c. 1998 Religion News Service

NEW ORLEANS _ Seeking to save a matchless trove of Bibles, prayer books and historic documents from the corrosive elements of time, the Ursuline nuns here have sold their extensive library to the Historic New Orleans Collection, which will both protect the treasures and make them available to researchers.

The Ursuline nuns, who have been a part of New Orleans since their arrival from France in 1727, sold their archives primarily because they could not afford to keep them from rotting in the community’s library, said Sister Joan Marie Aycock, the archivist for the local Ursuline community.

The slow process of cataloging the approximately 2,000 books began this month and should be complete in a year, said Gerald Patout, the collection’s librarian.

The material, being processed at the rate of about 200 pieces per month, will not be available until next summer. Nevertheless, Patout said, “I’m already getting researchers who are calling us to get at it.”

The Ursulines’ holdings include textbooks in such subjects as pottery painting, languages, art and botany, he said, as well as a book of sheet music published in 1730 and a first edition of John James Audubon’s “Birds of America.”

“They collected extensively,” Patout said.

But the Ursulines’ library provides more than just a survey of teaching materials, said Emily Clark, who used the books at Ursuline Academy in research for her doctoral dissertation at Tulane University on the nuns’ impact on colonial society.

The library, she said, is “a window into the minds of these women and the kinds of things they were reading and teaching about.”

For instance, Clark said, the Ursulines’ library contains two volumes of sermons by John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist Church, as well as a French translation of John Milton’s “Paradise Lost.”

These were surprising, she said.

In addition to studying another branch of Christianity, “here they were teaching the great poetry,” Clark said. “I think it’s neat that these Catholic teachers were familiar with this great poem of the Protestant Reformation.”

The library also has a prayer book one of the nuns brought with her from France when she came to help found the Ursulines’ New Orleans community.“When I would hold that book and think that this nun held that book for so many days in the heat and the wet and the cold, it put me in her presence,” Aycock said.

For Clark and Aycock, the library’s most important book is “The Chronicles of the Ursuline Order” by Mother Augustine de Pommereu, a Parisian member of the order who was its first historian.

Published in 1673, the book contains the stories of the founding of the first Ursuline convents all over France at the beginning of that century.

“It was done when the women who participated were still alive, so it was oral history that was being written down and collected,” Clark said. “The Ursulines brought a copy of this with them; it was an inspiration because they were coming to found a colony of Ursulines.”

By being in Louisiana, the book escaped the turmoil of the French Revolution, when many libraries went up in flames, Aycock said.

But, she said, being in Louisiana presented another set of problems for the books.

“These things have gone through hurricanes,” Aycock said. “They have gone through termites and dampness. It’s almost a miracle that they went through so much. Even now, when we worry so much about how we’re going to preserve them, I stop and think, `They’ve come this far …'” Because the Ursulines could not afford to keep their treasures in the pristine, climate-controlled, acid-free conditions they deserve, Charles Nolan, archivist of the Archdiocese of New Orleans, brought the nuns and the Historic New Orleans Collection together, Patout said.

After the first meeting a year ago this month and a visit to the collection, “it was like a wonderful relationship,” the librarian said.”We’re into preservation and conservation, and we collect things about New Orleans. It just matched.”

The decision to send the library to the French Quarter research center wasn’t easy, Aycock said, but the nuns were consoled because they knew their holdings would be preserved and accessible.

“I wept, but I knew it was for the good of the city,” Aycock said. “We were part of the history of New Orleans. That’s why these books are part of the history of New Orleans. I would much, much rather see them go to an organization that could take care of them.”

MJP END POPE