October 17–18, 2008, Pere Marquette Gallery, DuBourg Hall
The Knights of Columbus Vatican Film Library and its journal, “Manuscripta,” will hold their annual Saint Louis Conference on Manuscript Studies in Pere Marquette Gallery, DuBourg Hall, October 17–18, 2008.
This annual conference features papers on medieval and Renaissance manuscript studies, including topics such as paleography, codicology, illumination, book production, library history, reading & literacy, textual criticism, and manuscript cataloguing. Sessions at this year’s conference will address the following topics: (1) Maps and Diagrams of the Holy Land in Manuscripts: Graphic Presentations of Sacred Space, (2) Glossing across the Medieval School Curriculum, (3) Paleography and Manuscripts of the Early Middle Ages, (4) Manuscripts and Memory, (5) Production and Transmission of Medieval Musical Manuscripts, (6) German Vernacular Manuscripts, and (7) Otto Ege and the Fortunes of Fragments.
The guest speaker, Professor Virginia Brown of the University of Toronto and the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies—one of the world’s leading experts on Latin paleography and the medieval and Renaissance reception of Classical authors—will deliver the annual Lowrie Daly Lecture on Manuscript Studies. The Lowrie Daly lecture, which commemorates the founder of the Vatican Film Library, Fr. Lowrie J. Daly, S.J., is open to the public and does not require registration. It will take place at 4pm, Friday, October 17, in Pere Marquette Gallery.
The conference is accompanied by an exhibition in Pius XII Memorial Library of medieval manuscript facsimiles, entitled “’What a Piece of Work is a Man’: Reading the Body in Medieval Manuscripts.” This exhibit, curated by Susan L’Engle, Ph.D., will be on display through November 30, 2008.
Visit http://www.slu.edu/libraries/vfl/conference for full program and registration information.
The Knights of Columbus Vatican Film Library, established in 1953, is a research collection for medieval and Renaissance manuscript studies that holds on microfilm more than 37,000 Vatican Library manuscripts comprising major portions of the Vatican’s Greek, Latin, and Western European vernacular collections, as well as materials in Arabic, Ethiopic, and Hebrew. Among its other collections, the Library possesses over 52,000 color slides of manuscript illumination from collections of the Vatican and other libraries; 2,500 manuscripts on microfilm from non-Vatican libraries; the microfiche editions of the Bibliotheca Palatina (consisting of more than 12,000 printed titles from the Vatican’s Palatine collection) and the Cicognara Library (consisting of more than 4,800 printed titles from the Vatican’s Cicognara collection on art, architecture, and archaeology); and the CD-ROM edition of the papal letter registers from the Archivio Segreto Vaticano.
The Vatican Film Library maintains an extensive reference collection for manuscript studies, including catalogues of Vatican Library manuscripts (complete sets of the Vatican’s published catalogues and unpublished inventories, and Studi e testi), as well as those of many other libraries, in addition to numerous works on paleography, codicology, illumination, and other disciplines to support the study of medieval and Renaissance manuscripts and their texts. Researchers may also take advantage of the rare book and general collections of the Saint Louis University Library, which are especially strong in early and medieval church history, philosophy, and theology.
For further information on the Vatican Film Library, see http://www.slu.edu/libraries/vfl.
