Subscribe to RSS FeedFunding medieval and Renaissance acquisitions
In an effort to offset the uncertainties inherent in annual funding levels and market prices, RBMS has established a number of funds dedicated toward the acquisition of materials supporting Medieval and Renaissance Studies at OSU. Listed and described here are the seven current funds specifically tasked with supporting medieval and Renaissance purchases.
John Bennett ¨Retiring¨
John Bennett, Curator of the Avant Writing Collection, is retiring, officially, as of Dec. 31, 2010. I will, however, be coming back in on a regular basis to deal with new acquisitions, collection development and processing, and other issues. I want to say that the Rare Books & MSS staff is a wonderful group of [...]
Tax time at OSU’s Rare Books & Manuscripts Library
Unless you are an accountant, chances are you probably find taxes and all things pertaining to them to be mundane, depressing and completely uninteresting. However, the Rare Books and Manuscripts library has recently acquired a rather interesting tax record: a 14th century tax roll dated 4 January 1352 (658 years ago this past Monday). The [...]
The Summa Aurea of William Peraldus
Last summer OSU’s Rare Books & Manuscripts Library acquired a wonderful book to add to its growing collection of incunabula (books printed prior to 1501). Printed in Brescia by Angelus and Jacobus Britannicus in 1494 (the colophon states that the firm completed the job on 24 December, just in time for Christmas) , this [...]
Philip Melancthon and the “Loci communes theologici”
We’ve all heard about Martin Luther, “father” of the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation. But how many of us know about Philip Melancthon, Luther’s ablest assistant and the man the arch-Reformer called the Lord’s “learned champion”? Born in 1497 in Bretten, a small town located in Germany’s Kraichgau Valley, Melancthon (Greek for “black earth,” or Schwarzerd, his [...]
Things happen in threes… or at least medieval manuscripts do!
It’s not every day that I have the pleasure of announcing that the Rare Books and Manuscripts Library at OSU has acquired an original medieval codex, and I’m pleased to say that today isn’t one of those days either. Pleased, you might ask? Yes, because today I happily announce that we have just added three [...]
Welcome to our new location
The Rare Books and Manuscripts Library and the William Charvat Collection of American Fiction are proud to join their colleagues from the Hilandar Resaerch Library and the Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee Theatre Research Institute Library in becoming the new Special Collections department at the newly renovated William Oxley Thompson Main Library at the [...]
OSU Campus Campaign
As OSU employees consider an annual contribution to the Campus Campaign we’d like to take this opportunity to point out that gifts may directed to funds that support the Charvat American Fiction Collection and/or several areas within the Rare Books and Manuscripts Library. Fund code numbers are included below for your convenience. We’d be happy [...]
Bellingham’s Commonplace Book online
The Rare Books & Manuscripts Library is pleased to announce the completion of an ambitious project to digitize the seventeenth-century manuscript commonplace book of Sir Henry Bellingham. The project is live at http://library.osu.edu/sites/rarebooks/bellingham/. This project was researched, designed, and created by Sarah Shippy, a graduate student in OSU’s Department of History. Essentially scrapbooks of useful [...]
The Great Comet of 1618
Savants throughout history (along with a fair number of quacks and hucksters) have interpreted comets streaking across the sky as heralds of doom or harbingers of great change. Perhaps had we here at OSU’s Rare Books Library been wearing our divinators’ hats earlier this month we would have associated the arrival on our doorstep [...]
