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.
Rare Books and Special Collections is pleased to highlight its recent acquisition of the George Koyt Short Track Motor Racing Photographs Collection (MSSP 10150). Consisting of 459 photographs from the 1970s through the 1990s, the Koyt Collection visually documents short track and/or dirt track motor racing tracks mostly in small towns and cities around the United States. Shot over the course of three decades by racing enthusiast and avid amateur photographer George Koyt, some photographs feature the racing action on the track, but many of the images focus instead on the racetrack as place. Koyt’s images tend to center the physical structures of the tracks, the signage at the tracks, and the crowds of fans who attended the races. Koyt’s vernacular photographs provide an enduring and substantial visual record of the culture and the built environment at hundreds of the small-town and local racing tracks that dotted the countryside in the late twentieth century.
George Arthur Koyt (1939-2010) lived most of his life in Bucks County Pennsylvania where he worked as an auto mechanic and was a well-known collector of motor sports memorabilia and a respected amateur historian of auto racing. George and his wife Margaret were both fans of short track and dirt track racing, and they were regular attendees at several different tracks in southeastern Pennsylvania and central New Jersey. Starting in at least the 1970s, the Koyts also frequently traveled to visit local race tracks in different parts of the country. George Koyt’s camera documented their experiences at more than one hundred local tracks in 27 states and one Canadian province.
During his travels, Koyt routinely photographed racetrack signs. These sample images from the collection provide a sense of the different types of signage at local tracks in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s.
Macon Speedway, Macon, Illinois, 1989 (MSSP 10150-11)West Central Speedway, Fergus Falls, Minnesota, 1982 (MSSP 10150-38)Southern Speedway, Altamahaw, North Carolina, 1980 (MSSP 10150-52)Cedar Lake Speedway, Cedar Lake, Wisconsin, 1989 (MSSP 10150-96)
Koyt also regularly photographed the structures at racetracks, taking pictures of admission booths, spectator stands, judging booths, and other buildings.
Rockford Speedway, Rockford, Illinois, 1989 (MSSP 10150-12)Capitol Speedway, Plymouth, Indiana, 1992 (MSSP 10150-15)St. Francois County Raceway, St. Francois County, Missouri, 1990 (MSSP 10150-41)Schmuckers Speedway, Schmuckers, Pennsylvania, 1976 (MSSP 10150-82)
Koyt also took pictures of the fans and spectators at the racetracks he visited. These images show the people attending the races and document the community who supported tracks in cities around the country.
George Koyt died in 2010 at the age of 71. His dual interests in short track racing and amateur photography helped to preserve the local and grassroots visual history of this persistently popular spectator sport. The George Koyt Short Track Motor Racing Photographs Collection is open and available to researchers.
Merriam-Webster defines a vampire as, “the reanimated body of a dead person believed to come from the grave at night and suck the blood of persons asleep.” The Oxford English dictionary gives the middle of the eighteenth century as their earliest evidence for the word vampire, but the concept far predates that in the folklore of various cultures. While characters of a vampiric nature occur as early as Babylonian poems recorded on cuneiform and the ancient Greek writings of Philostratus, the folklore that is most significant to the development of the Western concept of a vampire was that of the Slavic cultures of Eastern Europe. These malevolent beings were seen as gruesome and frightening, because death, disease, and degeneracy were all attributed to their actions and influence. As the vampire became a more familiar figure in Western cultures during the eighteenth century (by 1740 Alexander Pope compared himself to “one of those vampires in Germany” when he went out at night), they were initially perceived in a similar, grotesque manner. However, over time the vampire—though still a villain—came to be portrayed as charismatic and seductive.
