Collection highlights, news about acquisitions, events and exhibits, and behind-the-scenes looks at the work and services of Rare Books & Special Collections (RBSC) at Notre Dame.
The exhibition Notre Dame Football Kills Prejudice: Citizenship and Faith in 1924 is now open and will run through the end of January 2025.
Curators Gregory Bond and Elizabeth Hogan will host exhibit open houses on select Friday afternoons before Notre Dame home football games, including on November 8 and November 15. The drop-in open houses will run from 3:00–4:30pm and will feature brief remarks by the curators at 3:15pm.
Tours of the exhibit may be arranged for classes and other groups by contacting Greg Bond at gbond2@nd.edu.
The current spotlight exhibits are Wollstonecraft: Revolution & Textual Evidence (September – December 2024) and A Fourteenth-Century Chanson de Geste Fragment (September – November 2024).
RBSC will be closed during the University of Notre Dame’s Thanksgiving Break, November 28 – 29.
The exhibition Notre Dame Football Kills Prejudice: Citizenship and Faith in 1924 is now open and will run through the end of January 2025.
Curators Gregory Bond and Elizabeth Hogan will host exhibit open houses on select Friday afternoons before Notre Dame home football games, including on October 11, November 8, and November 15. The drop-in open houses will run from 3:00–4:30pm and will feature brief remarks by the curators at 3:30pm in October and 3:15pm in November.
Tours of the exhibit may be arranged for classes and other groups by contacting Greg Bond at gbond2@nd.edu.
The October spotlight exhibits are Wollstonecraft: Revolution & Textual Evidence (September–December 2024) and A Fourteenth-Century Chanson de Geste Fragment (September–November 2024).
RBSC will be open regular hours (9:30am–4:30pm) during the University of Notre Dame’s Fall Break, October 19 – 27.
Rare Books and Special Collections welcomes students, faculty, staff, researchers, and visitors back to campus for Fall ’24! We want to let you know about a variety of things to watch for in the coming semester.
Fall 2024 Exhibition: Notre Dame Football Kills Prejudice: Citizenship and Faith in 1924
“Notre Dame football is a new crusade: it kills prejudice and stimulates faith.” — Rev. John F. O’Hara, C.S.C., Prefect of Religion, Religious Bulletin, November 17, 1924
In the fall of 1924, the University of Notre Dame found great success on the football field and confronted a dangerous and divisive political moment. The undefeated Fighting Irish football team, cemented forever in national memory by Grantland Rice’s legendary “Four Horsemen” column, beat the best opponents from all regions of the country and won the Rose Bowl to claim a consensus national championship. Off the field, Notre Dame battled a reactionary nativist political environment that, in its most extreme manifestation, birthed the second version of the Ku Klux Klan. Sympathizers of this “100% Americanism” movement celebrated white, male, Protestant citizenship and attacked other groups—including Catholics and immigrants—who challenged this restrictive understanding of American identity.
In the national spotlight, Notre Dame leaders unabashedly embraced their Catholic identity. They consciously leveraged the unprecedented visibility and acclaim of the football team to promote—within the very real political constraints of the era—a more inclusive and welcoming standard of citizenship. Attracting a broad and diverse fan base, the 1924 national champion Fighting Irish discredited nativist politics and helped stake the claim of Notre Dame—and Catholics and immigrants—to full citizenship and undisputed Americanness.
Curators will host exhibit open houses on select Friday afternoons before Notre Dame home football games, including on September 6, September 27, and October 11. The drop-in open houses will run from 3:00–4:30 and will feature brief remarks by the curators at 3:30.
Other curator-led tours open to the public will be announced soon. Tours of the exhibit may be arranged for classes and other groups by contacting Greg Bond at gbond2@nd.edu.
This exhibition is curated by Gregory Bond (Curator of the Joyce Sports Research Collection, Rare Books and Special Collections) and Elizabeth Hogan (Senior Archivist for Photographs and Graphic Materials, University Archives).
Stop in regularly to see our Collections Spotlights
Currently on Display: Making Books Count: Early Modern Books in the History of Mathematics
Discover how books shaped science and our understanding of nature. The history of mathematics guides our understanding of astronomy, as revealed in works by Galileo, Copernicus, and others. Through ancient texts tracing the evolution of mathematical thought, visitors can explore the dialogue between mathematics and nature.
The last public spotlight tour is scheduled for August 28 at 1:30 pm.
This dual case spotlight is curated by Caterina Agostini (Indiana University Bloomington, Department of History and Philosophy of Science and Medicine). She previously served as a Postdoctoral Research Associate with the Reilly Center for Science, Technology, and Values and the Navari Family Center for Digital Scholarship. She is Co-PI in the Harriot Papers project.
