Legacy 10- Royal Manuscripts

All The King’s Books

Mar 23, '12 11:47 AM for everyone

I caught the Royal Manuscripts exhibition at the British Library just before it closed down.   It’s a very hard show to write about.   I could have a moan at the presentation; given the limited space available it was bizarre that visitors were shunted into a semi-circular cul-de-sac which they had to go round before getting into the core of the show.  Given that the exhibition clearly packed in far greater numbers than expected, the result was lengthy queues at the door and a lot of initial irritation.   One might also argue that showing over 150 manuscripts was a bit too many; while these are huge books by modern standards, they still require very close up examination to make sense and the overall result was an exhibition which was uncomfortably cramped and took a very long time to do justice to

On a more subtle level, there were some problems with the theme.    With some exceptions, this wasn’t exactly a show displaying the illuminated manuscripts owned or even commissioned by the medieval kinds of England.  Some were.  One of the highlights was a clutch of sumptuous manuscripts from Flemish workshops created (or in some cases re-badged) for Edward IV in the 1470’s.   These appear to have been acquired as a set and were used as a source of readings undertaken in the king’s presence during meals and other semi-public, semi-private court events.  Most of them were in one form or another books of history, which perhaps gives an insight into Edward’s own interests and what he thought mattered.   One of the more touching books in the show had been undertaken in the context of a planned royal marriage involving one of Edward I’s sons in the 1280’s but work stopped half-done when the young lad died and was eventually picked up for a different royal wedding some years later, with the heraldry in the text reworked to new circumstance.

Others definitely were not.   Some arrived in London as loot from the Hundred Years War, captured on the battlefield (as with a Book of Hours which belonged to John II of France and went into captivity with him after the Battle of Poitiers in 1356) or shipped back from Paris when the royal library of John’s son Charles V fell into English hands after the city was handed over to Henry V.   Quite a few were actually the fruits of antiquarian collection in the 17^th and 18^th century- this was the origin of many of the Italian pieces in the collection.

Indeed it wasn’t clear that there was much by way of a stable royal library until well into the 16^th century.  Books came and went, slipping into royal hands through various channels and, at least in some cases, slipping out again as gifts or conscious de-accessions- in the early 1550’s the library was supposed to be purged of Catholic service books and other religious material which no longer fitted the new Protestant world of Edward VI, for instance.   While in practice some exceptions were made (usually for items closely associated with his father Henry VIII) some kind of purge does seem to have happened.   The royal manuscripts only settled down as a permanent fixed collection with a keeper and a more or less fixed home at the point when illuminated manuscripts stopped being books for regular use and became relics of a past age.

The exhibition sought to finesse this rather messy history by grouping manuscripts in certain categories based on presumed use (educational texts for princes, for instance, or geographies and encyclopedias imparting knowledge of the world).   This was ingenious but not entirely convincing; while the books in question may well have been used for the purposes implied by the section they were put in, they certainly wouldn’t all have been used for those purposes by any English monarch.    Books may have been designed to show royal magnificence or assert specially close links with God but the audience for these messages was inevitably limited by comparison with other media- and in some cases the audience meant to be impressed was probably limited to the king himself.

This sounds a horribly quibbly and negative write up.   It isn’t meant to be; it’s something of an explanation of why I’m not writing more about the show as a whole.  Each item in it could easily merit a piece in its own right but I don’t have the time for that.   Instead I’ll put a few of my very favourite piece of Flickr and suggest anybody who’s interested should follow the link to a full set of the items in the exhibition.

http://www.bl.uk/whatson/exhibitions/royalman/facebook/index.html