This page is referenced by:

• 1 media/20240423_160553_small.jpg 2024-03-26T13:43:07-07:00 The Rare Book Room 21 The History of the Collection image_header 1511484 2024-05-26T07:03:43-07:00

  The Rare Book Room at Saint Mary's College houses a robust collection of more than 4200 items that includes three medieval codices, ten manuscript fragments, thirty-nine pre-1600 documents, eleven incunabula, numerous art house publications, and first editions. With the exception of one purchase in the first half of the twentieth century, this collection was acquired through decades of alumnae and benefactor gifts and donations from Sisters of the Holy Cross and Saint Mary's College faculty and staff. It thus provides serves as a witness to the interests of the Saint Mary's College community and those who have been affiliated with it over the past one hundred and fifty years.
  
  Not all items housed in the Rare Book Room are discoverable in the online catalogue. Nearly 400 items await cataloguing and/or incorporation into standard finding aids, most notably due to recent gifts. As a result, every visit to the Rare Book Room bears with it the potential for discovery, since each item bears its own unique histories of authorship, printing, and ownership. During the spring of 2024, a group of fourteen students explored the stacks and emerged with items that evince Saint Mary's College's deep history of intellectual inquiry and devotion to the pursuit of educational excellence and truth -- and that they perceived as speaking to modern audiences regarding issues (be they pedagogical, ecological, geographic, or linguistic) that continue to resonate in our present moment.
  
  The past can feel so distant from us, students stated, and so removed from our daily concerns. In their work in the Rare Book Room in the spring of 2024, however, they were struck by how the books they encountered, these time-traveling objects from distant temporal and geographical locations, demonstrated how humanity and human conceptions of the world have remained unexpectedly constant. They found it comforting to know that individuals in the past had dealt with many similar problems as today, even if they approached their topics from their own social, geographical, and historical contexts. 
  
  Books can be physically seen and touched, allowing you to participate in the pastness those objects represent. You can come to understand the story of the book and how it has moved through time to, fortuitously, reach our Rare Book Room. In our explorations, students were particularly struck by how, since they weren't "required" to read all the books we explored, they suddenly became more interested in reading them, since working with their selected rare items was an act of self-initiated discovery.
  
  Before this semester, many students had primarily learned about the past through textbooks. Working with archival material, however, can provide an unfiltered view of the past, as rare books are historical objects in their own rights, offering both textual evidence of past cultural, political, and social concerns and material evidence of book production techniques and practices. While it can be hard to understand the relevancy of history from textbooks, students commented, studying these books allowed them to participate in the past and see the connections between ourselves and prior generations in a direct, tangible way.