1998) and Sixteenth-Century Readers, Fifteenth-Century Books: Continuities in Reading in the English Reformation (2019).

Synopsis: On display in a cabinet at Abbotsford is a curious book-object. It consists of a substantial collection of medieval charters, many with dependant wax seals attached, which have been been grafted onto the stump of a seventeenth-century printed book. The Latin parchment documents, which were given to Walter Scott by a neighbour, relate to lands in Suffolk and once belonged to the antiquary Thomas Martin of Palgrave. The printed paper book is a copy of a popular English prose romance, A Tragi-comicall History of our Times, itself now a rarity. This talk explores the history of the hybrid book-object, starting with Scott's acquisition of it. It considers who made it and when, and how its different elements were brought together, tracing a detective trail of provenance back over 500 years.