Protestant & Catholic Reformations
The Sheridan Libraries hold an extensive collection of early Judeo-Christian bibles, liturgical texts, and medieval and early modern biblical commentaries. From a leaf of the Gutenberg Bible and a copy of Thomas Aquinas’s De articulis fidei et ecclesiae sacramentis, printed ca. 1460 with Gutenberg’s type, to a massive four-volume illuminated Koberger Bible (Nuremberg, 1497), onwards to Martin Luther’s epoch-making “September” and “December” German bible translations (1522), and the famous Genoa polyglot Psalter (1516) and Plantin Polyglot bible (1569-72), JHU holds many of the great treasures of the pre-Reformation and Reformation periods. This is due, in large part, to the acquisition in 1928 of the private library of biblical texts gathered together by Julius Hoffman, the pastor of Zion Lutheran Church in Baltimore—a collection that has been substantially complimented in recent years by the acquisition of many of the earliest Protestant apologies and polemical pamphlets issued by Luther and his followers in the first three decades of the 16th century. In recent years a small but important collection of early editions of the seminal works of Martin Luther has been added to the holdings of the George Peabody Library, where the Hoffmann Collection currently resides.
While each of the major contributors to Protestant thought—Erasmus, Luther, Zwingli, Melanchthon, Calvin, et al.—are represented in the collections, JHU’s holdings in the Catholic Reformation are among the strongest in the country, most notably as a result of the Women of the Book collection, now the single largest, purpose-built gathering of rare books, manuscripts, and objets d’art dedicated entirely the history, culture, and literary output of early modern Roman Catholic women (1450-1800). These materials focus, in particular, on nuns, female saints and women mystics, healers, prophetesses, and female lay confraternity members from throughout Western Europe and Latin America. The literature of global post-Reformation Catholic missionary work is also richly represented in the holdings of the Sheridan Libraries at JHU, in particular, the publications of the Sacra Congregatio de Propaganda Fide (“Sacred Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith”).
—Earle Havens, Daniel T. McClurkin
