What is the Patricia-Ann Lee Collection?
The Patricia-Ann Lee Collection in Scribner Library’s Special Collections at Skidmore College is made up of thirty-six manuscripts, all of which have been digitized and are available to consult online.
Handwritten between 1567 and 1758, these legal documents include a 1655 will by an English gentlemen from the prominent Wentworth family of York and a cluster of late seventeenth-century land use documents from lowland Scotland not far from Linlithgow and about twenty miles to Edinburgh.
Written primarily in secretary hand, the documents are as short as five lines on a scrap of paper or parchment to as long as parchment rolls totalling more than 100 lines.
In Fall 2022 and Spring 2023, ten students and one professor transcribed the Wentworth will, one of the few English documents, and nine Scottish acts of sasine.
Click here to see learn more about each one.
How did the Patricia-Ann Lee Collection come to Skidmore?
How do 36 seventeenth- and eighteenth- century English and Scottish legal documents end up in upstate New York, in the special collections of a liberal arts college? You might think they crossed the Atlantic with settlers who took over the area around Saratoga Springs in the early 1700s, or when more arrived around the time of the American Revolution. But their connection is more recent than that.
Instead of traveling at or near the time they were written, the documents were purchased in the late twentieth century by History Professor Patricia-Ann Lee as teaching tools for her classes in British history, and took a more mundane journey.
I was in England doing research and I used to pick up my mail at the university of London — and next to the mailboxes was a bulletin board. And one day there was a notice saying some guy whose name I have forgotten had a shoebox full of old property documents for sale — and I bought them for I forget how much but probably not much and in due course they arrived by mail and that was it.
Patricia-Ann Lee, personal communication, November 22, 2022
Who takes care of the documents and how?
Artifact Conservation Q&A
Special Collections Curator Wendy Anthony
Q: Where do the Lee Collection documents live?
A: The documents are stored in extra large, thick professional buffered conservation folders with light corner tabbing that uses mylar and preservation specific adhesive to secure the tabs. The documents were situated in these folders by a professional conservationist. These very large enclosure folders are then stored in shallow drawers in a non-reactive metal conservation grade map case in our climate controlled vault.
Q: How does Special Collections reduce risk when handling these artifacts?
A: We minimize handling as much as possible, as any time a rare object is handled, some risk occurs, no matter how careful people are. The documents can only be viewed in the reading room under supervision of Special Collections staff and hands must be washed beforehand or nitrile gloves worn on hands.
Q: Why is caring for and conserving these documents important?
A: The physicality of an original object that was made by another human hand so long ago is a part of the human experience that cannot be fully replicated in a digital environment as we are physical beings. There is something uniquely moving and primal about this interaction across the centuries from one human hand to another through the physical object present before you.
Q:How are these artifacts accessible to the student body and Saratoga community?
A: People can make an appointment with Public Access Curator Jane Kjaer.
Condition Reporting
Condition Reporting is a Registrarial practice in museum and collections that identifies damage in clear and relatively universal language. This damage reporting establishes a baseline to address the current state of a textual artifact. By creating this baseline, conservators and curators create a best care practice to preserve, transport, store and handle the piece.
Some Conditioning Terms:
Inclusion– a foreign piece of material melded to the document
Accretion– a small piece of foreign material on the document surface
Foreign Matter– a larger piece of material not original to the document
Loss– damaged area with missing pieces of the document
Patina– tan/orange discoloration and tint
Foxing– orange/red spotting
Condition Report on a 1699 Scottish Sasine
This vellum document has been well preserved. Most damage has been sustained along the edges where there is discoloration and darkening.
Some darkening and hyperpigmentation covers text and makes it unreadable. This discoloration is most likely from water damage and mold.
There are also many patches of vellum loss, dents, micro rips and scratching most likely from handling and fluctuating environmental conditions. Considering the number of creases in the document from folding, it is surprising that more tearing and weakening of the parchment has not occurred. Some staining, general patina and foxing marks (rust orange marks caused by mildew and oxidation) are apparent but do not obscure the text or create rough patches.
