In the age of the Web: strategies for building a collection of primary sources for European history from the Middle Ages to the eighteenth century.

CHANGES IN TECHNOLOGY and evolving trends in contemporary scholarship are enhancing the role of the research library as the principal custodian of the written and printed artifacts that serve as primary sources for studying the literature and history of western Europe from the Middle Ages to the eighteenth century. In order to respond to an increasing desire of scholars to examine original source materials in their original state, the Newberry Library has pursued new avenues of interinstitutional cooperation in collection development. These new approaches include: 1. A unique program of joint acquisitions with five midwestern institutions of higher education, 2. The en bloc acquisition of rare book collections from religious colleges and seminaries, and 3. The acquisition of selected books, appropriately deemed out of scope, from museums and historical sites open to the general public. Proceeding in this manner, the Newberry Library has since 1991 added eighteen medieval manuscripts and several thousand rare printed volumes, dating from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century, significantly augmenting the preexisting strengths of its holdings.

I.

At the turn of the twenty-first century, two trends in the world of research libraries seem clear, one ominous, one hopeful. The ominous trend is that the research library is increasingly becoming one of a series of redundant points of electronic access to the Internet rather than a unique repository of physical artifacts and their apposite reference tools. In a future world without books as tangible documents of the age, researchers shall likely lack the equivalent of the incunables and first editions that today serve to inspire scholars to appreciate the chronological development of European culture of previous centuries. An equivalent of the kinds of close documentation of authorship, publication, and reading which is so precious for appreciating the historic texture of European civilization from the Middle Ages to the French Revolution may not exist for future periods and, it digitization supplants conservation, much of the record of nineteenth- and twentieth-century erudition may well be decimated, or at least severely truncated.

In contrast, the hopeful trend is that at the very moment when the publication and preservation of bound monographs and serials that gave birth to modern scientific historical research are in maximum peril, humanistic scholarship has increasingly returned to the artifact book and journal as sources for cultural and literary history. The history of the book, which in the mid--twentieth century was a rather minor and dull subdivision of all historical enquiries, has evolved in the hands of leading historians such as Henri-Jean Martin, Roger Chartier, Robert Darnton, and Richard Rouse into the history of books and reading, one of the most vibrant areas of contemporary historical research. Among scholars of literature, the transformation has been even more remarkable. A generation ago, both philosophers of literature, like Jacques Derrida, and literary theorists of reader-response criticism, like Hans Robert Jauss, Wolfgang Iser, and Stanley Fish, viewed tangible old books as objects of scant import. Their focus was on the abstract "text." In theory, the school of reader-response criticism aspired to recapture the perceptions of literary works in the minds of readers of previous centuries, but in fact, especially for the Middle Ages and Renaissance, they did so solely on the basis of texts as presented in modern editions. (1) The distortion inherent in preparing any critical edition did not concern them. In material terms, they were thus implicitly guilty of the very historical anachronisms they deplored when they criticized the then current approach of university professors of modern languages who studied the evolution of genres on the basis of an arbitrarily defined corpus of canonical authors. In contrast, many of today's leading literary scholars, from Malcolm Parkes to William Paden, Lina Bolzoni, Brian Richardson, Mary Carruthers, and Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, are intimately engaged in the study of the book as artifact. By virtue of their intense interest in physical books, even scholars trained as historians, like Armando Petrucci, Brian Stock, and Roger Chartier, can today comfortably dwell in departments of either romance languages or comparative literature.

This transformation of scholarship has validated the role of libraries that collect rare books and, in fact, has reinvigorated the collecting impulses of institutions like the Newberry Library, whose primary function for over a century has been the collecting of original source materials in their original state or in historically significant subsequent emanations prior to our own day. (2) Partly in reaction to the new electronic technologies, in the last two decades the Newberry has pursued the goal of artifact collection with increasing determination, not only as an individual institution, relying on its own all too limited resources generated from donor restricted endowment, but in active collaboration with other educational and cultural institutions through a variety of programs that include joint acquisitions with Midwestern universities and, via either negotiated purchase or donation, the acquisition en bloc of rare book collections from religious colleges and seminaries, for whom an evolving paradigm of educational function has rendered such books largely superfluous. Also, the Newberry Library, with the support of a devoted circle of private donors, has purchased rare books individually and in groups from museums who have through various circumstances come into possession of volumes essentially unrelated to their scope and function.

