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.
Borromeo (1538-1584) is well known as one of the administrative leaders of the Catholic Reformation. Following his appointment as archbishop of the diocese of Milan (Italy) in 1564, he worked tirelessly to implement in his archdiocese the decrees of the Council of Trent, which had concluded the year before the beginning of his episcopal tenure. His reforms largely centered on the revitalization of education for both clergy and laity. He convened a series of synods beginning in 1568, and by the time of his death in 1584 it appears that 11 such meetings were held.
Apparently, not all of the synods’ decrees were published, and we have identified printed collections for only the first and fourth; the present work represents the work of the latter gathering, held in Milan in November 1574.
We have identified no other copies held by any other institution worldwide.
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.
The books in Special Collections’s April-May spotlight exhibit represent a small selection of materials from the University of Notre Dame’s collection that reveal the influence of William Morris on the Arts & Crafts movement. From the printing and binding of Thomas J. Cobden-Sanderson to the illumination and calligraphy of Edward Johnston and Alberto Sangorski, Morris’s ideal of the “book beautiful” was taken up by dozens of other makers who sought in their own way to merge artistry and craftsmanship in the creation of beautiful books.
William Morris founded the Kelmscott Press in 1891 in response to the decorative excesses of the waning Victorian era and declining material and design standards in book publishing. He aimed to print books “which would have a definite claim to beauty, while at the same time they should be easy to read and should not dazzle the eye, or trouble the intellect of the reader by eccentricity of form in the letters.” 1 Perhaps for the first time in Europe since Gutenberg, Morris sought to design the whole book, selecting the paper, type, illustrations, typography, binding, and even the ink that were used in the production of books from the Kelmscott Press.
In making these decisions, Morris was informed by a set of exemplary medieval manuscripts and early printed works that he assembled as a personal reference library. On his historical influences in book design, Morris wrote “I have always been a great admirer of the calligraphy of the Middle Ages, & of the earlier printing which took its place. As to the fifteenth century books, I had noticed that they were always beautiful by force of the mere typography, even without the added ornament, with which many of them are so lavishly supplied.” 2 The University of Notre Dame is fortunate to have two medieval manuscripts (cod. Lat. c. 6 and cod. Lat. e. 4) owned by William Morris.
Lat. c. 6 binding (fore edge) and Morris bookplate.
Cod. Lat. c. 6 is a 13th century copy of Peter Riga’s Aurora. Its undecorated, utilitarian limp parchment binding is charming even in its worn state and exemplifies the authenticity that Morris was attracted to in scribal book production. This book features particularly pronounced “yapped” fore-edge folds on the parchment cover, which were intended to protect the page edges from wear. Yapped edges are commonly found in this style of binding, and Morris would go on to incorporate them in his binding designs for books from the Kelmscott Press.
Except for the Kelmscott Press edition of Chaucer’s works, most books from the press were issued in two possible binding configurations: limp vellum with colored silk ties or a hardcover binding with off-white linen covering the spine and blue paper covering the boards. The Earthly Paradise was one of the last publications by the Kelmscott Press, and this particular copy retains its William Morris-designed limp vellum binding with green silk ties. It was bound for the Kelmscott Press by J. & J. Leighton. The yapped fore-edge folds of this binding are reminiscent of the yapped edges on the Riga Aurora manuscript, though they are more diminutive. The use of green silk (custom dyed at the request of Morris and used for the fore-edge ties on this binding) appears frequently in British Arts & Crafts movement books. A similarly colored green silk was used to sew the copy of Men & Women by the Doves Press in the exhibit and is visible in the gutter fold.
Men & Women opening showing colophon and green silk in gutter.
After taking up bookbinding in 1883 at the suggestion of Jane Morris, William Morris’ wife, Thomas J. Cobden-Sanderson established a new aesthetic for gold tooling in bookbinding using repeating patterns of a custom-designed set of brass finishing tools and high quality leather. Cobden-Sanderson’s aesthetic was also disseminated through his teaching. His students, such as Douglas Cockerell and Katharine Adams, became leading binders in their own right. Like William Morris, Cobden-Sanderson was interested in the design of the whole book and believed that ideally each part of the book’s production–materials, typography, illustration, and binding–should function together harmoniously to communicate the ideas contained by the written word.
