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This blog post is an excerpt by guest curator Diane Wolfthal from the catalogue accompanying the Morgan’s exhibition Medieval Money, Merchants and Morality.

The rise of the monetary economy transformed every aspect of European society, including its values and culture. From the late thirteenth to the early sixteenth century, western Europe, especially its major urban centers, was dramatically altered by the widespread use of money.

This is a guest post by Cassandra McLean Pereira, artist, writer, and editor.

To create one’s own library is the natural impulse of devoted bibliophiles and lukewarm intellectuals alike. Whether it’s a single bookshelf above a desk, or a dedicated room in a grand mansion, the home library evokes a distinct mood.

This is a guest post by Paris Shih, a Taiwanese writer, cultural critic, and Ph.D. candidate in English at the CUNY Graduate Center.

In “The Birthday of Madame Cigale,” Aubrey Beardsley’s famous Japonaiserie drawing for The Studio, the ceremonial scene is rendered through the style of the Kanō school as well as the genre of ukiyo-e.

In Part I, I discussed how bookbinders in the fifteenth century did not have full confidence in the strength of paper for text blocks in books, and how parchment lingered in bookbinding practice to reinforce the paper gatherings.

In the history of European bookbinding, the transition from parchment to paper as the primary material for text leaves caused an associated shift in bookbinding practices, as bookbinders adapted to what they thought of as a weaker material. Parchment is made of animal skin, prepared by dehairing, stretching, scraping, and drying, whereas paper at the time was made of plant-based materials, such as cotton and flax.

Miko McGinty Inc. is a design office based in Brooklyn. Our firm has been working with the Morgan Library & Museum since 2008. We were thrilled to draw on our long-standing collaboration with the Morgan to create a new centennial logo, which celebrates the Morgan’s unique and varied collections.

On my first day as an intern at the Morgan in the autumn of 1993, the head of the department of drawings and prints, William M. Griswold, asked me to accompany him on a trip uptown to return a group of framed drawings to Lore Heinemann.

Ten years ago, the Morgan’s Department of Photography made a landmark acquisition: Peter Hujar’s papers, 100 photographic prints, and 5,783 black-and-white contact sheets. The contact sheets are of great importance: they span the artist’s career from 1955 until his death of AIDS-related pneumonia in 1987, and index nearly every black-and-white exposure that he made.

The Herbert Cahoon papers (MA 4733) contain a series of letters dating from 1941 to 1959 from Frederic Hastings Smyth (1888–-1960) to Herbert Cahoon, Curator of the Literary and Historical Manuscripts Department at the Pierpont Morgan Library from 1954 to 1989. Smyth was an Anglo-Catholic priest and Marxist revolutionary who was simultaneously engaged in Christian theological debate and extremist politics.

In the summer of 2023, I was fortunate to accept the CUNY/Morgan Summer Fellowship to assist Dr. Robinson McClellan with research and preparations for the upcoming summer 2024 exhibition focused on the creative conditions and collaborations of the Ballets Russes, Crafting the Ballets Russes: Music, Dance, Design—The Robert Owen Lehman Collection .