by The Knights of Columbus Vatican Film Library—part of Special Collections in the Saint Louis University Libraries—announces the opening of an exhibition of manuscripts from South, East, and Southeast Asia, “The East in Script and Print: Manuscripts in Asia from the Fifteenth to the Nineteenth Centuries.”
Curated by Ben Halliburton, Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies research assistant in the Vatican Film Library and doctoral student in the Department of History of Saint Louis University, this exhibition focuses on the different cultures and practices involving pre-modern manuscripts outside the Christian and Arabic worlds. It is presented in two cases, divided into texts from the Indosphere and the Sinosphere. All are drawn from the VFL’s teaching collection of medieval and early modern manuscripts, some on display for the first time ever.
Especially noteworthy, among the examples from the exhibit, are a leaf from a nineteenth-century manuscript of the Bhagavadgita written with black, red, and gold lettering and two eighteenth-century manuscripts from the Indian subcontinent written on palm leaves. Additionally, in keeping with the long history of printmaking in Asia since its invention in China around the third century AD, there are several leaves taken out of printed texts from the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, including a children’s reference guide from Kansei-era Japan.
The exhibition is free and open to the public and will be on display Monday through Friday from 9:00 am to 5:00 pm, through 1 August 2016 in the Vatican Film Library of Pius XII Memorial Library (Room 105). For further information, contact Susan L’Engle, Assistant Director of the Vatican Film Library, at 314-977-3084, lengles@slu.edu.
