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The Opera Hrosvite illustris virginis were edited by Conrad Celtes from the sole surviving manuscript known at the time, and printed in Nuremberg under the first book publishing privileges granted to cover the whole Holy Roman Empire. Hrotsvitha of Gandersheim was born in the 930s and lived in Gandersheim Abbey in Saxony. This is considered to be the first example of a work published under a privilege covering the Holy Roman Empire. As well as the highly important literary content, the volume includes eight woodcuts, two by Albrecht Dürer.

The Codex Zacynthius is a named codex of the New Testament, consisting of 176 parchment leaves in a 16th-century goatskin binding. The Codex is a palimpsest, with a catena (commentary) on the Gospel of Luke, containing substantial parts of the book, overwritten by a selection of the Gospels in Greek, an evangeliary, in the 12th century. The importance of the manuscript lies in the undertext, the catena, which is most likely to be dated to c. 700 CE

The archive of the Canning Family, comprising the papers of George Canning (1770-1827), politician and Prime Minister; his son Charles (1812-1862), Governor-General, later Viceroy of India, and his wife Charlotte (1817-1861); and his son-in-law Ulick de Burgh, 1st Marquess of Clanricarde (1802-1874), postmaster-general. Charlotte Canning (1812-1861) wife of Charles)was an avid diarist and letter writer, whose Indian journals and letters are an important representation of British women in India. Lady Canning was heavily involved in the selection of nurses for the Crimea, and Florence Nightingale’s nine letters to her give a frank account of the problems she faced in the management of the hospital at Scutari.

The Chastising of God’s children, composed c.1390, circulated widely amongst a cosmopolitan readership in the late Middle Ages in England, and is a centrally important witness to the growing vernacular appetite in the fourteenth century for advanced spiritual guidance. As an immediate and urgent response to the threats posed by heretical doctrine (including Lollardy and Free Spiritism), it provides us with a remarkable and critical commentary on contemporary late-fourteenth century English devotional and liturgical practice. The emergence of this new manuscript is of real significance to scholars of medieval vernacular literature and thought, and will prompt original and important research.

The diplomatic papers of Charles Stuart, 1st baron Stuart de Rothesay, relating to his mission to Portugal 1810-1813, comprise some 680 letters, amounting to about 1,000 pages.
Stuart had been in the diplomatic service since 1801. Having undertaken a liaison and intelligence-gathering mission in French-occupied Spain from 1808-1810, he was appointed minister at Lisbon in 1810. In the absence of the Portuguese court which had fled to Brazil, Stuart was made a member of the ruling Regency Council, making him, along with Wellington with whom he worked closely, a highly important figure in military and political circles.

The correspondence reflects his position, and comprises military and administrative papers, papers relating to intelligence, diplomatic correspondence and also some personal correspondence.

Josephine Reid began working for Graham Greene as his secretary in 1959. Alongside more ordinary secretarial duties, she typed Greene’s manuscripts and, when she retired from the more secretarial side of the job she continued to type Greene's literary manuscripts. Josephine Reid’s collection of papers is mostly new to scholarship

A copy of the second edition of Dryden’s seminal translation of Virgil. The work had first appeared in 1697, and became perhaps the most frequently cited literary text in the Jacobite community during the 18th century. In format a folio, elegantly ‘adorn’d with a hundred sculptures’, what distinguishes this heavily-used copy is its provenance. It belonged to the most prominent Scottish Jacobite family after the '45, the Gordons of Letterfoury in Aberdeenshire, and bears the bookplate of Sir James Gordon (d.1748).

Coleridge wrote this letter to his brother George while he and Wordsworth were staying in Kendal. It can be fairly described as a manifesto issued at a turning point of his life: after his return from Malta and not long before his estrangement from Wordsworth.

This substantial collection of manuscripts relating to the artist, engraver and naturalist Thomas Bewick (1753–1828) was amassed over a lifetime of research and scholarship by Iain Bain. It includes working drafts and notes, correspondence, posthumous letters and documents, and invoices, accounts, notebooks and other papers.

A grant from the Friends of the National Libraries enabled Worcestershire Archive and Archaeology Service to purchase this rare item, issued only a few months into Edward's reign.