June 18 Friends of the Lehigh Libraries talk Making the Renaissance Manuscript: Discoveries from Philadelphia Libraries with Nick Herman

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Making the Renaissance Manuscript: Discoveries from Philadelphia Libraries

Please join us on Thursday, June 18, 2020, 4:00 p.m.-5:30 p.m. EST, online via Zoom, when Dr. Nicholas Herman, Curator of Manuscripts for the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, will present “Making the Renaissance Manuscript: Discoveries from Philadelphia Libraries.”

Through this talk, Dr. Herman will examine the making of the hand-written and hand-illuminated book during a time of great political, religious, and technological transformation in Europe. Herman will conceptualize the collaborative exhibition that opened in the University of Pennsylvania’s Kislak Center for Special Collections in February. Three of Lehigh’s manuscripts were loaned to this exhibit, and will be especially featured in Dr. Herman’s talk. He will present about the intellectual and artistic depth of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries through a varied selection of extraordinary manuscripts, cuttings, and incunables, many of which have never before been exhibited, nor have been made openly accessible to remote users.

Please register in advance for this program. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.

Herman's talk will also provide an ideal opportunity to showcase the diverse collections of Philadelphia institutions, as well as the research discoveries made during the course of the Bibliotheca Philadelphiensis (http://bibliophilly.pacscl.org/) an unprecedented collaborative cataloguing and digitization project, led by Lehigh University Libraries' Special Collections. Bibliotheca Philadelphiensis: Toward a Comprehensive Online Library of Medieval and Early Modern Manuscripts in PACSCL Libraries in Eastern Pennsylvania and Delaware created the country’s largest widely accessible online collection of medieval manuscripts; fifteen libraries created images and descriptions for over 160,000 manuscript pages thanks to a grant from the Digitizing Hidden Special Collections and Archives initiative of the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR), and generously supported by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

This event is made possible by the generosity of The Friends of the Lehigh University Libraries.

Please be aware that there has been a nationwide increase in disruptions to virtual events. Some of these disruptive incidents could include offensive language or imagery. If this occurs, the meeting host may need to end the meeting and reschedule. Thank you for your patience as we work through these challenges.

“The manuscripts presented in this exhibition extend far beyond the rarefied atmosphere of the Renaissance studiolo,” explains Herman, noting that Making the Renaissance Manuscript gives precedent to “everyday” documents over more elaborate texts. The exhibit features manuscripts, cuttings, and incunables dating from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
Making the Renaissance Manuscript: Discoveries from Philadelphia Libraries, Penn Libraries
  • Dogale, Lehigh Codex 21
  • Antiphonal, Lehigh Codex 25
  • Book of Hours, Use of Rome, Lehigh Codex 18
  • Portolan Charts (Anon.), Lehigh Codex 12
  • Nicholas Herman. MAKING THE RENAISSANCE MANUSCRIPT: DISCOVERIES FROM PHILADELPHIA LIBRARIES. Philadelphia: Penn Libraries/Kislak Center, 2020.