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Inside Spencer: The KSRL Blog

Books on a shelf

Welcome to the Kenneth Spencer Research Library blog! As the special collections and archives library at the University of Kansas, Spencer is home to remarkable and diverse collections of rare and unique items. Explore the blog to learn about the work we do and the materials we collect.

Marvelous Medieval Marginalia

March 19th, 2025

One of the most fascinating things about medieval manuscripts is that every copy is unique and individual. Because scribes wrote manuscripts by hand, no two copies are identical. On March 8th, Kenneth Spencer Research Library opened Marvelous Medieval Marginalia, an exhibit that celebrates the unique and the individual, the best parts of medieval manuscripts, and the scribes, readers, and owners who had a hand in transforming texts over time. It’s dedicated to the voices of not necessarily the great and influential authors and artists of old but to a quieter subset who aren’t always given the attention they deserve – the readers, the imaginers, and doodlers across centuries.

Exhibit case of medieval manuscripts currently on display as part of the Marvelous Medieval Marginalia exhibit
Exhibit case of medieval manuscripts currently on display as part of the Marvelous Medieval Marginalia exhibit. Click image to enlarge.

The exhibit focuses on marginalia. From the Latin for literally just “things in the margins,” marginalia can encompass many things, from formally executed illustrations meant to enhance the manuscript into a work of art to notes and annotations. We tend to think of books as static or frozen in time, but through marginalia and readers, they were often amorphous and ever-changing, shaped and reshaped by their owners over decades and centuries. Medieval readers were not merely passive consumers of manuscripts; they thought about and engaged with their texts, argued and agreed, and added their thoughts. And their relics are preserved in the notes they left behind, capturing their fleeting thoughts in amber for us to enjoy centuries later.

With annotations, we can see what people actually thought about the texts they read. They let us see where readers denied or disagreed with the original manuscript – as with this manuscript copy of Lactantius’ Divine Institutes, a defense of Christianity and a refutation of Greek and Roman polytheism.

Image of a detail from a manuscript copy of Lactantius’ Divinae Institutiones [The Divine Institutes], Italy, ca. 1400-1500 CE., with manuscript notes in the margin.
Lactantius’ Divinae Institutiones [The Divine Institutes], Italy, circa 1400-1500 CE. Call Number: MS C61. Click image to enlarge.

An early reader has added the note “falsum” or “false” while striking lines through parts of the text – potentially either disagreeing with the text itself or perhaps claiming it was spurious and misattributed. Where readers’ notes give us insight into the sometimes-critical thoughts of medieval readers, their doodles provide glimpses into the universal experience of boredom and the creativity it can allow to blossom. With doodles, “the more things change, the more they stay the same.” We doodle just as much today as people did 800 years ago, but what we doodle changes, reflecting the nuances of human culture and identity. It’s a time-honored tradition across the centuries; you’ve likely stuck at least a few notes in the margins of your class assignments or books over the years. Idle doodles encapsulate the wandering thoughts of people from the past as they were when they took quill pen to page.

Sometimes, it was the scribes themselves, the people writing and copying the manuscripts for later audiences, who added flares of fun into the margins. Copying manuscripts by hand was often a long and tedious process, taking anywhere from days to months. A certain playfulness to these marginalia emerged when the scribe’s mind and hand wandered. You wind up with texts like MS B15, a collection of Divine Offices, hymns, prayers, and devotional poetry, where the scribe has very diligently copied the text for over 700 pages, all written in the same hand so that you know this is one person scribbling page after page after page. But they’ve broken the tedium by dappling the tops and bottoms of letters with -Picasso-esque caricatures, skewed profile faces wearing silly hats, and the occasional peacock.

Image of doodles of faces in the margins of Spencer's manuscript copy of Ordinatio totius officii divini secundum usum monasterii Beatae Mariae de Belgentiaco. [A Complete Order of the Divine Offices According to the Use of the Monastery of the Blessed Mary of Beaugency.]. France, 1400-1500.
Ordinatio totius officii divini secundum usum monasterii Beatae Mariae de Belgentiaco [A Complete Order of the Divine Offices According to the Use of the Monastery of the Blessed Mary of Beaugency], France, 1400-1500. Call Number: MS B15. Click image to enlarge.

