Gordon Duff Prize
Your chance to write an essay and win £500!

The Gordon Duff Prize is awarded annually for an essay on a subject relating to the science or arts of books and manuscripts. It is open to all University of Cambridge members, students, staff and alumni. There is an award of £500 for the winner(s) of the competition: the prize can be shared for a co-written work or attributed to two separate entries.
The Prize arose out of the bequest of Edward Gordon Duff, read more about the history of the prize here.
How to enter
Who may compete?
The Gordon Duff Prize is an annual competition and is open to all University of Cambridge members, students, staff and alumni.
On what subject?
Any one of the following subjects: bibliography, palaeography, typography, book-binding, book-illustration, or the science of books and manuscripts and the arts relating thereto.
Proposal of subjects:
The 2024 Prize is now closed.
Please send a title and brief abstract of proposed subjects to the Cambridge University Library Research Institute, Cambridge, CB3 9DR (researchdevelopment@lib.cam.ac.uk) so as to reach them no later than the last day of Michaelmas Term, 19 December (email preferred).
Candidates will be informed whether their proposed subjects are approved by the Library Syndicate after its meeting in February.
If you have any enquiries related to the prize, please contact Suzanne Paul, Keeper of Rare Books and Early Manuscripts, Cambridge University Library, Cambridge, CB3 9DR (sp510@cam.ac.uk).
Submission of essays:
If the proposed subject is approved, essays, which must not exceed 10,000 words in length, must be sent in hard-copy and electronic form to the Cambridge University Library Research Institute, Cambridge, CB3 9DR (researchdevelopment@lib.cam.ac.uk) by the last day of Lent Term, 24 March (or 25 March in a leap year).
Award:
The Prize shall be awarded in the Easter Term. If essays of sufficient merit are submitted, it shall be open to the Adjudicators to award an additional Prize.
Please note Adjudicators are not obliged to provide feedback to submitted essays.
A copy of the winning essay will be deposited in the Manuscript Department of the University Library.
Alfonsi regis dicta et facta (Pisa: Gregorius de Gente, 1485), the Library’s only Pisan incunable, which Edward Gordon Duff signed and presented to the Library in 1910.
Alfonsi regis dicta et facta (Pisa: Gregorius de Gente, 1485), the Library’s only Pisan incunable, which Edward Gordon Duff signed and presented to the Library in 1910.
Winner of the 2024 Prize
Dr Ruth Abbott
Transcribers of the Mind: Copying Historical Manuscripts in the British Museum Reading Room, 1759-1795
Abstract: The discipline of textual criticism dominates conceptions of scribal activity, which it speculatively reconstructs for recension and emendation. Yet the nature of these methods means that transcription is always imagined as error. Against these ‘transcribers of the mind’ (to adapt D. F. McKenzie’s phrase), this essay sets the real scribes whom scholars employed to reproduce historical documents in the early decades of the British Museum Reading Room. Drawing on a series of barely known records that document the identities and activities of scribes working in the Reading Room in the four decades after its opening in 1759, the essay demonstrates that paid amanuenses were initially so ubiquitous that they had to be regulated. It shows that while the copying involved in eighteenth-century note-taking was increasingly personal, and admired for being customisable through selection, the transcription of entire manuscripts was still regularly delegated because it was understood as sheerly mechanical reproduction. It also shows how this began to change, as scholars began to transcribe historical manuscripts for themselves and scribes became sufficiently recognised for their expertise to be acknowledged as scholars in their own right. Finally, it develops a thesis about why this change occurred. Because seventeenth-century transcriptions were usually commissioned as ancillaries to specialist inquiries – to provide antiquarian precedents, for example, or collations for editions based on a textus receptus – expertise was attributed to the inquirers, not the scribes they employed. As eighteenth-century textual criticism began to challenge the reliance on received texts, and as the discipline of history was increasingly associated with archival research, scholars and scribes began to transcribe historical manuscripts as a method of personally studying those manuscripts: not to use them as evidence, or collate them, but to read them. The scribes who worked in the British Museum Reading Room in the last four decades of the eighteenth century – scribes who were increasingly scholars in their own right, and credited for their expertise – not only counter the error-prone, mechanical ‘transcribers of the mind’ imagined in the discipline of textual criticism. They also suggest that manuscript transcription itself was transforming during this period: from outsourceable, unspecialised aid to many disciplines, into a discipline in its own right.
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