Bryn Mawr Joins Other Philadelphia-Area Libraries in Creating Country’s Largest Regional Online Collection of Medieval Manuscripts

Bryn Mawr College is among the schools taking part in Bibliotheca Philadelphiensis a new project organized by the Philadelphia Area Consortium of Special Collections Libraries (PACSCL) and funded by the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) with generous support from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Through a nearly $500,000 grant, the project, which involves a total of 15 partner institutions, will complete the digitization and online presentation of virtually all of the region’s medieval manuscripts – a total of almost 160,000 pages from more than 400 individual volumes. The images, together with descriptive metadata, will be released into the public domain and easily downloadable at high resolution.

Bryn Mawr is the 2^nd largest contributor to the project, with 50 medieval manuscript volumes totaling about 15,000 pages, or about 10 percent of the project total.

Bryn Mawr’s  manuscripts date from the eleventh century to the early sixteenth century, and are nearly evenly divided between volumes that are heavily textual and volumes that were produced for devotional purposes with extensive illuminations, principally books of hours and psalters.  The largest number of text manuscripts come from the New York collector Howard Lehman Goodhart and his daughter, Renaissance scholar Phyllis Goodhart Gordan ‘35, who built their collections in the 1930s and 1940s. 

“Ms. Gordan’s interest in Renaissance Humanism is reflected in the presence of three works by Poggio Bracciolini and five by Leonardo Bruni, all written in Italy in the mid-fifteenth century,” says Eric Pumroy, director of Bryn Mawr’s Special Collections. “  There are also two mid-15^th century Latin translations of Greek works (John Chrysostom and Eusebius) done by Francesco Griffolini of Arezzo and George of Trebizond, two of the critical figures in bringing Greek literature to western Europe, and an Italian edition of Petrarch’s Rime.”

The Goodhart-Gordan collection also includes some earlier manuscripts, including an 11^th century Northern French manuscript of Gregory the Great containing annotations by Petrarch; a 14^th century Spanish manuscript of Avicenna’s work on medicine; a 14^th century English manuscript of Nicholas of Salerno’s work on herbal treatments;  an inventory of the jewels belonging to Edward I of England; and an account of a trip to the Holy Land by Pierre Mesenge de Rouen, written in French in the early years of the 16^th century.

The devotional works include 11 books of hours, most produced in northern France or Flanders in the mid-15^th century, including one Flemish work with large images attributed to the Master of Nicholas Brouwer. Other works include breviaries, graduals, psalters, and a missal.

The devotional works are used several times a year in medieval history and history of art classes at Bryn Mawr, and were featured in a student-curated exhibition in 2008.  The text volumes have been used frequently in Classics courses, and have been the subject of regular inquiries over the years from scholars in Europe working on related manuscripts. 

The project is led by PACSCL members Lehigh University, Free Library of Philadelphia, and the University of Pennsylvania Libraries

Other project participants include the following area libraries and museums: Chemical Heritage Foundation, College of Physicians of Philadelphia, Franklin and Marshall College, Haverford College, Library Company of Philadelphia, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Rosenbach Museum and Library, Swarthmore College, Temple University, University of Delaware, and Villanova University.