With just one day before our talk for the 2025 Cambridge festival, we are delighted that the story of the Merlin fragment has been picked up in two news stories. You can read more about it in BBC Future: The magical medieval tale revealed by a hi-tech camera focuses on the Merlin story and explores the imaging techniques used in the project.
Continue reading “News stories on the Cambridge Merlin fragment project”
Back in 2023, library staff from Archives and Modern Manuscripts, Conservation & Heritage, Cultural Heritage Imaging Laboratory, and Collections and Academic Liaison was awarded funding from Cambridge Digital Humanities. Our aim was to carry out a project of conservation, digitisation and analysis of a fragment from a manuscript of the medieval French story of Merlin the magician which had been re-discovered at Cambridge University Library.
We are delighted that the recording of the talk, which Dr Marie Puren (Liberation Collection Visiting Scholar) gave at the Cambridge University Library on 24th October 2024, is now available online on the library’s YouTube Channel. In this lecture, Marie gave an overview of her work on French publishing at the end of the Second World War, based on the Chadwyck-Healey Liberation Collection, a unique collection of over 3,000 works in French published at the end of the Second World War.
The Liberation of France in 1944 marked a decisive turning point, not only in political and societal terms, but also in the field of publishing and literature. The way in which the collective memory was constructed through the works published at that time reveals how literature was used to redefine national identity after the traumatic years of the Occupation. Continue reading “More on the New Editorial and Literary Landscape in Post-War France (1944-1946)”
Last year, Cambridge University Library received a donation intended to complete its existing collection of books produced by the Kickshaws publishing company. John Crombie and his partner, the artist Sheila Bourne, founded the private press in Paris in 1979 by before moving to La Charité sur Loire.
The donation to Cambridge UL was made by the family of the late John Crombie as part of his legacy. He had studied French and German at the University of Cambridge (St John’s College, 1957). The library’s holdings went from about 90 to 140 items (mostly numbered copies of limited editions), in English and in French. All quotations provided below are from the “Kickshaws Tentative provisional checklist of all titles published by letterpress” (2023).
Continue reading “Playful books and the Kickshaws private press donation”
Following the Francophone and Arabic display of books from North Africa, including books on textiles, organised at the University Library, this guide aims to facilitate more in-depth research into CULs’ print and electronic collections.
L’Algérie de nos jours. Alger : J. Gervais-Courtellemont, 1893 (S644.a.89.1)
Continue reading “Guide to searching material on North Africa in Cambridge University Libraries”
The recent exhibition of books on and from North Africa in the UL brought together a fascinating selection of volumes on textiles. In putting the display together, Irene Fabry-Tehranchi kindly considered my interest in the topic. The fact that I teach on the (Un)clothed body module for the MMLL comparative paper CS5: The Body means that I am always looking for material that resonates with this subject area. My research in North African literature has always involved consideration of the ways in which social customs, including dress, are represented in literature, thought and art on or from the region.
In addition to this, I am a keen amateur embroiderer and on a trip to Paris in recent years I discovered a silk embroidery floss called ‘soie d’Alger’ (Algiers silk), considered one of the finest silk embroidery threads available, produced by the family-owned firm Au ver à soie. Their website suggests that there is no connection between this stranded embroidery floss and the city of Algiers. The silk itself is imported from China, and the name ‘soie d’Alger’ is believed to be related to the process of spinning the stranded silk. But I am reluctant to accept this lack of geo-political connection without some investigation. Irene has pointed me in the direction of French press database Retronews and highlighted several articles on the French production of silk in Algeria under French rule. She also sourced a number of colonial exhibition catalogues and agricultural reports from the 19th and 20th centuries containing information on the production of fibres including silk, wool and cotton in French Algeria. Continue reading “Books on North African Textiles at Cambridge University Library”
It has been a year since the Fitzwilliam Museum exhibition Black Atlantic: Power, People, Resistance, and the CCC network (Collections Connections Communities Strategic Research Initiative, which encompasses Cambridge University’s museums, garden, libraries, and archives) has just published a report on African Collections Futures, about Africa-related objects and materials present across the University of Cambridge. A few weeks ago, we organised at the library a display of books from North Africa, focusing on items about and from Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia (mainly Francophone, but including some Arabic material). This gave us the opportunity to showcase key collections among Cambridge University Library’s holdings. While older material often provided a Western perspective regarding the Maghreb, for 19th and 20th century works, we focused on publications emanating from these countries (historically marked by a strong colonial outlook); we still collect current Francophone publications from the region.
Continue reading “North Africa in Cambridge University Library’s Francophone and Arabic collections”
About a year ago, the study-day “French Collections in UK Libraries: Discovery, Research, Dissemination” was held at the Institut Français in London. We are looking forward to the symposium on “Collections in French at the British Library” which is happening tomorrow and whose speakers include, among others, acclaimed author Michel Pastoureau and Professor William Marx, who will be talking about “The World Library”. Both events have been sponsored by the French Studies Library Group, which aims to bring together librarians, information professionals, academics and the wider public to provide access, promotion and preservation of printed and digital French Collections in the UK.
Some of the papers given at last year’s study day will soon be published in a Special issue of Paper Trails: The Social Life of Archives and Collections. We are delighted to announce that some of the presentation from the event are now available on the French Studies Library Group’s Events and Resources page. These cover a wide range of French collections in UK libraries, from caricatures of the Franco-Prussian war in Cambridge University Library, the British Library and the University of Glasgow Special collections, to recordings from WW2 resistants in the Archive of Resistance Testimony at the University of Sussex, and archives from the Barbier family at the University of Cardiff or Georges de Peyrebrune holdings at the Taylor Institution (Bodleian Libraries). They also include collections of digital material such as the UK Web Archive and its London French Special collection.
Irene Fabry-Tehranchi
This year probably marks the 500th anniversary of the birth of Luís Vaz de Camões, the Portuguese language’s greatest poet. I say “probably” because, like much of the life of Camões, the exact date and place of his birth are uncertain – although Lisbon in 1524 is considered most likely. What we do know is that Camões lived a life as full of exotic and outlandish adventure as his most important work, Os Lusíadas (The Lusiads in English).
Ravensbrück was published in Neuchâtel by Éditions de la Baconnière in 1946, as part of the blue series of “Les Cahiers du Rhône”, a collection directed by Albert Béguin. As a tribute to the French flag, the collection was subdivided into the blue, white and red series. Works in the blue series dealt with contemporary events. The Cahiers defended a form of Christian humanism and spirituality opposed to Nazi materialism and the compromises of the Vichy regime. Ravensbrück is a compilation of testimonies by 13 survivors of the German concentration camp for women, starting with French résistante Germaine Tillion, author of the longest piece by far. It includes texts by Anne Fernier, Violette Maurice, Nina Zwanska, Anise Girard, Grazunska Chrostowska, Renée Metté, Bluette Morat, Monique Nosley, Geneviève de Gaulle, Thérèse Grospirron, Marie-Elisa Nordmann and Génia Rosoff. They cover subjects ranging from hunger to scientific experiments, and communism to prayer in the camp.
Continue reading “Ravensbrück (1946), Germaine Tillion and Jeannette L’Herminier”
Languages across Borders 
