In the first gush of our sorrow and our indignation because of this atrocity, we waited not for any official prompting to pour forth our grief in tremulous, glowing words of mingled emotion, as the irrepressible bidding of our hearts draped our homes and our sanctuaries in the weeds of a national funeral.Ī Discourse in Memory of our Late President, Abraham Lincoln 1865 Its collections already cover Shakespeare and the Renaissance, the Romantic and Victorian periods, and 20th-century literature and drama, with the library planning to continue adding to the resource until “it covers the whole rich and diverse backbone of English literature, from The Canterbury Tales to The Buddha of Suburbia”.Pool clapped his hands, and the little maid ran out of the house to him in tremulous, fluttery haste. Launched in 2014, the Discovering Literature site has so far received more than seven million visitors, according to the British Library. “We have these unbelievably precious pieces of our literary heritage and we need to preserve them, but we also need to make them available for new readers. “A library is a memory, and the British Library is the nation’s memory,” said Wellesley. The anchoress Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of Divine Love, the first work authored by a woman in English, and The Book of the Queen by the French author Christine de Pizan, the first woman writer to earn a living from her work, also feature. These are taken from a drastically edited print from 1501 that effectively silenced Kempe’s voice her longer, original autobiography, also part of the collection, was discovered by chance in 1934, and restores the author’s own account of her mystical visions and travels. Several notable early works by female writers also feature in the collection, including early printed extracts of Margery Kempe’s book, the earliest known autobiography in English. Two Chaucer manuscripts are included in the Discovering Literature project: a copy of his dream vision, the Parliament of Fowls, in which a group of birds gather on “seynt valentynes day” to choose a mate, believed to be the origin of the idea that 14 February is for lovers and his Legend of Good Women, an unfinished work that he began in 1386, in which the narrator is chastised by the God of Love and his queen for his treatment of women in prior works. The collection contains many works that have been digitised for the first time, giving the general reader their first access to manuscripts dating back hundreds of years. We have these precious pieces of our literary heritage that we need to preserve, but we also need to make them available Mary Wellesley, a specialist in medieval manuscripts “All of Cædmon’s poems are lost, but Bede gives a report of one of them – it’s a wonderfully compressed piece of poetic verse,” said Wellesley. But then, Bede recounts, Cædmon had a vision when he awoke he performed the song he had sung in the dream, amazing everyone. According to Bede, Cædmon was one of his age’s greatest poets, but initially, “he was so shy that when the harp came out at parties he would hide,” said Wellesley. Describing Christianity in Roman Britain, and the arrival of St Augustine in Kent, it recounts how the English were converted to Christianity.īede also tells of the first named English poet, a cowherd named Cædmon who lived at the Abbey of Whitby. “In a way, we’re pleased he had this essential tremor, because it means we can identify his work on a huge number of manuscripts … He was interested in preservation is a metaphor, in a way, for what we’re trying to do with these manuscripts today.”Ĭovering medieval drama, epic poetry, dream visions and riddles, the British Library project includes the eighth-century illuminated manuscript of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, which Wellesley called “the first great piece of English historical writing”. The language was changing a huge amount, and Old English was no longer spoken generally,” said the British Library’s Mary Wellesley, a specialist in medieval manuscripts. “The Tremulous Hand was from one of the last generations who would have understood Old English. Incredibly fragile, the Beowulf manuscript dates back to the 11th century, and survives in a single manuscript that was singed in a fire in the 18th century. One of the manuscripts on which the Tremulous Hand worked is part of the British Library’s free new online resource, Discovering Literature: Medieval, which brings together digitised copies of more than 50 medieval manuscripts spanning the fifth to the 15th centuries, and includes some of the period’s most valuable texts, such as Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. A 13th-century manuscript written by the Tremulous Hand.
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