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.
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).
The February-March Spotlight, A Choir Book for Medieval Nuns, highlights one item from the Hesburgh Library’s Special Collections in order to showcase the activities of women religious in the Middle Ages. It features a small fifteenth-century manuscript from Poissy, France, which once belonged to a convent of Dominican nuns devoted to St. Louis (that is, King Louis IX of France, who ruled 1226-1270). This manuscript, called a Processional, would have been used by the nuns at Poissy as they moved through the ceremonial space in liturgical celebrations throughout the year.
Processional chants for Palm Sunday, cod. Lat. a 17, f. 7r
Each member of a procession likely held her own book as they processed. Nuns at Poissy, typically noblewomen, often personalized their Processionals with elaborate paintings of their personal patrons, family coats of arms, or convent community. Unlike most other surviving Processionals from this convent, of which there are many, this manuscript is surprisingly lacking in ornate decorations. Even on celebrations unique to their community, such as the Procession for the feast day of St. Louis, the decorations are standard for the genre. This, along with an ownership mark from the seventeenth century, may indicate that this Processional was a general community book under care of the chantress – the appointed musical leader of the liturgy – rather than personally owned.
Processional chants for St. Louis, cod. Lat. a 17, f. 44r
Even within a women’s community, the foremost leadership roles in the liturgy were primarily held by the male religious who oversaw the convent and its care. However, at the convent in Poissy, the nuns held an explicit liturgical role in certain ceremonies, including processions. This can be seen in this Processional’s rubrics (red-ink liturgical instructions).
Rubrics (red ink) and chant cues for Good Friday responses, cod. Lat. a 17, f. 23v-24r
For example, on Good Friday, after two priests (duo sacerdotes) sang Christ’s words in a ceremonial recapitulation of the Passion, this manuscript designates that two sisters (due sorores) sang a part assigned typically to male deacons. The choir (chorus) responded afterwards. Since it was unusual to include women as liturgical leaders, these rubrics indicate that women regularly used this manuscript and emphasize their agency and participation within the liturgy.
This exhibit was curated by Kristina Kummerer, a Ph.D. student in the Medieval Institute, as part of a curatorial assistantship in Rare Books and Special Collections. It can be viewed in 102 Hesburgh Library from 9:00 am – 5:00 pm on weekdays.
This exhibition is curated by David T. Gura, PhD, Curator of Ancient and Medieval Manuscripts.
The current spotlight exhibits are Scripts and Geographies of Byzantine Book Culture (February – April 2024) and A Medieval Nun’s Choir Book (February – March 2024).
Special Collections is open regular hours during Notre Dame’s Spring Break (March 11-15), Monday through Friday, 9:30am – 4:30pm.
We will be closed on March 29, in observance of Good Friday, and open regular hours on Easter Monday.
The tension between literal and figurative arrangements of space, time, and knowledge during the Middle Ages is brought to the fore through the primary objects that remain. Geography, whether real or imagined, manifests on the page to convey a variety of spatial arrangements: topography, pilgrimage, peripatetic liturgical procession, diaspora, and boundary marking. The materiality of medieval manuscript books expresses a similar reality: geographic colophons mark time and space, prayers localize devotion, and the communal memory of a journey commingled with hope and desperation survives in liturgical readings. Even the scattering of manuscript leaves through biblioclasty creates the boundary of what a book once was and what it has become.
Detail of a T and O Map, a world map based on Isidore of Saville’s description of the physical world. The O represents the earth and the T marks its three divisions: Europe, Asia, and Africa. (cod. Lat. d. 7, f. 157v)
To map the Middle Ages is to journey through the space created by the objects and the individuals who used them. If we embrace a manuscript in the totality of itself, we form a new bond and continuity with those who have come before us. The manuscripts in this installation are drawn from the collection of the University of Notre Dame’s Hesburgh Library.
All exhibits are free and open to the public during business hours. Exhibition tours may be arranged for classes and other groups by contacting David T. Gura at (574) 631-6489 or dgura@nd.edu.
In the spring exhibition, Mapping the Middle Ages: Marking Time, Space, and Knowledge, primary objects bring to the fore the tension between literal and figurative arrangements of space, time, and knowledge during the Middle Ages. Geography, whether real or imagined, manifests on the page to convey a variety of spatial arrangements: topography, pilgrimage, peripatetic liturgical procession, and boundary marking. The materiality of medieval manuscript books expresses a similar reality through geographic colophons, regional markings of book production, devotional locals, and even the dispersing of manuscripts through modern-day biblioclasty.
To map the Middle Ages is to journey through the space created by the objects and the individuals who used them. The manuscripts in this installation are drawn from the collection of the University of Notre Dame’s Hesburgh Library.
This exhibition is curated by David T. Gura, PhD, Curator of Ancient and Medieval Manuscripts.
