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1. The Mummified Cat in the Library Roof

   18th May 2026 10:12 am Leave a Comment

   Readers are advised that this post contains a photograph of a mummified cat and rat which they may find distressing.

   Over the years, the medieval buildings that now house Chetham’s Library and parts of Chetham’s School of Music have undergone numerous repairs and refurbishments, unearthing new discoveries. It was during renovations to the buildings during the late twentieth century that one of the more eccentric and—to some—spooky objects found to date was uncovered. While completing work on the school’s new library, which today occupies the space where the boys’ dormitories once stood during the days of Humphrey Chetham’s hospital school (a charitable school for boys from poor backgrounds), one of the workmen came across a mummified cat in the rafters! Looking into the folklore and spiritual beliefs of our predecessors can give us insight into why a cat was placed in the roof to begin with.

   

   Figure 1: A mummified cat from Late Period ancient Egypt (Baltimore, Walters Art Museum, 79.2 (gift of the heirs of Mrs Frances Eaton Weld, 1947)).

   In ancient Egypt, the birthplace of mummification, cats and various other animals were mummified for a number of purposes. One of these was so that they could be buried with their owners after death, an extension of owners’ love for their pets. Animals were also mummified as a sign of respect for the gods: many ancient Egyptian gods were depicted with the heads of animals, with the goddess Bastet commonly represented as a cat. Certain animals were therefore sacred through their association with the gods, rather than having a divinity of their own: ancient Egyptians did not worship every animal associated with an animal god, but mummified some of these animals as a sign of respect and devotion or as sacrifices to their respective gods. Some animals were mummified and placed alongside a mummified person as a source of food for their trip into the underworld, although we can rule out any cats being mummified for this reason. In the case of the first two reasons for mummification, the ancient Egyptians usually waited until the animal passed away naturally. However, a shipment of mummified cats that reached England in the nineteenth century revealed that some of these cats had had their necks broken, suggesting they were purposefully killed before being mummified in order to be sacrificed. In fact, cats were so often the subjects of mummification that a large number of them met their fate for the second time as fertilizer in England.

   England’s relationship with mummified or dried cats goes much further back than their use as fertiliser, however. For centuries, people placed dead cats in the walls of houses and other buildings in England, which subsequently dried out and became mummified. In times of great superstition, such as the witch trials that occurred between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, some of the population looked to commonplace magic and apotropaic practices (practices thought to protect practitioners against evil) to ward off evil spirits that might threaten their homes and family. One such charm was placing a dried cat within the walls of your home, which would protect against pestilence and evil magic or spirits. Cats were popularly associated with witchcraft, most notably as witches’ familiars, and especially black cats, which have a reputation for being unlucky in certain European folklore. These discoveries of dried cats reveal that cats were also perceived to ward off black magic, perhaps tricking evil spirits that someone else had already infested this house. One piece of folklore claims that in the erection of a new building, the devil demanded that a sacrifice be provided lest tragedy befall the building later on. Dried cats may have been just the sacrifice that the devil was looking for.

   

   Figure 2: A mummified cat and rat that dropped from a pipe of an old organ during restoration, now displayed at Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin (photograph by Flickr user Psyberartist, licensed under CC by 2.0).

   In a less spiritual sense, dried cats hidden within walls may reflect an effort by buildings’ inhabitants to protect against rodents and other pests. Many of the discovered dried cats are found—unfortunately for the builders discovering them—in intimidating postures, with their teeth bared and claws out. This suggests that these cats were placed within walls in something of a defensive position for the house, and were intended to scare away mice and rats, if not evil spirits. This may remind visitors to Chetham’s Library of our medieval cat flaps, and the important role cats have played in the buildings’ history, helping the fellows of Manchester’s collegiate church deal with rodent infestations in times of straw floors coverings and draughty corridors.

   The positions of these cats suggest that they are unlikely to have become trapped in these cavities and subsequently mummified, since they must have been posed post-mortem, and that they died beforehand rather than being killed for this purpose like the mummified cats of ancient Egypt, since they show no signs of having had their necks broken. While some may believe that many of these dried cats are examples of unfortunate accidents, the stench of a decaying cat within a home would surely have driven the inhabitants to locate and get rid of it. Although the ancient Egyptians did not record their methods for mummification, but it is noted that animals prepared for mummification would be anointed with cedar oil and strong, pleasant smelling herbs to mask their smell, which we can presume our superstitious ancestors used for their protective dried cats.

   

   Figure 3: The old hospital school dormitories, where the mummified cat was discovered.

   According to the scholar Brian Hoggard’s study of the archaeology of counter-witchcraft and popular magic, ‘only 139 documented cases of dried cats have been reported for England. Of these only sixteen (12 per cent) are pre-1700, seventeen (12 per cent) are post-1700, and the remainder of 106 (76 per cent) could not be dated’. This makes it hard for us to say when exactly our mummified cat was placed within the rafters, although it is unlikely that it would have survived the damage inflicted to the medieval buildings in the early to mid-seventeenth century during the English Civil War (which notably included damage to the roof). One could imagine that a superstitious builder placed it there during refurbishment works afterwards, or that a student or teacher placed it there during the years of the hospital school; it is hard to decipher whether this mummified moggy has been protecting the students for one hundred years or three hundred years.

   The unfortunate builder’s discovery of a mummified cat in the library roof may have come as a shock, but their discovery sheds light on England’s own relationship to spirituality and the legacy of ancient Egyptian post-mortem practices. Much to his credit, the cat remained within the rafters, preserving important historical information, and the new library was completed. Hopefully, the mummified cat in the roof will continue to shield students from evil spirits while they study for their exams for many years to come!

    

   Blog post by Georgia Hathaway

2. Thomas de la Warre’s Trans-Atlantic Manuscript

   10th May 2026 6:21 pm Leave a Comment

   In a letter dated 18 February 1669, the master of Jesus College Cambridge, John Worthington, described Chetham’s Library in Manchester as ‘a fair library of books (where I might pursue my studies) better than any College library in Cambridge’. Founded only sixteen years earlier under the will of the Lancashire textile merchant, banker and landowner Humphrey Chetham, the library had swiftly prospered, but the association of the site on which it stood with books and learning was far older. The sandstone buildings that the library came to occupy had originally been constructed to provide accommodation for the fellows of the medieval town’s collegiate church, which has been founded in 1421 by the lord of Manchester, Thomas de la Warre. Like any medieval religious foundation, the college possessed a library that served the needs of its fellows as they served the needs of the wider community. The evidence for this library is scattered, but enough survives to enable us to reconstruct its overall shape and the intellectual life of the college (more on this at a later date). One of the earliest books that belonged to the college, and the only one known to have survived, is a fourteenth-century Mariale (a manuscript containing texts relating to the Virgin Mary) that was probably donated to the college by its founder. In the twentieth century, however, this manuscript travelled across the Atlantic Ocean to California, and the story of how it came to do so highlights the efforts of the numerous individuals who sought to preserve it in Manchester.

   

   Figure 1: The inscription of Thomas de la Warre in the Mariale (San Marino, Huntington Library, HM 26560, fol. 1v).

   That the Mariale was donated to the college by Thomas de la Warre, or was at least owned by him, is indicated by the prominent inscription of his name on its front flyleaf (a blank initial page). This flyleaf also bears the traces of the physical condition in which the Mariale was once kept: although the manuscript’s current binding dates to the eighteenth century, marks on the flyleaf indicate that the medieval binding featured two straps that kept the book closed, and that it was once chained in place. This practice was common in late medieval libraries, with many donors expressly stipulating that their books be chained to prevent their removal (a practice that continued into the early modern period, as can be seen at Chetham’s Library in the Gorton Chest). Books that were borrowed or otherwise removed from libraries were more vulnerable to damage and loss, but even the books that remained in libraries were not invulnerable.

   As was seen in one of the library’s recent blog posts, Manchester’s college faced turbulent times during the English Reformation. In 1547, the college was dissolved under the Chantries Act of Edward VI, its lands seized by the crown, and its fellows pensioned off. A decade later, the college was one of only four re-founded by Mary I, and some of the fellows who had been there before its dissolution returned. One such individual was Laurence Vaux, in whose hands the Mariale next resurfaces: a Latin inscription entered on its second folio reads ‘Laurence Vaux, master of grammar, possesses me’. It is unclear when Vaux added this inscription; he may have done so after carrying the book away in order to protect it when the college was dissolved, or later as the college’s warden, an office that he succeeded to in 1558. Vaux’s wardenship was short-lived, however, since he fled the college before the visitation of Elizabeth I’s commissioners the following year. The Mariale’s later presence in Manchester suggests that he did not take it with him then, although he did take the college’s previous silver plate, vestments and muniments (the title deeds to the college’s properties).

   

   Figure 2: Laurence Vaux’s inscription in the Mariale (San Marino, Huntington Library, HM 26560, fol. 2r).

