Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts Collection - Library Special Collections, Ca
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http://oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/kt6b69q574 Online items available Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts Collection - Library Special Collections, ca. 1198-1616 Processed by Mirella Ferrari and Richard H. Rouse; machine-readable finding aid created by Caroline Cubé. UCLA Library Special Collections Room A1713, Charles E. Young Research Library Box 951575 Los Angeles, CA 90095-1575 Email: [email protected] URL: http://www.library.ucla.edu/libraries/special/scweb/ © 2005 The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Medieval and Renaissance medspeci 1 Manuscripts Collection - Library Special Collections, ca. 1198-1616 Descriptive Summary Title: Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts Collection - Library Special Collections Date (inclusive): ca. 1198-1616 Collection number: medspeci Collector: Ferrari, Mirella. Abstract: This finding aid lists the Medieval and Renaissance manuscripts holdings of the Department of Special Collections as cited in Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts at the University of California, Los Angeles (1991), compiled by Mirella Ferrari and edited by R.H. Rouse (Call Number - Z6621 C123m 1991). The catalog identifies the contents, illumination, physical makeup, binding, and provenance for all Medieval and Renaissance manuscripts in the UCLA library system. These manuscripts can be found in the Louise M. Darling Biomedical Library's History and Special Collections Division, the John E. Anderson Graduate School of Management Library's Robert E. Gross collection of Rare Books in Business and Economics, the Music Library's Hathaway Collection, and UCLA Library Special Collections. The various Indexes are brief lists of all manuscripts in the UCLA library system while the Container List consists only of the holdings in UCLA Library Special Collections. Language: Finding aid is written in English. Language of the Material: Materials are in English. Repository: University of California, Los Angeles. Library Special Collections. Los Angeles, California 90095-1575 Physical location: Materials located at the Louise M. Darling Biomedical Library's History and Special Collections Division, the John E. Anderson Graduate School of Management Library's Robert E. Gross collection of Rare Books in Business and Economics, the Music Library's Hathaway Collection, and UCLA Library Special Collections. Some materials are stored off-site at SRLF. Advance notice is required for access to those items in the collection. For items listed in the Container List please contact the UCLA Library Special Collections Reference Desk for paging information. For all other items listed in the various Indexes as not part of UCLA Library Special Collections, please contact the specified repository for more information. http://digital2.library.ucla.edu/viewItem.do?ark=21198/zz0009gx4f Restrictions on Access Open for research. STORED OFF-SITE AT SRLF. Advance notice is required for access to the collection. Please contact UCLA Library Special Collections for paging information. Restrictions on Use and Reproduction Property rights to the physical object belong to the UC Regents. Literary rights, including copyright, are retained by the creators and their heirs. It is the responsibility of the researcher to determine who holds the copyright and pursue the copyright owner or his or her heir for permission to publish where The UC Regents do not hold the copyright. Preferred Citation [Identification of item], Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts Collection. UCLA Library Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA. History The present catalog, begun over a decade ago, stands at the beginning of modern cataloging of medieval manuscripts in North America. Its completion may serve as the occasion to pause for a moment and examine the beginnings and progress to date of manuscript cataloging in America, as well as to offer some comment on what it has taught us and how best to continue. 1 By “modern” cataloging is meant the writing of catalogs that can stand comparison with those of European national collections, such as the catalog of the Prussian State Library by Rose, that of the Royal Collection in the British Library by Warner and Gilson, the still-growing catalog of the Latin manuscripts at the Bibliothéeque nationale, and the catalogs of various portions of the Vatican Library, such as the Vaticani latini by Pelzer and Ruysschaert and the Reginenses by Wilmart. 