Minnesota History at the Hill Museum & Manuscript Library

The Hill Museum & Manuscript Library has just put up a new display from the Saint John's Bible (the Epistles and the book of Revelation). In conjunction with this exhibit, I was given the opportunity to "showcase" some of our newest acquisitions from the Anderson Collection on Minnesota history and culture.  One case is dedicated to "Non-fictional Minnesota" and two to "Fictional Minnesota."  Included in the fiction are several novels that take place in Minnesota.

Click on any image to see it enlarged!

OK, so the author just got his hair cut today (March 14)--he still does not look (quite) this bad.
From Father Louis Hennepin's account of his travels in North America.

The Anderson Collection includes important works on Minnesota and the Upper Midwest from the time of the earliest western explorations by Hennepin and Carver up to the era of European settlers and even into the twentieth century. Other early editions of travels in Minnesota (not on display this time) are J.C. Beltrami’s Pilgrimage in Europe and America (1828), George Catlin’s Letters and Notes (1841), G.W. Featherstonhaugh’s Canoe Voyage up the Minnay Sotor (1847), Daniel Williams Harmon’s Journal of Voyages and Travels (1820), and William Keating’s Narrative of an Expedition to the Source of the St. Peter’s River (1825). Although these are first editions, many of these titles are also in the Collection in later reprints.

"The Sieur de la Salle unhappily assassinated" ... From Fr. Hennepin's New Discovery (1698).

From the era of the early settlers come several titles from the likes of Mary Eastman, Jane Grey Swisshelm, Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, John H. Pitezel, as well as the Minnesota Year book and the Immigrants’ Guide to Minnesota in 1856.

The list of resources is quite expansive, including several volumes of individual county and city histories, biographies and works bearing the autographs of people like Henry H. Sibley and James J. Hill.

Title page of A New Discovery.

Father Louis Hennepin. A New Discovery of a Vast Country in America. London: Bentley, Tonson, et al., 1698.

Father Louis Hennepin, OFM (1626-1705), traveled into Wisconsin and Minnesota in the 1670’s as an extension of the peregrinations of René Robert Cavalier, Sieur de La Salle. Father Hennepin first gave an account of these explorations in French (1683), and these were later translated into Italian, Dutch, German, and eventually even English. His report of the St. Anthony Falls was the first printed reference to this natural landmark. On display is the earliest map of the Upper Midwest in the Saint John’s collections.

Page 182: “The Navigation of the Meschasipi is interrupted ten Leagues above this river of the Grave [the St. Croix River], by a Fall of fifty or sixty Foot high, which we call’d The Fall of St. Anthony of Padua, whom we had taken for the Protector of our Discovery. There is a Rock of a Pyramidal Figure, just in the middle of the Fall of the River.”

The Eastern part of North America, from Father Hennepin's Discoveries (1698). 
One the two oldest maps of North America in the Saint John's collections.

Close-up of Minnesota, Wisconsin and Manitoba.

Jonathan Carver. Travels Through the Interior Parts of North America. 3rd ed. London: C. Dilly, … etc., 1781.

Jonathan Carver (1710-1780), a colonist from Massachusetts, traveled into Wisconsin and Minnesota in the 1760’s to search for a Northwest Passage to the Pacific. While he provided vastly improved maps of the river systems in Minnesota and Wisconsin, a disgreement led him to London in his final years, seeking payment from the English king. The third edition is the first to appear after Carver’s death, and its editor (John Coakley Lettsom) included the unusual assertion that two chiefs of the Naudoissies signed over much of Minnesota and Wisconsin to Carver. In the exhibit we can see the beginning of the transcript of this “document” that gives the land to Carver:

“from the fall of St. Anthony, running on the east banks of the Mississippi, nearly south-east, as far as the south end of Lake Pepin, where the Chipeway river joins the Mississippi, and from thence eastward five days travel, accounting twenty English miles per day, and from thence north six days travel, at twenty English miles per day, and from thence again to the fall of St. Anthony, on a direct straight line.” (p. 13)

Saint Anthony Falls circa 1770.

