Among the 200,000 items in Stanford’s Special Collections, a few were made for the limelight. There’s a seminal work by Copernicus, who proposed that the Earth revolves around the sun, that is valued at $2.5 million; a handwritten draft of Cannery Row, by John Steinbeck, Class of 1923; a receipt for grain from the year 2056 BCE, carved into a piece of hardened clay the size of a postage stamp.
But just offstage, there is an artifact that Benjamin Albritton, the university’s rare books curator, calls his favorite. It might not inspire awe at first glance. It’s been doodled on and cut up, a manuscript not outrageously old, expensive, or rare. Yet this 15th-century book has Albritton’s academic heart. “It tells a story,” he says. “We like things that are scruffy, that have been used.” In his eyes, this small, mangled manuscript is emblematic of Special Collections and its purpose.
It’s a handwritten copy of Bucolics, Georgics, and The Aeneid: an anthology of the best-known works of the celebrated Roman poet Virgil. The Aeneid, his epic, tells the mythic story of the founding of Rome and became a cornerstone of Roman identity, just as Homer’s Iliad had for ancient Greek society. Now, Albritton is piecing together details about the manuscript’s 600-year journey from Italy. He and his colleagues regularly work to uncover the provenance of books, since research insights can come not only from the words on the pages but also from their trails of use. “We’re a young university for collecting, and we didn’t get into medieval collecting really heavily until the last couple of decades,” Albritton says. “One of the reasons I love this book is precisely because it’s been in the Stanford orbit for so long.”
While much of the Virgil manuscript’s journey to Stanford is still a mystery, the past 130 years are now clear. For that, Albritton says, we can thank a railroad worker turned student, an influential professor, and a ruptured appendix.
The student
Through handwritten letters also housed in Special Collections, Albritton has traced the book’s first brush with Stanford to 1903 in Alta, Calif., a small mountain town in the Sierras with more redwoods than residents. More specifically, he tracked it to the hands of Joseph Jarnick, Class of 1900, MA ’01, one of the earliest nontraditional students at Stanford.
Jarnick was working on the Northern Pacific Railroad as a clerk when, at 33 years old, he applied to become one of Stanford’s “specials”—mature students who didn’t meet the typical entry requirements. “[H]e had utilized his spare time in studying Latin, mathematics, and other subjects,” reads a description of Jarnick in the autobiography of Henry Rushton Fairclough, his future classics professor and a founder of Stanford’s classics department.
Jarnick made it through a trial year, working as a house cleaner for a professor to cover his board, and went on to earn a bachelor’s and a master’s in Latin. “[Jarnick] proved himself one of the best Latin students we have ever had,” Fairclough wrote. “He loved his studies, and found his chief delight in haunting the University Library and delving among its books.” After graduating, Jarnick became a classics teacher at the Agassiz Hall School for Boys in Alta—a school started by William Wightman Price, Class of 1897, MA ’99.
In September of 1903, Jarnick sent a letter to Fairclough. “I was able to purchase from Germany a Virgil M.S. [manuscript] of the fifteenth century,” Jarnick wrote. “It’s a parchment M.S., mutilated somewhat to be sure but not to a very great extent.”
Says Albritton: “You can imagine [him] saying, ‘Well, what can I get with the amount of money that I have?’ and getting really the only thing that he could afford.”
The professor
Jarnick owned the manuscript for just three years. On November 5, 1906, when he was 44, his appendix ruptured and, too far away from a hospital, he died.
On his deathbed, Jarnick asked that his prized manuscript be sent to his former professor. “As the volume had only a paper cover, I had it bound appropriately in vellum,” Fairclough wrote, “and now I treasure it as the most precious book that I possess.” Fairclough was, at the time, one of the world’s preeminent Virgil scholars. He later translated the official edition of Virgil’s Bucolics, Georgics, and The Aeneid still used in the Loeb Classical Library, a series of essential Greek and Latin literary masterpieces.
When tourism to Italy began to rise in the 18th century, Italians cut out the ornate painted letters from their books and sold them as souvenirs to tourists.
