Welcome to the new academic year for Early Modern at the Beinecke, a blog for the British and European print and manuscript collections, 1500-1800, at Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

Each month, Early Modern at the Beinecke will explore an area of the early modern collections, introducing not only the materials themselves but their stories as objects or collections. As items in a rare book library, books and manuscripts are met and understood in many spaces and contexts. These essays will delve into the translations which occur as works move between the database and the reading room, the stacks and the footnote, the conservation lab and the classroom.

Early Modern at the Beinecke also peeks inside the reading room. The voices of researchers in the Beinecke collections can be heard in “From the Reading Room,” a column featuring postings by visiting researchers, Yale graduate fellows, and other researchers in the collections.

Early Modern at the Beinecke invites its readers to participate in the social life of the Beinecke’s early modern collections. Exhibitions, lectures, new resources, and events relating to the early modern collections will be announced; these are always free and open to the public. Further information on events can be found on the Beinecke’s calendar of events. Questions on the Beinecke’s location and hours can usually be answered on its web-site.

For further information on Early Modern at the Beinecke or on the Beinecke’s early modern collections, please feel free to contact Kathryn James, the Beinecke’s Assistant Curator for Early Modern Books and Manuscripts & the Osborn Collection at kathryn.james@yale.edu.

This untitled piece is one of a portfolio of forty drawings attributed to Samuel Cooper (1609 -1672), the English miniature painter. The works are of unidentified subjects, traced in red ink on transparent paper. Beinecke call number: Osborn fb 122.

There are forty drawings in Osborn fb 122, all of which have been scanned and included in the Beinecke’s Digital Images and Collections. The Cooper portfolio is in the public domain, and these images can be used or downloaded without any need for permissions.

All you ever needed to speak Dutch (or English):

“will you believe me?  Wilje my geloven?

are we obliged to do it? Zijn wy verpligt het te doen?

hath she so much boldness?  Heeft zy zoo veel stoutigheyt?

Is he an honest man?  Is hy een eerbaar man?

Can you doe that?  Kung gy dat doen?

Are you a man of your word?  Zijt gy een man van u woort?

Is he dead?  is hy doot?”

From J.G. van Heldoren’s A new and easy English grammar, containing brief fundamental rules, usual phrases, pleasant and choise dialogues concerning the present state and court of England.  Whereunto is added a nomenclature, English and Dutch (Amsterdam: Mercy Bruining, 1675), p. 27.  A recent purchase in the Macclesfield sale.

For anyone with a yen to separate the sheep from the calves–or mottled calf, as the case may be.

Please join us this Thursday, October 16, for a lecture by John Palfrey in the Beinecke Lectures in the History of the Book series, entitled “Digital readers: the future of the history of the book.”

John Palfrey is the new Vice Dean of the Harvard Law Library, a Professor of Law at the Harvard Law School and the Co-Director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society.  The lecture will be held at 4PM in the Beinecke Library, rooms 38 & 39.

Taken from Athanasii Kircheri … Musurgia universalis, sive Ars magna consoni et dissoni in X libros digest (Romae : ex typographia hæredum F. Corbelletti, 1650); Beinecke call number: Vi2 013, vols 1&2.

The engraving of Madame de la Valliere, in this manuscript account of the mistresses of Louis XIV. From the facing page: “Ouy madame continua il avec un trouble qui charma la belle, vous ete maitresse absolue de ma vie et de ma mort et meme de mon repos. vous pouvez tout pour ma fortune.”