4. Curzon’s Manuscripts and Documents

Many of Curzon’s manuscripts were bequeathed by his daughter to the British Museum in 1917 and are now held in the British Library. Of his acquisitions in the Near East, the Greek and Slavonic manuscripts can be found in the Western manuscripts collection, under the shelfmarks Add. 39583-39671. Manuscripts from his collection in “oriental” languages (i.e., Coptic, Hebrew, Syriac, and Arabic) are under the shelfmarks Or. 8729-8855. Older shelfmarks are sometimes “Parham” (the name of Curzon’s estate) or “Curzon.”

Overall, the documentation of these is poor and relatively few of the manuscripts are digitized. The “Western” manuscripts in the British Library are included in the catalogue of acquisitions between 1916–1920 (Bell 1933, see especially pages iii–xiii, 54–55, and the index s.v. “Curzon”). Descriptions of Curzon’s Coptic manuscripts can be found in Layton 1987 (under the British Library shelfmarks Or. 8770–8812, also see pages xliv-xlix) and of the Ethiopic ones in Strelcyn 1978 (beginning under the shelfmark Or. 8813). The latest published catalogues for other oriental languages were mostly printed before 1917 and thus do not include Curzon’s manuscripts (see the British Library finding guides for Arabic and Hebrew). Some scattered references to the Syriac manuscripts can be found in the preface of Wright’s catalogue (1870, 3:ix-x and note) and the unpublished handlist made by British library staff (1979, 2, see image above). There is also a catalogue of British private collections (1833–38?), possibly compiled by Sir Thomas Phillipps to whom Curzon wrote the “Libraries of the Levant” shown in the previous section. The catalogue lists in a single page (shown above) the acquisitions Curzon had made by 1837, before his 1837–38 trip to Mt. Athos and Egypt or his later diplomatic appointments to Constantinople and Erzurum (see Lane-Poole 2006).

The catalogue is also interesting because it inventories the collections of other manuscript hunters Curzon knew (see Cormack 2016). For an interesting example of how Curzon’s manuscripts were handled, see Emmel 1989.

Curzon’s own documentation, besides what he mentions in Monasteries, includes his Catalogue of Materials for Writing (1849, printed in only 50 copies!) and notes in the flyleaves and inside bindings of the manuscripts he acquired. (There are also letters and archival materials that appear in the online catalogues of the British Library and West Sussex Record Office but so far are not digitized and must be consulted in person. Among these the most interesting might be Curzon’s three travel journals from 1833–34 [London, British Library, Add MS 79529-79531] containing much that is not in the published version of Monasteries. See also the correspondence between Curzon and the Rev. Walter Sneyd, 1809-1888, collected and studied by Fraser [1974]. The catalogue of these letters, also made by Fraser, is available from the Sneyd Family Archive at the University of Keele.)

Exercise 1

Choose one of the following manuscripts and summarize what you can find out about Curzon’s acquisition of the manuscript based on his notes on the binding or flyleaves.

• London, British Library, Or. 8733 (Hebrew, 15th–16th cent.) manuscript viewer | catalogue record
• London, British Library, Add MS 39603 (Greek, 12th cent.) manuscript viewer | catalogue record
• London, British Library, Add MS 39591 (Greek) manuscript viewer | catalogue record
• London, British Library, Add MS 39604 (Greek with Arabic, 12th–14th cent.) manuscript viewer | catalogue record

Exercise 2

See if you can find the same manuscript (as best you can tell) appearing in multiple places (Curzon’s writings, catalogues, etc.).

Library

Works Cited and Further Reading