Over the years, the Institute Library has been the beneficiary of several gifts to its collections of manuscripts, incunabula, rare books and special collections. Some recent gifts are described below. A conspectus of the Library's principal collections and other recent acquisitions is provided elsewhere on this site.

Manuscripta: Two manuscripts from the Bergendal Collection
The Bergendal Collection, whose origins lie in the acquisition of a codex that had been presented to Pope John XXII in 1329 by Bishop Bernard Gui, is perhaps the largest library of mediaeval manuscripts in private hands in the Americas. There are at most half a dozen private manuscript libraries which are as large in Europe. Dr Joseph Pope, the curator of the collection and longtime benefactor and patron of the Institute, recently made a gift of two of these manuscripts. The Institute is deeply grateful to him for this remarkable gift.

Bergendal MS 9 Saint Augustine, Tractatus in Evangelium Sancti Johannis Augustine's commentary on the Gospel of Saint John comprises 124 sermons that were preached, or possibly dictated, in blocks: one set runs from 406 AD to 407 AD, the other from 419 AD to 424 AD. The order of the sermons follows those found in modern editions, although the numbering differs. This twelfth-century manuscript is written by a single scribe in a beautiful early gothic script that still retains more than a trace of the Caroline. All initials are in the Cistercian style: plain, almost to the point of being stark, yet majestically dignified. This is the only complete copy of Augustine's Tractatus to be found in the Americas.

Bergendal MS 16 Origen, Expositio super Epistolam S. Pauli ad Romanos translata ab Rufino de Graeco in Latinum This eleventh-century French manuscript contains the text of Origen's commentary on Saint Paul's Epistle to the Romans as translated by Rufinus of Aquileia, c404. Origen's work itself dates from c235; the sixteen chapters of Romans are covered in 10 books. Written in a regular late Caroline minuscule script, the manuscript includes 13 initials of varying sizes and decorated in complicated intertwining patterns. Folio 84 has a zoomorphic 14–line Romanesque gymnastic initial in red, green, and blue of a dragon holding a small dragon in its mouth while a third dragon bites on its hind leg, the whole design forming a capital S.

Historia naturalis: The Thomas Collection
As any gardener's spouse will attest, gardeners can be very driven. About having the blackest tulip, the most perfect bonsai or every known variety of hosta. At the end of the sixteenth century, the Prince bishop of Eichstätt, Johann Conrad von Gemmingen, first wanted – and got – the largest botanical garden outside Italy, then decided to record it for posterity. The result, the Hortus Eystettensis, is now among the world's most valuable books.

A superb modern reprint of the Hortus is one of some 4000 books presented last year to the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies by another determined gardener, Dr Arlette Waris Thomas. Dr Thomas's library, the largest gift of books ever received at one time by the Institute, focuses broadly on mediaeval gardens, covering everything from herbals and medicine to climate, travel, and cosmography, from linen, silk, dyes, textiles, and tapestries to bestiaries, treatises on farming, and monographs on craftsmen and commerce.

Arlette Waris Thomas grew up in Epernay, the heart of French champagne country. Her family were champagne producers, but she trained as a concert organist until a broken wrist nipped that career in the bud. Travelling in Canada, she met and married Scots engineer Frank Thomas, took a doctorate in French literature at the University of Toronto and for many years taught at the University of Alberta, in Edmonton. It was after retiring to Ottawa's Rockcliffe Park that her passion for gardening took full flower, as she and her husband planted their own medieval garden and began amassing their library. A downsizing move to Toronto two years ago prompted the gift to PIMS.

The Institute passed Dr Thomas's 1500 books of French literature "downstairs" to the Kelly Library at St Michael's College. Two hundred other books duplicated ones it already had. Nine hundred of the remaining books are catalogued in other Toronto libraries, but 1700 are unique in the city and make the PIMS library one of the country's best sources for historical works on botany and horticulture.

Irises, from the Hortus Eystettensis
Arlette Waris Thomas collection, Library of the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies

Probably the rarest treasure in the trove is a complete facsimile edition of the Album de Croÿ. In the late sixteenth century, through inheritance and marriage, Duke Charles de Croÿ came to rule vast land holdings in Flanders and northern France. In 1595, recognizing that the management of his domain required a high degree of administrative organization, the Duke engaged his court painter, Adrien de Montigny, of Valenciennes, to make careful studies of his many castles, estates and towns. By the time Montigny finished his assignment in 1611, he had produced more than 2500 paintings, sorted geographically into about two dozen albums. Unfortunately, in 1614, soon after the duke's death, the albums were put up for sale in Brussels and dispersed across Europe. A 1988 facsimile edition brought the images back together for the first time. Dr Thomas has given the Institute all 26 of its volumes. Harvard University Library owns four.

The Thomas collection is of course about more than avid gardeners and pretty pictures. For centuries, until well after the Middle Ages, botany attracted the world's foremost scientists, along with its painters, troubadours and winegrowers. Scholars of all kinds will find much to chew on. But they will also find an extraordinary feast for the eyes.
— Charles Oberdorf, St Michael's College Alumni Magazine (Fall 2007)