Posts by Pablo Alvarez

Visit us on the sixth floor of the Hatcher Library to see this exciting exhibit! It consists of a selection of historical bookbinding models from the personal collection of conservator and scholar, Julia Miller. In 2015 and 2016, Julia bequeathed her extensive model collection to the Special Collections Research Center. Now named as The Julia Miller Collection of Bookbinding Models, it includes binding replicas of ancient and medieval manuscripts in various materials and formats, including a variety of Graeco-Roman tablet models, Coptic codices from the 3rd to the 10th century AD, and medieval European, Near Eastern, and Islamic binding models from the 12th to the 17th century.

The Exhibit "The Art and Science of Healing: From Antiquity to the Renaissance" is now gone from the Kelsey Museum and the Audubon Room of the Hatcher Library, but we can still see it through the eyes of undergraduate Noah Waldman, who last semester wrote an exhibit critique for professor Aileen Das' class, "Ancient Medicine in Greece and Rome". Selected by Dr. Das, I am very pleased to post Noah's review in our Special Collections blog.

As part of last week's Enriching Scholarship events, I offered an introductory workshop on the subject of illustrations in early printed books. In brief, the participants of this session learned not only about how these extraordinary images were created but also about how to identify the details of their production by examining actual books. For each book the following question was raised: are these illustrations woodcuts, engravings, or lithographs? We all had great fun!

I am pleased to showcase a student critique of the current exhibit, The Art and Science of Healing: From Antiquity to the Renaissance. Students of professor Aileen Das' class, Ancient Medicine in Greece & Rome, visited this exhibit at the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology last February. They were assigned with the fascinating task of examining this display from various angles, not only from the perspective of the visitor but, more interestingly, also from the view of the exhibit curator. As I guided their visits, I tried to reconstruct for them the different stages involved in the making of this exhibit, from the original idea that I probably wrote on a piece of napkin, to the aesthetics of the display room and the painful selection of the witnesses of the story I wanted to tell: the artifacts themselves! But let us now hear Shannon's critical reaction:

We are pleased to announce the opening of a new exhibit from the Special Collections Library. It includes an extraordinary selection of magical, religious, and medical artifacts held at Special Collections, the Papyrology Collection, and the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology. These objects are an extraordinary evidence of how people coped with physical and mental ailments from antiquity through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.

I am frequently asked by students and faculty: where do our rare book collections come from? While we have purchased many extraordinary books since the early years of the University of Michigan, many of our treasures were bequeathed by grateful alums and faculty. The reasons why they donated these artifacts are often fascinating, revealing little-known stories that shed light not only on the history of our institution but on our country at large. The book featured in this post is a rare seventeenth-century edition and Latin translation of the Homer's Iliad...

The Liber medicinalis (Book of Medicine) is a medical treatise of around 1,200 dactylic hexameters, traditionally attributed
to the second-century Roman author, Quintus Serenus Sammonicus (d. beginning of 3rd c. AD). It contains sixty-four therapeutic recipes,
divided into two sections: recipes for illnesses affecting individual organs listed from head to toe, and recipes for general ailments like injuries, fevers, fractures and dislocations, insomnia, toothache, and poisoning.

Our featured book today is a fourteenth-century Latin manuscript of a medieval bestseller: the Secret of Secrets (Secretum secretorum). Wrongly attributed to Aristotle, and originally composed in Arabic in the eighth century, the content of this work has been gradually shaped, and changed, by scribes and translators throughout the centuries. From being conceived as a manual about kingship, it eventually became one of the most popular medical treatises in the Middle Ages.

Around 1511, the Dutch Catholic humanist, Erasmus of Rotterdam (1466-1536), began working on an edition and Latin translation of the Greek New Testament, for which he thoroughly compared the text of several Greek manuscripts with Jerome's fourth-century Latin translation of the Bible, the so-called Vulgate.

We are very pleased to announce a new online exhibit from the Special Collections Library: Shakespeare on Page and Stage: A Celebration. It is a virtual record of the physical exhibit that took place in the Audubon Room of the Hatcher Library from January 11 to April 27, 2016. As the title playfully suggests, the exhibit is a historical journey through different versions of Shakespeare’s plays as they were edited for publication or interpreted for the stage.