On the 4th of October in 1531 a group of twelve artisans in Siena founded the Congrega dei Rozzi, a company devoted to writing and producing popular theater. The original founders included a sword maker, two blacksmiths, a papermaker, painters, a woodcarver, a saddler, a weaver, and a trumpeter. Throughout the 16th century, only members of the lesser guilds were admitted to the group, which eventually included wool workers, carpenters, cobblers, potters, fishmongers, clock makers, booksellers, printers, hosiers, and barbers. The name (rozzi means simpletons) was chosen to emphasize the popular and anti-academic character of their theater, and they called themselves a congrega (flock) instead of an accademia for the same reason. When a member was initiated into the Rozzi, he adopted a pseudonym that mocked a personal characteristic (Serious, Skinny, Blunderer, Smoky, Sad-sack).

The plays of the Rozzi are not only in the vernacular rather than Latin, they are mostly in the Sienese dialect. Based on the everyday life and cares of simple people, they are devoid of any religious or moral preoccupations. All of them are comedies, set for the most part in the countryside, with protagonists who are farmers or other rustics, usually depicted as buffoons. Their comic force is largely straightforward slapstick, the comedy not infrequently crude or obscene.

The plays were performed only on feast days, an explicit requirement of the group's statutes designed to insure that none of the members lost time or money from their participation. The statutes also insist on "twofold poverty, one of ingenuity, the other of means." But this profession of modesty does not prevent the comedians from continual boasting about their own cleverness and comedic genius. They were in fact so convinced of their own self sufficiency that most of the statutes were designed to prevent infiltration into the group by "anyone important, or a merchant, or who can write Latin." The group even adopted a prohibition against anyone who was not a member reciting one of their plays, and prohibited members from reciting any drama that was not by a member.

The plays were not only anti-academic, they were also anti-official and as such fell under suspicion at various times during the 16th century, especially during wars and occupations. The group was officially banned in the years 1535-44, 1552-61, and 1568-1603, after which the group was co-opted into a state sanctioned Accademia, and began to produce cultivated, pastoral elegies.

The comedies of the Rozzi constitute the earliest, the most extensive, and the most influential popular theater of the Italian Renaissance. One need only recall the rustic's play-within-a-play in A Midsummer Night's Dream to appreciate the extent of their influence outside Italy. The plays, however, were produced only for the members, and the printing of them, often undertaken by members of the group, was unsophisticated and of limited circulation. The volumes are short, the format small, the paper mediocre, the printing inelegant--though not entirely lacking in charm. Few of them survive in more than a handful of copies, and with the exception of four or five plays which were later included in anthologies, almost none of them has been reprinted since the Renaissance.

The Beinecke's acquisition this year of a collection of 136 printed editions of the Rozzi comedies makes a major addition not only to Yale's already outstanding holdings in Italian drama, but to the holdings of such material in North America, for fewer than two dozen of the editions in the collection are recorded in American libraries, and usually only in a single copy.

This handsome copy of Father Fossati's account of the Italian participation in the Thirty Years War, bound in gold-tooled limp vellum and with gilt and gauffered edges, poses an intriguing bibliographic and historical problem. All the copies of the book known so far bear 1640 as an imprint date. The dedicatory letter to Don Caspar de Guzman, Conte de Olivares and Duca di S. Lucar, the commander in chief of the armies of Philip IV, is dated 28 December 1639. The beauty of the volume, the remarkable freshness of the printing, and the insertion of a long manuscript note in Spanish between pages 254 and 255, criticizing the conduct of the Spanish generals during the siege of Casale, point to the possibility that this was the copy sent to the Count-Duke for comments.

Dryden was the principal author of these miscellanies (73 poems), but Jacob Tonson was chiefly responsible for soliciting the verse. All the most important poets of the period are represented. These volumes (four bound in three) belonged to Alexander Pope and bear his annotations on many pages.

The first edition of this collection of forty-four speeches that, it is claimed, were really made. Few actual speeches, other than sermons and academic lectures, are otherwise preserved in German from this time. The book has an introduction about the art of rhetoric as differentiated from other modes of literary expression.

The Sanson family was the leading French dynasty of cartographers in the 17th century. Nicolas Sanson (1600-67) was succeeded by his sons Guillaume and Adrien. Their nephew Pierre Moullart-Sanson bought the map business from the former in 1694 and in 1704, after Guillaume's death, received a royal privilege to continue to publish the family maps. This reprint by Moullart-Sanson of the Introduction to Geography, generally attributed to Nicolas, is illustrated with 39 maps and plates, many in outline color. Of further interest is that the volume is dedicated to Jean-Paul Bignon, Abbot of Saint-Quentin, an influential member of the French Academy and the nephew of the then secretary of state Pontchartrain, whose favors Moullart-Sanson may have been courting at the time. The atlas is, in any event, unknown to all bibliographers.