Opening Soon: September Spotlights
RBSC spotlight exhibits will switch over for the fall during September. Two new exhibits will feature recently acquired editions of books by Mary Wollstonecraft and two manuscript fragments of French poetry. Stay tuned for more information!
These and other exhibits within the Hesburgh Libraries are generously supported by the McBrien Special Collections Endowment.
All exhibits are free and open to the public during business hours.
Special Collections’ Classes & Workshops
Throughout the semester, curators will lead instructional sessions related to our holdings to undergraduate and graduate students from Notre Dame, Saint Mary’s College, and Holy Cross College. Curators may also be available to show special collections materials to visiting classes, from preschool through adults. If you would like to arrange a group visit and class with a curator, please contact Special Collections.
Events
These programs are free and open to the public.
Thursday, October 3 at 5:00pm | The Fall 2024 Italian Research Seminar and Lectures will begin with a lecture by Giovanna Corazza (Università Ca’ Foscari), “Dante’s Chorographies: From the Territory to the Comedy.”
National Women’s Football League CollectionA Revised Martyrology for 16th Century German CatholicsWomen in Irish Prisons: Autographs of Prisoners in 1923Influencing Opinion by Mapping the Early American Civil WarSome of the recent acquisitions highlighted on the blog in the past year.
Anticipated Closures
Rare Books and Special Collections is regularly open 9:30am to 4:30pm, Monday through Friday. The department will be closed for the following holidays and events:
September 2, for Labor Day (Monday) September 13, for Rev. Robert A. Dowd, C.S.C., Presidential Inauguration Events (Friday, afternoon only) November 28-29, for Thanksgiving (Thursday and Friday)
Our last day open before the campus closure for Christmas Celebration will be December 20 (the Friday of final exams week).
The current spotlight exhibits are Scripts and Geographies of Byzantine Book Culture (February – May 2023) and The Book Beautiful: A Selection from the Arts & Crafts Movement (April – May 2024). Towards the end of May, we will install a double case spotlight exhibit highlighting Special Collections items relating to the early modern history of mathematics.
Rare Books and Special Collections is open regular hours during the summer — 9:30am to 4:30pm, Monday through Friday.
RBSC will be closed Monday, May 27th, for Memorial Day and Thursday, July 4th, for Independence Day.
This exhibition is curated by David T. Gura, PhD, Curator of Ancient and Medieval Manuscripts.
The current spotlight exhibits are Scripts and Geographies of Byzantine Book Culture (February – April 2024) and A Medieval Nun’s Choir Book (February – early April 2024). The current bi-monthly spotlight will run through April 5, with a new exhibit featuring a selection of books from the Arts & Crafts movement being installed on April 8.
Special Collections will be closed on March 29, in observance of Good Friday, and will be open regular hours on Easter Monday (April 1).
This exhibition is curated by David T. Gura, PhD, Curator of Ancient and Medieval Manuscripts.
The current spotlight exhibits are Scripts and Geographies of Byzantine Book Culture (February – April 2024) and A Medieval Nun’s Choir Book (February – March 2024).
Special Collections is open regular hours during Notre Dame’s Spring Break (March 11-15), Monday through Friday, 9:30am – 4:30pm.
We will be closed on March 29, in observance of Good Friday, and open regular hours on Easter Monday.
In the spring exhibition, Mapping the Middle Ages: Marking Time, Space, and Knowledge, primary objects bring to the fore the tension between literal and figurative arrangements of space, time, and knowledge during the Middle Ages. Geography, whether real or imagined, manifests on the page to convey a variety of spatial arrangements: topography, pilgrimage, peripatetic liturgical procession, and boundary marking. The materiality of medieval manuscript books expresses a similar reality through geographic colophons, regional markings of book production, devotional locals, and even the dispersing of manuscripts through modern-day biblioclasty.
To map the Middle Ages is to journey through the space created by the objects and the individuals who used them. The manuscripts in this installation are drawn from the collection of the University of Notre Dame’s Hesburgh Library.
This exhibition is curated by David T. Gura, PhD, Curator of Ancient and Medieval Manuscripts.
The current spotlight exhibits are Football and Community at Historically Black Colleges and Universities and A Warning Against Rum in Early America. Both spotlights will change out in February, check our website for more details in the near future.
Rare Books and Special Collections welcomes students, faculty, staff, researchers, and visitors back to campus for Spring ’24! Here are a variety of things to watch for in Special Collections during the coming semester.
Spring 2024 Exhibition: Mapping the Middle Ages: Marking Time, Space, and Knowledge
The tension between literal and figurative arrangements of space, time, and knowledge during the Middle Ages is brought to the fore through the primary objects that remain. Geography, whether real or imagined, manifests on the page to convey a variety of spatial arrangements: topography, pilgrimage, peripatetic liturgical procession, and boundary marking. The materiality of medieval manuscript books expresses a similar reality: geographic colophons, the regional markings of book production, devotional locals, and even the dispersing of manuscripts through modern-day biblioclasty.
