"Our collection of culturally valuable materials has been built by donations."
Fiona Tyson
Macmillan Brown Library
Creased with folds, its red wax seal cracked and broken, the black ink of the document’s script has faded somewhat since a scribe living during the Wars of the Roses put pen to parchment.
A serendipitous encounter in a San Francisco bookshop brought this manuscript, written in 1465, to Ōtautahi Christchurch. Last year, UC Emeritus Professor Geoff Rice ONZM donated it to the Macmillan Brown Library.
“I thought it was a great example for students of medieval history to practice deciphering pre-modern handwriting,” he says.
“I was coming back from leave in San Francisco, and I came across the most marvellous antiquarian bookshop, and saw the framed manuscript hanging there. It was from the estate of an old collector in Los Angeles who had a scattering of English manuscripts, and this was the last of the collection.”
Professor Rice bought the document and shipped it to Christchurch, “where it has been under my bed for the last 10 years,” he adds with a laugh. “I thought it would be better for it to be in the Macmillan Brown Library.”
Emeritus Professor Geoff Rice presents the manuscript, a 15th century land grant, to Macmillan Brown Library Kaiwhakahaere Taonga Tuku Iho | Manager Fiona Tyson at the 2023 UC History Awards.
The document, a land grant in Latin, is written in Cursiva Anglicana – a cursive style typical of legal documents of the era – and contains many abbreviations.
“Our collection of culturally valuable materials has been built by donations,” says UC Macmillan Brown Library’s Kaiwhakahaere Taonga Tuku Iho | Manager Fiona Tyson. “These gifts enable us to support students and academics at UC.”
Along with primary materials such as rare manuscripts, archives, and artworks, the library also holds many secondary sources in its published collections that help students and academics make sense of primary resources, like the manuscript donated by Professor Rice.
That’s incredibly important for learning and understanding, says Professor Rice, who considers the highlight of his time teaching at UC to be that moment when students’ eyes light up when “the penny drops” and they understand something they didn’t before.
Six other books written and donated by Professor Geoff Rice:
- A Scientific Welsh Eye-Surgeon: the short life of Llewellyn Powell, MD (1843-79), Christchurch’s First Medical Officer of Health
- Doctors Divided: Medical Societies in Christchurch, 1865-97
- Nedwill: That ‘Peppery’ Irish Surgeon: New Zealand’s Outstanding Public Health Pioneer
- Frankish: the Rise and Fall of a Prominent Christchurch Physician: the Life of John David Frankish MD (1842-1913)
- Coward: Christchurch’s Controversial Coroner: the Life of John William Smith Coward (1815-88) Quackery in Christchurch, 1850-1900: Alternative Remedies and Marginal Practices
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