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Mapping the Past: Rare Russian Maps from Special Collections has been created as a digital highlight of books and maps on the website of the Special Collections and Rare Books department. This virtual exhibit describes the cartographic trade and the exploration of the Russian empire from the 16th through the 18th centuries. The display was originally mounted as a physical exhibit in the Ellis Library colonnade at the University of Missouri in April 2011.
This post highlights Summa Contra Gentiles by St. Thomas Aquinas published in Venice in 1480 by Nicolas Jenson, one of the most renowned printers. The book is of special importance to all with an interest in theology, history of book printing, and rare books. This is one of the four incunabula recently acquired by the Special Collections and Rare Book department.
On the warm and humid Venetian day of June 13th, 1480 the book was finally finished. Nicolas Jenson had only two months to live: he wasn’t well and felt old, tired and lonely. His children were in France: daughters Joanna, Catherine, and Barbara were young and unmarried, still living in Sommevoir with his beloved brother Alberto and his mother donna Zaneta; his son Nicolas, whose behavior worried him a lot, was in Lyon. A “most honorable tradesman, alien and printer of books”, Messer (as stated in his official will and testament), Nicolas Jenson, a very rich man, felt with some sadness that this strange place was going to be his final destination. A Frenchman, he had come here twelve years prior, when Venice was already in a long and exhausting war with the Turks, and when two years earlier the Doge Giovanni Mocenigo had made peace with Mehmed II, the famine and plague were still ravaging La Serenissima (the name of the Republic of Venice). Messer Jenson was a very successful printer; even his rivals admitted that the elegance of his Venetian Gothic type was unmatched — after all, he published a good quarter of all the books printed in Venice from his arrival in 1468 to 1480* , and Pope Sixtus IV made him Count Palatine.
Contra Gentiles was his second book published this year. By the end of July the last part of De humilitate interiori et patientia vera by Johannes Carthusiensis was to become his last printing venture. After his death his printing partner John of Cologne published a few more titles from the stock left after Jenson’s repose, under the joint name of Johannis de Colonia, Nicolai Jenson, and Sociorumque.
Nicolas Jenson was a master, not a scholar like Aldus, Merula, or Caracciolo, and thus he was in need of assistance by monks in proofreading the works of philosophy and especially theology. Petrus Albus Cantianus, a Dominican friar, was the editor of Contra Gentiles: at the very end of the text, after the colophon, we find his letter to Petrus Frigerius, Archbishop of Corfu (“Veneto theologico Excellentissimo Archiepiscopo Corkire[n]si ordinis”) confirming that he checked and corrected the text.
Why did Jenson decide to publish Contra Gentiles in 1480, when the market was still saturated with the books by Aquinas? Only four years earlier Contra Gentiles was brought out in Venice by Francis Renner of Heilbronn and Nicolas of Frankfurt, and before that, in September of 1475, in Rome, by Arnold Pannartz, and before him in 1473-74 Georg Reyser printed it in Strasburg. And this is not counting numerous editions of his most widely known and enormously influential Summa Theologiae.
St. Thomas Aquinas‘s authority in the Roman Church was indisputable: his works were the basis of Thomist theology and philosophy. It is widely believed that Aquinas wrote Contra Gentiles in Italy between 1261 and 1264 at the request of St. Raymond of Penafort, Magister General of the Dominican order, who wanted to have a good and convincing resource for the missionaries in Tunisia and Murcia, a Moorish kingdom in southern Spain. While written most probably in Rome, it is supposed to be based on his lectures he read at the University of Paris between 1257 and 1259. Aquinas’ intention was to give his students clear and focused answers to the most important questions about God, creation, providence and salvation. Each of the four books that constitute this work consists of about a hundred chapters (102, 101, 164, 97, to be precise). Each chapter is a question/postulate (Quod veritati fidei Christianae non contrariatur veritas rationis <That the truth of reason is not in opposition of the Christian faith>) which is then proved in a series of arguments and counter arguments, supported by citations from the Scriptures, and led to a logical conclusion.
Our book looks characteristically mediaeval: in contemporary brown tooled leather binding over wooden boards with the front half of embossed metal clasps still present. The title is written in a contemporary hand on the fore-edge and at the top of the blank recto of the first printed page: Tho[mae] [contra] gentiles. The watermarks {a crown without arch between two chain-lines} suggest that Jenson bought the paper from Genf (Genève), and the binder of the book had a paper stock {watermark: Virgin Mary in a shield} produced in Dorpat (modern Tallinn) or Riga in Livonia in the 15th century.