Bram Stoker’s 1897 Dracula was not the first vampire in English literature, Robert Southey’s 1801 poem “Thalaba the Destroyer” is generally given that title. Polidori’s short story “The Vampyre” (1819), Varney the Vampire; or, the Feast of Blood (1845–1847), and Sheridan Le Fanu’s “Carmilla” (1872) all preceded it as well. But Stoker’s vampire has become the template against which all modern vampires are compared. The Count is initially described as,
“…a tall old man, clean shaven save for a long white moustache, and clad in black from head to foot, without a single speck of colour about him anywhere. …his hand grasped mine with a strength which made me wince, an effect which was not lessened by the fact that it seemed as cold as ice—more like the hand of a dead than a living man.” (Dracula, Chapter 2)
He is gracious and courteous, however, and as the novel progresses, and he feeds, he becomes less corpse-like. When Mina and Johnathan see him in London, she describes him as “a tall, thin man, with a beaky nose and black moustache and pointed beard… His face was not a good face; it was hard, and cruel, and sensual, and his big white teeth, that looked all the whiter because his lips were so red, were pointed like an animal’s.” (Dracula, Chapter 13)
Count Dracula has become more immortal in popular culture than he was in Stoker’s novel, the subject of numerous theatrical adaptations and cinema classics. The first play—more of a staged reading of the book, really—ocurred the same year as the book was published, as a way of securing copyright protection. In the 1920s, Hamilton Deane and John L. Balderson created their own adaptation, and in 1977 a revival of this version arrived on Broadway. This production featured the design work of Edward Gorey in its sets, costuming, posters, and playbills. He won a Tony Award for the Costume Design, and was nominated for Set Design. The play also won a Tony for Most Innovative Production of a Revival. (Frank Langella was nominated for Best Performance by a Leading Actor in a Play, while Dennis Rosa was nominated for Best Direction of a Play.)
As the play became a popular success as well as a critical one, Gorey’s designs appeared on a variety of merchandise from t-shirts and bags to puzzles, toys, and even a miniature theatre, examples of many of which are found in Notre Dame’s Special Collections.
The Suzy Conway and Robert M. Conway Collection of Gorey Ephemera (EPH 5004) also includes articles and article illustrations, drawings, picture postcards, posters, and correspondence. There are materials relating to his work illustrating book covers for Doubleday, including a few other vampire themed or related texts.
In recognition of the centenary of Edward Gorey’s birth and the 25th anniversary of his death, RBSC’s September-October spotlight has highlighted Gorey’s engagement with the New York City Ballet in his distinctive noir style. Although the exhibit officially closes today, it will remain viewable through early next week, before the installation on November 5 of the November-December spotlight. Come visit Special Collections for a further look at some of Gorey’s distinctive work.
Happy Halloween to you and yours from all of us in Notre Dame’s Special Collections!
Rare Books and Special Collections houses one of the most comprehensive yet least explored collections dedicated to Rubén Darío. The Nicaraguan poet is a central figure in Latin American and world literature; however, many of his texts have deteriorated over time, and reliable academic editions of his works are scarce. Under the direction of María Rosa Olivera-Williams, the University of Notre Dame has partnered with the Archivo Rubén Darío Ordenado y Centralizado at the Universidad Nacional de Tres de Febrero in Argentina to produce four critical editions of Darío’s writings. Since 2022, the Rubén Darío Collection has been the site of multiple research projects led by Olivera-Williams that have included significant digitization and stabilization work of the materials by RBSC staff.
These projects have resulted in compelling findings that have been widely celebrated by the international academic community. The first of these projects culminated in the publication of Opiniones in 2024, a collection of Dario’s journalistic writings accompanied by an introduction and critical annotations from the renowned essayist Graciela Montaldo of Columbia University. The book received the seal of excellence from the MLA Committee on Scholarly Editions, which guarantees the publication’s philological rigor.
The Rubén Darío Collection played a key role in the development of the book because it provided access to the original publications of its chapters, which appeared in the pages of the Argentine newspaper La Nación between 1904 and 1906. The collection also preserves a lesser-known portrait of Rubén Darío that was used as a medallion on the back cover of La vida de Rubén Darío escrita por él mismo (The Life of Rubén Darío Written by Himself), a critical edition published in 2021.
