In this exhibit, Wellesley College students who were part of Prof. Hélène Bilis' French 303 course, "Long Live the Queen: Women in Power Under the Ancien Régime" present detailed readings of every hairstyle found in the queen's almanac, exposing the queen's participation in the theatrical trends of the eighteenth century and her commemoration, through the styling of her hair, of historical events of the day.
View the online exhibition here.
Virtual Reconstruction of the Llangattock Breviary leaf.
The Llangattock breviary leaf, recently acquired by Special Collections as a gift from Nancy Hattox Fohl, '59 and Timothy Fohl, features as the first test case manuscript of the Broken Books project under development at the Center for Digital Humanities at Saint Louis University. The project seeks to virtually reunite separated leaves of manuscripts from their disparate locations worldwide, and present the complete (or near-complete) version online for reading and research.
View the online exhibition here.
In the spring of 2015, the members of History 353 ("Sentimental Education in Early Modern Europe") drew from Wellesley's Special Collections of early modern books to offer a small selection of the many types of objects designed to engage the sense and the non-rational faculties of the mind: memory planes, emblem books, pictorial encylopedias, card collections, history paintings, cabinets of curiosities, pictorial meditations handbooks, scientific atlases, illustrated books with moveable flaps, and much more. These objects were, and are, all tools, intended to help their users remember information, learn moral lessons, and understand how the world works.
The members of HIST 353: Ashley Cale '15, Abigail Golden '15, Xiaorong Liu '17, Seraphina Oney '16, Bhargavi Ramanathan '16, Nicole Tai '15, Charlotte Treadwell '16, Alice Yuan '15, and Professor Simon Grote.