   During the English Civil War, the college’s fellows were driven out by Parliamentary soldiers, and the college was dissolved for the second time by Parliament in 1649. By then, the college buildings had fallen into disrepair, and they were soon afterwards purchased in accordance with Humphrey Chetham’s will and converted for use as a library. The college was subsequently re-founded during the Restoration in 1660, and this time survived until it was converted into Manchester Cathedral in 1847. Thomas de la Warre’s Mariale also proved itself to be remarkably impervious, resurfacing in the hands of another of the college’s wardens, Richard Wroe, in 1697. Wroe had become a fellow of the college in 1674–5, and was appointed as warden in 1684, an office that he continued to hold until his death in 1717–8. The manuscript had therefore survived the eleven years between the college’s dissolution and its re-foundation, and the displacement of the fellows from their original building, remaining in the possession of the college’s wardens. Thomas de la Warre’s Mariale therefore stands in stark contrast to a well-entrenched assumption that is now starting to be challenged, namely that the Dissolution of the Monasteries and the English Reformation more broadly represented the defining moment of loss for British medieval libraries. Instead, it demonstrates how resilient at least part of the college’s library was to the turbulence of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

   

   Figure 3: The Mariale in Edward Bernard’s Catalogi Librorum Manuscriptorum Angliae et Hiberniae (Chetham’s Library, Dd.8.13, Tom. II, Vol. I, p. 222).

   How and why the Mariale eventually left the possession of the college’s wardens is unknown, but it had certainly done so by the early nineteenth century, when it acquired the bookplate of Le Gendre Pierce Starkie (1796–1819) of the Starkie family of Huntroyde, Lancashire. It then remained in this family’s possession for some time, ultimately passing to Guy Piers Le Gendre Starkie (1909–85) before appearing as lot 136 in the sale of his books by Sotheby & Co. on 12 December 1962. A series of letters in the Bodleian Library from Chetham’s Librarian Hilda Lofthouse to the distinguished palaeographer Neil Ker around the time of this sale (Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS. 21050/21) attest to an unsuccessful campaign to keep the Mariale in Manchester. The letters relating to the sale occur in the middle of a longer correspondence, of which only half survives, although it is possible to fill in the gaps.

   Lofthouse’s first letter on the subject, dated 22 November 1962, reveals that Ker had written to alert her to the upcoming sale of the Mariale and another local manuscript. This was probably a breviary (a manuscript containing the texts for the Divine Office) that appeared as lot 137 in the auction catalogue, which also had a Lancashire provenance and had similarly passed through Wroe’s hands; this identification is supported by the fact that a copy of the Sotheby’s catalogue held at the John Rylands Library in Manchester contains a loose sheet of paper with the heading ‘with Messrs. Sotheby & Co’s compliments’, which bears a typewritten note that reads ‘may we draw your attention to lot 137’. Sotheby’s catalogue did not make the connection between the Mariale and the college, instead misidentifying Thomas de la Warre and making no mention of Laurence Vaux’s wardenship. It was to Ker’s intervention that Lofthouse probably owed her knowledge of the Mariale. She agreed with Ker that the manuscripts ‘really ought to be here or across the road at the Cathedral’, stated that she had written to the chairman of the Library Committee of Chetham’s Library to urge them to find the money for the manuscripts’ purchase, and wondered whether she could remind the owner of his family’s Lancashire connections.

   

   Figure 4: Photograph of Hilda Lofthouse and her cat.

   In the second letter, dated 27 November, Lofthouse expressed her gratitude to Ker for his (now-missing) offer to contribute to the fund that was then being assembled to purchase the manuscripts and to intercede with the Friends of the National Libraries—whose support the library has recently benefitted from—to similarly contribute. She hoped that Ker could ‘soften their hearts’, since Chetham’s Library was not a national library (a distinction since erased by their name change to the Friends of the Nation’s Libraries). Lofthouse had since heard back from the Library Committee, who were entirely in favour of acquiring the manuscripts; the chairman, Professor Ernest Rupp, was going to write to Starkie urging a private sale, and if that proved unsuccessful then the library would bid in the ensuing auction. Lastly, she noted the advice of Ker and Professor Ernest Jacob (a medievalist, one of the library’s feoffees and president of the Chetham Society) to concentrate on the Mariale if it went to auction, although she drily remarked that ‘we could manage to find space for both’.

   By the time of the next letter, dated 3 December, Ker had written to the Friends of the National Libraries on the library’s behalf, and Rupp had received a reply from Starkie. Although we do not have this reply, it was presumably negative, since the sale proceeded as planned on 12 December 1962. There, the Mariale was purchased for £680 (roughly £12,500 today) by Maggs Bros Ltd for the Huntington Library in San Marino, California. In her fourth letter, dated 16 January 1963, Lofthouse was still holding out hope that the Mariale would remain in Manchester; the library had been asked if it wished to object to its export, and since Manchester University Library was prepared to meet the auction price, the objection had been registered with Theodore Skeat, Keeper of Manuscripts and Egerton Librarian at the British Museum. Lofthouse nevertheless regretted ‘that it should have to happen in this way, and that either we or Bodley could not have had infinite cash to buy up anything which we wanted’.

   In the fifth and final letter relating to the sale, dated 30 January, Lofthouse informed Ker that the university had backed out of the purchase and ‘decided not to appeal against the export of the Mariale’, and lamented that ‘the Huntington will, presumably, get it’. Skeat did not expect that Chetham’s Library’s own appeal would amount to anything, and he was sadly proven right: the Mariale slipped through the library’s fingers, and resides to this day at the Huntington Library (a few pages have been digitised and may be viewed online). Half a world away from its former home, it now stands as a distant testament to the efforts of the numerous individuals who sought to preserve Manchester’s medieval patrimony.

    

   Blog post by Emma Nelson

3. Births, Deaths, Marriages and Chickens: Strange Finds in the Margins

   10th April 2026 3:43 pm Leave a Comment

   Readers’ marks are a common phenomenon in the books in Chetham’s Library: particularly in the early modern period between c. 1500 and c. 1700, readers frequently annotated their books, adding notes, comments and corrections to any available blank space. Such marks, also called marginalia, from the collections of Chetham’s Library have been the subject of several of our blog posts so far, including a recent blog post on the provenance of the library’s copy of Shakespeare’s Third Folio. In one of our Bibles, however, one reader left some particularly unusual traces: a flock of over twenty chickens of various shapes and sizes populates a blank page after the book of Genesis, with an additional ‘stray chicken’ also occurring several pages earlier (figures 1 and 2). Although drawings such as these do not show readers’ close engagement with the text of the Bible, they do provide a fascinating insight into the role of books in the lives of their past owners.

   

   Figure 1: A flock of over twenty chickens (Chetham’s Library, Mun.7.B.3.18, sig. O1v).

   

   Figure 2: The ‘stray chicken’ (Chetham’s Library, Mun.7.B.3.18, sig. A2v).

   The book that is home to the flock of chickens is a ‘Bishops’ Bible’, a version of the English Bible that was first printed in 1568. This was a revision of the ‘Great Bible’, which had been introduced under Henry VIII and Thomas Cromwell as the first English Bible whose provision was mandated in churches. The Bishops’ Bible was therefore the second authorised version of the English Bible. Its name is owed to the fact that work on this version of the Bible was undertaken by Archbishop Matthew Parker and other English bishops. It remained the official English Bible until the completion of the King James Version (which is still in use today) in 1611. This particular copy of the Bishops’ Bible was printed by Richard Jugge in London in 1577, and was donated to Chetham’s Library in the nineteenth century. It is now Chetham’s Library, Mun.B.3.18(1).

   

   Figure 3: ‘Samuel son of John Taylor March 3 Anno Domini 1621’ (Chetham’s Library, Mun.7.B.3.18(1), fol. 412v).

   

   Figure 4: The signature of John Taylor, partly obscured by the drawings (Chetham’s Library, Mun.7.B.3.18(1), sig. O1v).

   In addition to the drawings of chickens, there are some other readers’ inscriptions in this book. One of these may provide a clue to the identity of the artist who drew the chickens: on another blank page, a reader recorded the birth of a child: ‘Samuel son of John Taylor March 3 Anno Domini 1621’ (figure 3). Although John Taylor is a very common name, Samuel’s exact date of birth together with his father’s name makes it possible to find out where he most likely lived: the parish registers of Middleton, just north of Manchester, record the birth of a Samuel Taylor, son of John Taylor, on the correct date. Looking closely at the page with the chickens also reveals the signature of John Taylor (here spelled ‘Telyor’), partly obscured by the drawings (figure 4). Around four hundred years ago, therefore, this book was likely already owned by a family in North-West England. It appears to have stayed in the Taylor family for some time: elsewhere in the book, Samuel Taylor, by then around forty years old, made the notes ‘Samwill Taylor [his] book 1663’ and ‘Samwill Taylor [his] book god give him gra[ce] on ito [i.e. it to] looke that hee may run A hap pay [i.e. happy] race and heaven may be his dwelling place’, a relatively common type of ownership inscription found in many early modern books (figure 5).

   

   Figure 5: Samuel Taylor’s note (Chetham’s Library, Mun.7.B.18(1), New Testament, sig. A1v).

   The Taylors were not the only family during the seventeenth century to record family events in their Bible. Since paper was relatively scarce and expensive in the early modern period, blank pages in books were sometimes the most readily available writing surface. The increased accessibility of the Bible in English and the increased emphasis on the authority of the biblical text concomitant with the Protestant Reformation, along with the sinking costs of books enabled by the spread of printing with moveable type, meant that the number of families who owned a copy of the Bible was relatively high. In households that were not wealthy in particular, the family Bible may often have been the only book in the house, and a treasured possession. This meant that it was a good place to document milestones such as births, deaths and marriages, making many family Bibles from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries a kind of family archive and reinforcing the ties between the family and their religion. There are several other examples of this practice in Chetham’s Library’s collections, one of them in a Bible printed in 1551 (Chetham’s Library, Mun.7.B.2.3) that was owned by the Boardman family of Eccles in the seventeenth century, in which they recorded the baptisms of their daughter Anna (figure 6). Another particularly elaborate example from the library’s collections is a hand-drawn record of births and deaths in the Burgiss family in a 1553 copy of the Great Bible, now Chetham’s Library, Z.6.5 (figure 7).