Jenson’s division of chapters differs from some of the known printed editions. He thought, for instance, that chapter 20 (Quod Deus non est corpus) was too long and he divided it after the 11th argument thus making an additional chapter 21, “Obiectiones co[n]tra hu[n]c processum”. (Objections against this reasoning). On the other hand, his Book Three consists only of 163 chapters instead of 164 in several other editions. The very first line of Chapter 20 also differs from the majority of modern texts and coincides with the Roman edition of 1894 that reads: “Ex praedictis a[u]t[em] oste[n]ditur,[ quod] Deus non e[st] corp[us]”; in later editions it reads: “Ex praemissis etiam” etc. St. Thomas’ hand was notoriously difficult to read, and it is not my task here to determine what manuscript was used by Jenson for his publication, but it is interesting to observe that even after seven hundred years of studying the text even at the beginning of the twentieth century, some passages were still being disputed, and monks who spent their entire lives reading, editing and publishing it, complained about difficulties in decoding it.
The text is rubricated with red and blue capitals. A large and very elaborate first capital “v” in “Veritatem” opens the book, and each objection and counter argument is marked with red paragraph mark up to Book Four, chapter 11; after that, hand written capital letters at the beginning of chapters continue, but paragraph marks are much rarer and frequently coincide with short contemporary notes in the text, as if a reader was rubricating while reading.
More than just another remarkable example of an incunabulum printed by one of the greatest printers of Venice, our book carries a fitting St. Thomas’ message not only to Jenson and his contemporaries, but to the posterity — and thus to us — as well, namely that “of all human pursuits, the pursuit of wisdom is the more perfect, the more sublime, the more useful, and the more joyful.” (Book 1, Ch. 2)
*There were 596 books brought out in Venice in that period, of which number 150 were published by Jenson.
Bibliography:
Did you know today is International Geek Pride Day? Here in Special Collections, we’re celebrating with a selection from the Comic Art Collection. This collection contains over 3,500 catalogued comic book titles and hundreds of pieces of original art from cartoonists like Mort Walker, Frank Stack, and John Tinney McCutcheon, ranging in date from the 1850s to the present.
The Comic Art Collection unites fun and fandom with serious scholarship. It has been used by faculty and students for everything from freshman composition assignments to studies of the history of popular culture. In 2008, scholars, comic enthusiasts, artists, and students of all interests demonstrated the collection's broad appeal by convening at Ellis Library to celebrate 75 years of the comic strip Alley Oop. Special Collections holds the papers of the comic strip's creator, V.T. Hamlin.
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The Comic Art Collection is open to the public in the Special Collections Reading Room. All patrons – geeks and non-geeks alike – are welcome to make use of these materials.
The Special Collections and Rare Book department recently acquired four incunables,[1] and we’ll be featuring them individually on the blog. This post highlights Sermones de adventu by Roberto Caracciolo (Venice, 1474), a book interesting for what it can tell us about religion and technology.
The author of this book, Fra Roberto Caracciolo de Lecce, was one of the most successful preachers of the fifteenth century, hailed as a “second St. Paul” for his oratorical talents.
As a preacher, Caracciolo’s crowd-pleasing specialties were melodrama and spectacle; he even boasted that he could reduce any audience to tears. His career started early. By 1450, when he was only in his mid-twenties, he was well-known enough to be chosen by Pope Nicholas V to deliver the official canonization eulogies for Bernardino of Siena. Later in his career, when asked to preach a crusade sermon against the Ottoman Turks, he did so in full knight’s armor, complete with a sword. It’s no wonder that large, enthusiastic crowds flocked to hear him wherever he went.
Eager to capitalize on the popularity of Caracciolo and his colleagues, printers issued vo
lumes of their sermons in Latin and vernacular Italian. Caracciolo alone had at least eight different editions of his sermons printed throughout Italy from the 1470s until his death in 1495. By the time the sixteenth century drew to a close, over one hundred editions of his works had been printed throughout Europe.
This volume contains Caracciolo’s sermons on Advent, St. Joseph, the Beatitudes, divine charity, and the immortal soul, as well as a sermon by the canon lawyer Dominicus Bollanus on the immaculate conception of the Virgin Mary. It preserves the words Caracciolo’s audiences heard and read so that we can access them today. Thanks to this copy’s scattered marginal notes in sixteenth-century handwriting, we can even know how they responded.
As Caracciolo’s career as a preacher reached its height, Italy stood on the brink of a technological revolution. Gutenberg had developed movable type in Mainz around 1455, but it took about a decade for the technology to reach Italy. Venice had to wait even longer – until 1469. That’s the year that Johannes of Speyer emigrated from Mainz, got a five-year monopoly from the Doge, and set up shop as the city’s first printer.
