The papers of the Panat family include correspondence, legal documents, and financial records dating from the 13th to the 19th century. The documents of trials, testaments, and genealogies concern the Panat family and families to which they were joined by marriage, including the families of de Brunet (later de Brunet de Castelpers), Toulouse-Lautrec, La Rochefoucauld, Saint Chamans, and Pujols.
A collection of approximately 400 manuscript items, including letters; letterbooks; copies of statutes, pleadings, opinions and precedents; King's Bench reports; abridgments and commonplace books of cases; and other papers, documenting the development and practice of English law and the evolution of the English legal system from the thirteenth into the twentieth century. Included are an early copy of Henry de Bracton's De legibus Anglie; a fourteenth-century pocket compilation of "Statuta vetera" that opens with a copy of the Magna Carta; case reports from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries; letters, opinions and notes by a range of English legal figures, including William Blackstone, Edward Coke, Edward Law, Lord Thurlow, and Francis Wedderburn; and guides to court proceedings and practice from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
The Osborn Manuscript Files contain single, unbound manuscripts and small groups of manuscripts acquired for the Osborn Collection which the Library has chosen to describe in finding-aid style lists rather than as discrete entries in Yale University Library's on-line public access catalog (ORBIS). The materials in the Osborn Manuscript Files include literary and historical manuscripts, individual and small groups of letters, and single documents, as well as some "Unprocessed" material such as engraved portraits and bibliographic information.
The papers in this collection have cross-reference slips in the manuscript catalog and fuller descriptions in the inventory catalog. However, these slips do not indicate where in the collection items may be found. It may be necessary for the reader to look in several containers in order to find an item. Unless the item is one of the few which this listing mentions individually, or is likely to be one of the autographs in box 15 or one of the large legal documents in folio 21 A+B, it is probably best to begin by checking under the proper date in boxes 1-9. Small legal documents will also be found here. If the item is not found, the reader should check folios 18 and 21 A+B (or box 12 if the date is 1848 or 1850). Items in these folios, as in boxes 1-9, are in chronological order and may be quickly found. It is possible, however, that an item, to which a date is assigned in the catalog, has been misfiled in the "undated" section at the end of boxes 9 and 10, folio 48, and folio 21 A+B.
Spinelli Archives. Over 100,000 documents dating from the fourteenth century to the eighteenth, from the palace archive of a Florentine family distinguished for their international banking and mercantile interests in the fifteenth century, their political activities in the city for several centuries, their patronage of religious institutions in Florence and Rome, and their association with the local silk guild. Included are the records of family members who served as papal bankers in the fifteenth century, ambassadors to the courts of Henry VIII and Charles V, churchmen, senators, and ducal employees. The collection documents social and family history, recording the day-to-day concerns of merchants, farmers, workmen, slaves, women, and children in thousands of wills, marriage contracts, personal diaries, family correspondence, grocery lists, household inventories, farm reports, tax statements, and business ledgers. In addition to the papers of the Spinelli family members, the Spinelli Archive also includes extensive documentation on the Baldocci, Guardi, Buonguglielmi and many other Florentine families.
The Walter L. Pforzheimer Collection of Historical Manuscripts contains approximately 500 manuscript documents, circa 1370s-1870s, consisting of letters, legal documents, and other manuscripts written or signed by European heads of state, government, diplomatic, military or church officials, or literary authors. Most materials are French, including documents signed by French royalty and nobility, 14th-18th centuries. Many French manuscripts date from the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars, including printed Revolutionary government documents completed in manuscript. A small amount of similar documents from other European countries and the United States are present. Some documents contain evidence of previous ownership, such as annotations, collectors' bindings, or bookplates. Also present are materials relating to Pforzheimer's research and collecting, 1920s-circa 1960s, consisting of card files, biographical notes, engraved portraits, and vendor descriptions.
A collection of correspondence; government documents, including reports, commissions, decrees, and awards; church documents; and writings and poems from Spain on civil, military, economic, religious, and social topics.