   

   Figure 6: Records of Boardman family events (Chetham’s Library, Mun. 7.B.2.3, sig. NN6v).

   

   Figure 7: Records of Burgiss family births and deaths (Chetham’s Library, Z.6.5, n.p.).

   The Taylor family Bible clearly also provided its owners with a handy writing—and drawing—surface. The chicken sketches look as if they may have been created by a parent and child: although some of the drawings were clearly made by a child, others look like the artist was a little more at ease using a quill and ink. This demonstrates the role that books could play in an early modern home even for those members of the household unable to engage with the biblical text. Drawings such as the Taylors’ chickens are not uncommon in books from this period: another example from Chetham’s Library’s collections depicts what appear to be several horses and a person on the final blank page of a work on church history that was printed in Paris in 1524 (Chetham’s Library, H.4.15), beneath longer notes by an adult concerning the contents of the book (figure 8). In a medical book in the collections (Chetham’s Library, Byrom 3.E.7.76), a reader with slightly more advanced drawing skills similarly seems to have copied the printer’s device from the title page, an eagle and two snakes (figure 9). Finally, a Bible that was printed in 1539 and donated to Chetham’s Library in 1870 as part of the Byrom collection features a number of children’s drawings of strange creatures, likely added to the book during the eighteenth century, long after it had been printed (figure 10).

   

   Figure 8: Drawing of horses and a person (Chetham’s Library, H.4.15, n.p.).

   

   Figure 9: Drawing of a printer’s device (Chetham’s Library, Byrom 3.E.7.76, n.p.).

   

   Figure 10: Drawings of strange creatures (Chetham’s Library, Byrom 2.K.5.57, n.p.).

   Drawings such as these and books such as the Taylor family Bible provide us with a glimpse into the interactions between early modern book owners and their books. They present books as objects that were not just read, but that also provided space for records unrelated to the text and even for doodles, giving them an important place in the household. Surviving readers’ marks in books from this period provide invaluable evidence of the lives of readers in the distant past.

    

   Blog post by Ellen Werner

4. Lost and Found in the Library

   20th March 2026 2:29 pm 1 Comment

   In the early years of the nineteenth century, Chetham’s Librarian John Taylor Allen (1812–21) made a remarkable discovery in his apartment at the library: a treasure trove of the private papers of Humphrey Chetham, stuffed up the chimney! Until that date the library’s founder had been an enigmatic figure, with much more known about his death and legacy than his life, but the papers that Allen discovered provided invaluable information about his landed and commercial interests and his time as treasurer of the County Palatine of Lancashire and collector of subsidies during the English Civil War. Incredibly, these papers were almost lost for a second time during the nineteenth century, since, while most of them were bound into books for their protection, a smaller number remained in Allen’s possession. These loose papers later came into the hands of the local antiquarian James Crossley, who was honorary librarian between 1875 and 1883, and only returned to Chetham’s Library in 1885, when the library was obliged to purchase them from the sale of Crossley’s library. Today, they are rightly considered one of the library’s treasures.

   This remarkable story is only one of many, and Chetham’s Library’s latest exhibition focuses on the various instances of loss and discovery in the library over the years. Despite the efforts of librarians and library staff, books have sometimes been mislaid and even stolen, while one governor of the hospital school chased away the would-be thieves of the English Civil War weaponry mounted above the fireplace in the Baronial Hall while brandishing a sword—but not before they’d made off with some of those weapons. At other times, unexpected items have been discovered in the unlikeliest of places: during building conservation work between 1996 and 1997, a fragment of medieval sculpture was discovered on top of one of the book presses in the library, while a mummified cat was discovered in a portion of the building’s roof. The stories of these objects shine a light on the library’s history and the people who have interacted with it over the last four centuries and beyond, and over the coming months, we look forward to sharing them with you.

   

   Figure 1: A letter from Thomas Fairfax to Humphrey Chetham concerning the supply of gunpowder (Chetham’s Library, Humphrey Chetham’s private papers, volume 2, p. 17).

5. John Dee, Re-animator of Corpses, and Humphrey Chetham, Rejected Young Lover: Fictional Versions of Real People in W. H. Ainsworth’s Guy Fawkes (1841)

   10th March 2026 10:09 am Leave a Comment

   William Harrison Ainsworth, the popular Victorian historical novelist, had a long association with Chetham’s Library. Born in King Street, Manchester, in 1805, Ainsworth attended Manchester Grammar School on the library’s doorstep, and as a teenager, became a solicitor’s clerk. Escaping the tedium of his job, he spent many hours reading in Chetham’s Library. His favourite poems were those of Byron, featuring tortured heroes, while the historical novels of Walter Scott and the Gothic romances of Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis also inspired him. The atmosphere of Chetham’s Library also exerted a powerful effect on his imagination: although there is no historical evidence to suggest that Guy Fawkes had any direct association with Christ’s College, Manchester, or with John Dee, its warden at the time of the Gunpowder Plot, Ainsworth set several scenes in his novel Guy Fawkes, or The Gunpowder Treason: An Historical Romance (1841) in the buildings that later became Chetham’s Library and Hospital School. In this work, he mixed real historical characters, such as Guy Fawkes, John Dee and Humphrey Chetham, with romantic inventions such as the heroine Viviana Radcliffe, the young, beautiful Roman Catholic mistress of Ordsall Hall, who is also the love interest of both Fawkes and Chetham. Throughout the novel, Ainsworth characterised Chetham as an altruistic, rational and tolerant Protestant, in contrast with the more dashing, violent and impulsive Catholic Fawkes. It is, of course, Fawkes whom Viviana favours.

   The novel begins in late June 1605, when the Gunpowder Plot is already well advanced. Guy Fawkes is in Manchester, witnessing the gory executions of two Jesuit priests outside the Collegiate Church. The executions, although fictitious, were based by Ainsworth on real executions carried out in Lancaster, York and London during Elizabeth I’s reign. A local prophetess, Elizabeth Orton, intervenes dramatically but dies after attempting to escape from the soldiers pursuing her. Shortly afterwards, a young Humphrey Chetham and Guy Fawkes witness her body being exhumed from the section of the collegiate church’s graveyard reserved for criminals. It is Chetham who recognises the body snatchers: ‘the famous Doctor Dee … divine, mathematician, astrologer—and if report speaks truly, conjuror … and the other in the Polish cap is the no-less celebrated Edward Kelley, the doctor’s assistant, or, as he is ordinarily termed, his seer’.

   

   Figure 1: John Dee and Edward Kelley exhume the body of Elizabeth Orton, watched by Guy Fawkes (Chetham’s Library, 12.F.2.14, plate after p. 60).

   Disregarding the inconvenient facts that Kelley had died in 1597 and that Dee had left Manchester in November 1604, Ainsworth constructed a narrative in which Fawkes witnesses Dee and Kelley re-animate the corpse of Elizabeth Orton in order to hear more of her prophecies. In a scene of supernatural horror, Fawkes asks the corpse for information about the success of his scheme. The prophecy, however, is ambiguous: ‘”the end will be death,” replied the corpse’.

   Eager to learn more about his future fate, Fawkes is taken by Dee into ‘a large chamber, panelled with oak, and having a curiously moulded ceiling, ornamented with grotesque sculpture’, recognisable as the present Audit Room. From there, he is led through intricate passages to a chamber ‘which was evidently the magician’s sacred retreat’. In a recess behind a black curtain, Dee’s show-stone is placed on a table ‘covered with cabalistic characters and figures, referring to the celestial influences’. If Ainsworth was thinking here of the present Reading Room, the recess he describes may be the alcove in which Marx and Engels later came to study, or a small room known as the ‘scriptorium’. Ainsworth’s description of the ensuing ritual involves Dee and Kelley throwing gums and herbs onto a brasier, producing noxious and fragrant odours and multi-coloured flames, with accompanying incantations, howling, shrieking, music, laughter and silence: ‘“the spirits are at hand!” cried Dee. “Do not look behind you or they will tear you to pieces!”’. Fawkes is afforded three visions: one shows the conspirators taking their oath in the past; a second vision is of a gloomy vault filled with wood and barrels of gunpowder in the present; finally, in the future, Fawkes sees a crowd of skeletons pointing their bony fingers at ‘a figure resembling himself, stretched upon the wheel, and writhing in the agonies of torture’. Dee forewarns Fawkes of the failure of his plot and attempts to discourage him from proceeding further with it, to no avail.

   

   Figure 2: John Dee and Edward Kelley summon up a vision of Guy Fawkes’ future fate (Chetham’s Library, 8.E.1.27, plate before p. 61).

   Ainsworth was clearly not averse to embellishing the myth of Doctor Dee with all the paraphernalia of Gothic fiction at his disposal, including the re-animation of a corpse, elaborate conjuring and horrific prophetic visions. Later in the narrative, Dee appears as a more benevolent figure, saving the life of the injured Fawkes with the aid of his supernatural knowledge. He consults his show-stone and produces ‘an elixir of wonderful efficacy … a gourd-shaped bottle with a clear sparkling liquid’. He applies some of this to Fawkes’s temples and makes him drink three draughts of it. Dee, however, is in some doubt over whether this is the right thing to do: ‘I am debating within myself whether it is worthwhile reviving him for a more dreadful fate’. Dee is no doubt remembering the former vision of multiple skeletons pointing at Fawkes being tortured.

