Subscribed: The Manuscript in Britain, 1500-1800

Saturday, January 18, 2020 to Sunday, March 8, 2020

Exhibition brochure & videos available through links below!

View and download the exhibition brochure

Watch exhibition videos on YouTube

Join the Paleographical Challenge 2020!

Was the pen ever mightier than the sword?  This exhibition looks closely at the hand-written text in early modern Britain, and asks what it has to tell us about power, wit, and the questions we should ask of the manuscript past.

Subscribed: The Manuscript in Britain, 1500-1800 consists of three individual exhibits:
  • Paper-businesses: Manuscript and Power in Early Modern England by Kathryn James, curator of Early Modern Books and Manuscripts and the Osborn Collection
  • Pastime With Good Company: Writing and Leisure in Early Modern England by Eve Houghton, graduate student in the Department of English, Yale University
  • The Critics’ Gallery: The Manuscript as Critical Object by Ray Clemens, Johanna Drucker, Diane Ducharme, Anastasia Eccles, Marta Figlerowicz, Susan Howe, Kathryn James, David Scott Kastan, Nancy Kuhl, Larry Manley, Lucy Mulroney, Cathy Nicholson, John Durham Peters, Sara Powell, Joe Roach, Peter Stallybrass, Emily Thornbury, Michael Warner

View some images of selected highlights of materials in the exhibition in the gallery below:

Open Gallery
“Give me thy grace, good Lord, to set the world at nought.” The start of Thomas More’s prayer, written in his prayer book, while in the Tower of London before his execution. MS Vault More, f. 17r
I write now with a Goose quill, on white paper, the deedes of a dull leaden age, blackish, I should say, brokish age. 
Muld sacke: or the apologie of hic Mulier: to the late declamation against her (London, 1620)
And doth it not resemble the Inke & Waxe, wherein gentlemens lands are morgagde, which afterwards turns offensiue to themselves?
A.R., True and wonderfull A discourse relating to a strange and monstrous serpent (or dragon) lately discouered (London, 1614)
“I’ll call for pen and ink, and write my mind.”
Shakespeare, Henry VI, Part I