The Anderson Collection is particularly rich in early fictional works that take place in Minnesota. Here we find stories of lumberjacks, farmers, entrepreneurs, explorers, ox-drivers, and even a 1920’s flapper. Minnesota literature extends well beyond the famous pair of Sinclair Lewis and F. Scott Fitzgerald, who are themselves well-represented. Other authors and poets in the collection include Margaret Culkin Banning, John Berryman, Kay Boyle, Jon Hassler, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Maud and Delos Lovelace, Frederick Manfred, Walter O’Meara, Sigurd F. Olson, Martha Ostenso, Mabel Seeley, Sigurd Jay Simonsen, and Arthur Upson. There is even an early novel by Harry Reasoner (yes, the CBS news reporter!) set in the Twin Cities.

These authors created a “fictional Minnesota,” often (loosely) based on their own experiences in the 32nd state. Many of the books come with dust jackets that provide a colorful taste of the contents. In this exhibit, the descriptions with each title are excerpted from these blurbs. In several instances the copy of the book is from the first (or an early) printing of the first edition. Some copies have been inscribed or signed by the author.

On display are works (with dustjackets) by Maud and Delos Lovelace, Bernard Francis Ederer, Darragh Aldrich, Martha Ostenso, Sabina Adler, Paul de Kruif, Margaret Culkin Banning, and Sarah Lockwood.


The Hill Library & Manuscript Library is open Monday through Friday, from 8:00 am to 4:30 pm.  Come visit our galleries!

Peace, now and always.

A minor bibliographical conundrum on the Wilde side

A modest cover.

The primary joy of cataloging rare books is that you never know what you will find next or where your bibliographical travels will take you.  My hope is that someone out there will help guide me to my destination on my current journey!

Or at least help an aging medievalist (did someone say "15th-century German religious plays?") to catalog this book!!!

I have been cataloging a large gift of books that come to our library in the summer of 2012.  Many of these books from the Anderson Collection are about Minnesota history, life, and literature.  As such, they provide a strong core of materials to support the study of local history at our parent institution, Saint John's University, and its sibling institution, the College of Saint Benedict.

One book caught my attention--an 1898 edition of Oscar Wilde's Ballad of Reading Gaol.  I have to confess that while I have found the history and art of fin-de-siecle Europe quite fascinating (especially as it developed in places like Vienna, Austria), I know sadly little about this author and his work.  What especially caught my attention, however, was the pencilled note on the inside of the front cover that this was a "1st ed[ition] with auto[graph]."  Spoiler alert -- it does not appear to be a first edition, but it does have an autograph pasted in.

The title page of Oscar Wilde's Ballad of Reading Gaol, with his name given as his cell number in the jail/gaol: "C.3.3." = Cell 3 on the third landing of gallery C.

My searches in OCLC/WorldCat did not produce any exact matches to the item I had in my hand.  While the title page matched the descriptions I found, I soon ascertained that there were six different editions that appeared from the same publisher in 1898, each one slightly different from the other.  However, the copyright statement on the first edition did not match that on this copy. The limitation statements on other editions did not appear on this copy either. I turned to published bibliographies in an attempt to verify which edition this really is.  Fortunately, two early bibliographies were available for free at www.archive.org.

Copyright statement for February 1898. Note the lack of any kind of limitation statement.

Christopher Millard's 1914 Bibliography of Oscar Wilde indicates that the very first edition of the Ballad bears a copyright statement from January 1898--ours states "February 1898." This matches the second to sixth editions.  Several textual variants cited in Millard also indicate that this is not from the January version, but one of the later ones.

Autograph of Oscar Wilde glued into the Ballad.

The second edition of the Ballad appeared in 1000 copies, with the edition statement on the verso of the title page, followed a short while later by a third edition (99 copies, each signed by the author on the copyright leaf), and then a fourth (1200 copies, in March), a fifth (1000 copies in March), and a sixth edition (1000 copies, in May 1898).  Millard states clearly that the second and sixth editions bear the number of the edition on the verso of the title page--he does not say this explicitly for the fourth and fifth editions.

So here's the problem:  The verso of the title page has been covered with a glued-in piece of paper signed by Oscar Wilde and dated March 22.  From my limited experience, I would say this looks like other autographs of the author that appeared in the bibliography (or online).  So, I am hoping it is genuine.

My assumption was that the edition statement could be found under the autograph sheet.  Unfortunately ...

Looking through the title page from behind.

When I held the title page up to the light, I could see through both leaves, and the text on the title page, the autograph and even the watermark were all clearly visible.  Unfortunately, no edition statement was forthcoming!

