A manuscript goes home

Harold Shapiro

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Harold Shapiro

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Beinecke Library curators handed over a twelfth-century manuscript, known as a Cistercian Collectar (above), to representatives of the Polish government in a ceremony on January 29, decades after it was thought to have disappeared. “This Cistercian Collectar is so much more than parchment and ink,” Michelle Light, associate university librarian for special collections and director of the Beinecke Library, said in her statement as the manuscript was being returned. “It is a vessel of memory—of ritual, worship, learning, music, and community life—that connected generations in Ląd Abbey and later the Seminary Library in Poznań.”

The document disappeared from Poland during the Nazi era and was assumed lost. But in 2024, Polish researchers tracked the manuscript to Yale and submitted a formal restitution request. After confirming its provenance, Yale arranged the handover. “When we learned more about how this manuscript, along with so many other cultural treasures, left Poland in a time of war and cultural destruction, we knew we had a clear responsibility to return it to its rightful home,” added Light.