Leaf from a book of hours printed circa 1500 by Gilles and Germain Hardouyn in Paris. Prayer books were widely owned and in demand during this period, a demand that influenced early book design and the course of printing as an industry.
Folio 46 recto of the Nuremberg Chronicle (1493), depicting an English city. The colorfully-illustrated Chronicle was popular in its day and printed in both Latin and German.
Welcome to Medieval Portland!
Students in Professor Anne McClanan’s Medieval Portland Senior Capstone present the Summer 2023 Library exhibit, featuring 14th- and 15th-century manuscripts and incunabula from PSU Library Special Collections, and reproductions of manuscripts and printed books from Reed College Library Special Collections.
Many of these pages are some of the earliest to be printed in Europe, as the use of printing presses made mass production of books possible and spurred the rise of a new industry.
Capstone students curated the exhibit and contributed the captions and poster text as part of their final projects, which also included contributions to the publicly accessible Medieval Portland database, a digital repository of research on medieval and early modern artifacts held in Portland-area collections.
Brent Schauer, photographer and co-author of “Portland State: A History in Pictures,” in Special Collections during the 1970s, with the antiphonal page on the wall in the background.
One of the PSU items featured is a large antiphonal manuscript, super-sized to be read from a distance by a choir. This oversized leaf has hung in Special Collections’ reading room since before the Library Addition in 1989. In the exhibit, you can see that it is framed so that you can view both sides of the leaf!
The Medieval Portland Capstone exhibit will be on display throughout the summer term in the first floor elevator lobby, Portland State University Library.