Guest researcher Agnė Zemkajute on her research stay at Special Collections

Just a few weeks ago, I wrote a letter introducing myself and now I am writing to say thank you!

I am very grateful to the University of Groningen Library and the Consortium of European Research Libraries for this opportunity to come and work with incunabula at the Special Collections. I spent four weeks here cataloguing these books into the MEI database. This was more than just cataloguing. While researching these books I was able to learn about people from Groningen who, more than 500 years ago, bought the books not only for themselves, but also for their communities. The Martinikerk for me now is not only an impressive church with a tower in the very heart of the city, but also the church of Wilhelmus Frederici, Bernardus Pistoris and others who left their books to the Martinikerk’s library that was later transferred to the UB, where I could now meet them through their incunabula 400 years later.

But material evidence is not only about people that we can identify. Here, we can find interesting or even strange curiosities, such as non-rubricated pages in a rubricated book. Why was just one quarter of the page left non-rubricated? Why was only one page in a whole book left with no red marks on it? We can only guess what might have been the reason for such unfinished work. Was the rubricator of that book tired? Was he thinking about something else?

Another interesting question without answers is what spiders and other beetles do in the books. (Don’t worry, they died long ago.) Were they killed accidentally? Was the reader afraid of spiders and intentionally killed the poor creatures by closing the book? Someone could write a novel “Who killed the spider?” There are many more interesting things to find. You only need to open the books and they quickly appear.

I am also very grateful to all the people in the Special Collections department. I am very glad that I had the opportunity to be with you, work here and learn new things from you. These were four amazing weeks that ended too quickly. But I’ll remember you all, our talks and the treasures that you showed me. Thank you!

Agnė Zemkajutė

Wroblewski Library of the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences (Vilnius, Lithuania)

P. S. If you would like to reach me, feel free to send an email.