Marginalia can help reveal the silent reader’s voice and how they understood or analyzed texts – but even in the case of drawings and doodles, these weren’t all the product of an idle mind. Often, the doodles in the margins directly responded to and sometimes commented upon the text itself, creating visual commentary that shows how a scribe or reader responded to the work. These are called deliberate or communicative doodles.

Marginalia didn’t end with the advent of print, but they were unquestionably changed by it. In many ways, printing is more rigid than writing a manuscript. You work with a metal frame that limits where letters can fit, the shape of the page and its structure, and all the letters are predetermined shapes carved into small metal pieces that you then reorganize into different words. That rigidity, of course, meant that it was much easier to make literal copies of the text, nearly identical to one another.

While print stole some of the freedom and flexibility of the page and written word, readers continued to imbue their books with their agency and interpretations, even with the radical technological shift. One reader of Agostino Nifo’s A Small Commentary on the Most Accurate Signs of Weather has bestowed nearly every page with minute illustrations connected to the text, highlighting the vibrancy of weather with sketches of animals associated with certain types of weather alongside copious notes, including a doodle of a bat next to Nifo’s claim that when bats fly in a great flock in the evening, it promises a calm, serene night.

Image of manuscript marginalia, including an image of a bat, in the margins of a 1540 printed copy of De verissimis temporum signis commentariolus [A Small Commentary on the Most Accurate Signs of Weather/Seasons], by Agostino Nifo.
Detail of manuscript marginalia in De verissimis temporum signis commentariolus [A Small Commentary on the Most Accurate Signs of Weather/Seasons] by Agostino Nifo. Venice: H. Scotus, 1540. Call Number: MS B75. Click image to enlarge.

Manuscripts reflect the medieval mind. Through marginalia, we can see how they organized their thoughts and how they reacted and responded to text and information.  In the same way, when you visit an exhibit, you bring your thoughts, experiences, and analyses to the books. As you go through it, you may pick and choose different parts of the exhibit that catch your eye and interest; you may find the exhibit text insightful (or boring!). My exhibit text will tell you what I think is important about materials, but those won’t be the same things that you find interesting or important. With this exhibit, open through July, I invite you to bring your own doodles to our margins – including the exhibit wall text! You’ll see the manuscripts mentioned above, with many more, that all embody the agency and choices of their readers over the centuries. We welcome you to read, think, and doodle about the exhibit (albeit preferably not in our manuscripts). Thank you for being a reader of our exhibits here at Kenneth Spencer Research Library.

Eve Wolynes
Special Collections Curator

In the Conservation Lab: Valentine’s Day Edition

February 14th, 2025

Currently, I am treating a group of parchment leaves that make up a legal document. The text discusses partitions of land in Wickenby and Great Humby, hamlets in Lincolnshire, England. The document is dated September 21, 1716.

Group of parchment documents affixed to one another with fourteen wax seals at the bottom edge.
Partition: Wickenby, Great Humby, September 21, 1716.
Call number MS 240A:783.

The large pieces of animal skin are affixed to one another with sewing and fourteen red wax seals. Each seal was stamped with a heart, pierced by two arrows.

Detail two wax seals imprinted with hearts, on a parchment document
Partition: Wickenby, Great Humby, September 21, 1716.
Call number MS 240A:783.

How appropriate to discover fourteen red hearts on a document on Valentine’s Day, February 14!

Whitney Baker
Head, Conservation Services

Digital Reunification and 16th Papal Diplomacy in Spencer’s Graziani-Commendone Collection

December 10th, 2024

It might surprise readers to know that the Kenneth Spencer Research Library holds a sizeable collection of Italian manuscripts and papers dating (primarily) from the 1300s to 1800. These range from individual items, such as a 15th century manuscript volume of Italian poetry that includes Petrarch’s Canzoniere (MS C24), to large groups of materials, such as an extensive collection of an Italian family’s business records dating from the 16th-18th centuries.  This last collection was featured in a Fall 2022 exhibition entitled Keeping the Books: The Rubinstein Collection of the Orsetti Family Business Archive curated by Whitney Baker, Head of KU’s Conservation Services.

