S. Rowe, Connecting People of the Past and Present
I was surprised that there are so many really interesting and valuable books in our Rare Book Room at Saint Mary’s. It made me wonder how they came to be here, and I learned that a lot of them were donated, though some were purchased by the college. When I was doing archival descriptions for some of the books, I found a collection of Virginia Woolf novels, many of which were first editions and a couple of which were signed by the author. Jill Hobgood, the librarian, showed me the bookplates on these books that said they had belonged to a man named John Bennett Shaw. She told me that he was the father of a Saint Mary’s alumna who donated his collection to the college.
I am very interested in the provenance information that I found from the books in the Rare Book Room, and many of them had very interesting traceable histories. I did my StoryMap presentation on a book from 1607 called Euclidis Posteriores Libri IX. This book has an incredible history. It is a commentary on Euclidean geometry that was written by Christopher Clavius, the famed mathematician and astronomer who introduced and defended the Gregorian calendar for Pope Gregory XIII. The copy in the Rare Book Room appears to be an original 1607 edition and is the only copy in the United States according to the USTC catalogue.
The book was also owned by two famous English authors, Frances Milton Trollope and her son Anthony Trollope, according to a bookplate and a note written inside. I think it is so fascinating that every book has a possibly unbroken line of owners going from the person who currently owns it all the way back to the first person who ever owned it and even the people who created it. This connects the past to the present in a way that makes me see that a lot of human interests have stayed the same over time because many of the books we have from the past talk about similar or ongoing issues, such as women’s rights and healthcare.
I am also very interested in the books that connect to the history of Saint Mary’s College. I was very touched by one book in particular, a book of Emily Dickinson’s poems that was donated to the college by Sister Mary Franzita. Inside the book, someone placed Sister Mary’s obituary along with a note from her that reads: “I part with this only because I am sure it goes to people who will enjoy and read Emily Dickinson’s poems as much as I have!” I think this is very heart-warming, and it shows the deep love and care that the Sisters who helped start and teach at the college had for their students and the commitment they had to educating women. I hope that by researching the books in the Rare Book Room and showing them to others, we are fulfilling Sister Mary’s wish that the books will be with people who will enjoy them.
However, one frustration I had while working in the Rare Book Room, which we also discussed as a class, goes along with this quote. I think it is sad that these books are kept out of circulation and are seen by few people. I know that this will keep the books protected so they can last longer, but it makes we wonder if we are honoring Sister Mary’s wish that the books should continue to be read and enjoyed. I hope that by creating this website, we can allow some pages of the books in the Rare Book Room to be seen and read by many people so that they can be enjoyed without endangering the older, more fragile books.
For this website, I chose to focus on the religious education book Talks with Our Daughters by Sister Mary Eleanore, C.S.C., PhD and the etiquette book Good Form for Women by Mrs. Charles Harcourt. I chose these books because a lot of the books people in our class found had a common theme of relating to women’s rights and women’s education. Since our college is a women’s college that has a deep connection to the Sisters of the Holy Cross, books that relate to the history of women’s education and the Sisters who ran the college have special relevance to Saint Mary’s students.
This is also a timely topic since debates of women’s rights are still ongoing, and in the modern day, we are losing spaces for women as many women’s colleges are shutting down. That is why my group decided to make the focus of our section on the website be about women’s education. We have books going from one of the original feminist treatises from 1792, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, to a women’s reproductive healthcare pamphlet, Our Bodies Our Selves, that was created by women, for women in the 1970s and lives on today as a website.
I hope that viewers of this website will come away with an appreciation and interest in the books of the Rare Book Room and other old books, along with a time-anchored sense of where we have been and where we are going as humans. I hope people feel inspired to learn about issues that have been going on for hundreds of years that are still occurring today. It is important to learn about the history of such things in order to better understand what is happening today and what we can do in the future. Overall, I hope that people who view this website will feel a connection to the people of the past who had some of the same problems, hopes, and dreams that we do.
Stephanie Rowe
Cellular/Molecular Biology major, Class of 2024