This exhibition has been postponed. Please check back for updated information.
Traditionally viewed as one of the quintessential and longest-lasting institutions in the West, the papacy in its rich history mirrors the wide-ranging story of European ascendancy, hegemony, and subsequent compromise. The influence of the papacy was based on its ability constantly to transform and restructure its roles, both religious and political. Key to this evolution was an ever-changing relationship between the popes and various technologies of communication. This exhibition brings together a range of objects from the collections of the Beinecke Library, including illuminated manuscripts, letters, official proclamations, maps, music, festival books, caricatures, printing specimen books, and broadsides. The exhibition will focus on the period covering the medieval triumph of the papacy and its early modern reassessments, ca. 1300 to ca. 1700. [ca. 60 items]

This exhibition has been postponed. Please check back for updated information.
Carl Van Vechten (1880-1964) had an artistic vision rooted in the centrality of the talented person. He cherished accomplishment, whether in music, dance, theater, fine art, literature, sport, or advocacy. He began to make photographic portraits in 1932; in 1939 he discovered newly available color film. For a quarter century, he invited friends and acquaintances, well-known artists and fledgling entertainers to sit for him, often against backdrops reminiscent of the vivid colors and patterns of a Matisse painting. Among his subjects are a very young Diahann Carroll, Billie Holiday in tears, Paul Robeson as Othello, and a procession of opera stars, composers, authors, musicians, and others who made notable contributions to the cultural life of the country. The exhibition includes 140 full-sized portraits, digitally reformatted from Van Vechten's original slides. [ca. 140 items]
Selected images from the Carl Van Vechten Photograph Collection

January 22 through March 15, 2008
The exhibition includes a broad display of books exploring the ways in which poets, publishers, artists, and printers have navigated the intersection of poetry and art in printed formats. The exhibition considers the ways poetry and book arts interact and connect, their shared context, and their potentially conflicting functions; materials on display explore questions of verbal and visual metaphor making, emphasizing the roles of creative and collaborative processes involved in uniting image, verse, and print. A companion exhibition, "The Publishers' Roundtable: Book Artists in Dialogue," will be on view at the Arts of the Book Collection at Sterling Memorial Library through March 31. [ca. 200 items]
Information on the related conference
News Release (pdf file)
Podcast and additional information

January 16 through February 2008
Mathematics became an essential part of literate culture in England in the early modern period. This exhibition showcases the means, serious and playful, by which readers learned, practiced, and implemented mathematics in England, from the mid-sixteenth through the eighteenth century. Drawing on the Beinecke Library's print and manuscript collections of early modern English material, the exhibition includes student exercise books, almanacs, textbooks, illustrations, account books, poems, literature, and instruments made out of paper. [ca. 60 items]
News Release (pdf file)

November 5, 2007 through January 9, 2008
An exhibition that celebrates the 250th anniversary of the birth of New Haven composer Daniel Read (1756-1836). The exhibit showcases early American psalters (including the Bay Psalm Book), as well as manuscript and printed music by Daniel Read, William Billings, and other prominent American tunesmiths. Materials on display are drawn from the collections of the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, the Irving S. Gilmore Music Library, and the New Haven Colony Historical Society. [ca. 30 items]

November 7, 2007 through January 9, 2008
A medieval "best-seller," the Nibelungenlied soon fell into obscurity. When a manuscript of the epic poem was discovered in 1755, German literary critics hoped it would come to rival Homer's epics in popularity and esteem. Critical studies and new incarnations of the epic began to appear, from the first fragment, Chriemhild's Revenge (1757) through Wagner's Ring cycle and beyond. Against the backdrop of German admiration for ancient poetry, particularly the Iliad and the Odyssey, this exhibition chronicles the creation of a "German National Myth" from the ill-suited cloth of the Nibelungenlied. [ca. 30 items]
Yale Daily News Article

September 24, 2007 through January 7, 2008
This exhibition of books produced between the 16th and 19th centuries documents religious, civic, and public festivals in the towns and provinces of Italy. Such festivals are as old as Italy itself, but the tradition of publishing lavishly illustrated books to record them began in the 16th century and was connected in most towns with aristocratic families and courts. Births and funerals, betrothals and weddings, elections and coronations, the visits of popes, princes, and princesses were the occasions for elaborate public events that included parades, dancing, singing, athletic competitions, mock battles, theater, opera, and banquets. Rulers of church and state competed to produce the most memorable events, and to this end they employed the best artists, architects, and engineers to design stage settings and floats; the finest actors and musicians for the performances; the best dancers for the ballets and riders for the equestrian demonstrations. Seeing these festivals as a reflection of their own prestige and a guarantor of their positions as rulers, they sought to document for posterity, and for personal propagandistic reasons, the splendor of their celebrations by having the leading artists and engravers produce the illustrations that embellish the festival books included in this exhibition. [ca. 65 items]
News Release (pdf file)
Yale Daily News Article

