The Nicaraguan author Sergio Ramírez has been named the 2017 winner of the prestigious Cervantes Prize in Spanish Literature (Premio de Literatura en Lengua Castellana Miguel de Cervantes). He is the prolific author of more than twenty novels, including Margarita, está linda la mar (1998) and Mil y una muertes (2004), as well as short stories, essays, and journalistic writings. Ramírez was a long-time member of Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional (FSLN), a democratic socialist organization, which opposed the dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza (1925-80) and his family. Ramírez served as vice president of Nicaragua under President Daniel Ortega, 1984-90, but retired from politics in 1997 and wrote Adiós muchachos (1998) as a personal memoir and analysis of the Sandinista Revolution. Since then, he has devoted himself almost entirely to the world of literature, winning wide critical acclaim. The Sergio Ramírez Papers (C1123), which have been in the Manuscripts Division since 2005, contain more than 165 boxes of manuscripts and drafts, correspondence, political files, photographs, and other papers documenting his creative work and public life since the 1950s. For a full description, see the finding aid.

The Spanish Ministry of Education and Culture created the Cervantes Prize in 1975 for lifetime achievement and began awarding it a year later. The forty-three authors so honored since 1976 are almost equally split between Spain and Latin America. It is interesting to note that Princeton holds some or all of the papers of a third of the twenty-one prize-winning Latin American authors, including Carlos Fuentes, Mexico (1987), Mario Vargas Llosa, Peru (1994), Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Cuba (1997), Jorge Edwards, Chile (1999), Juan Gelman, Argentina (2007), Sergio Pitol, Mexico (2008), and now Sergio Ramírez. In addition, Princeton holds extensive personal and editorial correspondence of Octavio Paz, Mexico (1981); and the Charles Scribner’s Sons publishing files for Juan Carlos Onetti, Uruguay (1980). Two of these authors are also winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature: Octavio Paz (1990) and Mario Vargas Llosa (2010). Many of the Cervantes prize-winners are represented in the correspondence files of more than eighty Latin American literary archives in the Manuscripts Division. Politics is a frequent theme in these collections and is complemented by the Library’s excellent holdings of Latin American political ephemera, a collecting effort and digital project coordinated by Fernando Acosta-Rodriguez, Librarian for Latin American Studies and related areas.

For more information about relevant archival holdings, consult the finding aids site. Researchers can also contact Public Services at rbsc@princeton.edu

Sergio Ramirez at a political rally in Nicaragua.

Every old manuscript, however fragmentary, has a story to tell. And such is the case with Garrett Hebrew MS. 4. Robert Garrett (1875-1961), Class of 1897, one of the Princeton’s most celebrated collectors, donated it to the Library 75 years ago as part of the extensive Garrett Collection. Long overlooked, the two parchment strips (see images below) appear to be remnants of a lost 16th-century Hebrew pilgrimage scroll, probably brought back from the Holy Land by a Jewish pilgrim. The fragments depict Temple utensils (sometimes called Sanctuary implements) used in religious ceremonies at Jerusalem’s ancient Temple; as well as the recommended itinerary for other Jewish sacred places in the Holy Land. Images of the Temple and its sacred implements had been depicted on illuminated double-pages bound into deluxe Hebrew Bibles from Castile, Catalonia, and Perpignan between the 13th and 15th centuries. These visualizations have been interpreted as representing the Messianic hopes of the Sephardic Jews in the Iberian Peninsula, when they began to face Christian persecutions and proselytizing during the final centuries of the Reconquista. The Garrett Hebrew scroll was informed in part by such imagery yet belongs to a later book tradition.

In the second half of the 16th century, Jewish scribes and book artisans in Jerusalem and Safed, under Ottoman Turkish rule, began to custom produce Hebrew pilgrimage guides on parchment scrolls for the growing numbers of Jewish travelers to the Holy Land. No doubt, some were Sephardic Jews, whose families had fled the Spanish Inquisition and forced conversion. Several pilgrimage guides were definitely brought back to Italy as souvenirs, and a few most likely served as models for similar guides produced in Italy. Most of the seven extant pilgrimage guides are configured like medieval scrolls; that is, reading from top to bottom in one long column. This is the form of two well-preserved pilgrimage scrolls at the Jewish National University Library (nos. 1187 and 6947), respectively 140.0 cm and 219.0 cm in length. The first of the two was in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s recent exhibition Jerusalem, 1000-1400: Every People under Heaven. They each have substantial text accompanying stylized images. Clearly, not all the holy places and objects were still extant or could actually be visited by Jewish travelers. Scroll producers did not hesitate to show the Dome of the Rock, topped by a crescent, as a stand-in for the Second Temple. But even when a physical visit was impossible, these scrolls could still serve far-flung Jewish communities in Europe and the Near East as visual reminders of sacred places and objects. Rolling them out for wall display or table-top consultation offered a virtual pilgrimage.

Garrett Hebrew MS. 4 is somewhat different than the best-known Hebrew pilgrimage scrolls of that era. To judge from what survives, which is perhaps a third to a half of the scroll’s original length, the text is more limited and the images not well executed. Moreover, it was configured in the form of a classical scroll, being unrolled and read from right to left, as were Torah scrolls and small-format scrolls of particular Hebrew Books of the Bible, intended for use on specific holidays: Ecclesiastes (Sukkoth), Book of Esther (Purim), Book of Ruth (Pentecost), The Song of Songs (Passover), and Lamentations (Ninth of Av). The small size of pilgrimage scrolls made them portable. Jewish pilgrims could easily transport them in a leather or fabric sack. Equally portable was a small codex, such as one produced in 1598 for a member of the Jewish community of Casale Monferrato, in northern Italy (Leeds University Library, Roth MS. 220). But scroll format had the advantage of laying out the entire itinerary in a straight line.

