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Bringing a manuscript collection to a broader audience | DCDC14
1. Out of Context: Bringing a
Manuscript Collection to a
Broader Audience
Rebecca Bridgman – Birmingham Museums
Sarah Kilroy – University of Birmingham
3. Loan to ‘Qalam: the art of beautiful writing’
In 2013 Birmingham
Museums Trust
requested to borrow
14 manuscripts from
the Mingana Collection
of Middle Eastern
manuscripts for an
exhibition on Islamic
calligraphy, ‘Qalam’
Mi’a Kalimat attributed to
Ali ibn Abu Talib , 1568-9,
Islamic Arabic 1651
4. The Mingana Collection: a cultural asset
• The Mingana Collection is one
of the University of
Birmingham's most important
cultural assets
• Joint working allows us to
contribute to a professionally
curated exhibition
• Exhibit these manuscripts in
Birmingham’s leading gallery
Masnavi-yi Ma'navi by Jalal al-Din Rumi, early 19th century, Persian 1
6. Background to the Mingana Collection
• Over 3,000 manuscripts
originating from the
Middle East
• Brought together in
Birmingham during the
1920s by Alphonse
Mingana
• Under the patronage of
Edward Cadbury
Clockwise from top left: Alphonse
Mingana; detail from Persian 9;
Edward Cadbury; the Mingana
Collection in 2009
7. Content of the Mingana Collection
• Manuscripts date from 7th to 19th century
• Written in 20 different languages
• Broad range of subjects Majalis al-Ushshaq attributed to Sultan
Husayn Mirza, 17th century, Persian 12
Fragmentary Qur’an, 7th century, Arabic Islamic 1572
8. Cultural value of the Mingana Collection
Fragmentary Qur’an, 9th century, Arabic Islamic 1563 Four Gospels, 17th century, Armenian 1
9. Context of the collection within the University
Since 2010 the collection has been available for
consultation in the Cadbury Research Library at the
heart of the University’s Edgbaston Campus
12. Selection of manuscripts
Grouped into 6 themes by case:
1. Sacred text
2. Writing materials
3. Angular and round scripts
4. Regional scripts
5. Illuminated manuscripts
6. Making a manuscript
Palimpsest, 7th/9th century, Arabic
Additional 150
17. Reaching a Wider Audience
Community voices in the exhibition – object handling & artwork display
18. Family Trail
Qalam Family Trail and links to Mingana
manuscripts on display.
Illustrated manuscript of ‘Kalila wa Dimna’, 1412,
Persian 10
19. Film & Media
Screen shot of Qalam film, available on YouTube
Recording an advert for the exhibition on Unity FM
20. Events & Outreach
Tour with Muslim Women’s Network
Sonia Sabri Company dance performance
Calligraphy classes with Soraya Syed
21. Feedback & Evaluation
• Total visitor numbers = 33,343
• An exit pole in January indicated that BAME
audiences in the Museum were doubled compared
within same period previous year
• 61% of visitors in Qalam exhibition identified as
Muslim, 20% had never visited the museum before
• 26% cited the manuscripts as the section of the
exhibition they enjoyed most – many specifically
mentioned the 7th century Qur’an loaned by
University of Birmingham
22. Going Forward
Visit by Waverley School to current exhibition
‘True to Life? New Photography from the
Middle East’
Fihrist website, union catalogue for manuscripts in Arabic script held
in UK libraries
23. Acknowledgements
• Team at Cadbury Research Library, in particular Susan Worrall (Director of
Special Collections) and Josefine Frank (Specialist Cataloguer)
• Team at Birmingham Museums in particular Zelina Garland (Curatorial
Services Manager) & Josefine Frank (British Museum Future Curator, 2013)
• The following institutions lent objects not discussed here : The Potteries
Museum & Art Gallery, Stoke on Trent; The Fitzwilliam Museum,
Cambridge; The October Gallery, London
• We would like to extend particular thanks to the British Museum for their
advisory support and the loan of a significant number of objects
• The artists Soraya Syed (Art of the Pen) and Mohammed Ali (Soul City Arts)
collaborated with us on many aspects of this project.
• Arts Council England support Rebecca Bridgman’s post and contributed to
the cost of this exhibition
Editor's Notes
Josefine Frank, presenting for the Cadbury Research Library on behalf of Sarah Kilroy
At the time of the exhibition - British Museum funded Future Curator – internship at Birmingham Museums & Art Gallery and co-curator of the exhibition Qalam with Dr Rebecca Bridgman, Curator of Islamic and South Asian Art
Subsequently employed by the University of Birmingham as Specialist Cataloguer of the Islamic Arabic manuscripts in the Mingana Collection and currently in this post.
