Mission

Reflecting the scholarly breadth of Dr. Virginia Fox Stern’s research and publications, the core of the Stern Center’s ongoing mission is the promotion of interdisciplinary scholarship rooted in the Sheridan Libraries’ rich premodern and early modern collections of rare books and manuscripts at Johns Hopkins University. To embrace this interdisciplinary commitment across the humanities at Hopkins, the Center’s expansive chronological breadth encompasses the historical reception of classical and medieval thought, and the culture and influence of the Renaissance throughout the early modern period up to the close of the 18th century.

The Stern Center integrates scholarly research and teaching and provides a robust schedule of academic programming related to JHU’s early book collections. To these ends, the Center engages directly with faculty, postdoctoral and visiting fellows, and students across a dozen Krieger School academic departments, centers, and programs. These include the Departments of Classics, English, History, History of Art, History of Science & Technology, Modern Languages & Literatures, Museums & Societies, and Near Eastern Studies; the Institute for the History of Medicine; the Charles S. Singleton Center for the Study of Premodern Europe; and the Alexander Grass Humanities Institute. The Stern Center is administered by a Director, Postdoctoral Fellow, and members of the Stern Center Faculty Advisory Board drawn from a broad range of humanities disciplines within the Krieger School of Arts & Sciences.

Stern Center Postdoctoral Fellow, Dr. Kelsey Champagne (JHU ’15) leading guided tour to visiting Grolier Club members of the Women of the Book exhibition, October, 2022

Dr. Virginia Fox Stern

History

The Stern Center was established through the gift of a permanent academic programming endowment in 2017 from Mr. Jolyon Fox Stern in honor of his mother, the distinguished Renaissance scholar and book historian, Dr. Virginia Fox Stern (Ph.D., English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University, 1976) and her most influential book, Gabriel Harvey: His Life, Marginalia, and Library (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979). Her work focused on the history, literature, and court culture of the Tudor and Stuart period in England, publishing books about three of its more colorful figures: the Cambridge don and inveterate annotator of books Gabriel Harvey; the poet and playwright Christopher Marlowe; and the international agent, Chancery clerk, and Virginia Company adventurer Sir Stephen Powle. Her numerous scholarly articles and book reviews appeared in major scholarly journals, including the Renaissance Quarterly, Sixteenth Century Studies, English Literary Renaissance, and English Historical Review. Click here for a full bibliography of her scholarly publications.

Though Dr. Stern had no direct connection with Johns Hopkins University, her son’s interest in permanently endowing the Stern Center in Baltimore in 2017 was inspired by JHU’s leadership in the Archaeology of Reading in Early Modern Europe (AOR) digital humanities initiative. A five-year international collaboration, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, AOR brought together a team of scholars, curators, and technologists from Johns Hopkins, Princeton, and University College London to digitize, transcribe, and make searchable manuscript marginalia across dozens of books heavily annotated by the English Renaissance scholars Gabriel Harvey and John Dee (Principal Investigators: Earle Havens, JHU; Lisa Jardine and Matthew Symonds, UCL; and Anthony Grafton, Princeton).

JHU alumnus and Renaissance book collector, Mark McConnell, speaking about his research on the economics of Renaissance printing, Stern Center Master Class, Hendrik Conscience Library, Antwerp, May 2022

Undergraduate class on Renaissance astronomy with the Hinkes Collection of Rare Books in the History of Scientific Discovery, January 2022

Activities & Programs

The Stern Center co-sponsors—with an interdisciplinary array of academic departments and centers within JHU’s Krieger School of Arts & Sciences—an annual Lecture Series, Graduate Student Master Classes focused on particular themes within the history of the book and material texts, and an annual Stern Center Symposium and allied scholarly publications that result from those symposia.

The Stern Center funds annual Visiting Research Fellowships to bring scholars to Baltimore to work with JHU’s early book collections, which are administered in collaboration with the Renaissance Society of America (RSA) and the American Trust of the British Library (ATBL). The Stern Center is also an Associate Organization of the RSA—a learned society in which Virginia Fox Stern was particularly active—and is thus able to sponsor multiple scholarly panels and roundtables dedicated to the history of the book at the RSA’s Annual Conference. Undergraduates interested in pursuing focused research on the early book and manuscript collections at JHU are also supported through the Sheridan Libraries Dean’s Undergraduate Research Awards (DURA) program.

Stern Center curators also produce major rare book and manuscript exhibitions at JHU’s historic George Peabody Library in downtown Baltimore, contribute interpretive essays related to JHU’s early book collections on the Stern Center’s website, and supervise recipients of Sheridan Libraries Dean Undergraduate Research Awards (DURA) who elect to work with early materials in the university’s collections.

In 2022, further philanthropic support from friends and members of the Stern family and the Sheridan Libraries Advisory Board was directed toward the renovation of a dedicated suite of handsomely appointed rooms in JHU’s historical Renaissance Revival Evergreen Museum & Library. Also the location of many of the Sheridan Libraries’ premier early book collections, this physical space now constitutes a permanent home for the Stern Center at Johns Hopkins in support of its teaching, research, and programming missions. The inauguration of the physical center at Evergreen also allowed the Stern Center to commence an annual Graduate Student Curatorial Fellows program, which brings several JHU PhD students in the humanities together for a full academic year. The Curatorial Fellows engage with Stern Center staff in a weekly academic seminar, attend all Stern Center lectures and programs, and collaborate on interpretive curatorial work focusing on early book collections at JHU that coincide with their respective scholarly interests.

