A Tour Through Time - EWL Students View Fifteenth Century Literature Collection

Wednesday, April 6, 2016: Students in Dr. Jennifer Brown’s History of the English Language and Shakespeare Seminar were treated to a private tour at the Morgan Library and Museum in Midtown.

As part of her courses this semester, the students from Dr. Jen Brown’s Shakespeare Seminar (EWL 410) and The History of the English Language (EWL 212) had the opportunity to visit the Morgan Library’s extensive medieval and early modern literature collection on 36th and Madison.

The museum’s Assistant Curator of Printed Books and Binding, John T. McQuillen, gave a lecture to about twenty students on medieval manuscripts and early printed books. The students saw Chaucer’s 15th-century manuscript - one of only 38 in the world - and the first printed edition of Chaucer (printed by William Caxton). Dr. Brown was thrilled to see the enthusiastic expressions of her students. “It was a very informal lecture – they got to get up close, take pictures of everything and they got to ask questions not only about the texts but also about the process of making vellum, of making paper, binding books, and of conserving books. They asked about his background, how he got into it, what his work was on. It was so fun.” 

The students in her two courses have been studying not only the texts themselves, but about medieval handwriting, manuscripts, English look like and how this shifts to printed texts. Students had the rare chance to see a forged Shakespeare quarto, Shakespeare’s first folio, Shakespeare’s third folio - rarer than the first - and a first edition of Milton’s Paradise Lost

There is an importance to seeing the manuscripts in person, explains Brown. “Everything that we read is a twenty-first century printed edition so you won’t have a sense of how malleable those texts actually are. With Chaucer especially, you see it was handwritten - there wasn’t an official order, even the first printed version was different from the manuscripts… it also moves from large manuscripts that would have been read publicly because most people couldn’t read – they would have heard a story – to something like Paradise Lost which is a small, hand-held volume, when you start moving to private reading…” 

Many thanks to Dr. McQuillen for his time and formidable knowledge and to the museum for hosting us. Visit our department’s Facebook page for more photos and check out the museum’s official website for more information on JP Morgan’s extended collection.


 

Published: April 06, 2016

Contact

Dr. Jennifer Brown
646-393-4120
jbrown1@mmm.edu