   Dee’s ministrations lead to Fawkes’ recovery, and he secretly marries the heroine, Viviana Radcliffe. After Fawkes’s arrest and imprisonment, Dee makes a further appearance, attempting to help Viviana. Despite her being Catholic, she had not supported Fawkes’ plot to blow up the king and the Houses of Parliament. She was, however, aware of the conspiracy, and was culpable in not having reported it. It was Dee who had revealed the plot to the Earl of Salisbury, and he therefore believes that he can arrange a merciful judgement on Viviana. He tries to persuade her that he can help her regain her mansion and estates, but that she must obey him by marrying Humphrey Chetham after Fawkes’s death. Although in love with Viviana, Chetham is aware that she does not love him, and is appalled by Dee’s attempts to bargain with her. He did not know of Dee’s intention in advance, and urges him ‘not to clog his proposal with conditions which cannot be fulfilled’. Viviana refuses to marry Humphrey Chetham, but requests that he escort her to London. She voluntarily surrenders herself to the authorities and pleads her case before the Earl of Salisbury and the king: ‘I was restrained from the disclosure [of the Gunpowder Plot] by a fatal passion!’ Her excuse does not impress her inquisitors, however, and she is imprisoned in the Tower of London. In a final meeting with Chetham, she regrets being unable to reciprocate his love, and expresses hope that he will ‘meet with someone worthy of [him]’. Chetham vows that he will never love again. She advises him to return to Manchester, and, as a cure for his unhappiness, to ‘devote [him]self to the business of life’ and ‘employ [him]self in [his] former occupations’. Shortly afterwards, Viviana dies before the conspirators come to trial.

   

   Figure 3: John Dee and Edward Kelley revive the injured Guy Fawkes with a magical potion (Chetham’s Library, 8.E.1.27, plate after p. 140).

   Ainsworth portrays Humphrey Chetham as the unsuccessful lover who never recovers from his unrequited passion for Viviana. The trauma of rejection and the premature death of Viviana affect him for the rest of his life: he remains unmarried and channels his energies, as she had advised, into business, making money which he uses for philanthropic purposes. From the perspective of two centuries later, Ainsworth pays tribute to the founder of Chetham’s Library and Hospital School:

   ‘Obedient to Viviana’s last request, he quitted London … and, acting upon her advice, devoted himself on his return to Manchester to his mercantile pursuits. His perseverance and integrity were crowned with entire success, and he became in due season the wealthiest merchant of the town. But the blighting of his early affections tinged his whole life, and gave a melancholy to his thoughts and an austerity to his manner originally foreign to them. True to his promise, he died unmarried. His long and worthy career was marked by actions of the greatest benevolence. In proportion as his means increased, his charities were extended, and he truly became “a father to the fatherless and destitute”. To him the town of Manchester is indebted for the noble library and hospital bearing his name; and for these admirable institutions by which they so largely benefit, his memory must ever be held in veneration by its inhabitants’.

   Ainsworth’s sensationalist historical fiction has not found favour with later generations: the critical consensus has preferred the humour and social conscience of Dickens, the psychological depth of George Eliot, and the romantic passions of the Brontës. Novels such as Guy Fawkes give us an insight into early-Victorian popular taste, however: audiences then preferred simple characterisation, continuous rapid action, and fantastic and supernatural elements above historical accuracy. The teenage Ainsworth, escaping from the uncongenial work in his solicitor’s office, probably contemplated the portrait of Humphrey Chetham in the Reading Room, and twenty years later, he invented a psychological explanation of youthful romantic disappointment to reconcile the severity of Chetham’s later appearance in the portrait with the benevolence of his actions in devoting his wealth to the foundation of the Library and Hospital School, through a fictional association with the college’s most famous warden (for a more factual account of Dee’s time as warden, you can read a recent blog post on the topic).

    

   Blog post by John Cleary

6. The Afterlives of John Dee’s Books

   28th February 2026 6:53 pm 2 Comments

   By the 1570s, John Dee had established at his home of Mortlake what has been described as the largest and most diverse library in Elizabethan England, containing—according to Dee—three thousand printed books and a thousand manuscripts. Before he departed for the continent in 1583, he selected eight hundred of his printed books and nearly a hundred manuscripts, requiring four coaches to transport these all around Europe. When he returned from the continent in 1589, however, he found that his home and much of his library at Mortlake had been plundered in his absence. From Dee’s once-fine collection, five books can now be found within Chetham’s Library’s collections, which have commonly been assumed to have remained in the college buildings between Dee’s departure and the library’s foundation in 1653, but their histories are actually much more interesting.

   Fortunately for us, Dee compiled two manuscript catalogues of his library in 1557 and 1583. Following his return from the continent, Dee annotated the latter catalogue, now in the library of Trinity College, Cambridge, and his notes provide an insight into the history of his books. This catalogue can be viewed online, also an edition of the catalogue was published by the Bibliographical Society in 1990. In its introduction, the editors suggest that Dee marked the books that he had taken with him with a ‘T’, and the books that he had left in the care of his brother-in-law Nicholas Fromond with an ‘Fr’. Two of Dee’s books now in Chetham’s Library’s collections—Konrad Gesner’s De remediis secretis (Chetham’s Library, Mun. 7.C.4.214) and Agostino Nifo’s Euthici Augustini (Chetham’s Library, Mun. A.6.42 (8))—were marked with a ‘T’, while three—Vitruvius’ De architectura (Chetham’s Library, P.8.23), Arrian’s Periplus euxeinou pontou (Chetham’s Library, Mun. 7.C.4.116) and Francesco Vimercati’s In quatuor libros Aristotelis meteorologicorum commentarii (Chetham’s Library, Dd.3.64(2))—were marked with an ‘Fr’.

   

   Figure 1: The title page of John Dee’s copy of Agostino Nifo’s Euthici Augustini (Chetham’s Library, Mun. A.6.42 (8)).

   In some cases, we also know something of these books’ later provenance. Dee’s copy of Agostino Nifo’s Euthici Augustini, which was marked as taken, can be traced to the collection of the prominent Mancunian scholar and short-hand writer John Byrom (1692–1763). Byrom had close connections with Chetham’s Library: he had been offered and turned down the librarianship, but remained a close associate of one of Chetham’s Librarian Robert Thyer (1732–63), and regularly acted as an agent for the library, purchasing books at London auctions. Like Dee, Byrom was a noted bibliophile, whose large collection of printed books and manuscripts was donated to the library following the death of his descendant, Eleonora Atherton, in 1870.

   Another of Dee’s books with an intriguing provenance is his copy of Vitruveus’ De architectura. Vitruvius was a Roman architect and engineer during the first century BC, but his work covered geometry, arithmetic, painting, music, astronomy, military fortification and the construction of machinery in addition to architecture. Besides Dee’s ownership mark, the title page of this book contains the inscription ‘John Soane Aug. 1805’, beneath which is written, in brackets and a different hand, ‘the Architect’. This refers to the renowned architect Sir John Soane, one of the most prominent architects of the Regency period, professor of architecture at the Royal Academy, and dedicated collector of paintings, sculpture, architectural fragments, models, books, drawings and furniture. His unique home can still be visited by the public today. This book had left Soane’s collection by 1871, when it appears in Chetham’s Library’s accessions register, having been purchased for three shillings and five pence from a Mr John Walker in London. Furthermore, Dee’s copy of the De architectura was not included in the first printed catalogue of Soane’s library in 1830, suggesting the book had left his collection during his lifetime.

   

   Figure 2: Annotations in John Dee’s copy of Vitruveus’ De architectura (Chetham’s Library, P.8.23, n.p.).

   The acquisition of the remaining three books that belonged to Dee during the nineteenth century was linked to the formation of the Chetham Society in 1843, and to the influence of the local antiquarians who founded it (most notably James Crossley, Francis Robert Raines, Thomas Corser and Richard Parkinson). The Chetham Society is the oldest historical society in the North West of England, and the second most senior historical society in the North. The society’s interest in Dee is apparent in one of the earlier titles published by the society, The Autobiographical Tracts of Dr John Dee (1851). In the preface to this work, James Crossley explained that ‘the following Tracts having been printed off some time ago, it has been considered desirable to include them as part of the present volume. The Correspondence of Dr. Dee, with selections from his MSS. and printed works, will form a separate publication, to which will be prefixed a fuller account than has yet been given of the Life and Writings of this most extraordinary person’.

   The forthcoming publication referred to by Crossley could be either of two different works, the first of which was being prepared by Chetham’s Librarian Thomas Jones (1845–75). This work, A Selection of the Letters Written by Dr Dee with an Introduction of Collectanea Relating to his Life and Works, was listed as forthcoming in a list of works under contemplation and in progress in 1869. Unfortunately, Jones died before the work was completed, but the manuscript of it in his own hand was donated to the library as part of the Francis Robert Raines Collection in 1878. It was also during Jones’ librarianship that Dee’s printed items entered the collection, and the notes in the library’s accessions register that these copies belonged to Dee suggests that this was an important factor in their acquisition. The other work that Crossley may have been referring to was one being undertaken by John Eglinton Bailey, another Chetham Society stalwart and Lancashire antiquarian. Bailey was in the process of transcribing the diary that Dee kept during his time in Manchester, a work that was intended for private circulation, with only twenty copies published in 1880. The following year, he established the Palatine Notebook, a journal in which he published pieces on Dee’s printed books within Chetham’s Library, including Dee’s copy of Konrad Gesner’s De remediis secretis. Bailey was also a regular contributor to The Bibliographer, and wrote that ‘amongst other relics of the celebrated Dr Dee in Chetham’s Library is his copy of the 1533 edition of Arrian’s Circumnavigation of the Black Sea’.