Mounted together, the two fragments of Garrett Hebrew no. 4 depict sacred places and objects as stylized illustrations, executed in iron-gall ink and red tempera, and individually labeled in Hebrew. Section A (12.7 x 41.5 cm) relates to the Temple of Jerusalem (right to left): Two Shofars, below which is the Ark of the Covenant, containing the Ten Commandments, each tablet with an abbreviated title; forceps for rites; the Altar of Sacrifice and Stairs; Menorah; Foundation Stone (checkerboard design, called The Drinking Stone); Shim’i the Ramati (or Place of our Lord) with hanging oil lamps. Section B (12.4 x 45.5 cm) includes scenes outside Jerusalem (right to left): Cave of Machpelah (near Hebron), which Abraham bought for the burial of Sarah and which came to serve as the burial place for the patriarchs and matriarchs; an unidentified cave identified as the Three Wells of Stone; Tomb of Rachel, with double arch, located between Jerusalem and Bethlehem; Tomb of Zechariah, an ancient rock-cut stone monument in the Kidron Valley.

Garrett Hebrew MS. 4 is also reproduced in Rachel Sarfati, ed., Offerings from Jerusalem: Portrayals of Holy Places by Jewish Artists (Jerusalem, The Israel Museum, 2002), pp. 48-49. For further reading on pilgrimage scrolls and imagery, see Bianca Kühnel, “Memory and Architecture: Visual Construction of the Jewish Holy Land,” in Doron Mendels, ed., On Memory: An Interdisciplinary Approach (Bern: Peter Lang, 2007), pp. 177-93, figures 8.1, 8.2; Eva Frojmovic, “Messianic Politics in Re-Christianized Spain: Images of the Sanctuary in Hebrew Bible Manuscripts,” in Imagining the Self, Imagining the Other: Visual Representation and Jewish-Christian Dynamics in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Period, edited by Eva Frojmovic (Leiden: Brill, 2002), pp. 91-128; Eva Frojmovic and Frank Felsenstein, Hebraica and Judaica from the Cecil Roth Collection (Leeds: Brotherton Library, University of Leeds, 1997), pp. 16-17, no. 5. Special thanks to Professor Susan Einbinder, University of Connecticut, for deciphering the inscriptions in Garrett Hebrew MS. 4.

Garrett Hebrew MS. 4

The oldest books in the Princeton University Library are a group of Pharaonic rolls written in Hieroglyphic and Hieratic script, preserved among more than a thousand ancient Egyptian papyri in the Manuscripts Division. Among the most interesting of these rolls has now been published in a scholarly edition by a Swiss Egyptologist: Sandrine Vuilleumier, Un rituel osirien en faveur de particuliers à l’époque ptolémaïque: Papyrus Princeton Pharaonic Roll 10, Studien zur spätägyptischen Religion, 15 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2016), 593 pages; 25 color plates. Her research began as a graduate student at the University of Geneva. She studied the roll at Princeton with the help of a Princeton University Library Research Grant (2004-5). Vuilleumier’s book contains transcriptions, translations, commentaries, and color images, as well as a final chapter on the rituals, ceremonies, and other aspects of Egyptian religion.

Pharaonic Roll no. 10 dates from the Ptolemaic Era—the period between the death of Alexander the Great (323 BCE) and the Roman conquest of Egypt (30 BCE). Lacking its first part, the roll contains portions of seven chapters arranged in twenty-two columns of Hieratic texts, some of which are known from other sources and others not. Performance of ancient Egyptian rituals for the gods Osiris (god of the afterlife) and Ptah-Sokar-Osiris is central to the texts. The roll is unusual in that it was a ritual compilation from different sources and was used for burial instead of a Book of the Dead, the most common of Pharaonic funerary texts interred with mummies. Embedded in the text are the personal names of two men, Padihorpakhered and Mesreduwief, who were perhaps brothers. The surviving text in Pharaonic Roll no. 10 has seven chapters, dealing with processions, destruction of enemies, navigation, ritual of offerings, litanies, formulas, officiants and beneficiaries, and other subjects.

Robert Garrett (1875-1961), Class of 1897, among the Library’s greatest benefactors, probably purchased the roll in the 1920s. It was then still fully rolled, as it had been for two thousand years, and the roll remained that way after Garrett donated his extensive collection of manuscripts to the Library in 1942. Pharaonic Roll no. 10 was not opened, conserved, and mounted until 1998, as part of the multi-institutional APIS (Advanced Papyrological Information System) Project, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). Don C. Skemer, Curator of Manuscripts, was the Library’s project director; Ted Stanley, Paper Conservator, supervised the unrolling and mounting of the roll in the Library’s Preservation Office; and Leonard H. Lesko, Charles Edwin Wilbour Professor of Egyptology, Brown University, served as textual consultant. Several other Pharaonic rolls were also unrolled and conserved as part of the APIS project, including several Hieroglyphic Books of the Dead, an almost-intact Hieratic Book of Breathings, and other texts. Scholarly articles have been published about several of Princeton’s Pharaonic rolls.

