Conservators Jane Eagan and Maria Hayward describe their work treating seven manuscripts re-covered in velvet for Henry VIII, part of a small corpus of royal books still in their textile bindings in the Queens College Library
The Queen's College Library, University of Oxford, has seven manuscripts re-covered in red or black velvet for Henry VIII, part of a small corpus of royal books still in their textile bindings. This unusual part of the college's collection was conserved by Jane Eagan and Maria Hayward between 2002–9. In their talk for Textiles in Libraries: Conservation and Context, they will describe the velvet textiles used, how the Tudor binders re-covered the manuscripts, and how they worked together to achieve the treatment aims. The Queen's project opened up an area of investigation that Eagan and Hayward continue to explore through related work on objects that combine textiles and text.