So, my primary question is this:  did the fourth or the fifth edition have an explicit edition statement on the verso of the title page?  Were there editions from 1898 that did not bear any edition statement on them?

A corollary:  Was it common to glue an autograph sheet into early editions of this work?  I've not seen something quite like this, so I am assuming that a later collector added the sheet.

My hope, as I tried to say earlier, is to identify this edition so I can catalog the piece. So any clues that those more experienced in late 19th-century authors like Oscar Wilde and their publishing history will be greatly appreciated!!

Until next time,

peace!

Can You Read This? Early Scripts in HMML's Collection

Along with the millions of manuscript pages photographed by the Hill Museum & Manuscript Library over the past 48 years, the library has also collected several manuscripts and manuscript fragments of its own.  Nearly all of these have come as gifts, although a few have been purchased.  In reviewing samples of early scripts in the HMML collections, I came up with the following gallery, arranged somewhat chronologically from the 10th to the 20th centuries, for consideration. I have attempted to crop the pictures below so that they will appear very large on computer screens, thus making the script easier to see.

Some of these may also find their way as paleographic examples into vHMML (http://vhmml.wordpress.com/), a set of tools being developed for manuscript studies.

All of these samples can be enlarged by clicking on them.  They also reside in a Picasa folder at:

https://picasaweb.google.com/112955289865277743856/EarlyLatinScriptsInHMMLManuscripts?authuser=0&feat=directlink

If any of my readers are skilled at paleography, I invite comment on any or all of these descriptions. Some of these examples have only come to my attention within the past few days. So, who knows what may still be lurking out there!?!

10th or early 11th century:

Ms. Frag. 1: Mass book with musical notation. Introit from the 22nd Sunday after Pentecost. Removed from a bookbinding. Click on image to enlarge.

Ms. Frag. 1 (see above)
Click on image to enlarge.

12th century:

Ms. Frag. 15: Martyrology with the story of Saints Alexander, Eventius and Theodolus.
Click on image to enlarge.



Ms. Frag. 15: Martyrology with the story of Saints Alexander, Eventius and Theodolus.
Click on image to enlarge.



Ms. Frag. 24: Lectionary from Italy. Mounted between two plates of plexiglass.
Click on image to enlarge.

Ms. Frag. 24: Lectionary from Italy (detail)
Click on image to enlarge.

Ms. Frag. 2: from a Bible, book of Daniel.
Click on image to enlarge.

Ms. Frag. 2: from a Bible, book of Daniel.
Click on image to enlarge.

J. G. Plante Ms. 15: from a Lectionary. Removed from a bookbinding. Given to Father Oliver Kapsner, OSB, who received it as a gift from the Abbey of Nonnberg (Austria).
Click on image to enlarge.

J. G. Plante Ms. 15: from a Lectionary. Removed from a bookbinding. Given to Father Oliver Kapsner, OSB, who received it as a gift from the Abbey of Nonnberg (Austria).
Click on image to enlarge.

Early 13th century:

Ms. Frag. 3: from a copy of Cicero, Distinctiones verborum latinorum.
Dated as 12th-13th century. Removed from a bookbinding.
Click on image to enlarge.

Ms. Steiner 54: from a 12th or 13th-century copy of Isidore of Seville's Etymologies.
Click on image to enlarge.



Ms. Barton Williams no. 1, pastedown:  from a collection of sermons by Peter Comestor. Dated as early 13th century.
Click on image to enlarge.

Ms. Barton Williams no. 1, pastedown: from a collection of sermons by Peter Comestor. Dated as early 13th century.
Click on image to enlarge.

13th century:

Arca Artium fragment, aap2251: from a glossed Bible. Here, from Psalm 49.
Click on image to enlarge.

Ms. Frag. 19: from a glossed Bible. Here from the Gospel of Luke.
Click on image to enlarge.

Ms. Frag. 19: from a glossed Bible. Here from the Gospel of Luke.
Click on image to enlarge.

Arca Artium, aap1304: from a Bible. Here from 1 Kings 13.
Click on image to enlarge.

Arca Artium, aap1306: from a Bible. Here from Jerome's prologue to Chronicles.
Click on image to enlarge.

SJU Ms. 12: Latin New Testament. Here: the opening of the Gospel of John.
Dated as mid-13th to early 14th century.
Click on image to enlarge.

