A body of knowledge: winter lectures

Virtual tour of a body of knowledge

Speaker: Katie Birkwood, RCP rare books and special collections librarian

The evening will begin with a virtual tour of exhibition ‘A body of knowledge’ with rare books and special collections librarian, and lead curator of the exhibition, Katie Birkwood. Discover 500 years of book collecting at the RCP. Explore the doctors’ library, an enthralling collection that has shaped the minds, practice and identity of physicians for centuries.

Islamic knowledge in an Elizabethan physician’s library: Lancelot Browne and his Arabic books

Speaker: Samantha Brown, doctoral researcher, UCL

Among the books on display in A body of knowledge is a heavily annotated Arabic edition of Avicenna’s Canon of Medicine, printed in Rome in 1593. The volume once belonged to Lancelot Browne (d. ca 1605), physician to Elizabeth I and former RCP consiliarus and elector, who filled its margins with notes in Arabic, Latin, and Greek. Browne was one of only a handful of people known to have studied Arabic in sixteenth-century England, during a period of increasing contact with Muslim rulers, their representatives and their subjects. As well as owning Arabic books, he rubbed shoulders with Moroccans in London and moved within a network of European scholars interested in the language. Browne and his books reveal both the challenges and the rewards of learning Arabic at a time when teachers and texts were scarce, and show how England’s relationship with the Arabic-speaking world left its mark not only on trade and diplomacy, but also on the interests and libraries of a small and determined band of scholars and physicians.

Moving libraries: from the personal to the institutional

Speaker: Dr Alice Wickenden, Early Career Fellow at the University of Cambridge

Private book ownership often has impacts on the shape of institutional collections far past the moments of donation. Particularly notable or rich individuals might donate rare and important works that become key items; books which have been annotated can provide invaluable clues to the research and thinking behind canonical works; large donations can pave the way for a library’s future strengths and specialisms. However, donor names can also carry less welcome connotations. Exploring a library’s history thus means asking ourselves how we approach, for example, entwined histories of donations and the trade of enslaved people. What responsibility do we owe to the past? What does it mean to perpetuate a name? In this talk, I will consider these questions with particular reference to founding collections of the British Library as well as the RCP Museum.

About the speakers

Katie Birkwood has been the rare books and special collections librarian at the Royal College of Physicians since 2012, where she cares for a collection of over 50,000 titles spanning 550 years. She is the lead curator of current exhibition 'A body of knowledge' which explores 500 years of book collecting at the RCP.

Sam Brown is a PhD student at UCL, where she explores how people in early modern England encountered and engaged with the Arabic language, mostly through evidence found in manuscripts and early printed books. Her work has taken her to collections across the UK, and in 2024 she was awarded a National Trust–British Library Doctoral Fellowship to investigate the provenance of Arabic manuscripts in English libraries from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries. Her research at the Royal College of Physicians Library is shedding new light on Lancelot Browne, an important yet understudied figure in early English Arabic studies.

Dr Alice Wickenden is an Early Career Fellow at the University of Cambridge. Her current project, ‘The Material and Ethical Afterlives of Named Collections’, explores the complicated histories behind the collection of early modern rare book material. Her book on the founding collection of the British Library, Hans Sloane’s Library Collection and the Production of Knowledge, with Cambridge University Press will be out later this year.

From left to right: Katie Birkwood, Samantha Brown and Dr Alice Wickenden.