Australian billionaire Kerry Stokes has purchased the Rothschild Prayerbook. The book will be exhibited in Australia next year. For more on this announcement, please visit: https://au.news.yahoo.com/sunday-night/features/a/24909678/mystery-australian-buys-15m-ancient-book.

Thanks to the Folger Shakespeare Library, tens of thousands of high resolution images from their Digital Image Collection, including books, theater memorabilia, manuscripts, and art, are now available online. And they’re free to use under a CC BY-SA Creative Commons license.

For more information, please visit: http://collation.folger.edu/2014/08/free-cultural-works-come-get-your-free-cultural-works.

The Database of Women’s Travel Writing (DWTW) provides full and accurate bibliographical records for nearly 200 titles, all the known books of travel published in Britain and Ireland by women between 1780 and 1840.

The database is part of a larger database project, based in the University of Wolverhampton’s Centre for Transnational and Transcultural Research, which will include all travel books published in this period.

You can search the database by combinations of author, title, date of publication, publisher, genre, and regional content.

For more information and to visit the database: http://www4.wlv.ac.uk/btw

There is currently a petition from the Friends of the Warburg calling upon the University of London to withdraw their legal challenge of its own deed of trust concerning the care and integrity of the Warburg Institute. Possible results of this action include the dispersal of the library, or its relocation abroad.

There is more information on the history of this important library and research institution and the threats it faces in the Times Higher Education:

The future of a “unique and extraordinary” library saved from Nazi Germany lies in the balance after the University of London launched a legal action to challenge its deed of trust.

The Warburg Institute, which holds about 350,000 books in its Bloomsbury premises, was originally established in Hamburg by Aby Warburg (1866-1929), an intellectual whose brilliance has been compared to that of Sigmund Freud. More.

You can add your signature to the petition here https://www.change.org/en-GB/petitions/petition-save-the-warburg-institute. They already have almost 3500 and are aiming for 5000.

The Visualizing Chaucer Project seeks to capture post-medieval illustrated versions of Chaucer’s work. The project provides annotations for books containing illustrated versions of Chaucer’s writings and organises these images by character/work for easy accessibility. The intention is to make these images readily accessible, where copyright allows, for teachers, students, and scholars interested in the afterlife of Chaucer’s works.

Visualizing Chaucer was developed by Kara L. McShane and supported by the Rossell Hope Robbins Library Fellowship in the Digital Humanities.

Visualizing Chaucer is prepared and published in the Rossell Hope Robbins Library, a special medieval collection in the University of Rochester’s Rush Rhees Library

To access the Visualizing Chaucer Project please follow this link: https://d.lib.rochester.edu/chaucer

The Catholicon Anglicum, a fifteenth-century English-Latin dictionary acquired by the British Library earlier this year, is now fully online on Digitised Manuscripts.

Read more about the MS at: http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digitisedmanuscripts/2014/05/a-world-of-words.html

View the MS at: http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/FullDisplay.aspx?ref=Add_MS_89074

The National Library has chosen to focus this year’s donation appeal on preserving and digitising key medieval manuscripts from some of their most significant collections. Digitisation would enable the Library to discover more about their provenance and make a major contribution to research in this field.

With your support, the Library will undertake essential preservation and commence digitising the manuscripts to enable their access by a worldwide audience. By providing online access to these rare and fragile documents, they can create a lasting legacy, making the medieval past available to scholars throughout the world.

For more information on the Library’s collection of medieval manuscripts, and how to donate, please visit: http://www.nla.gov.au/support-us/medieval-manuscripts

ROLLCO, is a site providing records of Apprentices and Freemen in the City of London Livery Companies between 1400 and 1900.

Currently the database includes information about apprenticeship bindings and freedom admissions for seven of London’s Livery Companies, with the records of further Companies to follow.

ROLLCO is a not-for-profit project, and access is free to all.

http://www.londonroll.org

The Digital Library of Spain is the digital library of the Biblioteca Nacional de España. It aims to give free access to thousands of digitized documents: books from the 15th to the 19th century, manuscripts, drawings, engravings, pamphlets, posters, photographs, maps, atlases, music scores, historic newspapers and magazines and audio recordings.

Today it comprises more than 134,000 works on all topics in all documentary forms, freely accessible from anywhere in the world.

http://bdh.bne.es/bnesearch/AdvancedSearch.do?showAdvanced=true

Western Australia’s biggest, best and longest running medieval carnivale, the Balingup Medieval Carnivale will be held on the fourth weekend of August 2014.

Date: Saturday & Sunday, 23rd-24th August, 2014
Time: 10:00am – 4:30pm
Location: Balingup, WA (250 km south of Perth)
Entry Fee* : $15 per day or ONLY $20 for a weekend pass.
*Free Entry for accompanied children under the age of 12

• Market Stalls – Craft, Food & Wine Tastings
• Music and Dance, Medieval Re-enactors Combat
• The Blacksmith & Potters
• Daily Grand Parade at 1pm each day

For full details, visit the Balingup Medieval Carnivale website: http://www.balingupmedievalcarnivale.com.au

“The world’s largest collection of original Shakespearean books and manuscripts is expanding its online offerings.

Next month, the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC will release a series of apps that will broaden access to thousands of original books and manuscripts from Shakespearean England.”

More about this: http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-24589338

“More than 600 years ago poet Geoffrey Chaucer died without completing his greatest masterpiece, The Canterbury Tales.

A collection of more than 20 stories written in Middle English in the 14th Century, they show the best and worst of human nature with a humorous touch.

And the earliest manuscript containing his work has been kept at the National Library of Wales in Aberystwyth.

Now the priceless collection has been published online for the first time.”

More about this: http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-wales-mid-wales-27155607