Early 20th century:

Arca Artium, aap2736: from a practice sheet by Edward Johnston (1872-1944).
Click on image to enlarge.

 I invite your comments!!

Two Women of Frontier Minnesota

One of the joys of working with rare and special materials, is that one can never become so focused on one thing that all else is forgotten.  I started out with a major in German language and literature and ended up studying late medieval religious drama.  But now I am learning about Minnesota's history, culture and literature in the 19th and 20th centuries.  The recent gift of "Minnesotiana" from the T.R. and LaJean Anderson family has offered many new ways to look at my adopted home.

Fort Snelling, Minnesota, from an illustration in Mary Eastland's
Dahcotah; or Life and Legends of the Sioux around Fort Snelling (1849).

Two particularly interesting figures represented in this collection are Jane Grey Swisshelm (1815-1884) and Mary Eastman (1818-1887).  Both remind us of the complexities of nineteenth-century life and that we should never assume that things were "simpler back then."  Neither was born in Minnesota and neither died in Minnesota.  However, both spent formative times in their careers in this frontier area on the edge of the prairie.

Jane Grey Swisshelm (born Cannon) arrived in Minnesota Territory with her daughter on June 22, 1857.  Having divorced her husband, Swisshelm had set out on her own to test her fortunes in the new settlement of Saint Cloud, Minnesota (where a certain group of Benedictine monks had arrived only about a year earlier to start a community that became Saint John's Abbey and University).

Cover to Jane Grey Swisshelm's autobiography, published in 1880, only four years before her death.

 
Swisshelm was a staunch abolitionist and quite outspoken on women's rights.  Within a few months of her arrival, she became the editor of the newly established newspaper, the Saint Cloud Visiter (December 10, 1857-July 29, 1858, with a hiatus between mid March and mid May 1858).  At the same time, she took this position as an opportunity to attack Sylvanus B. Lowry, a prominent local Democrat and supporter of the slave states--Swisshelm called him "the Minnesota dictator" in her autobiography, Half a Century (1880).

By contrast, Swisshelm supported Abraham Lincoln and readily condemned President James Buchanan as a slave-supporter.  It is no surprise then, that her outspoken polemics in the Saint Cloud Visiter soon led to a physical attack on her press and office.  Although the attack did interrupt her publication briefly, her supporters soon acquired a new press for her and she again began publishing.  When threatened with a lawsuit by her enemies, she closed the Visiter and started up a new newspaper, the Saint Cloud Democrat, which continued to September 1866.

Part of Swisshelm's account of her struggle with "the Minnesota dictator" (Sylvanus Lowry). Here we read of the replacement of her destroyed press and type.

The biggest blow to her life in Minnesota came with the Dakota War in 1862.  Unlike her strong abolitionist beliefs and support for African Americans, she also bore a strong aversion to Native Americans and their culture.  In 1863, she embarked on a speaking tour in the East to promote more punishment for Native Americans.  As part of that tour, she came to Washington, D.C., where she joined in the Union efforts during the Civil War.  Her brief and colorful career as an editor in Saint Cloud had thus already ended after about five or six years.


Mary Eastman accompanied her husband, Captain Seth Eastman (1808-1875) to Fort Snelling in 1841, about a decade and a half before Swisshelm.  In her seven years in Minnesota, Mary Eastman set out to meet Native Americans and record their stories.  This culminated in her collection:  Dahcotah; or, Life and Legends of the Sioux around Fort Snelling (1849).  This collection has proven to be quite popular in the years since its first publication and has been frequently reprinted.  Like Swisshelm, Eastman proved to be an outspoken and ambitious promoter of her view of the territories being opened up in Minnesota.

Two books by Mary Eastman.  On the left, Dahcotah, and on the right, Aunt Phillis's Cabin (1852), a response to Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin.

Her chief informant was a Native American named Chequered Cloud, who was a medicine woman and legend teller, but Eastman had numerous other contacts with Native Americans in the area where one day the Twin Cities would thrive.  Her husband, who was an artist-soldier, supplied illustrations for her collection, and she in turn promoted his art, especially for its inclusion in the major overview of Indian life being prepared by Henry Rowe Schoolcraft:  Information Respecting the History, Condition and Prospects of the Indian Tribes of the United States (1853-1857).

The Maiden's Rock; or, Wenona's Leap. From Mary Eastman's Dahcotah.