“Virgil is one of the most important authors of antiquity,” says Robert Pogue Harrison, an emeritus professor of French and Italian. He points to the Great Seal on the back of the U.S. one-dollar bill, where there are two quotes from Bucolics, Georgics, and The Aeneid: “Annuit cœptis” and “Novus ordo seclorum,” which roughly translate to “He favors our undertakings” and “New order of the ages.” “These works have a certain charisma,” Harrison says. For readers not already drawn to Virgil or other classical authors, manuscripts with rich backstories can serve as gateways to interest. “I think the only way to really get students intrigued,” he says, “is the spirit that’s exuded by the artifact.”
After Fairclough died in 1938, the book was donated to Stanford. While it’s not the most widely prized copy of Virgil’s poems, it is a valuable window into history—and one of the first medieval manuscripts acquired by Stanford Libraries. “There’s no way to get back to what Virgil actually wrote, because there’s no autographed manuscript of his works, really,” says Albritton. “All we’re doing is looking at copies over and over again.” The students and faculty who visit Special Collections to flip through the pages of Albritton’s favorite book can read Virgil exactly as Italians read it 600 years ago.
The book
Some owners of private collections want their books fully restored, so that they look just like they did when they were created. That’s not the goal at Stanford, says Richenda Brim, the associate director for preservation at Stanford Libraries. At the Conservation Lab, which she oversees, the team works to preserve and document evidence of use while making the artifact strong enough to withstand handling by faculty and students.
The content of these artifacts is valuable in itself. Professors of history and of religious studies flock to the university’s oldest copies of the Nuremberg Chronicle, a large, illustrated world encyclopedia first printed in 1493. (Stanford holds two copies printed that year.) The Mexican American Legal Defense Fund papers, among Stanford’s newer collections, have been referenced in more than 1,000 doctoral dissertations and continue to spark new PhDs because of the view they provide into the labor movement in California.
But, Brim says, every doodle and stain also has potential research value. “We are interested, usually, in the whole life of the book,” she says. “You never know when you’re going to be removing something from the book that’s a key piece of its history.” Brim recalls a peeling cover that once revealed an entirely separate historical document. At a book preservation conference, a speaker described how seed fragments found in the binding of a book changed historians’ understanding of its provenance.
When Jarnick purchased the Virgil manuscript, it was a carcass. Its cover was falling apart, the first page was missing, and throughout, pages were half cut off or cut into with large holes missing.
The holes, Albritton says, are where colorful, illuminated initials used to be. “It was a way to make money.” When tourism to Italy began to rise in the 18th century, he says, Italians cut out the ornate painted letters from their books and sold them as souvenirs to tourists.
“If you kind of go through here,” Albritton says, turning the pages of the book and stopping at a small drawing of a face in the margin, likely made by a reader centuries ago, “every now and then you find somebody just playing around.” Since its arrival, the book has been used heavily by classes and researchers in classics, medieval studies, history, and English, in part due to the history of use evident in its pages.
Not long after Albritton first encountered the Virgil manuscript in 2019, shortly after he joined the university, the rare books team selected it to be digitized. Overall, Special Collections has digitized some 15,000 items, offering researchers and the public the ability to closely inspect entire works online. As a team went through the book, making a high-resolution scan of each page, Albritton was drawn to the white space behind the words, some of which showed barely perceptible hints of other writing. Using an analysis technique involving UV light, Albritton found a palimpsest: “It’s when they’ve taken a piece of vellum, scraped all of the ink off, and then reused it,” he says.
The vellum pages—a type of parchment made from calfskin, kidskin, or lambskin—had originally been used as court documents in Ferrara, Italy. Though Stanford Libraries still lists the manuscript’s imprint in Florence, about 90 miles away from Ferrara, Albritton is optimistic that he’ll soon be able to correct that.
Fairclough’s rebinding of the cover might have erased evidence that could have been used to study the book more thoroughly, but that, too, is part of the story that makes the book Albritton’s favorite. “History is being captured here,” he says, “which hopefully sets Stanford up as a research hub for decades to come, generations to come.”
Kali Shiloh is a staff writer at Stanford. Email her at kshiloh@stanford.edu.
