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 spring exhibit, Paws, Hooves, Fins & Feathers: Animals in Print, 1500-1800, is now open and will run through the summer. This is an exhibit of rare zoological books featuring early printed images of animals. We welcome classes and other groups of any age and would love to tailor a tour for your students and your curriculum — and if you can’t come to campus, the curators can bring the exhibit to you. Watch for forthcoming announcements of additional related events!
For more information about the exhibit or to set up a visit, contact curators Julie Tanaka and Erika Hosselkus.
This small poster (11 ½” x 18”) advertises “The First Annual Miss de Meanor Beauty Contest” by the Cockettes, an avant-garde, hippie theater group that became known for experimental, free spirited performances of cross-dressing and musical theater. The ensemble formed in 1969 with men and women from the Kaliflower commune in San Francisco. They first gained attention by performing parodies of musical theater songs (in full costume and makeup) at the city’s Palace Theater before a regular Saturday night underground film showcase, the Nocturnal Dream Show. The Cockettes created shows titled, “Gone with the Showboat to Oklahoma,” and “Tinsel Tarts in a Hot Coma.”
The evening’s special feature, “Lady Divine,” refers to Divine, a drag queen and stage name of Harris Glenn Milstead. Divine had already achieved countercultural acclaim playing characters in John Waters’ films (Mondo Trasho, 1969; Pink Flamingos, 1972) before this San Francisco appearance. She joined the Cockettes at one of their Palace Theater shows (“Journey to the Center of Uranus”) and then as Miss de Meanor in this performance at the House of Good, another underground cultural venue in the city. Other characters in the show included Miss Shapen, Miss Used, and Miss Conception.
Hesburgh Libraries has just acquired an important work on the persecution of Catholics in England during the reign of Elizabeth I, De persecutione anglicana libellus, by the English Jesuit Robert Parsons (1546-1610). Parsons accompanied St. Edmund Campion on his mission to England in 1580, but while Campion was captured and eventually executed, Parsons was able to flee the country. He built a printing press in Rouen (France) and in 1597 became the rector of the English College in Rome.
This 1582 edition, published in Rome, includes two letters by the Jesuit martyr Alexander Briant, the first of which alludes to the interrogation of Campion.
RBSC looks forward to an event-filled Spring ’20! As we welcome students, faculty, staff, researchers, and visitors back from the holiday break, we want to let you know about a few things to watch for.
Spring ’20 exhibit: Paws, Hooves, Fins & Feathers: Animals in Print, 1500-1800
This exhibit features mammals, sea creatures, and birds from our early modern rare book collection and is enhanced by images from our botanical collection as well as plant and animal specimens on loan to us from Notre Dame’s Museum of Biodiversity. We would like to extend our appreciation to Barbara Hellenthal (Curator) and Ronald Hellenthal (Director) for their help to make this possible.
Spotlight exhibit featuring works by and related to John Ruskin
Drop in every month to see what new surprise awaits you in our monthly feature.
Special Collections’ Classes
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 as well as from other local schools ranging from preschoolers to adults. If you’re interested in us doing instruction for your class or group, please contact Special Collections.
Italian Studies Research Seminar Series
The Spring ’20 series kicks off on Thursday, January 30 at 5:00pm. Join us for the first of four talks this semester.
Recent Acquisitions
We acquire new material throughout the year. Watch for announcements about recent acquisitions. RBSC has already received new materials for our Irish, Latin American, Medieval manuscripts, Eastern European, American, and European collections. We are awaiting the first installment of a new artist book, Birds of Acid by Parisian artist Didier Mutel some time this month.
The spring exhibit, Paws, Hooves, Fins & Feathers: Animals in Print, 1500-1800, curated by Erika Hosselkuss and Julie Tanaka, will open in January and run through the summer.
If you would like to bring a class or other group to Special Collections, schedule a tour of any of our exhibits, or schedule another event, please email rarebook @ nd.edu or call 574-631-0290.
Rare Books and Special Collections is open through Friday, December 20, 2019. We will be closed for the Christmas and New Year’s Break December 21, 2019 through January 1, 2020. We will reopen on Thursday, January 2, 2020.
This is the last blog post for 2019. Happy holidays to you and yours from Notre Dame’s Rare Books and Special Collections!
Hesburgh Libraries is pleased to announce that we have acquired the second edition of Boniifazio Simonetta’s De Christiane Fidei et Romanorum Pontificum Persecutionibus Opus, printed in Basel by Nicolaus Kessler, December 1509. This fascinating work is really encyclopedic in scope; the basic narrative deals with the history of the persecution of Christians, but also includes 179 letters by the author to a wide circle of his contemporaries, including such renowned figures of the Italian Renaissance as Lorenzo de Medici, Ludovico Sforza, Pico della Mirandola, and Pope Innocent VIII. This correspondence, interspersed throughout the text, treats a wide range of disparate subjects, including classical history, mythology, music, geography, botany, agriculture, medicine, physics, astronomy, and astrology. This second edition also includes a dedicatory preface by Jerome Emser, a prominent German theologian and Catholic opponent of Luther.