2 These works distinguish themselves from earlier catalogs by the fact that they involve extensive research into the identity of the contents, illumination, physical makeup, binding, and provenance of the manuscripts they describe. The manuscript collections of North America are at the same time substantial and dispersed. In this they are no different from the collections of any European country, save in degree: Europe's collections are larger, North America's collections more widely dispersed. Institutional cataloging of the great collections in Europe has moved at a slow but assured pace. Cataloging of smaller collections has been largely haphazard. In Germany after World War II, at the urging of Bernhard Bischoff the program for catalogs of state libraries was begun, providing scholars with modern catalogs of the libraries of Medieval and Renaissance medspeci 2 Manuscripts Collection - Library Special Collections, ca. 1198-1616 Frankfurt, Stuttgart, and Nurnberg, among others. In England, N.R. Ker saw the cataloging of undescribed manuscripts in small collections as a major desideratum, and undertook to do it himself. Ker was part of that generation of English medievalists, formed in the 1930s, who shared a belief in the importance of the written page and who, when something needed doing, got up and did it. To them, knowledge of the medieval past lay in an understanding of its surviving manuscripts and, therefore, these were to be sought out and cataloged; order, in the form of bibliographic control, was gradually to be imposed upon chaos. This message was firmly transmitted to anyone who listened. Following in the footsteps of M.R. James, any scholar possessed of reasonable curiosity would find an interesting collection of manuscripts to describe. R.A.B Mynors explored Bishop Gray's manuscripts in Balliol College; Malcolm Parkes described the liturgical manuscripts at Keble College; and Ian Doyle with Alan Piper is cataloging the manuscripts of Bishop Cosin's library in Durham. 3 In California also, cataloging began as an individual effort, involving a number of scholars working in undescribed, isolated, and largely overlooked collections. At the first and simplest level was the undertaking by Dennis Dutschke, and later also by Consuelo Dutschke, of a general survey of manuscripts on the West Coast, ranging from Mount Saint Angel Abbey in Oregon to the San Diego Public Library. The initial intent was to present the results of the survey as a handlist, but in time the Dutschkes agreed that only a more thorough examination of the manuscripts would be of valid service to the academic community. The author of the present catalog, Mirella Ferrari, a member of the faculty of Classical Philology at the Università cattolica del Sacro cuore in Milan, was brought to UCLA in the spring quarter of 1977 by the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies to catalog the medieval and renaissance manuscripts then in the university's libraries. Her mentor, Giuseppe Billanovich, who had spent a term at UCLA as visiting professor, had seen the body of uncataloged manuscripts and recommended to Fredi Chiappelli, then director of the Center, that Ferrari be invited for the task. The opportunity to have a knowledgeable manuscript scholar as a colleague at UCLA and to assist her in whatever way possible with the library and the manuscripts was a great stimulus to catalog locally in Southern California and, in turn, to encourage cataloging in American collections generally. Ferrari delayed her return to Italy, and in the summer of 1977 she, Consuelo Dutschke, and I began with the Claremont Libraries, which housed the very sort of interesting but hitherto ignored collection endemic to the United States. Much of the summer went to the task. Undertaken at our own expense as an enjoyable experiment without deadlines or semi-annual progress reports, the catalog, frequently set aside when more urgent things came along, was finally completed and published in 1986, as the first volume in a series devoted to catalogs of manuscripts in California institutional libraries both private and public. 4 In the late 1960s and '70s, with the prospect of the computer on the horizon, the production of a second supplement to De Ricci's Census 5 was frequently put forward as a worthy undertaking at meetings of the Medieval Academy's Standing Committee for Centers and Regional Associations (CARA). From the enormous effort it had cost W.H. Bond to produce the first supplement to De Ricci, however, it was obvious that the obstacles lying in the way of such a large undertaking made these suggestions impracticable. For one person, working for a research center or alone, however well equipped with research assistants, to catalog not only the new acquisitions of the Morgan, the Beinecke, and the Houghton but also the numerous uncataloged manuscripts in smaller out-of-the-way collections of manuscripts scattered across America, was impossible unless the researcher wanted to consecrate a lifetime to this task—which usually turned out not to be the case. An application to the NEH with the