   

   Figure 3: John Dee’s copy of Arrian’s Periplus euxeinou pontou in Chetham’s Library’s accessions register (Chetham’s Library, Chet/4/11/1, fol. 168r).

   Chetham’s Library’s accessions register records that Dee’s copy of Arrian’s Periplus euxeinou pontou entered the library’s collections in 1870 through purchase, and specifies that it contains ‘Dee’s autograph notes’. This detail was re-iterated in the acquired book itself, in which a nineteenth-century hand added the words ‘Autograph and MSS of the Famous Dr Dee Warden of Manchester College’. It is difficult to discern what happened to the book between Dee’s ownership of it and its acquisition by at the library (it was among those that were plundered while he was abroad), but there was clearly an appetite at Chetham’s Library and in its circle for collecting books that had belonged to Dee. This is further illustrated by Bailey’s correspondence with a Mr B. H. Beedam, in which he mentioned that he ‘came across another Dee note … the late Joseph Lilly, the bookseller, had a copy of Aristotelis Metereologica et cum Comentarius F. Vicomercarti, with the autograph of the former Dr Dee’. He cited the catalogue of the sale by Sotheby’s of the second portion of Lilly’s books in June and July 1871. The book that Bailey mentioned, Dee’s copy of Francesco Vimercati’s In quatuor libros Aristotelis meteorologicorum commentarii, entered the library’s collection by 1883. The fact that the correspondence mentioned ‘another Dee note’ suggests that books connected to Dee were actively being sought, at the very least by Bailey, who was serving as a member of the Chetham Society’s council by 1876, and as its secretary from 1882.

   

   Figure 4: Annotation in John Dee’s copy of Arrian’s Periplus euxeinou pontou (Chetham’s Library, Mun. 7.C.4.116, n.p).

   The final printed book that belonged to Dee, his copy of Konrad Gesner’s De remediis secretis, which entered the library’s collections in 1871, once again through purchase (at a cost of seven shillings). This is one of the library’s more heavily annotated books owned by Dee, featuring his notes, alchemical illustrations and recipes. A note has been added in a later hand on page 49 ‘the famous Dr Dee Warden of our Town of Manchester’. The book also contains an ownership inscription by John Barker de Hopwood, a name that belonged to a local gentry family. During his time in Manchester, Dee had leant books to Edmund Hopwood, justice of the peace, so it is possible that the book had remained with members of the Hopwood family (although further research is needed to confirm this).

   

   Figure 5: Annotation in John Dee’s copy of Konrad Gesner’s De remediis secretis (Chetham’s Library, Mun. 7.C.4.214, p. 48).

   It is therefore clear that the printed books owned by Dee that are now found in Chetham’s Library’s collections did not remain in the college buildings between Dee’s departure and the library’s foundation in 1653. Many of these books instead found their way into the vast collections of like-minded individuals such as John Byrom and John Soane, and were later acquired by the library as a result of the interest (and consequent collecting activity) of the nineteenth-century antiquarians associated with the library and the Chetham Society in one of Manchester’s most famous historical residents. Although Dee’s years in Manchester were largely unhappy and disappointing, he remains one of the most fascinating figures associated with the city, and will surely remain so.

    

   Blog post by Laura Bryer

7. Shakespeare’s Third Folio: Early Readers and Their Marginalia

   12th February 2026 10:19 am Leave a Comment

   Chetham’s Library’s copy of the 1664 Third Folio, the subject of a recent blog post, is a handsome complete copy in an eighteenth-century dark blue calfskin binding, with decorative gilt borders and gilt-edged pages. It was first mentioned in the printed catalogue of the library, published in 1826, the previous volume of which had been compiled in 1791. The Third Folio has therefore been at Chetham’s Library since the late eighteenth century or the first quarter of the nineteenth century. On the page showing the famous Droeshout portrait of Shakespeare and Ben Jonson’s poem, which refers to the portrait and praised Shakespeare’s wit (‘Reader, look/ Not on his Picture but his Book’), the name Jo: Eddowes is inscribed in a seventeenth- or eighteenth-century hand. Jo(hn?) Eddowes was probably an early or even the first owner of the book.

   Inside the front cover, two bookplates have been pasted down. One of these is the bookplate of Chetham’s Library, showing Humphrey Chetham’s coat of arms featuring the familiar griffin. The other bookplate shows the coat of arms of the Scudamore family with the inscription ‘The Right Honble. Ye Viscountess Scudamore’. The coat of arms bears the motto ‘Scuto Amoris Divini’ (‘by the shield of divine love’), and the deviser of the motto chose Latin phonological approximations to the English sounds, with ‘scut-’ signifying ‘shield’ in Latin and ‘amor-’ signifying ‘love’. The English etymology of Scudamore (probably a village place name meaning ‘low moor’) was therefore disregarded in order to produce a new, more elevated Latin-inspired meaning.

   

   Figure 1: The bookplates of Viscountess Scudamore and Chetham’s Library in the Third Folio (Chetham’s Library, Mun. 7.B.1.2, front pastedown).

   The Third Folio is the sole book in Chetham’s Library whose previous owner can be identified as Viscountess Scudamore. Frances Scudamore (1684-1729) was the daughter of Simon, fourth Baron Digby, and the wife of the third Viscount Scudamore of Sligo, the Tory MP for Herefordshire. He predeceased her, dying in 1716 at the age of 32 from the effects of a fall from his horse. During the early 1700s, the Third Folio is likely to have been kept in the library of the Herefordshire mansion of the Scudamores, Holme Lacey, which is now a hotel.

   In 1623, the First Folio was priced at 15 shillings without a binding, or about £1 with a binding. The price of the Third Folio in 1664 would have been perhaps a few shillings more. There is no record of the volume being donated to Chetham’s Library, so it is likely that it was purchased at some point between 1792 and 1826. On one of the blank initial leaves there is a pencilled price of £65, which may have been the price that was paid for it by the library. Meanwhile, inside the back cover, a small newspaper cutting referring to a Sotheby’s sale in March 1899 of another copy of the Third Folio for £260 has been pasted down. At the 2025 Melbourne book fair, a copy of the Third Folio was on sale for $2 million.

   

   Figure 2: The character list for Othello in the Third Folio (Chetham’s Library, Mun. 7.B.1.2, p. 817).

   Chetham’s Library’s copy of the Third Folio bears some marks of past readers studying the texts closely. In the early modern period, the convention of printing a list of characters and the location of the action before the start of a play was starting to become standard. In the Third Folio, as in the previous two editions, the character lists are highly inconsistent. Only seven plays feature ‘The Actors Names’ (i.e. the names of the characters) but, unusually, these are printed at the end of each play. In most cases, the list of characters fills a space on the final page of the play text that would otherwise be blank. For Henry IV Part 2 and Timon of Athens, however, the lists occupy a whole page, and the characters are grouped not only according to their status and gender, but also their dramatic functions or allegiances.

   

   Figure 3: The character list for Henry IV Part 2 in the Third Folio (Chetham’s Library, Mun. 7.B.1.2, p. 404).

   In Chetham’s Library’s copy of the Third Folio, an early reader added character lists at the conclusion of five comedies: Twelfth Night; The Taming of the Shrew; As You Like It; The Merchant of Venice, and The Comedy of Errors. These lists follow the practice of some printed lists in identifying some characters’ occupations, status and relationships to other characters, and are presented approximately in the order of the social status or importance of the character’s role in the play. The female characters are listed separately after the male characters. In the list compiled by a reader of the Twelfth Night, Orsino appears at the head of the list, identified as the Duke of Illyria ‘in love with Olivia’. Sir Toby Belch appears second in the list, although his surname is omitted and he is identified as the ‘uncle to Olivia’. Oddly, the reader has given the most detailed description to a relatively minor character: ‘Anthonio, an old sea captain who had formerly fought against ye Duke’.

   

   Figure 4: An early reader’s character list for Twelfth Night in the Third Folio (Chetham’s Library, Mun. 7.B.1.2, p. 276).

   In the case of The Comedy of Errors, the compiler may have felt that a character list would help them follow the complexities of the plot. This play’s comedic confusion arises from there being two sets of identical twins, accidentally separated at birth; each twin has the same name as his brother, with one set of twins being masters and the other set their servants. The plot is based on a comedy by the Roman playwright Plautus, in which the plot similarly revolves around multiple mistaken identities. Unless a reader had a strong theatrical imagination, private reading of the text was likely to produce even more confusion than a public performance. The act of compiling and consulting the list may have helped the early reader of the play clarify the characters and the plot.

   

   Figure 5: An early reader’s character list for The Comedy of Errors in the Third Folio (Chetham’s Library, Mun. 7.B.1.2, p. 100).

