Collecting Culinaria exhibition runs September 2024 to March 2025

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Collecting Culinaria: Cookbooks and Domestic Manuals Mainly from the Linda Miron Distad Collection

Curators: Caroline Lieffers and Merrill Distad

3 September 2024 – 31 March 2025

Back by popular demand, this visually compelling exhibition of books and ephemera relating to the preparation and enjoyment of food over several centuries is a tribute to a generous donor and a remarkable woman. From national and regional cookbooks to manuscript and corporate cookbooks, this exhibition features highlights from the collection of librarian-researcher-editor-chef Linda Miron Distad (1944–2012) who had a special ability to “combine, separate, enhance, reduce, clarify, liaise,” and thereby to make magic. The catalogue for this exhibition may be purchased in person in the Peel library for $25 (cash only, no dealers) or through University of Alberta Press or Indigo.

Class/group exhibition visits may be arranged on Monday afternoons (only) and require advance booking; drop-in visitors are welcome on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday afternoons (1-4pm).

Check out a related digital exhibition: Culinaria: A Taste of Food History on the Prairies.



Peel Workshops, Winter 2025

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Peel Workshops, Winter 2025

Peel Workshop participants have found it deeply rewarding to work with primary materials, to learn about the history of books and ideas in various disciplines, to hold special rare items in their hands, and to discover what kinds of knowledge can be gleaned from the material objects themselves. We offer smaller in-person and larger online workshops to members of the U of A community. Advance registration is required. Further information and registration here.

Topics include:

Cryptic Mysteries and Literary Hoaxes

Taming the Unruly Female Body: Exploring Misogyny in the History of Medicine

Jane Austen and Friends

Poison Books

Medium and Message: Publishing Formats Through the Ages

Honorary Degree Books: What Are They and Why Were They Acquired? 

Making Marbled Paper, A Hands-On Learning Opportunity






Peel's hours and services

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HOURS & SERVICES AT BRUCE PEEL SPECIAL COLLECTIONS

EXHIBITION HOURS (September through March)
Mondays 1-4pm: Reserved for prearranged group visits
Tuesdays: Closed
Wednesdays-Fridays 1-4pm: Open for drop-in visits

RESEARCH HOURS (September through March)
Mondays: No research appointments
Tuesdays 1-4pm: Reserved for quiet research, by appointment
Wednesdays-Fridays 1-4pm: By appointment

Questions? Please write to us at bpsc@ualberta.ca

Research appointments: To view rare materials held in Bruce Peel Special Collections, please write to us at bpsc@ualberta.ca to request an appointment well in advance, listing the requested materials including author, title, and call number for each item, and offering some date options. We book research appointments during the regular academic year, September-March, on a first-come, first-served basis, so there may be a delay, but we will do our best to be accommodating. Standard reading room policies and protocols, designed to protect rare materials, are in force.

Remote Research Services: The Peel team serves researchers' needs remotely by answering questions about rare materials, providing researchers with images of materials not otherwise available (whenever possible), and providing links to digital resources that may help to meet current research and teaching needs (see "Peel materials online"). If you have questions that relate to materials housed in Bruce Peel Special Collections, you can send us an email at bpsc@ualberta.ca.

Visiting Researchers: If you are planning to travel to the Edmonton area to carry out research at Bruce Peel Special Collections, we strongly recommend that you do so during the regular academic year to avoid our limited summer service period. Regardless of when you plan to visit, it is important to contact us at bpsc@ualberta.ca well in advance so that we have every opportunity to accommodate your needs.

Like other locations of the University of Alberta Library, Bruce Peel Special Collections is open to all researchers, including faculty, staff, students, and members of the general public.

Peel materials online

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Bruce Peel Special Collections offers a limited number of research appointments each week (September-March), but some researchers will want to consider using digital resources where possible, and professors who are planning classes are encouraged to make use of rare materials that can be examined either as print originals or using digital reproductions, so that all options are available to your students.  

In order to help you to identify digital reproductions of primary source materials, we continue to work to add relevant links to the Research Collections page on Peel's website. Such links will help you to find digital content that has been created by U of A Library, by our colleagues at other institutions, and through collaborative projects, such as the very extensive HathiTrust database.  Also, please note that University of Alberta Library subscribes to numerous online databases, including many that offer digitized primary source materials.

Here are some highlights of Peel's digital resources:

Peel's Digital Exhibitions - Expertly curated and filled with images of rare materials, Peel's award-winning digital exhibition program covers topics from the history of photography (Photographies) to Canadian Women Artists' Books to the source of some of the earliest ideas about witches and witch trials (Tinctor's Foul Treatise). They explore the papers (including photographs) of pioneering Western Canadian journalist Miriam Green Ellis, the complexities of interpreting primary historical materials (Sam Steele's Forty Years in Canada: History or Fiction?), and some of the most frequently-requested rare books in Bruce Peel Special Collections (Honorary Degree Books).

Digitized in Databases - Some of Peel's collections have been partially digitized through databases hosted by major publishers, including the Gregory Javitch Collection of books about Indigenous peoples and the Dr Ronald B. Madge Entomology Collection.

Internet Archive - A selection of Peel materials have been digitized through the Internet Archive, including Treaty parchments (for Treaties 4, 6, 7, & 8), the Tinctor manuscipt, a Medieval Book of Hours, a collection of English Playbills (1779-1949), the Indigenous Photograph Collection, the Prairie Postcard Collectionin addition to selections from the Gregory Javitch Collection of books about Indigenous peoples and the Dr Ronald B. Madge Entomology Collection.

Good luck with your research!


Where do ideas about witchcraft come from?

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Explore early ideas about witchcraft by learning about a very rare (and sinister) fifteenth-century manuscript housed in University of Alberta's Bruce Peel Special Collections.

Tinctor's Foul Treatise is an award-winning digital exhibition that unlocks the secrets of this special manuscript. The exhibition was mounted in October 2016 by University of Alberta's Bruce Peel Special Collections, and it is the winner of the prestigious 2018 Leab Award (Electronic Exhibitions) from the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) and the Rare Books and Manuscripts Section (RBMS) of the American Library Association.

The Arras Witch Treatises is a full English-language translation of two important fifteenth-century source texts (Tinctor's Invectives and the anonymous Recollectioprepared by the curators of Tinctor's Foul Treatise and published by Pennsylvania State University Press (2016) as part of their Magic in History series. This edition is available through University of Alberta Library (BF 1582 A155 2016) and is widely available for sale.

Get a close look—through Archive.org—at the copy of Tinctor's Invectives housed in University of Alberta's Bruce Peel Special Collections.

You can still check out Tinctor's Foul Manual online, a one-hour documentary produced by Paul Kennedy for the CBC's Ideas that has been aired numerous times, most recently on 2 August 2016.


Read "The Travels of a Fifteenth-Century Demonological Manuscript: The University of Alberta's Copy of Jean Taincture's Invectives contre la secte de vaudrie," by Robert Desjardins, Francois Pageau, and Andrew Gow. Florilgelium 33 (26 Aug 2019).

Check out Paula Simons' fascinating exploration of the ways that old ideas about witchcraft continue to haunt us today: "Politics, Powerful Women and Hunting Witches in a New Age of Superstition," Edmonton Journal (29 Oct 2016).  This story helpfully links to a relevant story by Simons: "Witch History takes flight in Rare Manuscript at U of A," Edmonton Journal (27 Oct 2012), and a related blog post "The Witch-Burner's Mein Kampf: Excerpts of Evil" (Oct 2012).

Or this recent article: "300 years on, will thousands of women burned as witches finally get justice?" The Guardian (13 Sept 2020).