Eastman's views toward the issue of slavery in the South are somewhat more problematic to modern readers, however.  Born in Virginia, she found slavery to be a difficult necessity for the economy in her earlier home.  So it was, that her response to Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin was to publish her own justification for slavery in Aunt Phillis's Cabin, or Southern Life as It Is (1852).  As her husband and sons fought on the side of the Union during the Civil War, it seems likely that her views changed over time.  Unfortunately, the references I have read thus far have not indicated what Eastman's reaction to the 1862 Dakota War was.

Mary Eastman's response to Uncle Tom's Cabin.

The Anderson gift of Minnesota titles has given us chance to become reacquainted with two early Minnesota women who were both sympathetic to us in their strong personalities and in their interest in improving the lives of others.  Some writers have even described them as early feminists (or perhaps proto-feminists).  At the same time, their displays of intolerance toward certain groups (Native Americans and Catholics for Swisshelm, African Americans for Eastman) help modern readers to see that the years leading up to the American Civil War were filled with complex events and people that still deserve our attentive research. As HMML continues to catalog the Anderson gift, I am certain that we will find many resources for such studies right here in Central Minnesota.

Cited works in the Anderson gift:

• Jane Grey Swisshelm. Half a Century. Chicago, J.G. Swisshelm, 1880.
• Mary Eastman. Dahcotah; or Life and Legends of the Sioux around Fort Snelling. New York: John Wiley, 1849.
• Mary Eastman. Aunt Phillis's Cabin, or Southern Life as It Is. Philadelphia: Lippincott, Grambo, & Co., 1852.
• Henry Rowe Schoolcraft. Information Respecting the history, Condition and Prospects of the Indian Tribes of the United States (illustrated by Seth Eastman), in six large volumes. Philadelphia: Lippincott, Grambo & Co., 1853-1857.

Literary Minnesota--The Anderson Gift to Saint John's University

Several titles by Martha Ostenso (1900-1963), a Norwegian immigrant author,
who wrote several novels located in Minnesota and Canada.

In April 2012, members of the T.R. and LaJean Anderson family approached HMML to offer a gift of books focusing on Minnesota history, literature and culture.  The Anderson family has long been friends to Saint John's University, the College of Saint Benedict, and the Hill Museum & Manuscript Library in particular.  LaJean was a 1937 graduate of the College of Saint Benedict. In the HMML files, I found a photograph of the HMML Board of Overseers dated June 28, 1988, which includes many familiar names--Fr. Colman Barry, OSB, Julian G. Plante, Abbot Baldwin Dworschak, OSB, and several others.  Standing in the back row is also T.R. Anderson.  The photograph appears to have been taken by HMML's round table (not the Arthurian kind), when it was still located in a different part of the library.



Before there was a "Central" Minnesota:  a map from 1843 shows the upper Mississippi
several years before statehood, when the area was without any settlements.

After T.R.'s death in 1989, LaJean and her family continued their generous support of HMML's preservation work overseas.  At the same time, they took great care of T.R.'s fabulous collection of books about Minnesota.  When LaJean passed away in 2009, discussions began about the possible donation of the collection to Saint John's.  In 2012, these talks gave way to action, and the collection came to HMML from Nisswa, Minnesota, in two truckloads.  In the end, the gift included about 5000 volumes, many of which were neither rare nor directly related to Minnesota. However, the bulk of them do relate to Minnesota, and many are not widely held in other libraries. After several months of unpacking boxes (as many as a hundred remain!), we have now started cataloging some of the rare items--including several that bring new aspects to the research collections at Saint John's.

Today, I would like to introduce one of the Minnesota authors who was well represented in the gift:  Martha Ostenso (1900-1963), who situated most of her stories on the great plains of the upper Midwest and Canada.  Ostenso was born in Norway, but came to Canada and then the United States when only a very young child.  She and her parents lived in several locations in Minnesota,
South Dakota, and Manitoba.  Ostenso's works are especially welcome in our collections as they were only barely represented in out book collections.




Two works by Martha Ostenso, with illustrated dust jackets, from the Anderson Collection.

