Today was field trip day for my Latin 201 class! We hiked down the hill (and up the stairs, as one student reminded me) to the 3rd floor of BGC where reside the Wheaton College Special Collections. They have a relatively small but very lovely collection of books and manuscript facsimiles in Latin, and I had arranged with David Malone the director over there for a show-and-tell today! What fun!
After a little lecture (by moi) on the techniques of ancient/medieval manuscript manufacturing, we got to look at each of the books set up around the room. The pride of their collection here is an original 1519 edition of Martin Luther's Sermons on the Psalms, originally owned, signed, and written by one of Luther's own students (one Sigimundus), and one of the hand-written marginalia clearly states: "sola fide." It's a little but powerful glimpse into the very foundations of the Protestant Reformation. And all that came after it.
I used to frown on marking up books when I was younger, but I now happily write all kinds of comments in my books, marking them as mine, and offering to it's next, future reader the invitation to continue the conversation. Who knows.... a book of mine might just end up in an archive somewhere one day. You never know.
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