II.

The most innovative of our strategies for bringing new rare materials into a repository where they will be freely available to a broad spectrum of scholarly readers has been our joint acquisition program. In it the Newberry shares acquisition funds with five Midwestern institutions of higher education to build a core collection, which to date is composed primarily of fifteen hitherto unstudied medieval manuscripts. In general the Newberry pays two-thirds of the purchase price, and the collaborating institution one-third. (3) The program began in 1995 when Professor Kent Emery of the University of Notre Dame (a world-renowned specialist in the Carthusian order) brought to the library's attention a precious Carthusian manuscript in the catalogue of a German antiquarian bookdealer. The Newberry challenged Professor Emery to help with the financial burden. Ultimately the Medieval Institute of Notre Dame, guided by its then director John Van Engen, in a splendid commitment of resource-sharing, contributed funds to the purchase of a codex from a North American dealer similar to the one that had initially caught Professor Emery's eye. Under four successive Institute directors, the Newberry-Notre Dame collaboration has flourished. In 1997 Professor Van Engen, himself an expert in the late medieval religious literature of the Low Countries, vetted a copy of Gerard Zerbolt of Zutphen's De reformatione virium animae that had been underdescribed in a London auction catalogue. Armed with his expertise, and a Notre Dame guarantee of financial support, the Newberry made a successful bid. In Van Engen's hands, this volume has since proved to be important for ongoing research on the Devotio Moderna, a lay Gatholic religious movement, long seen as a precursor of the Reformation. A canon law text, the Liber sextus decretalium, representing a genre of university book of which examples are rarely available for sale, was subsequently acquired with Notre Dame in 2000. By early 2003, with Professor Thomas F. X. Noble as director of the Medieval Institute, a seventh and an eighth manuscript were being purchased--two volumes of thirteenth-century sermon collections both copied in Paris, with one containing hitherto unpublished texts of the twelfth-century university professor and later bishop of Paris, Maurice de Sully. In each instance Notre Dame contributed not only financial wherewithal, a necessity for all successful collecting, but also intellectual expertise, an essential but intangible prerequisite to all wise bibliographic expenditures.

In 1995, after the initial joint acquisition with Notre Dame, Theodore Karp, a distinguished Midwestern musicologist at an institution not yet a Newberry partner, brought to the Newberry's attention a liturgical codex copied in about 1300 that contained a rare example of Aquitanian neumatic notation, a form of musical notation that antedated the square notation customarily found in late medieval manuscripts and early printed tomes. Full funding being available neither at the Newberry nor from Notre Dame, the library approached Western Michigan University. Dr. Lance joint torian and then director of the university library, taking heart from Notre Dame's example, joined in the acquisition of the codex. This manuscript, along with a Processionale from Saint-Denis of Reims, subsequently acquired with Notre Dame, was "resurrected" to join the living by a concert performance held at the Newberry in spring 2002. To date Dr. Query and subsequently his learned colleague, Western Michigan's able director of special collections, Dr. Thomas Amos, have collaborated with the Newberry in acquiring three additional codices. The first, acquired in 1996, was a mid-fifteenth-century manual for nuns, written in Nuremberg with texts in Latin accompanied by German vernacular rubrics; (Illustration 1) the second, acquired in 1998, was an Antiphonary in a portable format suitable for individual use during performance. The latter was bound in a fragment of a thirteenth-century liturgical codex containing examples of Catalonian neumatic notation (closely related to the Aquitanian variety present in the first Western Michigan go, led by then librarian Doris Brown, joined this burgeoning consortium of the willing and purchased in collaboration with the Newberry a fifteenth-century Italian copy of the Regula monachorum attributed to Jerome, which in actuality is a text formed in the Middle Ages from extracts of Jerome's genuine writings that were circulated as a work from his pen. This purchase complemented the Newberry's outstanding collection of genuine and spurious Jerome texts, both in manuscript and early printed editions.

