Manuscript Studies
The Palaeography Room
One of the glories of the Senate House Library, the Palaeography Room was established alongside the only endowed Chair of Palaeography in the English-speaking world at King’s College and was opened in 1956. It has been since 'the most welcoming and most helpful of palaeography libraries', holding a reference collection 'worth crossing oceans to use' with 'books which cannot be found in Princeton, Chicago, Toronto, or even Oxford and Paris.'
David Ganz, 'Latin Palaeography since Bischoff', in Omnia disce: Medieval Studies in Memory of Leonard Boyle, O.P., ed. Anne J. Duggan, Joan Greatrex and Brenda Bolton, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005, p. 95
The Paleography Room is the only library in the UK where books on the subject are classified together in a unique location and are available for borrowing or consultation in an open access setting. Jonathan Alexander, in his obituary for Julian Brown in the Proceedings of the British Academy 1989 wrote of the Palaeography Room that it has 'become a meeting place for all interested in script, illumination and the manuscript book', and he quoted Julian Brown who described it as 'an open access reference library which is perhaps the best of its kind in the world'.
The Palaeography Room has been used to designate both a physical space - the reading room for Special Collections and Archives - and the Manuscript Studies collection of books and periodicals concerned with the study of Western manuscripts from Late Antiquity until the establishment of printing. The collection is comprehensive and acts primarily as an indispensable bibliographical resource for scholars of medieval books and documents. It is also used more widely as a reference tool for those needing to acquire palaeographical skills or to prepare themselves for working with original manuscript material. Given its interdisciplinary nature, it provides an essential introduction to the most important resources for the study of classical and medieval civilization.
The main concentration of the Manuscript Studies Collection is on Western manuscripts written in Latin and the Western European vernacular languages from the 6th up to the 16th century. Greek palaeography and Greek Byzantine manuscripts are also represented though less prominently. The collection does not, as a rule, cover manuscripts in Cyrillic or Eastern European vernaculars, Armenian, Islamic, Hebrew and Oriental manuscripts, or papyri, although books on these subjects may occasionally be found.
A sizeable proportion of monographs and journals in the collection are in German, French, Italian and Spanish. Some manuscript catalogues and manuscript facsimiles are (entirely or partially) in the classical languages, mainly Latin.
As a result of the refurbishment (check the Senate House Library homepage for more details) the Manuscript Studies collection is currently available on the open access shelves of the Special Collections Reading Room, North Block. The Palaeography Room as a physical location is now being used to house the Circulation Desk.