The current spotlight exhibits are Football and Community at Historically Black Colleges and Universities and A Warning Against Rum in Early America. Both spotlights will change out in February, check our website for more details in the near future.
Rare Books and Special Collections welcomes students, faculty, staff, researchers, and visitors back to campus for Spring ’24! Here are a variety of things to watch for in Special Collections during the coming semester.
Spring 2024 Exhibition: Mapping the Middle Ages: Marking Time, Space, and Knowledge
The tension between literal and figurative arrangements of space, time, and knowledge during the Middle Ages is brought to the fore through the primary objects that remain. Geography, whether real or imagined, manifests on the page to convey a variety of spatial arrangements: topography, pilgrimage, peripatetic liturgical procession, and boundary marking. The materiality of medieval manuscript books expresses a similar reality: geographic colophons, the regional markings of book production, devotional locals, and even the dispersing of manuscripts through modern-day biblioclasty.
To map the Middle Ages is to journey through the space created by the objects and the individuals who used them. The manuscripts in this installation are drawn from the collection of the University of Notre Dame’s Hesburgh Library.
Curated by David T. Gura, PhD, Curator of Ancient and Medieval Manuscripts.
This exhibition is being held in conjunction with the annual meeting of the Medieval Academy of America, which will be hosted March 14–16, 2024, at the University of Notre Dame.
Stop in regularly to see our Collections Spotlights
Fall Spotlight, continued through the end of January: Football and Community at Historically Black Colleges and Universities
This exhibit features a selection of sources from the Joyce Sports Research Collection that document and preserve the history of football at Historically Black College and Universities (HBCUs). During the era of Jim Crow segregation, the vast majority of African American college students and student athletes attended HBCUs.
Many of the yearly gridiron contests between rival institutions developed into highly anticipated annual events that combined football with larger celebrations of African American achievement and excellence. The programs, media guides, ephemera, guidebooks, and other printed material on display document the athletic accomplishments, the celebrations, the spectacle, and the community-building that accompany football at Historically Black Colleges and Universities.
December-January Spotlight: A Warning Against Rum in Early America
Displayed in the spotlight is a 1835 poster commemorating a Salem, Massachusetts minister’s attack on a neighbor for distilling and selling rum. This particular copy was partially hand-colored in watercolor, preserved with a cloth backing, folded, and bound into a pocket-sized leather cover. The broadside is part of Hesburgh Library’s Rare Books and Special Collections’ collection of prints, posters, and broadsides.
These and other exhibits within the Hesburgh Libraries are generously supported by the McBrien Special Collections Endowment.
All exhibits are free and open to the public during regular hours.
Special Collections’ Classes & Workshops
Throughout the semester, curators will teach sessions related to our holdings to undergraduate and graduate students from Notre Dame, Saint Mary’s College, and Holy Cross College. Curators may also be available to show special collections to visiting classes, from preschool through adults. If you would like to arrange a group visit and class with a curator, please contact Special Collections.
Upcoming Events
Thursday, February 1st at 5:00pm | The Spring 2024 Italian Research Seminar and Lectures will begin with a lecture by Francesca Fiorani (University of Virginia), “Leonardo da Vinci’s Way of Seeing Water. Wetlands, Mapping, and the Art of Painting.”
Early-20th-century souvenir programs of the Union Printers National Baseball League Tournament.An 18th century work advocating converting Ireland’s Catholics to ProtestantismA collection of materials relating to the National Women’s Football League.A revised martyrology for 16th century German Catholics.Some of the recent acquisitions highlighted on the blog during the fall semester.
Autograph books, nicely-bound books full of blank pages, have been popular for a long time — from schoolchildren’s record of classroom friendships to collections of famous people’s autographs. The Hesburgh Library recently added to its collection a small but powerful document of women’s involvement in Ireland’s politics one hundred years ago.
Our new acquisition is the prison autograph book of Aoife Taaffe (MSE/IR 1101). The autograph book, signed by her fellow prisoners in 1923, documents the women, and also their dates and places of imprisonment during the Civil War of 1922-23.
Aoife Taaffe, Political Prisoner. Four Courts, Mountjoy, N. D. U., Kilmainham. 1922, 1923.
Information given on this page tells us that Taaffe was a prisoner in the Four Courts, in Mountjoy Jail, in the North Dublin Union, and in Kilmainham Gaol. The book is filled with the signatures of other women who were imprisoned during the Civil War of 1922-23, and their signatures are usually accompanied by information on imprisonment places and dates.
Like many women activists of her time, Aoife Taaffe is not well-known today. Information gleaned from various sources tells us that she was very involved in theatre both as an actor and a director, and she was also involved in many commemorative events for the 1916 Rising and the War of Independence during the 1920s and 30s. While in Kilmainham Gaol, she marked the seventh anniversary of the 1916 Rising by producing P. H. Pearse’s The Singer, with a cast of women prisoners.