Descriptions of the Pharaonic rolls (with bibliographic citations) are found in the Descriptive Inventory in the Princeton University Library Papyrus Home Page. Selected Pharaonic rolls may be viewed online in the Princeton University Digital Library (PUDL), where they can be found by searching for the keyword “Pharaonic.” For more information, contact Don C. Skemer, Curator of Manuscripts, at dcskemer@princeton.edu

Throughout recorded history, people have turned to magic, prophecy, prognostication, divination, astrology, and other forms of pseudo-science in a vain effort to know the future and control the course of events in an uncertain world. In the late Middle Ages, plague and internecine warfare gave added impetus to the medieval penchant for prognostication and lead to forms of popular literature that circulated in custom-produced manuscripts. By the second half of the fifteenth century, the demand for inexpensive copies of almanacs, prognostications, and other such texts was sufficient for early printers to produce large numbers of copies on speculation and market them through street hawkers and itinerant peddlers. Yet manuscript dissemination would live on for centuries, long after the Printing Revolution, and it was always possible for individual readers to transcribe printed texts in whole or part for inclusion in manuscript compendia and commonplace books.

Manuscript copies of new texts could circulate privately for years or decades, almost like pre-prints, until finally being printed. We can see this with a scribal manuscript of a work by the Italian polymath Gerolamo Cardano (1501-78), who played a major role in development of the Renaissance pseudo-science of metoposcopy. This form of divination claimed that one could determine a person’s character and destiny from patterns of lines in their forehead. A French manuscript copy of ca. 1615 (C0938, no. 499) is one of several versions of Cardano’s metoposcopy text that circulated before the Latin text was published in 1658 as H. Cardani medici Mediolanensis metoposcopia. The Princeton manuscript is essentially a hybrid book comprised of an engraved title page, with handwritten author’s name and title; and manuscript prologue; and 102 unnumbered folios, with four faces of men on each page, to which the same scribal hand added identifying numbers (1-816) and forehead lines, with accompanying prognostications for the particular face (1-769). Other metoposcopy treatises were never printed, such as an Italian manuscript of 1762 (C0938, no. 556). See image below.

Also circulating in manuscript before being printed were treatises on chiromancy (palmistry), according to which one’s future could be predicted from lines in the palms of hands. Ludwig Heinrich Lutz’s Chirosophia concentrata appears to have circulated in manuscript (C0938, no. 687) before the treatise was printed in 1672, 1674, 1679, and 1685. While each of the diagrams in the Princeton manuscript occupies a full page, the diagrams are grouped several to a page in the copper-engraved plates of the printed editions. But other chiromancy texts circulated as manuscripts for centuries and were never printed. For example, “Libro della Chiromantia di Ercole da Ferrara. Scritta da me Gio[vanni] Cristofano Crispolti nel anno 1676” (C0938, no. 745). Crispolti was the scribe responsible for this manuscript, which contains the main portion of a larger, unpublished sixteenth-century Italian text by Ercole Forte, da Ferrara, “Libri trè de Chiromantia e della Fisionomia,” ca. 1560-65, which survives in Brussels, Royal Albertine Library. Other manuscript copies are cited in eighteenth-century printed library catalogs. In the Princeton manuscript, the chiromancy treatise is followed by a brief anonymous text on Pythagorean numerology.

In addition to treatises, some texts were prepared in manuscript form because they were intended for the exclusive use of particular people. Wealthy patrons commissioned custom-made horoscopes and collections of genitures. Princeton MS. 187 is a multi-part custom horoscope prepared by an anonymous German astrologer around 1583 for an unnamed person born in 1549, as indicated in the geniture (fol. 5v), indicating the precise time of birth. The manuscript is possibly from the duchy of Saxony because it refers to an elector of Saxony from the 1550s and 1560s. The text cites ancient authorities such as Galen and Ptolemy, and Renaissance figures such as Andrea Alciati (1492-1550) and Gerolamo Cardano. A group of three German custom horoscopes (C1500) were prepared between 1670 and 1687 for Baron Alexander von Enke (1650-87), who served in the army of the Electorate of Saxony, fought against the Ottoman Turks during the Great Turkish War (1683-99), and died of a fever on the Ionian Greek island of Zakynthos (Zante) in 1687. Johann Henrich Voigt (1613-91), a northern German astronomer, astrologer, and almanac-compiler, who lived in the city of Stade and other places, prepared two of the horoscopes. The author of the third is unknown.

Almanacs and prognostica were very popular in print, like Farmer’s Almanacs in later centuries. François Rabelais (ca. 1494-1553?) satirized such popular literature. Despite large press runs, there was still a demand for custom prognostica in manuscript form. For example, Princeton MS. 171 is an entire volume of pseudo-Solomonic prognostications prepared for the Rousset family of the Loire Valley in the late fifteenth century. The main text is comprised of anonymous French verse prognostications prepared for Huguet Rousset. After a prose introduction interpreting the heavenly bodies in terms of Christian doctrine and astrology, the anonymous author has verse prognostications about agriculture, weather, commerce, and related issues of importance to provincial landowners. These are provided for a 28-year cycle of solar years, as indicated in incipits and explicits for the sections. Also in the volume are other verse prognostications, possibly prepared for Nicolas Huguet, grandson of Huguet Rousset. The verses end with prophecies pertaining to the years 1542 and 1572. Serving much the same purpose is a 1698 French manuscript, “Almanach universel” (C0938, no. 702), which provides predictions for a different 28-year cycle, 1689-1716, with climate and crop predictions, particularly for French wines in Auxerre and Poitou, along with business advice.

