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>> Nathan Dorn: Hi everyone, welcome to the Library of Congress. My name is Nathan Dorn; I'm the curator of the rare books collection of the Law Library of Congress. What I thought we'd do today is to present a few items that the library acquired for the rare books collection in the last year or so. The items I'm about to share with you, we'll talk about 5 items, are just a few of the many items that we acquired in that time but they are some of the ones that really stand out so I'm excited to talk about them with you. One of the treasures of the Law Library is its collection of historic Russian legal works. The first acquisition I want to share with you is a very exciting addition to that collection. It is the first edition of the Sobornoye Ulozhenie or the Ulozhenie of 1649. The Ulozhenie was a compilation of the laws that were in effect in Russia in the middle of the 17th Century. It was also, depending on how you count it, the second law book to be printed in Russia. In the time leading up to its creation, Russian society was experiencing major domestic upheaval. The Ulozhenie was a response to that generally but it was commissioned specifically in reaction to rioting that took place in Moscow and a dozen other towns which began in June of 1648. On July 17th, Sir Alexei Mikhailovich set up a five-man commission headed by Prince Nikita Odoevskii to codify the law. The commission created a draft to the document in a remarkably short period of time between July of 1648 and January 1649. The commission included laws from a variety of sources. The exact source of each of the 967 articles has been a subject of debate among researchers from the time of its creation. Major sources were Byzantine law, especially as it was channeled through the medieval [inaudible] statute of 1588 and the Sudebnik of 1550, which was a code of law from the time of Ivan IV. The commission also drew many articles from Russian practice dating after the Sudebnik. It's written in Old Church Slavonic, which was the literary language of the time and it's printed in a Cyrillic script. Almost immediately, it became the most important legal text in Russia, a status it kept for nearly 200 years. The first edition, printed in early 1649, had three variant printings. The Law Library owns a copy of the second and third variants of that edition, but until this acquisition, the library has not owned a copy of the first variant. The library's copy is bound in brown boar skin over wooden boards. The boards are beveled and they retain traces of the clasps. There's a variety of [inaudible] shaped center panel with a roundel and an eagle. This item is a manuscript recording a real estate contract from 17th century Nantucket. Maybe real estate deals are not automatically fascinating but I hope you'll agree with me that this one is an exciting find. The Law Library's rare books collection is, in principle, a collection of books but we also have the good fortune from time to time of acquiring unique documents things, that we judge for one reason or another will enrich the collection. Usually these are documents that were created by major historical figures who began as attorneys but sometimes we stretch this category to make sure we keep the collection growing in ways that represent the broad range of voices from the past. That's the case with this document; this single piece of paper records the sale of a piece of land called Nashowamoiasuk or Neck Point of the Edgartown Great Pond. The seller is called Mr. Harrie, Indian of Nantucket, and the buyer is John Coffin. What's really astonishing is the identity of the two witnesses that signed the document; they are Nathaniel and Mary Starbuck. You can see here, it's signed on the [inaudible] "Signed, Sealed and delivered in presence of Mary Starbuck, Nathaniel Starbuck". The Mary Starbuck, whose name appears here, is Mary Coffin Starbuck, a woman who was a major figure in early colonial Nantucket. Mary Coffin Starbuck lived from 1646-1717. When she and her husband arrived on the island, they opened a general store and trading post. Mary took on the management of the company. Her husband could neither read nor write so all the records of the store, some of which have been preserved, were in her hand. In time, the store thrived and Mary came to exercise so much influence over her community that when ministers visited seeking to make converts on the island; they sought her out thinking that if she were to adopt their denomination most of the community would follow. When Mary finally became a Quaker, she established a Quaker meeting house in her home and became the first Quaker minister on the island. Her conversion and influence is credited with helping to make Quakerism predominant on the island in the 18th Century. She was also considered a sort of judge by the people in Nantucket. Locals called her home the Parliament House because of the amount of public business that was transacted there. Very few documents remain that are in her hand. The most important of these is an account book that she kept in the Starbuck family store. That account book is now in the library of the Nantucket Historical Association. Like the Starbuck account book, this document is also interesting for the evidence it preserves of interactions between English settlers and the Wampanoag people of Nantucket at the end of the 17th Century, a time at which the population of Nantucket was still overwhelmingly Native American. Another unique document that the Law Library recently acquired is this manuscript copy of Article 9 of the Treaty of Ghent in the Hand of Henry Clay. The treaty, which was signed on December 24th 1814, brought an end to the War of 1812. In fact, hostilities continued after the treaty signing but this was in part due to geography. The treaty was negotiated and signed in the city of Ghent, which was then in the United Provinces, the Netherlands, and is now in northwest Belgium. The diplomatic commission from the United States and United Kingdom met there during the second half of 1814 to resolve the issues that led to the conflict. It took some weeks to send the signed treaty to Washington D.C. where the Senate passed a resolution of ratification of the treaty on February 16th 1815. The commission that represented the United States included John Quincy Adams, Albert Gallatin, James Bayard, Jonathan Russell and Henry Clay. Clay represented Kentucky in Congress and echoed the broad support for the war found among people in the western states. Many people across the west held Britain responsible for ongoing conflicts with Native Americans and accused the British of inciting Native Americans to aggression and resistance toward American interests. At the start of the negotiations, the two sides were in deep disagreement over that issue. The British Commission began the negotiations by insisting that peace between the United States and the Native Americans who were involved in the conflict had to be negotiated as part of the treaty. The American position was