Notes and Comments
- Notes and Comments
Libraries, Archives, and Research Tools
The Vatican Library is scheduled to reopen on Monday, September 20, 2010, after extensive renovations. Among the changes is the installation of a new elevator in the Library courtyard. With generous support from Swedish foundations a tenth-century Evangeliary (Vat. Gr. 1522) and a number of manuscripts that belonged earlier to Queen Christina of Sweden have been restored, and the library’s incunabula have been electronically catalogued.
On January 25, 2010, the Congregation of the Mission’s present provinces of the Midwest (St. Louis), South (Dallas), and West (Los Angeles) merged into a new Western province that is headquartered in St. Louis. The archival collections of the former South and West provinces have been incorporated into the DeAndreis-Rosati Memorial Archives (the archives of the former Midwest Province). Since 2001, these Vincentian archives have been located at DePaul University in Chicago, available on the Web at http://library.depaul.edu/Collections/DRMA.aspx . The combined collections will provide a rich resource for the history of the Vincentians and the Catholic Church in the United States in the areas west of the Mississippi River.
The Yale University Law School Rare Book Library’s Flickr site contains twenty-five scanned portraits attributed to Niccolò Nelli of leading jurists from the thirteenth to sixteenth centuries taken from Antoine Lafréry’s Illustrium iureconsultorum imagines (Rome, c. 1566).
The Medieval Canon Law Virtual Library ( http://www.colby.edu/canonlaw ) makes available electronically primary sources from the Carolingian period through the Decretalists, together with papal and curial registers, and select secondary resources.
The Carolingian Canon Law Project ( http://ccl.rch.uky.edu ) offers searchable transcriptions of Jean Luc d’Achery’s edition of the Collectio Dacheriana (1723) and Johannes Dobneck (Cochlaeus)’s edition of the Collectio Dionysio-Hadriana (1525), texts available to Carolingian jurists. It will soon also host tenth- and eleventh-century texts.
Exhibitions and Restorations
From August to December 2010, the University of San Francisco will sponsor the exhibition “In the Circle of the Galleon: California Mission Arts and the [End Page 413] Pacific Rim” in the Thatcher Gallery at. The exhibition is part of the celebrations commemorating the 400th anniversary of the death of the great Jesuit missionary to China, Matteo Ricci (1552–1610). The exhibition seeks to promote a better understanding of the cultural interchange among the missions of Peru, Paraguay, Baja and Alta California in Mexico and the United States, the Philippines, Macau and the rest of China, and Japan. In conjunction with the exhibition the conference “Legacies of the Book: Early Missionary Printing in Asia and the Americas” will be held on September 24–26, 2010. For more information, contact Thomas Lucas, S.J., at lucast@usfca.edu.
As a result of excavations and historical research, portions of the town of Baturyn, the former capital from 1669 to 1708 of the Cassock state in Left- Bank Ukraine, have been restored with the backing of the various foundations and of former President Viktor Yushchenko. In 1708 Peter I ordered the massacre of its estimated 14,000 inhabitants and its complete annihilation when it resisted tsarist forces. Among the reconstructed buildings in the fortress is the timbered church of the Resurrection erected by the Hetman Ivan Samoilovych (1672–87). Still to be restored is the large cathedral of the Holy Trinity built by the Hetman Ivan Mazepa (1687–1708) that blended the Roman Catholic Baroque style of a triple-nave basilica with the Ukrainian Orthodox five-domed cruciform church with a semicircular two-tiered exonarthex.
After eight years of restoration work, the Coptic Orthodox Monastery of St. Anthony the Great near the town of Al-Zaafarana at the foot of the Red Sea Mountains in Egypt has opened its door to pilgrims. It was built around the burial site of St. Anthony (251–356) immediately following his death. The renovations have uncovered fourth-century monastic cells, now visible under glass to pilgrims coming to the monastery that is still inhabited by monks. At the cost of $14.5 million provided by the American Research Center in Egypt and the Supreme Council of Antiquities, the project also restored...
