Adele Kibre

Last updated

Adele Kibre was an expert in microphotography and a medievalist who participated in the clandestine discovery and filming of European academic documents during World War II at a time when Western libraries were otherwise unable to obtain scientific publications from countries with whom they were at war.

Contents

In 1942, Dr. Adele Kibre—dark-haired, wicked-eyed, a medievalist by training—began work as an overseas agent for the Interdepartmental Committee for the Acquisition of Foreign Publications. This Committee was a branch of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS): the wartime predecessor to the CIA, which sought to acquire documents in Europe that the Allies could use to develop intelligence and plan covert operations. Kibre, a scholar, was now also a spy. [1]

Adele Kibre
Born1898
Alma materUniversity of California, Berkeley; University of Chicago
OccupationDocument microphotographer
Years active1939-1945
EmployerInterdepartmental Committee for the Acquisition of Foreign Publications (IDC)
Relatives Pearl Kibre

Early life and education

Adele Kibre was born in Philadelphia in 1898, and grew up in Los Angeles. Her family was involved in Hollywood life; her parents designed sets and one sister was married to a silent film star. [2] Her sister Pearl Kibre was also a well-known academic in medieval studies. Adele studied at the University of California, Berkeley and taught Latin there after receiving her master's degree. She later earned a PhD at the University of Chicago. Her dissertation was a study of the text of the Carolingian scholar Smaragdus of Saint-Mihiel's Liber in partibus Donati, [3] and was incorporated, after her death, into a critical edition by Bengt Löfstedt. [4]

Documentation research

She obtained a postdoctoral fellowship to the American Academy of Rome after completing her PhD. She lived for most of the 1930s in Europe, supporting herself by doing research for American academics by photographing materials in European libraries. It was at these European libraries that she was exposed to microfilm technology. [2] In 1939 she met microfilm entrepreneur Eugene Power and acted as his interpreter at the Vatican library. [5] She was recommended by Power to work freelance with the Interdepartmental Committee for the Acquisition of Foreign Publications (IDC), a United States agency which had an office in Stockholm. [5] The role of the agency was to obtain and transmit mostly public documents originating in Europe, in particular from those areas under Axis control. Through this agency Kibre is attributed with sending 182 reels of microfilm to the British Ministry of Information. [6] She also continued to make copies and photograph materials for US faculty and for her own studies, and in 1941 is reported to have journeyed from Europe to the United States with 17 pieces of luggage containing research materials. [2] "Private, mysterious and comfortable with her anonymity, Kibre’s last known research was published in 1986. It’s believed that she died in Andalusia, Spain in 1997." [7]

Publications

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Terence</span> Roman comic playwright

Publius Terentius Afer, better known in English as Terence, was a playwright during the Roman Republic. He was the author of six comedies based on Greek originals by Menander or Apollodorus of Carystus. All six of Terence's plays survive complete and were originally produced between 166–160 BC.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">ProQuest</span> Distributor of eBooks and digital media

ProQuest LLC is an Ann Arbor, Michigan-based global information-content and technology company, founded in 1938 as University Microfilms by Eugene Power.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Elise Richter</span> Austrian philologist

Elise Richter was an Austrian philologist, specialising in Romance studies, and university professor. She was the first woman to achieve the habilitation at the University of Vienna(which is equivalent to being accepted as a full badge member of the German-speaking research community), the first female associate professor and the only woman at any Austrian university before World War I to hold an academic appointment. Persecuted like all other members of her family, by Nazi officials during World War II, she was deported to the Theresienstadt concentration camp in German-occupied Czechoslovakia in October 1942, and was murdered there, like her English PhD holder sister Helene. Elise was killed in June 1943, half a year after her sister.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies</span>

The Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies (PIMS) is a research institute in the University of Toronto that is dedicated to advanced studies in the culture of the Middle Ages.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Aelius Donatus</span> Fourth century Roman grammarian and teacher of rhetoric

Aelius Donatus was a Roman grammarian and teacher of rhetoric.

Raya Dunayevskaya, later Rae Spiegel, also known by the pseudonym Freddie Forest, was the American founder of the philosophy of Marxist humanism in the United States. At one time Leon Trotsky's secretary, she later split with him and ultimately founded the organization News and Letters Committees and was its leader until her death.

