Houghton Library has a famously strong collection of richly illustrated medieval manuscripts, many of which can be viewed online here. But, if your eyes grow weary of beautiful illuminations, I invite you to explore our collection of charters relating to the Cistercian abbey of Buckland in Devon, England (MS Lat 10, digitized here). While less Read More

In the preface to his 1887 edition of Boswell’s Life of Johnson (including his Journal of a Tour of the Hebrides and Johnson’s Diary of a Journey into North Wales), George Birkbeck Hill laments how intervals of time and distance complicated his task of reviving Johnson, England’s greatest eighteenth century man of letters, for a Read More

Experience the works of the father of English poetry the way some of his earliest readers did via digital copies of his works held in our collections. Houghton has digitized two 16th century editions of Chaucer’s works. Richard Pynson published editions of The Canterbury Tales, Troilus and Criseyde, and The House of Fame together in Read More

Feeling disconnected at home? You’re not alone. Diana Churchill is literally beside herself in this zany portrait by Angus McBean from 1940. Angus McBean’s portraits of actors are among the most complete visual records of the British stage from the 1930s through the 1960s. Early in his career, he dabbled in the surreal, producing a Read More

The multi-talented Edward Lear is probably best remembered today for The Owl and the Pussycat and other “nonsense books” as he called them, but his artistic skills far surpassed the whimsical sketches with which he illustrated those books. Our collection of Edward Lear Landscape Drawings includes more than 6000 digital images of Lear’s work, drawn Read More