John H. Pollack
John H. Pollack is Curator, Research Services, in the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts at the University of Pennsylvania Libraries. He has worked in this department since 1995. His responsibilities include providing assistance to students and scholars, and teaching and organizing class sessions centered on the collections. He is also responsible for the Furness Shakespeare Library, which is part of the Kislak Center.
John holds a PhD in English from Penn and a BA from Washington University in St. Louis. He specializes in Early American literature and history, and early modern book history. His research has focused on topics including Native American languages; colonial writings from New France; and Benjamin Franklin and colonial education.
This talk will introduce a forgotten spiritual advisor and amateur painter who was responsible for producing a fascinating hybrid book now housed at the Kislak Center (Ms. Codex 1620). The item in question consists of a 1524 edition of Hendrik Herp’s Mirror of Perfection, bookended by two manuscript sections written and illustrated by Denis Faucher (1487–1562), a mystical poet and Benedictine monk from Provence who spent much of his career on the remote island monastery of Lérins. The sections by Faucher are mostly addressed to a nun in training, and are accompanied by a pair of highly unusual didactic images, one of which shows a skull surrounded by symbols of mortality, and the other of which depicts a Crucified nun. Recently, a second intriguing manuscript signed by Faucher has resurfaced, and by considering it alongside the Kislak Center sammelband we can begin to reconstruct the trajectory of this unusual author-painter who oversaw the religious education of many prominent women in the late-Renaissance Mediterranean world.