La Nación Suplemento Ilustrado, April 1903 (MSN/LAT 0092-30)Photograph of Rubén Darío, July 1912 (MSN/LAT 0092-10)
“The Rubén Darío: Critical Editions Project” has received tremendous support from a broad community of specialists at numerous international conferences and seminars. At these events, various members of the project team presented significant advances in their research. These conferences include the International Congress of the Latin American Studies Association (2024 and 2025), the International Congress of Comparative Literature at Adolfo Ibáñez University (2024), the International Congress of the Modern Language Association (2025), and the Northeast Modern Language Association conference (2025). Attendees have praised the project for its comprehensiveness and rigor, the quality and depth of its research, and its potential to open new avenues of inquiry in different fields. Our work has also revitalized studies in the field of literary modernism. As a result of this project, several team members have published works in the form of dossiers or individual articles in specialized journals, with more in progress. Notably, the monographic issue of the journal Chuy, coordinated by Olivera-Williams in 2024, has emerged as a significant achievement.
As part of the symposium, the Hesburgh Library will present the latest developments in the publication of Rubén Darío’s prose works, including the critical edition of Peregrinaciones, edited by Beatriz Colombi of the University of Buenos Aires. This edition was made possible by the materials in the Rubén Darío Collection at Notre Dame and will be presented by Rodrigo Caresani, one of the directors of the Complete Works project.
This exhibit traces the global journey of Dante’s masterpiece through rare and valuable printed editions, highlighting how translators, artists, and printers have popularized and reshaped the Commedia. These volumes reveal a dynamic dialogue between Dante’s poetry and the world. A global literary perspective transforms Dante from a monumental yet isolated figure of the European Middle Ages into a central presence in the ongoing international conversation about humanity, the universe, time, eternity, and the power of literature.
Drop in to one of this month’s Exhibit Open Houses to meet and speak informally with one of the curators of the fall exhibition, Mapping Global Dante in Translation. Learn how translators, artists, and printers have popularized and reshaped the Divine Comedy over the centuries and across the world and discover the Library’s many Dante editions.
This exhibit is curated by Salvatore Riolo (Notre Dame, Italian Studies doctoral candidate), and co-curators Giulia Maria Gliozzi (Notre Dame, Italian Studies doctoral candidate); Inha Park (Notre Dame, Italian Studies doctoral candidate); and Peter Scharer (Yale, Comparative Literature doctoral candidate). Theodore J. Cachey Jr. (Notre Dame) and Jacob Blakesley (Sapienza Università di Roma) served as consultants on the exhibit.
Opening November 5, our next spotlight exhibit will feature several friendship albums being studied this semester by Notre Dame students in a class taught by Vanesa Miseres (Romance Languages & Literatures).
This exhibition traces the global journey of Dante’s masterpiece through rare and valuable printed editions, highlighting how translators, artists, and printers have popularized and reshaped the Commedia. These volumes reveal a dynamic dialogue between Dante’s poetry and the world. A global literary perspective transforms Dante from a monumental yet isolated figure of the European Middle Ages into a central presence in the ongoing international conversation about humanity, the universe, time, eternity, and the power of literature.
The exhibit is curated by Salvatore Riolo (Notre Dame Italian Studies doctoral candidate), and co-curators Giulia Maria Gliozzi (Notre Dame Italian Studies doctoral candidate); Inha Park (Notre Dame Italian Studies doctoral candidate); and Peter Scharer (Yale Comparative Literature doctoral candidate).
Theodore J. Cachey Jr., Notre Dame, and Jacob Blakesley, Sapienza Università di Roma, served as consultants on the exhibit.
Events
Drop in to meet and speak informally with one of the exhibition’s curators. Learn how translators, artists, and printers have popularized and reshaped the Divine Comedy over the centuries and across the world and discover some of the Library’s many Dante editions.
Tours of the exhibit may be arranged for classes and other groups by contacting rarebook@nd.edu.
All exhibits are free and open to the public during business hours.This and other exhibits within the library are generously supported by the McBrien Special Collections Endowment. This exhibit is co-sponsored by the Center for Italian Studies and the Devers Program in Dante Studies.
We join the Library of Congress, National Archives and Records Administration, National Endowment for the Humanities, National Gallery of Art, National Park Service, Smithsonian Institution, and United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in celebrating National Hispanic Heritage Month.
