In the early 1970s, Father Urban Steiner, a member of Saint John's Abbey in Collegeville, Minnesota, purchased various medieval manuscripts while he was microfilming monastic archives in Spain for the Hill Museum & Manuscript Library. Many of the medieval documents relate to Spanish Benedictine monasteries whose archives had been lost or destroyed when they were suppressed during the Carlist wars in 1835. He collected other historical items pertaining to Spanish Benedictine monasticism and acquired nineteenth-century hand-written books. All these materials pertain to Spain and its possessions in the New World up to the 19th century.
Steiner deposited his purchases in the Special Collections vaults in St. John's Alcuin Library for safekeeping. After Father Urban died in an accident, these documents were subsequently forgotten. The collection was rediscovered in July of 1994, when Dr. George Greenia and Dr. Theresa Vann were invited to tour the Special Collections vault as part of the Summer Apprenticeship in Archival Skills for Medieval and Renaissance Studies.
The Steiner Collection was exhibited at the Hill Museum & Manuscript Library in the Fall of 1994. In the summer of 1995 it was the focus of an extensive international research effort funded by a grant from the Program for Cultural Cooperation between Spain's Ministry of Culture and United States' Universities. The research team was headed by George Greenia (College of William & Mary), with the collaboration of Vincent Barletta (UCLA), Francisco J. Hernández (Carleton University, Ottawa) and Theresa Vann (HMML). Additional help came from Summer Apprenticeship students from the College of William & Mary, The College of Saint Benedict\Saint John's University, UCLA, UC Riverside, Duke University, University of Michigan and Bucknell University.
Not only does the Steiner Collection restore a lost part of Benedictine history; it also contains materials that illuminate many different aspects of Spanish and Colonial Spanish-American history, and it is a valuable representative collection of original archival materials.
The Steiner collection consists of more than 50 items and contains loose parchment
charters, parchment rolls, bound paper and parchment codices from the fourteenth through
the nineteenth century. The physical appearance of the items is of as much historical
interest as their contents; three parchment sheets have been reused as book covers, and
some of the codices are fine examples of post-medieval bookbinding. The contents of the
collection include a Nativity play, an Islamic law code, private wills, sales, court
cases, a formulary from an episcopal chancery, and private notebooks. Most of the
materials originated in northeast Spain, including Barcelona, Valencia, and Catalonia. A
small portion of the collection comes from Toledo. Four additional French parchment
notarial registers from the 12th and 13th centuries are not included in this checklist,
and the Alcuin Library of St. John's University holds many additional medieval
manuscripts. The Steiner Collection documents detailed below are written in Latin,
Castilian, Catalan, or Portuguese.
The Steiner Collection of leaves and codices is housed in the Alcuin Library of St.
John's University, Collegeville, MN. Please contact the Hill Library for more information
and for permission to reproduce either images or transcriptions.
Hill Museum & Manuscript Library: The Steiner Collection | Copyright 2000 by HMML
URL: http://www.csbsju.edu/hmml/steiner/steiner.html
maintained by HMML | Last Revised
February 28, 2007