Tag: books

Souvenirs from the Union Printers National Baseball League Tournament

by Greg Bond, Sports Archivist and Curator, Joyce Sports Research Collection

A pair of finely crafted, meticulously detailed, and distinctively shaped books—a baseball-glove shaped book and a baseball-shaped book—are among the Joyce Sports Research Collections newest acquisitions. The two unusually-shaped publications are both early-twentieth-century souvenir programs of the Union Printers National Baseball League Tournament from 1908 and 1911, respectively. Sponsored each year by the International Typographical Union (ITU), the tournament brought together teams representing the ITU from different cities for several days of sports, camaraderie, and brotherhood. Labor Day seems a fitting time to explore the history of these unique books and to remember the Union Printers National Baseball League Tournament.

The first Union Printers National Baseball League Tournament took place in New York City in September of 1908. To mark the festive occasion, the Allied Printing Trades Council of New York lovingly designed and published the First Printers’ National Baseball Tournament Souvenir Program in the shape of a realistic looking catcher’s mitt. The New York printers seemed to relish the opportunity to show off their craft for their visiting colleagues with this elaborate and creatively shaped program.

The 1908 catcher’s mitt souvenir program describes the origins of the Union Printers National Baseball League Tournament. As early as 1883, union printers in New York City had organized the New York Morning Newspaper Baseball League with teams representing different New York and Brooklyn newspapers. In 1906 and 1907, the squad from the New York American and Journal won the championship, and, after the regular season, team manager Harry B. Wood arranged several games against ITU teams representing the Boston Globe and the Pittsburgh Dispatch. The 1908 souvenir program reported that during their road trip to Pittsburgh, “the light of geniality and the warmth of hospitality from the sun of fraternity and good fellowship was ever on the job.”

Photograph of the New York American and Boston Globe Baseball Teams, taken at American League Park, Boston, September 11, 1907.

Following the successful inter-city matches, Wood hatched his grand plan for an ITU national baseball tournament. He formed an organizing committee, helped draft a constitution, and invited union printers from Boston, Chicago, Cincinnati, New York, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, and Washington, DC, to come to New York for the event. Each invited city received an informational prospectus that included a framed six-color formal invitation designed by New York artist Harry Goodwin that recipients later described as “a work of art.” The 1908 catcher’s mitt souvenir program, which Goodwin also took the lead in designing, featured a black-and-white reproduction of the elaborate invitation.

A black-and-white reproduction of the formal invitation New York Union Printers sent to their colleagues around the country to organize the First Printers’ National Baseball Tournament.

All eight cities accepted the offer to compete in the tournament that was held in the stadium of the New York Yankees. Boston beat Pittsburgh 5-1 in the 1908 finals to win the inaugural title. For their victory, Boston received the traveling International Typographical Union Championship Trophy that had been donated to the ITU by Cincinnati Reds Owner August Hermann. The first tournament proved to be a rousing success, and it soon became a highly anticipated ITU annual event.

After Chicago (1909) and Washington, DC (1910), St. Louis was the host city for the fourth annual tournament in 1911. Like their counterparts in New York, the Allied Printing Trades Council of St. Louis and the local union printers league, known as the “St. Louis Typo Athletic Association,” spared little expense in designing and printing a lavish baseball-shaped Souvenir Program for the Union Printers National Baseball League Fourth Annual Tournament. The color cover featured pennants for all participating cities, which had expanded to include Denver and Indianapolis, and an image of the Hermann ITU Championship Trophy.

Teams in the Union Printers National Baseball League Tournament were composed of all-star squads representing ITU leagues in each participating city. The New York league, for instance, explained in the 1911 program that the association’s Board of Director’s chose the tournament roster from the pool of eligible athletes: “every player has an equal chance to become a member of the team representing New York in the National Tournament even [if] his team finishes last in the league. This rule causes a good player on a poor team to be satisfied and keeps up interest in the organization.”

Pages from the 1911 Union Printers National Baseball League Tournament featuring the Indianapolis team wearing warm-up sweaters with the ITU (International Typographical Union) logo. The outsides of the round pages are decorated with baseball scenes.

