Today marks the beginning of the
7th annual Schoenberg Symposium on Manuscript Studies in the Digital Age here in Philadelphia. This year the symposium theme is "Collecting Histories" and features a line up of speakers discussing the ways in which provenance and the history of collecting informs our wider knowledge about manuscript culture. As readers of this blog know, I'm very much interested in the historical movement of books and manuscripts and I'm excited to speak during the conference on the ways in which the
Schoenberg Database of Manuscripts (SDBM) can be used to track manuscripts over time.
For this post though I want to highlight the fantastic work done by a team of scholars whose work very much informs the SDBM project. Over the past two decades, Lisa Fagin Davis and Melissa Conway have worked to create a new directory for all institutions in the U.S. and Canada which hold European manuscripts dating to before 1600. They have published
their own excellent description of the origins and methodology of the project but in short their work began as a way to update the censuses of American manuscripts created by
Seymour de Ricci from 1935-40 and supplemented by
Faye and Bond in 1962. Their census includes entries for 937 entities: historical owners of manuscripts derived from previous censuses, the former names of institutions now renamed, as well as current holders. Running to 126 pages in a
freely available PDF sponsored by the Bibliographical Society of America, the census is an incredibly helpful resource and I wanted to find a way to make the data contained within it browseable in a different way than just on the printed page.
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| Example of a listing from the Fagin Davis & Conway Census (p.37) |
I extracted the text from the PDF census and chopped it up into relevant delimited fields like "Name" "Address" "Holdings" etc. and then mapped the results using
CartoDB. I had to make a few decisions about display along the way, especially when it came to how to determine the size of each manuscript owning dot on the map. Most institutions provided Fagin Davis and Conway with numbers for how many manuscript codices they held as well as how many leaves, documents, and scrolls were in their collection (though others reported only an aggregate number). Most institutions with full-fledged manuscript books had a fairly well-informed count of exactly how many they had but the numbers for leaves and documents often were estimated in larger round figures. As a result, the default map view gives all locations in the census with dots on their
locations by number of total manuscripts held (leaves, codices, scrolls, documents, etc.). Using the "visible layers" dropdown you can turn off and on just
those locations currently holding manuscripts or just those recorded in earlier
censuses which no longer hold manuscripts or both together. Of course sizing the dots by total manuscript holdings will be necessarily a bit misleading as a
university with 2 codices and 37 leaves appears to have total holdings
of 39 manuscripts, so there is also an
option in the "visible layers" menu to view only holdings of codices.
Unsurprisingly one can see the concentration of pre-1600 European manuscript holdings along the east coast. In a league table of manuscript holders New York, Washington, and Philadelphia(!) come out on top by volume but in terms of individual institutions the Huntington and Folger with their extensive holdings of pre-1600 documents come out on top.
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| Top-15 current owners of pre-1600 manuscripts by "total" count in the Fagin-Davis/Conway census |
Given the fuzziness of this catch-all "total" manuscript number it's helpful to also get a sense
of institutions by number of codices held:
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| Top 15 current owners of pre-1600 manuscript codices in the Fagin Davis/Conway census |
One of the advantages of using the Fagin Davis and Conway survey is that it lists private collections, and in the cases where these were dispersed or relocated, notes their current location. I don't think it would be terribly controversial to say that most collections of medieval manuscripts in the U.S. and Canada rest on substantial gifts from individual collectors or families. The remarkable extent of these private collections can be seen in part below:
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| Top 15 now-relocated collections of pre-1600 manuscript codices in the census |
It's edifying to see the late Larry Schoernberg at the top of the list of codices, especially today during the conference celebrating his legacy. His manuscripts are now
here at Penn but a decade ago when they were in Longboat Key, Florida they made that small community the largest holder of pre-1600 manuscript codices in the south. Others on that list will be familiar to many, including
George Plimpton whose manuscripts are now largely at Columbia University and Thomas Marston whose collection is at the Beinecke, and Ricketts, whose collection is now mostly at the Lilly library.
