A new series of multimedia exhibitions at the University of York will begin next month starting with the fascinating story of the great lost library of Alcuin and the research of Dr Mary Garrison from the University’s Department of History.
In the eighth century, York owed its reputation as one of the most intellectually influential cities in Europe to the library and school headed by the scholar Alcuin. However, the library has vanished; no books now exist that can be proven to have come from it. The disappearance of the library is a mystery. Was it destroyed in the violence of ninth-century Viking conquest, or were some books from it exported and recopied? The exhibition allows visitors to follow the clues to this mystery.
Open to all, the free exhibition ‘The Great Lost Library of Alcuin’s York’ uses photographs, primarily of eighth-century books in Anglo-Saxon and Caroline minuscule, alongside specially made work by local calligraphers Dorothy Wilkinson, Sue Sparrow and Angela Dalleywater, to tell the story of the lost library.
Click here to read this article from Medievalists.net