From our Latin American and Latino Studies Archives: Celebration and Resistance
2025 has seen various local and community-based annual public celebrations of Latino heritage scaled-down, postponed, or cancelled altogether out of fears for the safety of participants and community members. Other public celebrations have gone on as planned, with some organizers even rearticulating their yearly “Grito de Independencia” (the September 15th commemoration of the “Cry of Independence” from Spanish colonial rule, specific to the Mexican context) as “Grito de Resistencia” (“Cry of Resistance”). Both paths, however, are guided by a spirit of solidarity, and informed by a history of perseverance, that predate—and are poised to persist beyond—any formal federal recognition of the diverse cultures, accomplishments, and contributions of Latinos in the United States.
Inspired by that same spirit and history, we present three examples, preserved in Notre Dame’s Rare Books and Special Collections, of historical moments when Latino communities organized celebrations of resistance—both public and private, and throughout the calendar year—in direct response to histories and realities of persecution, oppression, exclusion, and erasure.
1969: “La Fiesta de los Barrios”
“The Fiesta De Los Barrios is the Fiesta of all of our people. For the first time the heritage of our cultural past and the richness of our cultural present will be expressed through the creative talent and skill of our barrio artists, writers and performers. […] It is this pride in ourselves and confidence in our future that has made this magazine and indeed the entire Fiesta possible.”
The name “La Fiesta de los Barrios” carries multiple references: it was a community celebration, a literary journal, and an aspiration for the future. The actual “fiesta” took place in early May, 1969, at Lincoln High School in Los Angeles to celebrate the one-year anniversary of the LA Walkouts: a watershed movement through which Mexican American students protested systemic racism, abuses, and neglect on their campuses, and demanded inclusive and unbiased curricula. (For an introduction to the Walkouts, we suggest you watch thisRetro Report hosted by PBS, or this excerpt from PBS’s Latino Americans.)
The journal by the same name, or Fiesta Magazine (MSH/LAT 0099-61), memorialized select verse, prose, and drawings created by community members and event participants, representing a diversity of voices and experiences. And finally, it was the hope, as articulated by photographer Pedro Arias in one of the journal’s opening essays, that all peoples of Mexican descent living in the United States could overcome generational and cultural divides to work together toward common goals: “Y entonces será un día de fiesta, será una FIESTA DE LOS BARRIOS, pero una Fiesta de Los Barrios permanente […]” (And then it will be a day of celebration, it will be a FIESTA DE LOS BARRIOS, but a permanent Fiesta de Los Barrios […]) (7).
1984: “A benefit for Casa El Salvador Farabundo Martí”
“Casa El Salvador Farabundo Martí is a solidarity committee of Salvadoran refugees living in the U.S. Our goals are to inform people about the situation in El Salvador and Central America, to promote friendship with our people, and to discourage U.S. intervention in our country.”
In December 1984, the Chicago-based, refugee-led organization called Casa El Salvador Farabundo Martí hosted a benefit dinner and invited allies and supporters to “share this season of peace with the people of El Salvador.” El Salvador itself, rather than celebrating a season of peace, was deep in a brutal civil war marked by widespread human rights abuses: far from a conflict confined to fighting between armed factions, the government’s military and paramilitary death squads—trained and funded by the United States government—broadly targeted civilian non-combatants. Meanwhile, only a minuscule portion of refugees fleeing El Salvador were granted asylum in the United States. This combination of domestic U.S. policies, enabled by controversial Cold War rhetoric, sparked passionate peace, solidarity, and anti-intervention movements across the country. A snapshot of those efforts, and the array of allies that were involved in them, are captured in this small poster (MSH/LAT 0120 U.S./Central America Cold War Ephemera Collection).
San Francisco’s first annual “Encuentro del Canto Popular” (“Gathering of Popular Song”) was organized by volunteers from the community newspaper El Tecolote in 1982. The event was inspired by the life and legacy of Víctor Jara, a Chilean educator, activist, and singer-songwriter who was one of the founding figures of Chile’s—and, ultimately, Latin America’s—nueva canción (new song). This folkloric genre was imbued with such deep social commitment that it became an international movement (the Smithsonian offers an introduction to la nueva canción in their Folkways series). Jara was kidnapped, imprisoned, tortured, and executed by Chile’s military just after the U.S.-backed coup that ousted the democratically-elected president, Salvador Allende, and which began the 17-year military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.