Though foremost a bookbinder, Cobden-Sanderson collaborated with Emery Walker—a renowned typographer who assisted Morris in the development of several Kelmscott typefaces—to establish the Dove Press in 1900 four years after the death of William Morris. Their Doves typeface was a more accurate, svelte interpretation of Nicolas Jenson’s roman types from the late 15th century than was Kelmscott’s squat Golden typeface used in The Earthly Paradise (and in Morris’s bookplate).
This Doves Press copy of Men & Women by Robert Browning was “flourished” in the margins by Edward Johnston. Johnston was a calligrapher who was inspired by Medieval and Renaissance manuscripts and helped revitalize illumination and lettering in the Arts & Crafts movement. Ironically, Johnston is perhaps best known today for creating the sans serif typeface used by the London Underground transportation system than for his floral calligraphy.
Sometime between 1901 and 1905, Edward Johnston taught calligraphy at the Central School in London to Francis Sangorski, an virtuosic bookbinder and younger brother of Alberto Sangorski. Though Alberto was initially a bookkeeper from Francis’s bindery, Sangorski & Sutcliffe, Alberto learned the rudiments of calligraphy, quill pen cutting, and gold illumination from Francis. In 1905 at the age of 43 (coincidentally the same age Thomas J. Cobden-Sanderson gave up lawyering for bookbinding) Alberto Sangorski established himself as a calligrapher.3
This illuminated manuscript of John Milton’s On the morning of Christ’s nativity: an Ode was created by Alberto Sangorski sometime between 1905 and 1910. Alborto Sangorski developed his own miniaturist painting style based on Medieval and Pre-Raphaelite artists, which can been seen in this manuscript and in the manuscript of Dante Gabriel Rosetti’s The Blessed Damozel also on display in the exhibit. Alberto’s work drifted from the historical modeling of other Arts & Crafts figures and embraced the Edwardian era’s exuberance in design and catered to the conspicuous consumption of the truly “Gilded Age.”
This Alberto Sangorski manuscript of Dante Gabriel Rosetti’s poem The Blessed Damozel was bound by his brother Francis’s bindery, Sangorski & Sutcliffe. Francis Sangorski began his bookbinding apprenticeship in 1901 under Douglas Cockerell, another leading figure in the Arts & Crafts movement who himself trained under Thomas J. Cobden-Sanderson at the Doves Bindery. This binding is typical of Sangorski & Sutcliffe’s higher-end design bindings, featuring elaborate gold tooling and decorative leather onlays of thinly skived crimson goatskin. Sangorski & Sutcliffe’s most expensive and celebrated binding of an 1884 imprint of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám sank on the RMS Titanic on April 14, 1912. Francis Sangorski drowned six weeks later while swimming in the English Channel. Like the Milton manuscript, this codex was likely created early in Alberto Sangorski’s career sometime between 1905 and 1910.
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).
Hesburgh Libraries has just acquired the first edition of an extremely rare German-language Catholic Martyrology that was edited by the famed Jesuit scholar-saint, Peter Canisius (1521-1597). The work, Martyrologium: der Kirchen-Kalender, darinnen angezeiget werden, die christlichen Feste und Heiligen Gottes beyder Testamente (Dilingen, 1562), was apparently undertaken by one Adam Walasser, who enlisted Canisius’ help while the latter was in Augsburg. Canisius’ name appears prominently on the title-page, while Walasser only takes credit in the dedication leaf—probably because Canisius was becoming well known by this time.
The purpose of this Martyrology seems to have been two-fold: first, the authors wanted to appeal to the German Catholic population in the German language, especially since Protestantism had been making significant inroads using the vernacular language; second, the authors recognized the need for a scholarly revision of Martyrological texts in order to conform more accurately with known historical facts. In this respect, Canisius anticipated the call for similar revisions by the Council of Trent (which would conclude the year after the publication of this work)—by the end of the 16th century, other revised Roman Martyrologies had been published.
We have found no other North American library holdings of this edition.
This year’s Halloween post brings you tales of the Pooka:
“an avil sper’t that does be always in mischief, but sure it niver does sarious harrum axceptin’ to thim that deserves it, or thim that shpakes av it disrespictful.”
Broadly speaking, the Pooka (also referred to as a púca or puca) is a mischievous creature found in Celtic, English, and Channel Islands folklore—its name is the root of Shakespeare’s Puck in the play A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Although a shapeshifter capable of a variety of appearances, in our story the Pooka takes one of its more common forms, that of a black horse with fiery eyes and blue, flaming breath.
