Presented by Hopkins at Home, Sheridan Libraries and Friends of the Johns Hopkins University Libraries
Dr. Earle Havens, Director of the Virginia Fox Stern Center for the History of the Book in the Renaissance, and JJ Haddad, a PhD Candidate in the Department of History at JHU, have begun a deep dive into the university’s collection of medieval and Renaissance manuscripts as part of a larger project to more fully catalogue and digitize all pre-1600 manuscripts in the Sheridan Libraries. Together, they will tell the story of how the university’s collection of medieval and Renaissance manuscripts developed over time, and share some of their greatest favorites. Together they will explore world-class illuminated books, sacred and secular, as well as humbler scribal fragments, and many points in between. Highlights will include some stunning books of hours (including one stolen long ago from the Peabody Library!), an ancient Jewish text scribally reproduced at a scriptorium in Renaissance Florence and owned by a Pope, a forged medieval charter, and one of the earliest known examples of arguably the first “textbook” in Western history.
About
Earle HavensDr. Earle Havens is Nancy H. Hall Curator of Rare Books and Manuscripts, director of the Virginia Fox Stern Center for the History of the Book in the Renaissance, and an adjunct professor of modern languages and literature at Johns Hopkins University. His academic teaching and published scholarship focus on the history of the book and material texts in early modern Europe, from 1400 to 1750. Dr. Havens has authored, co-authored, and edited thirteen scholarly books and exhibition catalogues, and dozens of journal articles and book chapters, including Fakes, Lies, and Forgeries: Rare Books and Manuscripts from the Arthur and Janet Freeman Bibliotheca Fictiva Collection (Sheridan Libraries, 2014; 2nd ed. rev., 2016); and (with Walter Stephens, Literary Forgery in Early Modern Europe, 1450-1800 (JHU Press, 2018). He is currently co-editing several books, including with Mark Rankin, The Elizabethan Catholic Underground: Clandestine Printing and Scribal Subversion in the English Counter-Reformation (forthcoming with Brill); and with Erin Rowe and Kelsey Champagne, Women of the Book: The Spiritual Lives of Early Modern Women, 1450-1800 (forthcoming with the Pennsylvania State University Press). In Spring 2024 he once again taught his popular undergraduate seminar, “The History of Fake News from the Flood to the Apocalypse.”Dr. Havens earned an interdisciplinary joint-PhD in Renaissance Studies and History from Yale University.
About
JJ Lopez HaddadJJ Lopez Haddad is a scholar of Europe and the Mediterranean during the High Middle Ages. His research centers on the lives of Christians under Muslim rule, and their relationships with Church hierarchies in Europe and elsewhere. He has also worked on the social history of England and France during the thirteenth century, focusing on urban life and development.When it comes to historical books, JJ’s interests lie mainly in liturgical codices from the Middle Ages and early modernity. He works on rare books both as texts and as material artifacts, exploring what signs of wear and use, alterations, and craftsmanship over time can tell us about the people who made and used them. He is also interested in the afterlives of medieval books and their continuous use, and frequent adaptation, during the early modern period.Before enrolling in Johns Hopkins, JJ earned an A.B. degree in History, summa cum laude, from Princeton University, along with certificates in Medieval Studies and in European Cultural Studies. His undergraduate thesis consisted of a new social history of Paris as glimpsed through unusual sources, in particular through the writings of a Latin Master at the University of Paris.You can find JJ on Twitter @JJLopezHaddad.
