NOTE: The following was written by Union Theological Seminary student Heather J. Ketchum (MDiv 2020). Her brief bio is below. ———- This week, the American Academy of Religion and Society of Biblical Literature convene in San Diego for the annual AAR/SBL conference, and this year, I was pleased to collaborate with faculty and librarians at […]
Greetings from the Archives: Leah’s First Big Offsite Project
Happy (mid) October, and happy American Archives Month! I’m Leah Edelman, the Outreach Archivist at the Burke Library, and though I started working here at the end of June, I thought this month would be a good one to introduce myself on the blog. With support from the wonderful library team, I manage all things […]
Martin Luther Redux
In the fall of 2017, an exhibit marking the 500th anniversary of Martin Luther’s Reformation-kindling Ninety-five Theses was mounted at Columbia’s Rare Book & Manuscript Library. On Oct. 31 — “Reformation Day” — a panel was held there that included Union Seminary faculty members Euan Cameron and Brigitte Kahl and the German Consul-General, David Gill. The […]
Dietrich Bonhoeffer on Microfiche: the Nachlass Collection
“Microfiche is cool” is a sentence one rarely hears any more, in the Internet age. Yet I am constantly reminded of the astonishing efficiency of microformatting, when researchers ask to see the collection of primary-source materials of Dietrich Bonhoeffer—noted German theologian, pastor, and anti-Nazi dissident, and onetime student at Union Theological Seminary—preserved on microfiche, collectively […]
A German Ecclesiastical Heritage in the Smaragdus Manuscript
UTS Manuscripts Student Series Post 4 of 4* The curiously-nicknamed “Smaragdus manuscript” (after the author of its first and most prominent text) is a curious collection of medieval writings officially known by its item number at the Burke Library at Union Theological Seminary, UTS MS 006. Written around the year 1100 in a Rhineland […]
A Life of its Own: an Itinerant Manuscript
UTS Manuscripts Student Series Post 3 of 4, by Emily Gebhardt, a Graduate Student in the Medieval and Renaissance Studies Program at Columbia University* At first glance, UTS MS 019 resembles many of the other medieval manuscripts and codices housed in Burke Library’s collections—it is old, it is worn, and it has clearly seen […]
Never Enough Singing!
Never Enough Singing is the title of the Festschrift published in 2011 on the occasion of Seth Kasten’s retirement from the Burke Library. It is among the items featured in the inaugural exhibit in the Seth Kasten Memorial Exhibit Case. Seth (1945-2017) was a reference librarian at the Burke for more than 35 years. In […]
“Summa contra gentiles” and its Readers
UTS Manuscripts Student Series Post 2 of 4, by Valerie Wilson (MA candidate, Medieval and Renaissance Studies)* The script of the Burke Library’s UTS MS 005, a manuscript of Thomas Aquinas’s Summa contra gentiles within the Burke’s Van Ess Collection, is one of its most baffling features. The manuscript comes from the Benedictine monastery of […]
St. Eustace and Unexpected Emptiness in a Fifteenth-Century Book of Hours
UTS Manuscripts Student Series Post 1 of 4, by Eleanor Stern (Barnard College 2019)* Inside of UTS MS 051, a fifteenth-century French book of hours believed to have belonged to King Henry III, now housed at the Burke Library, I expected to find certain kinds of illuminations. Most books of hours begin with a […]
The Burke Library Goes International
One of the great joys of working at an educational institution is the chance to meet and interact with students, teachers, and researchers from all over the world. At the Burke, that kind of interaction usually takes place when people come to visit us in New York City. But recently I had the distinct pleasure […]