Included among Spencer’s Italian manuscript holdings is the Graziani-Commendone collection, a collection of correspondence, letter-books, reports, historical texts, and other documents primarily concerning papal diplomacy (particularly in Poland and Eastern Europe) during the Counter-Reformation. It is named for the two men whose letters lie at the center of the collection:  Giovanni Francesco Commendone (1524-1584), an Italian papal diplomat (nuncio) and cardinal, and Antonio Maria Graziani (1537-1611), his secretary, who served as a papal representative in Poland and later became the Bishop of Amelia and a nuncio for Venice. Many of the materials in the collection were amassed by Graziani and his family and offer fascinating insight into the complex politics (religious and otherwise) of the late 16th century as Catholic and Protestant groups jockeyed for power in Europe.

The Graziani-Commendone Collection, as housed in manuscript boxes and protective enclosures, pictured in the Spencer Research Library's Reading Room.
The Graziani-Commendone Collection, as housed in manuscript boxes and protective enclosures. The collection spans multiple call numbers.

Over four hundred years later, a group of scholars in Italy recognized the historical potential of these materials and undertook a digital humanities initiative (the Nuncio’s Secret Archives project) to digitally reunite Graziani materials residing in the Graziani family archives in Vada, in the Province of Livorno in Italy, with those that are now dispersed and housed at the University of Kansas and the New York Public Library. Together, research teams at the University of Parma, the University of Padua, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, and the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia have created an online portal  (https://grazianiarchives.eu/) that combines digitized images of selected manuscripts with detailed metadata and historical/contextual information, enabling researchers to conduct advanced, structured searches and trace figures, places, and other references across the collections. The result is an enormously useful resource which offers unprecedented insight into aspects of papal diplomacy, European multi-denominational societies, and politics (particularly in Poland and Eastern Europe) during the second half of the 1500s. The site is currently in Italian, but it is accessible to English-speakers if viewed using a browser like Chrome that permits automated translation into other languages.

Screenshot of the main landing page for the Graziani Archives portal (viewed with GoogleTranslate English translation overlay).

Screenshot of the main landing page for the Graziani Archives portal (as viewed with GoogleTranslate English translation overlay).  This digital humanities resource was created as part of the Nuncio’s Secret Archives project.


In April of this year, I travelled to Parma, Italy to participate in the closing conference for Nuncio’s Secret Archives project. Titled La Chiesa di Roma e l’Europa multiconfessionale nella prima età moderna: attori, politiche, esperienze (The Roman Church and Multi-denominational Europe in the Early Modern Age: Actors, Policies, Experiences), the conference brought together scholars from across Europe. As a complement to the conference papers grounded in the religious and political history of the early modern period, my paper outlined the story of how the Graziani-Commendone collection came to reside in Lawrence, Kansas at a university roughly 5000 miles from either Italy or Poland. It’s a fascinating story that involves KU’s strength in Italian manuscripts as well as the politics and diplomacy of a much more contemporary period: the Cold War. The collection was acquired during the late 1960s as KU’s special collections sought to support KU’s recently created “Slavic and Soviet Studies Language and Area Center” (now known as the Center for Russian, East European, & Eurasian Studies [CREES]). Though there isn’t room in this post to go into the acquisition history in detail, its story draws extensively on surviving correspondence between the Head of Special Collections, Alexandra Mason, and Alexander Janta, a bookseller of Polish national origin, from whom KU acquired the majority of its Graziani-Commendone materials and with whom KU also worked to build its holdings of rare books related to Poland. Because the provenance of collections is important for a variety of reasons, including how researchers understand and contextualize the documents in a collection, special collections libraries and archives often maintain internal files related to the acquisition of the collections they hold.