Among the strangest unpublished texts are Italian manuals that claimed to show gamblers how to win local lotteries by coming up with winning numbers. A manuscript of ca. 1714-50 labeled “Cabala” (C0938, no 564) is filled with prophecies, prognostications, numerology, and cryptography. Reference is made to older prophecies of St. Malachi, Joachim of Fiore (ca. 1132-1202), and St. John of Capistrano (1386-1456). Another such Italian collection (C0938, no. 730) is a recently acquired composite volume of approximately 600 pages, in 50 paper booklets of varying dimensions, bound together in the mid-nineteenth century. The texts were written by different hands in Italian (with occasional Latin), each in a separate booklet. These were bound together in the mid-nineteenth century, with the handwritten title “Cabale.” Most were probably copied and/or translated from earlier manuscripts and printed books that pertain to Cabalistic systems for lotteries. While undated, internal dates given in individual texts are from the 1760s to 1830s. The texts contain many numerical and alpha-numerical tables, astrological diagrams, and other figures presenting information in geometric forms, such as number squares and pyramids. Authorship of individual texts is attributed, perhaps through an intermediary text, to Ramon Llull (1232?-1316), Giovanni Francesco Pico della Mirandola (1470-1533), and Rutilio Benincasa (1555-1626).

For more information about manuscript holdings, consult the online catalog, published catalogs, and relevant finding aids. Researchers can also contact Public Services at rbsc@princeton.edu

Italian Metoposcopy Manuscript, 1762
C0938, no. 556

The Manuscripts Division is pleased to announce that the Clarence Brown Papers (C1571) are now open for research in the Princeton University Library’s Department of Rare Books and Special Collections. The papers were the generous gift of the Estate of Clarence Brown, through his widow Jacqueline Brown, Executor. Clarence Brown (1929-2015) had a long and distinguished teaching career in Russian and Comparative Literature at Princeton from 1959 until his retirement in 1999. He was a faculty member in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures from 1967 and in the Department of Comparative Literature from 1971.

Brown’s name will forever be associated with that of the great Russian poet Osip Emilyevich Mandelstam (1891-1938), a tragic victim of Stalinist repression. Brown spent decades studying Mandelstam’s life and work, and translating his poetry and prose. It was through Brown’s friendship with the poet’s widow Nadezhda Mandelstam (1899-1980) that the papers of Osip Mandelstam were donated to Princeton in 1976, together with all literary rights. Brown initially served as custodian of the papers, which were later transferred to the Manuscripts Division. The Princeton University Library has digitized the Mandelshtam Papers (C0539), including a significant portion of his extant manuscripts, in order to make them available to researchers worldwide. Brown’s papers include correspondence with Nadezhda Mandelstam, chiefly relating to the publication of her memoir Hope Against Hope (1970); files pertaining to Brown’s successful collaboration with the American poet and translator W. S. Merwin (Princeton Class of 1948) on the English translation, Osip Mandelstam: Selected Poems (1974); and Brown’s Russian travel diaries (1962-66) and notes on conversations with poet Anna Akhmatova (1889-1966).

The Clarence Brown Papers also contain his extensive correspondence with Guy Davenport (1927-2005), a prolific fiction writer, poet, critic, translator, artist, and illustrator. Both were South Carolina natives, fellow students at Anderson Boys’ High School, and undergraduates at Duke University. Davenport taught at the University of Kentucky. There are seven folders of Davenport’s original letters, mostly typed, dating from 1945 to 2005. The letters include Davenport’s discussions of their respective literary interests, recent publications, ongoing projects, teaching careers, and other topics. The Manuscripts Division already had five folders of Davenport correspondence in the archives of the distinguished literary journal The Hudson Review (C1091), to which Davenport was a frequent contributor, 1949-2005. Jacqueline Brown also donated Davenport’s 1946 self-portrait (Graphic Arts Collection).

The Manuscript Division holds papers of other former faculty in Comparative Literature, including R. P. Blackmur, Robert Fagles, Joseph Frank, Edmund Keeley, and Allen Tate. For information about collections, consult finding aids or contact Public Services, at rbsc@princeton.edu

Clarence Brown and W. S. Merwin at Princeton Commencement, 1993.

The Manuscripts Division’s extensive holdings on the celebrated English Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope (1815-82) have grown measurably thanks to a generous recent gift by the Rev. George S. Rigby, Jr., of Media, Pennsylvania. The George S. Rigby, Jr., Collection of Anthony Trollope (C1582) contains 122 autograph letters of the author, many of which are not in The Letters of Anthony Trollope, edited by N. John Hall (Stanford, CA.: Stanford University Press, 1983), 2 volumes. In addition, the Rigby Collection includes autograph envelopes, notes, and documents; leaves from his novel Castle Richmond (1860) and Australian journal (1872); selected letters of his older brother, the novelist Thomas Adolphus Trollope (1810-92), and other members of the Trollope family; original photographs; and caricatures, including an original watercolor (reproduced below) by the French artist “Sem” [Georges Goursat (1863-1934)], which is similar to a caricature done by him for Sem’s Pantheon of Celebrities of the Day (1876). Printed editions of Trollope’s work were also donated as part of the Rigby Collection and will be cataloged and housed in Rare Books.

