Medieval Manuscripts: Treasures from Furman’s Collections

       The largest corpus of objects of material culture from the medieval period in the West come to us as examples of textual culture: handwritten manuscripts on treated animal skin (parchment, or vellum) and, later in the 15th century, early printed books. Considering surviving textiles, household objects, and even architecture in stone, it is from manuscript culture that we have the greatest range of insight into the thoughts and actions of people in Western Europe during this period. Fortunately, being quite resilient, many manuscripts survive, sacred and secular, and some of which were broken up into individual leaves, as can be found in the cases in this exhibition.

       Furman holds the second largest collection of medieval manuscripts in South Carolina. Several have been here as part of a portfolio of early printed and manuscript leaves since at least the 1960s, but our conscious collecting has increased considerably in the past 15 years as librarians realized their potential for teaching and classroom use. Furman’s is very much a teaching collection, with examples of different genres of books as well as regions and design styles, across several centuries, that are fairly well represented. More recently, we have also been acquiring non-Western manuscripts from the late medieval and early modern periods on forward (including a large collection of elaborate and rare 16th century Mesoamerican manuscript facsimiles) that together demonstrate an interconnected global history of books, manuscripts, and the transmission of ideas across time and place using textual media.

       As you view these cases of documents, you will see many variants of popular genres and texts that comprise the medieval book: the Book of Hours (the medieval bestseller, a personal prayerbook), Bibles, psalters, missals, songbooks, and also secular works such as legal texts and works from ancient Greek and Roman authors that were preserved, copied, and recopied onto parchment to preserve them for over 15 centuries from their initial creation.

       The Furman History Department and the Furman Manuscripts Club have contributed funds to acquire several manuscripts in this exhibition together with several individual donors of items, and many thanks are also due to Rick Jones for creating the exhibition poster.

—Jeffrey Makala, Special Collections and Archives