Blog

Annually, CERL offers Internships and Placement Grants to allow qualified librarians and scholars to work on several projects in CERL libraries, in CERL offices, and to be trained on CERL databases. For 2022 six CERL Grants were offered in libraries and institutions all over Europe.

Sara D’Amico is Cataloguer at the Biblioteca dell’Archivio Centrale dello Stato, Rome, with an Erasmus traineeship at the John Rylands Library in Manchester, and a MA in Library Science from “La Sapienza” University of Rome.

Founded in 1707, Marsh’s Library is the first public library in Ireland and – as such – it holds some of the finest special collections in the country.

Among its rare books, there is a small but fascinating Incunabula collection: my task as a CERL grantee was to enter the 93 incunables into the MEI database and – in doing so – tracing the long and adventurous journey they have taken before reaching Marsh’s beautiful dark oak shelves.

Most of the incunables come from the private libraries of four major collectors: Edward Stillingfleet (1635-1699), Élie Bouhéreau (1643-1719), John Stearne (1660-1745) and the founder himself, Narcissus Marsh (1638-1713).

These men lived in a century when book-collectors had not yet developed the strong conviction that the ideal copy was a clean copy, which, luckily for us, means that they did not obscure, cut out or washed previous owners’ names from their books.

On the contrary, almost all of their incunables still bear very clear evidence of early provenance: inscriptions, annotations, decorations, bindings and so on. Each of these marks helps us to shine some light on the story beyond the text, on the life these books lived after leaving the printing press and, therefore, on the history of all the different people who have read them and preserved them.

Marsh’s Library’s Incunabula collection has proven to be a rather valuable source of information. Thirty names were added to the Owners of Incunabula database, including two relevant figures within the history of Ireland: Jane Nugent, countess of Westmeath (d.1643) and wife of Richard Nugent, 1st Earl of Westmeath (1583-1642), and Benjamin Guinness, 3rd Earl of Iveagh (1937-1992). A widely-known name in the book-collecting landscape is that of Edward Gwynn, whose gold-stamped bindings appear on three incunables – one of which was not in the Folger Library’s list of all known surviving books from his collection, but has since been added.

Many binders and illuminators remain anonymous, although sometimes identified with conventional names – such as the Unicorn Binder. The same can be said about the countless annotators who have filled the books with their corrections and comments in different languages – from Latin and English to Greek and Hebrew – beautiful manicules and doodles of all sorts, including a little red-coloured heart next to a passage of particular interest and human faces drawn in the empty spaces of large initials.

More details can be found in the article I wrote for Marsh’s Library’s blog, but the work is far from complete: there is scope to continue the research on Marsh’s Incunabula collection and add to the story told so far.