Ostenso's most famous work, Wild Geese, was published in 1925, and brought the young author a lot of attention.  The gift includes two editions of this book, one with a dust jacket.  The later edition even includes some photo stills from the movie adaptation that came out in the same year.  The blurb on the jacket describes the main character as follows:

"Caleb Gare is the most prosperous farmer of Oeland, but that is because the bitter soil has imbued him with all its harshness.  His one passion is a lust for black acres, and the endless yearly nursing of them.  His wife, unprotesting for the sake of her first son--who is not Caleb's--and his children, held in thrall to the power of his single-minded personality, are to him merely servants in the service of his one great mistress, the soil."

While Wild Geese takes place in Manitoba, her next novel, The Dark Dawn (1926), is situated in Minnesota. Again the title is represented in two editions, with differing dust jackets--and modes of depiction.  Here, the central character is Hattie Murker, described as: "a woman of indomitable will and ruthless ambition" (the other edition calls here "beautiful, unloving and domineering").  Hattie marries a good-natured "farmer's boy" to try to ingratiate herself to her neighbors.

In the edition on the left, Hattie is looking straight at a man (presumably her
husband, Lucien Dorrit), but he only appears on the back of the volume.

A tense moment out on the prairie.

Unfortunately, my work leaves me precious little time to actually read these books. Although, I must say that the covers and the blurbs have left me wanting to spend some time reading their contents!  At least these works have now been cataloged and are available for students, faculty and researchers who may want to learn more about how one person (who grew up as an immigrant in Minnesota) imagines life on the prairie.  Other titles by Martha Ostenso (not all of them with dust jackets) in the gift include:

• The Mad Carews (1927)
• The Young May Moon (1929)
• The Waters Under the Earth (1930)
• Prologue to Love (1932)
• The Stone Field (1937)
• The Mandrake Root (1938)
• O River, Remember! (1943)

Two works by Martha Ostenso that take place in a mythical valley in Minnesota.

By no means is Martha Ostenso the only author represented in the Anderson Collection.  Other names that appear frequently include Maud and Delos Lovelace, Frederick Manfred, Margaet Culkin Banning, James Gray, Walter O'Meara, Darragh Aldrich, Herbert Krause, as well as first issues of works by Sinclair Lewis and F. Scott Fitzgerald.  Beyond these, there are hundreds of non-fiction works on the history of Minnesota, the explorations of the upper Midwest and Northwest Territory. While nearly all of these await cataloging, many of these works will be the subject of a small exhibition at HMML--perhaps one case of "fictional Minnesota" and one of "non-fictional Minnesota" (starting in January 2013, I hope).

Saint John's University and the College of Saint Benedict have always had wonderful resources for studying the history and culture of Minnesota and its neighbors.  With the Anderson Collection, the library may now have one of the premier collections of such materials outside of the Twin Cities.  HMML (as the stewards of the Saint John's Rare Books collection) is deeply grateful to have the opportunity to share these materials with the world!

Civilization (?) at last:  Sauk Rapids appears on an 1851 map
 (at the confluence of the Osakis (Sauk) and Mississippi Rivers.



Detail from the map for the Minnesota Year Book of 1851.

In the coming weeks, I hope to introduce more snippets from the Anderson Collection to readers of this blog. We will continue to unpack, document and catalog the collection over the next several months.

(For more on Martha Ostenso, see the article at the Saint Olaf College website: http://www.naha.stolaf.edu/pubs/nas/volume28/vol28_03.htm)

Until then, Peace to all in the coming year!

CLA/Lowe, vHMML, Films, and all that

 As many of my readers will know, HMML (the Hill Museum & Manuscript Library; www.hmml.org) started a two-year project nearly three months ago to create a suite of tools known as vHMML (or "virtual HMML"; find more details about the project at: http://vhmml.wordpress.com/).  Within the scope of this project is the development of image galleries and tutorials to aid students and scholars working with early scripts and manuscripts.

Sixth-century Uncial fragment from the Historisches Archiv der Stadt Koeln (Germany--HMML 37172)--CLA 1171.

Integral to this project is access to images of actual scripts and early materials.  To that end, HMML has been digitizing and identifying a large number of manuscripts and manuscript fragments from its own collections, so that these can be made available online.  We have also searched through our digital files to make materials more accessible to scholars and the general public, including the addition of over 18,000 color images from our microfilm collection (www.hmml.org/vivarium). However, most of our microfilm is not in color, but black-and-white.

Recto of sixth-century fragment in Uncial script from Goettweig Abbey (Austria--HMML 3791)--CLA **1286a.