The 1911 souvenir program also emphasized that the participants were both serious athletes and serious union men: “this league differs materially from the great majority [by] the fact that all players must be printers and members of the International Typographical Union, or registered apprentices who have served two and one half years at the trade. From this it will be seen that it is not such an easy matter to get together a representative baseball team to compete in these tournaments.”

International Typographical Union President James M. Lynch also gave his endorsement in the 1911 program, praising the “healthy outdoor recreation” and the “advertising value” of the baseball tournament. He also reminded readers about the ITU’s organizing efforts, which “endeavored to impart dignity to the craft by assisting in the maintenance of just and equitable rights of the individual craftsman and cementing the bonds of friendship and brotherhood that should exist between all men, and especially those of a distinctive craft.”

Most importantly, though, as the 1908 catcher’s mitt souvenir program had proclaimed a few years earlier, the Union Printers Baseball League National Tournament had the “purpose of promoting good fellowship and pure amateur sport.” Happy Labor Day!

RBSC is closed Monday, September 4th, for Labor Day.

A 16th Century Biography of a Jesuit Missionary

by Alan Krieger, Theology and Philosophy Librarian

Hesburgh Libraries has recently acquired a rare edition of a biography of Jesuit missionary Gaspar Berse (1515-1553), Nicolas Trigault’s Vita Gasparis Barzaei Belgae e Societate Iesu B. Xaverii in India socij (Coloniae, 1611). Trigault (1577-1628) was himself a Jesuit missionary to China, arriving in Nanjing in 1611; this edition was published just prior to his departure. He eventually traveled to Hangzhou where he worked until  his death in 1628.

Berse was a companion of St. Francis Xavier and went with him to Goa, India in 1548. When Xavier left Goa to travel further east, he left Berse to lead the new Jesuit mission. A prior edition of this work was published in 1610 in Antwerp.

We have found only seven other North American holdings of this edition.

Upcoming Events: August 2023

There are no public events currently scheduled for August. Please check back for events being hosted in Rare Books and Special Collections during September.

The exhibition Making and Unmaking Emancipation in Cuba and the United States will open mid-August and run through the fall semester.

The August spotlight exhibits are Football and Community at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (August – December 2023) and Centering African American Writing in American Literature (August – September 2023).

RBSC will be closed Monday, September 4th,
for Labor Day.

Early Printed Versions of Medieval Liturgical Commentaries in Rare Books & Special Collections

by Julia A. Schneider, Ph.D, Medieval Studies Librarian

Treatises on the Catholic Liturgy emerged as a genre of commentary during the Middle Ages (ca. 500-1500 CE), providing explanations for some or all aspects of the church’s religious ritual, including the Mass, the Divine Office, the Sacrament of Baptism, Ordination, and other rites, as well as church buildings and furnishings, such as vesture, candles (and their placement), bells, and the like.1 Although the reason for the treatises may have stemmed from necessity, whether due to the institution of reforms of liturgical practice or to the interest of particular bishops, the authors of many of these commentaries sought to provide theological background and spiritual edification for readers and preachers alike, aiding in the broader understanding of particular aspects of the Catholic liturgy. This deeper understanding provided for more fruitful meditation on the content and spiritual effects of the ritual. As with commentary on the scriptures in the Middle Ages, composers of these treatises on the liturgy provided their interpretations in multivalent senses, including allegorical understandings alongside (and sometimes instead of) historical or literal interpretations of the various actions, prayers, furnishings, and ministers involved in the ritual.

Although modern scholars have not published as extensively about the genre as they have about other medieval commentary types, existing manuscripts and library inventories indicate that they were important texts to be studied. Medieval authors tended to “recycle” the works of other authors by weaving the work of those earlier authors into their own commentaries; the manuscript transmission rate of texts from this genre, whether directly or through borrowing suggests a rather broad readership of treatises on the liturgy. That the dissemination of some of the most popular commentaries continued well into the print period, even as European ritual practices were reviewed and codified into a revised, unified Roman Rite,2 testifies to their use and usefulness.

