The Collections: An Overview

The Ancient & Medieval Studies Reading Room was opened in the Fall of 1994, having been created with a gift from the Gordon/Rousmaniere/Roberts Foundation. The Reading Room is designed to serve as a select reference collection for anyone studying or researching the literature and history of Greco-Roman Antiquity and the Middle Ages.

The Reading Room, containing c. 10,000 volumes, provides researchers with an extensive selection of primary texts as well as commentaries, concordances and reference works useful in study of these texts. The collection is not comprehensive. The research collections supporting these fields remain primarily in the Butler Stacks. But every effort is made to provide an Reading Roomm environment that is conducive to work in these fields.

In the literature of Classical Antiquity an effort has been made to include the collected works of of the most significant authors. Individual editions of all Classical authors have also been included, where faculty have designated such editions to be vital for research. For the Middle Ages editions of the works of individual authors have, for the most part, not been included for reasons of space.

The Reading Room does NOT contain periodicals, which continue to be located in the Periodical and Microform Reading Room on the 4th Floor and in the Butler Stacks.

The Large Sets

The largest portion of this collection is primary texts. Most of the large text sets are represented:

• Loeb Classical Library
• Teubner Texts
• Oxford Classical Texts
• Migne's Latin & Greek Patrologies
• Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum et Graecorum
• Corpus Christianorum, including its various subsets
• Sources chrétiennes

In addition, significant subject specific sets have been included, such as:

• Acta Sanctorum
• Mansi's Sacrorum Conciliorum Nova et Amplissima Collectio
• Labbe & Cossart's Sacrosancta concilia ad regiam editionem exacta
• Binius' Conciliorvm omnivm generalivm et principalivm collectio regia

Finding these and other large sets in CLIO

Each large text sets in the Ancient & Medieval Studies Reading Room, such as the Loeb Classical Library, has been cataloged and shelved under a single call number. This varies from the treatment of such sets in the Butler Stacks, where each text within the set is usually given its own call number and its own, separate entry in CLIO or the card catalogs. In the Ancient & Medieval Studies Reading Room no separate catalog records have been created for the individual texts within large sets. Consequently, if a patron looks up a particular text in CLIO, a record for the Butler Stacks copy may be readily apparent, but the fact that an additional copy is held in the Ancient & Medieval Studies Reading Room may be less apparent.

Consequently, when seeking a text in CLIO, it is wise to search not only under the title or author of the particular text but also under the large set within which the edition occurs. Only in this way will the location of a text in the Ancient & Medieval Studies Reading Room be apparent.

There is one exception to this rule: the Collection des universites de France, or "Budé," published by Les Belles Lettres.  This set is not classed or shelved together in the collection, and can be found only by searching under individual author or title.

If you have questions about locating a text in the Reading Room, please inquire at the Butler Reference Desk in Room 301.

Planned Acquisitions

The collections of the Ancient & Medieval Studies Reading Room are under development.  If you have suggestions for the acquisition of new texts for the Reading Room, please contact: the Ancient & Medieval History and Religion Librarian.