Autographs in the book include those of Margaret Buckley, Kid Bulfin, Eithne Coyle, May Gibney and Margaret Skinnider. In all, the book features the names and signatures of dozens of women prisoners.
Seven years ago, we mounted a centenary exhibition, Easter 1916: The Irish Rebellion, which featured books and documents on a small number of women. This autograph book encourages us to look more widely for sources of Irish women’s history, which is slowly being pulled from the shadows.
Rare Books and Special Collections recently acquired a small archive that documents the Bonus Army—a Depression-era protest by World War veterans and their families. Lonore Kent (1907-1993), a journalist living in Washington DC at that time, created and assembled these sources.
In 1924, Congress had rewarded World War soldiers for their service with certificates of investment that would be payable by the government in 1945. By 1932, however, many veterans, like millions of Americans, were desperate after nearly three years of the nation’s disastrous economic depression. Former soldiers began to demand that President Herbert Hoover pay out the promised veteran bonus immediately, given the national (and global) crisis. The men’s plea caught the attention of people who thought the federal government should be doing more to address the economic depression and people’s real need. By the spring of 1932 legislation began moving through the House of Representatives’ Ways and Means Committee.
Some veterans, in a determined effort to put the case directly to their Congressional representatives, embarked for Washington. In early May, 300 former soldiers left Portland, Oregon, bound for the capital. Quickly dubbed the Bonus Army, they were joined by a trickle and then a river of veterans and their families nationwide. By June 40,000 Bonus Army marchers were in Washington; some huddled in makeshift shelter amid construction sites downtown, but the largest concentration of marchers settled on a muddy stretch of the Anacostia River, in an encampment of thousands of men, women, and children.
On June 15, 1932, the House passed enabling legislation, but the Senate blocked the bill two days later. This spared Hoover the embarrassment of vetoing it, which he had promised to do, citing budgetary constraints. Most Bonus Army members stayed put, hoping for some form of government relief. By the end of July, as Hoover looked to his re-election prospects in November, the President ordered city officials to disperse the Bonus Army. When some squatters resisted, Hoover called in US Army General Douglas MacArthur to restore order. MacArthur exceeded his instructions, however, using armed troops, tanks, and cavalry to drive Bonus Army families out of their shacks and tents, and burning the Anacostia River encampment to the ground.
Lonore Kent’s collection offers a perspective on MacArthur’s violent overreach on the night of July 28 and the charred remains the next day. In a letter to her parents, Kent described how she used her press pass to get onto the Anacostia Bridge between Maryland and Washington, where a line of soldiers—bayonets drawn—fired tear gas at the evicted and homeless Bonus Army to keep them from crossing the bridge and entering the city. Beyond the soldiers, Kent saw the Bonus Army camp in flames.
Kent drew a map of where she was that night—in relation to the soldiers, the encampment, and what she saw. (She identifies the river as the Potomac, probably short for the “Eastern Branch of the Potomac,” commonly-used for the Anacostia River.) The next day she returned to the burned-out site and documented some of the destruction. Kent reflected on the Bonus Army, noting, “Probably the granting of the bonus is unsound economically, but you can’t expect people to be impressed with such arguments when they are starving.”
Hoover’s mistreatment of the Bonus Army and general mishandling of veterans’ requests for economic assistance fatally soured the nation on his administration. The brutal ousting of the Bonus Army came to symbolize Hoover’s callous indifference to Americans’ suffering and his inability to govern amidst a national economic disaster. In the fall, Franklin Delano Roosevelt decisively defeated Hoover and implemented federal-level economic and social reforms to address the magnitude of the Great Depression. The Bonus Army, although defeated in 1932, re-formed and continued to press for an early payout, which Congress granted in 1936.
Rare Books and Special Collections is closed today (May 29th) for Memorial Day and will be closed on July 4th for Independence Day. Otherwise, RBSC will be open regular hours this summer — 9:30am to 4:30pm, Monday through Friday.
During June and July the blog will shift to our summer posting schedule, with posts every other Monday rather than every week. We will resume weekly publication on August 7th.
Best wishes to the 2023 graduates of the University of Notre Dame, Saint Mary’s College, and Holy Cross College, from all of us in Rare Books and Special Collections.
We would particularly like to congratulate the following students who worked in Special Collections during their time on campus:
Sarah Berland (ND ’23), Bachelor of Arts in Neuroscience and Behavior, with an Irish Language and Literature Minor.
Kathryn Heyser (ND ’23), Bachelor of Science in Aerospace Engineering and Bachelor of Arts in History.
Both images: MSE/EM 110-1B, Diploma, University of Padua, 1690
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.