Hesburgh Libraries Rare Books and Special Collections holds several witnesses to this early print tradition for liturgical commentaries. For this blog post, we will examine five of our printed treatises on the liturgy. Four of the five include versions of the commentary Rationale divinorum officiorum, which dates from the end of the thirteenth century and was written by William Durand, Bishop of Mende († 1296). Containing eight books, it provides encyclopedic commentary on all aspects of the rites of the liturgy, as well as church furnishings, vesture, and other topics. In addition to the Rationale, Durand compiled a Pontificale (the liturgical book including rites particular to the bishop) and composed the Speculum iudicale (Mirror of Canon Law), along with other works.

In composing the Rationale, Durand lifted text from commentaries by Pope Innocent III (1161-1216), John Beleth (1135-1182), Amalarius of Metz (c. 755-850), and others. It was an extremely popular work, as liturgical commentaries go! One hundred and thirty-nine manuscripts currently exist that were produced during the one hundred and sixty year period between the first manuscript version of the Rationale and its first printing.3 This may not seem like a lot of evidence of interest in the text by our contemporary standards, but given that the literacy rate was less than 20% during the Middle Ages,4 given that texts were copied entirely by hand during this period, and given the ecclesiastical audience for the text, this number is indicative of the status of a late medieval best-seller. Pointing to continued interest in Durand’s text into the modern period is the fact that forty-four printed editions of the Rationale–whole or in part–are known to have been printed between 1459-1500, with a total of one hundred and eleven different editions printed by the end of the nineteenth century.5

The earliest of the printed versions of the Rationale in Hesburgh Libraries’ holdings was printed by Jacques Huguetan in Lyon, c. 1503 on two hundred and twenty-three folios, and includes Huguetan’s printer’s mark. It contains historiated initials which were added after printing (mimicking the process of manuscript illumination), and some of those initials are missing.

The second version of the Rationale examined here was acquired as part of the José Durand Collection and was printed in Venice in 1509 by Peiro Quarengi. It provides a complete version of the text in one hundred and forty-seven leaves including both large and small initials throughout the text. These two represent two of the twenty-five versions of the Rationale printed between 1500-1519.6

Also from the Durand Collection, another of the later editions of the Rationale was printed in 1568 in Venice by Grazioso Percaccino. It contains three hundred and twenty-two leaves and includes a frontispiece; there are initials for each section as well, with some of them planned but absent.

The final version of the Rationale we will reference in this post was printed in 1581, also in Venice, by Giovanni Antonio Bertano. It contains three hundred and seventy-five leaves. In this version, William Durand’s text is appended by John Beleth’s twelfth-century treatise, Summa de ecclesiasticis officiis. Astrik L. Gabriel, O.Praem. (1907-2005), former director of Notre Dame’s Medieval Institute, gave this volume to the Hesburgh Libraries.

These are but four examples of the early print versions of William Durand’s Rationale from the sixteenth century. The demand for new versions of this text began to dwindle after 1672.7 His name was all but forgotten until, during the mid-nineteenth century, a resurgence of interest in manuscript studies and a subsequent pastoral and liturgical renewal occurred that gave rise to the composition of new treatises on the liturgy and an increase in regard for medieval liturgical forms.

Reflecting the climate of reform, a revision of the Roman Rite, and a renewal of pastoral care during the mid-sixteenth century, we have an imprint that contains a compendium of liturgical description, directions, and commentary, first addressed to Salentin IX of Isenberg-Grenzau, who was Archbishop-Elector of Cologne at the time of publication. This volume was published under the name De divinis Catholicae Ecclesiae officiis ac ministeriis, in 1568 by Gerwin Calenius and Johannes Quentel in Cologne.