In 2013 the Cadbury Research Library was approached with a request to borrow material for an exhibition about Islamic calligraphy at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, part of the Birmingham Museums Trust. Lending material from the collections to exhibitions is not an unusual request and the department processes about 8 to 10 loans-out each year, to exhibitions on a wide range of subjects. Recent examples include interpretations of Pompeii, the history of Magna Carta and an exhibition on the First World War artist C. W. Nevinson.
Normally a curator will request to borrow one or a small number of items to augment a much larger exhibition. This request stood out because all the material requested was from one collection: the Mingana Collection of Middle Eastern manuscripts and the Cadbury Research Library would be the major lender to the exhibition, contributing 14 manuscripts which would fill almost all of the first gallery of the exhibition, or in other words nearly half of the total exhibition space. We immediately agreed in principle.
The Mingana Collection is one of the University of Birmingham's most important cultural assets and the opportunity to work jointly with Birmingham Museums Trust would allow us to do what we can't achieve on our own campus: display this important material in a professionally curated exhibition within Birmingham's leading gallery, to a broader audience than we would otherwise expect to be able to reach with our own resources.
We had previous experience of working with Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery in 2005 when 40 manuscripts from the Mingana Collection formed the basis of the major exhibition 'Illuminating Faith'. That exhibition had showcased more broadly art and culture from the Middle East through themes such as literature, astronomy, history, science and theology. Illuminating Faith was heralded as a great success, an example of cross-sector working for the benefit of the community. However, despite generous HLF funding and all the hard work that went into curating the exhibition from selecting material to writing captions and text panels, there is no tangible legacy of that exhibition. Funding did not stretch to the production of a printed catalogue or the creation of an online version of the display. When we were approached by Birmingham Museums Trust in 2103 almost a decade had elapsed in which time very few of the manuscripts from the collection had been on public display, and none had been displayed outside of the University’s own campus. Therefore when we received the request to borrow we were very keen to collaborate on this opportunity to contribute to a major exhibition in the heart of the city for a public audience.
What is the Mingana Collection and why is it culturally important?
The collection is made up of over 3,000 manuscripts, originating from the Middle East and brought together in Birmingham during the 1920s by an Iraqi priest, Alphonse Mingana (1878-1937), under the patronage of the philanthropist and businessman Edward Cadbury, who generously named the collection after its first keeper.
The manuscripts date from the 7th century AD to the 19th century and are on all manner of subjects not just theology but also medicine, history, science, law, literature, astronomy, astrology. The collection includes examples of early Qur’anic texts, illuminated Gospels, fables and poems. The manuscripts are predominantly written on paper or parchment, most are bound and are in an array of different bindings materials: leather, paper and textiles. Many are in their original bindings. They are written in over twenty languages including, among others, Arabic, Syriac, Ethiopic, Georgian, Hebrew, Samaritan and Armenian.
The value of the collection is enormous, the Syriac section with its 662 manuscripts rates third in the West after the British Museum and the Vatican Library. The Christian Arabic section is surpassed in the West only by the Vatican Library and the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris. The large Islamic Arabic section contains over 2,000 manuscripts, including some very important early fragmentary Qur’anic text, dating from the 7th century and the beginnings of Islam.
In 2007 the collection was awarded ‘Designated’ status in recognition of its outstanding international importance.
How is the collection used within the context of the University?
The collection is available for registered readers to consult in the reading room within the Cadbury Research Library. This facility is open to everyone but in practice use of the collection has primarily been for academic research. In the past 10 years requests to consult material in the collection has increased considerably from just 12 in 2004, up to 74 manuscripts requests in the first 9 months of 2014. Improvements made to the storage and the relocation of the collection from the Selly Oak campus to the new Cadbury Research Library at the heart of the University’s main Edgbaston campus in 2010 have contributed to this increase, as has the availability of some sections of the collection online.
In 2009 the Virtual Manuscript Room was launched. This was a joint project with the University’s Institute for Textual Scholarship and Electronic Editing (ITSEE) in conjunction with the University of Munster. The website is a platform for academic exchange of views on textual scholarship. 71 manuscripts from the Mingana Collection can be read in full online in the Virtual Manuscript Room, the aim being to ultimately digitize the entire collection and publish it in the Virtual Manuscript Room, however it is challenging to secure the funding for this project.
Parts of the collection are being catalogued online through contributions to joint projects.