Also in 1997, the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, with the support of special collections director and historian Dr. Barbara M. Jones, made its first of a series of important purchases with the Newberry: a fifteenth-century Burgundian genealogical roll of the Kings of England and France. This unusual artifact of Burgundian ducal propaganda subsequently became a central document in a master's thesis written in the department of art history at Urbana. The same Illinois-trained scholar, Charlotte Bauer Smith, has since written an article on this roll forthcoming in a volume of internationally collected essays. In 2001, the University of Illinois again joined with the Newberry in acquiring a second manuscript, this time a codex: the fifteenth-century German Carthusian Heinrich Reicher's autograph of his Tractatus divinae sapienciae, a work of which no other manuscript copy is known to survive and of which only a fragmentary portion has been printed (Illustration 2). This manuscript, clearly important for its text, also contains folkloric illuminations that are very different from those usually found in late medieval university manuscripts, but curiously similar to eighteenth-century Pennsylvania Dutch frakturs. In a mark of true interinstitutional sharing, the "consortium's" resident Carthusian specialist, Professor Emery of Notre Dame, provided crucial expertise in the decision-making process that led to the purchase. In 2001-02 the University of Illinois and Norte Dame's efforts again complemented each other. First, the University of Illinois joined the Newberry in purchasing as its third joint acquisition: the first North American copy of the verbal concordance to the Latin Bible, which was prepared by Dominican friars in Paris in the mid--thirteenth century (Illustration 3). This concordance to the Vulgate provided alphabetical access to all the substantive words of Scripture in the context of the phrases in which they occurred. As an index to the Bible, this concordance remained a standard reference tool well into the age of print. (4) A year later the University of Notre Dame joined the Newberry in acquiring a Book of Hours (the rare Use of Therouanne in northeast France) of which the thirteenth-century flyleaf came from an early copy of the preliminary version of the same Biblical concordance (Illustration 4). These tomes, like all the books bought jointly, live in the Newberry and may be borrowed by the co-owners for prolonged periods of study either by faculty (like Professor Van Engen) or students (like Charlotte Bauer Smith) for research or for exhibition. We hope eventually that any one of the participating institutions will be able to borrow any of the jointly owned books in like manner.

III.

In the nineteenth century, small religious colleges and seminaries assembled important collections of manuscripts and especially early modern printed books chiefly for pedagogical purposes. As interest in psychology and the social sciences has replaced the study of Greek and Latin patristics in these institutions, the Newberry has found significant opportunities to purchase, and more frequently to receive as donations, entire rare book collections en bloc. These institutional collections, containing prime original source material for early modern European intellectual history and the history of the printed book, also reflect the denominational character and the ethnicity of the Chicago-area institutions that assembled them. In 1991 Newberry trustee Sister Ann Ida Gannon, B.V.M., working with the Library, arranged to purchase (at a price established by an independent appraiser) the rare book library of Chicago's Mundelein College of the Sisters of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary (an order founded in nineteenth-century Germany), shortly before that institution ceased to exist as an independent entity. The collection reflected the tastes of the order's nineteenth-and twentieth-century immigrant Irish and German members and its secular patrons. Over one-half of the titles added to the Newberry had been collected and donated to Mundelein by a German-American priest, Father John E. Rothensteiner of St. Louis. The entire collection is now traceable as a virtual entity within the Newberry's online catalogue, and the books given by Father Rothensteiner can be retrieved in like manner.

Highlights of the Mundelein collection include eight incunables, among which are a two-volume German vernacular Bible with hand-colored woodcuts, published by Anton Koberger in Nuremberg in 1483, and a copy of Saint Sidonius Apollinaris' Epistolae et carmina (Milan, 1498) that formerly belonged to the noted seventeenth-century Dutch Protestant scholar Isaac Vossius and possibly bears his annotations. In addition, the Mundelein purchase included nine volumes dated prior to 1521. Among the latter were Jean Petit's 1505 edition of the Sermones of Saint Ephraem and the unique and exceedingly rare first edition of Claude de Seyssel's Tractatus de triplici statu viatoribus (Turin, 1518), an unstudied work by sixteenth-century France's most distinguished translator of classical texts and a political theorist of note. Another nine titles dated from prior to 1551 included two scarce editions of Erasmus, and twenty-three works dated from the second half of the sixteenth century. These sixteenth-century editions included a 1562 German vernacular Livy with remarkable illustrations printed in Strasbourg (Illustration 5) and an example of the extremely rare unexpurgated first state of Holinshed's Chronicles of England (London, 1587). In addition, 109 volumes dated from the seventeenth century; 173 volumes dated from the eighteenth century. The last group included numerous British printings of the Latin classics, seven of which were published in Glasgow by the Foulis Press.

