Collecting Histories

The Schoenberg Database of Manuscripts (SDBM) is one of the richest sources of transaction data on the movement of pre-1600 manuscript codices available to scholars today. With over 220,000 records pertaining to manuscript provenance over several centuries, the SDBM provides scholars a unique opportunity to look at the history of manuscript transmission writ large. This workshop will demonstrate several the ways in which using mapping and other visualization tools alongside the Schoenberg database can reveal patterns, help ask and answer new questions, as well as clarify existing hypotheses.

The silent film star Gareth Hughes has never appeared in the cast of characters who populate the world of medieval manuscript provenance in the United States. But he should. A study of the leaves and codex that he bequeathed to the University of Nevada in Reno demonstrates how the manuscripts he acquired perfectly suited the Gothic aesthetic that permeated the first act of his life, lived as a Hollywood darling in the 1920s and 1930s, as well as the faith-based second act in which he embraced the life of a monastic missionary to the Paiute in Nevada.

Apparently, the first medieval manuscript in the New World, now at the Walters, arrived with a Spanish bishop in 1555. In North America medieval manuscripts can be documented in the early eighteenth century. These are sporadic acquisitions, given to the new Republic’s historical societies, Athenaea, and library companies; to the early universities, notably Harvard; and to seminaries, largely through the bequests of erudite travelers. Even before the Civil War, however, Americans had collected manuscripts for personal libraries. Small and haphazard, their gatherings often comprised inferior books in fragmentary or damaged condition. Yet in Savannah, Georgia, the timber baron Alexander Augustus Smets assembled an exceptional collection of manuscripts publicized nationally in New Orleans and Boston, and worldwide in Leipzig and London. Smets bought his books in the marketplace. The Schoenberg Database enables researchers to trace these manuscripts, assess their quality, identify the motivations for their acquisition, and discover the routes of their dispersal. Slightly earlier than Smets, the Baltimore collector William Howard MD, the son of Governor John Eager Howard, had an excellent small collection, largely absorbed into that of Robert Gilmor in 1834—just at the time Smets was buying from the London bookseller Thomas Thorpe. A Baltimore native, Gilmor was related to Howard through the marriage of his sister, Jane Gilmor Howard. Some of Howard’s manuscripts are likewise traceable through the Schoenberg Database, although Gilmor’s collection was auctioned, and scattered, in 1849. While Smets, Howard, and Gilmor were the first important owners of medieval manuscripts in the antebellum South, other medieval manuscripts can be traced to South Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky, and Alabama. Exploring these few books enables us to fathom the earliest distinctively American medieval manuscript collections.

The "Paris" and ‘pocket’ bibles of the 13th-century survive today in greater numbers – as "complete" books and as "fragmented" manuscript leaves - than any other kind of medieval manuscript. My paper explores why this should be. We will first consider the scale upon which these books were produced in the 13th-century before tracing the post-medieval economic and geographical networks of sale and purchase, and ownership and collection that have kept these bibles circulating so consistently on the book market for hundreds of years. By locating the position of these 13th-century bibles on the medieval book trade to their prominent (commonplace?) presence in the modern transatlantic ‘Rare Books’ trade, we will interrogate the construction of these manuscripts’ cultural value in relation to their use, their provenance and their commercial availability to collectors of medieval manuscripts. In mapping the transformation of these innovative medieval textual technologies into antiquarian objects across the interconnected spaces of the library, the book seller’s salesroom and the collector’s repository over the centuries, we will explore these 13th-century bibles’ transformations from Scriptural texts and bibliographical tools, to collectable objects and "medieval" artifacts.

Workshop participants will be introduced to the Provenance Online Project (POP), a collection of nearly 12,000 digital images of provenance markings including bookplates, inscriptions, stamps and bindings. We will use resources from POP in activities for identifying individual provenance markings, tracing the history of individual books and manuscripts, and imaging the shape of the libraries of past owners. Following the activity portion will be time for discussion about what the group’s interactions with this new online project suggests about the present practices and digital futures of provenance research.

The eleventh- or twelfth-century parchment codex 170/347 is one of the rarities archived in the UCLA Young Research Library Special Collections. It has much to offer to a student of paleography: illuminations, a scribe’s colophon, calligraphic minuscule script, later inscriptions and modifications, inserted paper quires, missing folia, study notes, and even a cryptographic table. One of the most fascinating aspects of this New-Testament-turned-lectionary manuscript, however, is its history as a world traveler, for the most part incognito. Although the manuscript’s mysterious disappearance from St. Catherine’s metochion in Cairo obscured its trajectory, the analysis of its graffiti and the comparison of catalogues’ data help reestablish its provenance and narrate its journey beyond the walls of a monastic scriptorium. The resulting travelogue not only tells the story of how Sinai-born MS 170/347 landed in Los Angeles; it offers insight into the fate that befell many other rare books in the height of the nineteenth-century collecting and scholarship rush.

The Schoenberg Database of Manuscripts can be used not only to track the provenance of individual manuscripts, but also to uncover larger patterns in multiple provenance strings of manuscripts. For example, does an individual auction sale or bookseller’s catalogue have any discernable influence on the acquisitions made by a collector or institution? Or is the publication of a collection or exhibition catalogue preceded or followed by any discernable pattern of acquisition activity? In this paper I explore patterns of acquisition, exhibition and sale associated with the collections of William Bragge (1823-1884) of Sheffield and Dr. T. Shadford Walker (1834-1885) of Liverpool. Bragge was the largest single exhibitor in the Burlington Fine Arts Club exhibition in 1874. The sale of his library less than two years later at Sotheby’s in June 1876 was only identified as the property of “a gentleman of consummate taste and judgment,” but full reports in The Times revealed his identity to those not already in the know. Not surprisingly the London antiquarian booksellers, Bernard Quaritch, were a major buyer at the sale; its Catalogue 31 published in the fall of 1876 after the sale contains numerous items acquired there. Quaritch was also apparently bidding on behalf of the British Museum and of Dr. Walker of Liverpool. In October of the same year Walker was a major contributor to the Liverpool Fine Arts Club exhibition of illuminated manuscripts and every one of the 18 manuscripts exhibited by Walker had been purchased at the Bragge sale earlier that year.

Manuscriptlink is a digital humanities project that aims to re-unite related but dispersed manuscript constituents (fragments, leaves, and cuttings) into virtual codices that can be viewed online. These constituents originally belonged to complete manuscripts. Either by accident or through deliberate mutilation (for commercial purposes), individual pages or even partial pages were cut out and put into circulation. Manuscriptlink aims to reconstitute a “lost” medieval library by restoring the bibliographical, textual, and artistic coherence of its dismembered books.