46
view . fall 2012
Editor’s note: This is one in a series of articles about students
who were involved in research, scholarly and creative
activities during their summer break from classes. For more,
visit
Whenever Stephan Pigeon signed up for a graduate
level history course with professor Guy Lazure,
he figured that Evan Suntres was the student he’d be
academically duking it out with for top marks.
Instead, Suntres became one of his best friends—a
relationship further cemented this past spring by a research
trip the history majors took to Palma de Mallorca, an island
off the Mediterranean coast of Spain.
Dr. Lazure invited the students to spend several weeks
working in the library of the Foundation Bartolome March,
a wealthy Mallorcan collector of art and rare books who
died in the early 1990s. The students helped catalogue
a collection of almost 1,700 early printed books, hoping
to find some of the nearly 12,000 volumes that had once
belonged to a 16th-century learned ecclesiastic from
Seville named Luciano de Negrón.
De Negrón’s books eventually came in to the
possession of the Duke of Alcalá, a rich local aristocrat.
His descendant, the Duke of Medinaceli, sold the collection
to March. Through this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, the
students managed to trace and identify books from the
Negrón-Alcalá collection, including some that date back to
before Guttenberg’s printing press.
“To sit down and hold the physical object, to see
how it’s bound and stitched together, how they feel, how
they smell, looking at these bright inks and gold-leaf
pages…,” says Pigeon. “It’s an artifact. I was like a kid
in a candy store.”
Pigeon said the books were everything from small
pieces to monstrous tomes, and the students were tasked
with looking for those that had ownership plates, which
they would photograph, while making note of titles, author,
place and year of publication.
“We were just trying to trace how these books went
from one person to the next,” he said. “At the end of our
trip, all of our data went back to the library.”
One of the most fascinating features of the books,
they said, was copious notations in the margins they
contained—drawings, sketches, notes, and remarks that the
owners had made in them.
Suntres, who is doing his master’s work on how certain
social upheavals in the 1960s and 1970s affected the
way conservative males expressed their masculinity, said
he enjoyed getting a sense of what’s required to be an
academic historian.
“It was a real eye-opener,” he said. “The trip was just
a huge indication of what’s possible in this field.” Both
students say they are interested in pursuing careers as
academic historians.
How they spent their summer
Evan Suntres (left) and Stephan Pigeon pause for a photo while
taking in some of the night life around Palma de Mallorca.
ESEARCH
COMMUNITY
SOCIAL JUS
TICE
TRANSNATIONAL
EXPERIENTIAL
UWINDSOR
LEADERS
EXCEPTIONAL
INFLUENTIAL
MBA/JD
MSW/JD
CANADIAN & AMERICAN DUAL JD
INCLUSIVE
AL REACH
NN VA I O TIVE
DEDICATED
SUPPORTIVE
FELLOWSHIP
AWARD-WINN
PRIDE
RESPONSIBILITY
EXCEEDING
EXPECTATIONS
FRIENDLY
QUALI
TUDENT INTERACTION
Windsor
LaW
Windsor LaW stands out
Interested in a career in law? Find out what sets
Windsor Law apart. Visit
for more information.
