During this stretch in England, I've also had the opportunity to do some work related to my current research on 16th- and 17th-century poetry. I have hung out with manuscripts at the Wren Library in Trinity College, Cambridge, and in the British Library. Here are a couple of cool photos of old texts:
In Cambridge, I got permission to have E spend some time in the Wren with me, where I was able to request for him some suitable 17th-century reading material to occupy his attention while I was reading psalters.
I was also granted permission to visit Penshurst, that great pile in Kent--the subject of Ben Jonson's poem and the late 16th-century HQ for the Sidney-Herbert Circle. The family that lives in the house now is the same family that has occupied the house for nineteen generations. (Not the exact same humans, obv. They're not vampires.) And they still have the family books in the family library, which is perhaps to be expected, but it's pretty cool when the family tree includes Philip Sidney, Mary Sidney Herbert, and Mary Wroth, among others. I dearly wish that I could post some photos of the sublime manuscript (each letter ornamented with gold) that I went there to examine, but photos were not allowed. So instead, I offer here a couple of pictures of Penshurst, witness to both a lot of history and a significant chunk of literary history, to which I came as a kind of pilgrim.
That last line goes in the quote book.
ReplyDelete