For example images and catalogue descriptions of the 41 Hebrew manuscripts in the collection are available through the Friedberg Genizah Project website,
a website that brings together manuscripts on philosophy, theology and polemics, that originated from the Cairo Genizah. Similar to the Virtual Manuscript Room the Friedberg Genizah Project is an academic collaboration with many contributors and is described as ‘a research instrument for scholars’, ‘using cutting-edge, sophisticated and simultaneously user-friendly software and interface tools’ for the study of manuscripts.
In the case of the 2,000 Islamic Arabic manuscripts, the Cadbury Research Library is contributing to Fihrist, ‘a union catalogue for manuscripts in Arabic script’ providing ‘a searchable interface to basic manuscripts descriptions’.
Contribution to Fihrist is ongoing, indeed its continuation is one of the positive outcomes of the joint exhibition with Birmingham Museums Trust.
While pdfs of four printed catalogues produced for the Islamic Arabic, Christian Arabic and Syriac collections are available, there is currently no single online searchable catalogue for the whole collection.
As well as academic consultation in the reading room the manuscripts are consulted periodically by The Mingana Symposium, a group of scholars who meet every four years in Birmingham. This group ‘continues the studies of the life and teachings of the Arabic-speaking Eastern Churches and their engagement with the Islamic world’ in commemoration of the scholar Alphonse Mingana. The Symposium’s most recent meeting in September 2013 centred on ‘The Qur’an and Arab Christianity’.
Raising public awareness of the collection
There have been efforts on the part of the University to raise awareness of the collection’s contents to a public audience, such as staging small scale exhibitions within display cases on the University campus. ‘Travels to Collect Manuscripts’ (2006), ‘Writing in the Near East’ (2006) and ‘Illuminating Manuscripts’ (2010) were all publically accessible, small scale, displays. However audiences for these tend to be drawn from those already on campus for university business: students, staff and visitors such as conference delegates. The collection has featured in the University’s Black History Month activities and a pop up display promoting how to access the collection has been exhibited in in the Library of Birmingham and more recently in ‘Think Corner’, a University public engagement initiative where a city centre shop was used to promote University research from across the sciences, arts and humanities to the local community through displays, activities and talks.
By the very nature of being in a University our own endeavours to promote the collection are inevitably skewed towards an audience associated with academia; those already either studying or working in higher education, or engaged in the study of manuscripts.
Joint working with Birmingham Museums Trust on an exhibition allows us to take this collection out of its academic context and present it to a wider audience, for whom the significance of the manuscripts is not about textual scholarship but potentially has a more personal relevance and meaning, and can the manuscripts can also be a source of inspiration for creativity.
Manuscripts were selected by the six themes presented in the display cases:
Hijazi Qur’an (7th century)
Writing materials: palimpsest, papyrus, paper book
Angular and rounded scripts: Large Qur’an, pocket prayer book, kufic script (9th century Qur’an0
Regional scripts – north African book of Wisdom, Poem (Persian 10)
Illuminated Rumi text Persian 1
Making a manuscripts
The CRL’s loan process is the same as a museum’s, with a loan agreement covering all aspects of the movement, insurance and display of the manuscripts. Once selected the manuscripts were checked by our conservation staff for their suitability for display, then photographed and a condition report prepared for each. The condition reports travel with the manuscripts and are checked by conservation staff from both organizations on arrival and at the end of the exhibition. Acrylic cradles for support of the open volumes were sourced from our existing supply. Single leaf material was window mounted in heritage museum board and stands provided to angle them fowards.
The whole package of manuscripts and mounts was then couriered to the venue and installed in a day. The expertise in curating and interpreting the material as well as arranging the launch event and organising appropriate community engagement activities were taken on by Birmingham Museums Trust staff [hand over to Rebecca]
In Oct 2012, I was appointed as Birmingham’s first Curator of Islamic and South Asian Art - the only specialist role of its kind outside the national museums and Oxford. Since taking up this post, I have been able to quantify and begin to identify the importance of Birmingham’s Islamic art collection - which consists of around 1,100 objects.
Soon after commencing this role I began to realise that elements of Birmingham’s Islamic art collection – specifically a group of writing equipment and a stone inscription - could combined with manuscripts from the Cadbury Research Library’s Mingana collection – to form key elements of an important exhibition on calligraphy in Arabic script.
I also realised that this theme could help fulfil another important aim of my post – to reach out to Muslim audiences in the city, who are some of the people least likely to visit the Museum. Arabic calligraphy is particularly important to all Muslims because it was first developed to preserve the accuracy of God’s revelation to the Prophet Mohammed and so remains of spiritual significance to many Muslims to this day.
While the first gallery displayed the Mingana manuscripts alongside Birmingham’s pencases and writing equipment, the second, larger gallery was divided into two sections: the first section showcased the development of calligraphy on objects, juxtaposing historic and contemporary artworks to illustrate the continued influence by calligraphy, while the second section explored the variety of contemporary practice.