Melchior Hittorp is the compendium’s compiler, editor and author of his own commentary. After introductory material, Hittorp included a reconstruction of the Order of Mass (Ordo Romanus) and other liturgical rites. This is followed by liturgical commentaries in full or excerpted form by Isidore of Seville, Amalarius of Metz, Berno of Rheichenau, Walafrid Strabo, Bernold of Constance, and Ivo of Chartres, among others. Hittorp’s versions of several of these treatises have influenced twentieth-century scholars attempting to create critical editions of commentaries, particularly that of Amalarius of Metz. Most of the authors represented here were bishops whose commentaries were well-known already while they still lived. Their work was mined, either directly or indirectly, by authors of later treatises. Several of these authors’ works were written during or after the Investiture Controversy (1076-1122), in order to illuminate reforms to church practices. That theme is notable here, as Hittorp’s work of 1568 appeared only five years after the Ecumenical Council of Trent closed in 1563. It was convened in 1545, in part, as the church sought to respond with doctrinal and practical definitions to the critiques of the reformers like Martin Luther.8

All of these imprints show the vibrant life of the liturgy and the importance placed on understanding its spiritual reality in the medieval and early modern periods. Although the intent of the author or compiler is sometimes difficult to determine, particularly for those treatises that do not necessarily describe the liturgical practices of a particular location, the modern reader is left with a broader understanding of the actions, prayers, and furnishings used in the ritual, which ultimately helps them understand the medieval world a bit better. And interest in these texts is reviving. Several medieval liturgical commentaries have been recently translated into English and other languages. A partial translation of Durand’s text into English by Timothy Thibodeau, an alumnus of Notre Dame’s Medieval Institute, is available by consulting the Hesburgh Library’s Catalog.

 

Footnotes

1. Roger Reynolds, “Liturgy, Treatises on,” in the Dictionary of the Middle Ages,  Joseph Strayer, ed. (NY: Scribner, 1989)  7: 624B.

2. The Roman Rite is the Latin Rite liturgy observed by Catholic churches in the West. Most European countries used the Roman Rite at the time of the Protestant Reformation (beginning 1517). In 1570, Pope Pius V promulgated the new, unified Roman Rite, later referred to as the Tridentine Rite or the Tridentine Mass, so-called after the Ecumenical Council held in Trent (1545-63) tasked with the reform and unification of the liturgy, among other things.

3. Menard, Clarence, “William Durand’s Rationale divinorum officiorum: Prelminiaries to a Critical Edition,” (Dissertation: Academia Pontificia Gregoriana, 1967), 2: 292. 

4. Ekselson, Tyrel C. “States, Institutions, and Literacy Rates in Early-Modern Western Europe,” Journal of Education and Learning (10. 2; 2021), 192. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1290524.pdf (accessed July 113, 2023).

5. Michel Albaric, “Éditions imprimées du Rationale de Guillaume Durand,” in Guillaume Durand, Évêque de Mende (v. 1230-1296) Actes de la Table Ronde du CNRS, Mende 24-27 Mai, 1990 (Paris: Éditions du CNRS, 1992), 183-4.

6. Ibid.

7. Ibid, 185.

8. Roger Reynolds, “Liturgical Scholarship at the Time of the Investiture Controversy : Past Research and Future Opportunities,” The Harvard Theological Review, 71.1, 1978), 113-4. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1509778 (last accessed July 11, 2023)

Keough-Naughton Library Research Award — Visiting Scholars of Irish Studies

We congratulate the following scholars who won this award in 2023, and we hope they will enjoy, as well as benefit from, their time in the Hesburgh Libraries.

The Keough-Naughton Library Research Award in Irish Studies, a grant designed to assist scholars who travel to use the Irish collections at the Hesburgh Libraries, was inaugurated in 2018. The annual competitive award is sponsored by the Keough-Naughton Institute of Irish Studies and ND International.

Dr. Seán Doherty, a lecturer at the School of Theology, Philosophy and Music, Dublin City University, is a composer and musicologist.

Seán Doherty

His project is ‘Patterns in 1001 Gems: The O’Neill Collection of Traditional Irish Music.’

Seán expects to visit in the fall and will work closely with the O’Neill Collection, the personal library of Francis O’Neill, the Chicago Chief of Police whose published collections of Irish traditional dance music have played a large role in the music of Ireland. 

