By Madeleine Klebanoff O’Brien Last summer I conducted independent research at Houghton Library through Harvard’s remote Summer Humanities and Arts Research Program undergraduate fellowship. Inspired by Houghton’s collections, I created an allegorical map of Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy. The Comedy follows Dante through Hell, Purgatory and Heaven. It is a cosmography, a “total vision” of Read More
Research
An “Old Prayer Book”, Yet Not “a ‘dull’ one”: The Liber ordinarius of Nivelles
By Jeffrey F. Hamburger, Department of Art & Architecture, Harvard University Edmund Bishop, the famous historian of Catholic liturgy, once posed the question: “Is the subject ‘An Old Prayer Book’ a ‘dull’ one?” Tongue-in-cheek, he replied that he would prefer the dullest form possible, namely, a tabulation of its contents, adding that “any subject Read More
A Mysterious Manuscript in a Banned Language
By Christine E. Jacobson, Assistant Curator, Modern Books and Manuscripts, Houghton Library Houghton recently acquired a nineteenth-century bilingual manuscript of Ukrainian and Russian folk songs and verse. At first glance, the work seems unremarkable. At 370 pages, it contains over 120 poems and songs, including well-known works by Alexander Pushkin and Taras Shevchenko as well Read More
Accessing Archives in the 19th-Century Atlantic World
By Derek Kane O’Leary I have everywhere found Archivists the least competent of human beings to judge of the character or value of historical papers; and if I had not been favored with the aid of higher powers, both in Paris and London, my enquiries would have been to little purpose. There Archivists look upon Read More
Surprises and Suddenness in Edward Lear
By Noreen Masud, 2018–2019 Houghton Library Visiting Fellow/Eleanor M. Garvey Fellow in Printing and Graphic Arts, and a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at Durham University. She works on topics including aphorisms, culinary leftovers, flatness, and hymns in nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature. Owls and Pussycats going to sea, Old Men with beards full of birds, Pobbles Read More