The Bill Kent Library & The Bill Kent Foundation
The Bill Kent Library
On 20 May 2010, as a major event of the first Open Day of the Monash University Centre in Prato, the Bill Kent Library was officially inaugurated by Alison Brown, Professor Emerita of Italian Renaissance History at Royal Holloway, the University of London. Also present was the Australian Ambassador, Amanda Vanstone. The occasion was both moving and symbolic. It was an opportunity to honour the Founding Director of Monash Prato, Professor Bill Kent, and also presaged the direction in which one of Monash's teaching and research strengths will take in the future. Bill, due to illness, was not present, but his words, read on the occasion, frame the library's significance:
Since I can't be with you in person, I have sent as my emissary a picture (right) of the Ponte Vecchio painted in 1925 by the English artist, Graham Clilverd. It belonged to Nicolai and Ruth Rubinstein [the former a leading historian of Renaissance Florence, and the latter a foremost art historian], and anyone who visited them in their flat in Hampstead will remember it hanging there. The executors of the Rubinstein estate kindly gave the painting to me as a memento of Nicolai, my PhD supervisor and mentor in Italian Renaissance Studies, and I should like today to donate it to the Monash Centre in the same spirit, to hang in this library if that seems feasible. I hope you agree with me that this is an apt and genial idea. The nucleus of this library - I say ‘nucleus' because of course it needs to, and I'm sure will, grow - is the collection of academic books both Rubinsteins kept at home. So the painting is returning home in a sense, through my mediation, to dwell in a library you have so thoughtfully named for me.
As a legendary teacher and scholar, Bill Kent established Monash University as a centre for Renaissance studies with an enviable international reputation. With the signing of memoranda of understanding with other leading centres of medieval and renaissance studies (the Universities of Edinburgh, Toronto, Durham, Warwick and Arizona), along with the State Archives of Prato, the newly established Prato Consortium for Medieval and Renaissance Studies has, in the library, a focus and a space for the leading and innovatory research forwhich Monash is known.
With the aim of ensuring that the Bill Kent Library is a growing, developing entity, rather than an archive, its cataloguing will be undertaken through membership of the IRIS consortium of libaries (including Harvard University's Villa i Tatti and Italy's National Institute for Renaissance Studies) which will make the titles readily accessible to the international scholarly community, as well as the local Pratesi, and will enhance Monash's reputation in a very visible way through the catalogue's web-presence.
The Bill Kent Foundation
Bill's colleagues and friends will be delighted to learn that a new body - The Bill Kent Foundation - has just been established by Monash University with a broad mandate to fund the development and maintenance of the library, including its ongoing membership of the IRIS consortium (the Arts Faculty is generously funding the first three years), as well as supporting other initiatives related to teaching and research in Bill Kent's field e.g. conferences, scholarships, fellowships, annual lectures and workshops in both Melbourne and Prato etc. The university will be seeking contributions from Bill's former students, friends, colleagues and scholars further afield to support this endeavour. The Dean of Arts, Professor Rae Frances and Professor Bruce Scates have ‘kicked off' the Foundation with a generous donation.
Alison Brown concluded her remarks when opening the library thus: "Bill also happens to be one of the best-read friends I have - I have always marvelled at how he has managed to fit into his life scrupulous reading in his own field and in related academic fields - as a writer, teacher and editor - together with an eclectic and broad-based reading of novels and literature. I am sure that he - like me and all good Renaissance humanists - believes in the immortality bestowed through letters and books. For this, as well as for so many other reasons, I can think of no better, more deserved, and more appropriate tribute to his life-long dedication to letters and to Monash University than to have this library named after him: The Bill Kent Library in the Monash University Centre in Prato".
Peter Howard
Please visit the donation website to give make an online gift to the Bill Kent Foundation Fund or visit www.monash.edu/giving/billkent. You can also call Donor, Alumni & Community Relations Telephone: +61 3 9903 1608