Kenneth Spencer Research Library

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 15^th 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 16^th-18^th 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 16^th century as Catholic and Protestant groups jockeyed for power in Europe.

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.

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.

For researchers interested in learning more about religion and politics in Europe (and especially papal diplomats in Poland) during the second half of the 16^th 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 16^th and 17^th century collections for Poland, including the Graziani-Commendone collection. Applications are due by January 5, 2025.

Elspeth Healey
Special Collections Curator