Dr. Anne Jamison,  Senior Lecturer in Literary Studies at the School of Humanities and Communication Arts at Western Sydney University, Australia.

Anne Jamison

Anne is a feminist literary critic with a research focus on nineteenth-century Ireland and also on Australian women’s literature. She has published widely on Somerville and Ross as well as on other Irish women writers. 

Her project is ‘Irish Women’s Fairy Tale and Fantasy Writing for Children, 1800-1935.’

She expects to visit this summer, and to make great use of the Irish literature collections throughout the Hesburgh Library, focusing on works by Winifred Letts, Rosa Mulholland and Frances Browne in our Rare Books and Special Collections.

Annabel Barry is at the Department of English at the University of California, Berkeley, where she is a PhD candidate.

Annabel Barry

Her project is ‘The Romantic Ordinary’, and in her visit she studied materials from the nineteenth century and earlier, including the Holzapfel Collection of James Clarence Mangan.

Past recipients of the Award are listed on the Keough-Naughton Institute’s website, and this website also provides information on the award itself.

An early Italian vernacular response to Martin Luther’s teachings

by Alan Krieger, Theology and Philosophy Librarian

The Hesburgh Libraries has recently acquired a very rare sole edition of an early Italian vernacular response to Martin Luther’s teachings, Giovanni Pili Da Fano’s Iesus Maria Opera vtilissima uulgare co[n]tra le pernitiosissime heresie Lutherane p[er] li simplici (Bologna, 1532).

“At the end of the 1520’s and especially in the course of the 1530s, the Italian market offered a wide range of anonymous books in the vernacular that were merely translations, often partial, of Lutheran texts disguised behind seemingly innocent titles… To the complete absence of reaction by controversialists … there had been one significant exception… Giovanni of Fano offered the uneducated reader a Luther skilled in controversy, a violently anti-Roman, systematic theologian and subverter of tradition, presenting, together with a ‘clearer notice’ of the fundamentals of Catholic doctrine, a fully detailed picture of Lutheran errors.”

— Giorgio Caravale, Beyond the Inquisition:
Ambrogio Catarino Politi and
the Origins of the Counter-Reformation
(University of Notre Dame Press, 2017)

The first chapter of the work treats the handling of all kinds of heretics. Fano subsequently introduces his lay reader to the usual anti-Lutheran responses found in Latin treatises of the time: on the unity of the Church; St. Peter and the Apostolic Succession; on faith, Confession, the Eucharist, indulgences, Purgatory, idolatry, prayer, and finally on the celibacy of the clergy.

We have located only one other North American institutional holding of this title.

The Henry Grattan Pamphlet Collection

by Aedín Ní Bhróithe Clements, Irish Studies Librarian

The Henry Grattan Pamphlet Collection, purchased by the Hesburgh Libraries some twenty years ago, deserves to be highlighted in a blogpost.

Henry Grattan (1746-1820), was a prominent Irish politician, closely associated with the Irish parliament so that from 1782 until the Act of Union of 1800, it was known as ‘Grattan’s Parliament.’ 

The collection of books and pamphlets, bound together in nine volumes, comprise part of his personal library. These nine volumes became separated from the rest of the Grattan Library which was sold at auction in 1888. These volumes were discovered some hundred years later in a country house in Ireland.

The thematically-arranged volumes are handsomely bound with a title on each spine and a list of contents inside, hand-written in ink by Henry Grattan and another person.  Many of the publications also have marginal pencil marks and some have annotations.

The volumes are as follows:

1. Ireland. Free Trade & Independence
2. Ireland.
3. Ireland. 1798
4. Ireland. Catholics
5. Ireland. Catholics
6. Ireland. Catholics
7. Ireland. Union
8. Ireland. Union
9. Ireland. Union

The fourth volume shown here has the usual listing of contents written on the inside cover, and this volume also has Henry Grattan’s name inscribed in ink.

Pencilled annotations were cut when the pamphlet was trimmed for binding.

