In world terms they are not very important, but to me, at the age of 12 or 13, they were the most magical things I had ever seen, up to 600 years older than even my Penny Black. They are still there, although the Library is now in a new building not far away. Here, for example, were two illuminated Books of Hours of the 15th century and three Latin Bibles of the 13th century, and part of a large lectern Bible of about 1320. It is hard to convey the thrill of encountering these, after the bright sunlight of the modern street outside. Halfway up was a kind of mezzanine gallery, parallel to the front of the building.Īlong one side and in a little room down a step at the far end were glass display cases filled with precious rare books, including half a dozen medieval European manuscripts. You would go into the entrance hall and double back up the wide wooden staircase on the left towards the upper floor. Within a few months I had discovered the Dunedin Public Library, a stately brick and stone building in the neo-Romanesque style opened in 1908 in Moray Place, following a Carnegie grant from Scotland. In 1963 we moved to Dunedin, further down the South Island, a city which still preserves its Scottish founders’ respect for learning and their ethics of Presbyterianism. Anything earlier than that was prehistoric. We each owned a Penny Black of 1840, sent by our grandparents in Surrey as the best Christmas present ever, and that same year, 1840, had marked the beginning of the British colony of New Zealand. My elder brother and I both collected stamps with great enthusiasm. We were made to keep our English accents and never quite to integrate with New Zealanders. New Zealand in the 1950s was a very long way indeed from the bustling metropolitan drawing rooms of her upbringing and from Westminster Abbey and the National Gallery. Initially, however, my mother, an Oxford graduate who had taught languages and the history of art in central London, struggled greatly with the transition to the isolation of a suburban bungalow in Christchurch. My father took part in the Hillary-Fuchs expedition to the Antarctic in 1957-8, recording the domesticity of Adélie penguins. The kakapo, a chunky parrot from the dinosaur age, for example, was rediscovered still living deep in the Fiordland bush in 1958. There are extraordinary birds and plants to be studied there which exist nowhere else and corners of the country were still unexplored. My father, a medical doctor with a passion for natural history, embraced the opportunities of New Zealand with delight. It was an exciting adventure for small children and we sailed through the Panama Canal and stopped at Pitcairn Island. In 1955, when I was four, my father took a job in New Zealand and we traveled out with my brothers in what, I now realize, was one of the last of the government-assisted immigrant ships. Gallois, so-called Naives Hours, 1839 – 42, Paris. Heures françoises et latines pour Madame L. The Naives book of hours, on the other hand, was commissioned by Jules Gallois, Count of Naives, for his wife, as a devotional work, though also supporting his claim to descend from noble medieval ancestors. The Missal was presented in 1844 to the Count of Chambord, then head of the House of Bourbon, by the Legitimist Ladies of France, who were in favour of a return to monarchy. Two high-end French manuscripts stand out as relatively recent acquisitions: the Naives Hours and the politically-charged Chambord Missal. Pugin and Phoebe Traquair are present in the library, but also some manuscripts reflecting the popular taste for illumination in Victorian England, such as illuminated addresses commissioned for ceremonial occasions, and instances of amateur illumination. Owing to the time and circumstances of its foundation, the museum holds examples of manuscript illumination exemplifying the revival of interest for anything medieval in the 19th century.
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