Bijoux Connoisseurship, Masonic Virtue, Bibliothèques de Travail and other “Radical” Motivations for Owning Medieval Books in the American South, 1819 to ca. 1881

Owning medieval and Renaissance manuscripts was exceptionally rare in the American South before ca. 1881, and many reasons explain such esoteric connoisseurship: Freemasonry, celebrity provenance, aristocratic pretensions, academic bibliothèques de travail, Catholic sentimentality, keepsake culture, neo-Gothic architecture and, in one instance, murder. Contextualizing early manuscript ownership more broadly, Dr. Gwara's illustrated lecture will explore the motivations of a dozen relatively unknown American bibliophiles

Dr. Scott Gwara has taught English literature at the University of South Carolina for 31 years. He has authored six books and sixty articles on Old English literature, medieval Latin learning and the historical connoisseurship of pre-modern manuscripts. His most recent monograph, entitled Fragmentology and the Medieval Book: Describing, Analyzing and Interpreting Manuscript Fragments, will be published this year by ARC Humanities Press. Scott is also currently completing a volume on the history of medieval and Renaissance manuscripts in North America. Between 2009 and 2023 Scott raised more than $300,000 to establish a "Teaching Collection of Early Manuscripts" at his university.