Pietro Bembo, Gli Asolani, Venice: Aldus, March 1505.
Two issues of the first edition of Cardinal Bembo's dialogue on the nature of love, both in Aldus' "pocket edition" format bound in contemporary Venetian black morocco over wooden boards. The larger of the two is the first issue, complete with the dedication to Lucrezia Borgia, which was suppressed for political reasons in the second and later issues, and with the uncommonly found errata leaf. The second issue lacks the dedication and the errata leaf.
Biblia polyglotta, Alcala de Henares: in Complutensi universitate, industria Arnaldi Gulielmi de Brocario, 1514-1517 [i.e., 1520 or 1521].
This copy of the great Complutensian polyglot Bible (in Hebrew, Greek, Aramaic, and Latin), edited by Cardinal Ximenes, is shown closed to display the ownership brands on the fore- and top-edges of the text block. This particularly Mexican form of indicating ownership indicates that the six-volume set once belonged to the library of the Convento de San Agustin in Puebla de Los Angeles, Mexico.
The Torrelaguna manuscript, written at the Convento de la Madre de Dios, a Franciscan monastery in Torrelaguna, Spain, over many years beginning in about 1520.
Gift of the Helen F. Spencer fund; acquired in 1974 from Colin and Charlotte Franklin. Cardinal Francisco Ximenes de Cisneros (1436-1517), who edited the Complutensian Polyglot, was born in the small town of Torrelaguna, some thirty miles north of Madrid, and founded the Franciscan monastery of La Madre de Dios there, beginning its construction in 1517. This manuscript, mainly concerned with the annals and business affairs of the monastery (including such matters as a dispute between the town and the monastery about the maintenance of an aqueduct built by Ximenes), contains as its first item an otherwise unknown biography of the cardinal.
Aristotle, Summa philozophie moralis, Leipzig: Martin Landsberg, ca 1492.
A school text, printed with its lines widely spaced for convenience in note taking. It has been heavily annotated, as intended. Bound with this are three manuscripts of works attributed to Aristotle, including the pseudo-Aristotelian work "De pomo", translated from Hebrew into Latin by King Manfred of Sicily. It is clear from the presence of these four works together in their 15th century binding that, in the eyes of the original owner, a book is a book whether printed or handwritten and is important for what it says rather than for the form in which it was made. Following the modern separate appreciation and valuation of manuscript and printed books we keep this book with the manuscripts. Acquired from Bernard Rosenthal in 1969.
"The Legend of the Cross", first half of the 11th century, Anglo-Saxon text with Latin glosses by the "tremulous Worcester hand".
Found as binding reinforcement inside the upper cover of a copy of the 1636 edition of Barclay his Argenis (C34). This leaf is the only evidence for this early version of the Legend of the Cross apart from two narrow strips of vellum from the same manuscript now in the library of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. Shown beside the manuscript leaf is the leather of the binding in which it was found, with some of the text in mirror image.
The printer's copy for part of Spelman's Concilia, decreta, leges, constitutiones, London: P. Stevens and C. Meredith; R. Badger, 1639.
The Spelman-Macro miscellany (MS E107) is a composite manuscript made up of a number of individual items, most from the 17th century. The first section consists of a fair copy in Anglo-Saxon of the Decrees of the Council of Eynsham (1009), probably made around 1630 for Sir Henry Spelman (1564?-1641). It is marked by the printer. The second section contains copies of extracts from Latin language charters, chronicles, genealogies, and the like. The third part consists mainly of a heavily revised draft of Spelman's Concilia marked for the printer; and part four consists of a number of 17th-century poems—one of them on the comet of 1652—and prose. The Spelman items apparently came into the hands of Cox Macro (1683-1767) who bound up the papers with some of his own. The volume (bought by the Spencer Library from Theodore Hofmann in 1969) passed from Dr. Macro to John Patteson, thence by sale in 1820 to Hudson Gurney, and was in the library of J.H. Gurney in 1891. The manuscript, the printer's copy for the Concilia, is open to the beginning of a section concerning the duties and position of a priest; in the printed Concilia (No. 25; Clubb E 1639.1) it begins in the middle of p. 586.
Ælfric, Abbot of Eynsham, A Testimonie of antiquitie, London: John Day, [1566?]. The second edition.
At least two printed states prior to the first edition reveal how the work was produced. As the sheets were printed, they were carefully compared to the manuscripts, which had been marked up to make proofreading as easy as possible. The states prior to the first edition show a progressive shift in punctuation to the Anglo-Saxon usage, the introduction of new passages, and the reduction of printing errors. The editor, John Joscelyn, added letters and extracts during the proof stages that increased the work by one-half and must have caused Day, already coping with the problems of an unfamiliar language in a new type face, considerable difficulty. The second edition, illustrated here, is a further corrected version which was probably set immediately after the first. The Spencer copy was acquired from Bernard Quaritch in 1972; it once belonged to Maurice Johnson of Spalding (1688-1755), librarian of the Royal Society and eminent antiquary and bibliographer.