Case 8: Beautiful Babylon: The Diversity of Languages
St John’s holds manuscripts and early printed books in a large variety of languages. Even within the English language, St John’s Library has contemporary textual witnesses from all three major early linguistic stages (Old English, Middle English, and Early Modern English), plus one text in Anglo-Norman. Works in Latin, Greek, Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and Syriac have already been presented in this exhibition.
The following three books include two more examples of languages not written with the Latin alphabet, which is used for most, though not all, European languages. St John’s College’s only Hebrew manuscript codex (MS 143) was produced in England in the context of Christian Bible studies. By far the newest of all three books displayed here is a manuscript in the north African language Ge‛ez (MS 228), which looks considerably older than it is.
These manuscripts are joined by the first Bible printed in the British North American colonies (A.2.10), a translation into a dialect of the indigenous Algonquian language. It is an example of a language which had only been spoken before Christian missionaries adapted the Latin alphabet to record it in writing – just as it had been done with English and other European vernaculars around one thousand years earlier.