In an original autograph manuscript leaf, in the Rigby Collection, for an article published in The Century Magazine (July 1883), the American author Henry James (1843-1916) observed, “Trollope did not write for posterity, he wrote for the day, the moment; but those are just the writers of whom posterity is apt to take hold. So much of the life of his time is reflected in his novels that we must believe a part of the record will be saved; and they are full of so much that is sound and true and genial that readers with an eye to that sort of entertainment will always be sure … to turn to them. Trollope will remain one of the most trustworthy … of the writers who have helped the heart of man to know itself….” Henry James’s confidence in Trollope’s enduring place in English literature has been borne out by generations of readers, drawn to the author’s portrayals of politics, society, gender, and other timely issues.

George S. Rigby, Jr., the collector and donor, was born on 27 April 1937, and raised in Media, Pennsylvania. He was educated in Media public schools, graduated from Asbury University (1959), and the Eastern Baptist Theological Seminary, B. Div. (1963) and M. Div. (1972). Rigby was ordained to the United Methodist Church ministry in 1960 and served six churches in eastern Pennsylvania until his retirment in 2002. Since he retired, the Rev. George S. Rigby, Jr., has served as minister-of-visitation for a church in Aston. Pennsylvania. Rigby has had a life-long interest in collecting. After first collecting holographic material of English and American authors, Rigby began in 1980 to focus on Anthony Trollope. His Trollope collection really began with the purchase of a single autograph letter from the George MacManus Company (Philadelphia), through David Holmes, whose career as an antiquarian bookseller began in that firm’s rare books and manuscripts department. Holmes subsequently opened his own business and, until his untimely death in 2016, was the sole source of all the Trollope material in the Rigby Collection. A few items were purchased since 2016 from Holmes daughter, Sarah Holmes Bookbinder.

Rigby donated the Trollope Collection to the Princeton University Library in September 2017 so that it could be (in the donor’s own words) “maintained as a unit and preserved in a facility suitable for its care, and in an institution which contained material consonant with [his collection].” His collection nicely complements the rich holdings of Trollope in the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, especially in the Morris L. Parrish Collection of Victorian Novelists and in the Robert H. Taylor Collection of English and American Literature. More than a dozen complete Trollope manuscripts are preserved in these collections, including Orley Farm (ca. 1860) and North America (ca. 1861), along with a wealth of correspondence, journals, illustrations, and other materials. These two collections have grown over the years by judicious acquisitions, such as selected papers of Thomas Adolphus Trollope and Lionel Grimston Fawkes’s original illustrations for Anthony Trollope’s The Way We Live Now (1875). For more information, consult the relevant finding aids and online catalog. Researchers can also contact Public Services at rbsc@princeton.edu

Anthony Trollope, by “Sem.”

Information is so abundant and readily available today through the internet and social media, it can be difficult to imagine the glacial pace of news reporting in the distant past, before the advent of printed newspapers and organized postal services. In the Middle Ages, long-distance travel occasionally enabled such news reporting through oral and written accounts. By the fifteenth century, personal letters and news sheets written on paper, readily available and far less expensive than parchment, facilitated dissemination of international news by merchants, diplomats, soldiers, clergy, and other travelers. Information included in personal letters could be repackaged or aggregated in news sheets, at first handwritten and later printed, to report on current events of broad geopolitical and economic interest. The Manuscripts Division has examples of both types of news media, complementing other holdings in the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections.

The Ottoman Empire’s challenges and threats to the Christian West was a recurrent news theme from the fifteenth century and is the subject of the best-known international news report in the Manuscripts Division: Testament de Amyra Sultan Nichemedy (Garrett MS. 168), an elegant manuscript, decorated with the royal arms (see below), was produced in Bruges (ca. 1482) and then bound by the Caxton Binder in Westminster. The manuscript was for Edward, Prince of Wales (b. 1470), who ascended the English throne briefly as King Edward V (r. 9 April–25 June 1483), under the control of his uncle, the Lord Protector, Richard, Duke of Gloucester, who ascended the throne as Richard III (r. 1483-85). The text of this manuscript, available in print, is a French translation of an anonymous Italian letter of 12 September 1481, concerning the death and funeral of the Sultan Mehmed II (r. 1444-46, 1451-81), whose conquest of Constantinople in 1453 marked the the fall of the Byzantine Empire. The text also concerns the civil war faced by his successor, Beyazid II (r. 1481-1512).

From the mid-sixteenth century, news reporting by personal letter came to be complemented by organized scribal copying and dissemination of news sheets. The Manuscripts Division recently acquired a handwritten Genoese news sheet of around 1535 (Princeton MS. 239). This 21-line avviso, labelled “Copia de litera di Genoa de 22 Iulii,” offers an Italian news report, copied by a scribe on the recto of an unwatermarked paper sheet (28.3 x 19.5 cm) in a rapid cursive script, with abbreviations and corrections. The news sheet was presumably copied from a manuscript exemplar and dispatched to its intended reader by hand or post. The subject is the imminent defeat of the Ottoman Turkish Admiral Hayreddin Barbarossa (d. 1546) and death of the feared Turkish naval commander Aydin Reis (d. 1535), known as “Cacciadiavolo.” In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Genoa and Rome were close rivals of Venice in gathering and disseminating news. By the time it was written, news was already being circulated by printed news sheets, presumably in press-runs of 200 or more copies.