In 1993 the Library was contacted by Father Sebastian MacDonald of the Passionist Monastery of the North Side of Chicago (an order of early eighteenth-century Italian origin), who was seeking a new home for his rare book collection, some 270 titles (ca. 435 volumes). In 1994, the Passionists gave the entire collection (which in fact had been consolidated from a number of other Passionist monasteries in the Midwest and adjacent southern states). On the evening of 30 November 1994, His Eminence Joseph Cardinal Bernardin participated in the joyful celebration of the transfer from the monastery located near O'Hare Airport, where the volumes had been stored stacked in cartons, to the Newberry, where they are now fully cataloged and traceable as a bibliographic unit and stored in an environment ideal for conservation.

The Passionist gift included two Strasbourg incunables, four sixteenth-century books, thirty seventeenth-century imprints, and seventy-eight eighteenth-century titles. The collection was particularly rich in tracts and theological works pertaining to the Catholic Counter-Reformation flowing from the Council of Trent (1545-63) as well as the Latin and Greek patristics favored in Counter-Reformation Europe. A disproportionate number of titles were published in Venice. However, one of the few vernacular titles was an early edition of Antoine Arnauld's De la frequente communion (Paris, 1644), an item complementing the Newberry's strong Jansenist holdings. Among the neoscholastic theologians, Jesuit authors were prominent. These included Cornelius a Lapide, Thomas Sanchez, and Nicolo Mazzotta. Sumptuous critical editions of the Greek and Latin Fathers, like the first critical edition of the collected works of Saint Augustine published in Italy (Venice, 1729-35), were of monumental physical proportions with beautiful copper engraving frontispieces (Illustration 6). Microfilms of these works can never substitute for personally encountering the physical objects of which the imposing dimensions were intended to symbolize the majesty and power of reformed Catholicism. A copy of the Decrees and Acts of the Lateran Council of 1725, published in Rome, was illustrated with a magnificent engraving of a church council in plenary session.

In 1996, the Newberry, building on its prior success, solicited and received as a gift from the Seminary Library of the Divine Word Society located in Techny, Illinois, over seventy titles that formed the totality of that institution's rare book collection. One title dated from the sixteenth century, at least sixteen from the seventeenth century, and over forty titles from the eighteenth century. This missionary order had been established in the late nineteenth century by a German priest, and its origins were reflected in the books. Indeed, in contrast to the Passionist gift, only one Divine Word volume was published in Venice, the greater part of the others being printed in either Germany or Austria, with a high proportion in the German language. These vernacular tomes, consisting largely of sermon collections and devotional works expounding the ideals of the Counter-Reformation, were intended for broad lay consumption. Also present was a smaller collection of eighteenth-century Parisian imprints, virtually all in the French vernacular and most either versions of the Bible prepared for lay consumption or treatises of either a devotional or pedagogic character. The gift included at least two works explicitly intended for the instruction of children. The following year, Concordia University in Oak Park presented to the Newberry its large rare book collection of over 1,250 titles, a quarter of which were German imprints dealing with Protestant and especially Lutheran theology. The entirety included tire sixteenth-century, thirty seventeenth-century, and almost 100 eighteenth-century titles. The two collections complemented each other to create at the Newberry a splendid resource documenting the comparative use of German vernacular books in the rival Catholic and Protestant camps, from the late sixteenth century to the end of the eighteenth century. (5)

In 2000, Father David F. Wright, O.P., Vicar Provincial of the Dominican Province of Saint Albert the Great, invited the Newberry to inspect its rare book collection housed in River Forest, and in February 2001 the Order's Provincial Council approved its gift to the Newberry. The collection was composed of over 1,100 titles of which almost all date from the eighteenth century or earlier. Dominican authors were especially well represented. Its four incunables included philosophical treatises of Albertus Magnus (Venice, De Gregoriis, 1492) and three volumes of the Sermons of Vincent Ferrer (Cologne, Heinrich Quentel, 1485). Of particular import was the second edition of the first comprehensive collection of Thomas Aquinas's Opera in eighteen volumes (Venice, 1593-1594) in its original binding, with early printed labels, and with pastedowns and endleaves formed from late medieval manuscripts (Illustration 7). The Lyon, 1517 edition of St. Antoninus of Florence had a beautiful engraved title page. Several editions of Hugh of St. Cher's Postilla on the Bible, one of the two principal late medieval commentaries on the Scriptures, were of particular scholarly import and also constituted monuments of fine printing. Among other early editions was Joannes Ludovicus Vivaldus' Opus regale (Saluzzo, 1507) containing a magnificent woodcut of Saint Louis, king of France. Overall, the strength of the collection was in moral theology of the Counter-Reformation with strong holdings for the Council of Trent, including the 1566 Aldine edition of the Catechismus Romanus. At the Newberry this collection complements the Passionist collection, with the ensemble offering to scholars a rare instrument for research on the history of Counter-Reformation printing in Venice, Rome, and Lyon. This gift is currently being cataloged.

