Hidden in Plain Sight

East Asian Rare Books in American Libraries & Museums

Virginia Fox Stern Center Symposium

APRIL 20-22, 2023

The centerpiece of the symposium is the nearly 400 Chinese, Mongolian, and Manchu books in the Hauer Collection of East Asian Books in the Sheridan Libraries, first acquired by the university in 1935. Covering everything from dictionaries and grammars, to literature, history, science, and geography, the Hauer Collection encompasses imprints and manuscript material spanning the history of East Asia from the early modern period to the nineteenth century.

SYMPOSIUM ORGANIZERS

EARLE HAVENS, Stern Center, JHU
TOBIE MEYER-FONG, JHU
YUNSHAN YE, Sheridan Libraries, JHU

SYMPOSIUM PARTICIPANTS

STEPHEN ALLEE, National Museum of Asian Art
HE BIAN, History and East Asian Studies, Princeton
IAN CHAPMAN, Library of Congress
DEVIN FITZGERALD, History and Beinecke Library, Yale
ELLI KIM, Library of Congress
KRISTINA KLEUTGHEN, Art History and Archaeology, Washington University
FAN MANG, History, JHU
CAMERON PENWELL, Library of Congress
DONGFANG SHAO, Library of Congress

Contextualizing Comedias Sueltas

Virginia Fox Stern Center Symposium

APRIL 6-7, 2023

JHU is home to one of the largest collections in North America of comedias sueltas—an early modern genre of unbound ephemeral Spanish comedies primarily of the 17th and 18th centuries. These unique testimonials to the transmission and performance of the works of Tirso de Molina, Pedro Calderón de la Barca, Lope de Vega Carpio, and many other prolific Siglo de Oro playwrights, and their literary successors, have been entirely digitized, made freely available through the Internet Archive, and are now fully integrated into the Comedias Sueltas USA on-line database.

This Stern Center Symposium celebrates this collection and these scholarly achievements through a hands-on, interdisciplinary investigation of this extraordinary gathering of rare, and in some cases unrecorded, imprints. Long-standing scholars of the genre join graduate student researchers who have played an integral role in making JHU’s comedias sueltas collection accessible to the wider world.

SYMPOSIUM PARTICIPANTS

RHIANNON CLARKE and RACHEL WILLIAMS,
Modern Languages & Literatures, JHU
SZILVIA SZMUK-TANENBAUM and MATTHEW MURPHY, Comedias Sueltas USA
SANDY WILKINSON, History, University College Dublin
MACKENZIE ZALIN, Sheridan Libraries, JHU

Empires of the Book: How Richard Eden Read Peter Martyr’s Decades of the New World

Virginia Fox Stern Center Symposium

OCTOBER 7-8, 2022

This symposium explores one of the most important rare books in the collections of Johns Hopkins University: Richard Eden’s heavily annotated translation copy of Peter Martyr’s Decades of the New World (Basel, 1533), first acquired by the Garrett family of Baltimore in 1878. This remarkable Renaissance survival presents an extremely revealing, and until now remarkably little studied, record of the origins of the British Empire. Eden’s extensive manuscript notes, drawings, emblems, maps, interlinear notes and translations, and bibliographical cross-references will be explored afresh by a cross-disciplinary team of experts spanning the full range of Eden’s and Martyr’s interests.

SYMPOSIUM PARTICIPANTS

RALPH BAUER, English, University of Maryland, College Park
SUREKHA DAVIES, History and History of Art, Independent Scholar
BARBARA FUCHS, Spanish, UCLA
MARY FULLER, English, MIT
EARLE HAVENS, Stern Center, JHU
SETH KIMMEL, Spanish, Columbia
MARÍA PORTUONDO, History of Science and Technology, JHU
JENNIFER RAMPLING, History of Science, Princeton
RENEE RAPHAEL, History, UC Irvine
ERIKA VALDIVIESO, Classics, Yale

Women of the Book

A Conference on the Spiritual Lives of Early Modern Women

SEPTEMBER 6-7, 2019

From psycho-spiritual autobiographers, bi-locating nuns, and rock-star-status mystics, to the hidden careers of women printers and engravers and miracle-makers—this interdisciplinary conference explores JHU’s recently acquired “Women of the Book” collection of rare books and manuscripts on early modern nuns, 1450-1800. Together they illuminate lives actively and creatively lived by early modern women religious within and beyond the cloister. Free from traditional family and spousal constraints, and wed to a spiritual life of the mind, these women changed the world and, through their unique access to print, permanently preserved their contributions to history.

SYMPOSIUM PARTICIPANTS

KELSEY CHAMPAGNE, St. Mary’s College of Maryland
MITA CHOUDHURY, Vassar
SIMON DITCHFIELD, York
MARILYN DUNN, Loyola, Chicago
CARLOS EIRE, Yale
CARME FONT, U. Autònoma de Barcelona
CRISTINA CRUZ GONZÁLEZ, Oklahoma State
EARLE HAVENS, Stern Center, JHU
VICTOR HOULISTON, U. of the Witwatersrand
AARON HYMAN, JHU
DANIELLA KOSTROUN, IUPU, Indianapolis
ANNE LESTER, JHU
JOHAN OOSTERMAN, Radboud U. Nijmegen
ELIZABETH PATTON, JHU
MARÍA PORTUONDO, JHU
ERIN ROWE, JHU
ALISON WEBER, UVA

Image: Detail of Barbara Moreel with 11 of her 13 daughters and St. Barbara, from Hans Memling, Moreel Triptych, 1484, Groeningemuseum, Bruges.