Acción Latina, a community organization based in San Francisco’s Mission District that grew out of El Tecolote, took part in U.S.-based protests against Pinochet’s regime (as can be seen in this post from the Bancroft Library, which now preserves a substantial Acción Latina archive), as well as later solidarity movements. The poster featured here was created for the Encuentro’s 20th year, celebrated in 2001 under the stewardship of Acción Latina. Its lineup of musicians from Nicaragua for this “tribute to 20 years of culture and resistance” was a nod to the protest and dissent expressed in both Nicaragua and the United States following the CIA-led formation in 1981 of the Contras (an umbrella organization of anti-Sandinista combatants), a covert project that ultimately culminated in the Iran-Contra Scandal. The musician wearing the symbol of the United Farm Workers on her shirt speaks to solidarity within and between Latino communities.
Please join us for the following public events and exhibits being hosted in Rare Books and Special Collections:
Drop in to one of this month’s Exhibit Open Houses to meet and speak informally with one of the curators of the fall exhibition, Mapping Global Dante in Translation. Learn how translators, artists, and printers have popularized and reshaped the Divine Comedy over the centuries and across the world and discover the Library’s many Dante editions.
This exhibit traces the global journey of Dante’s masterpiece through rare and valuable printed editions, highlighting how translators, artists, and printers have popularized and reshaped the Commedia. These volumes reveal a dynamic dialogue between Dante’s poetry and the world. A global literary perspective transforms Dante from a monumental yet isolated figure of the European Middle Ages into a central presence in the ongoing international conversation about humanity, the universe, time, eternity, and the power of literature.
This exhibit is curated by Salvatore Riolo (Notre Dame, Italian Studies doctoral candidate), and co-curators Giulia Maria Gliozzi (Notre Dame, Italian Studies doctoral candidate); Inha Park (Notre Dame, Italian Studies doctoral candidate); and Peter Scharer (Yale, Comparative Literature doctoral candidate). Theodore J. Cachey Jr. (Notre Dame) and Jacob Blakesley (Sapienza Università di Roma) served as consultants on the exhibit.
Historian Gert Gielis has recently explained the importance of these university writings:
“As the first official statements concerning Luther’s heresy, they were imperative steps in branding his teaching as heretical. Conveyed to Rome by Johannes Eck in March, 1520, the academic condemnations eventually influenced the official papal condemnation of Exsurge Domine, issued [by Pope Leo X] a few months later.”
—Gert Gielis, “«Post exactam et diligentem examinationem». How the Louvain Theologians condemned Luther’s Theses (1519): Context, Practices and Consequences,” Annali di Storia delle università italiane 2017, no. 2: p. 121.
The Louvain theologians produced 13 articles and Cologne authored its own set of 10; both faculties presented them to the pope’s representative in Germany, Cardinal Cajetan, for his comments. In early November 1519, the Louvain faculty also sent the text of their condemnation to their Dutch colleague Adriaan Florensz Boeyens, Bishop of Tortosa, who within a few years would become Pope Adrian VI. He answered with a letter on December 4, 1519, expressing his critical views on Luther and supporting the condemnation by Louvain. Both sets of condemnations, along with the letter from Boeyens, were published at Louvain in February 1520. By March 27, Luther had finished a lengthy critique of the universities’ views.
This volume includes the full text of the articles of condemnation issued by both Cologne and Louvain, Boeyens’ letter criticizing Luther, and the first edition of Luther’s rather lengthy reply—which constitutes the majority of the text.
We have identified only three other North American holdings of this Wittenberg edition.
In honor of Labor Day, Rare Books and Special Collections is pleased to highlight three recently acquired 1937 issues of the scarce monthly publication Sport Call, The Official Organ of The Workers’ Sports League of America. Published during the 1930s, Sport Call’s tagline explained that it was “a periodical devoted to the physical education of the working class,” and it promoted healthful sports and recreation for laborers and workers.
Front page of Sport Call, February 1937.
During the turbulent years of the Great Depression, Sport Call and the Workers’ Sports League of America (WSLA) were active participants in national and international socialist movements. Headquartered in New York City, the League—through its official journal—offered a decidedly pro-labor view of sports and athletics that critiqued, what it saw as, capitalist exploitation of laborers and athletes. Sport Call also fervently opposed the rising tide of fascist politics during the 1930s and endorsed sports as a potential unifying and democratizing force.