Norman Frank Cantor was a Canadian-American medievalist. Known for his accessible writing and engaging narrative style, Cantor's books were among the most widely read treatments of medieval history in English. He estimated that his textbook The Civilization of the Middle Ages, first published in 1963, had a million copies in circulation.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Roma Tre University</span> Public university in Rome, Italy

Roma Tre University is an Italian public research university in Rome, Italy, with its main campus in the Ostiense quarter.

John Earl Haynes is an American historian who worked as a specialist in 20th-century political history in the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress. He is known for his books on the subject of the American Communist and anti-Communist movements, and on Soviet espionage in America.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Microform</span> Forms with microreproductions of documents

A microform is a scaled-down reproduction of a document, typically either photographic film or paper, made for the purposes of transmission, storage, reading, and printing. Microform images are commonly reduced to about 4% or 125 of the original document size. For special purposes, greater optical reductions may be used.

Smaragdus of Saint-Mihiel OSB was a Benedictine monk of Saint-Mihiel Abbey near Verdun. He was a significant writer of homilies and commentaries.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hope Emily Allen</span> American scholar

Hope Emily Allen (1883–1960), was an American medievalist who is best known for her research on the 14th-century English mystic Richard Rolle and for her discovery of a manuscript of the Book of Margery Kempe.

The World Congress of Universal Documentation was held from 16 to 21 August 1937 in Paris, France. Delegates from 45 countries met to discuss means by which all of the world's information, in print, in manuscript, and in other forms, could be efficiently organized and made accessible.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Eugene Power</span> American entrepreneur (1905–1993)

Eugene Barnum Power was an American entrepreneur, philanthropist, founder of the modern microfilm industry, and pioneer in the use of microfilm for the reproduction of scholarly publications.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Watson Davis</span>

Watson Davis (1896–1967) was the founder of the American Documentation Institute (ADI), the forerunner of the Association for Information Science and Technology, and a pioneer in the field of Library and Information Science.

Robert Cedric Binkley was an American historian. As chair of the Joint Committee on Materials for Research of the Social Science Research Council and the American Council of Learned Societies in the 1930s he led several projects in the areas of publication using new near-print technologies, microphotography, copyright and archival management, many under the aegis of the Works Progress Administration. His theoretical writings on amateur scholarship and the ways non-experts could contribute to scholarship have been influential on recent thinking about digital humanities and web publishing.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Grace Macurdy</span> American classical philologist (1866-1946)

Grace Harriet Macurdy was an American classicist, and the first American woman to gain a PhD from Columbia University. She taught at Vassar College for 44 years, despite a lengthy conflict with Abby Leach, her first employer.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Pearl Kibre</span> American historian

Pearl Kibre was an American historian. She won a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1950 for her work on medieval science and universities.

Elizabeth Solopova is a Russian-British philologist and medievalist undertaking research at New College, Oxford. She is known outside academic circles for her work on J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle-earth writings.

Joëlle Rollo-Koster is a French medievalist working as a professor of medieval history at the University of Rhode Island.

References

  1. Galvin, Annie (2021-03-25). "The Spy Who Came In from the Carrel". Public Books. Retrieved 2025-01-30.
  2. 1 2 3 Peiss, Kathy (2019). Information Hunters: When Librarians, Soldiers and Spies Banded Together in World War II Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN   978-0190944612.
  3. Kibre, Adele (1930). Prolegomena to the unpublished text of Smaragdus' commentary on Donatus, De partibus orationis (PhD). University of Chicago. OCLC   835587.
  4. Löfstedt, Bengt; Holtz, Louis; Kibre, Adele (1986). Liber in partibus Donati. Turnholti: Typographi Brepols. ISBN   2503036821.
  5. 1 2 Power, Eugene B. (1990). Edition of one: the autobiography of Eugene B. Power. Ann Arbor, Mi: University Microfilms International. ISBN   978-0835708982.
  6. Richards, Pamela Spence (June 1988). "Great Britain and Allied Scientific Information: 1939-1945". Minerva. 26 (2): 177–198. doi:10.1007/BF01096695. JSTOR   41820723. PMID   11621564. S2CID   43475999.
  7. Look, Alice. "Adele Kibre: Academic Scholar and Wartime Intelligence Agent" . Retrieved 21 Jan 2025.