Red Rot Megaphone

Natalie Nitsch, a newly minted graduate of the Divinity School's MA program, has been a Rare Books Assistant for the past year. In honor of her last day, she wrote about one of her favorites from our collections: MS 120, a 13th-century manuscript containing Petrus Comestor's Historia Scholastica (and plenty of evidence of use by centuries of former owners). Congratulations, Natalie!

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Many scholars of medieval manuscripts are drawn to their field because of the ability of old books to, as it were, make eye contact with a person from across the centuries. Of course, manuscripts are neither animate (though I wonder about the life of the deer and livestock who gave up their skins for their binding and pages, and the wasp larvae that once inhabited the oak galls used in ink) nor conscious (though I always say goodbye to a manuscript when I reshelve it for the last time). Nevertheless they reward careful looking uncannily well, in a way that I have come to conceive of as meeting and holding the gaze of modern viewers. Of the materials I have written descriptions of over the past year of my employment---130 codex manuscripts and the hundred-odd piece Wandel Collection of Manuscript Fragment---UC’s MS 120 held my gaze the longest and looked back the hardest.

By way of its less recent history, MS 120 was written in the 12th or early 13th century in Germany. It contains an imperfect copy of the 12th-century Historia Scholastica by Petrus Comestor (whose name, delightfully, translates to Peter the Eater), a Biblical paraphrase that enjoyed huge popularity in the medieval period. MS 120 resided at either the Benedictine priory of St. Jakobsberg near Mainz or the Premonstratensian monastery at Steinfeld, both in modern-day Germany, until the desecularization of many German religious houses in the early 19th century. It was then acquired by the 18th-century German theologian Leander van Ess, and subsequently owned by the famed English book collector and ‘vellomaniac’ Thomas Phillipps, Baronet, in 1824. After the dispersal of Phillipps’ collection, it made its way to Ricketts.

By way of its recent history, MS 120 was given to the University of Chicago just before Christmas in 1924 by Coella Lindsay Ricketts (almost as delightful a name as Peter the Eater), a self-described “scribe, illuminator, and binder” who, among other occupations, produced the parchment diplomas issued by the U of C for the first several decades of its existence. MS 120 apparently looked back at Ricketts, just as it looked back at me: in Ricketts’ presentation letter to then-University president Ernest D. Burton, he writes, “Here is an old manuscript on vellum that has been knocking around this world for seven hundred years or more, and thinking that is long enough, I want it to find a permanent home where it will be welcome and appreciated and enjoy companionship.” I imagine he said a fond goodbye to MS 120 before sending it across the city, presumably by courier.

The reason MS 120 held my eye for so long is not necessarily its copious annotations, though it does appear to have been continuously annotated by monks from its creation to the 18th century, when it was acquired by Ess. (Frankly, copious annotations are cool, but a bit of a pain for a person writing a description of a manuscript. They are 1. not often written legibly and 2. not usually particularly revealing.) Its erased 13th century musical notation on four-line staves (ff. 46r-47r, f. 106r) is similarly eye-catching, but must be left for some future researcher to decipher; they are illegible even using the usual imaging methods that help scholars to read faint text. Two relatively minor and unimportant details were, instead, what stared me down.

First, there is a drawing of a woman on the right margin of f. 44r. It was done with a sharp instrument that had no pigmentation, so it is nearly impossible to see unless you hold the parchment at the right angle---imagine the impressions that are left on the next page of a notepad if you press hard with your pencil. (These kinds of annotations, not uncommon in parchment manuscripts, are often called “scratch” or “fingernail” glosses, because they can also be done with a fingernail.) The woman doesn’t seem to have anything in particular to do with the text that accompanies her, a commentary on the First Commandment, “you shall have no other gods before me”. It’s impossible to know which German monk drew her, or why, or who she is intended to represent; she has no identifiable attributes, and the art quality is not that of a master (her eyes bulge). She is fascinating to me mainly because of her invisibility and anonymity. I flipped past this page several times without noticing her, and the fact that I did eventually---I believe I selected the text on this page to check against an edition of the Historia Scholastica totally by chance---felt like MS 120 rewarding me for my diligence. I wondered how many of MS 120’s former owners had noticed this woman, and whether they had any more of an idea than I did about what she was doing there.

