Manuscripts Collection

Scholars from around the world conduct academic research in the Library’s nearly six million manuscripts dealing with English and American history and literature from the 11th century to the present, and with the complementary fields of  European medieval manuscripts, Renaissance exploration and cartography, Latin American history, and the History of Science and Technology. Particular strengths include Middle English literature, English politics and law in the Early Modern era, the English aristocracy from the later Middle Ages through the 18th century, American colonial history, 18th century British and American military history, the American Revolution, the Civil War, the exploration and development of the American West, and California from its discovery to the present. English and American literary collections from the Renaissance to the present day are especially strong in material relating to 18th-century Britain, Victorian literature and the pre-Raphaelites, American literature in the second half of the 19th century, and theater and drama covering some 500 years. There are full archives of several distinguished modern authors.

 

On Permanent View

A selection of the most famous and interesting items from the collections, including illuminated Books of Hours, the Ellesmere manuscript of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales,  Renaissance maps,  letters and documents by George Washington and  Abraham Lincoln, Thoreau’s autograph manuscript of Walden, records of the California missions, and manuscripts by Jack London, Christopher Isherwood, W.H. Auden, Langston Hughes, and Charles Bukowski, are on  public display in the Library’s Main Exhibition Hall; changing short-term exhibits regularly explore specific topics in greater depth.

 

The Ellesmere Chaucer is a beautiful and elaborately decorated manuscript of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Created between 1400 and 1405, it contains what is believed to be a portrait of Chaucer as well as miniature paintings of twenty-two of the fictional pilgrims who tell stories in order to enliven the journey from London to Canterbury. The manuscript is in excellent condition partly because it was undisturbed for about three centuries in the library of Sir Thomas Egerton (later Baron Ellesmere) and his family. The binding dates from 1995, when the manuscript was conserved and rebound to meet modern standards of preservation.

Like most medieval manuscripts, the Ellesmere Chaucer was written on vellum, which was probably made from calfskin. The largest calfskins measured about two feet by three feet after they had been prepared for use. Such a skin would have made four leaves (or eight pages). Thus the Ellesmere manuscript took at least fifty-eight of the largest skins.

The Library has several thousand medieval documents of historical, literary, and religious significance. Books of Hours, for instance, are among the most striking of all illuminated manuscripts. They contain prayers appropriate to the various canonical hours into which the church divided each day. The Book of Hours pictured here from the Workshop of the Master of the Duke of Bedford was produced in France in the middle of the 15th century. It is one of more than seventy Books of Hours in the Library’s collections. Producing a Book of Hours was complicated: the leaves were made of vellum, the text lettered by a scribe, the ornamental colored borders drawn by a specialist in decoration, and the miniature pictures painted by a master artist.

Library Online Catalog

More than 1,000 of the Library’s manuscript collections are described in collection-level summaries in The Huntington Library Online Catalog and are searchable in OCLC’s WorldCat. Detailed descriptive handlists of nearly 200 of these are posted on the Online Archive of California (OAC) database at www.oac.cdlib.org, with more added as they become available.

 

For registered Huntington researchers, a traditional card catalog, closed to further entries as of January 1, 1994, provides access to cataloged collections by author; further finding aids are available for most collections.