Kuttner Institute Library comes to Yale
On Friday (Sept. 13), the library of the Stephan Kuttner Institute of Medieval Canon Law arrived at its new home in the Lillian Goldman Law Library. This weekend it is being installed in the Law Library’s Upper East Side, next to the fish tank.
This outstanding collection of research materials draws scholars from around the world. It contains over 2,000 monographs and 15,000 offprints from the private library of Stephan Kuttner, the Institute’s founder and one of the 20th century’s most influential scholars of medieval law, as well as microfilms of approximately 670 medieval manuscripts.
This is the second time the Institute and its collection have resided at Yale. Kuttner founded the Institute of Medieval Canon Law in 1955 at Catholic University of America. In 1964 Kuttner and the Institute moved to Yale, and its library was housed in the Sterling Memorial Library. In 1970 the Institute moved to the Robbins Collection, University of California-Berkeley. When Kuttner died in 1996, the Institute was renamed the Stephan Kuttner Institute of Medieval Canon Law in honor of its late founder, and it moved to its most recent home at the University of Munich.
The Institute’s library will remain in the Lillian Goldman Law Library for the next 25 years, with an option to renew the arrangement. The materials will not circulate but must be used in the Law Library.
Plans are being made to add records for the Institute’s library to the Law Library’s online catalog, MORRIS. In the meantime, researchers can use the library’s existing online catalog for monographs and microfilms, and a database for the offprint collection.
Thanks to the Kuttner Institute’s president, Professor Peter Landau of the University of Munich, and its Secretary Anders Winroth, the Forst Family Professor of History here at Yale University, for making this move possible. thanks to all my Law Library colleagues who helped with the move: Law Library Director Blair Kauffman, Teresa Miguel-Stearns, Fred Shapiro, Julian Aiken, Cesar Zapata, Susan Karpuk, Ryan Greenwood, Ben Bernard, Antonio Malabag, Liliane McClenning, and Shana Jackson.
– MIKE WIDENER, Rare Book Librarian
Professor Anders Winroth helps unpack the library of the Stephan Kuttner Institute of Medieval Canon Law.
