Beyond the Reading Room

There are many beautiful and fascinating medieval and Renaissance manuscripts that can be viewed in the reading room of the Special Collections Research Center (SCRC). Out of the hundreds of manuscripts found at U-M, copied in many languages and representing various cultural traditions, including those of western Europe, Byzantium, and Islam, I will be focusing on Mich. Ms. 152, an extraordinary medieval manuscript containing St. Augustine's De doctrina christiana.

We are very pleased to invite you all to the first session of a series of virtual encounters on various aspects of book history. Our first online meeting is devoted to bookbinding and is scheduled for July 6, 11:00 am (EDT). This session, and the series, are organized by Pablo Alvarez (UM) and Benito Rial Costas (UCM), and will be hosted by the University of Michigan Library and the Facultad de Ciencias de la Documentación of the Universidad Complutense de Madrid on Zoom. The session is free of charge and open to all, but registration is required.

We are pleased to announce the opening of a new online exhibit: Written Culture of Christian Egypt: Coptic Manuscripts from the University of Michigan Collection. This online display is a virtual record of an actual physical exhibit that took place at the Audubon Room of the University of Michigan Library between November 12, 2018 and February 17, 2019. Curated by Alin Suciu and Frank Feder (Göttingen Academy of Sciences and Humanities, Germany), and with the collaboration of Pablo Alvarez (Special Collections Research Center), the display includes highlights from our collections of Coptic fragments and codices held at the Papyrology Collection and the Special Collections Research Center.

The Special Collections Research Center holds a large collection of works by Cuban book artist Rolando Estévez, including many books that he designed during his time with Ediciones Vigía and examples of those published under his own imprint, El Fortín, established in 2014. A new book from the University of Florida Press explores Estévez' impact as artistic director of Ediciones Vigía from 1985-2014.

Due to newfound free time exclusively spent at home, bread baking has become massively popular as of late. Americans collectively baked enough bread to cause a national yeast shortage. For me, remote work at home led to research on Special Collection’s culinary archive; and, desperate to preserve my last packet of instant dry yeast, I decided to find out how bakers before us made non-yeast bread.

We are very pleased to announce the recent acquisition of the first comprehensive treatise ever published about the illustration technique of woodcut: Jean Michel Papillon. Traité historique et pratique de la Gravure en bois. 2 vols. (Pierre Guillaume Simon, 1766). Papillon’s manual is particularly remarkable for including a fully illustrated step-by-step depiction of the sixteenth-century technique of chiaroscuro.

The Special Collections Research Center is pleased to announce a new online exhibit: A Menagerie of Animal Tales, curated by students in Dr. Lisa Makman’s English 313 course: Children’s Literature and the Invention of Modern Childhood.

When examining a selection of rare books that had been requested for a class presentation about the impact of censorship in early modern Spain, I noticed something truly remarkable in one of these books. Our copy of the eighteenth-century edition of Francisco de Quevedo y Villegas’ El Parnaso español y musas castellanas, published in Barcelona in 1703, had been manually, and massively, expurgated by a representative of the Spanish Inquisition, Joseph Pinell, as he himself stated on the title page: Expurgavi ex Commisione S(anc)ti Officii die 8 Aprilii/ Joseph Pinell, Supr(emus). Missionum (I, Joseph Pinell, the highest of delegates, have expurgated it by a mandate of the Holy Inquisition on April 8 1760).

We are pleased to report about our recent acquisition of the first edition of Alessandro Vellutello’s influential commentary on Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy, which was published by Francesco Marcolini da Forlì in Venice in 1544. Undeniably, this edition marked a significant shift in the history of the iconography and reception of Dante’s poem, departing from the previous allegorical interpretations by Cristoforo Landino and Girolamo Benivieni, and challenging Antonio Manetti’s reconstruction of the topography of Hell as described by Dante.

The Renaissance and Medieval Manuscript Collection belonging to the University of Michigan Library consists of an impressive array of medieval and early modern manuscripts from multiple cultures and languages, including Greek, Latin, Armenian, and Ethiopian. Fortunately, many of the manuscripts within this collection have largely been left in their original bindings and most damages have gone untreated.