Unfortunately for the Speyers, Johannes died around eighteen months later, invalidating the monopoly. His brother Vindelinus attempted to carry on the business, but Johannes’ death touched off an equivalent of the dot-com boom of the late 1990s. Within three years, there were at least a dozen printing shops in Venice, all producing the same Greek and Roman texts – over 80 different editions of them by the end of 1472. By 1473, the book market was so glutted with classics that the bottom dropped out.
This was merely the first in a series of market collapses, but most of Venice’s new high-tech start-ups went out of business as a result. The Speyer press survived – barely. Vindelinus sold a large stake in the company to two new investors: Johannes de Colonia (also called Johannes of Köln or Cologne), and Johannes Ma
nthen de Gerresheim. Colonia and Manthen became the senior partners in the business; Vindelinus’ name disappeared from the company until 1476.
Colonia and Manthen were prolific printers, producing 86 editions from 1474 to 1480. They gave up on the Greek and Roman classics after 1475 and shifted their focus to the more profitable market in law, theology, and philosophy. This book is an example of the output from their reinvented company, produced during their first year of business.
Although the Speyer brothers are sometimes credited as the originators of Roman type, this book was printed using their space-saving but 
elegant Gothic. Like many other early printed books, the printers left space for initials and ornament to be added by hand. In this copy, several of the initial Ns are written backwards, for what reason we do not know.
There’s much more this book could tell us; a book is never just a book when it’s in Special Collections. As its own history shows, this particular book has been an active participant in a tradition of study that has continued for hundreds of years.
The following resources are available at MU Libraries.
Aguzzi-Barbagli, Danilo. “Roberto Caracciolo of Lecce,c. 1425-6 May 1495.” In Contemporaries of Erasmus: a biographical register of the Renaissance and Reformation. Ed. Peter G. Bietenholz, Thomas B. Deutscher, associate editor. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, c1985.
Gerulaitis, Leonardas Vytautas. Printing and Publishing in Fifteenth-Century Venice. Chicago: American Library Association, 1976.
Telle, Emile V. “En marge de l’éloquence sacreé aux XVe-XVIe siècles: Erasme et Fra Roberto Caracciolo.” Bibliothèque d’humanisme et Renaissance. Travaux et Documents 43 (1981): 449-470.
[1] The word incunabulum (plural incunabula, or incunable(s), if you prefer English) means in the cradle in Latin. It is generally applied to printed books produced prior to 1501, in the earliest years of printing.
Controlling Heredity: The American Eugenics Crusade, 1870-1940 has recently been mounted as a permanent exhibit on the website of the Special Collections and Rare Books department. This virtual exhibit explores the intersections between ethics and the pseudo-science of eugenics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It was originally mounted as part of Ethics and the Brain, the seventh annual symposium sponsored by the Life Sciences and Society Program at the University of Missouri in March 2011.
This April Fool’s Day we thought we’d share several editions of Moriae Encomium by Desiderius Erasmus, which, in addition to being a definitive resource on fools and foolishness, has a great Latin pun for a title.
Frontispiece portrait of Erasmus, engraving after Hans Holbein (London, 1709).
Frontispiece and engraved title page featuring Erasmus, More, Holbein, and Folly as a goddess (Leiden, 1715).
The folly of scholarship, engravings after Hans Holbein (Paris, 1715).
Frontispiece illustration of Folly as a goddess, illustration after Charles Eisen (Paris, 1757).
The folly of drunkenness, engraving after Charles Eisen (Paris, 1757).
Various types of folly, engravings after Daniel Chodowiecki (Berlin, 1781).
The folly of pedagogues, mezzotint by Lynd Ward (New York, 1953).
Desiderius Erasmus (1466-1536) isn’t the figure one would suppose to be an authority on foolishness. Ordained as a priest and consecrated as a monk, Erasmus spent his life as a classical scholar, humanist, and theologian. Although he is best known for theological work, he was also a prolific and engaging author whose works ranged from popular handbooks on children’s table manners to bitter mockeries of Church and state officials.
Around 1498, Erasmus moved to England, where he met Sir Thomas More, the author of Utopia. The two men worked together on a translation of the works of Lucian and became close friends. Erasmus moved to Italy to pursue a doctorate in divinity in 1500, but he and More continued to write to each other regularly.
In 1509, Erasmus returned to England and wrote Moriae Encomium during his journey, dedicating it to More. The title of the work makes an affectionate joke of More’s last name – Moriae Encomium can be translated as either The Praise of Folly or The Praise of More. Erasmus continued the wordplay throughout the text, parodying the elaborate literary style both he and More would have encountered in their classical studies.
Erasmus considered Moriae Encomium a minor work and was surprised and dismayed at its popularity upon its first publication in 1511. The work went through multiple editions and translations in his lifetime, and it touched off an entirely new literary genre – the spoof encomium, which became popular among learned Elizabethans.
