Literature

the Wife of Bath, the Ellesmere Manuscript of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, c.1410.

Are you Experienced?

Not a queen or a saint, witch or idealised lady-love, the Wife of Bath is a much-married working woman and an enthusiastic traveller.

Pietro Miliani’s paper mill in Fabriano, Italy in the mid-15th century.

Clean Sheets

The smooth whiteness of paper belies the mess and hard labour that went into its production.

 17th-century manicule and notes in the margin of translations of Aristotle. Courtesy of the Penn Library.

Filling the Gaps

Notes in the margins of early modern books can be very revealing about their readers’ lives and interests. 

Telegraphers at work, 1908. Library of Congress/Getty.

Love on the Wire

The advent of telecommunications gave rise to a new literary genre through which female telegraphers and writers found social freedoms.

Book sale in the Łódź Ghetto, 1940 © Collection Walter Genewein/akg-images.

The Underground Library

As the Nazis enclosed Warsaw’s Jewish quarter in a ghetto, a librarian set up a secret children’s library. 

Shock and enchant: from The Nightmare, by Henry Fuseli, 1781. Alamy.

Echo Chamber

Dinner parties in the ‘Revolutionary Age’ with the publisher Joseph Johnson.

Library

Libraries for All

Early modern parish libraries, frequently established for the benefit of the general public, were often deliberately inaccessible.