that the United States had complete sovereignty over its territory and over the Native Americans that occupied it. It was up to the United States and the tribes to make peace between themselves if peace was  going to be had. After three months of negotiations, the British Commission gave ground and proposed that each side reciprocally agreed to make peace with the Native American tribes on its own, restoring them to their status before the war began. This language became the basis of Article 9 of the treaty. It didn't acknowledge American sovereignty over the Indians but it didn't deny it either. The practical result of Article 9 included the British withdrawal from any direct interference with Native American conflicts with the United States. This changed the balance of power between Native Americans in the old Northwest and U.S. Americans decisively in favor of the United States. In this document, Clay writes out the text of Article 9 of the treaty. It seems that it was then included in a package of materials that the American Commission sent to William H. Crawford, the United States Ambassador to France. President Madison relied on him during the war as a central point of contact for information related to the treaty negotiations and the progress of Britain's war with France. Subsequently, the document was in the possession of Crawford's descendants. I want to change directions a little bit with this next item. The Law Library has a growing collection of medieval manuscripts. This next item is a really beautiful addition to that collection. It is an extremely rare manuscript of the Lectura of Johannes de Imola on the Decretales of Gregory IX, made in Italy possibly in Padua between the years 1431 and 1447. The Decretales of Gregory IX, also known as the Liber extravantium decretalium or the Liber extra, was finished in the year 1234. It occupies a central place in the history of the canon law of the Catholic Church. Compiled by Raymond of Peñafort, a professor of canon law in Barcelona and Bologna, the liber extra brought together in a single work numerous papal orders that weren't included in the earlier authoritative work of canon law, Gratian's decretum, which was created about 80 years earlier. The Liber extra remained a principal source of law from that time until the year 1917 when the Catholic Church adopted a new code of canon law. Johannes de Imola's commentary on the liber extra is one of many commentaries on that work that circulated in the late middle ages. Johannes de Imola was a doctor of "both laws," an expression that refers to the two branches of the learned law -- civil law and canon law. He taught in a variety of universities in Italy, although principally in Padua and Bologna where he originally obtained his doctorate in 1397. He died in Bologna in 1436. This manuscript contains commentary on the second part of the liber extra, which covers judicial procedure. It's one of only three known manuscript copies of the text and although it appeared in early print editions, no modern critical edition of the text yet exists. The manuscript is in an 18th Century modeled calf binding. It's adorned by hundreds of painted initials, including 18 large illustrated initials, many marginal annotations, and simple doodle drawings throughout. The first page of the text has this beautiful illustration. It depicts St James seated on a throne. At his feet, are three men at prayer. He holds a book in one hand and a walking staff, probably a pilgrim staff in the other. St James is the patron saint of pilgrims. The figure of a pilgrim likewise appears in the initial below. One of the genres of literature that the Law Library acquires is historical works on legal education. This next item, the Memoriale Institutionum Juris by Johannes Buno is a very interesting example of that literature. Johannes Buno was born in 1617 in the town of Frankenberg in Hesse, Germany. He was a theologian, a secondary school instructor, and a minister. In his published works, he introduced what he called the [inaudible] or the emblematic teaching method, which was a way of using images and short text which together are called emblemata to help students memorize their lessons. Buno first published on the use of emblemata for teaching in 1651 in a book that taught Latin grammar through fables and pictures. The way he used emblemata was to create an image that captured, often in an unexpected or comical way, some part of the meaning of a passage in the text he is teaching. This was based on a well-known strategy for memorization. The idea was, that by associating the ideas that you're trying to memorize with strange or shocking images, you'll be more likely to remember them. It's a strategy that goes back to antiquity but is often traced through the works of the Renaissance philosopher and magician Giordano Bruno, whose work helped to popularize the "Ars Memorativa" or the "Art of Memory". Bruno's innovation was to apply the strategy to memorizing canonical textbooks passage by passage. Over the course of his life, Bruno created a number of works that related to the law. In three books in particular, he covered the contents of the major works of Roman law. This book, "The Memoriale Institutionum Juris" covers the contents of Justinian's Institutes, which was used as an introduction to Roman law. Let's see how it works. I chose an image from one of the fold-outs in the book. Let's look at this image. It's one of the pictures Buno presents from Book 3 of the Institutes. It's labeled with Number 8 and has the word "habit" printed next to it. For each illustration, Buno gives us an explanation on a nearby page in a column which he entitled [inaudible] or "explanation of the images". For this image, he explains that the word habit should make us think of the hats that you see in the image. He says [inaudible] which means "the manner of dress of freed men or formerly enslaved people" was once the hat called the pileus. Now in the Roman Empire, a pileus was a hat that was a sign of a freed man's freedom. It showed a freed man status as a Roman citizen. Still freed men were not entirely independent. They were counted as part of their enslaver's household. The enslaver could even, under certain circumstances, inherit the freed man's property. Buno uses this image to remind us of the chapter in the Institutes about the laws of inheritance relating to freed men. It shows the son of a freed man reaching out and holding his father's pileus, which represents the way a freed man's heir inherits both his father's freedom and his wealth. But it also shows the enslaver wearing the freed man's pileus to remind us that there are circumstances where an enslaver can also inherit the freed man's wealth. This is a heavy topic but Buno's book is both beautiful and an interesting approach to legal education. I hope you enjoyed this presentation. Remember that the Law Library is here to serve your information needs during the pandemic and afterwards. We hope to hear from you. Thank you very much.
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