More common in the Manuscripts Division are personal letters conveying international news, such as a recently acquired three-page letter of 11 October 1480, with traces of a red wax seal (Princeton MS. 138.76). In it the Venetian merchant shipper Antonio Soranzo conveyed breaking news to Ierolimo Venier, member of an old Venetian noble family. The news was from the Greek fortress of Methoni, a town that the Venetians called Modon, located in the southwestern Peloponnese. Soranzo’s news dispatch concerned recent Ottoman military assaults by the forces of Sultan Mehmed II. Ottoman attacks were against a fortress known as the Castle of St. Peter (or Petronium) to the Knights Hospitalers of Saint John, and as Bodrum Kalesi to the Ottomans. The fortress built by the Knights Hospitalers was in the southwestern Turkish port city of Bodrum. They also had a fortress on the Greek island of Kos, twenty-four kilometers to the southwest. The Knights Hospitalers were able to resist attacks on both fortresses. Soranzo was a member of a Venetian family of merchant shippers, whose firm specialized in the importation of Levantine cotton from the Syrian ports of Hamā, Latakia, and Tripoli, for use in the European textile industry.

Italian news and diplomatic reports are found in other collections. A recent acquisition (Princeton MS. 138.77) is an anonymous Italian report dispatched from France around March 1552 to convey intelligence about the military preparedness of King Henry II (r. 1547-59), early in the Italian War of 1551-59. From stations across Europe and in the Ottoman and Persian empires, Venetian ambassadors prepared and submitted detailed diplomatic reports, which were later transcribed from archival copies for dissemination as bound sets of relazioni, such as Princeton MS. 157, dating from the last quarter of the sixteenth century. The Seventeenth-Century Italian Letters Collection (C0920) contains 97 letters and documents of various Italian church and political figures, primarily in Florence, Pisa, and Rome, 1598-1699. Many letters contain information about military and diplomatic history, focusing on the Farnese dukes of Parma, Spanish occupation of Milan, and political ambitions of the Holy See. Reporting on current events can also be found among the letters of Ottavio Falconieri (1636-75), the Papacy’s diplomatic internuncio in Flanders. His papers include 135 autograph drafts and secretarial copies of outgoing letters to Cardinal Francesco Barberini (1597-1679) and others, chiefly written from Brussels between February 1673 and December 1674. This correspondence covers many subjects, including church affairs, international politics, books and learning, and everyday life. Also found in the papers is Affari d’Inghilterra, a 23-page political report on England (C1305).

International news reporting was not restricted to Italy. Many German, Dutch, English, and French printed examples in the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections are preserved in the Folke Dahl Collection of Early Newsbooks, Corantos, and Newspapers, 1512-1787. The oldest example in this collection is a report by the German humanist and historian Michael Köchlin (or Coccinius) of Tübingen (1478-1512), De rebus gestis in Italia (Strasbourg: Johann Grüninger, 1512), a 24-page news sheet, which covered the Spanish siege of Bologna, the Venetian occupation of Brescia, the Battle of Ravenna, and other recent events. Printed news sheets can also be found by searching the online catalog under the subject heading “Newsbooks.” Printed news continued to coexist with personal news dissemination. For example, found in the Radcliffe Family Papers (C0926), of Hitchin, Hertfordshire, are twenty-seven business letters written from the Turkish city of Galata (near Istanbul) and eleven other letters from Aleppo (modern Syria), ca. 1703-57, relating in part to current political conditions that impacted trade and commerce between England and the Ottoman Empire.

For more information about holdings of the Manuscripts Division, consult the online catalog and finding aids site or contact Public Services, rbsc@princeton.edu

Garrett MS. 168, folios 14v-15r

The Manuscripts Division is pleased to announce that it has recently acquired the papers of the contemporary Irish poet and editor John Ennis, who is one of the poets included in the Leonard L. Milberg ’53 Irish Poetry Collection. Ennis’s papers include 79 boxes of manuscripts, drafts, corrected typescripts, notes, literary and publishing correspondence, and other materials dating from the 1960s to the present. His papers also include files relating to his editorship of the Poetry Ireland Review (Dublin) and anthologies of Irish Canadian poetry. To date, nineteen volumes of his poetry have been published, beginning with Night on Hibernia (Dublin: The Gallery Press, 1976), which won the Patrick Kavanagh Award. He has also published with Dublin’s Dedalus Press and Book Hub Publishing. From 2002 to 2007, he co-edited three anthologies of Irish and Canadian poetry, and edited a further all-Canadian anthology in 2009. Ennis was at the Waterford Institute of Technology for forty years as Lecturer, Head of the School of Humanities, and Chair of the Centre for Newfoundland and Labrador Studies. At present, Ennis divides his time between Waterford, Canada, and his native County Westmeath, Ireland. Ennis’s correspondence is with fellow poets and authors, editors, publishers, and friends, from the 1960s almost to the present. Among them are Seamus Heaney, John F. Deane, Des Hogan, Dennis O’Driscoll, Brendan Kennelly, Macdara Woods, Neil Jordan, Michael Hartnett, Chris Agee, Noel Monahan, Seán Dunne, Paul Durcan, Frank Ormsby, Padraic Fiacc, Seán Lucy, Francis Stuart, Michael Longley, Peter Fallon (The Gallery Press), David Marcus (New Irish Writing, The Irish Press), James and Janice F. Simmons (The Poets House, Ireland), and others. The Papers of John Ennis (C1563) are described in the finding aid. For information about other Irish literary holdings of the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, contact rbsc@princeton.edu

John Ennis’s Draft of “Orpheus”

