By Jay Moschella, Curator of Rare Books at the Boston Public Library. Phillis Wheatley Peters (1753-1784) was an early American poet and correspondent who became a transatlantic literary celebrity while enslaved in Boston. As both a Black woman enslaved in pre-Revolutionary Boston and an internationally renowned poet, Phillis Wheatley Peters navigated a world of complexity…
BPL Manuscript Card Catalog Now Online
The Rare Books and Manuscripts Department is happy to announce that we have digitized the entire manuscript card catalog and images of all the individual cards are now freely available online.
Cataloging BPL Manuscripts From Home
Since March, a small team of BPL Special Collections Department staff have labored to make more of the library's manuscripts findable online.
Notes From A Lost Renaissance Library
The BPL recently purchased an annotated volume from the library of the Italian author and magistrate Giuliano Guizzelmi (1446-1518).¹ A minor, if interesting figure in the history of renaissance Italy, Guizzelmi is mostly remembered as a jurist, diary-keeper, and pious chronicler of miracles attributed to the shrines and holy relics of the Tuscan city of…
250th Anniversary of the Boston Massacre: Highlights From Our Collections
March 5th, 2020, is the 250th anniversary of the Boston Massacre. As one of the nation's premier repositories for materials documenting the history of colonial and revolutionary America, the BPL holds a trove of rare books, pamphlets, newspapers, and broadsides printed in direct response to the events of March 5th, 1770. The library also holds…
Recently Digitized: Boston Tax Records, 1780-1821
The BPL Rare Books and Manuscripts Department has just digitized a major collection of early Boston tax records. Comprised of approximately 90,000 handwritten pages, the collection covers the years 1780 through 1821 and represents a rich data set for genealogists and historians alike. The records contain a wealth of information about individual residents and about…
Medieval Manuscript Highlights: Books of Hours at the BPL
The book of hours is a collection of Christian devotional texts that was widely popular during the late Middle Ages and Renaissance. Books of hours were intended to help devout laypersons connect with one of the central obligations of monastic life: the ritualized cycle of daily worship known as the Divine Office, or Liturgy of…
Recent Digitization Highlights: the San Sisto Choirbooks, 1475-1495
Thanks to the generous support of the Associates of the Boston Public Library, the BPL recently digitized two monumental, highly decorated prayer books from our collection of medieval and early renaissance manuscripts. The two manuscripts -- an antiphonary and a psalter -- once belonged to a larger set of 14 choirbooks created for the Benedictine monastery of San Sisto…
Up for auction: S.L.M. Barlow’s early Americana at the BPL
On Monday, February 3rd, 1890, the personal library of Samuel Latham Mitchill Barlow came up for auction in New York City. One of the major American book sales of the late 19th century, the auction of Barlow’s collection was also a watershed moment for the BPL rare books collection. During his lifetime, Barlow had been one of…
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