   The printed text of Hamlet carries two marginal notes. The first is a gloss of Horatio’s description of the Ghost of Hamlet’s Father in Act 1 scene 1 as an ‘extravagant and erring spirit’. The Ghost describes how he is punished in Purgatory in daytime but leaves each night to wander the earth, and the gloss reads: ‘extravagant: wandering out of its proper boundaries’. The wording of the reader’s definition is very close to that of the first meaning given by Dr Samuel Johnson in his Dictionary of the English Language (1755): ‘wandering out of his bounds’. According to Johnson, this was ‘the primogeneal sense [of the term], but not now in use’. This archaic meaning was derived from the word’s Latin etymology: ‘extra’ means ‘outside of’, and ‘vagrans’ means ‘wandering’. By the mid-eighteenth century, this meaning of ‘extravagant’ had been largely displaced by a semantic shift towards associations with wildness and recklessness, often financial. Remarkably, the usage that Johnson quoted to support his definition was the same line from Hamlet that was glossed by this reader.

   

   Figure 6: A reader’s definition of the use of ‘extravagant’ in Hamlet (Chetham’s Library, Mun. 7.B.1.2, p. 731).

   One other annotation occurs in the text of Hamlet. Next to Claudius’s speech in Act 1 Scene ii, in which he sends his messengers Cornelius and Voltemand on a mission to the king of Norway, a reader has written in Latin the marginal note ‘Aeschyli Persae’, a reference to what is probably the earliest extant Greek tragedy, Aeschylus’ Persians. It is difficult to see any direct and specific relevance of Claudius’s speech to Aeschylus’s play, and it is more likely that the reader had a comparison of characters and dramatic situations in mind. In both Persians and Hamlet, the ghost of a deceased father returns from the underworld and comments on his son’s behaviour. In Persians, the ghost of Darius is appalled by what he learns of Xerxes’s military failure, and attributes it to insanity: ‘what else but a disease of mind was this | that took hold of my son?’ Meanwhile, the revelations of the Ghost of Hamlet’s Father initially inspire Hamlet to feign madness in order to achieve his revenge.  Later critical comparison of Shakespeare with Aeschylus has centred not on Persians but on the Oresteia, and the similarity of Hamlet and Orestes as sons seeking revenge for the deaths of their fathers. The early reader of this copy of Hamlet was intrigued not by the more obvious parallel with the Oresteia’s theme of revenge, but by that between the return from the afterlife of the two paternal ghosts.

   

   Figure 7: A reader sees a parallel between Hamlet and Aeschylus’ Persians (Chetham’s Library, Mun. 7.B.1.2, p. 731).

   Finally, one other, probably later, handwritten addition to Chetham’s Third Folio is less learnedly obscure but very strongly felt. The book’s dedicatory epistle to William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke and Philip Herbert, Earl of Montgomery, is couched in the typical language of seventeenth-century flattery of aristocratic patrons, but Heminge and Condell went further in their sycophancy and appear to disparage the plays that they are supposedly recommending. They present the plays to the earls as ‘the remains of your servant Shakespeare’, request their ‘indulgence’, and refer to the plays as ‘these trifles’. Above the word ‘trifles’, a reader has written a single word, ‘blasphemy’. The judgement is a noteworthy example of literal Bardolatory, with Shakespeare’s plays conceived of by the reader as if they were a sacred text.

   

   Figure 8: A reader expresses their shock at the apparent disparagement of Shakespeare’s plays (Chetham’s Library, Mun. 7.B.1.2, n.p.).

   The word ‘Bardolatory’ was coined by G. B. Shaw in 1901 to denote the excessive worship of Shakespeare that developed from the time of Garrick’s Shakespeare Jubilee in 1769 and peaked in Victorian England with such panegyrics as Thomas Carlyle’s in On Heroes and Hero-Worship (1841). To express the supreme value that he placed on Shakespeare, Carlyle proposed a hypothetical choice between losing Shakespeare or the ‘Indian Empire’. Despite his well-deserved reputation as a racist imperialist, Carlyle opted to lose the Empire on the grounds that it was only temporary, while Shakespeare would undoubtedly act as a nationally unifying force a thousand years in the future. As a Victorian Bardolator, Carlyle was highly influential. The hand in which the word ‘blasphemy’ is written appears to be different from and later than that of other additions to the text, and the addition may well have been made by a nineteenth-century reader who shared Carlyle’s view of Shakespeare. If this was the case, then it would have occurred after the book was acquired by Chetham’s Library. Such was the reader’s sense of outrage at the plays being labelled ‘trifles’ that they were willing to flout the library’s rules in order to express their extreme indignation at the apparent belittlement of Shakespeare’s work.

    

   Blog post by John Cleary

   With thanks to Laura Bryer, Emma Nelson and Ellen Werner for their help and advice.

    

8. John Dee and Alchemy

   29th January 2026 11:43 am Leave a Comment

   When John Dee initially sought appointment as the warden of a collegiate church following his travels on the continent, Manchester was far from his mind. Instead, he had fixed his hopes on the wardenship of the Hospital of St Cross in Winchester, or else the provostship of Eton College or the mastership of Sherborne School. Among the reasons that he listed for preferring the wardenship of St Cross above all other appointments was its ease of access to glass-blowers in the south of England, which would have enabled him to personally oversee the production of glass instruments, and the space afforded by the hospital buildings for the establishment of a printing workshop and what would now be called a ‘research institute’ to advise the royal court. It seems likely, given his mention of such glass instruments, that Dee’s proposed research included alchemy.

   The practice of alchemy, ‘a form of speculative thought that, among other aims, tried to transform base metals such as lead or copper into silver or gold and to discover a cure for disease and a way of extending life’, fascinated scientists for centuries. First practiced in Hellenic and Greco-Roman Egypt during the classical period, interest in alchemy was revived in the West following the translation of lost Greek scientific and medical texts from Arabic (in which they had been preserved) into Latin during the twelfth century and their re-introduction into the Western textual canon. Even the practice’s name reflects its route of transmission, since the word ‘alchemy’ descends from the Arabic word ‘al-kīmiyā’, meaning ‘the Egyptian [science]’. Alchemy remained a common preoccupation in medieval Europe, reflected in surviving alchemical manuscripts such as the famous Ripley Scrolls, a family of parchment scrolls that display learnedly-obscure mystical imagery, the meaning of which is not fully understood even today.

   

   Figure 1: Hermes Trismegistus, the purported founder of alchemy, holding a large vessel known as a Hermetic Vase in a sixteenth-century ‘Ripley Scroll’ (San Marino, Huntington Library, HM 30313).

   The appeal of alchemy persisted during the early modern period, and the practice was adopted by those who, in subsequent centuries, would come to be described as scientists: the modern word ‘chemistry’ shares its etymology with ‘alchemy’, and the first recorded instances of the terms ‘research’ and ‘researcher’ in a scientific sense in English both occur in an alchemical context (albeit after Dee’s lifetime). Even the renowned scientist Isaac Newton (1643–1727) is known to have taken an interest in alchemy alongside his more famous scientific pursuits; indeed, the two were very closely entwined for him. Besides the more famous goals of transmuting base metals into precious ones and discovering the philosopher’s stone, the art of alchemy also extended to practices that might today be termed ‘chemical technology’, such as the production of pigments and salts, the refinement of ores, the manufacture of acids and the distillation of alcohol, and to medicine,  pursuits that were all linked by their experimental approach.

   John Dee was arguably Britain’s most famous alchemist, and his interest in the subject was reflected in his personal library, which was one of the largest in sixteenth-century England. His collection included a large number of books about alchemy, many of which can now be found in the library of the Royal College of Physicians, which contains more than one hundred books from Dee’s library. Nor was Dee’s engagement with alchemy purely theoretical: he constructed alchemical laboratories at his home of Mortlake, and in 1571, he travelled to the Duchy of Lorraine (present-day Lorraine in France) to acquire and bring back ‘a great cartload of specially made vessels’ for these laboratories. As was seen, he also hoped to supervise the production of glass instruments from the Hospital of St Cross.

   

   Figure 2: The title page of John Dee’s copy of Konrad Gesner’s De remediis secretis (Chetham’s Library, Mun. 7.C.4.214).

   

   Figure 3: A depiction of a furnace in Konrad Gesner’s De remediis secretis (Chetham’s Library, Mun. 7.C.4.214, p. 74).

   Fortunately, Dee’s own handwritten catalogue of his library survives, and is preserved in the library of Trinity College, Cambridge. This catalogue can be viewed online, while the an edition of the catalogue was published by the Bibliographical Society in 1990. Meanwhile, a search for ‘alchemy’ in Chetham’s Library’s catalogue of printed books returns sixty-seven results, forty-seven of which relate to books published between 1500 and 1699. Cross-referencing these two catalogues enables us to identify three books that Dee is known to have possessed copies of that can also be found in our collections. One of these alchemy books actually belonged to Dee himself, a copy of Konrad Gesner’s De remediis secretis, published psuedonymously in Lyon in 1555. This work was primarily concerned with the art of distillation and its use in medicine, and it contains illustrations depicting furnaces, glassware and other equipment used in the distillation process. Chetham’s Library’s copy of this book contains extensive manuscript annotations, underlining and even small drawings, most of which were made by Dee himself.

   

   Figure 4: The title page of Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim’s De occulta philosophia (Chetham’s Library, 2.I.5.32).

   

   Figure 5: The title page of Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim’s De occulta philosophia (Chetham’s Library, 3.A.2.28).