We have identified only other seven other North American holdings of this edition.
Sample page showing notation.
Front cover, showing binding in manuscript waste over vellum.
There are no events scheduled to be hosted in Rare Books and Special Collections in December 2019 or early January 2020.
Rare Books and Special Collections will remain open for our regular hours during Reading Days and Exams (Monday through Friday, 9am to 5pm). We welcome those looking for a quiet place to study.
The current spotlight exhibits are Touchdowns & Technology: The Evolution of the Media and Notre Dame Football (September – December 2019), a display of selected materials from the University Archives, and Irish Art and Literature from Graphic Studio Dublin (December 2019 – January 2020) in conjunction with the Snite Museum’s exhibit “Looking at the Stars”: Irish Art at the University of Notre Dame.
RBSC will be closed during Notre Dame’s Christmas & New Year’s Break (December 21, 2019 – January 1, 2020) and will resume regular hours (Monday – Friday, 9am – 5pm) on Thursday, January 2, 2020.
Like any person’s private possessions, family papers collected in Special Collections include heartfelt expressions. This scrap of paper, from the Strunsky-Walling Collection, contains a charming and original Thanksgiving greeting, created by Rosamond Walling (1910-1999) for Rifat Tirana (1907-1952). The piece is undated but must have been drawn during or after 1932, the year they met and married. At the time Walling was a recent Swarthmore college graduate who had traveled to Geneva to work as a journalist. Tirana, an Albanian Muslim, was a young economist working for the League of Nations.
“Thanksgiving Greetings For My Rifat,” Strunsky-Walling Collection, MSN/MN 0509-96, Department of Special Collections, Hesburgh Libraries of Notre Dame.
Rosamond Walling grew up in an affluent and politically ambitious family in Greenwich, Connecticut. Her parents were Anna Strunsky Walling and William English Walling. Twenty-five years earlier they had made their mark in American Socialist circles and within social reform more broadly. William English Walling reported on the Springfield, Illinois race riot, which provided the spark for the founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in 1909. Anna Strunsky Walling wrote about the Russian Revolution of 1905, advocated for socialism, and was a novelist.
The Strunsky-Walling Collection contains mostly family papers of Rosamond’s parents, including more than 500 letters (between Anna and English [as Rosamond’s father was known], and Anna and Rosamond, and letters from close friends), two diaries by Anna Strunsky Walling, miscellaneous manuscripts (like this drawing), printed ephemera, and photographs.
Rosamond Walling Tirana and her husband eventually settled in the United States. In 1941 Rifat Tirana published (under the pseudonym, Thomas Reveille) The Spoil of Europe: The Nazi Technique in Political and Economic Conquest, an exposé based on official German government documents. After World War II he worked for the US Mutual Security Agency, a post-war initiative to assist European allies with economic recovery. The couple had three children. Rifat Tirana died in 1952, aged 44. Although Rosamond Tirana married a second time, she chose to be buried with Tirana. She died in 1999.
RBSC will be closed during Notre Dame’s Thanksgiving Break (November 28-December 1, 2019). We wish you and yours a Happy Thanksgiving!
Hesburgh Libraries has just acquired two important works (bound together) concerning the historical slave trade of Christians. The first, Dominique Busnot’s Histoire du regne de Mouley Ismael, roy de Maroc, Fez, Tafilet, Souz, &c. (Rouen, 1714), treats the reign of Moulay Ismail ibn Sharif, Sultan of Morocco from 1672-1727, under whom the Kingdom of Morocco reached the zenith of its power and influence. Ibn Sharif controlled a fleet of corsairs based at Rabat which supplied him with Christian slaves and weapons through their raids in the Mediterranean and all the way to the Black Sea. The work also includes accounts of three voyages undertaken by the Trinitarian religious order to Ceuta and Meknes in Morocco in order to redeem some of these slaves and a list of names of the redeemed captives, as well as the lengths of their respective imprisonments.
Illustration from Busnot’s Histoire du regne de Mouley Ismael, roy de Maroc, Fez, Tafilet, Souz, &c. (Rare Books Small DT 323.5 .B87 1714)
The second work, Busnot’s La tradition de l’Eglise, dans le soulagement ou le rachat des esclaves, also published at Rouen in 1714, offers a more general study concerning the church’s practice of redeeming Christian slaves through the centuries.
We have found only one other North American holding for these works bound together that features separate title pages for each.
This exhibit features mammals, sea creatures, and birds from our early modern rare book collection and is enhanced by images from our botanical collection as well as plant and animal specimens on loan to us from 
We acquire new material throughout the year. Watch for 
