Early European Materials in Modern American Archives: Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society

Description Since its founding in 1791, the Massachusetts Historical Society has collected and communicated materials for the study of American history. Well-known today among its collections are the presidential papers of John Adams, John Quincy Adams, and Thomas Jefferson; the Wampanoag vocabularies Native speakers taught to John Cotton Jr. and his son Josiah; and items related to the Civil War-era Massachusetts 54th Regiment. The presence of pre-modern European manuscripts at the MHS might therefore seem a little odd. What does a book of hours have to do with Boston's early republic? Yet, since as early as 1796, when "several ancient manuscripts" entered the collections, the Society has held a slowly but steadily growing assemblage of medieval and Renaissance materials ranging from twelfth-century charters to a seemingly endless collection of indentures. Using the example of the MHS collections, Agnieszka Rec will offer a medievalist's perspective on the opportunities afforded by the presence of early European manuscripts in American historical collections. After an introduction to the MHS's earliest materials, we will follow two threads: colonial paleography and nineteenth-century antiquarian interests.

AudiencesGraduates, Professionals, Scholars