Folder open showing a letter/report from Graziani to Commendone, reporting on the diet in Warsaw to elect a new Polish-Lithuanian king, 5 May 1573
Letter from Antonio Maria Graziani to Giovanni Francesco Commendone, reporting from the assembly in Warsaw convened to elect a new King for the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, 5 May 1573. This twelve-page report discusses the voting on the contenders, noting that “Francia” (Henry Valois, Duke of Anjou and later Henry III of France) had, at this point, the majority of the votes. Valois (1551–1589) would ultimately be the one to ascend to the Polish throne. With respect to the history of the Graziani-Commendone collection, this letter was among the first Graziani items the Library acquired from the bookseller Alexander Janta in 1967. Graziani-Commendone Collection. Call #: MS 62:I: Item 26


For researchers interested in learning more about religion and politics in Europe (and especially papal diplomats in Poland) during the second half of the 16th century, we encourage you to explore the Graziani Archives portal and to visit Spencer Research Library’s reading room to examine our full Graziani-Commendone collection. Live more than 100 miles from the University of Kansas? Not a problem! Apply for Spencer Library’s Alexander and Valentine Janta Endowment Travel Award, which supports research with Spencer’s 16th and 17th century collections for Poland, including the Graziani-Commendone collection. Applications are due by January 5, 2025.

Elspeth Healey
Special Collections Curator

Today in the Lab: Ask a Conservator Day 2024

November 1st, 2024

Today, Friday, November 1, 2024, is the fifth annual Ask a Conservator Day, an initiative of the American Institute for Conservation (AIC), the national professional organization for conservators.

Ask a Conservator Day serves a dual purpose. First, it commemorates the flooding of Florence on November 4, 1966, which damaged cultural heritage sites throughout that city and, in the aftermath of the disaster, sparked a massive recovery effort that is seen as the origin of the modern conservation profession. Ask a Conservator Day also serves as an opportunity for conservators and other preservation professionals to educate the public about the conservation profession.

In that spirit, I will revive our occasional Today in the Lab series to share a snapshot of what I am working on right now. The materials at my workbench always represent an ever-changing mixture of long-term projects and one-off treatments with a shorter turnaround time, and at any given time I will have items from all of Spencer’s collecting areas in my queue. So come along on a tour of my workspace!

Recently cataloged children's books in custom-made boxes.
Recently cataloged 19th century children’s books in custom-made boxes, awaiting conservation treatment. Click to enlarge.
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First, on the green book truck next to my bench I have a group of recently catalogued children’s books from Special Collections, mostly from the 19th century. As my colleagues in cataloging complete their work on the records for these materials, they flag volumes that need repair or housing. Our team of Conservation Services student assistants have already made custom enclosures to protect these vulnerable books, and I have been working through the flagged items in batches to complete any needed repairs.

Watson Library building plans before treatment.
Watson Library building plans (1947 addition) before treatment. Call number: RG 0/22/99/00. Click to enlarge.

Next, I have several sets of architectural drawings for Watson Library, which is having its centennial this year. These sets are for the original 1922-1924 construction and a 1940’s addition, a total of 116 individual drawings. These drawings bear signs of being used on the construction site: edge tears and creases from frequent rolling and unrolling, builders’ markings in pencil and other media, and a significant accumulation of surface dirt. One by one I have been surface cleaning the drawings on both sides, flattening the creases, and mending the tears with a specially made repair tissue. Just 6 more drawings to go before these sets will be returned to the University Archives, where they will be available once again to researchers.

Detail of edge damage on Watson Library building plans before treatment.
Detail of edge damage on Watson Library building plans (1947 addition) before treatment. Call number: RG 0/22/99/00. Click to enlarge.
Watson Library building plans during treatment.
Watson Library building plans (1947 addition) during treatment. Call number: 0/22/99/00. Click to enlarge.
Items in special collections conservator's cabinet.
Items in special collections conservator’s cabinet, awaiting treatment or installation in an exhibit. Click to enlarge.

