We are deeply saddened by the recent passing of our friend and former colleague, Carol Irwin, who retired from the University of Alberta in 2016. Carol worked for over 30 years in Bruce Peel Special Collections where she provided public service and installed exhibitions. She had a natural talent for creating beautiful displays of rare books, and she relished opportunities to work with the collection, especially miniature books. We look back at her accomplishments in the Peel library with pride. She will be sorely missed. 

Link to obituary.

Bruce Peel Special Collections launched three new digital exhibitions—each prepared over several years—during the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences, hosted online by University of Alberta in May-June 2021. If you are new to Peel's digital exhibitions, you will want to be sure to also check out Tinctor's Foul Treatise, an award-winning exhibition that has been attracting an extraordinary amount of interest and discussion for almost five years. 

Enjoy!

Ancestors: Indigenous Peoples of Western Canada in Historic Photographs

Students who have participated in Peel Workshops have found it deeply rewarding to work with primary materials, to learn about the history of books, to hold special rare books in their hands, and to discover what kinds of knowledge can be gleaned from the material objects themselves. For the fall term, we are pleased to be able to offer a mix of small in-person and larger online workshops, as well as a couple of evening workshops (requested for the benefit of part-time students).

Registration opens at 8am on the first day of classes (September 1st), and is required. Find detailed workshop descriptions here. Please login using your UALBERTA ID to register here. If you join a waitlist you may be interested in knowing that there is usually some movement in the days right before the workshop, and also that we will put on extra sessions when needed if possible.

Exploring the Diversities of the Book Form: Artists’ Books
Peel classroom on Monday, September 20th from 10-11:30am
Exploring the Diversities of the Book Form: Artists’ Books
Peel classroom on Tuesday, September 21st from 10-11:30am

Women’s Gothic Writing
Online on Thursday, September 23rd from 2-3pm

Teeny Marvels
Peel classroom on Friday, September 24th from 10-11am
Teeny Marvels (ADDED DATE)
Peel classroom on Tuesday, September 28th from 10-11am

Bruce Peel Special Collections will offer a very limited number of research appointments in the fall term, but many 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 S. Javitch Collection of books about the Indigenous peoples of North and South America 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, as well as selections from the Gregory S. Javitch Collection of books about the Indigenous peoples of North and South America and the Dr Ronald B. Madge Entomology Collection.

Peel's Prairie Provinces database - This database offers digital access to materials from many institutions, much of it from Library & Archives Canada, but it also features some materials housed in Bruce Peel Special Collections, including Prairie Postcards and the Sam Steele Family Archive (Canadian police, military, and Klondike gold rush history).

Good luck with your research and please take care!

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. Curated by Andrew Gow, Rob Desjardins, and François Pageau, 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 Recollectio) prepared by Andrew Gow, Rob Desjardins, and François Pageau 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.

You can still check out Tinctor's Foul Manual, a very interesting 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).