Sport Call supported, for example, a January 1937 conference organized by the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) that aimed to establish a permanent Labor Sports Movement. Speaking to more than 150 delegates, Siegfried Lipschitz, President of the Workers’ Sports League, described the principles of Workers’ Sports International—the parent organization of the WSLA. “The Workers’ Sports International,” he said, “is a pillar of world democracy.”
A Jewish German emigré, lawyer, journalist, and activist, Lipschitz knew first hand the necessity of fighting reactionary politics: “The International and its affiliated organizations reject dictatorship in all its forms,” he declared. “To them it is an eternal creed that Labor cannot live and flourish,” Lipschitz concluded, “except in an atmosphere of free speech, free press, and the fullest expression of popular sentiments.” (March 1937, p. 3).
Sport Call well understood the connection between sports and politics, and an anti-fascist theme runs throughout these three issues. In February 1937, the journal editorialized strongly against the upcoming heavyweight championship fight between German Max Schmeling and American James Braddock. The editors wrote that they were “vehemently opposed to the spreading of Nazi propaganda in Sports!,” and they elaborated:
“The fact that Max Schmeling is a Nazi is known everywhere. The fact that Schmeling is a first-class propaganda merchant of Hitler’s is also well known. The opportunity to spread Nazi filth in this country must not be given to Hitler! The Braddock-Schmeling fight must not be staged!”
Similarly, the Workers’ Sports League had advocated for boycotting the 1936 Berlin Olympics in protest of Nazi Germany’s policies. The following year, the League supported and promoted the Third International Workers Olympiad held in Antwerp, Belgium, as an alternative and more egalitarian athletic competition.
In an editorial titled, “Forward to Antwerp,” the March 1937 issue of Sport Call endorsed the call to action of George Elvin, the General Secretary of the British Workers Sports Association. The purpose of the Workers Olympiad, Elvin said, was to promote: “The unity of the people against war; the determination to continue the fight for clean, healthy, and beneficial sport; the maintenance of liberty and democracy.”
Venue for the swimming events at the 1937 Third International Workers Olympiad as pictured in Sport Call March 1937, page 2.
More specifically, Elvin elaborated that there will be “none of those regrettable incidents, which mar other sports meetings. Working class leaders will not refuse the hand-clasp of congratulations to victors as Hitler did to Jesse Owens, because he did not approve of the color of his skin.” (March 1937, page 1).
The Workers’ Sports League and Sport Call consistently participated in anti-fascist events around New York and sought to include sports programming in socialist and pro-labor gatherings. In February 1937, Wilhelm Sollmann, a German politician and a former Minister of Labor in Germany’s Weimar government, gave a lecture in New York City titled, “What After Hitler?” As part of the event, members of the Workers’ Sports League put on a sports exhibition.
Athletes at Anti-Nazi Meet: Members of the Workers’ Sports League pose with American flags and a banner reading: “Welcome son of German soil, may freedom be yours” (March 1937, page 5).
Sport Call also favorably covered the Second Annual World Labor Athletic Festival held on July 11, 1937, at New York City’s Randall Park. More than 20,000 “trade unionists and sports fans,” according to the journal, attended and participated in the meet. The cover of the July 1937 issue of Sport Call featured members of the Workers’ Sports League performing “their rhythmic calisthenic drill.”
In addition to supporting national and international causes, the Workers’ Sports League also promoted the health benefits of recreation. Sport Call regularly printed health and recreation tips for readers and workers. In February 1937 (page 4), an article encouraged “Exercise in Winter” and featured a picture explaining, “It’s a lot fun and warmer than you think!”
A letter to the editor of the March 1937 issue further discussed the importance of the participatory and egalitarian nature of labor sports organizations:
“The Workers’ Sports League, building upon its program of solidarity with the working class and its aspirations, physical development of the masses rather than individual “stars,” real amateurism rather than quasi-professionalism, equal welcome to all regardless of race and color, and democratic organization control, can be built into a mighty organization—and become itself the “official” sports movement.” (March 1937, page 6)
These Sport Call issuesare available to researchers. RBSC welcomes new donations to expand our holdings of this scarce and important title.
