Rylands Lunchtime Seminar: Bookwork: Extra-Illustration in the John Rylands Library

Описание: The online Rylands Lunchtime Seminar Series highlights the breadth and quality of our unique Special Collections and showcases world-class collections-based research activities. It brings together experts from the University of Manchester Library and University of Manchester academics working closely with the special collections held in the Library.

Bookwork: Extra-Illustration in the John Rylands Library

This seminar provides an introduction to the rich holdings of extra-illustrated books in the John Rylands Library. It begins with a short exploration of extra-illustration (or ‘grangerization’) before going on to focus on a selection of examples of extra-illustrated books within the Rylands collections, including early modern books from the Spencer Collection and Enriqueta Rylands’ extra-illustrated Collects. Borrowing insights from Whitney Trettien’s concept of ‘Bookwork’ - the work carried out to transform a book and, simultaneously, the work done with books - this session concludes with a discussion encompassing the collectors and users of these books and how these artefacts are catalogued in specialist collections libraries.

With Dr. Hannah Yip, Leverhulme Post-doctoral Research Fellow & Dr. Elizabeth Gow Curator of Manuscripts at the John Rylands Research Institute and Library

Hannah Yip's research has been supported by the AHRC and a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship. She has published on a wide range of topics, from early modern loneliness to the early modern sermon, in journals including The Journal of Ecclesiastical History and The Lancet Psychiatry. Further work is forthcoming in Milton Studies and, together with Ben Jackson (JRRIL), she is currently working on Clerical Lives in England and Wales, c. 1600-1800, which is under contract with Manchester University Press. For the John Rylands, she has curated a digital exhibition on extra-illustrated early modern books, which she will talk about today.

Dr Elizabeth Gow is a manuscript curator and archivist at The University of Manchester Library. She has curated exhibitions relating to Enriqueta Rylands and the history of the John Rylands Library and published on Rylands’s collecting, philanthropy and biography. In 2023 Elizabeth completed a PhD in Museology at the Institute for Cultural Practices. Her thesis, ‘Enriqueta Rylands: the public and private collecting of a Nonconformist bibliophile, 1889-1908’, includes a chapter on Rylands’ extra-illustrated Collects.