   Another book that Dee is known to have owned a copy of was Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim’s De occulta philosophia. Von Nettesheim was a physician, legal scholar, soldier, theologian, occult writer, and court historiographer to the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V. He was born in Cologne and studied and taught at the university there, before travelling widely and lecturing in theology at various universities. He may also have founded a secret society devoted to magic, astrology and the Kabbalah, and, like Dee, he has since been compared to the literary Dr Faustus, who made a pact with the devil in order to obtain knowledge, wealth and power. The De occulta philosophia was divided into three parts concerning the natural world, the celestial world, and the divine world. In it, Von Nettesheim explained the philosophy and methods of magic, alchemy and astrology, and provided examples, illustrations, diagrams and techniques. He drew information from classical, medieval, and renaissance sources, and synthesised them into ‘a coherent explanation of the magical world’ in accordance with the Christian faith (although the work still faced censure from the Inquisition). Chetham’s Library possesses two editions of this book that were published during Dee’s lifetime: one that was published in Basel or Cologne in 1533, and another that was published in Paris in 1567. More recently, the publisher Inner Traditions released a modern hardback edition of Von Nettesheim’s book, which the publishers Simon & Schuster described as ‘one of the most important texts in the Western magical tradition for nearly 500 years’. The book was priced at no less than £170!

   

   Figure 6: Title page of Guglielmo Gratarolo’s Alchemiae quam vocant (Chetham’s Library, 3.E.3.36).

   

   Figure 7: A text attributed to Roger Bacon in the Alchemiae quam vocant (Chetham’s Library, 3.E.3.36, p. 518).

   A third book that Dee is known to have owned a copy of was known by an exceptionally long title, Alchemiae, quam vocant, artisque metallicae, doctrina, certusque modus, scriptis tum nouis, tum veteribus, duobus his voluminibus comprehensus (‘The doctrine and certain manner of alchemy, as they call it, or the art of metals, in both new writings and old, contained in these two volumes’). This book was edited and published by Guglielmo Gratarolo, a physician and alchemist from a wealthy Italian family who studied at Padua and Venice. As a Calvinist, he was forced to flee Italy and sought refuge in Graubünden, Strasbourg and finally Basel, where he taught medicine and edited texts on a wide range of subjects, including medicine, dietetics, memory, wine, agriculture, and alchemy. It was there that Chetham’s Library’s copy of the Alchemiae quam vocant was printed in 1572. In the preface to this work, Gratarolo announced his intention of editing and publishing new and existing alchemical texts for a new generation of scholars, while correcting the obscure passages in them to make them easier for readers to understand. At a time when out-of-print texts were much harder to access than they are today, this must have been an invaluable book for any aspiring alchemist to possess. Chetham’s Library’s collections also contain two more books about alchemy that were edited by Gratarolo: Johannes de Rupescissa’s De consideratione quintae essentiae rerum omnium (Basel, 1597), and Giovanni Braccesco’s De alchemia (Hamburg, 1673).

   Despite his strongly-expressed preference for the wardenship of St Cross, Dee was appointed as the warden of Christ’s College in Manchester and installed in February 1596. As was seen in a recent blog post, the college’s affairs were in a disordered state, and his attempts to resolve them brought him into conflict with the fellows. He nevertheless found some time to pursue his interest in alchemy while he was in Manchester, although his plans for a research institute never came to fruition. Another of Dee’s unrealised proposals was the foundation of a national library, and while his period in Manchester came half a century before Humphrey Chetham left money for the creation of a public library in the town, it is almost certain that he would have thoroughly approved of the project. Indeed, it is probably the case that he would have been much happier if he had come to Manchester as a librarian, rather than as the warden of a college of priests!

    

   Blog post by Patti Collins

9. Shakespeare’s Third Folio: The Page vs. the Stage

   7th January 2026 1:52 pm Leave a Comment

   One of the most fascinating books in Chetham’s Library’s less well-known literature collection is a copy of Mr William Shakespeare’s comedies, histories and tragedies, published according to the true original copies, better known as the Third Folio (1664). The title page of this work specified that it was ‘the third impression’, meaning that it largely reproduced the First and Second Folios, published respectively in 1623 and 1632. The First Folio is a collection of thirty-six plays, only eighteen of which had been previously published in the small individual editions known as quartos. Without it, we would not have half of Shakespeare’s dramatic output, including Macbeth, Julius Caesar, The Tempest and Twelfth Night. Although it has never enjoyed the celebrity status of the First Folio, the Third Folio has two major claims to distinction: its comparative rarity, and the addition of a group of plays not published in the First and Second Folios. Out of the seven extra plays included at the end of the Third Folio, only one—Pericles, Prince of Tyre (1607)—is now generally acknowledged to be mainly the work of Shakespeare. All seven of the additional plays had been published during Shakespeare’s lifetime in quarto form, and on the title pages of these editions they had been attributed either to ‘William Shakespeare’ or ‘W.S.’, an indication of the commercial power of Shakespeare’s name even during his own lifetime.

   The inclusion of Pericles in the Shakespearean canon facilitates a fuller picture of Shakespeare’s obsessions during the later part of his writing career. The play deals with themes of restitution and the re-establishment of justice, linking it to the other late plays such as The Winter’s Tale, Cymbeline and The Tempest, which are often classified as romances rather than comedies or tragedies. Pericles, like Leontes in The Winter’s Tale, after years of suffering and separation, regains his daughter and his wife. Pericles is an exiled ruler who, with supernatural aid, is ultimately restored to his land, as is Prospero in The Tempest. The heroines of the four plays—Marina, Perdita, Imogen and Miranda—all embody fortitude and innocence. All four romances have potentially tragic elements, too, but the sense of injustice and loss is resolved in denouements featuring recognitions, restorations, healing and harmony.

   

   Figure 1: The Droeshout Portrait in the First Folio.

   The Third Folio is a rarer book than the First Folio. Some copies of the Third Folio bear the date 1663 while others, including Chetham’s Library’s copy, are dated 1664. It is likely that 750 copies of the First Folio book were printed, of which at least 235 survive, while only about 182 copies of the Third Folio have thus far been traced. Since the seventeenth-century London book trade was centred in the area around St Paul’s Cathedral, unsold copies of the Third Folio are thought to have been destroyed two years after its publication during the Great Fire of London in 1666.

   The layout of the first two printed pages of Chetham’s Library’s copy of the 1664 Third Folio differs from that of all earlier printings. In this copy, the famous Droeshout engraved portrait of Shakespeare and Ben Jonson’s poem ‘To the reader’ appear on the first printed page, facing the title page. In the First, Second and 1663 Third Folios, the first printed page contains only Jonson’s poem, while the engraved portrait occupies most of the title page. The printers of the 1664 Third Folio moved the Shakespeare portrait to the preceding page in order to make room for a list of the seven extra plays on the title page. In the 1663 Third Folio, this list of plays appears near the back of the volume, before the seven supplementary plays. The greater prominence afforded to the list in the 1664 printing may indicate their value as a unique selling point of the Third Folio. Indeed, when the Bodleian Library acquired a Third Folio upon its publication, it de-accessioned its copy of the First Folio on the grounds that it was obsolete, only re-accessioning the same copy two-hundred-and-fifty years later.

   

   Figure 2: The Droeshout Portrait and Ben Jonson’s ‘To the reader’, facing the title page, which lists the seven additional plays in the 1664 Third Folio (Chetham’s Library, Mun. 7.B.1.2, facing title page).

   Paratextual material from the First Folio was also carried over into the Third Folio. As well as Jonson’s poem, the Third Folio contains two letters signed by Shakespeare’s fellow actors in the King’s Company, John Heminge and Henry Condell, who are usually credited with ‘editing’ the First Folio. They presumably collected and provided the printers with the texts of the thirty-six plays, including the eighteen previously unpublished plays, but did not ‘edit’ in the modern sense of ensuring presentational consistency. The Third Folio was ‘printed for P.C.’, Philip Chetwinde, who probably added the seven extra plays ‘never before printed in folio’, as the title page boasts.

   The first letter in all of the Folios is a dedication to the aristocratic brothers, William and Philip Herbert, using the sycophantic language that was standard for addressing patrons at the time. The second letter, ‘To the great variety of readers’, encouraged the reader to buy the book. These are followed by four dedicatory poems in praise of Shakespeare, a list of actors, and a catalogue of the plays divided into the familiar genres of comedies, histories and tragedies. Although the text of Troilus and Cressida was included in the First Folio, the title of the play was not listed; in the Third Folio, the omission was rectified, and ‘Troylus and Cressida’ appears at the head of the list of tragedies.

   

   Figure 3: The Comedies, Histories and Tragedies listed in the order in which they appear in the Third Folio (Chetham’s Library, Mun. 7.B.1.2, n.p.).

   The publication of the Third Folio in 1663–4 reflects the renewed interest in drama during the Restoration period. Performances of plays had been illegal between 1642 and 1660, and the Restoration of Charles II brought with it an enormous appetite for the many types of entertainment that had been denied the mass of people during the period of the Cromwellian Republic. There were initially few new plays to mount, so theatrical producers such as Thomas Betterton, Thomas Killigrew and William D’Avenant turned to texts from earlier in the century, chief among them Shakespeare’s plays. By the 1660s, however, these plays had come to seem very old-fashioned and did not always delight the public. Samuel Pepys, an ardent theatre-goer, recorded enduring the very first Restoration performance of Romeo and Juliet in March 1662: ‘the play of itself the worst I ever heard in my life, and the worst acted that I ever saw these people do’. Six months later, he was no happier with A Midsummer Night’s Dream, denouncing it as ‘the most insipid ridiculous play that I ever saw in my life’. Despite Jonson’s praise in his second dedicatory poem (‘he was not of an age but for all time!’), the image of Shakespeare as a timeless genius was not yet firmly established.

