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Senate House Library acquires Institute of Conservation grant to help preserve precious manuscripts

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Written by
Mark Piggott

Senate House Library is the recipient of a prestigious grant from The Institute of Conservation which will help ensure the conservation of its rare and valuable manuscripts.

Fuller Collection detail
The Fuller Collection includes over 1000 documents, seals and objects mostly from Britain and Western Europe

The Institute of Conservation grant will allow the employment of an intern in the Conservation Department to work in the field of manuscript conservation. They will be working particularly on MS278, the ‘Robert of Gloucester Chronicle’ dated around 1440, and the Fuller Collection, which was donated to the Library to be used in the teaching of palaeography. 

MS278 'Robert of Gloucester's Chronicle' is a Middle-English verse chronicle written c.1440 on parchment. The text is partly taken from Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae (‘History of the Kings of Britain’) which described an ancient British nobility and a wide variety of other sources. 

Alongside the text are many drawings of grotesque heads, animals and fish in the lower margins of the manuscript. The manuscript is regularly used in teaching palaeography, manuscript studies and Middle-English texts and has given generations of students their first introduction to the world of medieval manuscripts.

The Fuller Collection includes over 1000 documents, seals and objects mostly from Britain and Western Europe. One of the earliest objects in the collection is a cuneiform clay tablet dated to c.2400 BC, but the majority of the items date from the 12th to the 20th century.

The Fuller Collection was given to the Library in July 1965 through the National Art-Collections Fund by Estelle Fuller in memory of her husband AWF Fuller, who had built up the collection over many years. It is a valuable resource for teaching and research in palaeography and the study of documents.

The new intern will also have the opportunity to be involved in all day to day work of the conservation department including preventative work, exhibition planning and installation and leading inductions on safe handling of collections. 

The grant is funded by a group of five funders (The Pilgrim Trust, Idlewild Trust, National Manuscripts Conservation Trust, Anna Plowden Trust and The Radcliffe Trust). The intern will also be supported by a generous grant from Convocation Trust to support their professional development during their year at Senate House Library. Recruitment for the post will begin shortly. 

This page was last updated on 27 January 2025