To map the Middle Ages is to journey through the space created by the objects and the individuals who used them. The manuscripts in this installation are drawn from the collection of the University of Notre Dame’s Hesburgh Library.
Curated by David T. Gura, PhD, Curator of Ancient and Medieval Manuscripts.
This exhibition is being held in conjunction with the annual meeting of the Medieval Academy of America, which will be hosted March 14–16, 2024, at the University of Notre Dame.
Stop in regularly to see our Collections Spotlights
Fall Spotlight, continued through the end of January: Football and Community at Historically Black Colleges and Universities
This exhibit features a selection of sources from the Joyce Sports Research Collection that document and preserve the history of football at Historically Black College and Universities (HBCUs). During the era of Jim Crow segregation, the vast majority of African American college students and student athletes attended HBCUs.
Many of the yearly gridiron contests between rival institutions developed into highly anticipated annual events that combined football with larger celebrations of African American achievement and excellence. The programs, media guides, ephemera, guidebooks, and other printed material on display document the athletic accomplishments, the celebrations, the spectacle, and the community-building that accompany football at Historically Black Colleges and Universities.
December-January Spotlight: A Warning Against Rum in Early America
Displayed in the spotlight is a 1835 poster commemorating a Salem, Massachusetts minister’s attack on a neighbor for distilling and selling rum. This particular copy was partially hand-colored in watercolor, preserved with a cloth backing, folded, and bound into a pocket-sized leather cover. The broadside is part of Hesburgh Library’s Rare Books and Special Collections’ collection of prints, posters, and broadsides.
These and other exhibits within the Hesburgh Libraries are generously supported by the McBrien Special Collections Endowment.
All exhibits are free and open to the public during regular hours.
Special Collections’ Classes & Workshops
Throughout the semester, curators will teach sessions related to our holdings to undergraduate and graduate students from Notre Dame, Saint Mary’s College, and Holy Cross College. Curators may also be available to show special collections to visiting classes, from preschool through adults. If you would like to arrange a group visit and class with a curator, please contact Special Collections.
Upcoming Events
Thursday, February 1st at 5:00pm | The Spring 2024 Italian Research Seminar and Lectures will begin with a lecture by Francesca Fiorani (University of Virginia), “Leonardo da Vinci’s Way of Seeing Water. Wetlands, Mapping, and the Art of Painting.”
Early-20th-century souvenir programs of the Union Printers National Baseball League Tournament.An 18th century work advocating converting Ireland’s Catholics to ProtestantismA collection of materials relating to the National Women’s Football League.A revised martyrology for 16th century German Catholics.Some of the recent acquisitions highlighted on the blog during the fall semester.
The exhibition Making and Unmaking Emancipation in Cuba and the United States is now open and will run through the fall semester.
Tours of the exhibit may also be arranged for classes and other groups by contacting Rachel Bohlmann at (574) 631-1575 or Rachel.Bohlmann.2@nd.edu.
The December spotlight exhibits are Football and Community at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (August – December 2023) and TBD (December 2023 – November 2024).
Rare Books and Special Collections will be closed for Notre Dame’s Christmas and New Year’s Break (December 22, 2023, through January 1, 2024).
We otherwise remain open for our regular hours during Reading Days and Exams, and welcome those looking for a quiet place to study.
Thursday, November 9 at 5:00pm | Book Presentation: La vita dell’altro. Svevo, Joyce: Un’amicizia geniale by Enrico Terrinoni (Affiliate of the Center for Italian Studies). Terrinoni will be joined by Sara Boezio, Charles Leavitt, and Clíona Ní Ríordáin for a roundtable discussion of his book. This event is co-sponsored by the Center for Italian Studies and the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies.
A tour of Hesburgh Libraries’ Fall 2023 exhibition, Making and Unmaking Emancipation in Cuba and the United States, precedes the panel discussion (4:30 – 5:00pm). A reception will follow the panel discussion, in the Hesburgh Libraries Scholar’s Lounge.
Free and open to the public; no tickets required.
The exhibition Making and Unmaking Emancipation in Cuba and the United States is now open and will run through the fall semester.
A curator-led tour, open to the public, will be held noon–1:00pm on the following upcoming Friday: November 17. Tours of the exhibit may also be arranged for classes and other groups by contacting Rachel Bohlmann at (574) 631-1575 or Rachel.Bohlmann.2@nd.edu.
The November spotlight exhibits are Football and Community at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (August – December 2023) and Path to Sainthood: Brother Columba O’Neill (October – November 2023).
RBSC will be closed during the University of Notre Dame’s Thanksgiving Break, November 23 – 24.