Moving on to my cabinet! Right now the upper section of my cabinet mostly holds materials that I have prepared for an upcoming temporary exhibit. I have made cradles or selected other supports from our supply of exhibit materials, and for now these items are simply waiting for the installation date. On the lower shelf, second from the right, is a very long-term treatment that is in progress, an early 20th century funeral ledger from the Kansas Collection. I have removed duct tape from the spine of the volume and have mended about half of the text block. When mending is completed, I will reinforce the sewing and board attachments so that this fascinating volume will be stable enough for use in the reading room.

Items awaiting boxes in special collections conservator's cabinet drawer.
Items in special collections conservator’s cabinet drawer, awaiting custom-made enclosures. Click to enlarge.
Items awaiting treatment in special collections conservator's cabinet drawer.
Items in special collections conservator’s cabinet drawer, awaiting conservation treatment. Click to enlarge.

Finally, in two of my lower cabinet drawers I have items awaiting treatment that have come to me either from cataloging and processing, or from the reading room. These are typical of the single-item treatments that make up the bulk of my daily work: items needing custom enclosures, volumes with detached spines or boards, rolled material that needs to be flattened, photographs that need to be removed from frames. This steady stream of “patients” is what keeps my day-to-day work from becoming boring or repetitive, as the depth and variety of Spencer Library’s collections means that I always have something new-to-me to work on.

Angela Andres, special collections conservator

That’s Distinctive!: Famous Monsters of Filmland

October 29th, 2024

Check the blog each Friday for a new “That’s Distinctive!” post. I created this series to provide a lighthearted glimpse into the diverse and unique items at Spencer. “That’s Distinctive!” is meant to show that the library has something for everyone regardless of interest. If you have suggested topics for a future item feature or questions about the collections, you can leave a comment at the bottom of this page. All collections, including those highlighted on the blog, are available for members of the public to explore in the Reading Room during regular hours.

For one final installment of spooky October, I am sharing an item from the library’s science fiction holdings within Special Collections. This week I am highlighting select covers of Famous Monsters of Filmland. Published from 1958 to 1983, the magazine “offered brief articles, well-illustrated with publicity stills and graphic artwork, on horror movies from the silent era to the current date of publication, their stars and filmmakers.” Editor Forest J. Ackerman was a leading figure in science fiction and horror fandom as well as a science fiction writer and editor. The back of issue #158 of the magazine includes “home movies so ghastly you will be astonished,” “deluxe latex rubber whole head masks,” and lists of books and other magazines being printed at the time. One article is titled “You Scream as They Leap from the Screen Horror from the Third Dimension,” and it covers the use of 3-D in films and television. Per Wikipedia, the success of Famous Monsters of Filmland “inspired the creation of many other similar publications, including Castle of Frankenstein, Cinefantastique, Fangoria, The Monster Times, and Video Watchdog.”  Some full issues of the magazine can be found on the Famous Monsters of Filmland website.

The covers shown today highlight films such as Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope, King Kong, Mr. Sardonicus, and Superman. I’m pretty sure I stumbled upon this collection by literally searching for “monsters” in the KU Libraries online catalog when looking for items to highlight in October. When the students brought the issues to me, there was quite a selection to choose from, which always makes my decision harder. Generally, in cases like that, I choose at random what to show.

It is always sad for me to see October come to a close. With the end of spooky season, I hope the items I have chosen to highlight this year have helped share more insights to the collections Spencer houses.

Color illustration of King Kong standing on buildings in a city, fighting airplanes with a woman in his hand.
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Smiling monster man in a suit with the words "King Kong's Colorful Crash, Lugosi's Transylvania Trip, Mr. Sardonicus Grins Again, Renfield Revisited at Last."
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A creature from Star Wars with the text "Enter Our Fabulous Star Wars $1000 Contest!"
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Superman plus characters from Lord of the Rings, Galactica, and Star Wars.
Front covers of Famous Monsters of Filmland from (top to bottom) May 1976, July 1976, September 1978, and March 1979. Call Number: ASF CURR D82. Click images to enlarge.

Tiffany McIntosh
Public Services