Rare Books and Special Collections
Upon the completion of my PhD, I was selected to be the 2024-2025 Hesburgh Library Rare Books and Special Collections Postdoctoral Research Fellow. This fellowship combines intensive material research - namely, the cataloguing and arrangement of over two hundred medieval and early modern charters - and practical library and curatorial experience.
The Hesburgh Library has a large collection of hitherto undescribed medieval and early modern private charters (legal documents, often pertaining to land). As part of my fellowship, I am describing, arranging, transcribing, and cataloguing these charters. These charters range in type from feoffements, gifts, grants, and indentures, in language from Latin, French, Italian, Middle English, and Early Modern English, and in script from English court hands, various cursives, and early modern secretary and italic scripts!
Some charters are damaged or faded, which requires the constant use of UV light to see the ink
Many charters are "docketed," or folded and summarized
The majority of the charters were made in England - see the distinct English "W" here in Wyrksall
Some charters retain the personal seals of those involved
Interestingly, the majority of our medieval charters come from Lancashire and Yorkshire. In fact, many of the Yorkshire charters pertain to land surrounding the city of Sheffield and the civil parish of Bradfield. Many of these charters were witnessed by the same men, or their sons, and concern generations of the same families. For instance, we have grants from both Thomas Furnivall (s. xiv) and his descendent, George Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury (s. xvi).
The Hesburgh Collection also includes a wide variety of early modern charters, many of which concern the buying and selling of shares in the Joseph Percivall and Copper Co. (later John Freeman and Copper Co.), a corporation which operated White Rock Copper Co. in Bristol in the eighteenth century. The documents themselves are very inane ("Jeremiah Osborne sold 6 shares in the company for 6,000 pounds of lawful English money," etc.). The Copper Co., however, is anything but. Like many Bristol industries at the time, the White Rock Copper Co. was originally founded by Thomas Coster as a means of profiting off the Transatlantic slave trade, which commonly traded copper ingots and various copper products to West African leaders in exchange for enslaved Africans. The Copper Co. also profited from the popularity of copper products in the West Indian sugar industry, the East India Company, and the Royal Navy - each of which exploited the labor of enslaved peoples. You would never suspect that the accumulation of wealth evident from the documents in the Hesburgh Collection was profit from the slave trade (the trade is never mentioned), but once you know it's impossible to forget. The same men (and women!) who signed and sealed these documents were heavily implicated in one of the most brutal stains upon humanity - all for the sake of some copper.
The indenture to the right is an assignment of shares in the Copper Co. from March 25, 1775. It explains how Mary Legg, widow of a former partner in the company, wishes to sell a share back to the company for 2,000 pounds. See her signature above.
In addition to the charter project, I am also gaining practical experience in different departments relating to specialized collections.
I spent a few weeks in the Preservation Lab learning from the Hesburgh Library's amazing Preservation and Conservation team. I learned how to make custom clam-shell boxes for books large and small, how to mend paper with Japanese tissue, how to make tuxedo boxes from scratch, how to sew pamphlets into protective bindings, how to analyze environmental monitoring data, and so much more.
I explored the Hesburgh Library's bindery, discussed our preservation standards and procedures, and found myself very envious of the lab's giant box cutters.
Here are a few pictures of what I made and how I made them!
I also spent a few weeks with Daniela Rovida, our Rare Books and Special Collections cataloguer, to learn RBSC specific cataloguing! We practiced copy cataloguing, original cataloguing, editing WorldCat entries, MARC encoding, and much more!
Towards the end of our workshop, Daniela gave me a large, leather-bound, German Bible to catalog. The reprint of the Luther Bible (with myriad commentaries, registers, engravings, and illustrations) was over 2,000 pages (double column), had complex signatures, and in German Fraktur typescript. The Hesburgh copy even included loose manuscript material in Polish. I spent two days (the second alongside Daniela) cataloguing this item - creating everything from an original call number, identifying the appropriate Library of Congress subject headings, extensively updating the OCLC entry, and creating the local entry. Below is the final entry.