This display allowed the Mingana manuscript s and Birmingham’s pencases to be contextualised and integrated within a narrative that told of the development of Arabic calligraphy from its origins to the present day. It was made possible by a series of other loans principally from the British Museum.
Conforming with Birmingham Museums interpretation standards, the labels guiding the visitors through the exhibition were divided into 4 layers. Each layer had a strict limit on word length but provided a gradually more detailed explanation of Arabic calligraphy and the objects on display.
Those layers incorporated an initial introduction panel to the exhibition as a whole, section panels – here introducing the gallery on historic manuscripts, in-case labels that summarised key points in relation to the objects displayed and finally three section folders giving more detailed explanations of the section’s subject area and importantly where possible providing translations or summaries of the writing displayed.
We all know that it is never sufficient to put together an exhibition and simply expect people to come and see it. We felt this was particularly the case in relation to our target audiences for this exhibition – the city’s Muslim communities who are significantly under-represented within the visitor profile at Birmingham Museums.
On advise from one of our community partners and following consultation with a community advisory panel we chose the title Qalam – which means reed pen in a number of different languages, including Arabic, and we used this word alongside the strapline ‘the art of beautiful writing’. One of the main reasons for selecting this title was that we knew that it would be immediately recognisable to many Muslim audiences – who are often taught Arabic from an early age, to allow them to read the Qur’an in its original form.
We worked with calligrapher Soraya Syed to design a logo that incorporated the word Qalam in both Latin and Arabic script in order to further signify the content of the exhibition. That logo was used both in the gallery and also on leaflets advertising the exhibition.
We also wanted to give local and specifically Muslim community voice within the exhibition. For this we were lucky enough to work with a woman’s literacy group – part of the GoWoman alliance! based in a area of the city with high density Muslim populations. The group came to the museum for an object handling session and subsequently, led by local artist Mandy Ross, produced their own artwork, inspired by the objects and themes of the exhibition - and which you can see here on the bottom right. .
Research on Birmingham’s population carried out by Josefine indicated that many of Muslim communities in the city incorporated young families – this fits in with the broader demographic of the city which is one of the youngest and most diverse in Europe.
So to cater for that audience and ensure that families felt comfortable bringing children to the Museum Josefine created this family trail or quiz which included questions or tasks around the objects on display - such as this illustrated manuscript of Kalila and Dimna dating to the early 15th century.
To get the word out about the exhibition to our target audiences we used both standard marketing but deliberately focused on media channels that would attract young and diverse audiences.
One of the most important of these was a film produced by well-known Birmingham-based visual artist Mohammed Ali, also known as Aerosol Arabic. The film incorporated objects from the exhibition, most importantly a selection of the Mingana manuscripts. This was set to a sound track of poetry and a the call to prayer. The film was just under 5 minutes in length and was shown in a room adjacent to the exhibition. We also released clips on social media – you can still find it on YouTube if you search for ‘Qalam, Birmingham’
Promotion activity focused on programmes and channels specifically reaching out to Muslim audiences – so here you see me making an advert on Unity FM – a community radio station broadcasting across the West Midlands. Feedback from visitors to the exhibition indicated that this channel was particularly successful at reaching Muslim communities.
Finally during the run of the exhibition itself I worked with local groups to ensure that they knew about and most importantly came to visit the exhibition. Thirty free tours were given to local community groups and a number of events were put on to attract people to the exhibition – these ranged from a dance demonstration with the lead dancer incorporating the shape of Arabic letters in her performance, to a series of calligraphy classes – for adults and children - led by London-based calligrapher Soraya Syed.
The evaluation of the exhibition speaks for itself but also indicates that we hit the right note and that Qalam was very successful in engaging Muslim communities.
In the short term the collaboration between Birmingham Museums and University of Birmingham through the Qalam exhibition has helped me develop a network of contacts within the city. Over the course of this year, I have been building on those contacts and through them brought new groups into the museum – here we see two girls from Waverely School visiting the current exhibition ‘True to Life? New Photography from the Middle East’.
While for the University of Birmingham and for me as Josefine’s supervisor in 2013 - one of the positive outcomes has been her employment as a specialist cataloguer for the Mingana Collection. Josefine who can read Arabic script is adding the Islamic manuscripts to the online catalogue Fihrist.
In the long term the outcome of the partnership between Birmingham Museums and the Cadbury Research Library has been to identify the great potential for future collaboration and we hope to build on and develop this partnership in the future.
It only remains for me to thanks the many people and organisations who contributed to the Qalam exhibition. Thank you for your attention.
