Archaeological adventures in the Bolton Library

We’re delighted to be able to share this fascinating post by Paul Novosel, with additional thanks to Dr Eleanor Giraud and the Centre for Early Modern Studies, Limerick.

Centre for Early Modern Studies, Limerick

by Paul Novosel

If I wasn’t a professional musician, I would have probably been an archaeologist. Unearthing the past and finding historical artefacts has always fascinated me. And this term at UL, I had the chance to experience something akin to an archaeological dig: as part of my MA in Ritual Chant and Song, I delved into the world of rare liturgical books.

For one of my MA modules, I was given the awesome opportunity to thoroughly examine a rare book from the Bolton Library and create a record of its health (image 1). The University of Limerick takes care of the Bolton Library, “a collection of 12,000 early printed books, manuscripts and incunabula of exceptional academic and bibliographic importance”. It’s a literary goldmine of historical artefacts for future generations of researchers—a very noble legacy, and a coup for the Glucksman Library.

Image1-MARitualChantandSongstudentscataloguechantbooksfromtheBoltonLibrary 1: Students of the MA in Ritual Chant…

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Music Panel Recordings

We would like to thank Margaret Bent and Eleanor Giraud for giving us permission to share their papers. Margaret Bent (Oxford) speaks at the 2017 Teaching the Codex Colloquium about music palaeography in the classroom. Eleanor Giraud (Irish World Academy of Music and Dance, University of Limerick) speaks about music palaeography in the classroom (re-recorded).

Paleography and Music Notation: Using Research Methods to Develop Pedagogy

Dr Samantha Blickhan is the IMLS Postdoctoral Fellow at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago, where she works on crowdsourced text and audio transcription projects for Zooniverse.org. Her PhD (Royal Holloway, University of London, 2016) thesis focused on the paleography and notation of insular song from 1150-1300. Here, she writes about designing an undergraduate music paleography …