Note about Sport Call publication history: This hard-to-find and relatively obscure journal is held by few repositories. It apparently began publication as the German-language Arbeiter-Sport in Amerika (Workers’ Sport in America) in about 1930. The journal changed titles to Proletarian Sports and adopted English in 1934, before changing titles again to Sport Call in about 1936.
RBSC is closed Monday, September 1st, for Labor Day.
Rare Books and Special Collections welcomes students, faculty, staff, researchers, and visitors back to campus for Fall 2025! We want to let you know about a variety of things to watch for in the coming semester.
This exhibition traces the global journey of Dante’s masterpiece through rare and valuable printed editions, highlighting how translators, artists, and printers have popularized and reshaped the Commedia. These volumes reveal a dynamic dialogue between Dante’s poetry and the world. A global literary perspective transforms Dante from a monumental yet isolated figure of the European Middle Ages into a central presence in the ongoing international conversation about humanity, the universe, time, eternity, and the power of literature.
This exhibit is co-sponsored by the Center for Italian Studies and the Devers Program in Dante Studies. It is curated by Salvatore Riolo (Notre Dame Italian Studies doctoral candidate) and co-curators Giulia Maria Gliozzi (Notre Dame Italian Studies doctoral candidate), Inha Park (Notre Dame Italian Studies doctoral candidate), and Peter Scharer (Yale Comparative Literature doctoral candidate). Theodore J. Cachey Jr. (Notre Dame) and Jacob Blakesley (Sapienza Università di Roma) served as consultants on the exhibit.
Few 19th-century antiquarians matched the obsession or eccentricity of English baronet Sir Thomas Phillipps (1792-1872). A self-described “vello-maniac” (lover of parchment), Phillipps spent his life and fortune amassing what became the largest manuscript collection of his time. It included more than 60,000 manuscripts and 20,000 printed works.
Upon his death, Phillipps mandated that his collection never be dispersed, nor that any Catholic ever be permitted to view his library. After his will was contested, however, Phillipps’ descendants began the century-long process of ridding themselves of the burdensome trove. This exhibit features five manuscripts that have made their way from the Phillipps collection to the University of Notre Dame, testifying to the fraught legacy of one of history’s most extreme collectors. In this exhibit, three medieval charters, a medieval codex, and an early modern treatise are now available for all to see, in direct contrast to Phillipps’ restrictive wishes.
This exhibit is curated by Anne Elise Crafton, 2024-2025 Rare Books and Special Collections Postdoctoral Research Fellow.
This exhibit displays a medieval sermon composed from a variety of preaching aids and sourcebooks: bibles, summae, florilegia, and other systematized anthologies. The sermon was the most influential vehicle for religious and moral instruction: virtues, vices, canon law, and living the faith all reached the masses in urban centers through preaching. The physical formats of the manuscripts themselves provide insight into pastoral care in the medieval world. This exhibit emphasizes a few of the many items from the Hesburgh Library’s collection of medieval manuscripts created for and used by actual medieval preachers.
This exhibit is curated by David T. Gura, Ph.D., Curator, Ancient and Medieval Manuscripts, Concurrent Professor of Classics and the Medieval Institute.
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
This program is free and open to the public.
Friday, September 12 from 2:00 to 3:30 pm | Exhibit Open House: Drop in to meet and speak informally with curator Salvatore Riolo (Notre Dame Italian Studies doctoral candidate) about the new exhibit, Mapping Global Dante in Translation. Learn how translators, artists, and printers have popularized and reshaped the Divine Comedy over the centuries and across the world and discover the Library’s many Dante editions.
Remembering the Harrisburg TrojansThe First Women’s Political PartyDiscovering Fianna: The Voice of Young IrelandReading the Gay Rodeo Ephemera Collection for Pride MonthSome 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 1, for Labor Day (Monday)
November 27–28, for Thanksgiving (Thursday and Friday)
Our last day open before the campus closure for Christmas Celebration will be Tuesday, December 23. We will reopen on January 5, 2026.