IV.

The most recent strategy of the Newberry is to acquire rare books from cultural institutions whose primary mission in no way relates to the study of European history. In spring 2002, Cathryn McElroy Anders, assistant director of Lyndhurst (the home of railroad banker Jay Gould near Tarrytown, New York) indicated that this historic site administered by the National Trust for Historic Preservation was preparing to sell Jay Gould's personal rare book library. After inspection in autumn 2002, the Newberry offered to purchase eight volumes from the Gould library: two fifteenth-century manuscripts and six incunables. In January 2003, the National Trust, seeking to make these materials available for scholars, agreed to sell them to the Newberry at 15 percent below their independently appraised value. One of the two manuscripts is an illuminated Book of Hours, copied in about 1450 in Flanders, possibly for export to Germany, as indicated by its marginal decoration and its coats of arras that appear to be Germanic (Illustration 8). The second manuscript is a northern Italian illuminated notarial cartulary of the second half of the fifteenth century containing charters from a series of churches in or near Vicenza (Illustration 9). The six incunables include a 1490 Venetian edition of Niccolo Perotti's Cornucopiae, valuable for the history of the introduction of pagination to printed volumes (Illustration 10); a not yet identified edition of Landino's Italian vernacular Formulario di epistolae, as well as Venetian and Augsburg editions of 1474 and 1476, respectively. None of these volumes have ever either been fully cataloged or recorded in any published census of medieval manuscripts or incunable editions.

In the century ahead, vigorous collecting has every promise of preserving the role of the research library as the premier laboratory of humanism. As the Newberry's example indicates, cooperation among institutions can augment the corpus of primary source material by bringing rare, hitherto unstudied, and inherently thought-provoking objects into a venue where scholars can avail themselves of them. In fact, the Newberry's innovative electronic online cataloging, based on a new and evolving paradigm of the book as object, provides for scholars of history and literature an overview of these materials that in former times would not have been possible. By providing an avenue for searching its newly acquired collections for their artifactual characteristics in addition to their textual content, the Newberry's new collections of old books may well contribute to unparalleled opportunities for a new generation to rewrite the history of literature, books, and reading from the late Middle Ages to the end of the eighteenth century.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The author wishes to express his appreciation to Paul E Gehl and Jenny Schwartzberg of the Collection Development Division of the Newberry Library for their assistance in the preparation of this article.

NOTES

(1.) See, for example, Jauss (1979). The words "manuscript," "scribe," "codex," and "incunable" do not occur.

(2.) See Saenger (1987).

(3.) For additional details, consult Jones & Saenger (2000).

(4.) Numerous editions of it have been added to the library as part of the en bloc acquisitions discussed below.

(5.) In 2001, a private donor, Thomas A. Stump, provided the Newberry with the library of a nineteenth-century Mennonite minister that included a significant gathering of German and Dutch vernacular works, which has further enriched this sector of the Newberry's collections.

REFERENCES

Jauss, H. R. (1979). The alterity and modernity of medieval literature. Neos Literary History, 10, 181-227.

Jones, B. M., & Saenger, P. (2000, August). Priceless takes on new meaning, and definition of sharing expands. American Libraries, 31(7), 50-52.

Saenger, P. (1987). Collecting in the second century. In Humanities' mirror: Reading at the Newberry, 1887-1987 (pp. 43-49). Chicago: Newberry Library.

Paul Saenger, The Newberry, Library, 60 W. Walton St., Chicago, IL 60610

PAUL SAENGER is the George A. Poole III Curator of Rare Books and Collection Development Librarian at the Newberry Library, Chicago. His publications include Space Between Words: The Origins of Silent Reading (Stanford University Press, 1997) and A Catalogue of Pre-1500 Manuscript Books at the Newberry Library (University of Chicago Press, 1989). He is currently preparing a monograph on The Evolution of the Codex: 1300-1600.