Possibly Better...

I didn't think anything could top Tuesday with the Bodleian tour, but we visited Merton college today, which is arguably the oldest library at Oxford and possesses 327 medieval manuscripts housed in a 14th century building. Imagine studying for your finals there!

First year students at Merton receive training in the care and handling of the special collections, a lesson that Julia describes as, "speed dating with manuscripts." The students get three minutes with a manuscript and have to write down everything they can learn about it. The goal of the exercise is to understand a book even if you can't read the language in which it is written.



Julia shared several middle English and Latin manuscripts, pointing out peculiarities such as the way scribes would write around flaws in the parchment, sometimes leaving gaps on the pages where you can see through to the next page. Sadly, many of the manuscripts at Merton suffer from the same problem as the Book of Josephus we saw at the O.C.C. yesterday, people at some time in the past cut many of the illuminations out of the manuscripts. Julia informed us that there was a trend in the Victorian era for men and women to do this in order to put together scrapbooks, although there were other motivations such as protecting the manuscripts from overzealous religious visitors who might want manuscripts with controversial illuminations removed from the library.

Due to restrictions, I am not allowed to post photos from Merton's manuscript collection, so you'll have to take my word that it was an amazing experience to be surrounded by so much history.

In a fit of meta-irony, we went straight from the medieval collection at Merton to a Krispy Kreme operating out of the Oxford castle.



From the sublime to the banal. Sigh. Even librarians succumb to the siren call of Krispy Kreme.

The "castle" isn't even a real castle but a former prison that has been turned into a luxury hotel where guests can pay for the privilege of sleeping in cells where thieves and robbers were once incarcerated.

After getting our sugar fix we traveled across the street to Nuffield college, which was founded in 1937 and funded by Lord Nuffield, William Morris (of automobile fame), however the college wasn't built until the mid 1950s, so the library is not very old. It does have a unique claim as the only tower library in Oxford, and the view from the top is exceptional.