August 30 through November 3, 2007
In honor of the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the British slave trade, this exhibition gathers materials from across the Beinecke Library's collections to document aspects of slavery in the United States and abroad: the slave trade, abolition, emancipation, and individual experiences of slavery from various points of view, including those of slave owners, politicians, and former slaves. The exhibition includes manuscripts and rare printed materials from the 18th and 19th centuries such as a slave ship log, trade and legal documents, photographs, and personal correspondence. Literary materials will also be on exhibition, including early editions of the works of Phillis Wheatley and Frederick Douglass and the manuscript of The Bondwoman's Narrative, thought to be the first novel written by an African American woman and the only novel written by a fugitive slave. [ca. 30 items]
Please click here for more information.
Yale Daily News Article
Podcast describing highlights of the exhibition

September 6 through October 31, 2007
The 'Golden Age' of Western piracy (ca. 1650–1730) spawned an extraordinary amount of lore and legend—and the pirate representations inspired by these legends continue to proliferate today. This exhibition charts the expansion and development of the Western pirate's image, from its inception in early trials and swashbuckler histories to its position in the romantic and sometimes lurid depictions by twentieth-century artists. Printed documents and original art from the Beinecke Library's collections illustrate the evolving image of the pirate and its multifaceted, shifting role in music, theatrical arts, adventure tales, and reportage of the past three and a half centuries. [ca. 30 items]
Yale Bulletin & Calendar Article
Yale Daily News Article

An exhibition curated by David Alan Richards
June 1 through September 15, 2007
This exhibition, focusing on the life and works of Rudyard Kipling, a writer who appealed to a vast audience with his novels, poems, and works for young readers, is drawn principally from the collection given to Yale by David Alan Richards (Yale College '67; Yale Law School '72). While tracing the development of Kipling's writings, the exhibition pays special attention to variant editions and elusive printings of many of his rarest works, reflecting the exhaustive research in Richards's recently published bibliography of Kipling. [ca. 225 items]
News Release (pdf file)
Podcast by David Alan Richards

June 18 through August 31, 2007
This reprise of the Beinecke Library's 1992 exhibition celebrates the centenary of Paul Mellon, Yale College '29 and founder of the Yale Center for British Art. On display will be maps and manuscripts from the archive of Jean Baptiste Donatien de Vimeur, comte de Rochambeau, documenting the last campaign of the American War of Independence. Commander of 6,000 French troops sent to America in 1780, General Rochambeau joined forces with George Washington and the marquis de Lafayette to defeat Cornwallis at Yorktown in October 1781. Paul Mellon donated the Rochambeau papers and cartographic archive to Yale in 1992. [ca. 30 items]

late June through August 25, 2007
Islamic manuscripts uniquely mirror the civilization that produced them. The entire gamut of learning can be seen in these pages, from grammar, literature, and poetry to theology, astronomy, mathematics, and medicine. The Islamic manuscript shows not only the beauty and variety of Islamic calligraphy, illuminations, and paintings, but also the extreme care various artisans took in penmanship, binding, and papermaking. These colorful illuminations and miniatures transcend time and place, providing a window into pre-twentieth-century Islamic culture. [ca. 35 items]
Yale Bulletin & Calendar Article
Related web exhibition

March 26 through June 9, 2007
As the quintessential instrument of imperial conquest, the British East India Company, with its commercial, political, and aesthetic concerns, tells a rich, conflicted story of engagement between two cultures. This exhibit brings together a diverse, multi-lingual range of Indian and British objects, illuminated mythological manuscripts, maps, letters, official proclamations, diaries, ship logs, company dictionaries, travel journals, novels, and broadsides from various Beinecke Library collections. [ca. 60 items]
Yale Bulletin & Calendar Article

April 9 through May 25, 2007
The spreading chestnut, the Charter Oak, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, Yggdrasil, the olive branch, the laurel wreath. Trees and images of trees pervade our language, our history, our poetry, and our mythologies. This unsystematic romp through the collections of the Beinecke Library gathers books with representations of trees. Included are botanical books from four centuries, first trees, biblical trees, sacred trees, mythological trees, family trees, emblematic trees, and literary trees, from Ovid, Dante, and Shakespeare to Goethe, Longfellow, and Joyce Kilmer. [ca. 150 items]
News Release (pdf file)

January 16 through March 30, 2007
This exhibition traces the evolution of world's fairs in Europe and America from the 1790s to the Second World War. From their beginnings in the struggles of Revolutionary France, fairs and expositions assumed an integral role in the political, economic, social, and cultural landscapes of the modern world. As they grew from small events for entrepreneurs and experts to mass spectacles attracting the largest crowds ever assembled, the fairs in turn shaped those landscapes. Experiments in architecture, mass transit, theme parks, crowd control, and the use of color and light changed the face of the modern metropolis. Drawn from the Alfred Heller Collection of World’s Fairs, acquired in 2005, the exhibition features posters, pamphlets, maps, government reports, commemorative albums, panoramas and peepshows, works of art, and literary satires. [ca. 150 items]
News Release (pdf file)
Yale Daily News Article

