Scope and content:

The library's collection of western European medieval and renaissance manuscripts, only a small portion of the manuscript materials housed in the Department of Special Collections, is steadily growing. The increase is obvious from a comparison of 1) the list of manuscripts possessed by the department in the 1950s, as recorded by Bond and Faye, Supplement, pp.538-539; 2) the number of manuscripts cataloged here; and 3) the list, below, of further acquisitions in the years since this catalog was made, 1978-1990. For the most part, the present catalog describes every manuscript written before 1600. Given their diplomatic nature, this was impossible to do for both the large Orsini Archive (Collection 902, Boxes 1-532) and the smaller Italian Diplomatic Collection (Collection 100, Boxes 113-114), which are reported summarily below; typewritten inventories are available in the Department of Special Collections. Among the literary (nondocumentary) materials, this catalog at times includes manuscripts written after 1600, when the texts present some peculiar interest (see 170/282, *170/380) or, in one case, when it seemed worthwhile rectifying data given in the De Ricci Census (see 170/87).

Three items described below came from the Isaac Foot collection, After Isaac Foot's death in 1960, the private library of his country house at Pencrebar, Callington, Cornwall, comprising ca. 70,000 volumes, was purchased by the University of California, primarily for the benefit of the university's smaller new campuses. Besides a number of printed books, UCLA received from the collection four manuscripts that antedate 1600: two letters of Philipp Melanchthon (Collection 100, Box 30), a Greek Bible (170/347, not cataloged below), and a Latin Bible (170/348). Concerning the collection see T.G. Griedler, The Isaac Foot Library: A Report to the University (Santa Barbara, California, 1964), where the Melanchthon letters are mentioned; and a shorter version of the same in The University Bulletin (28 October 1963) pp.80-84.

A number of the department's seventeenth to nineteenth-century manuscripts come from the collection of Sir Thomas Phillipps (1792-1872). Here is a concordance of the Phillipps numbers (Catalogus librorum manuscriptorum in Bibliotheca D. Thomae Phillipps, Bart., A.D. 1837, and anon. [T. FitzRoy Fenwick], Bibliotheca Phillippica: A Catalogue of the Phillipps Manuscripts . . . [Cheltenham, 1886]) with the present call numbers in the Department of Special Collections: Phillipps 2445 (170/369); 2456 (170/370); 2499 (170/371); 2500 (170/372); 2978 (170/366); 8508 (Collection 100, Box 82); 8979 (*170/361); 9447 (*170/166); 9503 (170/245); 10610 (170/367); 12376 (*170/362); 13144(170/368); 13819 (*170/363); 16172 (*170/461, kept with Phillipps 17405); 16177 (170/364); 17405 (*170/461, kept with Phillipps 16172); 18545 (170/374); 20133 (*170/365); 21332 (170/513); 21547 (*170/393).

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