Our flagship event series ‘PUL & MARBAS present…', a collaboration between MARBAS and the Princeton University library, aims to gather faculty members, graduate students, and library staff in Special Collections to explore Princeton's vast holdings of rare books, manuscripts, and archives. A brainchild of the late Will Noel, the series foregrounds hands-on and interactive sessions in which Princeton's in-house experts discuss one or more objects in Princeton's Special Collections.
MARBAS in collaboration with the Princeton University Library is excited to announce the Fall 2024 'PUL&MARBAS present' event series, which explores Princeton’s vast holdings of rare books, manuscripts, and archives.
Arabic manuscripts are brimming with annotations—notes that reveal the rich social and intellectual worlds in which these texts circulated. From audition notices to ownership statements, endowment attestations, and birth records, these marginalia offer a glimpse into the lives of scholars, institutions, and everyday individuals. This presentation will introduce the audience to these fascinating marginalia, exploring how they illuminate the social life of manuscripts.
Whose Book is it Anyway? Ownership Markings in the Special Collections Backlog showcases a selection of ownership markings including bookplates, signatures, and inscriptions from Firestone Library’s backlog elimination project. These books and their ownership marks range from the 16th to the 19th centuries from Europe to North America.
The Princeton University Library holds a small treasure-trove of medieval Francophone manuscripts. This hands-on, interactive session will introduce and contextualize a cluster of canonical codices, from the inescapable Romance of the Rose to the chivalric tales of Chrétien de Troyes. But aside from these literary celebrities, the PUL also holds, in its collections, a previously unknown miscellany of late medieval political poetry by the so-called grands rhétoriqueurs. Come and hear why this messy, unassuming, composite manuscript matters––and how a detailed study of Princeton MS 222 might shed new light on the literary history of the Burgundian Netherlands…
MARBAS in collaboration with the Princeton University Library is excited to announce the Fall 2024 'PUL&MARBAS present' event series, which explores Princeton’s vast holdings of rare books, manuscripts, and archives.
Mormon traditions are grounded in a commitment to continuing revelation. Since the early nineteenth century, the leaders of the various Mormon traditions – the largest and best-known of which is the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints – have published revelations from God to guide their flocks. This hands-on session will exhibit and contextualize the many fascinating Mormon revelations held by Princeton’s RBSC, including some extremely rare and largely forgotten examples.
Medicine in the Islamic world has a long history of textual production and practical adaptations, from the Canon of Ibn Sina and the Comprehensive Medical Casebook of al-Razi, onward to medicine today. Come explore this history of medicine with the medical manuscripts in Princeton’s Special Collections department, as we journey from translation to textual production and transmission into the realm of medical systems and practices.
Twenty years ago, the Princeton University Numismatic Collection had a serviceable but not remarkable collection of Byzantine coins, the accumulation of gifts from alumni, loans from the Princeton University Art Museum and the Department of Near Eastern Studies, and occasional purchases, as well as the thousands of Byzantine bronze coins found in the Antioch excavations. The acquisition of two remarkable collections, those of Peter Donald and Chris and Helen Theodotou, both purchased with the support of the Seeger Hellenic Fund, have elevated our collection to world-class importance.
The ubiquity of homoerotic themes and sexually explicit content in premodern Islamic literatures has been widely recognized. But how did early modern Muslims read such texts? This talk addresses this question for early modern India by analyzing commentaries on the Gulistan of Saʿdi.
In the past, scholars have disagreed about the date and provenance of Princeton's earliest Virgil, Garrett MS. 108. In this session we will reassess the fragment with the aim of learning more about the date, provenance and fragmentation of the original manuscript, based on a thorough analysis of both text and material.