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The Rev. Columba Stewart, OSB, was presented with a gift totaling $825,000 at the Hill Museum & Manuscript Library (HMML) Annual Millennium Club event Sept. 10. The gift is part of a $1 million fund that has been established to support HMML’s manuscript preservation initiatives over the next five years.

Contributed by HMML friends, the surprise gift paid tribute to Stewart and his successful five years as HMML’s executive director. In June 2009, Father Columba will leave his current post at HMML to spend more time teaching and writing.

As executive director, Stewart has seen HMML’s preservation fieldwork increase from two sites to 22 digital studios located in nine countries. He has earned acceptance and trust from many Eastern Christian communities, who know him both as a modern Benedictine monk and as a recognized expert on the history of early Christianity and monasticism. His leadership has made HMML widely recognized as the world’s premier resource for photographic preservation of manuscripts.

Using pieces from the Saint John’s Abbey, University rare books and Frank Kacmarcik collections, Teresa Walch (Irma Wyman Intern for Public Programs and Educational Outreach, Summer 2008) has installed an exhibition exploring changes in fine press book production. Guests to the Hill Museum & Manuscript Library can learn about a variety of developments in the printed format including the use of moveable type, the allowances provided for decorative and purposed spaces, the implementation of woodcuts, the introduction of type designs and advances made in bookbinding methods and materials. The exhibited books and accompanying didactics provide an interesting glimpse into the Fine Press movement.

The Rev. Columba Stewart, OSB, executive director of Hill Museum & Manuscript Library (HMML), is pleased to announce a new speaker series, Ex Oriente Lux (Light from the East): Eastern Christians Illuminating Global Events.

The first event in the series takes place at 4 p.m. Tuesday, Oct.7 at Room AV2 in Alcuin Library on the Saint John’s University campus. The event is free to the public, and is preceded by a reception at 3:30 p.m. in the lower lobby of Alcuin Library.

The featured speaker will be Chorbishop John D. Faris, associate secretary general of the Catholic Near East Welfare Association, www.cnewa.org, a papal agency founded to provide humanitarian and pastoral support to the Eastern Christian churches. His presentation, entitled, “Church and Churches: The Spread of Christianity from Jerusalem,” will explore how Christianity went from being a small group of Aramaic-speaking Jews in Jerusalem to being the world’s most diverse, populous, and widespread religion.

The Hill Museum & Manuscript Library has been digitizing the manuscript collections of three Christian communities in Aleppo, Syria, including both the Syriac Orthodox and Syriac Catholic Archdioceses. Recently, an agreement was made to digitize the most precious manuscript treasure of one of these communities: a 500 year-old copy of the 12th century Chronicle of Michael the Great.

Written in the 12th century, the Chronicle contains precious information about the rise of Islam, the Crusades and other major events in the life of the Church of Edessa (now the city of Urfa in southeast Turkey), the historic center of Syriac Christianity. The manuscript in Aleppo, copied about 500 years ago, is the only complete surviving manuscript of the Chronicle.

The manuscript was kept in Edessa until 1923, when persecution of the Christians led to the emigration of the Syriac Orthodox community, which fled to Aleppo with little but their manuscripts. Because the Chronicle contained their history, they regarded it as their greatest treasure.

Watch for further information about this intriguing manuscript in the next Illuminations this fall.

This month, HMML will begin a new manuscript digitization project at the Serbian Orthodox Diocesan Library in Szentendre, Hungary. A respected enclave of Orthodoxy in predominantly Catholic Hungary, Serbs first settled Hungary in large numbers following their defeat by the Turks at the Battle of Kosovo in 1389.

The 27,000 volume-library has a manuscript collection of 100 to 125 codices collected from the libraries of the Monastery of Grabovac, from Bishops Dionosije Popovic and Arsenije Stojkovic and the parish of Szentendre. The manuscripts are mainly in Serbian, Old Church Slavonic and Church Slavonic, with some in Greek. The oldest manuscripts date from the 13th and 14th centuries, while the majority are from the 16th through 18th centuries.

HMML's access to manuscripts belonging to the Serbian Othodox Diocesan Library was made possible by our principal partner in the Indian project, Hungarian scholar Dr. István Perczel, with permission from Szentendre's Bishop Vladika Lukian, and the Library's director, Mr. Koszta Vukovics. Financial support for the project is from the German Research Foundation, with cooperation from the University of Tübingen in Germany.

While managing the US Army and Air Force Exchange Service in Asmara, Ethiopia (1971-1973), Jerry Olson purchased a variety of baskets, rugs, Bibles and scrolls from many of the local citizens. Enjoying both the people and the bartering process, Jerry recalls the frequent presence of people waiting for him at the end of his workday and even exchanging an old sport coat for two bound manuscripts.

Thirty-five years after his purchase and with the assistance of his brother and sister-in-law, Duane and Joan Olson, Jerry generously donated four pieces of his collection to the Hill Museum & Manuscript Library (HMML) in August 2008. These pieces, including two scrolls of prayers, one bound ‘Gospel of John’ and one bound hymnal, are treasured additions to HMML’s Ethiopian Study Center.
 

COLLEGEVILLE, Minn. – The Rev. Columba Stewart, OSB, executive director of the Hill Museum & Manuscript Library (HMML), announced that HMML has met a $450,000 challenge grant from The National Endowment for the Humanities by raising $1.8 million in contributions and pledges for its Malta Study Center. The NEH awarded the 4:1 challenge grant in January 2004, requiring HMML to raise the matching funds in four year’s time. The 2.25 million-dollar endowment made possible by this NEH-challenge grant will establish a permanent curator and fund a full complement of activities including digital copying/microfilming, cataloguing, manuscript preservation, book acquisition, research fellowships and academic conferences.

Since it was established in 1973 in collaboration with the Honorary Consul General of Malta-St. Paul, Joseph S. Micallef, K.M., the Malta Study Center has served national and international researchers and students of the history of Western Europe, the Mediterranean and the island of Malta. The mission of the Center is to preserve and make accessible archival materials related to the history of the island of Malta and the Knights of Malta.

“The Malta Study Center has become an essential resource for graduate dissertations, scholarly monographs, and articles published in prominent and widely read publications such as National Geographic and Aramic World,” Stewart said. “The Center, with its expansive collection equal to none in the world, and its internationally- recognized curator, Theresa Vann, Ph.D., has confirmed its role as a cross-cultural resource of history’s development.”

According to Vann, HMML’s Malta Study Center is the only location outside of Malta where scholars have access to the archives of the Knights of Malta, as well as other major archival treasures of this island-nation, all under one roof. “The gathering of these materials at HMML makes research even more convenient than research in the various archives in Malta, where much of the material is either unavailable to scholars or available only on a limited basis.” Vann continued “These are the only sources for the complete central archives of an international military religious order, the Order of the Hospital, many crusader sources, printed music and unique inquisition records. The collections paint a complete picture of a complex, multi-cultural Mediterranean society and significantly contribute to our greater understanding and knowledge of the world’s major religious cultures. Many of these documents would have been lost had HMML had not begun systematic microfilming, because the Maltese climate is unforgiving to fragile manuscripts. HMML also assists in educating Maltese library and archival professionals in preserving, cataloguing and making their history accessible on-site.”

For more information about HMML’s Malta Study Center, please contact Theresa Vann, director of the Malta Study center 320-363-3993, or by e-mail at tvann@csbsju.edu. For further information about the Hill Museum & Manuscript Library or Vivarium, visit www.hmml.org.