10,000 JOANS: Treasures from the Joan of Arc Collection of the Boston Public Library
Now through August 15, 2006
Cheverus Room & Sargent Gallery, 3rd floor of the McKim Building
Admission is Free

As popular as we consider the legendary Joan of Arc to be, perhaps no one did more to preserve the record of her historic legacy from the Middle Ages to the 20 th century than Cardinal John Joseph Wright, donor of the Boston Public Library’s Joan of Arc Collection.

In 1976, Cardinal Wright, a former stack boy at the Boston Public Library, but by that time a Cardinal at the Vatican in Rome , donated his 6,000-item collection on the Maid of Orleans to the library of his native city. His express hope was that the collection be accessible to “every level of the Boston community.” That was a modest wish for the treasures he had gathered in the course of a fifty-five-year hobby. The Cardinal’s gift—augmented by subsequent donations by John McKenna, Father Daniel Rankin, and Claire Quintal—is the largest of its kind in North America , and second only to that at the Centre Jeanne d’Arc in Orleans, France. 

In honor of the thirtieth anniversary of Wright’s great gift, exhibition Curators Deborah Fraioli, Professor Emerita of French at Simmons College, and Earle Havens, Curator of Manuscripts at the BPL are mounting the first major exhibition of this remarkable gathering of manuscripts, printed books, commemorative medals, sculptures, prints, posters, toy soldiers, dolls, porcelain and more, in addition to completing an illustrated collection of essays about the Wright Collection. 

Click Here to see images from the exhibit

Exhibition Hours: Monday-Thursday 9-9, Friday and Saturday 9-5