Posted by vrcvanderbilt on Friday, August 10, 2018 in Conferences, HART, Lectures, News, Vanderbilt University, VRC.

Nashville, home to the United Methodist Publishing House, Thomas Nelson, the Southern Baptists’ Lifeway Christian Stores, and Gideons International (of the ubiquitous Gideon Bibles), is a world center of religious publishing, primarily for mainline Protestants and evangelical Christians. The printing and distribution of the Bible being a major industry, it is not surprising that the city has been called both the Buckle of the Bible Belt and the Protestant Vatican.

Elizabeth Moodey, associate professor of history of art, presented a paper in late June at Saint Louis University’s annual symposium on Medieval and Renaissance Studies. Her paper—The Buckle of the Bible Belt: Artifacts of Southern Culture and the History of the Bible at Vanderbilt—was delivered in the session entitled “Deep into the Archives: Manuscripts in Lesser-Known American Collections.”

In her talk Moodey considered donations to the library of Nashville’s Vanderbilt University by Nettie Hale Rand and Samuel Fleming, both graduates of Vanderbilt.  Rand’s collection of more than 300 fine examples of printing and binding also included a manuscript book of hours dated 1480, made for an owner in Reims (named Ponset) who is pictured in prayer before Saint Barbara.  Fleming gave the university a large number of 13^th-century French manuscript Bible leaves of the type so essential for theology students in Paris, and left funds for the library’s Southern Civilization Collection.

Since the mid-2000s, Fleming’s gift has supported the acquisition of handmade books by contemporary Southern artists. A recent exhibition brought together these two strains of the library’s developing collection, juxtaposing medieval and contemporary artifacts according to their subjects—travel, medicine, music, and of course, the Bible.  “The groupings suggest that contemporary book artists may share some of the concerns and techniques of their medieval predecessors,” said Moodey, “but that the active choice of making a book by hand has led the craft into a more personal, even idiosyncratic approach.”

She also noted that the Book of Hours in Vanderbilt’s Special Collections was the subject of an outstanding honors thesis by Christine Williams in 2012. The manuscript is known as the Ponset Hours, so named for the identified owner pictured in the final illumination, the Saint Barbara illumination.

*Prayer to Saint Barbara, BX 2080 c.37 1480 fol. 113.(courtesy of Vanderbilt’s Special Collections)