Verso of sixth-century fragment in Uncial script from Goettweig Abbey (Austria--HMML 3791)--CLA **1286a.

The Hill Museum & Manuscript Library started in 1965 with the primary mission to preserve manuscripts and manuscript culture through photographic means.  Over the past 47 years HMML has assembled one of the largest collections of manuscript images in the world (over 90,000 manuscripts on microfilm and more than 30,000 digitally photographed). It was back to this collection that I turned to identify potential candidates for the study of early Western manuscripts.  While HMML does not have a huge number of Latin manuscripts earlier than the tenth century, there are an interesting examples from the fifth to ninth centuries in Uncial, Pre-Caroline, Caroline, and other scripts. Today I would like to present some of these in scaled-down versions from the HMML microfilms.

The first issue to address was the quick identification of early manuscripts.  The most famous (and useful) resource for early Latin scripts is a collection assembled over several decades by Elias Avery Lowe (1879-1969), whose Codices Latini Antiquiores ("CLA") is the first stop for Latin paleographers still today.  Over the course of eleven volumes plus a supplement, Lowe recorded and produced samples from early Latin manuscripts from across Europe and beyond. Due to the constraints of the day when his volumes were produced, the CLA only has tightly cropped samples that do not include the entire fragment, much less complete manuscripts when they exist.

Irish majuscule in a fragment from the
Historisches Archiv der Stadt Koeln (Germany--HMML 36463)--CLA 1169.

So, I first turned to Lowe to find what HMML has (in the microfilms that it produced) that might be useful.  The bulk of the examples were found to be from Austria, Germany, Spain, England, and Switzerland.  However, digitization projects in Cologne (at the Cathedral Library) and Switzerland (including Einsiedeln Abbey) had already reduced the need for HMML to digitize some of the microfilms from these libraries.  On the other hand, many other libraries have not yet had the opportunity to digitize their collections, and HMML's films may here provide some useful sources for study.

CLA 1457 - eighth-century Uncial and minuscule from St. Paul im Lavanttal (Austria; HMML 12518).

CLA 1457 - from St. Paul im Lavanttal (Austria; HMML 12518).

From the Abbey of Saint Paul in Lavanttal (or St. Paul in Carinthia, per Lowe), we have a complete copy of a manuscript in eighth-century Uncial.  Lowe describes the manuscript as being in both Uncial and a later continuation in minuscule (eighth to ninth century), which he does not reproduce in CLA.  HMML's films can provide samples of both hands.  HMML also has a few samples of less-common scripts, as well, such as this eighth-century one from Corbie.

CLA 1168 - Historisches Archiv der Stadt Koeln (HMML 36456)

As it turns out, I also "re-discovered" a list I compiled almost a decade ago that listed several manuscripts dated before the tenth century in the HMML collection.  Most of the Lowe/CLA manuscripts were also on this list, but some had been accidentally omitted.  So, now we have a larger list of nearly 400 early manuscripts (pre-tenth century) in the HMML microfilm collections.  While very many of these are fragments from bindings, they still represent a large corpus of scripts and hands from across Europe and could prove useful to vHMML's long-term objectives of training the next generation of manuscript scholars.

The next stage of our work will be identifying which images are most useful to vHMML.  At this time we have digitized several microfilms of early manuscripts, and will continue to scan fragments and some of the complete manuscripts.  But, as with all of our microfilms, we must ask permission from the libraries that actually own the manuscripts, before we use these images on the Web.  For this presentation, I have used a few digital copies in greatly reduced form, but for vHMML we will need to provide the images in their fullest size for the best resolution.

CLA 1364 - Anglo-Saxon script from a copy of the Gospels at the Trier Cathedral Library (Germany; HMML 40231)

Finally, there were also some manuscripts filmed partially in color during HMML's work in the microfilm era, and many of these images have been put into Vivarium (www.hmml.org/vivarium) with the blessings of the libraries that own the manuscripts.  Yet, there are still some which HMML hopes eventually to be able to include in vHMML, such as this one from cathedral in Essen (Germany):

CLA 1192 - Early Caroline minuscule from a Gospel book in Essen (Germany; HMML 35251)

As we continue to find and make use of these pictures, HMML's goal remains the preservation of manuscript culture and the promotion of manuscript studies around the world.