The Manuscripts Division has just acquired four journals and related papers of Captain John Matthews (d. 1798), an officer in the British Royal Navy. He was involved in the African slave trade in Sierra Leone, first as an agent for the African Company of Merchants, 1785-87, and later as naval officer on coastal patrol, 1797-98. During the last fifteen years of the eighteenth century, the transatlantic commerce in African slaves was at its peak, even though British reformers, such as Thomas Clarkson (1760–1846) and William Wilberforce (1759–1833), were working tirelessly for the abolition of slavery, and the British government had begun resettling Africans in Sierra Leone. Matthews is best known for his book, A Voyage to the River Sierra-Leone on the Coast of Africa: Containing an Account of the Trade and Productions of the Country and of the Civil and Religious Customs and Manners of the People (London, 1788), which focuses on the natural history, geography, and ethnology of Sierra Leone. The book later appeared in a revised edition (1791) and a French translation by Nicolas-François de Bellart (1797).

Matthews’s book is comprised of a series of descriptive letters that he wrote during his residence in Sierra Leone to an unnamed English friend, 1785–87, with an additional letter on the American slave trade and his own illustrations, which he describes as having been “drawn on the spot.” Most interesting are Matthews’s explorations of Sierra Leone and insights into the African side of the transatlantic slave trade. He emphasizes the people he calls Mandingoes, a term for the Mande-speaking peoples of West Africa, including (but not restricted to) Sierra Leone. Matthews argued that the Muslim faith of certain African kings and their subjects led to continuing warfare in the hinterland against other kings and peoples who refused to accept Islam. This resulted in thousands of prisoners-of-war, who were then enslaved and sold to western traders for the Middle Passage to North America and the Caribbean. Despite compelling moral arguments against the slave trade, Matthews concluded that its abolition would not contribute to the well-being of Africans because of continuing religious wars and local enslavement. In making this argument, however, Matthews ignored the degree to which transatlantic demand for African slaves contributed to the trade

The first two Matthews journals, covering 1 April 1786–31 March 1787 and 28 April 1786–15 May 1787, concern the slave trade in Sierra Leone and negotiations with African kings and slave traders. The second volume also includes retained copies of four letters by Matthews, 20–25 April 1787. The third volume was the journal that Matthews kept aboard the HMS Vulcan, 3 May–15 September 1793, after he had been promoted to be the rank of captain in the Royal Navy in the Mediterranean fleet of Admiral Samuel Hood (1724–1816). He describes early stages of the Siege of Toulon (1793) his reassignment to HMS Courageux. In December 1795, Matthews became captain of the HMS Maidstone and on that ship kept his fourth journal, 1 January 1797–16 March 1798. In it he details his activities along the West African coast from 17 February 1797, in Sierra Leone but also Cape Coast Castle (now in Ghana); service in a convoy across the Atlantic and in the Caribbean, describing visits to leading figures in African coastal settlements; and official duties policing ships of various nations engaged in the slave trade (American, Dutch, Portuguese).

Of particular interest in this volume are Matthews’s “Detached Observations on the Manners and Customs of the Natives of Cape Gorse, Africa,” with headings, such as “Of the Craba & Acra” “Suicide,”, “Punishment of extravagance in youth,” “Veneration of the dead,” “Mode of ruining a man by costs of suit,” “Gaming,” and “Natural History.” This is followed by four watercolors by Matthews of the Sierra Leone coast, showing British colonial trading posts and anchored sailing vessels. He also offers navigational advice for sailing along the African coast from Sierra Leone to Cape Palmas. Along with the four volumes are a dozen separate items from the late 1780s, including his deposition on Sierra Leone and its “domestic slavery,” which he claims accounted for three-fourths of the population in the hinterland. There are also five watercolors of the Sierra Leone coast, signed by M. C. Watts as the artist; and three other watercolors (though with a shellac coating), similar to engravings in the second edition of Matthews’s book. Two are signed by Matthews and one by a Lieutenant John Larcom.

Three of four Matthews volumes complement A Voyage to the River Sierra-Leone on the Coast of Africa and provide additional information and illustrations not in the published editions. In his earlier career, Matthews served as a lieutenant in the Royal Navy and saw active duty against the French naval forces in the West Indies during and immediately after the American Revolution. On the basis of these naval tours, Matthews wrote and illustrated The Maritime Campaign of 1778: A Collection of All the Papers Relative to the Operations of the English and French Fleets… (1779); and Twenty-one Plans: with Explanations of Different Actions in the West Indies during the Late War (1784). It was after this that Matthews became a partner in a series of slave voyages, though he would spend more time in the Royal Navy.

Matthews was from the English port city of Chester (about 28 miles southeast of Liverpool), which was a second-tier county town, with a population of about 10,000 in 1800. Matthews erected a monument in Chester Cathedral in memory of his wife, Anna Helena Matthews (d. 1793). Additional details about his life emerge from his last will and testament, on file in The National Archives (Public Record Office), at Kew. The will was made on Christmas Day 1797 and (with a codicil) probated on 15 June 1798, several months after the last entry in his journals. Matthews seems to have died a relatively affluent man, in part probably as a result of his involvement in the slave trade. His will lists ₤2250 in legacies, charities, annuities, and annual allowances—the equivalent of nearly $300,000 today. Family members mentioned in his will include a few born or living in Jamaica, Antigua, and New York. Among his personal possessions were paintings of the HMS Victory, HMS Vulcan, and the island of St. Lucia.

