Miscellaneous documents, c1200-early 16th century

Component identifier:

Series 3

Content Summary:

This series comprises 108 groups of fragments, the majority of which have been used as pastedowns in later books, as evidenced by glue marks. The types of documents include religious texts, writings on Canon Law, commentary on the Gospels, legal texts and literary texts.

The bulk of the descriptive notes in this series were supplied by Professor Michelle Brown. They include, where identified: date, type of document, place of origin, content description, extent and palaeographic information.

Note: this series was originally titled MS 4052/series ‘T’

Immediate source of acquisition:

The documents in this collection were presented to the National Library of Australia by Sir Rex Nan Kivell in 1969. He referred to it as ‘The Nan Kivell Calligraphy Collection’. The documents were collected by him as specimens of early calligraphy and/or examples of early documentation. He acquired them over a number of years from varied sources which were not recorded. However, it seems likely that the group of legal documents in Series 1 relating to the Elliott family of Salisbury would have a single provenance. Nan Kivell had a country house in Devizes, Wiltshire, which is only a short distance from Salisbury.

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