The Summerfield Renaissance Collection
The Summerfield
Collection of Renaissance and Early Modern Books
was begun in 1957, its funding one of the many benefactions of the late
Solon E. Summerfield, a graduate of the University of Kansas. No restriction
of subject is placed upon the collection beyond the common-sense avoidance
of duplication with other collections in the neighborhood, but only
the restrictions of place and time: the books must have been printed
on the continent of Europe before 1701. Preference is given to those
works which have not been competently reedited within the past hundred
and fifty years or so and which must therefore be read in their original
editions.
The years of collecting have brought us well over seven thousand titles in history, literature, law, science, theology, and the arts. We have not sought out great rarities, although we have acquired some; the main strength is in large quantities and great varieties of the books used over the centuries by scholars, students, and readers. Although we collect primarily for text, we have gathered along the way rich sources for the history of printing, for bibliographical studies of many kinds, for the knowledge of provenance, for the study of bindings and illustration. As the collection grows and the general University Libraries simultaneously develop their holdings in modern scholarly literature of the period involved we are building a significant source for the study of the centuries during which the bases of our culture were laid.
Most
of the purchasing of the Summerfield books is done title by title, thus
preserving the intentional variety and breadth of subject which is desired
in this collection, but a few large purchases made in the early years
of the grant provided particular strength and influenced the shape the
collection was to take. The first of these was the acquisition in 1957
of a thousand volumes from the library of the French scholar and librarian
Léon Dorez. Dorez' great interest was in the Italian humanists and his
library included both the famous and the obscure: Boccaccio, Petrarch,
Tasso, Alamanni, Andreini, many editions of the writings of Cardinal
Bembo, the most complete edition of Poliziano's Latin writings (Basel,
1553), Palingenius' Zodiacus Vitae, as well as numbers of 16th-century
Italian plays, the first Italian translation of Alberti's book of architecture
(Venice, 1546), the 1619 edition of the works of Serlio, such historians
as Sabellicus, Guicciardini, and Sleidanus, and a few Greek and Roman
authors. This basic collection of the Italian humanists had its Spanish
equivalent in a somewhat larger purchase of the following year. Sir
William Stirling-Maxwell, noted for his The Cloister Life of the
Emperor Charles V, was a great 19th century British Hispanist and
book collector, whose library included a magnificent emblem collection
(now at the University of Glasgow), a collection of books on art and
design, and a working library of historical sources of the 16th and
17th centuries. It was this last section of over two thousand volumes
which the University acquired in 1958. They are Spanish, French, and
Italian imprints for the most part, with a small but significant number
of Dutch books. The rich accumulation of 16th and 17th century Spanish
chronicles, many of which have not been republished in critical editions,
is rivaled by the large number of contemporary tracts about Charles
V, with the relevant histories and biographies. Beyond these and other
smaller collections of Spanish city and town histories, there is a rich
conspectus of Spanish literature, including early editions of such authors
as Juan de Mena and Jorge Manrique and a fine copy of the Cancionero
General, Antwerp, 1573. Yet the solid value lies not so much in
these high spots as in the hundreds of contemporary editions of the
poets, travelers, theologians, historians, and bibliographers of the
time. As one would expect, there are extensive materials on the Austrian
and Dutch parts of the Spanish empire, including some important legal
material. In general the French and Italian books in this group are
perhaps less rare as well as less numerous than the Spanish, but nevertheless
still of note.
Another large purchase was nearly a thousand volumes of legal history acquired in 1963. Two-thirds of these are now part of the Summerfield collection, continuing a trend begun some years ago with the purchase of the 1475 Schoeffer Codex Justinianus -- the collecting of editions of Roman and canon law and their commentators.
The collection has 132 incunabula, a relatively small number, and a study collection of separate leaves from 78 more. 15th-century books especially worthy of mention are the Sweynheym and Pannartz Caesar of 1469, three Jensens (the Macrobrius of 1472, the first edition of Landini's translation of Pliny, 1476, and the 1478 Plutarch), Aldus' Hypnerotomachia Poliphili of 1499, Amerbach's 1494 printing of Trithemius' Liber de Scriptoribus Ecclesiasticis (the first modern biobibliography), Vincent of Beauvais' Speculum Historiale, Strassburg, Mentelin, 1473, Ulrich Richental's Concilium zu Constencz, Augsburg, Sorg, 1483, the 1477 Legenda aurea of Johannes Baemler, and Marciletti's Doctrinale florum artis notarie, Lyon, ca. 1490 (one of two known copies).
The Summerfield collection is strong in early bibliography (Gesner, Doni, Bale, Ziletti, Eysengrein, La Croix du Maine, Du Verdier and many others), Polish history, the great French Byzantinists (a nearly complete set of the Regia Byzantinorum Scriptorum Editio, including Du Cange's Historia Byzantina, Paris, 1680, with its clear statement of France's claim to the throne of Byzantium and of Rome itself), and such French humanists and political theorists as Guillaume Budé, most of whose works remain available only in 16th-century editions, and Jean Bodin, whose Les Six Livres de la Republique, of which we have the first edition (1576) and eight subsequent 16th-century editions, is another essential work not existing in a modern critical edition. Significant additions have been made over the years to most of the subjects begun by the early major purchases, increasing our strength in French and Italian history and literature, Dutch politics, Protestantism, geography and the history of art. The scientific strengths of the Summerfield Collection are described along with our other history of science.
| Special
Collections Librarian - Richard W. Clement, 785/864-4334 rclement@ku.edu Department of Special Collections, Kenneth Spencer Research Library, The University of Kansas Lawrence, KS 66045-7616 Phone: 785/864-4334 Fax: 785/864-5803 |
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