The second detail is even less arresting than a marginal drawing, but felt even more like a direct intervention from MS 120. A previous library assistant had noted that a break in the text at one spot in the manuscript, between the pages labelled f. 121 and f. 122---essentially, that some text was missing. After some comparison with an online edition of the Historia Scholastica, I discovered that there was, indeed, about a page’s worth of text missing. I recorded it in my very-21st century description (in an Excel spreadsheet, in accordance with modern descriptive cataloging standards) in the following terms: “Text is complete except for the contents of one folio following f. 121. Text ends at Migne P.L. Vol 198 col. 1366D ‘qua terminata iterum dedica[tione]’ and picks back up at 1369C ‘[sacrifi]cia et frequenta’.” Giving the page a final once-over, I noticed a small note at the bottom of the page (f. 121v), in a medieval hand: “Hic deficit 1 folio”, or, “Here, one page is missing.” Someone who lived at least a half a millennium ago had noted concisely and exactly what I needed to know, not knowing that the simple fact of a missing page would ever need to be recorded in such detail as I recorded it, nor that anyone would need to fiddle around with a digital edition of the text to figure out how much text the manuscript was missing. It was as simple as “here, one page is missing”, all along.

Medieval manuscripts, perhaps more than any other artifact of the past, are indelibly, undeniably human. That should be enough to hold our attention, and our collective gazes.

H is for HDS Library Book on Display in New York!

We are honored to have one of our rare books displayed as part of an exhibit titled, "The Book of Esther in the Age of Rembrandt" at the Jewish Museum of New York until August 10, 2025!

In the age of Rembrandt van Rijn (1606 – 1669), the biblical Book of Esther was a key source of inspiration for diverse communities in Holland, both Jewish and Christian. Traditionally, the Esther story is read annually on the Jewish holiday of Purim. For immigrant Jewish communities living with new freedom in more tolerant Amsterdam, celebrating Purim—notably through finely produced Esther scrolls and theater productions—became meaningful expressions of Jewish culture. For the Dutch, Queen Esther’s heroism came to represent their emerging nation’s identity. Rembrandt and his contemporaries depicted essential scenes of Esther’s story in paintings, prints, drawings, and decorative arts. This exhibition gives expression to this full range of the Book of Esther’s popularity and meaning in Rembrandt’s time.

The HDS Library contribution is a Dutch bible from 1649 that includes a lovely initial H illustrated with a scene of Esther before the king.

More info about the exhibit is here.

Photo credit (images 1 & 2): Installation view of "The Book of Esther in the Age of Rembrandt," at the Jewish Museum, NY, March 7–August 10, 2025. Photo by Kris Graves.

We are building up a variety of letterpress greeting cards and this card is beary special!The text on the card is typeset in 36 point Cheltenham Bold Condensed font and it says “You’re beary special!”

Now, they have a chance to reach a community of far beyond a million followers across platforms. For myself, I prefer how the videos embed here on Tumblr, since you can include the full explanation, context, and citations that ensure a great educational opportunity alongside the video.

Here's the merch, by the way.

We’re giving this book a digital glow-up one scan at a time.📖✨

A Lapwing Feathursday

The Northern Lapwing (Vanellus vanellus) is a wading bird in the family Charadriidae, which includes lapwings, plovers, and dotterels. It is a resident of Great Britain where the noted British naturalist artist and illustrator Charles Tunnicliffe (1901-1979) observed these birds and depicted them in his chapter on "Plumage Study" in Bird Portraiture (“How To Do It” Series No. 35), published in London and New York by The Studio in 1945. Tunnicliffe writes:

I think you will agree now that a knowledge of plumage changes is important, for it would never due to put a fine cock Lapwing, in summer plumage, in the middle of a December landscape. Remember that there is always a fierce ornithologist just round the corner, ready to pounce and rend you as soon as you make a "birdy" faux-pas.

Our copy of Bird Portraiture is from the collection of the Library of the Akron Art Institute with its bookplate, and is a gift to UWM Special Collections from our friend Tony Drehfal.

The lesson: don't make "birdy" faux-pas!

View more posts with works by Charles Tunnicliffe.

Title page of John Baskerville's Virgil (1757)

Cathy Baker making paper

In this video, Dr. Cathleen A. Baker (U-M Conservation Librarian Emerita) takes us through her years-long research into the earliest Western-made wove paper, including papermaking experiments to replicate the paper that first appeared in John Baskerville’s Virgil, published in Birmingham, England, in 1757. This paper, which is now the most commonly used type by people all over the world, had its origins in East Asia perhaps as long as a millennium ago, but until the mid-eighteenth century, it was unknown in the West.