Early Books’ Migration: European Upheaval and American Collections

The title of this lecture is also the title of a four-year project that Professor Cristina Dondi is leading at the University of Rome to investigate the consequences—intended and unintended, direct and indirect—of historical policies and political events on the European book heritage that migrated to the United States.

Between the 18th and 20th centuries, major political changes in Europe mobilized vast quantities of early European printed heritage that ultimately formed the core of American public collections. Policies such as the secularization of religious houses implemented under Joseph II, Napoleon, the formation of the Italian, Spanish, and Greek State, and events such as the October Revolution and the two World Wars caused the sequestration, disposal, dispersal, transfer, and sale of thousands of books printed in Europe in the 15th-century, the so-called incunabula, around 50,000 of which are today preserved in hundreds of libraries in the United States.

For the past fifteen years, Professor Dondi has been coordinating a large cohort of scholars and librarians who have been tracking the very mobile history of tens of thousands of incunabula today in hundreds of European and American libraries. Details of decoration, manuscript annotations, bindings, and ownership inscriptions are being fed into a powerful database that returns two valuable results: tracking the movement of each book over time and space and reconstructing dispersed collections. The lecture will discuss why this research matters and what we do with it.

This is the Zeidberg Lecture in the History of the Book.