We are pleased to report that the March-April issue of Harvard Magazine draws on two articles recently published in the Harvard Library Bulletin.
The Treasure column, “Orderly Living,” draws on Professor Jeffrey Hamburger’s study of Houghton Library MS Typ 590 in HLB 21:1-2 (2010, published in July 2011). Hamburger’s essay on a previously unpublished Regimen mensis or regime of the months, a miniature medical manual offering advice over the course of the calendar, examines a manuscript whose interest is as much textual as it is visual. The Latin hexameters that provide the backbone of this text turn out to be linked to an early vernacular medical regime. The calendar is illustrated, as was often the case with such monthly regimes, with small circles illustrating the signs of the Zodiac against vibrant red and blue backgrounds. This double issue of the Harvard Library Bulletin, edited by Hamburger, is entitled “Piecing Together the Picture: Fragments of German and Netherland Manuscripts in Houghton Library” and reports on the work of an international group of scholars and their efforts to link material in Houghton Library with related manuscripts in other collections.
The College Pump column, “Cold Meets Flame,” draws on Paul M. Wright’s work on a little known portrait by Kahlil Gibran of Harvard President Charles W. Eliot in HLB 21: 3 (2010, published in June 2011). While trying to establish himself as a designer, illustrator, painter, and poet, the twenty-seven-year-old Gibran conceived of several series of portraits of “great men.” His request to draw the seventy-six-year-old and recently retired president of Harvard was not surprising: after his forty-year tenure as president, Eliot was the most famous educator of his era, having created the modern Harvard and, by extension, a model for the modern research university. The resulting portrait was published for the first time in this issue of HLB.
[Thanks to William Stoneman, Florence Fearrington Librarian of Houghton Library, for contributing this post.]