Lunch with the Libraries & Museums - Illuminations: Exploring JHU’s Medieval and Renaissance Manuscript Collections

Presented by Hopkins at Home, Sheridan Libraries and Friends of the Johns Hopkins University Libraries

Dr. Earle Havens, Director of the Virginia Fox Stern Center for the History of the Book in the Renaissance, and JJ Haddad, a PhD Candidate in the Department of History at JHU, have begun a deep dive into the university’s collection of medieval and Renaissance manuscripts as part of a larger project to more fully catalogue and digitize all pre-1600 manuscripts in the Sheridan Libraries. Together, they will tell the story of how the university’s collection of medieval and Renaissance manuscripts developed over time, and share some of their greatest favorites. Together they will explore world-class illuminated books, sacred and secular, as well as humbler scribal fragments, and many points in between. Highlights will include some stunning books of hours (including one stolen long ago from the Peabody Library!), an ancient Jewish text scribally reproduced at a scriptorium in Renaissance Florence and owned by a Pope, a forged medieval charter, and one of the earliest known examples of arguably the first “textbook” in Western history.