Parergon

Transforming the Early Modern Archive: The Emmerson Collection at State Library Victoria

Rosalind Smith — 2024-12-22

From Private to Public: The Emmerson Collection as a Test Case

Paul Salzman — 2024-12-22

John Emmerson’s rare book collection was acquired by the State Library of Victoria in 2015. While the collection has a clear focus on events surrounding the English Civil War, it includes many volumes which reach beyond that theme. In this essay I consider what it means for such a personal collection to enter a public library space. In particular, I explore the way the acquisition of this kind of collection clarifies the tension within rare book collections in libraries between preservation and access. I compare the arrival of the Emmerson collection at the State Library with the impact of private collections on a number of other libraries, principally the Folger Shakespeare Library, the New York Public Library, the Pierpont Morgan Library, and the University of Pennsylvania Library (which has the Furness Collection).

Monumentum Regale: Elegies on Charles I in the Emmerson Collection, State Library Victoria

Sarah C. E. Ross — 2024-12-10

The Book as Mirror: Embroidered Bindings at the Court of Charles I

Anna Welch — 2024-12-22

Embroidered bindings were an important aspect of the culture of luxury goods associated with the Stuart court, and several surviving examples are associated with Charles’ queen Henrietta Maria, including one in the John Emmerson Collection, State Library Victoria, Melbourne, Australia. Most unusually, this binding can be linked to a group of eight bindings identified to date as the work of one individual or workshop, held in the collections of SLV, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Bodleian Libraries, Oxford and the British Library, London. This article will explore the relationships between these bindings as well as the cultural, gendered and material history of their production and their reception in seventeenth-century England. Regarding their reception, I will consider the books both as texts to be read in a literal sense, and texts that as objects, used form as well as iconography to encode directives about female royal behaviour within the richly symbolical and distinctive decorative culture of the Stuart court.

Morocco Leather in Early Modern Britain: Towards a Transcultural History of Fine Leather Bookbindings

Nat Cutter — 2024-12-22

Morocco leather, a variety of goatskin used extensively in fine British bookbindings across the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, may be the most widespread extant material result of early British-North African trade. Integrating archival and print sources on trade and diplomacy, eighteenth-century book sales catalogues, and detailed examination of morocco bindings from the Emmerson Collection (State Library of Victoria), this article presents a new economic and cultural history of morocco leather in English society. It disentangles ‘morocco’ and ‘turkey’ as terms for goatskin, measures morocco’s rise, incorporation and gradual decline, and advances guidelines for distinguishing between imported and imitated morocco.

Marginalia as Texts: Early Modern Marks in the Emmerson Collection

Rosalind Smith — 2024-12-22

When John Emmerson’s collection of over 5000 early modern rare books entered public hands in 2015, a new corpus of sixteenth and seventeenth-century marginalia within those books became available for analysis for the first time. Rather than studying this exciting new body of marks primarily as evidence of reading, this article takes up the idea of marginalia as a collection of ‘texts’, subject to generic convention and available to formalist literary analysis. It provides a taxonomy of kinds of marginalia found in the collection, from marks of ownership through reader annotation to marks of recording, followed by an analysis of these kinds in the near complete run of editions of Philip Sidney in the collection (1593-1674). Through these examples, I argue for a new approach to marginalia that focuses on form: textual, visual and material. This approach is shaped by John Emmerson’s collecting practices and the distinctive contours of the Emmerson collection, allowing us to rethink what marginalia is and who might be considered to be marginalists in early modern England.

From Inception to Interface: Ontologies, Data Modelling, and Linked Data for Online Exhibition-Making

Julia Rodwell — 2024-12-22

Beyond the Book: A digital journey through the treasures of the Emmerson Collection is an online exhibition composed of several, interconnected parts – prose, images, photogrammetry and data. To create the site, we experimented with a new methodology for online exhibition-making: using the cultural heritage ontology, the CIDOC CRM, we modelled, created and published Linked Data related to the John Emmerson Collection. As well as communicating context within the exhibition, this data encodes it a durable form, in a way that can be repurposed and integrated into collection catalogues. In this article, we discuss the process of experimenting with this method for online-exhibition-making as well as the challenges of drawing on data to create an online exhibition from inception to interface.

Collecting Early Modern English Books in British Settler Colonies: Contexts, Problems, and Opportunities

Hannah August — 2024-12-22

This essay considers the Emmerson Collection’s holdings of early modern printed drama, comparing and contrasting them with examples of printed drama found in other Australian and New Zealand libraries’ collections of early modern books. Prompted by the recent critical turns in bibliography and archival studies, the authors interrogate the extent to which the Emmerson Collection – and other major collections, such as those in the Mitchell and Turnbull Libraries – enables or frustrates feminist and decolonial approaches to book-historical scholarship.

Afterword: Ten Pound Poms

Emma Smith — 2024-12-10

Review Essay: Recent Studies in Theatre History: Evidence, Interpretation, and Bibliographers Behaving Badly

Adam Smyth — 2024-12-22