Oliver Smithies Lecture 2 - Medieval Manuscript Hunters and the Second World War

In the summer of 1939, as war loomed, scholars, librarians, and archivists knew that time to save Britain’s manuscript and book heritage was running short. Not only did unique and rare objects get moved to tunnels, safes, and secure rooms around the country, but a small group of bibliographers—the ‘arch sleuth’, Neil Ripley Ker, and colleagues such as Roger Mynors, Christopher Cheney, Joan Wake, Robin Flower, Frances Rose-Troup, and Ivor Atkins — sought to hunt down and list as many British books and documents as possible, so that a record would exist of the nation’s written legacy. This paper will examine letters and visits between Ker and his hundreds of correspondents during the Second World War that show these book hunters’ frenzied activities under fraught conditions in urgent work that helped create modern standards for cataloguing and archival research. 

Professor Elaine Treharne is Roberta Bowman Denning Professor of Humanities at Stanford University, and Oliver smithies Visiting Lecturer at Oxford.