The Stern Center is also an active partner in the greater Baltimore/Washington DC region. The Center hosts classes taught from rare books and manuscripts with area colleges and universities, including Loyola University of Maryland, Goucher College, Maryland Institute College of Art, and Towson University, and fosters collaborations with a host of cultural institutions, including the Department of Rare Books & Manuscripts of the Walters Art Museum; the Center for Prints, Drawings, and Photographs at the Baltimore Museum of Art; as well as classes convened at the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Rare Book Division of the Library of Congress, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC. The Stern Center is also a regular co-sponsor of the Cenacolo, a community of professors, curators, and independent scholars from across the Baltimore/DC region who have met annually since 2010 for a day-long conference of papers, roundtables, and collection visits focused on the art, culture, history, and literature to the late Middle Ages and early modern periods.

Faculty and graduate student Renaissance Print Culture Master Class, Cultura Fonds private Collection of Plantin-Moretus Renaissance books, Brussels, May 2022

Stern Center Renaissance Print Culture Master Class, Plantin-Moretus Museum, Antwerp, May 2022

Earle Havens (ed.), The Dr. Elliot and Eileen Hinkes Collection of Books in the History of Scientific Discovery (Baltimore: Sheridan Libraries, 2011)

Earle Havens (ed.), Bibliomania: 150 Years of Collecting Rare Books for the George Peabody Library (Baltimore: Sheridan Libraries, 2017)

Walter Stephens and Earle Havens (eds.), Literary Forgery in Early Modern Europe, 1450-1800 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018)

Arthur Freeman, Bibliotheca Fictiva: A Collection of Books & Manuscripts Relating to Literary Forgery 400 BC – AD 2000 (London: Bernard Quaritch Ltd, 2014; 2nd ed. rev., 2024)

Earle Havens (ed.), Fakes, Lies, and Forgeries: Rare Books and Manuscripts from the Arthur and Janet Freeman Bibliotheca Fictiva Collection (Baltimore: Sheridan Libraries, 2014; 2nd ed. rev., 2016)

Earle Havens, Renaissance Printers’ Devices: Essays on the Early Arts of Printing & the King Memorial Windows of Johns Hopkins University (Baltimore: Sheridan Libraries, 2015)

Earle Havens, with Abigail Sia, “‘A Memorial to My Family’: The Story of the John Work Garrett Library,” in Evergreen, the Garrett Family, Collectors & Connoisseurs: The Evergreen Museum & Library (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017), 157-97

Laurence Fowler and Elizabeth Baer, Bibliography of the Fowler Architectural Collection of the Johns Hopkins University (San Francisco: Alan Wofsy Fine Arts, 1991)

Mark Dion, Earle Havens, and Lisa Skogh, A Field Guide to Curiosity (London: Victoria & Albert Museum, 2019)

Eugene S. Flamm, The Dawn of Neurosurgery: Rare Books from the Collection of Eugene S. Flamm (Baltimore: Sheridan Libraries, 2013)

Arthur Freeman, Catullus Carmen 17.6 and Other Mysteries. A Study in Editorial Conflict, Eccentricity, Forgery, and Restitution. With a checklist of significant printed editions of Catullus in Latin, 1472-2005 (London: The Author, 2020), distributed by Quaritch

ANN BLAIR, Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor of History, Harvard University
ANTHONY GRAFTON, Henry Putnam University Professor of History, Princeton University
EARLE HAVENS, Nancy H. Hall Curator of Rare Books and Manuscripts & Director,
Virginia Fox Stern Center for the History of the Book, Johns Hopkins University

This monographic book series of the Johns Hopkins University Press examines how information has been produced, circulated, received, and preserved in the historical past. It concentrates principally, though not exclusively, on textual evidence and welcomes investigation of historical information both in its material forms and cultural contexts. Themes of special interest include the history of scholarly discourses and practices of learned communication, documentary management and information systems—including libraries, archives, and networks of exchange—as well as mechanisms of paperwork and record-making. This series engages with vital discussions among academics, librarians, and digital humanists, presenting a vivid historical dimension that uncovers the roles played by cultures of information in times and places distant from our own.

Paola Bertucci, Science, Fabricated Realities, and Industrial Espionage in the Age of the Grand Tour (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 2023)

Walter Stephens, How Writing Made Us Human, 3000 BCE to Now (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 2023)

Fabian Kraemer, A Centaur in London: Reading and Observation in Early Modern Science (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 2023)

Markus Friedrich, The Maker of Pedigrees: Jakob Wilhelm Imhoff and the Meanings of Genealogy in Early Modern Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 2023)

Margaret E. Schotte, Sailing School: Navigating Science and Skill, 1550-1800 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 2019)

Michael C. Carhart, Leibniz Discovers Asia: Social Networking in the Republic of Letters (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 2019)