Internship at The Society of Antiquaries
During the summer term 2024, I was the IES’s first intern at the Library of The Society of Antiquaries of London at Burlington House on Piccadilly. Britain’s oldest learned society, the Society of Antiquaries of London was established in 1707, and its purpose is ‘the encouragement, advancement and furtherance of the study and knowledge of antiquities and history in this and other countries’. Leading its study of the material past are over 3000 Fellows, recognised by the Society for being distinguished in their understanding of the human past, including historians, archaeologists, art and book historians, anthropologists, archivists, curators and conservators. The Society holds Archives and a Museum, and at the heart of Burlington House on the first floor is its Library. The Society currently publishes an annual Antiquities Journal and Salon, a fortnightly online newsletter reporting across the heritage sector and holds regular lectures and open days.
As one of the few national organisations interested in British antiquities, the Society has played the role of safe deposit for portable artefacts over the years and this has resulted in an eclectic mix of antiquities being given over to its care and conservation. The Society holds in its Museum Collection over 40,000 such objects, including prints and drawings of antiquities, monumental brass rubbings, seal impressions and ceramics, together with an enormous collection of iron, flint, bronze and pottery artefacts discovered in Britain and abroad.
The Archives Collection includes over 600 manuscripts, 300 deposited archives which consist of personal papers of Fellows of the Society and records of other connected institutions such as the Royal Archaeological Institute and its Journal, photographs, slides, records of archaeological excavations and over 45,000 bookplates. In addition, there are Institutional Archives of the Society’s activities since 1707.
The Library Collection of texts on archaeology, architecture, monuments, decorative history and traditions comprises around 130,000 books and many old and new journals, tracts, proclamations and broadsides which spread far beyond the main Library galleries on the first floor of Burlington House into locked bookcases in every room and corridor. The Library is the physical evidence and embodiment of nearly 300 years of acquisition by the Society and donation by Fellows.
My project at the Society bridged the Archives and the Library and concerned the papers and book collection of Albert Way FSA (1805-1874). Way was the Director of the Society from 1842 to 1846, founder in 1845 of the Royal Archaeological Institute and editor of the Archaeological Journal for over twenty-five years. He is known for cataloguing the Society’s Museum Collection in 1847. I was able to use the learning and skills I had developed on the MA modules ‘Research Methodologies and Resources’ and ‘Provenance in Books’, making the contents of the Library and Archives more accessible and useful for researchers. I worked with the Archivist, the Librarian and the Assistant Librarian.
In the Library, my project was a provenance one - to identify and record in the Library’s online catalogue books donated by Way to the Society during his lifetime, of which there were thought to be around fifty, by reference to lists of donations in the printed minutes of the Society’s weekly meetings. By the end of the process, I identified and catalogued 270 such books.
In relation to the Archives, my project was to create a detailed catalogue of the ‘Papers of Albert Way FSA’ on the Society’s Archive Collections online catalogue, which occupied two shelves of the physical archive in the Society’s basement. The papers showed Way’s interests and his work over the period 1830 to 1869 and were mostly his meticulous handwritten notes on subjects he was researching, together with many fine ink drawings and correspondence: the first archive box, for example, contained four notebooks with Way's handwritten notes on Wynken de Worde's Vulgaria Stanbrigi, the Vulgaria of Robert Whittington, and Wynken de Worde's sixteenth century editions of Galfridus Grammaticus/Geoffrey the Grammarian's (1440) Promptorium parvulorum (‘Storehouse for children’, the first English-Latin dictionary), all of which would seem to be studies in preparation for Way's own edition of Promptorium parvulorum.
The internship was an opportunity to learn about the workings of a significant British institution which grew out of a fascination with the past and established itself and its collections in the heart of London, and to play my part in preserving and cataloguing the collections for present research and future generations.
Sam McBain, 2023-24 MA History of the Book student.
