History Day

Items

• 'That which never can be suppressed': LGBTQ+ history in the Royal College of Physicians collections
  In this lively virtual talk rare books librarian Katie Birkwood and assistant archivist Felix Lancashire explore some fascinating and potentially challenging collections at the Royal College of Physicians highlighting the long, rich and inspiring history of LGBTQ+ lives.
• AGRA Video
  Discover more about AGRA. Who has are we and what we do.
• Bees in the Collections
  The University of Reading houses one of the largest collections of bee-related material in the United Kingdom. The works contained within provide vital insights into historic social and political perceptions of the world’s most important pollinators. This online exhibition showcases some of the most significant apian-related works, held by the University and beyond, from the sixteenth to the twentieth century which demonstrate how social and cultural perceptions of bees and hives changed as British society evolved. The online exhibition curated by Olivia Blackburn, as part of a student project, ‘Bees in the Collections’, which was supervised by Professor Helen Parish and Dr Rohan Deb Roy from the Department of History, University of Reading.
• Damaged & Destroyed : Three Stories of Preservation and Loss from the PMC’s Photographic Archive
  In 2021, the Paul Mellon Centre (PMC) published its photographic archive online. The archive comprises more than 100,000 reproductions of paintings, prints, photographs, and sculptures. The photographs, which were taken over a forty-year period between the early 1960s to the late 1990s, offer images of objects from across six centuries, and focus in particular on sixteenth- to nineteenth-century British art. This feature focuses on a selection of the damaged and destroyed works that are recorded in the Centre’s photographic archive, and uses them to suggest some of the values and limitations of such archives. It takes the form of three stories. The first offers a glimpse into the work and tragic life of the largely forgotten eighteenth-century artist Hugh Robinson; the second looks at four portraits of women associated with a titled Scottish family, the Rothes, which were totally destroyed during a high-profile warehouse fire in 1997; and the third looks at a damaged sketchbook by the nomadic Georgian artist George Chinnery.
• Exploration of the Paul Oppé Library and Archive
  Adolphus Paul Oppé (22 September 1878–29 March 1957) was an art historian and collector with a particular interest in British drawings and watercolours from the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. His scholarly work, like his collecting, focused on figures such as John Sell Cotman, Alexander Cozens, Francis Towne, Paul and Thomas Sandby and Thomas Rowlandson, and contributed considerably to establishing their reputations as major British artists.
• Exploring the Frank Simpson Archive
  Frank Simpson (1911–2002) was a Librarian and amateur art historian with a long-held interest in taste and the collecting of pictures in England in the eighteenth century, particularly from salerooms. The Paul Mellon Centre holds his archive, which includes records from the London office of M. Knoedler & Co., where he worked during the 1950s–1970s. Much of the material in this archive is unique and contains a wealth of information for those interested in the study of provenance, and collections and collecting during the eighteenth to twentieth centuries.
• Leonhard Fuchs’s History of Plants (1542) | Sachiko Kusukawa
  Leonhard Fuchs’s History of Plants, published in 1542, was a landmark in Renaissance book-printing. It contained more than five hundred large woodcuts of plants, accompanied by their morphological description and medicinal uses. Typical of its time, Fuchs’s study was based on a classical work on the medicinal uses of plants by Dioscorides (first century AD). Unusually for its time, Fuchs’s book contained an illustration of the artists that were involved in the production of the images. Fuchs had good reason to be proud of the artists, as they created for him the beautiful illustrations that functioned in multiple ways to aid the study of plants. I will introduce the ways in which illustrations mattered in Fuchs’s History of Plants before having a look at the copy now at the Linnean Society.
• Poultry against the Pestilence: Early Modern Surgeons’ treatments for the Plague
  During a three hundred year period from the 14th to the 17th century plague physicians, surgeons, and other medical practitioners reprised ancient forms of knowledge, as well as devising innovative treatments for the disease, producing a wealth of textual evidence. Thomas Banbury, this year's HLCE grant holder, has scoured the library for plague tracts and found one of the most outlandish and superstitious-seeming recommendations called the "Live Chicken Cure".
• Unfolding Time: the Medieval Pocket Calendar
  Fewer than thirty concertina-fold almanacs are known to exist, this exhibition brings a group of them together for the first time and sets them alongside treasures from Lambeth Palace Library.