The L. Tom Perry Special Collections has a long history of collecting the output of the major French humanist printers of the 16th century. Our vaults hold extensive collections of the work of the Estienne (Stephanus) family, Simon de Colines, Josse Badius Ascencius, and Christophe Plantin. These printers helped spread Renaissance and humanist learning throughout …
Today marks the 700th anniversary of the death of the Italian poet, Dante Alighieri. His Divine Comedy (completed in 1320) is considered both one of the greatest works in Italian literature and one of the greatest literary works of the European Middle Ages. Dante’s poetry and prose works were copied widely in Medieval Italy—around 800 …
L. Tom Perry Special Collections contains a variety of comet pamphlets by European astronomers of the 16th and 17th centuries. If you enjoyed (or missed) comet NEOWISE this summer, we’d like to share some delightful woodcut illustrations from recent acquisitions to this collection. This engraving, from Erhard Weigel’s Speculum Uranicum aquilae Romanae sacrum (1661), depicts …
Mary Shelley’s famous tale of horror, Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus, made its first appearance in print on Jan. 1, 1818. The novel gained notoriety almost immediately as another entry in the wildly popular genre of Gothic fiction, and has stood the test of time as a literary classic and one of the first pieces …
Curious Remedies, the library’s current main floor exhibit, highlights the contributions of scientists and physicians of the Renaissance and Early Modern periods. One such individual is Andreas Vesalius (1514-1564), whose monumental book on anatomy, De Humani Corporis Fabrica (On the Fabric of the Human Body, often shortened to Fabrica) was first published in 1543. Vesalius …
Wordsworth’s poetry was rarely illustrated during his lifetime, but after his death, publishers began issuing collections of his poems accompanied by illustration. Some of Great Britain’s top painters and designers, like Albert Henry Warren, Miles Birket Foster and John McWhirter, provided illustrations for these deluxe editions. Here is a very brief sampling of illustrated Wordsworth …
Enjoy these woodcut images of the Christmas story, as found in the Book of Hours printed by Simon de Colines in 1543. Three of the woodcut illustrations are signed by Geoffroy de Tory, and the kneeling figure in the scene of the Adoration of the Magi is thought to be a portrait of French king …
One of the newest acquisitions in the History of Science collection is the first edition of French mathematician Oronce Finé’s Protomathesis (Paris, 1532), a compendium of astronomical and geographical knowledge. This book is important as a detailed summation of the field of astronomy in the decade before Nicolaus Copernicus published his heliocentric theory of the …
Special Collections has a small but significant collection of rare Japanese materials from the Tokugawa period. Some items are currently on display in the library’s Guns, Scrolls, and Swords exhibit, and others have been featured in past exhibits as well. On occasion, we have the chance to add to the collection. Here are the most …
German translations of the Bible have been around since the Middle Ages. After Gutenberg printed a Latin Bible in Germany around 1465, vernacular Bibles in German quickly followed. A Bible in High German was issued by Johannes Mentelin in Strasbourg in 1466. Low German vernacular Bibles were issued in Cologne in 1478 and 1479. In …