Exhibitions
Women of the Book
The Spiritual Lives of Early Modern Women, 1450–1800
September 12, 2022 – January 31, 2023
George Peabody Library Exhibit Gallery
In 2017 the Johns Hopkins Sheridan Libraries acquired the world’s largest and most comprehensive collection of rare books, manuscripts, and ephemera detailing the experiences of early modern women from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment.
Though the voices of women were largely absent from traditional historical sources, the Women of the Book Collection turns that problem on its head through its focus on extremely rare or unique sources of evidence of the institution of female monasticism—the world of nuns and convents dedicated to enlivening, sharing, and preserving the spiritual, intellectual, and interior lives of women for the wider world, in manuscript and in print.
This exhibition of treasures from the collection paints the world of these holy women in living color—from psycho-spiritual autobiographers, bilocating nuns, rockstar status saints, ecstatic mystics, and female healers, to the hidden careers of women printers and engravers and miracle makers.
Links
Sheridan Libraries, Johns Hopkins University
Johns Hopkins Magazine, Winter 2019
Johns Hopkins Magazine, October 2022
Wikipedia
Video: Join curator Earle Havens for a virtual introduction to the collection
Video: “Women of the Book” exhibit reveals the lives of women from 1450-1800
Bibliomania
150 Years of Collecting Rare Books at the George Peabody Library
October 1, 2017 – January 31, 2018
George Peabody Library Exhibit Gallery
The Peabody Library was founded in 1857 with an initial donation of $300,000 from the Baltimore financier George Peabody. His wish was to establish an institute that might “become useful towards the improvement of the moral and intellectual culture of the inhabitants of Baltimore” and “the enlargement and diffusion of a taste for the fine arts.” While the nation suffered through the destructive cataclysm of the Civil War (1861–65), the recently established Peabody Library remained a relative beehive of productive activity. Its trustees and first librarian conceived of an initial collection of 50,000 books, and busily gathered half that many volumes by the library’s tenth anniversary in 1867.
Throughout the war years, the earliest stewards of the Peabody Library compiled ambitious “desiderata lists” of titles to be purchased, which they published and disseminated to booksellers the world over. These desiderata included everything from rare Renaissance imprints to the most recent scientific pamphlets, outlining a plan of almost universal knowledge. Within the crucible of the Civil War and its aftermath, this deeply creative undertaking constituted part of a “united effort,” George Peabody observed at his institute’s dedication in 1866, “to bind up the fresh and broken wounds of the nation.” Equipped with an ever-expanding library and cultural institution worthy of the world stage, Baltimore could hold its head high among America’s Athenian cities of the second half of the 19th century.
“Bibliomania: 150 Years of Collecting Rare Books for the George Peabody Library” tells this foundational story for the first time through many of the library’s rarest and most precious books. From its first collecting intuitions during the 1860s to the vaulting ambition of its cast-iron architectural expansion in the decade that followed, the Peabody Library has long remained a visionary “Cathedral of Books.” Sometimes succumbing to the pathology of an all-consuming “bibliomania” and the bibliophile’s eccentric obsession for the rarest of the rare, the Peabody Library’s collection has nonetheless registered the pulse of a great American metropolis all along its way.
Links
Johns Hopkins Magazine, October 2017
Baltimore Sun
WYPR – 88.1 FM Baltimore
WBJC – 91.5 FM Baltimore