   

   Figure 4: The balcony scene in Romeo and Juliet that failed to entrance Samuel Pepys (Chetham’s Library, Mun. 7.B.1.2, p. 648).

   Restoration producers of plays quickly realised that if Shakespeare’s plays were to be staged, they must be adapted to suit the taste of the times. Accordingly, extended musical interludes, singing, dancing and extravagant visual spectacle featured prominently, in a marked contrast to the more austere and technically limited stagings of the Elizabethan and Jacobean theatres. A further radical change saw female roles played by actresses rather than boy actors for the first time, and such was the popularity of women on the stage that adaptations of older plays increased the number of female parts. In William D’Avenant’s and John Dryden’s adaptation of The Tempest, for example, both Caliban and Miranda are given sisters, Sycorax and Dorinda, with entirely new romantic entanglements. Another cultural shift was evident in the Restoration distaste for unrelieved tragedy. Some previously tragic dramas were given happy endings. In Nahum Tate’s notorious re-write of King Lear, the aged monarch lives on at the end of the play in serene retirement, and instead of being hanged, Cordelia becomes queen and finds true love and happiness with Edgar. Chetham’s Library’s copy of the Third Folio contains a book plate indicating that it was owned by the Viscountess Scudamore in the early eighteenth century. If the lady attended a performance of King Lear and then rushed home to read the text of the play in her copy of the Third Folio, she would have had a very unpleasant surprise!

   It is clear that there was a disconnect between the versions of Shakespeare being seen by audiences on the late seventeenth-century stage, and the plays as they were published in the 1663 and 1664 Third Folios, as well as the subsequent edition, the Fourth Folio of 1685. In contrast to the free theatrical adaptations, the Third Folio retains Heminge and Condell’s insistence from the First Folio that the texts were ‘published according to the true original copies’. They refer to the earlier quarto versions of the plays, which were ‘stolne, and surreptitious copies, maimed, and deformed by the frauds and stealthes of injurious impostors’. These are now ‘offer’d to your view cur’d, and perfect of their limbes; and all the rest, absolute in their numbers as he [Shakespeare] conceived them’. Heminge and Condell’s boast of the integrity and authenticity of the texts that they published had become highly ironic by the late seventeenth century, since the texts were no longer seen as theatrically viable in their original form. The Third Folio, even more than the First and Second Folios, was a collection of texts not for theatrical performance, but for private reading and study.

    

   Blog post by John Cleary

    

10. John Dee and the Tudor College

    13th December 2025 4:46 pm 3 Comments

    At around midday on 15 February 1596, following an arduous journey by road and water, John Dee arrived in Tudor Manchester. Five days later, he was installed in a (presumably chilly) ceremony as warden of the town’s collegiate church, now Manchester Cathedral, and it cannot have been long after that he realised the college that he had come to preside over was a poor and fractious one. Dee’s wardenship was marked by strife and financial hardship for the college and himself, and in September 1597, he wrote to his friend, Sir Edward Dyer, to complain about the ‘most intricate, cumbersome, and (in manner) lamentable affayres & estate of this defamed & disordered colledge of Manchester’.

    The causes of the college’s disordered state during the late sixteenth century were diverse and overlapping, but the chief was confusion over the college’s possessions that stretched back to the middle of the century. As a secular-clerical foundation (a foundation staffed by priests rather than monks), the college had weathered Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries, but its fate was sealed during the early years of Edward VI’s reign by the Chantry Act of 1547. According to this act, the college was dissolved, its lands were seized by the crown, and the fellows were pensioned off. When the college was refounded by Mary in 1557, it was re-endowed with its former lands, and some of the fellows who had been there before the dissolution returned again. One of these was the future warden Laurence Vaux, a Catholic recusant who refused to swear the oath of supremacy following Elizabeth I’s ascension just two years later. By the time the queen’s commissioners visited the college in October 1559, Vaux had already fled to the continent, taking the college’s previous silver plate, vestments and muniments (the title deeds to the college’s properties) and hiding them with the local Standish family in an attempt to frustrate the aims of the Protestant reformers and set the stage for the college’s eventual Catholic restoration.

    

    Figure 1: The medieval quire of Manchester Cathedral, formerly the town’s collegiate church.

    In 1561, Elizabeth appointed Thomas Herle as the college’s warden. It is difficult to judge this warden’s character, since half of the scholarly literature on him claims that he was tasked with stripping the college of its properties and leasing them to the queen, while the other half sees this as a prudent action that set the college on a firmer legal foundation while guaranteeing an annual rent from the crown. Meanwhile, other properties were leased locally for periods of up to ninety-nine years, securing lump sum payments to the warden and fellows at the expense of the college’s long-term income. Herle spun such a convoluted web of leases that it became hard to know who the rightful tenants of many properties were, a problem that was probably exacerbated by Vaux’s action in 1557. In any case, Herle proved unpopular as warden, and following a petition from the town’s parishioners, Elizabeth re-founded the college in 1578 under the new name of Christ’s College. At the same time, she reduced the size of its community by half, possibly because the college’s income was by then insufficient to support a larger community: during the late sixteenth century, several fellows had to support themselves through medicine, law and even hospitality. Herle was pensioned off when the college was re-founded, although it has been suggested that he continued to cause trouble during the subsequent wardenships of John Wolton (1579–80) and William Chaderton (1580–95) by forging charters using a copy of the college’s seal matrix. One of these suspect charters still survives in the archives of Manchester Cathedral.

    One of the first tasks that faced Dee when he was installed as warden was to resolve the confusion around the college’s possessions and income. A draft of a commission that was drawn up in 1596, also in the cathedral archives, instructed Dee to investigate the poor state of the college and the authenticity of the college’s muniments, which were said to be ‘imbeseled, rased, diminished, defaced & kept from the sayd Warden & fellowes of the sayd Colledge to the greate loss & hinderance of the sayd Warden and fellowes’. In the manorial court of Newton (one of the college’s properties), Dee strove to recover lost tithes and prevent encroachments onto the college’s properties, although the process was inefficient: one offender, Richard Heape, had first appeared before the court in 1584 and was subsequently prosecuted by Dee at the court of the Duchy of Lancaster in London, but the case was not resolved until 1602. Dee also sought to define the parish boundaries, carrying out surveys and promoting the medieval custom of ‘beating the bounds’, fixing stakes, and engaging the most famous mapmaker, Christopher Saxton, to define and measure the town.

    

    Figure 2: John Dee’s signature on a letter to William Langley, rector of Prestwich, dated 2 May 1597, concerning the bounds of the parish of Manchester (Chetham’s Library, Raines C.6.63, vol. 32, p. 9).

    The problems around the college’s income were compounded by more general factors. The final decade of the sixteenth century was marked by pronounced economic depression and widespread famine across England, and four consecutive years in which the wheat harvest was poor meant that the country came to depend on imported Polish rye. In the aforementioned letter to Sir Edmund Dyer, Dee reported that he had received ‘barrels of rye from Danzig, some cattle from Wales, and some fish from Hull’, but complained that ‘so hard & thinne a dyet, never in all my life, did I, nay was I forced, so long, to tast’, nor had his servants ever had ‘so slender allowance at their table’. The general economic depression also resulted in inflation, leading to the general erosion of clerical incomes during this period as fixed monetary tithes and tithes of livestock came to count for less than they previously had. Dee found his stipend of four shillings a day as warden insufficient to support himself and his household, and he was repeatedly obliged to pawn his valuables in order to borrow money from local gentry, including Edmund Chetham.

    All of these hardships could perhaps have been borne if Dee had found a welcoming community at the college, but his dealings with the fellows were acrimonious. The late sixteenth century was still a time of religious turmoil, and national troubles were played out on a smaller scale in Manchester’s college. The previous warden, William Chadderton, had concurrently been the bishop of Chester (1579–95), and he had placed the college at the heart of the Protestant reformation of Lancashire. In order to suppress Catholicism in the region, Chadderton was prepared to overlook a strand of Protestant nonconformity that had emerged within the college community, reflected in the refusal of several fellows to wear the surplice, a type of vestment that was regarded with suspicion by radical Protestants as a relic of Catholicism. Dee’s appointment as warden was partly intended to curb such nonconformity, and this brought him into conflict with the ‘turbulent fellows’. Dee described the fellow Oliver Carter’s ‘impudent and evident disobedience in the church’, possibly related to the wearing of the surplice, and Carter—who also practiced as a solicitor—threatened to sue Dee.

    Dee left Manchester in 1598, and did not return until the summer of 1600. Despite his ‘heady displeasure’ with the college’s fellows in his absence, he reconciled with them, but within months trouble returned and he was called before the bishop of Chester’s commissioners to answer charges that the fellows had brought against him. In November 1604, he quit Manchester again. He may have intended to return, since his family stayed behind, but following the death of his wife Jane and potentially his three youngest daughters during a plague outbreak in Manchester the following year, he settled in his home of Mortlake. He was probably not disappointed to have left Manchester since he never found the peace and time for quiet study that he had sought in his appointment. Instead, his time in Manchester was defined by the troubles of the sixteenth-century college.

     

    Blog post by Emma Nelson