Incunabula and Early Printing

The Garrett Library has one hundred forty incunabula, including Thomas Aquinas's De Articulis Fidei, printed in Mainz before 1460; Lactantius's Opera, printed by Sweynheym and Pannartz at the Subiaco Press in 1465, the first dated book printed in Italy and the first appearance of Greek type in any printed book; and a first edition of Euclid, 1482. The collection also contains interesting incunabula printed in the vernacular, such as Caxton's Chronicles of England, Westminster, 1480 (English); Aesop's Vita et Fabulae, Augsburg, 1483 (German); Rolevinck's Fasciulus Temporum, Utrecht, 1480 (Dutch); Valera's Cronica de Espana, Seville, 1482 (Spanish); and Chroniques de Louis XI, Lyons, 1490 (French).

The Peabody Library has 52 incunabula including a good copy of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili printed by Aldus in 1499 and a copy of the Sermons of Bernardinus of Siena printed by Johann Amerbach, which is still in its early chained binding.

The Machen Collection, gathered together by Thomas G. Machen and given to the University by his widow in 1980, consists of a hundred volumes, fifty-two of which are incunabula. The first printed edition of Herodotus in any language (Venice, 1474) is in the collection, as well as an exceptionally fine copy of Homer's Opera (Florence 1488), and a very good copy of Pliny's Historia Naturalis (Florence, 1472), printed by Nicolas Jenson and the book which is generally considered to be the finest example of Jenson's work. There is also a fine copy of the Nuremberg Chronicle (1493) with the bookplate of the Hermitage Museum in Leningrad. Of the sixteenth-century books in the collection two of the most important are Albrecht Durer's Geometricarum Institutionum Libri Quatuor (Paris, 1535), and the Paris edition of the Hypnerotomachia of Francesco Colonna (1554). There is also a particularly fine copy of Sebastian Muenster's Cosmographia Universalis (1559).

Julius Hofmann gave the University a very good collection of Bibles, including the four volume Bible printed by Koberger in Nuremberg in 1497. The Polyglot Psalter (Geneva, 1516), the first polyglot edition of any given part of the Bible, was the gift of the Evergreen House Foundation. The Bible collection also includes the "September Bibel," the first edition of Luther's translation of the New Testament into German (1522). A very rare item in the collection is Eliot's Indian Bible (Cambridge, Mass., 1662-63), the first edition of the first complete Bible printed in the New World. John Eliot translated the Bible into the Massachusetts Indian language for the use of missionaries. The Hofmann Collection is complemented by an extensive collection of Bibles in the Peabody Library.

For additional information on these and other medieval and Renaissance resources, click here.