In 2025, two students studying for their Masters in History at Lancaster University, helped with cataloguing books in the Cathedral Library. They created exhibitions inspired by the Cathedral’s Library and these were on show to the general public through 2025.
Student Lucy Russell named her exhibition Beyond the Text.
Looking beyond the words on the pages we can find often neglected but just as fascinating areas of bookmaking and bookkeeping. For example, some books in Carlisle Cathedral Library’s collection contain binder’s waste made up of medieval manuscripts, or annotations of music or poetry. These elements add exciting dimensions to the texts, connecting twenty-first century readers to the past through handwritten annotations.
Here is one example of pre-Reformation music on parchment used as waste by the bookbinder to bind a later book:
One book that contains multiple annotations is Thomas Smith’s personal prayer book. Thomas Smith was Dean of Carlisle from 1672 and then Bishop of Carlisle between 1684 and 1702. Smith was an avid book collector and sought to rebuild the Cathedral Library throughout his time here. He had planned to convert the medieval Fratry building into a two-storey library but the Cathedral Chapter tried instead to convince Smith to rebuild the eastern range of the cloister as a library. Neither plan went ahead, but the Bishop bequeathed his collection of books to the Cathedral upon his death in 1702 – the largest single donation ever to the Cathedral Library.
Inside Smith’s prayer book is bound a copy of a printed psalm book in Hebrew. Smith uses the endpapers (the blank leaves at the end of the book) to write out two musical tunes. The first is Psalm 84, in tenor and alto, and the second is titled ‘Windsor tune’, in treble and tenor, and has been identified as Orlando Gibbons’s Song 67. click the links to hear reconstructions of these tunes, with Smith’s handwritten parts combined with Gibbons’s original bass to Song 67 and reconstructions by David T. Shingler, Organ Scholar at Carlisle Cathedral, 2023-25.
Thanks to the participants of the recording: Anna Howard (soprano), Hannah Ord (alto), Henry Howard (tenor), Simon Mortimer (bass) and David T. Shingler (director).
Lucy noted “I have really enjoyed learning how to catalogue the rare books, particularly gaining knowledge of the texts and their previous owners. A personal highlight has been listening to the music written in Thomas Smith’s personal copy of a psalm book (pictured below), played for the first time since the 17th century and recorded in the Cathedral itself.”
