Murray Seminar: ‘The Market for Medieval Illuminated Manuscripts c. 1890-1929 and its Consequences’, with Dr Laura Cleaver, Birkbeck, 4 December 2024 (5-6.30pm GMT)

• Location: Birkbeck, 43 Gordon Square, Keynes Library and Online
• Date and time: 4 December 2024, 17:00 — 18:30 GMT

In 1904 Charles Dyson Perrins, whose fortune derived from the Lea & Perrins business that made Worcestershire sauce, bought an illuminated medieval psalter for £5,250. This was an enormous sum at the time (roughly equivalent to £500,000 today) and one of the highest prices paid for a manuscript to that date. The price was justified by the aesthetic qualities of the manuscript and the circumstances of the sale: the book was new to the market, having been in a family collection since the sixteenth century. Another factor may have been the book’s English origin. Sydney Cockerell persuaded Perrins both to buy the book and to employ him to write about it. In 1908 Cockerell included the manuscript in his landmark exhibition of illuminated manuscripts held at the Burlington Fine Arts Club. The exhibition was not limited to English manuscripts, but made a ‘special effort’ to showcase English art. This paper will explore how rising prices for some manuscripts in the early twentieth century were intertwined with ideas about books as objects of national heritage, and the impact of this on the development of both scholarship and collections in Britain, Europe and America.

Laura Cleaver is Professor of Manuscript Studies at the Institute of English Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London. From 2019-2024 she was Principal Investigator of the Cultivate MSS project, funded by the European Research Council, which examined the trade in medieval manuscripts in the first half of the twentieth century. She is currently completing a monograph on the manuscript trade in Britain in the early twentieth century and its impact on the development of collections and scholarship.

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