The volume this story comes from is Irish Wonders: the Ghosts, Giants, Pookas, Demons, Leprechauns, Banshees, Fairies, Witches, Widows, Old Maids, and other marvels of the Emerald Isle by D. R. McAnally, Jr. We hold both American and British editions of this text from 1888, both illustrated by H. R. Heaton. The title page describes the book as “Popular Tales as told by the People.” The stories and storytellers are integrated in the narrative, with storytellers represented as local characters. The Hiberno-English, or English as spoken in Ireland, is represented in the spelling and dialogue shown above.
Captain Francis O’Neill copy (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1888)Loeber Collection copy (London: Ward, Lock and Co, 1888)
“Taming the Pooka” tells two brief stories of interactions with the spirit before settling in to the longer tale of how King Brian Boru tamed the beast. Click below for a PDF of the entire tale. Enjoy!
Happy Halloween to you and yours from all of us in Notre Dame’s Special Collections!
Tyrone-born clergyman John Richardson (c. 1669-1747) was a strong advocate of publishing Irish-language religious works as a means of converting Ireland’s Catholics to Protestantism. The Hesburgh Libraries recently acquired a copy of his 1711 book of sermons, Seanmora ar na Priom Phoncibh, na Chreideamh or Sermons upon the Principal Points of Religion, Translated into Irish. The book was published in London by Elinor Everingham.
In the same year that he published this book, Richardson presented a petition to the Lord Lieutenant, the duke of Ormond, calling for the publication of testaments, prayer books, catechisms and sermons in Irish, and he also published A Proposal for the Conversion of the Popish Natives of Ireland to the Establish’d Religion. Our book of sermons represents an early part of his campaign to provide printed sermons.
Richardson makes the case for his project in the book’s dedication to the Duke of Ormond.
It is too manifest to be denied that the many dreadful Calamities with which that unfortunate Island hath been miserably Afflicted since the Reformation, are in a great measure owing to the unhappy differences of Religion in it. To prevent them for the time to come, several Laws have been made to weaken, and at last to Extinguish Popery in that Kingdom; and there seems to be only one thing wanting, one thing very becoming the Professours of Christianity, in order to attain this happy End, which is, that proper Methods be used to Instruct the Natives in the true Religion, and to Convert them from their Errours.
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The first sermon, by Richardson, is headed with a Bible verse on the necessity of godliness. This is followed by a sermon by John Tillotson, the Bishop of Canterbury, preached in the presence of the King and Queen at Hampton Court in April 1689. The translator of this sermon, Pilib Mac Brádaigh (c.1655-1720), is said to have been a Catholic priest who “embraced the aristocratic religion of the State, for which he handed down his name to posterity as Philip Ministir” (John O’Donovan).
The final texts are three sermons given by Bishop William Beveridge, Bishop of St. Asaph, and are translated to Irish by Seón ó Mulchonri, or Seán Ó Maolconaire.
The printed text uses many contractions, and these are almost, but not all, listed in the key at the back of the book. The key displays the Irish alphabet of eighteen letters, the symbols for contractions of common letter-combinations, and a display of the lenited consonants, each one with an overhead dot.
We know of six other copies of this book in the U.S.
Hesburgh Libraries has recently acquired the first edition of Ambrose Corbie’s Certamen Triplex (Antuerpiae, 1645), a rare and important contemporary account of the martyrdoms of Thomas Holland (1600-1642), Ralph Corbie (1598-1644) and Henry Morse (1595-1645), who were Jesuit priests executed during the English Civil War while conducting missionary activities in England. The author (1604-1649) was the brother of Ralph Corbie and himself a Jesuit priest.
Holland, Corbie and Morse were captured and executed between 1642 and 1645 by parliamentarians after the English Civil War erupted. Holland was born in Lancashire and after studying at the Jesuit college at St. Omer and the English College, Valladolid, he joined the English mission in London, where he was apprehended in 1642.
Corbie was born, as the Certamen Triplex tells us, “in the vicinity” of Dublin (p. 43) after his parents fled county Durham in the northeast of England in the wake of being persecuted for recusancy. After studying at various Catholic institutions on the continent, he joined the English mission and was based in his ancestral home of county Durham where he was caught in July 1644.
The best known of the three martyrs was Morse, the “priest of the plague”, who ministered to the sick—both Protestant and and Catholic—during the plague epidemic of 1636. His courage, as many of the Protestant clergy fled the city, caught the attention of Charles I’s Catholic wife, Henrietta Maria. After Morse was arrested in 1637, Henrietta Maria interceded on his behalf and saved him from execution. Following a few years as chaplain to the English troops in Flanders, he returned to England in 1643. Morse was subsequently captured and, with his royal protector having fled to France in 1644, was executed in February of 1645 at Tyburn on the original charge from eight years earlier.
