Recommended by Professor Daniel Wakelin
I’m looking forward to reading a new edition of some letters by a great African-American scholar of medieval manuscripts, Belle da Costa Greene (1879–1950): Becoming Belle da Costa Greene: A Visionary Librarian Through Her Letters, edited by Deborah Parker, published on 8 October 2024. In the early twentieth century, Greene travelled Europe buying rare manuscripts for the millionaire banker J. Pierpont Morgan and, after his death, helped to establish his collection as a public institution, the magical Morgan Library in New York, of which she became the first director 1924-48. Her story reveals the vital contribution to medieval manuscript studies of an African-American woman and also reveals the challenges and compromises she faced in making that contribution. For there are ironies in registering her as a key figure in Black history: Greene, who grew up in a well-to-do Black family in segregated Washington DC, from adulthood ‘passed’ as white in her professional life---that is, concealed her racial origins, claiming Portuguese ancestry---and only years after her death was it widely known that she had been African-American. (Nella Larsen’s novel Passing of 1929 vividly conveys the challenges of such a double life in the New York high society of Greene’s day.) We might imagine possible motives, but she was silent about them, as this collector and saver of medieval manuscripts burned many of her own papers. These letters are therefore rare and treasured survivals. Also this month, the Morgan Library is celebrating its hundredth birthday with an exhibition about her achievements despite the prejudices she faced as an African-American woman.