January 12 through mid-March 2007
Before being made into the classic film, Dial 'M' for Murder was a thrilling stageplay by Frederick Knott, who repeated his success with Wait until Dark a decade later. Writings, photographs, and letters from Knott's papers combine with sketches, notes, and production stills from plays and movies to create a picture of the work of this master of suspense. [ca. 40 items]

January 10 through mid-March 2007
This exhibition of sketches created by Connecticut artist Robert Templeton documents the Black Panthers trial in New Haven in 1971. Because the courtroom was closed to artists and photographers, Templeton's sketches were made surreptitiously, without the permission of the court. His drawings are, perhaps, the only visual record of the courtroom during this critical case. The collection includes small preliminary notebook sketches made in the courtroom as well as larger, finished drawings later displayed on television news broadcasts. Defendants Bobby Seale and Ericka Huggins, Prosecutor Arnold Markle, and Judge Harold Mulvey are among the subjects represented. [ca. 30 items]

September 15, 2006 through mid-January 2007
A brilliant window onto the creative flourish of fin-de-siècle artists, radicals, and the literary avant-garde in Tsarist Russia tenuously opened when censorship collapsed for a brief time in the midst of the revolutionary upheaval of 1905. Drawing on a newly acquired collection of literary and satirical magazines, this exhibition highlights the work of graphic artists who rushed to fill the expressive void with powerful imagery of anguish and defiance, at once dark and colorful. [ca. 35 items]

October 1, 2006 through January 5, 2007
Famous for her strong opinions about art as well as for her beauty and wit, radical editor Margaret Anderson was a key figure in American and European Modernism. Between 1914 and 1929, Anderson's pioneering art and literature magazine, the Little Review, published poetry, criticism, and artwork by many of the most significant writers and artists of the 20th century, including William Butler Yeats, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, Pablo Picasso, Hart Crane, Man Ray, Mina Loy, Wyndham Lewis, T.S. Eliot, Sherwood Anderson, and Francis Picabia. James Joyce’s Ulysses appeared serially in the Little Review before it was published in its entirety in 1922; the Little Review and its editor became the subjects of a widely publicized obscenity trial when the United States Post Office deemed some segments of the work obscene and refused to distribute copies. [ca. 35 items]
Yale Bulletin & Calendar Article

September 15 through December 21, 2006
An exhibition of Yale's resources for the study of 16th-century encounters among Europeans and the indigenous peoples of Meso-America and of the early 19th-century re-emergence among European and North American writers of an interest in understanding the culture and history of Aztec, Olmec, and Mayan communities. The exhibition features the Codex Reese, a mid-16th-century manuscript map of the Valley of Mexico that incorporates Nahuatl and Spanish elements. [ca. 150 items]
Yale Bulletin & Calendar Article

June through September 2006
This exhibition highlights manuscripts in the Beinecke Library from the tenth century to the nineteenth, in Coptic, Ethiopic, Georgian, Syriac, Arabic, and Armenian, documenting the activities of Christians in the Middle East. [ca. 20 items]

July through September 9, 2006
Since the advent of printing on paper, attempts have been made to show dimensionality. Drawn from the Beinecke's collections, this exhibition will show the many interesting ways that the two-dimensional format has been manipulated to add depth, perspective, and motion. On view will be flap books, pop-ups, perspective books, panoramas, and peep-shows – delightful and colorful inventions for visitors of all ages. [ca. 120 items]

April through June 2006
An exploration of the life and writing of Rachel Carson, who fostered American awareness of the natural world's magnificence and vulnerability through her gifts for exact science and elegant prose. [ca. 200 items]

April through early June 2006
Since its establishment in 1958 as Chelsea Review, the literary journal has served as an important voice for original poetry, fiction, and works in translation. As the 50th anniversary of Chelsea approaches, an exhibition will highlight the evolution of the journal. Accompanying the archival items on display will be a group of photographic portraits of Chelsea contributors by Gerard Malanga, acclaimed poet and filmmaker. [ca. 60 items]

January 17 - March 31, 2006
This exhibition, celebrating the 250th anniversary of Mozart's birth, features two music manuscripts in the composer's own hand, as well as a variety of early prints, biographies, and materials from his family and associates. The manuscripts come from the Frederick R. Koch Collection at the Beinecke Library and from the Opochinsky Collection at the Irving S. Gilmore Music Library. [ca. 30 items]

February - March 2006
A selection of single-sheet poems from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, including examples ranging from hand printed and illustrated broadsides to commercially printed posters, mimeographed and photocopied flyers, and postcards. [ca. 150 items]

February - March 2006
Well-known writers such as Langston Hughes, Arna Bontemps, Paul Lawrence Dunbar, Jessie Fauset, and Shirley Graham Du Bois turn their talents to works for children and young adults. Drawn from the James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection of African American Arts and Letters and the Betsy Beinecke Shirley Collection of American Children’s Literature. [ca. 30 items]