An unpublished and hitherto unknown manuscript by Jane Austen's older brother, aged twenty. Edward Austen was befriended and adopted as their heir by his wealthy but childless cousins Thomas and Catherine Knight; in turn he later provided for his sisters Jane and Cassandra at Chawton House, Hampshire, after the death of the Knights in 1812.

This contemporary account of events in France during the Revolution was written by a German physician from Göttingen, based in part of firsthand observations made during travels through Holland and France. Girtanner was also wrote medical and chemical tracts; at one time, he was accused of plagiarizing the ideas of the Scottish physician John Brown (1735-88), whose medical system he had learned about during a stay in Edinburgh.

Gustav Mahler's copy of Beethoven's Third Symphony ("Eroica"), with extensive annotations and revisions throughout the score. There are dynamic and phrasing markings on almost every page, and many orchestral parts have been considerably rewritten and new parts added.

Undertaken in the summer of 1825, the 23 scenes of Pushkin's Shakespearean historical drama take place between 1598 and 1605, from Boris's accession to the throne to his death and the victory of the false Dimitri. The play terrified Nicholas I's censors. It was not cleared for publication until 1830 and for the stage only in 1866. Three years later, Musorgsky submitted his first operatic treatment of Boris Godunov (in seven scenes) to the Mariinsky Theater Directorate, which rejected it in 1871, as it did a second version the following year. A revised version was finally published in 1874 and on 8 February 1874, the opera was premiered at the Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg. Marina's boudoir scene in the opera was sketched by Pushkin in 1825 but not included in the 1831 edition. As for the Jesuit Rangoni, who plays such a pivotal role in Musorgsky's Polish act, he does not appear in Pushkin's play.

Born in 1812, the composer and choir master J.P. Hullah was a pupil of Crivelli at the Royal Academy of Music in 1833-35 with Fanny Dickens, Charles's eldest sister, and through her became acquainted with the novelist. In 1836, he wrote the music to Dickens's comic opera The Village Coquettes, which was premiered at the St. James' Theatre on 5 December and had a highly successful run of sixty performances. Starting on 29 December 1835 and ending in January 1837, this correspondence documents their collaboration.

Described on the title page as "a 'carpet-bagger' who was born and lived there, the author of this lively account of life in the Carolinas in the 1870s was born in North Carolina in 1845 to free black parents. In the 1870s, he attempted to make a living as a farmer while becoming involved in Reconstruction politics. His memoirs evoke the difficulties he and other African Americans experienced as a result of Ku Klux Klan intimidation. Out of lassitude in this unequal battle, Green eventually moved to Cleveland, where he became a lawyer.

In 1967, the books and papers of the critic, dramatist, and O'Neill biographer Barrett H. Clark were purchased for the American Literature Collection. Clark's library recently yielded several fine additions to the German Literature Collection, including works by Herbert Eulenberg, Walter Hasenclever, Gerhard Hauptmann, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Georg Kaiser, Arthur Schnitzler, Ernst Toller, Fritz von Unruh, and Stefan Zweig, all signed by the authors with dedications to Clark. There is also a libretto for Der Rosenkavalier signed by Richard Strauss.

This working copy of the 1934 screen adaptation of the novel and play by J.M. Barrie belonged to Donald Crisp, who played Dr. McQueen, and bears his annotations in several places. Directed by Richard Wallace, the film featured Katherine Hepburn as Babbie, one of her first important early roles. It was the fifth film adaptation of this popular Barrie work: the first dates from 1912 and "remakes" followed in 1913, 1921, and 1922.

The German Collection's 20th-century holdings have been significantly enhanced by the archive of the bilingual German/English literary magazine Dimension, founded in 1968 and for 26 years edited by Professor A. Leslie Willson of the University of Texas at Austin. The archive includes manuscripts, correspondence, and graphic art, as well as video and audio tapes of interviews with authors. The archive comes with some 3,000 titles from Professor Willson's working library, many of the books with inscriptions from their authors.

In more than 80 regular and special issues, Dimension published the work of hundreds of German-language authors. Poems, plays, essays, short stories, radio plays, and excerpts from novels appeared in the original German with facing-page English translations. The journal also featured graphics, often by writers, such as Günter Grass, who are doubly gifted as artists. Well-known authors (Grass, Peter Bichsel, Gerhard Köpf, Günter Kunert, Siegfried Lenz, Ernst Jandl, Friederike Mayröcker, Gabriele Wohmann, and Christa Wolf among many more) appeared in the pages of Dimension alongside lesser-known writers, some of them discovered by Leslie Willson.