PUBLIC TALK: Friends of the Library Talk: A Mania for Manuscripts

Sir Thomas Phillipps (1792-1872) was a self-styled "vello-maniac". He spent sixty years assembling a vast collection of medieval manuscripts - thought to contain about 60,000 items by the time he died. After his death, the collection was broken up and sold, a process which continued for more than a hundred years. Libraries all over the world now contain Phillipps' manuscripts, often of great rarity and value. This talk will look at Phillipps' obsessive collecting activities, his decades of bitter rivalry with institutions like the British Museum, and some of the more eccentric aspects of his private life - in his will, for instance, he tried to ban all Catholics from ever seeing his collection. We will also examine what happened to the manuscripts after his death - and how several of them ended up in Australia, including a 15th century copy of Virgil's Aeneid, which is now in the Scholars' Centre at UWA.

About the speaker: Dr Toby Burrows is an Honorary Research Fellow in the School of Humanities at UWA. He is involved in several medieval manuscript projects in Australia and Europe, and developed the first database of medieval manuscripts in Australia ("Europa Inventa"). He has an M.A. and PhD in medieval studies, and has published widely on the application of digital technology to the humanities.

Members Free, Non-members $5.00 donation Parking available in Myers St and Parkway, accessible from Fairway.