The finding aid for the Captain John Matthews Papers (C1575) is available online. These papers complement the Manuscripts Division’s growing holdings related to slavery in the Western hemisphere. See the earlier Manuscripts Division blog-post, “African Slavery in the Americas.” For holdings on European colonialism in Africa in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, see the journals of Walter Dundas Bathurst (C1588), kept while he was serving as an officer of the Association Internationale du Congo, 1884-85; and the papers of General Sir John Grenfell Maxwell (C0583) and Brigadier General Herbert Cecil Potter (C1409), which in part concern the British army in Sudan, Egypt, and South Africa. For more information about holdings of the Manuscripts Division, consult the online catalog and finding aids site. One can also contact Public Services, rbsc@princeton.edu

John Matthews, Journal no. 4, with views of Africa.

The Holy Qur’ān has occupied a central position in the spiritual and intellectual life of the Islamic world since the 7th century, serving as a common bond among Muslims, whether native speakers of Arabic, Persian, Turkish, or other languages. Not surprisingly, there are many Qur’āns to be found in the Manuscripts Division’s extraordinary holdings of nearly 10,000 Islamic manuscripts. One can find bibliographic records for at least 65 Qur’āns by searching in Voyager for manuscripts by the uniform title “[al-Qur’ān].” These are complemented by Qur’ānic commentaries and related texts. Sacred text merited the most luxurious production by book artisans, writing in calligraphic hands on parchment or glazed Arabic paper, which was then handsomely embellished with geometric and non-representational forms in gold, lapis lazuli, and other colors, and finally encased in hand-tooled, decorated morocco bindings. Most of Princeton’s manuscript Qur’āns are from the Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Persia, Turkey, and the Indian subcontinent, dating from the earliest centuries of Islam through the 19th century, when printing finally replaced scribal production of the Qur’ān. Among the oldest Qur’āns at Princeton are two on parchment: a 17-line Qur’ānic fragment (Sūrah 21:15-36), written in Hijāzī script, probably dating from the 8th century, early in the history of the Abbasid Caliphate (Islamic Manuscripts, no. 14G[a]); and a largely complete Qur’ān (Sūrahs 1-100), in Kufic script, dating from the late 9th or early 10th century (no. 34G).

In recent years, the Manuscripts Division has been making a conscious effort to acquire Qur’āns from other geographical areas of the extended Islamic world, in order to document the book arts and trace minor variations in textual transmission. Holdings of Qur’āns now include 19th-century examples from the Philippines (Moro), Malaysia, and Nigeria. The most recent additions are two complete Qur’āns from China under the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911), written in Arabic on paper and elegantly decorated in gold and vivid colors. Both are in contemporary bindings. In style, they combine Arabic, Central Asian, and Chinese influences. One of the Qur’āns dates from the 17th century (Islamic Manuscripts, Third Series, no. 875), and the other has a scribal colophon dated AH 1138 / 1726-27 CE (Third Series, no. 876). Islam was introduced to China in the 7th century and survives to this day as a minority religion, practiced by the Hui people, an ethnically Chinese group, chiefly in northwestern China, bordering on Muslim areas of Central Asia; by the Uyghurs, a Turkic people in Xinjiang, an autonomous region in northwestern China; and by Kazakhs, Kyrgyzs, Tajiks, Uzbeks, Tartars, and other less numerous ethnic minorities in China. The chronological range and geographical distribution of these substantial holdings of Qur’āns has made it possible for Professor Michael Cook, Department of Near Eastern Studies, to devote one class of his graduate seminar, NES 502 (An Introduction to Islamic Scholarly Tradition), to one-on-one engagement with a selection of about a dozen manuscript Qur’āns in the Consultation Room of Rare Books and Special Collections. See a recent NES 502 class at work (below).

The Princeton University Library has the largest collection of Islamic manuscripts in North America and one of the finest such collections in the Western world. About two-thirds came to the Library as part of the collection of Robert Garrett (1875-1961), Class of 1897, one of Princeton’s preeminent manuscript collectors. He donated most of his collection to the Library in 1942. The rest have been acquired by gift and purchase since the 1950s. Most of the manuscripts originated in Near Eastern centers of Islamic civilization. But holdings also include manuscripts from Moorish Spain and the Maghreb in the West, to the Indonesian Archipelago in the East, and even a few from sub-Sahara Africa. The chief strength are Arabic texts relating to all aspects of the world of learning. Subject coverage is broad and comprehensive, including theology based on the Qur’ān and tradition (hadīth); Islamic law (fiqh); history and biography (especially of the Prophet and other religious leaders); book arts and illustration; vernacular literature; science; magic and the occult; and other aspects of the spiritual, intellectual, and artistic life of the Islamic world and its diverse peoples, including non-Muslims.

The Princeton University Library has long been committed to making these collections available to researchers worldwide. Access was initially provided by printed catalogs. In the last two decades, with initial support from the U.S. Department of Education, followed by more substantial support from Princeton’s Magic Project and Council of the Humanities (Virginia and Richard Stewart Memorial Fund), the Library has put many thousands of bibliographic records online and has digitized over 1,200 Islamic manuscripts. For more information about Princeton’s Islamic manuscripts, one can search bibliographic records in the online catalog or access the Princeton University Digital Library. Reference assistance is available from Public Services staff, rbsc@princeton.edu

Professor Michael Cook with his NES 502 seminar in Rare Books and Special Collections