The eleventh object(s) in our 450th anniversary digital exhibition series ‘Jesus College in 12 Objects’ is the chemistry notebooks of  Muriel Chapman.

Muriel’s notebooks, which date from the 1920s and 1930s, offer a wonderful journey into the history of Chemistry and women at Jesus College. Spattered with chemical spills, they record the work of a pioneering early female chemist and one of the first women to graduate from Chemistry at the University of Oxford.

Muriel was born in 1894 (as Muriel Holmes) into an academic family: during her childhood, her father was a scholar and later Theology lecturer at Jesus College. Muriel, herself, turned to science, completing a BSc from Royal Holloway College, London in 1916. She then returned to Oxford, and took up work as a chemist in the Leoline Jenkins laboratories at Jesus College. Muriel’s beautiful notebooks and her few publications give us just a glimpse of the successes and challenges of a pioneering female chemist of the last century.

To find out more about Muriel Chapman’s notebooks and her life and work here at Jesus, look out for the penultimate video as part of the ‘Jesus College in 12 Objects’ series released later this week, featuring Fellow and Tutor in Chemistry, Professor Kylie Vincent!

Don’t forget that you can learn more about all the objects in the series here, and watch the videos about our first ten objects on our YouTube channel here.