Moriae Encomium also gave rise to an artistic tradition. The artist Hans Holbein, a mutual friend of Erasmus and More, decorated Erasmus’ own copy of the book with marginal drawings. Holbein’s humorous doodles were adapted as engravings in a later edition, and they were copied for the next two hundred years. They have served as an inspiration – or a point of departure – for the generations of artists who have illustrated this text.
The Division of Special Collections, Archives, and Rare Books has editions of Moriae Encomium ranging from the seventeenth through the twentieth centuries, and many are illustrated. In addition to Holbein, illustrators include Charles Eisen, Daniel Chodowiecki, and Lynd Ward. The images above are just a sampling from our collection. Enjoy!
Before Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, A Streetcar Named Desire, and The Glass Menagerie, there were Beauty is the Word and Hot Milk at Three in the Morning. And before he went by Tennessee, playwright Thomas Lanier Williams was an MU student. This weekend kicks off campus-wide celebrations of Williams’ 100th birthday, and to join in the festivities, we’re featuring two manuscripts of his earliest plays.
Beauty is the Word was Williams’ very first play. It was submitted for the MU Dramatic Arts Club’s Dramatic Prize Plays contest in 1930. The play was produced on stage as part of the competition, but it appears not to have won an award in the contest. Over the course of one act, two young and worldly aesthetes visit their austere and forbidding missionary relatives somewhere in the South Pacific. When the natives revolt and threaten to burn down the mission, the young couple saves the day by appealing to the natives with dance and music rather than fear of damnation.
Hot Milk at Three in the Morning was Williams’ sophomore submission to the Dramatic Prize Plays contest. The play focuses on an argument between a young married couple who are trapped by poverty and illness. It was staged in 1932, and like Beauty is the Word, it received an honorable mention. Williams revised the play in 1940, titling it Moony’s Kid Don’t Cry. It was included in a compilation of the best plays of 1940 and was the first of Williams’ plays to be published.
Both manuscripts are a part of the University of Missouri Collection, which features official publications along with the works of faculty, staff, and distinguished alumni.
Stefani Engelstein, professor of German at the University of Missouri, presented a lecture entitled “Visions of Transparency: The Human Body and Social Order,” on March 8 in the Ellis Library Colonnade. Dr. Engelstein’s talk opened the exhibit Controlling Heredity: The American Eugenics Crusade 1870 – 1940, which is on display in the Colonnade until March 30. The exhibit and lecture are part of the Life Sciences & Society Symposium series. A video of the lecture in its entirety is available below.
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Albert Bates Lord and Mary Louise Lord’s private libraries were donated by the generous Lord family to the University of Missouri Libraries in 2010. A University of Missouri Classics and English Professor, John Miles Foley and former student of Albert Lord, was able to secure the collection for the use in University Libraries. On Thursday February 10, 2011 there was a reception and talk by John Miles Foley about Lord and his library. In continued celebration of the Lord collection we thought we should share some images, with our blog readers.
Albert Lord documented oral tradition world-wide; he was specifically interested in oral performance and composition. Due to his B.A. in Classics from Harvard and a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature he was well suited for a career exploring oral tradition. He specialized in recording Serbian heroic poems, but also studied Homeric epics, Beowulf and Gilgamesh. Lord accumulated a large and unique library while professor at Harvard College. Additionally, he chaired and helped found the Department of Mythology and Folklore at Harvard from its inception through 1983, when he retired.
Mary Louise Lord, an academic herself, was a professor of Classics for many years at Connecticut College. She also contributed to her husband’s work through editing and helping him reflect on his work. Her part of the library represents her professional interests, contributing many classic works. Specifically of significance is part of Heinemann Publishing’s classic literature texts. They are pictured to the right and provide either Latin/English or Greek/English texts. She helped publish The Singer Resumes the Tale, one of Albert Lord’s books published posthumously.
One of the books is a signed copy of, Heinrich Schliemann’s, “Ithaka Der Peloponnes und Troja.” On the left is the title page with an inscription, which could be translated as: “To the lover of the arts Mr. Erik Barren (or Henry Warren?) as a memorial. 1874. Schliemann.” Schliemann, an archeologist of the 19th century, is credited with the archeological dig that unearthed ancient Troy. He submitted this work, written in Greek, to the University of Rostock in hopes of attaining a doctoral degree. He was
granted a Ph.D. based on this work, in 1869. 
Additional interesting items from the donation include an Albanian shepherd’s costume that is from the 20th century, two Sviralas, Croatian reed-type instruments, and Lord’s typewriter. This collection is currently being cataloged and processed. After, these important steps the items will be housed in MU Libraries. You can find a listing of all the books through the MERLIN catalog through: Lord Collection University Of Missouri Columbia Libraries