“The martyrs of the 1640s found themselves embroiled in the struggles between Charles I and Parliament. Earlier, in the 1630s, Charles’s reluctance to prosecute priests on charges of treason and his pro-Spanish foreign policy deepened suspicions that he was not fully committed to the Reformation and angered those who felt England should aid continental Protestants in their struggles against Catholic powers. The fear that Charles was betraying the Protestant cause at home and abroad directly affected the fate of Catholic priests. As conflict between king and Parliament flared, Parliament demanded that Elizabethan treason legislation be put into effect and proclaimed that all priests were to leave the country by 7 April 1641 on pain of death. The Irish Catholic rebellion further invigorated prosecution of the Elizabethan statutes.”
We have identified only eight other North American library holdings of this edition.
This exhibition explores the fraught, circuitous and unfinished course of emancipation over the nineteenth century in Cuba and the United States. People — enslaved individuals and outside observers, survivors and resistors, and activists and conspirators — made and unmade emancipation, a process that remains unfinished and unrealized.
Materials from Rare Books and Special Collections’ Latin American and U.S. collections are paired together to reflect on the history of enslavement and freedom beyond national borders. The show features books, manuscripts, maps, and prints, illustrating the array of formats held in RBSC and how they each shed light on historical experience.
Making and Unmaking Emancipation in Cuba and the United States is curated by Rachel Bohlmann, Curator of North Americana and American History Librarian and Erika Hosselkus, Curator of Latin American Studies and Iberian Studies, and Associate University Librarian for Scholarly Resources and Services.
Curator-led tours will be offered at noon on September 22, October 13 and 27 [tour on 10/27 cancelled], and November 17, 2023. They are free and no reservations are required. Exhibition tours may also be arranged for classes and other groups by contacting Rachel Bohlmann at (574) 631-1575 or rbohlman@nd.edu.
Please mark your calendars and join us on Thursday, November 30th at 4:30 pm in 102 Hesburgh Library for a panel program that delves more deeply into questions about enslavement and emancipation raised in the exhibition. The program also speaks to the challenges and opportunities in connecting broad audiences to new scholarly findings in the study of transatlantic slavery. A curators’ tour will precede the program; a reception will follow.
Hesburgh Libraries has recently acquired extremely rare editions of the two doctoral theses by Francesco Maria Sforza Pallavicino, an important seventeenth-century Catholic theologian and philosopher. These works, De Universa Philosophia (Romae, 1625) and De Universa Theologia (Romae, 1628), were issued only in these imprints.
Francesco Maria Sforza Pallavicino. De universa philosophia a marchions Sfortia Pallavicino publice asserta in Collegio romano Soc. Jesu libri tres ad Vrbanum VIII. P.M. Corbelletti, 1625.
Sforza Pallavicino (1607-1667) cuts an interesting and versatile figure in the church history of this period. He was an ardent supporter of Galileo and the “new science”, while also well known for his two-volume history of the Council of Trent, Istoria del Concilio di Trento (1656-57), a scathing rebuttal to Paolo Sarpi’s pro-Protestant Istoria del Concilio Tridentino. Over his father’s objections, Sforza Pallavicino entered the Society of Jesus in 1637 and became a staunch opponent of Jansenism and defender of the Jesuit theological tradition. He was made a Cardinal by Pope Alexander VII in 1657.
Francesco Maria Sforza Pallavicino. De universa theologia, a marchione Sfortia Pallavicino post theologicam lauream publice asserta in collegio romano Societatis Jesu, libri IX … Ex typ. F. Corbelletti, 1628.
The author’s philosophy dissertation is a wide-ranging text covering readings from Aristotle, Augustine, Avicenna, and Aquinas to Scotus, Suarez, and Xenophon; De Universa Theologia is similarly broad in scope, specifically treating the following nine subjects: “De Deo Uno, et Trino”; “De Angelis”; “De Actibus Humanis”; “De Gratia”; “De Fide, Spe, et Charitate”; “De Virtutibus Moralibus”; “De Incarnatione”; “De Primis Tribus Sacramentis”, and “De Quatuor Postremis Sacramentis”.
We have found only two North American library holdings for each of these titles.
