St John’s Printed Manuscript
by Petra Hofmann (College Librarian) Enchiridion preclare ecclesie Sarum St John’s College holds a remarkable 16th-century book of hours (Use of Salisbury) printed by Germain Hardouyn in Paris in 1530 with the title Enchiridion preclare ecclesie Sarum. The volume is full of decorative features (borders with floral motifs on gold,…
Librarian’s Pick #6: Uranometria Ominum Asterismorum
Over the course of Trinity Term 2020, the library staff at St. John’s College will be taking you on a ‘tour’ of some of their favourites among our special collections. Every Monday, we will upload a new note on the item of the week. Read on to discover more about…
Librarian’s Pick #4: The Character of a Quack-Astrologer
Over the course of Trinity Term 2020, the library staff at St. John’s College will be taking you on a ‘tour’ of some of their favourites among our special collections. Every Monday, we will upload a new note on the item of the week. Read on to discover more about…
Librarian’s Pick #2: The Feminine Monarchie
Over the course of Trinity Term 2020, the library staff at St. John’s College will be taking you on a ‘tour’ of some of their favourites among our special collections. Every Monday, we will upload a new note on the item of the week. Read on to discover more about…
“To delight and entertain”: Children’s Literature in the Special Collections
This blog post explores texts in our special collections written and created for children, and the ways in which this genre has evolved through the centuries. These items span from Ancient Greek stories and 17th century fatherly advice, to Victorian adventurers and mischievous modern poems. Links throughout the post will…
Literary Landscapers: horticulture in the special collections
November’s blog post featured Philip Miller’s Gardeners’ dictionary (1731), collecting names and offering advice for his fellow gardeners. This month the Special Collections blog further explores the theme of horticulture in early printed books.
A world of words: 17th and 18th Century dictionaries
This month’s Special Collections blog posts celebrates languages by exploring the 17th and 18th Century dictionaries housed in our Old Library. They include texts that share definitions, translations, and even advice on pruning fig trees…
Words on Witchcraft
The late 16th and early 17th Centuries saw the peak of ‘witch hysteria’ in Europe. Paranoia surrounding ideas about sorcery and demons led to accusations, trials and cruel punishments, including tens of thousands of executions. This month’s blog post explores the literature that fuelled this phenomenon: as texts that condemened…
The Texts of the Reformation
The 31st October 2017 marks the 500th anniversary of Martin Luther’s 95 Theses, a text that sparked the Reformation. The movement was entwined with the introduction of Gutenberg’s printing press, allowing the rapid spread of texts such as pamphlets and vernacular Bibles. As such, it is a historical moment of shift…
Scandinavia in the Special Collections
This month, we gather together a number of different items which share a northern theme: twentieth-century cartoons, seventeenth-century astronomy, nineteenth-century literature, sixteenth-century history, eighteenth-century exploration, and a seventeenth-century Bible. Historia de gentibus septentrionalibus [Description of the Northern people], Olaus Magnus (1550) ∑.2.14 Olaus Magnus (1490-1557) was a Swedish writer and…
Album of Prints, William Hogarth (1756)
One of St John’s treasures from the eighteenth-century is an album of 77 of William Hogarth’s prints, a seemingly unique contemporary collation including a broad range of his works. William Hogarth (1697-1764) A painter and printmaker who used his art to make satirical commentary on eighteenth-century social issues, Hogarth was…
Robert Hooke, Micrographia (1667), and Lectures and Collections (1678)
The works of Robert Hooke are well preserved at St John’s College Library with the library holding copies of 17th-century publications of Hooke’s work on microscopy, observations of comets, and the proposition of his eponymous law of elasticity. Robert Hooke (1635-1703) was renowned in his day for being an early…
Mamusse wunneetupanatamwe up-biblum God (the Massachusett Bible), 1661-1663
St John’s College library has a copy of the first Bible published in America. It is written in the Massachusett dialect of Algonquian, a Native American language which missionary John Eliot learnt in part of his attempt to convert the Massachusett people to Christianity and literacy. In 1663, in Cambridge,…
Abraham Ortelius, Theatrum Orbis Terrarum
In St John’s College Library’s Special Collections there are four copies of Ortelius’s world atlases. These were the first attempts at mapping the known world in its entirety which demonstrate a balance between striving for accurate cartography and presenting the wondrous elements of the distant world. Abraham Ortelius (1527-1598) From…
Do we need pictures? Illustration of the earliest printed books.
St. John’s holds an important collection of incunables, i.e. books printed before 31st December 1501. The process of printing with movable type was invented around 1450 in Mainz by Johannes Gutenberg, as recorded by the Cologne Chronicle of 1499, a text which preserves the testimony of the first printer of…
Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales (Westminster: William Caxton, c. 1483)
Early printed books form a significant part of the library’s Special Collections, and this particular item contains an illustrated second edition of one of the most famous works of middle English literature, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. It is thought to have been published in 1483 by William Caxton, famous for being…