A vernacular late Renaissance manuscript herbal from the eastern Ligurian Apennines

2019 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 318-331
Author(s):  
Raffaella Bruzzone

In 1982, in the course of transferring the archive of the De Paoli family of Porciorasco to the Museo Contadino di Cassego (eastern Ligurian Apennines), a manuscript herbal dated about 1598 was discovered. The document is analysed here in all its aspect: the materials (paper, inks and pigments), the plants represented, the iconographical models, and the archival context. The result is a hypothesis about the circulation of knowledge about natural history in the area where it was found and used between the late sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries. As for the iconographical sources, models were found in both manuscripts and printed books from the medico-botanical tradition, including Hortus sanitatis and Tractatus de virtutibus herbarum.

Quaerendo ◽  
1985 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 83-102 ◽  
Author(s):  
William Noblett

AbstractThis study attempts to show how the English entomologist, Dru Drury (1725-1804) exported his only published book, Illustrations of natural history, which appeared in three volumes between 1770 and 1782. Drury used three contacts on the European mainland: the Amsterdam bookseller, Jan Christian Sepp; the German botanist, Paul Dietrich Giseke and the Danish naturalist, Morten Thrane Brunnich. Drury's letters to these three men form the basis of the study. An examination of them reveal some of the problems encountered in the international book-trade in the eighteenth century (such as parcels going missing and the difficulties of payment) and show some of the formalities that had to be undertaken when exporting.


Gesnerus ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 73 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-72
Author(s):  
Florike Egmond ◽  
Sachiko Kusukawa

Conrad Gessner’s Historia animalium is a compilation of information from a variety of sources: friends, correspondents, books, broadsides, drawings, as well as his own experience. The recent discovery of a cache of drawings at Amsterdam originally belonging to Gessner has added a new dimension for research into the role of images in Gessner’s study of nature. In this paper, we examine the drawings that were the basis of the images in the volume of fishes. We uncovered several cases where there were multiple copies of the same drawing of a fish (rather than multiple drawings of the same fish), which problematizes the notion of unique “original” copies and their copies. While we still know very little about the actual mechanism of, or people involved in, commissioning or generating copies of drawings, their very existence suggests that the images functioned as an important medium in the circulation of knowledge in the early modern period.


1899 ◽  
Vol 31 (4) ◽  
pp. 739-756
Author(s):  
T. H. Weir

Dr. William Hunter (d. 1783) bequeathed to the University of Glasgow, along with his Natural History Collection, a library containing about twelve thousand volumes of printed books and six hundred manuscripts. The latter were catalogued by G. Haenel, in his Catalogi Librorum Manuscriptorum, Leipzig, 1830, columns 786–798. In regard to the Oriental manuscripts, however, he frequently does no more than state in what languages they are written, and that not always correctly. Thanks to the courtesy of the Keeper of the Museum, who gave every facility of access to the cases, the following is an emended list of the Arabic, Syriac, and Hebrew manuscripts. With the exception of No. 7, none of these is written on vellum.


2000 ◽  
Vol 25 (3) ◽  
pp. 37-40
Author(s):  
Muriel McCarthy

Founded 300 years ago, Marsh’s Library in Dublin – Ireland’s first public library – is described by its librarian as a ‘treasury of the European mind’. The outstanding collections, in their purpose-built 18th-century accommodation, are still accessible to the public. They include Irish books and manuscripts and books on subjects such as travel, botany, music and natural history. Recently the catalogue of printed books has been computerized and made available on the Internet.


2019 ◽  
pp. 45-68
Author(s):  
Pavel Sládek

This chapter looks at the medium of printed books that was introduced into Jewish culture soon after its emergence in the mid-fifteenth century. It discusses the arrival of the presses that were run by different members of the Jewish Soncino family in Italy and elsewhere at the beginning of the 1480s, wherein a wide variety of genres appeared in print. It also describes the Soncino editions that were distinguished among printers by the accuracy and beauty of their typefaces. The chapter mentions the early printed book that was seen as a radical innovation in the age of complex cultural transformations both within and outside Jewish society. It recounts how the 'knowledge explosion' that was spurred by the rise of the printing press was a key factor in the formation of early modern Jewish cultural history.


2005 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 15-21
Author(s):  
Ann Datta

Behind the scenes at the Natural History Museum is the world’s largest natural history library, with approximately one million printed books. But the crown jewels are the Library’s art collections, depicting rocks, minerals, fossils, plants and animals, and dating from the 17th to the 21st centuries. Its more than half a million individual items make this the largest collection of natural history art not only in the UK but in the world. Commercial exploitation of the collection has mostly been by publishers of books and journals, but others have seen opportunities for writing books about the illustrations, putting the art in exhibitions, printing the images on decorative items, and other marketing ventures. In 2003 the Library launched a website designed to promote the art collections further and make them accessible to a global audience.


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