2024 Landmarks
March 3, 2025 in 2024 Grant, Anniversary, Events, Manuscript Studies, RGME Recollections, RGME Symposia, Student Friends of Princeton University Library, Visits to Collections, Workshops on "The Evidence of Manuscripts"
Landmarks
Achievements for the RGME Anniversary Year
Reflections on the Year’s RGME Visits
(In Person, Virtual, and Hybrid)
to Special Collections
2024 Spring and Autumn Symposia
2024 Spring Symposium at Vassar College
2024 Autumn Symposium “At The Helm”
RGME Visit to the Collection of Steven M. Lomazow: Report
[Posted on 2 March 2025]
Private Collection, Photograph of Bridges in Paris, 1850s (enhanced). Image courtesy of David W. Sorenson.
Reflecting upon the many achievements of the Research Group on Manuscript Evidence in its 2024 Anniversary Year, we celebrate the Landmarks in the journey, as well as the individual and collective steps of its full course.
For the Anniversary Year, our Theme was “Bridges”. Our funded Project for a major part of its accomplishments was “Between Past and Future”. See:
With the completion of the year’s work for 2024, we observe that it brought many developments for the RGME, as we responded to the momentum of the events as they unfolded. Learning from them and gathering their momentum with follow-up events, we discovered that it was possible to create fresh approaches, returning participation, and new collaborations.
Let us focus on one of those sets of landmarks, to show how both the planned activities and their unexpected expansions could produce a remarkable series of visits to Special Collections of various kinds, whether in person, online, or both in hybrid format.
RGME Visits to Special Collections in 2024
The story unfolded in a series of steps, leading to specific events.
Spring and Autumn Symposium as a Pair,
with Follow-Up
Poster 2: Program for 2024 Spring Symposium at Vassar.
They centered upon the pair of 2024 Spring and Autumn Symposia, designed for the Project as an invited, hybrid, 3-day event in the Spring at Vassar College, and an online 1-day event in the Autumn as its follow-up.
The Spring Symposium took place as planned, while a few updates in the program adapted to circumstances, such as when a few speakers as short notice had to change travel plans and present in online format rather than in person. Our dedication to a hybrid format for the event maintained our commitment to our wider audience from the need to create online events in recent years, while we waited for the return of in-person events.
Spring Symposium “Between Past and Future”
April (hybrid)
That opportunity came in 2024, with the invitation to hold our Spring Symposium at Vassar College in April. The focus of the Symposium is manifested in its title,
“Between Past and Future:
Building Bridges between Special Collections
and Teaching for the Liberal Arts”.
Speakers from Vassar and other centers in the United States and the United Kingdom reported projects and initiatives for Special Collections dedicated to teaching with original sources in manuscript and other forms.
Our subjects were primarily medieval and early modern, in keeping with the new catalogue of such materials and the special exhibition on “Books of the Middle Ages & Renaissance” at the college. Thus collectively, with the Spring Symposium, were celebrated the acquisition of the Nicholas B. Scheetz Collection of Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts.
Autumn Symposium “At The Helm”
October (online)
Enthusiasm for the Spring Symposium led, by participants’ requests, to extend the Autumn Symposium to 2 days instead. This symposium featured a set of curated virtual visits to Special Collections, both private and public.
Poster 2 for RGME 2024 Autumn Symposium. Set in RGME Bembino. Image: Coventry Patmore, Amelia: An iIyll (1878), title page, illuminated by Bertha Patmore. Mark Samuels Lasner Collection, University of Delaware Library, Musuems and Press.
Expanding the time-frame of the Spring Symposium, the Autumn Symposium considered materials from antiquity to the present day, medieval and early modern still included. The materials under consideration included manuscripts, printed books, and coins.
The virtual visits examined highlights of collections at Vassar College (both Special Collections and the Art Center) and the Universities of Delaware, Missouri, Rochester, and Waterloo, as well as private collections. Manuscripts showcased in the presentations included examples not only from them, but also, for example, from the Biblioteca Capitolare in Vercelli, Princeton University, and the RGME’s own Library & Archives.
Collectors speaking about their collections and the inspiration for them included our RGME Associates, Mark Samuels Lasner, Beppy Owen, and Reid Byers, who previewed his exhibition on “Imaginary Books” about to open at The Grolier Club. Its catalogue, we note with delight, is set in our own RGME Bembino (like our website), Reid’s choice for its font.
The enthusiasm for that event was remarkable. It had vivid presentations and discussions about them by curators, teachers, students (undergraduate and graduate), independent scholars, and others. We can sum up the atmosphere with the words of one presider, Librarian at the University of Missouri, that the Symposium celebrated, and brought home and alive, “the joy of education”.
This momentum called for its own follow-up. Accordingly, we turned to an invitation (since January) to visit a private collection. The nature of our year’s Project encouraged us to prepare the visit, if possible, before the end of our Anniversary Year.
In-Person/Online Visit
November (hybrid)
In November, the RGME visited the Collection of Dr. Steven M. Lomazow both in person and online. The scope of the collection and our visit to it, with thanks to the generosity of Dr. Lomazow and his wife Suze Bienaimee, are described in our announcement and report:
- RGME Visit to the Collection of Steven M. Lomazow, M.D.
- RGME Visit to the Lomazow Collection: Report
This visit in hybrid format represents a significant landmark for the RGME. With it, we return to our tradition of In-Person Visits to collections, such as Firestone Library and the Princeton University Art Museum for our 2019 Spring Symposium “The Roads Taken”.
Poster 1 2024 Autumn Symposium
With the invited 2024 Spring Symposium at Vassar College, we have returned to In-Person Events, after having developed our multiple forms of Online Events in response to the Covid-19 Pandemic beginning in 2020.
The online 2024 Autumn Symposium “At the Helm” followed up the wonderfully successful Spring Symposium and carried forward its momentum by a set of curated virtual visits to Special Collections of various kinds, extending its range and covering many periods.
With the invited Visit to the Lomazow Collection, as a further follow-up for the curated visits of the 2024 Autumn Symposium “At the Helm”, we bring to the table the tradition of our online commitment to our wider audience.
Also, with this event came a new collaboration with the Student Friends of the Princeton University Library (SFPUL). We hope that it may continue into the future.
Culmination and Achievements
In certain ways, this hybrid visit in November represents a culmination for our 2024 Year of visits and virtual visits to see original materials attesting to the transmission of the written word across time and place. The inspiration and accomplishment of these goals formed the centerpiece for our 2024 Project “Between Past and Future”, designed to focus upon the strengths of Special Collections of many kinds for teaching and research in the Liberal Arts and other realms.
We give thanks to all our hosts, sponsors, contributors, participants, and audience for such instructive, illuminating, and enjoyable experiences.
The Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, California, as seen from Battery East. Photograph © Frank Schulenburg / CC BY-SA 4.0 via https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bf/Golden_Gate_Bridge_as_seen_from_Battery_East.jpg