Grattan’s careful reading of some of the publications may be inferred from pencil marks in the margins. In this example, the penciled annotations appear to have been cut when the pamphlet was trimmed for binding.

While the individual pamphlets are rare in libraries, digitized copies of various editions are available. Therefore, it is the provenance and the selection and grouping together of these publications that makes them so interesting, as part of the working library of an Irish politician.

To see a complete list of the pamphlets and books in these nine volumes, type the following in the ND Catalog: Henry Grattan Pamphlet Collection.

Upcoming Events: May and through the summer

Currently there are no events scheduled to be hosted this summer in Rare Books and Special Collections.

The exhibit Printing the Nation: A Century of Irish Book Arts  will run through the summer and close in late July.

The current spotlight exhibits are Language and Materiality in Late Medieval England (February – early May 2023) and Hagadah shel Pesaḥ le-zekher ha-Shoʼah – Pessach Haggadah in memory of the Holocaust (April – May 2023).

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 29th, for Memorial Day and Tuesday, July 4th, for Independence Day.

A 16th Century Theological Work with an Interesting Provenance

by Alan Krieger, Theology and Philosophy Librarian

Hesburgh Libraries has just acquired a copy of an important and rare early modern title in Catholic theology with an interesting provenance. Jean Garet (d. 1571) wrote a number of works aimed mainly at exposing the doctrinal errors of Protestantism and illustrating the truth of Catholic teachings; his works were highly esteemed during his lifetime and he was read widely throughout the seventeenth century. This work, De sanctorum invocatione liber (S. Manilius, 1570), deals with the efficacy of the intercession of the saints.

This copy is of particular interest as it was owned by the English Benedictine Priory of St. Edmund King and Martyr in Paris during the seventeenth century and is recorded in their library catalogue of 1702. Benedictine monasticism in England effectively ended when Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries between 1536 and 1540; however, it lived on through the various colleges and religious houses which were established on the continent. St. Edmund’s priory was founded in 1615 when monks from the English Benedictine priory in Lorraine arrived in Paris to establish a house of studies; in 1619, the community joined the revived English Benedictine Congregation which was formally established that year.

After a number of moves, the community settled in the Rue Saint Jacques (1632) where the monks were to remain until the French Revolution. Their library grew in size and importance from that date, given that the monastery was a house of studies. The first complete catalogue of the library is that of Dom Benet Weldon (1674-1713); it was finished in 1702.  The catalogue is important for bibliographical research today because the library of St. Edmund’s priory was dispersed during the French Revolution; this work is recorded in Weldon’s catalogue with shelfmark 7 E 7. The entry is written in Weldon’s hand, indicating that it was present in the library in 1702 and was not a later addition.

Only 117 books—out of a total of approximately 5,800—from the library at St. Edmund’s priory have been traced, and until now all of the identified copies are in institutional libraries in Europe or the United Kingdom. Thus, this is the first book from St. Edmund’s (and the first copy of the work itself) to be held by a North American institution.

Special Collections digital exhibition about Flamer in conjunction with One Book, One Michiana 2023

by Rachel Bohlmann, American History Librarian and Curator of North Americana and Greg Bond, Curator of the Joyce Sports Research Collection

During the month of April, people across northern Indiana and southwestern Michigan will be reading and discussing this year’s One Book, One Michiana selection: Mike Curato’s semi-autobiographical teen graphic novel, Flamer. Hesburgh Libraries is proud to participate in this community program alongside other local libraries and organizations. Please visit our contribution, the digital exhibition Papers Alight: Contextualizing Mike Curator’s Flamer.

The exhibition displays materials from Rare Book and Special Collections that place Mike Curato’s novel into social and historical context. The show includes sources about the Boy Scouts, Catholic pamphlets on contemporary devotional practices—including images of the sacred heart, which figure prominently in Flamer—Catholic pamphlets about pastoral care of LGBTQ people, and a selection of LGBTQ documents on sports and humor. Each section explores themes in the novel that may resonate with readers. We hope the show will encourage discussion of this award-winning book.