Habemus papam librorum
In March the world watched anxiously for a puff of white smoke and announcement: "Habemus papam." The election of a new Pope from the new world inspired Jane Carpenter, Library Special Collections Rare Book Cataloguer, to exhibit rare texts of Papal provenance. The six books selected, "our treasures, really" were a small "representation of items from our collection," she said. The Obeliscus Vaticanus Sixti V Pont. Opt. Max. (Rome: Bartolomeo Grassi, 1587), pictured below, is a case in point. "The book is composed of commentaries, engravings, poems, and epigrams celebrating the re-erection of the Vatican Obelisk in front of St. Peter’s Basilica by Pope Sixtus V in 1586. Our copy was specially bound for Pope Sixtus (1585-1590) whose papal arms are stamped in gilt on the vellum cover."
The Obeliscus Vaticanus Sixti V Pont. Opt. Max.
More remarkable is the Il Corelio (Padua: Paolo Frambotto) by Giacomo Zabarella. Jane described this priceless Library Special Collections item, ex libris Pope Gregory XII (1406-1415), as the "sole edition of an illustrated account by a genealogist living in Padua, of the origins of the powerful Correr family of Venice, apparently representing an attempt to link them to the Este (and Zabarella) lineages. The author traces the Corrers back to Japhet, third son of Noah." And, as proof that Vatican controversies are nothing new, Jane noted that LSC has first editions of Pietro Bembo’s Gli asolani (Venice: Aldus Manutius, 1505). Two states of this book exist and the Library owns both, ex libris Pope Julius II (1503-1513). Jane recounted, "The first copies off the press of the 1505 edition included Bembo's dedication to Lucrezia Borgia. However, during the course of the printing, a feud arose between the new pope Julius II and Lucrezia's husband, the Duke of Ferrara. Since neither Bembo nor Aldus, both loyal to the papal court, wished to present a book paying homage to the wife of an enemy of the Pope, the dedication was immediately removed, from the remaining copies of this edition, as well as those of all later editions." By Lauren Buisson and Jane Carpenter, Technical Services
Ahmanson Fellow Delves into Italian Literature Collection
Christiana Purdy Moudarres is a Visiting Scholar at UCLA’s Center for Medieval and Renaissance Study and Ahmanson Research Fellow for the Study of Medieval and Renaissance Books and Manuscripts. Purdy Moudarres received her PhD in Italian Literature at Yale in 2010, her MAR (Master of Arts in Religion) from Yale Divinity School in 2012, and looks forward to returning to her alma mater this Fall as Assistant Professor of Italian. Having edited and co-authored several volumes of collected essays (Table Talk: Perspectives on Food in Medieval Italian Literature [Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2010], Foundations of Modernity: New Worlds in the Italian Renaissance [Leiden: Brill, 2012]; and Dante’s Volume from Alpha to Omega [Tempe, Ariz.: ACMRS, Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, forthcoming]), she is currently at work on a book manuscript based on her dissertation, A Sacred Banquet: Medicine and Theology in Dante’s Divine Comedy. At UCLA Library Special Collections, she is exploring the rich collection of Aldine editions of the Comedy, as well as the medieval medical and religious works housed in the Ahmanson-Murphy Collection of Early Italian Printing and in Biomedical History and Special Collections.
Smoking in the Library, the Lab, the Cafeteria … Before the UCLA Tobacco-Free Campus
Blog post by
Russell Johnson, History & Special Collections for the Sciences, UCLA Library Special Collections
On Earth Day, April 22nd, the whole of UCLA joined the hospitals and health science campuses to become tobacco- and smoke-free environments, according to an announcement from the UCLA Newsroom.
A mini-exhibit in History & Special Collections for the Sciences, in the Biomedical Library (4th floor, up the ramp from Stacks level 9), uses yearbooks, archival photos, postcards, and advertisements to show the other side of the coin, when smoking and tobacco use were taken for granted in surprising (to us) circumstances.
-UCLA’s Tobacco-Free Campus [facebook page] https://www.facebook.com/UCLATFC
-UCLA Tobacco-Free Task Force http://tobaccofree.ucla.edu
-UCLA’s Tobacco-Free Policy http://evc.ucla.edu/tobacco-free-campus
-UCLA Policy 810: Tobacco-Free Environment http://www.adminpolicies.ucla.edu/pdf/810.pdf
Ahmanson Fellow Begins Research at LSC
Jane Raisch has been awarded one of the first Ahmanson Research Fellowships for the Study of Medieval and Renaissance Books and Manuscripts. Raisch is a doctoral candidate in the department of Comparative Literature at UC Berkeley. A native New Yorker, she received her B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania in English and Classics and then taught English and Latin at The Field School in Washington, DC. Her research at Berkeley focuses on the reception of Greek in Early Modern English literature and her dissertation, chaired by Victoria Kahn and Joanna Picciotto, examines the role Greek plays in the connection between scholarship and poetics. At UCLA Library Special Collections, she’ll be mainly working with Greek books from the Aldine press in an attempt to understand the ways in which Greek language and texts were read, encountered, and recovered. She’s interested in how the technical work of the material and historical reconstitution of ancient Greek texts bleeds into the theoretical and speculative work of Early Modern fiction.
